Molly had not bargained for such a steep treacherous trail up toward Two Cliffs. Having staggered across the soft thick cushion of the croquet courts, she had expected to find easy going on the path. Instead it was clear she was going to break an ankle.
She stood in the trees for a moment trying to decide what to do. She wanted to follow Con. She wanted to press her advantage, but she did not want to ruin her clothes, break a bone, or make an idiot of herself.
She lit a cigarette and smoked it to help herself think.
Molly found everything about smoking very soothing. It gave you something to do, it calmed you down, and it took up time. She ignored all the realistic warnings about smoking.
She flicked the match into the bushes and after an interval tossed the half-smoked cigarette in after it.
She faintly heard the boys yelling at Beth Rose.
Molly would never put herself in the position of being a pain. What could be worse than boys who were sorry you were along? Although in Molly’s opinion, having Beth Rose along automatically meant you were sorry about it. She could not imagine what anybody, least of all Gary, saw in such a namby-pamby as Beth.
All right.
She’d go back to the dance.
No point in throwing her energy into something pointless.
She had another cigarette first, though, because it was nice to be able to smoke (Rushing River Inn’s lovely rooms were marred by large red and white No Smoking signs) and because she wasn’t sure yet what she’d do once she got back to the ballroom.
Pammy really and truly wanted that VCR.
Her parents said they already subscribed to cable TV and HomeMovies, and there was no need for a VCR.
Pammy felt there was a deep imperative need, and that without a VCR she was going to die.
She was putting all her energy into this questionnaire. She was the only one to care this much, so she figured she had the best chance of winning it. She had most of the questions answered. She knew now that Douglas was the one who did not like chocolate. Her whole opinion of Douglas was changed now, although Douglas did not seem to care very much about this, and now Pammy was trying to find out who had skied in six countries. She had asked every single person who could possibly afford to live that kind of life. None of them admitted to skiing in any country except the United States, and several hadn’t skied there, either.
Pammy’s appetite was whetted by this.
It meant that somebody at this dance had a lot more money and a lot more style than Pammy would ever have dreamed. She was now asking the unlikely ones. She tried Kip, who with her four little brothers lived in an apartment, not a house, and certainly didn’t dress as if she went skiing abroad. Kip just looked annoyed and said, “No, I don’t even have a passport.” Pammy asked Evelyn, a nervous girl if there ever was one, and Evelyn said her idea of thrills and chills in winter was to look out the window at the snow. Evelyn’s date laughed. Pammy said, “So who can I ask? I’ve asked everybody.”
“Try the girls’ room,” Evelyn said. “The interesting people always hang out in there.”
Pammy had never known that. She rushed to the girls’ room to see if somebody interesting was hanging out there.
It was Anne and Emily sitting together on the couch.
Well, definitely Anne had not spent the winter skiing in Switzerland. And Emily? Dubiously, Pammy said, “Emily, are you the one who went skiing in six countries?”
Emily stared at her for a moment. Then she said, “No. I’ve only been skiing in five.”
“Oh, wow!” Pammy cried. “Maybe it’s a misprint! Maybe it’s really you! Did you write that down on your questionnaire? Did you, Em?”
Emily rolled her eyes. “I was kidding, Pammy. I’ve never been skiing anywhere.”
Pammy flung herself down on the couch with them. “How am I ever going to win this VCR?” she cried. “I just can’t find out the last few questions!”
“What do you have so far?” Anne asked, looking over Pammy’s answers.
“Let us copy Pammy’s answers,” said Emily, giggling. “Then we’ll be just as far along for a fraction of the effort.”
Anne thought that Pammy was a very lucky person. She had no idea that she had interrupted anything, or that she was the least bit unwelcome. Pammy was happy and ignorant. Kind of a nice way to be, actually. It spared you an awful lot of worry. Look at Emily—not telling Christopher where to get off because she was afraid it would be rude. Pammy would never think of that. Pammy would just say, “Christopher, stop your stupid car and let me out, you creep.”
