Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

behind her ear calmed her. The scent of him made her smile. “Come on, girl,” he said, walking along the border of the tomato field, toward the road. It wasn’t far from here to Ian’s, and it was plenty warm, beautiful, a good night for walking. When he reached the road, he had nothing on his mind except the way the trees looked in the reddish glow. He did not notice Pal stop suddenly. The first he knew of Mendelson was the sound of his laughter, close by.

“Hello, Joe. Had enough?”

Joe stopped, Pal caught up with him, and the two of them stood looking at the man in the road. “Who’s that?” Joe asked.

“We haven’t met,” the man said, stepping forward. “The name’s Mendelson.”

“Ah,” Joe said, taking his hand. It felt as if it were skinned with hoof, hard and dry and cold. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’ll bet you have. And I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Have you?”

“Well, sure. Strange young man shows up out of nowhere, no last name, no visible means of support. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Not really,” Joe said mildly. He couldn’t see much of the man’s face, but now and then, as Mendelson turned his head, the firelight caught his eyes. “I just got tired of living where I was, so I left.”

“And now you’re here,” Mendelson said.

“And now I’m here.”

Mendelson spread his feet and crossed his arms, something that smacked of the military. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that some of the locals called you in to the FBI.”

Joe raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Did they?”

“Yes, indeed. Thought you might be one of the ten most wanted or something, looking for a place to hole up.”

“And what did the FBI tell them?”

“Said they didn’t want you, but thanks anyway.”

“How could they know that, without taking a look?”

“Fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints?” Joe began to wonder if Mendelson might not be crazy.

“From a butter knife.”

Outside of the Schooner, the only Belle Haven butter knives he’d ever touched belonged to friends.

“Do you always do this when you meet new people? Invent some far-fetched tale, see how they’ll react?”

Mendelson chuckled. “I’ve been accused of a lot of things, Joe, and many of them are true, but I’ve never been known to lie.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it was a pleasure to finally meet you, Mendelson. See you around.”

“That you will,” he said as Joe walked away. “That you will.”

As he made his way home Joe wondered if someone might really have sent his fingerprints to the FBI. The thought made him laugh aloud, but this was an odd place, full of people with odd habits. Anything, he thought, was possible. Mendelson—now there was an eerie man. Standing in the shadows, watching. A flat, awkward laugh, unlikely to spread. A man who had dealt with the same fire for a decade, never making any headway, had to be unhappy in some ways. The way the dark air still looked red, this far from the hot spot, made Joe feel sorry for Mendelson. People seemed not to take this fire too seriously, but surely Mendelson did. Joe himself did, more and more the longer he stayed in Belle Haven.

By now he knew the names of every street in town and of a great many people who lived there. He knew where all the boreholes were, where Mendelson and his men were drilling, measuring, mapping. He knew all about the hot spots as they came and went. And he knew, as few others seemed to know or admit, that the fire was not abating. If anything, it was growing stronger. Or so it seemed to Joe.

The road twisted around a small hollow and rose, gradually, up the slope of a gentle hill. When it flattened out again, Joe could see Ian’s fields up ahead and the shape of the woods beyond them. He stopped and looked back toward the town, which cast its own faint light upward, like a dome. In the distance, Rachel’s hill rose smoothly up. Narrow valleys here and there plunged down and away. Small fields lay flat and fertile under the sky or sloped up to meet it. And all of this was cast in a subtle shade of orange, as if a foreign moon were preparing to roll up over the horizon.

Always before, as he had crossed Ian’s fields with his carving tools, on his way to the dead trees in the woods, the occasional pit of flame in the distance had been easy to avoid, if not ignore. Like a horse with blinders, he had walked the land, the smoke or the fire passing away at the edge of his vision, less commonplace than lightning. But lately, when he glanced back toward town, the tools in his hands felt oddly like weapons. And when he looked at the land that stretched between him and the distant houses, he now felt as if he were on the far side of a border that absent statesmen had only recently laid down.

It was with a sense of relief that Joe reached the Schooner and settled down with Pal to wait for Ian to arrive. This was a place where he had always felt safe, where he knew what to expect and what was expected of him. But for the first time he wondered how much of his comfort depended on the wheels that could someday take the Schooner on its way.

Chapter 29

        Out in the woods beyond Ian’s fields, in the stand of dead trees, Joe’s statue of his sister had weathered to a softer mien, tranquil, as gray as clouds gathering rain. Beside her, Joe had carved a charming, elfish Rusty, unmistakably bright. Next to him Rachel stood wrapped in the bark of a young, dead oak tree, crowned with fragile branches, her eyes all challenge and entreaty. A fourth tree, awaiting its own face, bore the first of Joe’s incisions.

It had been more than a year since he had discovered Holly’s gold and the site of her resurrection, but in all that