“Boyd is Boyd.” Maggie smiles. “I’ve been out of town a few weeks, so I haven’t seen him.” She hands Heather her credit card.
Heather swipes it through the reader. “I hear ya, hon. How his wife puts up with his shenanigans, I’ll never know.”
Boyd is a man whore, like Gary. Maggie would have to give that parallelism some thought, some other time. Boyd had even hit on her once prior to learning she was his daughter. She shudders. Thank God she doesn’t go for slick, rich older guys, especially not after she’d suffered through a few too many creeps in the early days of her music career. Heather hands Maggie a curly slip of paper, and Maggie adds a twenty percent tip and her signature.
“Thanks, Heather.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”
Back in the truck, Maggie offers Louise a piece of roll. Louise gulps it down.
“What, no thank-you?”
Louise grins and wags her tail.
During the drive to Gary’s, Maggie drums the steering wheel and works on her a cappella rendition of “Bombshell.” She only hates herself a little for enjoying it. The sun is setting, and traffic is light. A little silver sedan crosses over into her lane headed into town when she’s halfway to Gary’s house. She smashes her palm into the horn, steers right, and tries to keep Bess off the shoulder. Ditching while pulling her trailer could be fatal. The sedan driver reacts and returns to the other side of the road.
“Crazy-ass!” Maggie shouts.
After that heart-thudding encounter, she has the road to herself.
When her pulse is more normal, she sings again. “Bombshell, baby.” She thumps her chest like Ava does in her videos.
Maggie laughs, until she sees dark gray smoke in the distance. Her brow furrows. As the daughter of a volunteer firefighter, she grew up understanding the language of smoke.
She mutters aloud. “It’s too dry for burning. Grass and wood smoke is grayish white. Oil and plastic burn black. Dark gray . . . dark gray is bad.”
She presses the accelerator. Bess strains for more speed as they ascend a hill. Around the last corner before a long straightaway to Gary’s, flames shoot skyward and disappear into gray smoke.
The source, when she sees it, breaks her into a cold sweat. It’s Gary’s old wooden house. His jacked-up red Chevy Silverado is outside, parked way too close to the burning house. Flames lick outward, threatening to devour it.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
She fumbles for her phone as she floors the accelerator. Using her knees to stabilize the steering wheel, she presses 911, send, and the speaker button. Holding the phone to her ear with one hand, she takes the turn to Gary’s too fast. Bess careens off the pavement onto Gary’s driveway. For a moment, Maggie loses control. The trailer fishtails.
“No!”
Maggie mashes the brakes and grabs the wheel with both hands, trying not to jackknife. The phone slides off the seat into the floorboard. Louise joins it.
A calm female voice says, “911. Please state your emergency.”
“House fire.” Maggie shouts toward the phone, first giving the address. “Gary Fuller’s place. I’ve just pulled up. His truck is parked outside.”
“Please hold while I dispatch emergency response.”
“I can’t hold. There could be someone inside. Like Gary.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Maggie Killian.”
“Ms. Killian, please remain in your vehicle and wait for the firefighters.”
“Not a chance.”
Maggie gets as close to the house as she dares, then shuts the engine off and jumps out before the truck’s completely stopped. The fire shoots sparks that reach her hood, but she doesn’t care. She throws open her door and jumps out, falling to her knees. She scrambles up, Louise hot on her heels.
“Gary,” she screams. “Gary, where are you?”
Louise is barking hysterically, but all Maggie hears is the answering roar of the fire. She needs to get in, to figure out if Gary is inside, but the door is inaccessible. The entire front side of the house is engulfed in flames. Her heart pounds faster than the hooves of a racehorse. House fires are her worst nightmare. Once, when she was only eight or nine, her dad was called to a house fire. He didn’t have time to take her home before he responded.
“Stay in the car no matter what. Your mom will be here soon,” he’d told her, his brown eyes stern, his voice an order. “Promise me.”
“Yes, sir, Daddy,” she’d said, but she’d barely been listening to him.
He’d left her in the car. Maggie had never seen a serious fire before. She was curious about what her gentle farmer father did on his mysterious hero callouts. The leaping flames were mesmerizing to her. She snuck out of the car to get closer. But her fascination turned to terror when a woman about her mom’s age suddenly burst out an upstairs window along with the sound of shattering glass and earsplitting screams. The woman ran through the air, arms and legs churning, which was bad enough.
But what made it truly horrifying was that she was on fire. Her granny-style nightgown. Her long blonde hair. Her house shoes. When she hit the ground, her screaming stopped. A firefighter leaped onto her, wrapped her in a heavy blanket, and rolled her over and over. To Maggie, it looked like an alligator wrestling its prey, something she’d seen on TV.
Maggie had run for the car and slammed the door behind her. She buried her face in the tweed upholstery that never lost the smell of smoke after that night, no matter how many times her mom shampooed it. She’d jammed her fingers in her ears to block the sounds. When that didn’t work, she’d sung to herself. She still can’t hear “Ring of Fire” without thinking of that night, to this very day.
