Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [111]
If somebody produced information that altered my lot, so be it. If not, my destiny was in the hands of God.
If there was a God.
Spooky.
I didn’t believe in him, so why was I invoking his will now?
I began deep breathing again.
In my mind there was no longer much hope that I would be cured. It was a weak trail, and we were moving slowly. The fact that I had someone to share this with meant a lot to me. It meant even more that it was a woman who’d once reviled me.
We were on Ballarat, just past the library, when Stephanie pulled to the curb. My ears were ringing, and for a moment I couldn’t figure out why she’d stopped. Then a fire engine raced past, siren squalling, red lights whirling. The ground seemed to shake as it passed. A moment later Jeb Parker raced past in his Volkswagen. I wasn’t wearing my pager, so I had no idea what they were responding to. It must have been a fire call rather than an aid response, because moments later another volunteer sped past at seventy miles an hour. The engine could have handled an aid call by itself.
The moonlit road out of town took us north, then veered east directly toward the base of Mount Si, then north again paralleling Si toward my house, three legs, each about half a mile long. My place was in a small enclave of treed properties next to the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River.
Across the fields a plume of fast-rising black smoke rolled upward. The smoke, highlighted as it was by the moon’s light, looked like an act of war.
“Step on it,” I said, irritated that I wasn’t driving.
Stephanie followed my gaze and accelerated.
“A grass fire?” There had been two nuisance grass fires outside of town that afternoon.
“More likely a structure fire. Or a vehicle. Smoke from vegetation is light-colored.” Even as I spoke, I caught another glimpse of the column. It was close to my property, too close, and hot, with orange streaks high up in the black smoke.
“Hope it’s not one of your neighbors,” she said.
“Me, too.”
During the minute or two it took to complete the trip, my mind went blank, which was odd, because when I was riding the engine my mind never went blank. I would have been mentally running over the list of things to do when we arrived.
From 428th S.E. you took a dirt and gravel spur road, passing Helen Neumann’s place, to reach mine. A little farther along was Fred Bagwell’s homestead, Fred a confirmed bachelor, an acknowledged alcoholic, and a lifelong misanthrope. The odds were about a hundred to one the fire was Fred’s place.
As we approached the long gravel drive that led to my house, I saw the flashing red lights of the engine in front of us, the dust from Jeb Parker’s Volkswagen running along the center of the dirt road like a huge gray hedgehog, volumes of thick black smoke rising up off a structure partially hidden behind the trees.
“Oh, God,” I said, the words as dry as day-old toast.
“What?”
“It’s my house.”
“How could that be?”
“I don’t know. Drive in. I need to make sure my girls got out.”
47. INTO THE INFERNO
The confusion at the site could have been worse, but not by much. The engine clogged the one-lane driveway, Parker’s vehicle having swung around them. The engine had stopped too far from the fire. There were two trees next to my house and they were both alight now. The roof was burning, smoke pouring through the broken-out living-room window. Caution was one thing, but they were too far back.
I didn’t like the speed of the smoke. Or the color. Or the fact that some of the windows were already broken out. I didn’t like anything about it.
I motioned for Stephanie to drive around the engine and into the field, which she did, heading for a spot between Helen Neumann’s house and mine. It was good to have a partner who didn’t panic, a woman used to working in emergency rooms.
Before the car stopped rolling, I opened the door and leaped out, running past Jeb Parker as he donned his bunking clothes next to his Volkswagen. Anonymous volunteer firefighters in