Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(96)

“That sounds hard,” he said quietly.

“Well, I wasn’t completely alone,” she said. “He had some researchers there, doing their own work. We all kind of tiptoed around the Yeti, and a few of them sort of adopted me. Sally Sanchez in particular, she was kinda my backup mom. She went out of her way to make sure I got fed and did my schoolwork. She talked me through my first period, bought me my first bra.”

“Tell me about the other people. What did they do?”

“Sally was an agricultural researcher, she came one summer to test different designs of greenhouses and just stayed on. My dad wanted the valley to be able to feed itself, so we had orchards and big vegetable gardens, fields of wheat and corn and soybeans. By the time I left, Sally was running the whole ag project. Other scientists got grants to come work on a specific project for a year or two, sometimes a half-dozen people at a time. People doing solar power experiments, making 3-D printers, miniature battery technology, all this stuff that my dad said would help the valley, and by extension everyplace else. Sally was kind of the den mother, she’d been there the longest. She organized Saturday night dinners, and everyone would come, ag workers and researchers and whatever family they brought.” She smiled, and Peter could see what she’d looked like as a little girl. “That was always the high point of my week.”

The big two-trailer semi was really bogged down now. It was in the wrong lane and it couldn’t accelerate fast enough to keep irate commuters from dodging in front of it, which just slowed it more. June found a hole in the middle lane, hit the gas and flew ahead of the semi, the road opening up ahead of them.

“But there were really no other kids, you know? I mean, what kind of way is that to raise your daughter? I was a teenage girl, and I had nobody else my age to talk to. I’d ask him to go skiing on Mount Hood and he’d say it was too dangerous. Shit, I’d been climbing rocks and trees and skiing in the valley since I was five. What was so dangerous about Mount Hood? But it wasn’t the skiing he was worried about. It was the Taliban and al Qaeda and the war and the government, the whole wide world out of his control. Nothing was safe.”

He watched the memory play across her face. Wanting to be protected, and wanting to be free from that protection. She said, “I could do anything I wanted as long as I didn’t leave the valley. But at a certain point I just wanted more. I wanted the world.”

“And he didn’t want you to have it?”

“I don’t know what he wanted. I’m sure he loved me, in his fucked-up way. But I barely saw him. He was always busy in his workshop. People showed up from outside the valley and they’d go into his workshop with him, something I never got to do.” She looked at Peter. “The first time I ran away, I think I just wanted him to talk to me.”

“What did he do in his workshop?” asked Peter.

“I’d guess he did a lot of different things,” she said. “But the one thing I know about is building airplanes,” she said. “Little ones, you know, remote-controlled. He’d always liked that. He’d flown his own plane when I was a little kid, but had to give it up. Something happened. He had these little microseizures and they took his license away.”

Remote-controlled planes. Peter glanced out the window. Angled his head to peer skyward.

“What?” said June. She was looking at him.

“Nothing.” He levered a smile onto his face.

She looked harder. “What do you see?”

“Nothing right now.” He glanced out the window again. “A few times something I thought was a big bird, circling up high. But now I’m pretty sure it’s not, because when the sun hits it just right, I’ll get a flash of gold.” He looked back at June. “Have you noticed anything like that?”

She sighed. “Yeah. Since California. I think it’s my dad.”

He reached out and put his hand on hers. They drove like that until the freeway came to a long uphill grade and the truck began to slow. She had to let go of his hand to shift gears.





46





They were quiet as June drove east, each lost in their own thoughts watching the landscape scroll by. Peter was wondering about the Yeti and what he might have gotten up to in the fifteen years since his daughter left home. And he wondered about June.

She took the exit for the Deschutes River Recreation Area, where they planned to camp for the night. Lewis needed the time to get down the falls. Peter had no idea what Manny would do. For all he knew, Manny had a friend with a surplus Huey who’d drop them directly into the valley. Lacking a helicopter, Manny and his guys were more than capable of any technical climb necessary to get where he needed to go.

They found a site by the melt-swollen Deschutes and set up camp, not speaking more than necessary to get things done. Peter had a crate of scrap lumber in the truck, and he built a small fire in the rusty iron ring. June sat in one of his little folding chairs and watched the kindling ignite.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Peter finally said. This was part of what he’d been thinking about, how to get to this. “Your dad could have an army in there. And I’m guessing Chip will be right behind us, with everything he’s got.”

June stared at him across the fire, her eyes alight in the flickering flame. He had no idea what she was thinking.