I have to be more like Pammy, Anne thought.
She hid a giggle. Con would hate that.
But did she care any more?
Did Con mean anything to her now, other than some very mixed memories?
It sounded like a record or a movie.
Mixed reviews.
Anne said, “You don’t have Gary’s name down here for anything, Pammy. He’s kind of a mysterious person, don’t you think? Ask Gary if he’s an answer.”
Pammy looked pouty. She said, “Gary took off with—” she caught herself.
“Right,” said Anne. “With Con and Mike. Go for it, Pammy. One of those three is sure to have done something on this questionnaire !”
“But do you know for sure?” Pammy asked anxiously. “Has Gary ever said anything about skiing abroad?”
“Pammy, Gary never says anything period. You have to drag it out of him. Maybe Beth Rose knows.”
“And maybe not,” said Emily. “I think in that relationship, Gary dictates and Beth Rose obeys.” She felt overwhelmingly glad to have Matt. She wanted Pammy to leave so she could tell Anne that Matt had suggested she could live at his house, and what did Anne think of that? But Pammy stayed, and stayed, and Anne, not one to surrender an opportunity handed to her like that, copied down Pammy’s questionnaire answers on her own paper. Pammy said, “Well, okay, you can have my answers, but if you win, Anne…”
Anne giggled. “I’ll give you half the VCR.”
Lee found Kip.
Alone.
He had, until this moment in his life, found a girl standing all alone to be frightening. He would never consider walking up to a girl who was all alone. She might draw some kind of conclusion from it.
Kip alone, though. She was different.
“Hi,” he said to her.
She was startled, and for an instant her expression was nothing but surprise. Then her face softened, and her chin lowered. Turning slightly, she smiled at him. No words, just a smile.
She’s glad to see me, Lee thought.
There was no sign of the so-called boyfriend.
Just to be sure, Lee asked, “So where is he?”
Kip shrugged her eyebrows. He loved how she did that. Very economical of movement. No shoulders in her shrug—the so-called boyfriend wasn’t worth that much. She said, “I’m told he went for a hike up Two Cliffs trail.”
“Oh yeah, I heard some of the boys saying that they wanted to do that.”
“Is it safe?”
It was Lee’s turn to shrug eyebrows. “It’s safe as long as you stay on the trail.”
Kip giggled. “I guess that’s true of life in general. Now listen, I heard Mr. Martin yelling at you just as I slipped out of the kitchen; for once my timing was excellent. Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“I am working. I’m checking hither and yon for chaos and mess that I can clean up.” He shaded his eyes and stared into the dark shadows as if searching for icebergs at sea.
They flirted.
They knew nothing about each other.
They didn’t particularly want to.
Kip just didn’t want to start the whole thing—the “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” and “Did you always live here?” and “Are you getting good grades at school?” and “Do you like to sail?”
Boring.
Kip wanted to stay on the surface, gliding along, batting eyelashes, and trad
ing silly remarks. Dancing. Laughing.
She knew from Mike that when she got serious, she got too serious. And since Lee was a boy she really wanted to get serious about, well then, she could not get serious at all.
Now that’s weird, Kip thought.
That’s a truly weird thought.
But correct. I have only to ask Mike, and he will say, Go for it, Kip. Be light-hearted for a change. Don’t organize the evening, don’t organize his life, don’t organize his job. This Lee wants to get in trouble with Mr. Martin, let him, it’s his job, you’re not in charge.
“Shall we dance?” Lee asked.
Kip choked back a suggestion that he should be working.
The rule is—just dance, she told herself. Don’t organize.
So they danced. For at least thirty seconds Kip forgot about being in charge and just enjoyed Lee. Then she couldn’t stand it.
“Listen, I can’t stand it,” she said.
Lee let go of her like a burning torch in his fingers.
“Not you!” Kip said, taking him back again. “You just don’t know me. Lee. I’m very driven. I like things to go the way they ought to. You ought to be working. You’ll have to ask me out for a date so we can go dancing when you’re not working.”
