Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [118]
Somewhere under all that char and rubble, investigators would find two tiny bodies, most likely huddled together. Perhaps hidden under the lower bunk. Or below the window.
I struggled to avoid thinking about their final moments, but the visions came crashing in anyway.
My only consolation, feeble as it might be, was that my failed efforts at rescue had not been the cause of their deaths, that they’d probably died before I entered the structure. Jesus, I was such a fool! Had I not been screwing a woman I’d just met, I would have been home with them.
If I hadn’t been such a slut, my daughters would be alive.
I was a crappy father, a whore, an inept firefighter. In short, I was an asshole, and this syndrome was exactly what I deserved.
I walked to the backyard, past Morgan’s corpse, past a pair of solemn volunteers standing guard over her body, and when I got far enough out in the field where nobody would hear me, I wailed in the moonlight.
I knew now what I had to do.
It was early Friday morning.
Sometime before Sunday, before I lost my mind, I would kill myself.
50. THE KIND OF GUY I AM
I was sitting on a stump sixty feet from where my front door had once stood.
It was after midnight, and the trees and field beside my house had turned surreal with the blinking red lights and the ghostlike waves of smoke rolling over everything, my terrors complemented by the rumble of diesel motors, the sleep of the dead punctuated by the staccato bark of radio traffic. By now everyone on scene knew my daughters were inside. Clusters of firefighters, friends and coworkers alike, avoided me while they awaited directions from the fire investigation team on where and when to begin digging. Normally, I suppose, people would have come around to offer their condolences, but I’d been rude to the first couple of people who’d tried it, so the word had gone out: Leave him alone. He’s not feeling too good. Wisps of toxic smoke snaked off the remains of the house. Digging them out was going to be a long, arduous task. A gruesome one. Everybody was thinking about it.
I’d been told Helen Neumann was being comforted by neighbors, but I knew that to be a lie. There would be no comfort for Helen, just as there was none for me. Besides, Helen didn’t know any of our neighbors.
Everything else on the fire ground took a backseat to the investigation. Even if my girls had not been buried inside, the half-collapsed structure would have been dismantled piece-by-piece in an effort to understand how the fire had started and why Morgan failed to escape.
Until fire investigators deemed otherwise, my home would be a crime scene.
Just my luck—the county fire investigators who caught this case turned out to be Shad and Stevenson. They asked me a series of questions before going into the ruins. How many in the house? Where did I think their bodies might be? Where was I when the fire broke out? Who was with me? Why had I slugged Gil Cuthousen? Where had I found Morgan’s body? Why had I moved it? Did I have any enemies? Had anybody ever threatened me?
Then they went in, Shad and Stevenson, with four firefighters to do the grunt work, garbage cans and shovels in hand, picking through the living room, working the area where I’d found Morgan. Forty minutes later Shad and Stevenson came out, having cleared the floor where I’d found the body, taken photos, and removed large amounts of debris one shovelful at a time. They went around the periphery of the smoking ruins with Captain Pulaski from the Snoqualmie department and stopped in the backyard to examine Morgan’s corpse. They were back there for a while.
From time to time others approached and asked questions. Could they get me something to drink? Was I warm enough? Was there anyone I wanted called? I shrugged off the questions without answering. When asked whether I had a place to stay, I mumbled, “The Sunset Motel.”
I was a fool for leaving my daughters. But then, I’d been a fool all my life. I’d been a fool to invest so much faith in the teachings