The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

two others on the contact sheet that were perhaps worth printing but he wasn’t going to bother now. He was too interested in the other roll, the one he’d shot on Iron Mountain. In truth he was really interested in only one frame of it.
    His heart had beaten a little faster as soon as he held the negative up to the light and saw that it was there. He didn’t even look at the other shots. The moment the negative was dry enough he had gone straight for a ten-by-eight print. It was in the tray now and as he rocked it, letting the developer swill slowly to and fro across the paper, he could see the elk starting to appear, as if through a haze of smoke, just as it had on the mountain.
    In that fraction of a moment when he had taken the picture, the animal had lifted its head and turned it to a three-quarter profile and in so doing had sent the flames leaping from its antlers in a furious jagged swirl.
    But it wasn’t this, nor the ripple of flames along its charred black back, that made Connor shiver again. It was the look in the animal’s eye. There was a rim of white along its lower lid and the message it conveyed was not of fear itself but rather of some fearful admonition.

4
    O ne of the many things that she admired about Ed - and perhaps the only thing she envied - was the effortless way he fell asleep. No matter where he was, no matter how much noise or motion or fully-fledged chaos was going on around him, he could just close his eyes and rest his head and before you could count to twenty he was away. On this occasion, the resting place was Julia’s shoulder. He had taken off his glasses, kissed her neck and nestled there shortly after the flight attendant took away their barely touched meal trays and even though she was now finding it a little uncomfortable, she didn’t want to wake him. She liked the feel of his breath on her neck, rhythmic and warm and shallow as a child’s.
    Ed had insisted she take the window seat so she would have the better view of Montana when they flew over. They were on the north side of the plane and for the past hour she had been watching its shadow glide across mile after mile of dun-colored prairie and across badlands riven with the ragged scars of waterless creeks.
    It was more than four months now since Ed had called to claim his wipers. And although she would happily have consigned the whole saga of theft, reprisal and counter-reprisal to deepest history, never to be mentioned again (for she was still mortified over what she’d done), the story of how they met had already become legendary. Ed had told all of his friends about it and all of hers too - at least, all those she’d allowed him to meet. And during the telling, if she was present, Julia would dutifully grin and hang her head in comic yet heartfelt shame.
    If she was shocked at herself for stealing Ed’s parking space, she was almost equally shocked at how quickly the two of them had become what her mother, with a somehow disparaging tone, called ‘an item.’ Since breaking off her engagement to Michael the previous spring, Julia hadn’t dated anyone and was enjoying a life free from any whiff of romantic complication. She had devoted herself to her work at the institute, gotten many early nights, read more novels than she had in years, even done some painting. If she went out, it was only ever with girlfriends. And on the sole occasion she’d broken that rule and gone to see that godawful movie with her cousin, wham-bang, there she was, back in the tangled land of love.
    Her mother had doted on Michael. He was at Harvard Law School and was pure WASP - handsome, blond and brilliant, with a smile that came straight out of one of those magazines you found in dentists’ waiting rooms. Crucially, from Julia’s mother’s point of view at any rate, he was also seriously rich, or one day would be, when his inheritance came through. It was an inheritance which, like those of most noble families, had murky origins and as