Lee laughed.
What a wonderful change from the girls he knew at school. He could never tell what they were thinking, which always made him nervous, which always made him run, which meant he never would understand what a girl was thinking.
He said, “I don’t suppose you know what you’re doing next Saturday night.”
Kip said, “I am the type of person who always knows what she is doing next Saturday night.”
Lee thought, my kind of person.
At that point Kip, who never forgot anything, forgot she had come to this dance with Mike. She gave Lee a tremendous hug, and Lee being a wrestler gave her a tremendous one right back, and they began making plans for next Saturday night.
Lee was looking at Kip’s hair: her dark hair, and the way the lights made it gleam like gold, and he looked beyond her, and out into the darkness of the forest and mountain, and there was gold there, too.
At first he thought it was a reflection, and then he thought—
Hanging onto Kip’s arm he walked swiftly to the door of the ballroom and out into the fresh air. Gold?
Lee sniffed.
Kip whispered, “Fire.”
Chapter 10
KIP HAD BUT ONE thought: was the fire a sufficient threat to call the fire department?
But while Lee was saying, “We’d better check it out first. Maybe we can put it out ourselves,” Kip was realizing that it had not rained in some time, that this fire was on the rim of a very dry forest, and that there was a steady evening breeze off the mountain.
Her mind flipped through the possibilities of putting it out themselves: there was an underground sprinkler system: she had seen it working earlier in the day. So there would be outdoor water faucets somewhere, but hoses might be stowed anyplace, since they obviously weren’t normally used. Finding them would take valuable minutes. There were fire extinguishers inside, but ripping them off the walls would cause needless panic. There was Mr. Martin, but Kip’s opinion of his ability to handle a crisis was not high.
She had cataloged in her mind where the telephones were early on in the evening. While Mike was being annoying, and wishing he hadn’t come, and hoping his buddies like Gary would show up soon, Kip had taken in everything. She had a mind for detail. Just as she had known the questionnaire might not work well, because its sponsors hadn’t thought it out very clearly, Kip had absorbed without really looking for them the important things: phones, womens’ room, soda supply.
She had also glanced at the speedometer on the car when they were driving up to Mount Snow, curling down the narrow tree-lined roads with their occasional vistas of beauty: Rushing River Inn was four miles from the main road. The fastest any fire volunteers could get there was probably a good fifteen minutes.
A fire in a high wind could eat an acre in that time: attack the very Inn itself.
But the first worry was not the Inn: sprinkling the ground to keep the grass lovely had probably also kept the grounds damp enough for protection as long as the fire was still small.
But how small was it?
Very smoky: a few knee-high flames, but in these first few minutes it did not really appear very threatening.
All these thoughts had raced through her mind in only a few seconds.
“You run and estimate the size of the fire,” Kip ordered Lee. “Come tell me. I’ll be in the main kitchen.”
She did not give him the reasons she was going to the main kitchen; it would waste his time and hers. She simply began running, ducking back through the ballroom and out the side door, down the halls, through the side kitchen where she and Lee had had their first kiss, and burst into the main kitchen. She was right. The place was full of cooks and waiters and busboys slowly shutting down, as the formal dining service drew to a close for the evening.
In a sharp voice that cut through the music of the rock station they had playing and the sound of steak on an indoor grill, she said to them, “There’s a fire in the brush by the croquet court.”
Startled, they looked up to see a pretty brown-haired teenager in a dancing dress.
“This outside door is closest,” she said, gesturing to the door with its huge red EXIT sign. Flinging the door open, Kip began pointing at each person in the kitchen. “You! Find the outdoor faucet and hook up a hose to it. You Get that big bucket under the sink! Carry it out to dump on the fire! We may be able to put it out before it spreads! You! Call the fire department. Tell them to come into the lower parking lot. You!”
And just as the teenagers had obeyed her when she stopped them from swimming in the pool two hours earlier, the kitchen help obeyed her now.
