The Lioness(86)

When she reached the acacia, she studied her sunburn, and she recalled the one that Felix had told her about soon after they met—the one he had gotten on his back after his sister, Olivia, had died in the car accident. The first time she had given Felix a back rub in bed, she had noticed the small scars that remained.

The sun was dead overhead now. She sat down beneath the acacia to rest and thought how easily she could fall asleep here. But she didn’t dare. One foot in front of the other. She reached into Reggie’s pants pocket for his wallet and took out all the paper money and traveler’s checks that he had.

And then she trudged back to the baobab, trying to remain alert because now the impalas were gone and that might mean something. A predator was stalking them. She had gone no more than fifty yards when she saw the vultures lift off and glide over her head toward the acacia. Of course. They would feed on the dead publicist—a man who’d survived Okinawa, one of the most dangerous places on the planet, and Hollywood, one of the most toxic—while she was incinerating the tree that had saved her life last night.

At the baobab, she retrieved the pack with the antiseptic and the aspirin, and everything else that Reggie had salvaged from the wrecked Land Rover. She carried it thirty or so yards from the tree, what she supposed would be a safe distance from the baobab after she had turned it into a gigantic tiki torch. A flare. But she honestly had no idea what a safe distance was: the grass was dry. For all she knew, she’d scorch acres and acres of savanna and immolate herself. The fire might spread all the way to the acacia.

Still, this was her shot.

She looked at the ashes from the little fire that Reggie had started last night. She wanted something much, much bigger. She wanted a conflagration.

Shadows of more birds passing overhead dotted the savanna and there was a faint breeze now. She yanked up grass and foraged for twigs. She reached for the baobab’s lower branches and tugged from the tree the ones that she could. She snapped the medium boughs into small ones. She peeled off some pieces of bark so small that probably they were worthless, and scraped off others that might help start the blaze. She made piles and teepees around the trunk. Then she looked at the paper and cardboard she had. It wasn’t a lot: mostly bandages and gauze and the box that had held the Germolene tube, and the label on the bottle of Bayer aspirin. There was Reggie’s money and his traveler’s checks. It was why she had taken them. But it was all the paper she had been able to round up, and so it would have to do. She found nothing in the pack that might work as an accelerant.

She placed the papers and the bills in a ring beneath her mounds of grass and brush and twigs. Then she took the lighter and ran the flame along the bottom, walking stooped over in a circle around the base of the baobab.

It smoked and the paper blackened and curled, all of it more slowly than newspaper would: the cardboard was thick, the Band-Aids had a plastic coating, and money was, well, money. She had no idea why money burned slowly because she’d never tried to set fire to a bill before. But, as she’d feared, it sure as hell wasn’t igniting.

Still, the whole circle was smoldering. And there was a breeze, she thought, and that was encouraging.

For a long moment, she held the lighter flame under a section that had a particularly high and airy patch of pulled grass, staring into it, and that was when she felt the gust on the back of her neck and the fire began to rise up along the circle of brush she had built around the baobab. She backed away and watched, barely daring to hope. But the lowest protrusions of bark and dangling, stalactite-like branches started to burn. In a moment, the flames were singeing the section of trunk where she and Reggie had fought off the hyenas and then licking the bottom of the thick and sturdy branch where she had spent the night.

She knew that fire climbed, and this blaze was definitely climbing.

She felt a ripple of pride, but also anxiety. Was this all that was going to happen? Was this it?

But then, with a burst so concussive that she fell back on the ground, the tree exploded into flame. It was an inferno, bright yellow at its base, the smoke belching into a tall column that curlicued high into the air before the wind currents propelled it south. It was all she could have hoped for, and now she stood and walked backward toward the acacia and Reggie and the vultures, never taking her eyes off the baobab. She was actually a little awed.

As she neared the tree, the birds scattered, settling to wait patiently no more than a few dozen yards away. She lowered herself into the dry grass. The vultures had started to pick at Reggie’s face, and when she saw that parts of his cheeks were already gone, she looked away and vowed never to look back. She’d gaze instead at the baobab, her own burning bush, or she’d close her eyes, which she did.

Because her eyes had grown heavy in the heat. The sun was bright, even beneath the acacia, and it was easier to close them. She told herself that if she got her miracle—a plane saw the smoke or the fire and circled around to take a look—she would hear it.

Which she did.

She had lost track of time and honestly didn’t know if it had been fifteen minutes or thirty. Perhaps it had been an hour.

The noise was a dull buzz at first that could have been an insect. But it grew into the rhythmic whirr of an engine, and so she opened her eyes and there it was. A plane. Mostly white, but some red striping on the tail and the fuselage. Maybe it was big enough for two people and maybe four. Perhaps even six. She had no idea. But it had a propeller at the nose and three landing wheels, and so she ran out into the open between the acacia and the baobab, which was almost burned out, and she shouted “Here!” and cried out for help, waving her arms, and then—and the sight caused her to howl in anguish in the blistering heat, “No, no, no!”—the plane continued to the south. It hadn’t seen her. It was leaving.