sadness appeared in her mind, James. It took Lori a while for her to realize her hands were doing more than washing her body as she soaked under the hot water. She left the shower more confused than when she entered.
Lori dressed, and made breakfast. She turned the Saturday morning cartoon shows on, anything to escape the sadness. Nothing worked. She thought about calling her father but didn't. She thought about shopping or calling friends. Finally, she got into her car to drive to her father's. Suddenly she realized, she had turned the wrong way on the road.
Lori knocked on James' door. She turned to watch him appear around the corner of the trailer. She saw the sad loneliness in his eyes that had kept her from sleep last night.
Lost in their despondency she said, 'We need to talk.'
She entered the trailer and saw the walls of the living room had been lined with old firebrick up to the height of about three feet. The unusual
sight of broken brick lining the inside of a room gave an eerie desolation to the trailer. The stark bareness of the room with the mismatched furniture broke down her last restraint. She started to cry. Wrapped in the misery that engulfed her, she felt an arm go around her. Behind the tears she couldn't stop, she felt herself being guided to the floor. Sitting there her back touching the cold bricks, she gave up trying to control her tears and buried her face into Jim's shoulder.
Jim sat with her, holding her gently until her crying stopped. Her head was tucked under his chin and with every breath, he could inhale her fresh clean scent. She had fallen asleep! His hands gently stroked the side of her face. He tried to remember the last time he had touch the soft gentle curve of a face, but a mist of loss engulfed his mind and he slept.
Jim woke still holding her. The tears had dried on his shirt. He felt their crustiness contrasting with the soft warmth of Lori's body. He slowly eased her sleeping form to the floor. He gently rocked her glasses off her face. The soft warmth radiating from her cheek seemed to burn his hand. His dreams over the last few days took control of his hand and he slowly traced the soft curves of her body. He tried to move and pain shot through his body. His legs had fallen asleep.
Jim writhed on the floor in agony, careful not to wake Lori. After a few minutes, he was able to move. He crept into the bedroom to get a blanket. Gently covering the sleeping woman with the blanket, he left the trailer to do a perimeter check of his property. Finding nothing, he sat in a chair and watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Lori's chest as she slept curled up in a fetal position.
It was late evening and the setting sun was casting an eerie red glow though the room when she woke. She rolled from under the blanket and onto her back, stretching her cramped legs. In the red glow, Jim viewed the rounded curves of her lithe limbs as she moved.
Jim packed away the ache of desire he felt for Lori. 'Good, you're up. I'll make us something to eat. You can move around. Just stay away from the windows.' Jim lit an oil lamp, and in its dim light, started to make a meal.
He sensed Lori walk up to him. Turning to her, he saw her nose crinkle pulling her lips apart in one of the most erotic gestures he had ever seen.
'Do you know where my glasses are?'
Jim never found out how long he froze. His mouth hanging open, forgetting to breathe.
The lips moved again, 'Do you know where my glasses are?'
Breathing, 'Yes, here ... I'll get them.'
The rest of the night and most of Sunday was a blur to them. They talked. They ate. They napped. But neither touched the other. They knew what would happen if they touched. The fear of what was happening to them forced them to delay. Finally, Sunday afternoon came and Lori went to her car to leave. There by the open car door they kissed for the first time.
Their delay had done nothing to control their desires. Each tried to absorb the other in their embrace. They finally parted, trembling, neither knowing why nor what was happening. Jim called his children and talked for an hour. Lori stopped by her father's home and talked till morning. Both ended the weekend more confused then when they started.
* 1 * *
_The hands reach slowly for the deck. They seem to know what the next card will be. The card is turned over._
A tower struck by lightning and on fire appears. A man and a woman tumble off the tower and past a rocky cliff. A yellow crown is blasted away from the dark tower by the lightning and fire.
A sigh can be heard from the figure behind the hands. The light is turned off and darkness shrouds the room.
lumber mills. Some are small one-man or single-family operations. A few are large-scale productions run by the international lumber companies. But the most notable are a fascinating combination of high tech and low tech that is characteristic of a medium-size company. This particular mill was large enough to take full-size trees and cut them up into lumber. Anything left over would be fed into a couple of wood chippers and the resulting chips would be sent to a paper mill.
Trucks with full-length trees would drive into the mill and either a hydraulic crane or a front-end loader would unload the truck. The trees would be placed in a single layer on a table one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty feet wide. Running the length of the table were twelve chains with six inch long links. A cogged sixty-foot long shaft would move the chains in unison to a feeding table, which would bring a tree one at a time into the mill. The first saw the tree would get to was a ten-foot circular blade that would cut the tree into bolts. The bolts would then be fed into either a chipper or another table to be cut by a bank of saws. Throughout the mill in a haphazard manor would be troughs and chutes, each with its own huge chain moving chunks of wood to saws, chippers, or scrap piles. Men with shovels, forks, and pickaroons would clamber all over the troughs, cleaning out tangled or jammed splinters of wood. Every few months, a man would get a limb caught in one of the hundreds of moving chains and belts. Injuries would range from minor lacerations and amputations to the occasional death. The result was an agglomeration of emergency _off_ switches scattered throughout the mill.
It was an hour into the seven o'clock shift when the emergency off switch for the feed chain off the scrap hopper under the tree chipper was pulled. Bells rang, lights flashed and the ten men who worked in that section of the mill came running to the location. The man assigned to keep the feed chain clear had already straightened out a problem on the bolt table and a clogged chute in a chip blower when he got to the hopper. The man had hit the emergency switch and thrown up at the same time when he saw the two severed legs dangling from the side of the feed chain trough. The man had then fainted when he had walked farther into the hopper room and saw the mass of red tissue and wood scraps piled under the two-foot steel cog driving the hundred-foot chain.
It would take investigators five more hours to collect the remains of the body and a court order to keep the mill owner from turning the equipment back on before all of the on-site forensic work was done. It was ten AM on Tuesday when enough teeth had been examined to positively identified the remains as Pike Borland.
There were twenty officers in the Monday afternoon meeting in the sheriff's department's largest room. The BCA lieutenant, Frank, led the meeting. Although there was no positive identification yet, everyone assumed that the body found at Borgquist Lumber was Pike Borland's. A deputy who knew Borgquist was given the task of summarizing to the group what was known of the mill's operations.
The young man began, 'During the week, the mill is currently running three crews on staggered shifts. The seven o'clock crew cuts and processes the lumber. They quit at four o'clock. They were the ones to find the body at about eight Monday morning. The eight o'clock crew packages and ships out the lumber. They quit at five o'clock. Because of the unusually heavy spring demand this year, Borgquist put on a four o'clock crew. They finish any remaining shipping for the day and clean up the mill for the next day's running.
'No one on the four o'clock crew saw the body on Friday, although they did clean up the hopper area. On Saturday, there is a skeleton crew to unload any lumber trucks that arrive at the mill. They only work in the tree yard, the truck scales, and the garage where the two Caterpillar front-end loaders are kept. No one checks the hopper area during the weekends until Saturday night when the watchman does a walk-through of all the buildings. He does another walk-through on Sunday afternoon. Other than the two building walk-throughs, he mostly stays in a small guardhouse at the main truck entrance to the mill. There are five entrances to the mill area, none with gates. The two hundred-acre mill complex has a thirty-acre production area with a dozen buildings, truck and car
