The wildfire has created its own weather, the superheated plumes mixing with cooler air, forming fire clouds. These ice-containing clouds can cause thunderstorms and more dry lightning strikes, like the one that had hit the dying pine thirty-six hours before.
It is Sunday morning, but though the sun dawned an hour earlier, the sky remains midnight dark. In the branches, embers glow, but they are fading. A stand of green trees remains untouched next to stumps that smolder on blackened earth. There are on average seven thousand wildfires a year in California. Soon, the McRae Fire will die, and another will ignite somewhere else in the state.
Deeper in this forest, near the abandoned golf course, firefighters will eventually find bones that they will identify as belonging to Ridgepoint Ranch resident Richard Duran.
While tissue and other organic matter burn quickly, the bones and teeth remain intact. Temperatures exceeding two thousand degrees are needed to break down the minerals, and though other spots exceed that, this is the spot where the fire died. It will be assumed that, disoriented by smoke, Richard Duran fell while attempting to follow his wife up the stairs to safety.
Investigators will comfort the victim’s family, including his imprisoned widow, with the news that Richard was unconscious when the flames consumed him. He went quickly, they’ll say. They won’t be certain of this, of course, since only the bones remain to tell the story. But they won’t want the family to know he might have suffered, especially since he burned not far from the fairway where rescuers found his widow alive. They won’t tell her that her husband might have survived had he not followed her up the stairs. Even if she is guilty of other crimes, these half-truths are intended to spare her additional guilt. After all, they think, it’s not like there was anything Olivia Duran could’ve done to prevent her husband’s death.
Among themselves, though, they will talk about how horrible it would have been if he was alive when the fire came for him.