Since then, burning buildings—and the thought of people inside—haunt Maggie. But today she’s more scared of finding out later that Gary was in the house and that she could have saved him if she’d tried than she is of the flames.
Maggie charges toward the back of the house. Gary spent an obscene amount of money to have a yard designer install native grasses and flowers that thrive year-round. It’s a geographically correct flora obstacle course now with tall brown grass and late-blooming yellow flowers. She zigs, zags, and hurdles her way across it. Halfway through it, she catches her foot. The ground knocks the wind out of her and something hard and sharp digs into her knee. She kicks her feet in a panic and twists to see what has her. Her boot is caught in a hose snaked between clumps of prairie grass. As she extricates herself, she sees a long slit in the hose. It doesn’t make sense to her, but she has bigger problems. She frees her foot. Her knee is throbbing, but she ignores it. She scrambles to a crawl, fights to get herself upright, and takes off again at a run.
Her voice cracks with strain. “Gary. Gary!”
The flames are even worse in the back than in the front. His bedroom is back here, looking out on rolling hills, pasture, and oak groves. Is he inside? She prays he’s not. That he’s in town having dinner with his manager. Or that he got out earlier, and he’s on the other side of the house wielding a hose, unable to hear her.
But what if he is inside? He might be okay. He could have wrapped himself in a wet blanket. Or be hidden from the fire under his desk. Anything is possible. An image of the flying, burning woman with her churning arms and legs flashes through her mind again. Her breath catches. The only thing certain is that Gary’s chances of surviving—if he is in there—are decreasing by the second.
And she’s the only one here, the only one who can help him. She can’t search the grounds first. She can’t wait for the firefighters. She has to do something.
She studies the antique French doors to his bedroom. On the other side of the glass, the drapes are ablaze. She wraps her hand in the lightweight fabric of her top and tries the knob. The heat is searing. It won’t budge. She jerks her hand away. The doors are flimsy and insubstantial by modern standards—she’d helped Gary pick them out at an estate sale in Brenham—but still too sturdy for her to break do
wn. Even if she kicks out the glass, the panes are too small for her to crawl through.
She’ll have to break down the doors. But if she does, then what? She doesn’t even want to think about it.
There’s a gardening shed on the edge of the backyard. She sprints over to it. It’s unlocked. Finally, a door she can get through.
“Something heavy. Come on, Maggie. Something heavy.”
Fueled by adrenaline, she hefts a pickax over her shoulder. It will do. She runs back to the house, slower with the weight of the pickax. She hesitates at the door. Maybe Gary will come running out if she breaks a hole for him, because the last thing she wants is to go in that house herself.
“Please, God,” she whispers, “don’t make me have to go in there.”
Planting her feet, she swings the pickax with all her might like a giant bat at the doorframe. Wood splinters. Glass shatters. At the end of her swing, the weight of the pickax pulls it from her hands, slinging it into the room.
For half a second, she feels a strange sucking of the air around her into the house, like an inhale from something monstrous and alive, then flames exhale with a giant whoosh. Maggie falls backward, shielding her face, screeching with pain. Her four hundred dollars’ worth of Johnny Was top ignites, just like the gown on the woman she’d watched jump through the second-story window nearly thirty years ago. She hugs herself and rolls, smothering the fire with the dirt and her body. When she’s out of the range of the hungry, fiery monster reaching for her through the bashed-in door, she lies still as a corpse. She smells soot and tastes dirt, but she doesn’t move. She feels relief that she’s not in the house, then crushing guilt.
A wet tongue licks her cheek.
“Gary.” Her voice is weak. She coughs. “Gary.” She kneels, butt on her heels, hands bracing on her knees.
The tongue of fire no longer laps from the house. Louise whines, then darts through the broken door.
Hoarse and croaking, Maggie crawls after her dog. “No!”
A suited firefighter appears in her peripheral vision, grabs her shoulder, and yanks her back. “Ma’am, stop,” he says in a bass voice.
For a moment, she thinks she’s hearing her father. But that can’t be. He’s dead. Long dead. Her mind returns to the present. She struggles to break the man’s grip. “No. Gary. Louise.”
The firefighter peers at her burned clothing then speaks into a radio clipped to his chest. “I need an EMT.”
“Help them, please.”
Maggie tears her eyes away from Gary’s room. A fire truck is parked on the side of the house, and an ambulance beside it. Lights are flashing. Sirens are wailing.
“Holy shit,” the firefighter says.
Maggie’s gaze jerks back to the maw of the fire. Her dwarfish black-and-white dog appears. She’s carrying something in her mouth. The firefighter rushes to help Louise, and Maggie is on her feet, sprinting.
She’s shouting their names. “Gary. Louise.”
But when Louise clears the door and bounds toward her, Maggie’s shouts fade. The unreality of what she sees robs her of thought and voice. Just as Louise reaches Maggie, the firefighter tackles the burning dog and smothers the flames. Maggie slumps to the ground, numb, the blackened finger of her former lover in the grass beside her where Louise dropped it, still wearing his ridiculous gold ring.
