Heart on Fire Read online

  “I had to clear up some family legal business. Since Lou was scheduled to pick you up and drive the both of you back to St. Helens, she’s letting me—thank-you very much!—tag along for the ride.”

  “And we’re happy to have him along, aren’t we, Janine?” Lou chimed in, increasing pressure on the gas to pass a semi in the right-hand lane.

  Who wouldn’t be happy to have Chad along? He was pleasant, charming—and handsome. He was a colleague, and he would be working in the same scientific camp as Janine—if in an admittedly different capacity than her dealings in the kitchen. It was nice to get to meet another member of the team, besides Lou and Dr. Hank Heidelburg. Still, there was something about Chad that made her uneasy, if not in an unpleasant kind of way. She couldn’t remember getting quite the same feeling from meeting anyone else, and she was at a loss to explain it away.

  Janine only wished she knew Dr. Roger Lewis who had been appointed by the U.S. Geological Society to head the work team of scientists now on the mountain. Lou had talked Dr. Lewis into taking on Janine, sight unseen, when Barry Wilcox almost lost his arm as a result of a well-aimed swat from a massive bear. Lou had argued that it couldn’t hurt to have another biologist in reserve, albeit in the kitchen, just in case things started happening. Still unpredictable, Mt. St. Helens could start up again, at any time, and cause a lot of excitement, although it was doubtful it could match its display of May 1980 when it blew off 1,300 feet of its crest and devastated 200 square miles of Washington State.

  Lou steered the car into the first off-ramp that accessed a rest area.

  “I thought this was going to be a drive straight through,” Chad joked. Actually, he had to go to the toilet, too, all of the bathrooms at Janine’s having been filled non-stop with a steady line of Woofs and Farnwells.

  Lou took the next curve at a speed that shifted Janine toward the door.

  “You must really have to go,” Chad shouted after Lou who was quickly out the door and running as soon as the car pulled to an abrupt stop

  Janine laughed, unfastened her seat belt and got out. Momentarily, she contemplated joining Lou in the restroom, but didn’t. She’d been luckier in getting to a toilet at her parents’ house; part of a big family, she’d grown used to diplomatically maneuvering to the front of any line.

  Chad did follow Lou, at least until he detoured to the men’s room. He was back before Lou reappeared.

  “Lou says you’re a biologist, as well as a cook,” he said upon joining Janine. “Interesting career combination—biology and cooking.”

  “My mother insisted I at least minor in Home Economics. She’s convinced the scientific world is only filled with old men more interested in test tubes than in women.”

  Chad laughed; Janine wondered if he knew she’d been about to comment upon how he’d proved her mother’s theory completely wrong.

  “You were at Marine World until the fire?” He sounded unsure.

  “Right,” she admitted.

  “I know Curt Simms. Worked with him a short while on stream-fed hot pools down around Lassen.”

  “Curt is a nice guy.” Janine would never forget how touched she’d been when he’d broken down and cried when the winch malfunctioned, and they’d all known for sure Namu-Six didn’t have a chance of surviving the holocaust.

  “Nasty fire you people had there. Still on schedule for reopening this fall?”

  “Last I heard. Repairs seem to be coming along as projected, but the environmentalists are putting up a fuss about letting us bring in another killer whale. ‘Couldn’t even keep safe the one they had!’ they’re screaming.” She shook her head. She was as much for preserving the ecology as the next person, probably more so, but she couldn’t fathom the reasoning of some very well-meaning people. How many men, women, and children would never know the wonder of seeing an orca up close and personal if all the whales were left swimming far out at sea? There had to be compromises made somewhere along the line.

  “Okay, people, pit-stop over,” Lou said, looking far more at ease than when she’d hurriedly left them.

  “You want me to drive for awhile?” Janine volunteered.

  “Sure,” Lou conceded. Once in the car, she gave every indication that she planned to take every advantage to catch some shut-eye.