It didn’t occur to any of them not to.
Kip had such an air of authority that even the assistant cook stirring a sauce that would burn if he didn’t keep tending it just moved the sauce onto a cold burner and ran to obey his orders.
“You!” Kip said to a busboy. “Round up the waiters without any fanfare and get them out there to put out the fire.”
“Right,” said the busboy, turning on his heel and heading for the dining room.
“You!” Kip said to the chef. “Get that fire extinguisher. You! Get blankets from the linen closet in the hall. Maybe the fire can be extinguished by smothering it.”
Kip had not spent a minute and a half saying this.
Now she was out the door herself to get her people organized at the fire’s edge.
Gary and Mike and Con searched fruitlessly among the trees. The steep sides of Mount Snow rose above them, and this was no open ski trail, but a dense wilderness of vines and undergrowth, ragged rock edges and crawling clinging tree branches.
“Beth Rose! Beth! Beth!”
But no one answered their yells, and the dark closed in on them like the arms of the leafy trees.
Gary tried to tell himself that if she had fallen into this it would have cushioned her like a net beneath a circus act.
If she fell? he thought. Who am I kidding? If.
He tried to look up the mountain and locate the trail’s edge where Beth had gone over, but of course it was impossible. Not only was it too dark to see anything, but the trees growing higher up leaned over him, sheltering him to the point that he thought in a rainstorm he could probably stay dry down here.
And dry was the word.
Underfoot everything his shoe touched crunched like breakfast cereal. Good weather for a forest fire, he thought, and once more he shouted for her, crying, “Beth Rose! Bethie!”
Nobody answered.
He could hear Con shouting, too, beating at underbrush as if fighting through a jungle after the enemy. Gary’s head felt thick. He saw a square of pale light ahead of him and thought—it’s her dress. He stumbled toward it, muttering h
er name, gasping for breath, blundering into unseen fallen logs and stepping into a quagmire of wet soft earth where an unexpected spring had soaked the ground.
But it was not Beth Rose, or anybody else.
It was simply an opening in the forest ceiling and moonlight pouring down, reflecting limply on the huge leaves of some evil-looking cabbagelike weed.
It was pointless.
They could find nobody, see nothing in the thick woods by night.
Mike was the first to give up.
“Beth Rose! Beth!” came Gary’s voice, despairing, raw.
Standing on the path, staring into the nothingness of a forest at night, Mike thought, She must have broken her neck. Hit her skull maybe. Or else she’d moan, or answer us, or—
There was a moment of silence in which none of them was shouting Beth’s name.
In the silence Mike could hear Kip.
He couldn’t make out her words, but he could hear the authoritative ring of her shout.
Giving marching orders to somebody, that was for sure! A lot of somebodies.
It was enough to make a guy surrender. Could that girl not get along for an hour on her own without subjecting everybody to a military drill? Kip seemed to have a whole army at her disposal right now. Out of doors? It couldn’t be the VCR prize and the questionnaire she was marshaling them all to solve. What on earth could they—
But of course.
It would be Kip who found Beth Rose. Mike could not imagine how Kip would manage this, but she managed everything else.
“Gary,” he said. Horror thickened his throat and it came out a whisper. He tried to stay mad at Kip for getting involved, but horror over what condition Beth Rose might be in covered his anger. Because why would Kip need all those people except to move a body out of a terrible spot?
“Gary!” he tried again.
“You found her?” Gary’s voice was raw from shouting.
Mike couldn’t see him. He wondered briefly what they would do if all of them got lost down here. “I think Kip did. Higher on the mountain. Come back to the path, Gary. We’ve got to head toward the Inn.”
The fire had found a dead bush among the thick pretty hemlocks, and the bush went up like a torch and was consumed so quickly that Lee, the only witness, was not sure he had really seen it. It almost exploded, and its sparks leaped across the grass, and its flames circled the hemlocks and captured dead leaves and the smallest trees on the forest rim.