Four
Shivering in a shock blanket, Maggie croons to Louise and rocks the dog like a baby. Maggie had only submitted to treatment from the EMTs on the condition that they treat Louise first. Miraculously, while Louise has less of her long fur, her burns are relatively minor. The EMTs warn Maggie to monitor the dog’s coughing and breathing but assure her that Louise appears she will heal just fine. Better than a human would, because dogs are resilient that way.
Maggie will heal, too. Her arms are red, with a few blisters. She lost a good bit of her eyelashes, eyebrows, and arm hair. But all of her physical injuries are cosmetic and temporary.
“I don’t understand. How did Louise get out alive?” she asks a firefighter. A genderless, nameless, faceless, shapeless person as far as Maggie is concerned. A disembodied voice from a sooty face and a body in bunker gear.
“Because she’s short, and she wasn’t in there long. Two or three feet above the floor, you’re fine. Up high burns first. That’s why we coach people to stop, drop, roll, and crawl. Once the ceiling starts to rain burning materials onto the floor, the floor catches, and that doesn’t work anymore. Your dog made it out just in time.”
“But not Gary.” Maggie’s voice breaks.
Louise licks her face.
“No. Not Gary.”
“How did this happen?”
“You’ll need to talk to the fire marshal about that.”
“Who?”
The firefighter points at an unmarked SUV with a light on top parked next to a phalanx of Fayette County Sheriff’s Department vehicles. “If you’re ready, we can go over there now.”
Maggie stands.
Louise squirms out of her arms.
“Let me put her in my truck first.”
The firefighter follows her to Bess. At the truck, Louise resists, almost clinging to Maggie. Maggie lifts her and shoves her in, slamming the door before she escapes. The dog starts barking madly and jumping like she’s on a pogo stick. Maggie feels guilty turning away. When she does, she nearly plows into a perimeter barricade of plastic sawhorses and tape that had been erected while she was with the EMTs.
The firefighter grunts and removes a helmet. “Your dog is worried about you.” Long, silky hair cascades down her shoulders.
“I’ve only had her for a week. It’s crazy. I can’t believe she went into the fire. She’s never even met Gary.”
“Some dogs are like that. Special.”
Maggie wishes they’d arrived earlier, so Louise could have been special for Gary when he was still alive.
The firefighter leads her to the fire marshal. “Ma’am, are you ready to interview Maggie Killian? She called the fire in and was on scene when we got here.”
The woman is writing on a paper attached to a clipboard. She turns to Maggie, not the firefighter. She’s short and thick in a red bunker jacket open to show the suspenders on her coveralls. Shoulder-length steel-gray hair peeks out from her helmet. “Now is fine. Thank you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The firefighter walks away without another word to Maggie.
The fire marshal stares at Maggie through horn-rimmed glasses, sizing her up. “Maggie Killian.”
Maggie nods, wondering what someone who sounds so East Coast is doing in small-town Texas. “Yes.”
“I’m Karen Rosenthal, fire marshal for Fayette County. Let’s get a deputy from Fayette County to join us.”
“Okay.”
Karen waves over a bowling ball of a man in a sheriff’s deputy uniform. “Deputy Troy Mason, this is Maggie Killian.”
Maggie and the deputy shake.
“She called in the fire. Ms. Killian, start from the beginning.”
Maggie pulls the shock blanket tighter around herself. “I was coming to see Gary. I picked up dinner at Royers and drove out here. I saw dark gray smoke from a distance, then I came around the last bend in the road and saw the house in flames. I called 911.”
“Was there anyone here when you arrived?”
“I didn’t see anyone outside, but I don’t—didn’t—know about inside. Gary’s truck was here.”
“No other vehicles, no signs of other people?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see anyone leaving?”
“No.”
“An explosion?”
“No.”
“Explosives, accelerants, matches, lighters, or anything else that might be used to start a fire?”
“Nothing.”
“Smell anything odd?”
“Just smoke.”
“Why were you here?”
“We were . . . we used to be together. I’ve been traveling. I cal
led him, and he asked me to come over.”
Troy cuts in. He’s got a thick, slow Texas accent. “How long since you seen him, ma’am?”
“A few months, I guess.”
“Talked to him?”
“I heard from him a lot. He didn’t, um, he didn’t take our breakup well.”
The fire marshal’s eyes are big and shrewd behind her lenses. “Were you familiar with his house?”
“Very. I helped him remodel and furnish it over the last few years.”
“Any electrical issues, to your knowledge?”
“He had the whole house updated and rewired. It was old and crappy before that. But I don’t know if he had any current problems.”
“Did Mr. Fuller smoke?”
“No. He is—was—a singer. He believed it was bad for his vocal cords.”
“Would you characterize him as suicidal?”
Maggie shakes her head. “Do you know who this man is?”
“Gary Fuller.”
“Gary Fuller, international country music star, the biggest entertainer out of Texas since George Strait. He had a very healthy self-esteem, stoked by the admiration of an adoring public. I don’t think he’s been depressed since I’ve known him, which is over ten years. Certainly not suicidal.”
“That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been. Or wasn’t recently.”
Sick Puppy (Maggie #2) Page 4
