Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [70]
Zak didn’t answer. He could have, but he didn’t. While he waited for Charlene to save herself, the car’s interior burst into flames with a whooshing sound. Having already been escorted to the far side of the street by a middle-aged woman, Stacy screamed when the fire broke out. Zak didn’t budge. He didn’t scream and he didn’t move, not until somebody took him by the shoulders and moved him.
The fire department showed up a minute later and doused the flames, but it was too late. On the day of the funeral, Zak got dressed, went downstairs, and, after a long, tearful struggle, made the family leave him alone in the house while they went to the service. When they came back four hours later, he was still in his Sunday suit, sitting in front of the television, which he’d turned on only moments before, fearing they would find out he’d been staring at a photo of Charlene and crying the whole four hours.
“Are you having a good time?” said his mother, with sarcasm she was never to repeat quite so openly, though for the rest of her life he would know she blamed him for her eldest daughter’s death. If Zak’s father blamed anything on him, he never let on. Nor did Stacy. Still, during the next few years his mother reminded him of it by the way she tiptoed around the topic of Charlene, always with a brief look directed his way when she mentioned her dead daughter, always subtle enough that nobody noticed but Zak.
Since that night on Sixth Avenue, Zak felt in his heart that he was responsible for Charlene’s death, his parents’ divorce, Stacy running away from home, his mother’s pill-popping and religious binges, all of their financial woes. If he’d been a man instead of a baby, he would have worked that seat-belt buckle loose, Charlene would have crawled out of the family car, and they would have gone about their lives with an interesting yarn to spin about the time the three kids were involved in a car wreck. The tragedy so dominated his thinking that there were times when Zak believed the only reason he’d joined the fire department was to prove he wasn’t a coward.
Zak was never far from the panic of that night, and it had a way of coming back, tormenting him in the form of a recurring nightmare. He daydreamed about it on the freeway when he least expected it. House fires, shootings, heart attacks, suicides he could handle as casually as posting a letter, but car wrecks turned him into a frightened boy. Outwardly, though, he never let it show, and his determination to handle every car wreck in a manly way was what gave him a rep in the department as being some sort of car-wreck guru. And now he was falling in love with a woman he’d met in almost identical circumstances to those in which he lost his sister.
Nadine. What did the two of them have in common except their competitive instincts? She was religious, and he was not. She was from a family of wealth and privilege, and he was not. She was headed for a college degree, which he had no interest in achieving. She was from a loving, tightly knit family, and he was from a home that had shattered into a thousand pieces. The best part was that she thought he was a hero. When you put it into perspective and thought about how Charlene had died, he couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something Freudian and ultimately twisted and scarred and maybe a little bit scary about his attachment to Nadine.
The afternoon after Stacy’s date, Zak found himself on the front porch of the Newcastle estate in Clyde Hill, having been asked by the Hispanic woman who answered the door to wait outside for Nadine. During the few moments the front door was open, Zak heard shouting inside, one voice that was distinctly Nadine’s, another just as distinctly her father’s.
Moments after the maid closed the door, Kasey Newcastle exploded out of the house and stomped over to his Porsche, picked up a garden hose, and began spraying the windshield. If he noticed Zak, he didn’t let on. Zak couldn’t help noting