Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(97)
“I think you should stay here,” he said. “Where it’s safe. When it’s over, Lewis or I will come get you.”
June shook her head. “I need to see him,” she said. “If he’s really part of this, I have to be part of ending it. Or I’ll never resolve it myself, in my own mind. I’ll keep falling for the wrong guy.”
Peter had wondered when they’d get to this part.
“Am I the wrong guy?”
She gave him a richly layered smile. “You’re the right guy for right now,” she said. “You might be the first right guy I’ve ever been with. But I’m still a work in progress. I can’t make any promises, no matter how things turn out tomorrow.”
She didn’t say this: You’re a killer, Peter. And I like you, I’ve slept with you. Might even be falling in love with you. So what does that say about me? And you’re damaged. You’re unemployed, you have no fixed address, your life is a mess. You can’t even sleep inside. A girl wants to stay in a nice hotel every once in a while. A girl wants to have a home.
But she didn’t need to say it. Because he could already hear it in his head.
Instead she stood up and walked over to him, leaned in close for a kiss. A soft, deep kiss. When he closed his eyes it was like falling off a cliff.
Like flying, until you hit the ground.
She broke the kiss and stood up. She was barefoot. She unfastened her jeans with great deliberateness, then let them fall and stepped slowly out of them. She began to unbutton her shirt. The firelight illuminated her skin like an ancient manuscript. She wore a lacy black bra and black panties that looked like coal against the paleness of her flesh. The tops of her breasts were dappled with freckles.
He wondered if she’d already made up her mind.
When she reached behind her back to unhook her bra, he found that he didn’t care, not at that particular moment.
He scooped her up and carried her into the tent.
If a shadow flew overhead at that moment, glinting gold off the setting sun, neither of them noticed.
47
The next morning they crossed the wide Columbia River back into Washington on a high concrete bridge almost half a mile long.
It was still early morning and the air was incredibly clear, somehow scrubbed of all impurities. At the top of the span, they could see for miles up and down the river and along the wrinkled brown bluffs where green trees and brush grew in the creases cut by water. The sky was a distant faded blue. This was not the wet climate of Seattle. Past the western wall of the Cascades lay this high desert of small farming communities, vacation homes, orchards and vineyards, anchorites and mystics.
They stopped in Maryhill for gas. While Peter worked the pump, June held out the keys and absently watched the sky.
They turned west again on 12, following the river back toward the sea for a few miles. Peter drove and June stared out the window, her head tilted up toward the blue. With each mile, the creased landscape grew greener. At Lyle, they took 142 north along the Klickitat River, a narrow winding highway with signs warning of falling rocks. After a while they turned onto a lumpy unnamed road through an increasingly vertical landscape toward the narrow valley where June had grown up.
“How did you finally get out?” Peter asked.
“I walked,” she said. “I found a way up the ridge at the head of the valley, a goat path or something up to the head of the waterfall. There was a big alpine meadow, and then mountains as far as I could see. Over a few weeks I went farther and farther, trying to find some kind of trail out, but I couldn’t go far enough because I had to get back for dinner each night. Finally I took a pack and some food and a sleeping bag and some warm clothes and all the money I could find and just went.”
Peter imagined her at fifteen, furious and alone and so desperate to leave the safety of the prison her father had made for her that she’d climb a waterfall to hike without a map into the rugged unknown wilderness.
“You found a road,” he said. “Then what? You hitchhiked to California?”
She shook her head. “I bought a motorcycle, a little Yamaha 50, a couple miles outside of White Salmon. Guy had it parked out in front of his house. I’d never even been on one before, but I’d been cranking an old mountain bike around the valley trails for years, so I had pretty good balance. Before he’d sell it to me, he made me show him I could ride, and that I could pick it back up if I dumped it over. It was his son’s bike, he’d died in the first weeks of the war. The guy gave me the helmet for nothing, came back out with a couple of sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and some cold Cokes. I didn’t tell him anything but he must have seen something. He said he didn’t know what I was running from but he hoped I found what I was looking for.”
“And you did.”
“Back roads through three states on a little dirt bike not even street legal,” she said. “I should have been picked up by the cops a hundred times.”
“Or the child molesters.”
“Oh, they were scared of me,” she said.
Peter didn’t doubt it. He was a little scared of her himself.
She peered out the windshield at the rugged roadside. “Things have changed some out here, but not that much. A few more houses. Still pretty rough.”
They approached a gravel turnoff at the edge of a lumpy tilted hay field, the road marked only by a giant black boulder with a green cap of lichen and a blaze of white paint across its face. The boulder was unlike anything he had seen in that country, what geologists would call an erratic. Ejected by a volcano or dragged by a glacier in some previous age, and big enough that no farmer could remove it without blowing his seed money on dynamite, so it remained where it was.