Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [85]
“What happened to Milt?”
“A firefighter just happened to be standing fifteen feet away in a doorway, blacking out the room with a two-and-a-half. A guy named Gary Sadler. He spotted Milt and dragged him out.”
“He didn’t feel anything?”
“Like taking a nap.”
The phone rang, and as Emily stood up to get it he wondered what it would be like to lose a spouse of thirty-five years. He was hurting, but he didn’t have to give away Bill’s fishing tackle or find a home for his hunting dogs. He didn’t have to figure out what to do with Bill’s tools or his shotguns or his fire department uniforms. Or the folded flag from his coffin.
“Okay,” Emily said, hanging up the phone. “Why didn’t Reese and Kub find him?”
“It was a big place. Lots of smoke. Reese says they searched until the fire chased them out.”
“How far away was Bill when you met them?”
“About seventy-five feet.”
“I suppose they searched as long as they felt they could.”
“That’s my understanding.”
She looked at him with her wide doe eyes. As she walked him out of the house, Emily Cordifis detoured into the room Bill had converted to a combination den–sewing room after their youngest daughter moved out. “Some papers I found. Mostly department stuff. I haven’t really had the heart to sort through them. I would appreciate it if you would return anything that needs to be returned.”
He took the envelope from her, and said, “Emily I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“I was lost.”
Emily stepped forward and, without uttering a word, kissed Finney’s cheek. “Of course you were. Who wouldn’t have been? John? Next month would have been our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. The girls and I have decided to hold a celebration of his life, and we want it to coincide with our anniversary. Everybody’s going to be here. Marion, the whole gang from Station Ten. G. A. Montgomery. Chief Reese has promised to make a speech. Say you’ll come. It wouldn’t be complete without you.”
“I’ll be here,” he said, though he didn’t know how he could ever celebrate with that bunch. Anyway, he’d probably be in jail by then. He kissed her brow and left.
43. THE DEATH ROOM
Finney was driving his father’s 1948 Universal pickup truck, the same vehicle he’d borrowed as a teenager, the truck he’d parked on the West Seattle golf course on so many frustrating Friday nights with Sally Morrison. After high school Sally, still a virgin, went on to Western Washington University in Bellingham. Rumor had it that she’d married a podiatrist in San Bernardino and had two kids, a Great Dane, and an artificial hip. Finney had dated only two girls in high school, a statistic that had caused his older brother to label him a “social retard.”
With the mist-covered Lake Union to his left, he drove past Gas Works Park to Thirty-sixth and then to Leary Way. The fog was slowly crawling up from the lake, the streets dark enough now that alert drivers had turned on their headlights. The area was a mixture of residential and industrial blocks.
The ruins on Leary Way were much as the fire department had left them, the fire ground encircled with fence poles anchored in concrete blocks and holding up Cyclone fencing that well-wishers had decorated with flowers, cards, handwritten notes, and along one section, teddy bears and stuffed animals.
Little had been removed from the scene. The day after the fire Bill’s body was taken away, and then two days later the melted junction box G. A. said had caused the fire was dug out of the wall and taken downtown where it was displayed for months atop G. A.’s desk. The rubble from the fire had been pushed into piles along the remains of the interior walls. In some spots the rubble had sunk into what remained of the basement, so that it looked like