HUBERT ST. GERMAIN WAS AMONG THE FIRST GROUP OF FIREFIGHTERS the Tunbridge Volunteers, to cross the Carry. Coming along right behind the Tunbridge contingent were the Petersburg men and boys. Though he was a member of the Petersburg Volunteers, Jordan Groves was not among them. The distant tolling of the bell had penetrated his dream-tossed sleep and had accompanied his dream for a long while, and when at last he woke, it took him several minutes to clear his head of the dream and determine where he was and what he was actually hearing. He was in his studio, where late last night, after finishing off half a bottle of Cuban rum, he had fallen asleep in his chair. He telephoned the firehouse and learned that the fire was in the Reserve, at the Second Lake, and the Petersburg trucks had already left. If he wanted to join them, he could drive his own car to the clubhouse and go in from there, or he could fly his airplane in. The artist pointed out that there were rules against landing a seaplane in the Reserve lakes. The dispatcher at the firehouse told him to forget the rules, they might need the airplane up there today.
Like Russell Kendall, Jordan Groves had no doubt as to where exactly the fire was located, and he put his plane down on the lake a short ways out from the Cole camp at about the same time as the boats arrived carrying the rest of the Petersburg firefighters and Hubert St. Germain and the men and boys from Tunbridge. Among them were Ben Kernhold and Darby Shay and his son Kenny and a batch of Kenny’s teenage friends — they’d joined the Tunbridge Volunteers with the hope of getting to fight a forest fire while school was in session, but not like this, when school was out — and Buddy Eastman and Rob Whitney and Carl James. Sheriff Dan Peters and three of his deputies from Mascoma, the county seat, were there, along with thirty or thirty-five more men and boys, even including the reclusive artist James Heldon, who owned a house and studio in the village of Sam Dent. He, like Jordan Groves, spent a great deal of time in New York City and elsewhere, advancing his art, and thus was only a part-time member of the Sam Dent Volunteers. Finally, making their way slowly through the tangled brush and cumbersome rocks of the eastern shore — led by the intrepid manager of the Tamarack Club, Russell Kendall, and his lieutenant, the night watchman, Tim Rooney — came the members and guests of the Club who had volunteered to fight the fire, ten or twelve of them, including Dr. Cole’s old friends from Yale, Red Ralston and Harry Armstrong, and Ambassador Thomas Smith, all of them determined to save their ancient, beloved Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.
ACCORDING TO LATER REPORTS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, but generally conceded to be accurate by those who were present, by the time the firefighters arrived at the site, the main building of the camp called Rangeview had burned nearly to the ground, with only the large brook-stone fireplace chimney left standing. The nationally known artist James Heldon managed to retrieve from the wreckage of the house one of what he claimed were twelve high-priced paintings that he had placed on loan to the late Dr. Cole. The artist was confident that the appraised value of the eleven destroyed paintings would be covered by the late doctor’s fire insurance. However, most of the rest of the furniture, household goods, and personal possessions were destroyed or so badly damaged by smoke and by water tossed onto the dying fire by the bucket brigade as to be unsalvageable. The firefighters with great effort managed to confine the fire to the nearby grounds and, with the exception of several large pine trees located next to the main building, saved the surrounding trees and outbuildings and kept the fire from spreading to the adjacent forest. They were aided in this by the heavy rain that began to fall within minutes of their arrival at the site.
On the basis of pale green pieces of shattered glass found in the fireplace and certain other evidence, Essex County sheriff Dan Peters stated that the fire appeared to have been started by a kerosene lantern either thrown or, much less likely, accidentally dropped into an already lit fire in the fireplace. It was assumed by all that the person who threw — or dropped — the lamp was Vanessa Cole. Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn Cole, was at first thought to have been in residence at Rangeview at the time of the fire. But the region’s other well-known artist, Jordan Groves, said that he had flown Mrs. Cole from the Second Lake over to Westport on Lake Champlain the previous evening. Presumably, she had made her way to the Westport rail station and later returned by train to her home in Tuxedo Park, New York. It therefore appeared that at the time of the fire Vanessa Cole was alone at Rangeview. Russell Kendall, the manager at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve Club, and the guide Hubert St. Germain confirmed this.
When the firefighters first arrived at the camp, Vanessa Cole was nowhere to be found, and it was feared that she had perished in the fire. The firefighters, once they had succeeded in keeping the fire from spreading to nearby trees and the outbuildings, searched in vain through the still smouldering rubble for the remains of the woman. Meanwhile, the artist Jordan Groves, guided by intuition and a more thorough and intimate knowledge of Vanessa Cole’s mind than that available to the others present, left the group and bushwhacked his way uphill through the dense woods behind the camp and discovered the poor woman in a clearing about a quarter mile away. As he did not bring Vanessa in until sometime later, many of those present did not learn firsthand what had happened to her or even that she had been found by Jordan Groves. It was raining very heavily by then, and many of the firefighters and most of the volunteers from the clubhouse had started making their way back, either along the shoreline trail or across the lake by guide boat to the Carry and from there on to the First Tamarack Lake, where a second flotilla of guide boats awaited the brave, exhausted men and boys of the Adirondacks and the loyal members and guests of the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.
JORDAN GROVES STRODE QUICKLY UPHILL FROM THE CHARRED remains of the house and after a few moments of climbing through the stand of red pines saw Vanessa Cole in the clearing a short ways beyond. She was seated on the ground at the grave of her mother. She was still wrapped in the sheet, sopping wet from the rain, and was visibly trembling from the cold, and as he entered the clearing and drew near her, he saw that beside her on the ground lay a shovel — the same shovel that he and Hubert had used to bury Vanessa’s mother. Next to the shovel was a thick, brown, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon.
Vanessa was speaking, at least her lips were moving, but all Jordan heard was a low murmur cut with static and broken hisses, the same sound she had breathed into his ear that morning at Rangeview, the day they’d dropped Dr. Cole’s ashes into the lake. It had seemed intimate and erotic then, a teasing invitation. But it sounded like madness now. She stared straight at the grave of her mother and seemed to be addressing her — addressing the woman’s ghost, perhaps, or Vanessa’s memory of her mother from long ago, because there was a childlike tone to her voice, making sentences that ended with an upturn, a question mark. For a moment Jordan thought that she was mocking her mother in a little girl’s voice — he heard her say a great fall, or perhaps it was grateful, and together again, or maybe it was never again, and on a wall—words that emerged from a running stream of words in a grammar other than English. Or maybe it was a childhood nonsense song he was hearing, or a nursery rhyme.