  “When you get tired, let me know,” Chad said and smiled at Janine via his reflection available upfront in the rearview mirror.

  He was particularly handsome when he smiled.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I THINK HE MIGHT NEED some help,” Janine said. “What do you think?”

  They had been stopped by rocks on the night-black dirt logging road that led to the camp higher up the slope of Mt. St. Helens. Most of the stones had already been dispensed with by Chad, but the last one looked as if it would take even more strength than even his impressive physique could muster. Unfortunately, the boulder in question sat dead-center the road, leaving the car insufficient room to squeeze by on either side.

  “Think we should give Hercules a hand, do you?” Lou asked. She and Janine already had their car doors open and were stepping out.

  The women added their shoulders to Chad’s at the massive obstacle. It showed no response whatsoever to their combined efforts.

  “I think we have a bit more, here, than we can chew,” Lou ventured. “This might call for the bulldozer from camp, rather than we three mortals.”

  “Easier said than done,” Chad reminded. “Cell phone reception is nonexistent up here, or have you forgotten?”

  “How far is it, walking?” Janine asked and looked up as more gravel dislodged somewhere above them and began a disconcerting slide that stopped somewhere with in the concealing underbrush.

  “It might be easier to drive back to Cougar and spend the night there,” Lou said. “We can radio from there and have one of the guys come down with the bulldozer to let us on through.”

  “You’re telling me the three of us can’t handle this problem without a bulldozer?” Chad asked.

  “Yes, that is what I’m suggesting,” Lou admitted.

  “Possibly, you’re right,” Chad surprised.

  “So, it’s back to Cougar, then, is it?” Janine asked.

  There was a sudden sound of something very large, and very fast-moving, coming at them through the nearby trees and shrubbery. The sound faded as quickly as it had begun.

  “If that’s the bear that put the previous cook in the hospital, I’d feel safer inside the car,” Janine admitted.

  Several birds squawked and fluttered to flight before quickly returning to their roosts.

  “I say we head back to Cougar and repeat this leg of the trip after someone makes it a little easier for us,” Lou voted again.

  “Obviously, you never learned much about fulcrums and levers in physics,” Chad said with a new note of confidence. He pointed to a rectangular block of rock not far off the roadway. “Fulcrum,” he said. He pointed toward a fence-post sized tree trunk that had been sawed off and left nearby, either during the logging road’s original construction or, later, when the scientific team moved through. “Lever,” he said, as if explaining basic physics to two high-school freshmen. “With that rock, that piece of timber, and you two ladies in support of my efforts, the rest of this road will be cleared in no time.”

  Any immediate comment by either woman was interrupted by more sounds from the underbrush. This time it wasn’t nearly as loud as before.

  “Sounds as if the animals are restless tonight,” Janine said with a nervous laugh. The moonlight, which had originally seemed so romantic, had suddenly taken on an icy, brittle quality.

  “You don’t suppose they know something we don’t?” Lou asked.

  “You mean, like maybe these rocks didn’t just happen to come tumbling down because of simple erosion?” Chad suggested.

  Janine eyed first Lou and then Chad. Surely, neither was suggesting someone had purposely avalanched the rock into the roadway.

  “We have
n’t had the radio on, because of poor reception,” Lou reminded.

  “We wouldn’t have needed the radio,” Chad said. “We would have felt it, don’t you suppose?”

  “Felt what?” Janine asked.

  “The mountain still shakes a bit on occasion,” Chad said.

  Lou and he had been referring to something not to someone.

  Janine now knew exactly what they meant. The idea of an earthquake shouldn’t have come as any big surprise. The area had been constantly jolted by them prior to the May 1980 eruption, and more earthquakes had accompanied all previous flare-ups. Earth tremors went hand in hand with volcanic activity. However, there was a major difference between reading about earthquakes and realizing one might strike at any moment. Janine had never been in one up to this point in her life and, although the odds were pretty good she’d be in one or more before she left this assignment on the mountain, she wasn’t looking forward to it happening.

