Page 79 of The Goat Next Door

Brooks

“6 Down: What Brooks refuses to admit he feels (4 letters).”

— Crossword Hints

The heavy steel door shudders in its frame as I kick it shut, the sound swallowed by the cavernous quiet of the maintenance bay.

Davis doesn’t look up from the workbench. He’s attacking a brass gate valve with a wire brush, the rhythm aggressive, as if he’s trying to scour the very history off the metal.

He doesn’t stop scrubbing, but he gives me a sidelong glance, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face. “How’s the local celebrity doing? I trust you managed to fix whatever crisis she invented this time?”

“It was just a leak,” I say, tossing my jacket onto the lockers. “It’s fixed. Can we move on?”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Funny how you’re always the one who happens to be ‘mobile’ whenever she needs someone to stop by.”

“I was already out,” I snap. “It’s called doing the job, Davis. Where’s the log for the north ridge?”

Davis sets the valve down with a heavy, final thud. “Log’s on your desk. But you’ve got a bigger problem than the road, Brooks. The state forestry supervisor called twice while you were off playing hero.”

I freeze, my hand hovering over the office door handle. “Forestry? The burn permits are frozen until July.”

“It’s not the permits,” Davis says, leaning against the bench, his posture shifting from playful to professional. “Aerial survey. Thermal imaging picked up three hot spots in the peat bogs behind the old cedar mill. They think the lightning from Tuesday didn’t just pass through—they think it hit the deep mold under the hemlocks and it’s been smoldering subsurface for forty-eight hours.”

My stomach drops into a hard, cold knot.

Dealing with a peat fire is like fighting a ghost that’s actively trying to boil you from the feet up. You can’t just drop a pumper line into the river and call it a day.

It’s a slow-motion catastrophe, eating through five feet of dry moss and rotted pine needles, traveling along the roots of the trees until the whole forest floor is nothing but a hollow, ticking time bomb waiting to drop anyone standing on it into a bed of coals.

If the wind picks up from the lake tonight like the forecast warned, those three hot spots will clear the ridge and hit the hollow road before the morning shift even clocks in.

“Did they issue a red flag?”

“Not yet,” Davis says. “They’re calling it a localized monitoring event until they can verify the depth. But the state’s short-handed because of the big burn over in the next county. They want us to send an officer up to the railway spur with a shovel and a thermal probe to check the perimeter before the wind shifts at midnight.”

I look down at my boots, noticing the fine, tell-tale crust of white flour still stuck to them from the shop floor sixty minutes ago.

“Get Pumper Two greased,” I say. “And call Fred. Tell him he’s on standby for the town grid. If that peat catches the wind, we’re going to need every gallon of water in the municipal tank just to keep the smoke out of the valley floor.”

“You’re going up alone?” Davis asks, his tone shifting back to the protective edge of a partner.

“The lane’s too narrow for the big rig,” I say. “I’ll take the utility truck and the hand tools. It’s just an inspection.”

I walk into my office and slam the door.

I pull my cell phone out, my thumb hovering over the screen. I have exactly three people on my emergency pick-up list for Sophie: Nana, Davis’s wife, and the school principal.

Nana’s at the doctor’s, Davis’s wife is down with a migraine, and the principal has a district board meeting in twenty minutes. I’m staring at the contact list, the weight of the mountain and the ticking clock closing in, and for the first time in ten years, I don’t have a clear path out of the woods.

My thumb slides down the screen.

The phone rings three times before the line clicks open, the background noise full of the rattle of old iron pans and the low hum of a dishwasher.

“Ember,” I say.

“Chief,” her voice comes back. “Did you find a code violation in the sourdough crust already? Because I assure you, Marge’s parameters are historically verified.”

“Emmy, listen to me,” I say, turning my back to the office door and leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window. “I need a favor. A personal one.”