CHAPTER ONE

      Indian Lake, Indiana July

      THE SUMMER NIGHT sounds of chirping tree frogs and cicadas drifted through the open screen window of Beatrice Wilcox’s sixty-year-old log cabin. Loving the wildlife melodies, she closed her eyes, her weary body spent from a long day with ten rowdy, sometimes frustratingly taciturn children and preteens.

      But running this camp was her dream. She wanted to create a summer idyll for kids who faced challenges in their young lives, as she had when she’d been a camper herself as a child.

      But how to pay for it? Worrying over money often kept her awake at night. Tonight being no exception.

      She kicked the old patchwork quilt off her body. Then she flung her forearm over her brow. She was still wide awake.

      Breathing a sigh, she sniffed the air. And froze. Then sniffed again.

      “It...can’t be.”

      Curling through the screen was pungent smoke. Not the smoke from a cigarette or cigar, or the acrid, bitter smoke from a country farmer burning garbage. This was clean smoke. The kind from burning vegetation.

      Beatrice bolted upright in her bed, her eyes wide. She tossed aside the sheets and swung her legs to the rag rug she’d made herself that covered the painted concrete floor.

      “No!”

      Going to the window, she cranked the casement window open wide. The smell of smoke was unmistakable. “Not a fire. Not now. Not ever!”

      Spinning around, she shoved her feet into her sneakers and grabbed her cell phone off the varnished tree-stump table.

      “Please don’t let it be one of the cabins. Or the kitchen!” She raced out to her front porch, the wood screen door banging behind her. The yellow “bug” light on the front porch did a good job of keeping the mosquitoes and flies away, but unfortuntely gave little illumination. She leaned over the wide log railing that extended down the four steps to the gravel path that served as her sidewalk.

      The camp consisted of ten sturdy small log cabins, with five on either side of the main dining hall and activities center. Up the hill at the end of the five cabins was a larger cabin that housed the male counselors, though right now there was only the one. Beatrice’s cabin was on the left side after the five girls’ cabins and a larger cabin for the female counselors.

      Her eyes scoured the little cabins and the main hall. She saw nothing amiss.

      Walking farther down the path, she stopped abruptly as a crimson glow illuminated the side of her face. She turned toward the forest that stretched for acres across the country road. “Oh, no!”

       Forest fire.

      The summer had been hot and dry with barely a sprinkle of rain in the past month. The Weather Channel had said it was the driest summer in Indian Lake history. This was Southern California weather,