  “It’s probably just erosion,” Chad consoled. “As for the animals, we probably disturbed them just by being here.”

  “Right!” Lou assured. “Now, about this boulder?”

  Lou and Janine watched while Chad hauled over the rectangular-shaped stone and positioned it so it would act as the fulcrum to the pole he retrieved next. He wedged the leading end of the pole underneath the large boulder, resting a higher point on the pole against the smaller block-like stone. Lou, Janine, and Chad, pulled down on the uplifted far end of the lever, exerting the effort that would hopefully flip the boulder into a roll. Chad had calculated to take advantage of a small depression in the ground to one side of the rock, a rut made at one time by a constant flush of water over the roadway to waterfall over the steep drop-off beyond.

  “You think maybe it’s going to be Cougar, after all?” Lou pondered aloud when their first efforts did very little except rock the boulder.

  Chad repositioned the leading end of the pole for a better “bite.”

  “You both have to show me more of that heave-ho women’s-lib muscle of yours,” Chad encouraged and spit in the palms of his hands for a better grip on the rough-barked pole.

  “Whoever said I was a woman’s-libber?” Lou asked and balanced herself for better leverage. “All I ever wanted was a husband and a family. This job is something to hold me over in the interim.”

  “I wouldn’t let Roger hear you say that if I were you,” Chad said with a good-natured cluck of his tongue. “Our Dr. Lewis likes to think his team is all career-oriented professionals who eat, drink, sleep, and live scientific research, private life be damned!”

  “I wouldn’t let Jack Ledben hear it, either,” Janine said, welcoming the opportunity to insert a dig of her own. She shouldn’t have had to hear about Lou and Jack’s relationship from Chad. “He might think you were contemplating him as serious husband material.”

  “Are you two purposely ganging up on me?” Lou asked with a chagrin more faked than real. “If you are, please stop and concentrate on getting this rock out of the roadway so I can get to bed.”

  “Mention Jack, and note, please, the direction—bed—in which her mind immediately heads,” Chad joked.

  “Kindly remember that you’re in the presence of a young lady whose proper upbringing doesn’t make her appreciative of your particular brand of off-color humor,” Lou reminded.

  “Sorry, Janine,” Chad apologized good-naturedly. “It has to be you about whom she speaks. Can’t be her.”

  “Remind me not to have you build any pyramids that I may have scheduled for construction at any time up the line,” Lou said, going through the motions of pretending to operate the lever herself. The pole moved a bit, but the boulder didn’t shift even a fraction of an inch. “With you on the work team, the poor cornerstone would take years and years to get laid.”

  “Get laid, did you say?” Chad asked, taking full advantage of that double entendre. “Thinking of Jack, again, are you?”

  Lou and Janine groaned in unison.

  “One…two…three! Once again, please, ladies! One…two.…”

  “Cougar is beginning to look more and more inviting as an alternative to slave labor,” Lou said.

  On their next try, though, the boulder actually moved. At first, it didn’t seem likely that it was going to move any too far, but a scrunching of the ground beneath it sent the over-size rock on a half-roll half-slide that dropped it, finally, off and over the edge.

  “Success!” Chad shouted congratulations to the three of them.

  The boulder picked up speed on its descent and entered trees at the bottom of the grade. There was a squawk of birds, and the previously seen flock again took flight, this time as an undulating curtain that momentarily blocked the moon as fully as any complete eclipse.

  Rather than circle a few times and return to their roost, this time, they circled once and veered, as one, toward the horizon.

  Janine felt herself suddenly in a strange stillness broken only by the sudden slide of additional gravel from the embankment behind her. She caught the nervous looks exchanged between Lou and Chad.

  “I really think we should get back in the car and drive on, now,” Chad suggested.

  “Just how stable is that slope, do you suppose?” Lou asked nervously, nodding toward the incline from which the boulder had obviously tumbled before they’d sent it on its merry way farther downhill.

