That only wound him up further.
The chair sitting by the fire skidded across the room and slammed into the cabinets along the opposite wall. Small objects zipped through the air. He took hold of my other shoulder and shook me a little with each statement. “NO! NO! I DI—N’T HURT ANY?—!”
His body pulsed and flickered. Pieces of him faded until he was only a faint outline.
“NO!” He continued, the only word I could understand anymore. “NO! NO!”
Silence, sudden and hollow, swallowed the cabin.
The flying objects clattered to the floor.
Charlie vanished.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ileft the chair by the fire for the next seven nights.
It warmed up, and I didn’t need to light the wood stove anymore. In fact, I opened a couple of windows when it became uncomfortably stuffy in the evenings, but I still lit a fire.
I couldn’t shake the sight of Charlie holding his hands out over the hot stove.
On the third night since he disappeared, I draped a blanket over the back of the chair.
Just in case.
Our conversation consumed my thoughts. I went through the motions of the job and relished the stunning views and slow pace, all the while cataloging everything I thought I knew about what’d happened at Dead Man’s Lookout all those years ago.
I cycled through what he’d said over and over—that a police officer had hiked out to discuss the missing people, and that he last remembered being in the lookout before he died.
The police had always remained tight-lipped about the investigation, so the fact that it wasn’t widely known that someone met with Charles Randolph—Charlie—the day before he went missing wasn’t surprising.
But then why hadn’t they found his body? And what had they found instead that convinced them of his guilt?
A simple answer to those questions was that he’d lied to me, and he was, in fact, guilty.
It just didn’t feel right, though. The potent combination of disbelief, desperation, and rage that’d poured out of him would be difficult to fake. And why lie in the first place?
He was already dead.
Plus, his first thought hadn’t been for himself, or the legacy of fear he’d left behind. It was for his family, and whether they’d suffered in hope that he’d someday come home.
I refused to believe someone who loved their family that much could murder six innocent people in cold blood.
Storms rolled in at the end of my first week. When the forecast called for lightning after hours, we were paid overtime to continue our watch. Honestly, as live-in lookouts, most of us kept an eye out anyway, but the overtime was a nice bonus.
The towers themselves were safeguarded via a system of lightning rods and copper grounding wires, which attracted and dispersed electrical currents without harming the structure or occupants, but still.
There wasn’t anything quite like experiencing a lightning storm in the clouds.
It made for a tense couple of days, and a welcome distraction from my tumultuous thoughts. I’d settled into the job just fine, but really stretched my legs those first stormy nights. I called in three strikes, rotating the Firefinder until I centered the smoke plume between the front and rear sites, and reported the reading over the radio.
A few more reports came in from neighboring viewsheds, but so far, no fires.
“Lightning’s a tricky beast,” Janine said during our debrief on a private channel just before bed.
I was exhausted and sore from being on my feet so much, but it was a good kind of ache.
“It can simmer in a root system for days. I had a fire once that popped up nearly two weeks later! So keep a close eye on those strike sites.”
