Wounded (a mystery and a sweet romance)

Wounded: Chapter 4

Tara yawned and rubbed the back of her neck. After her late start to the workday, it had taken her until well after dark to interview people, upload her photos, and write her overview blog posts on the eco village. She would talk to the individual craftsmen and women tomorrow. Someone had mentioned a lady who kept bees and made her own mead, and Tara wondered if she could get herself assigned to help her. Making alcohol sounded more glamorous than mucking pigpens or chopping wood.

Malcolm’s binder lay on the desk next to her laptop. She hadn’t read it, other than to glance in and see that it was about mushroom picking. She hadn’t told anyone about the binder, or about her morning at his cabin either, though she almost had. That afternoon, Sam had warned her not to roam off the property alone until they figured out who was behind the mutilated animals. It had been a perfect opening. Tara had kept mum though. She wasn’t sure why. The man hadn’t done anything to deserve her allegiance. Of course, putative employer or not, Sam Jackson hadn’t done a lot to win her allegiance either.

Tara gazed out the dark window. From this side of the cottage, one couldn’t see the rest of the compound, only the ancient towering trees of the grove. There wouldn’t be much to see anyway. Her neighbors, as she had learned, tended to go to bed early. She supposed she could too. Or she could start looking over the grandmother’s work. She tried to summon the interest she’d had in helping Malcolm earlier that morning, but after their parting, she rather wished the grandmother were still alive and she were the one who needed a marketing plan. She would have been able to tell Tara, too, if Malcolm had been a fun little boy or if he had always been a... mushroom head.

She snorted and reached for the lid of her laptop, intending to shut it down for the night. She paused, hand hanging in the air. The state trooper had used Malcolm’s last name. Maybe she could find out for herself if he had been a fun little boy... or if he’d been a jerk who had a criminal record dating back to teenage car thefts and vandalism.

No, not likely. The trooper had respected him and whatever he had done in his previous line of work. Maybe he’d been a soldier, off enduring hardships overseas. She snorted, wondering if post-traumatic stress disorder could turn a man into the sort of person who zoomed past stranded motorists, spraying mud through their windows.

Tara pulled up Google and typed. “Mal..colm... what was it? Ashcraft? No, Ashcroft.”

It didn’t sound like that common of a name, so she didn’t expect many results. Indeed, the first couple were people’s LinkedIn and Facebook pages. Somehow, she doubted Malcolm would be the type to network online or run around liking pictures relatives had posted, but she checked the pages anyway. Nope, that wasn’t him. And that heavyset gray-haired fellow definitely wasn’t him.

A fluttery feeling of anticipation—or maybe that was unease—stirred in her belly as she scrolled further and came to a number of newspaper articles that mentioned a Malcolm Ashcroft in the text. They were all related to the big Cle Elum wildfire from the summer before. Seattle born and bred, Tara had never paid much attention to the eastern half of the state, but she remembered hearing about all the houses that had burned and that a team of firefighters had died.

“Malcolm Ashcroft,” she murmured, reading aloud, “only survivor from the team of smokejumpers... overwhelmed when the winds switched directions abruptly, and the blaze erupted, growing from a few acres to thousands in hours... team deployed portable shelters... inadequate to combat the intense heat.... only survivor got lucky and made it to a meadow where the flames were less intense...” The article listed the names of the fallen men, and the inclusion of another Ashcroft caught Tara’s eye. Philip. She skimmed on and learned that Philip had been Malcolm’s older brother, who had been on a hotshot team that had also been deployed and lost men in the fire. Other articles spoke of the investigation that had followed, the failure of accurate weather reports to be relayed to the firefighting crew, and she found profiles of those who had died. When she came across a photograph that included a younger Malcolm engaged in something between a hug and a wrestling match with his brother, she recognized the man from the sketchpad instantly. A lump formed in her throat as the picture offered an answer to her earlier question: yes, Malcolm had known how to have fun once.