  “I’d just as soon not stick around to find out, would you?” Chad took Janine’s arm and headed her toward the car.

  It seemed to happen in the time it took for just one footstep. The ground heaved up, bringing both of Janine’s knees to her chin. A second later, the same ground dropped away, leaving Janine seemingly suspended in midair. She’d begun the seemingly long fall, when the ground came back to her with a vengeance that knocked the breath out of her.

  Her instinct for survival told her she would be better off in the car. The trouble was that she couldn’t seem to find the car. When she did spot it, it was tilted precariously sideways, and there were brown ocean-like waves of land between her and it. Even Lou, whom Janine spotted, now and again, seemed to be playing hide and seek behind earth movement, rising and falling, between them.

  Moving wasn’t as difficult as controlling her movements when she moved. Janine might have wanted to go in one direction, but she ended up going in quite another. It was as if she were on the receiving end of a fraternity blanket-toss, except, each time she came down, there was nothing soft to catch her.

  “Ouch!” Something hit her hard on the back of her head. She tried to explore the damage done, but her arms kept waving this way and that, as if she were fighting off a swarm of bees.

  She…had…no…control!

  When she realized Chad was the sudden weight on top of her, she thought the heaving earth had dumped him there. Despite his smothering bulk, she welcomed the physical contact. He was another human being sharing this trial with her, and she could derive strength and hope from his closeness. She would later remember feeling vaguely embarrassed as to just how much pleasure she took from his hard body. However, there on that road, she was too concerned with survival to pay much mind to emotions that had little to do with her possibly life-and-death situation.

  “Protect your head!” she heard him order. Anyway, she thought it was his voice, seemingly confirmed by how his large hand suddenly cupped the back of her head to tuck her face securely against his chest and shoulder. She immediately smelled a heady fragrance of disturbed earth, virile man, and lime-scented cologne.

  Although the ground seemed to buck less and less, Janine heard a sound reminiscent of the fist-sized hail once dropped from the sky onto her parents’ home in Spokane.

  Someone—she?—squealed when hit by several of whatever it was suddenly dropped, en masse, from the sky upon them.

  Where was Lou?

  Chad grunted as he, too, was hit. Janine remained unsure just what assaulted them, because Chad kept her pressed so securely against him. His every resulting mo
an vibrated through her as if she were a tuning fork.

  There was a very loud thud close to her right ear. She tried to turn towards it, but Chad’s hand kept her face wedged tightly against him. All she saw was darkness.

  How long was she crushed beneath him before she realized the only sounds remaining were her and his heavy breathing? She’d later have access to the graphs and readouts from the scientific team’s monitoring equipment, and those would record a 6.4 earthquake for a duration of thirty seconds. She’d go to her grave thinking it was far bigger and that it had lasted far longer.

  Chad pulled himself off her. She missed the feel of him. He’d been her protective blanket against the fury of the worst. He was sprinkled with a heavy coat of dust and looked like one of those people who supposedly had their hair turn ash-grey after a major scare.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her. He looked genuinely dazed and rubbed his right shoulder; his grimace told Janine something had hit him hard.

  “I think so.” She moved, testing the parts of her body one at a time, and judging just how well each had survived her ordeal.

  “There’ll be aftershocks,” he warned. “We’ll be safer in the car.”

  Janine stood up in a landscape vastly changed. A fissure had opened behind the car and now divided the roadway into two separate pieces, one on each side of a six-foot chasm. A landslide of dirt had cascaded the mountain and was tented window-height against the left side of their now-tipped car. The ground all around was pockmarked with craters where rocks, now everywhere, had barreled and bounced down the mountain. How many of those would have struck Janine if Chad hadn’t been there to shield her from them?

  “You’re hurt!” she said; he still rubbed his shoulder and now walked with an obvious limp.

  “I doubt it’s serious.” He was optimistic.

  She finally remembered Lou and shouted her name. She looked where she’d last seen her friend, but there was nothing there but several hand-sized stones.