Rafe headed down the stairs toward the flames, and I found my voice. “No! What are you doing? You can’t—”
He glanced at me over his shoulder. His very bare shoulder. He’d put on a pair of drawstring pajama pants in deference to the fact that Wendell was in the house, but he was barefoot and bare-chested and quite a sight with the light from the flames flickering over his torso.
“We can’t stay here.”
He kept going. I had my mouth open to scream, but then he stopped, halfway down the stairs. A second later he’d grabbed the handrail and vaulted over the open side of the staircase into the hallway to the kitchen. A second later Wendell did the same thing, a little less gracefully, and landed with a grunt. He was twice Rafe’s age, so there was nothing surprising about that. I probably wouldn’t be able to vault at all, and since I had the feeling I’d be asked to, I’d better get used to the idea.
“Gimme the baby,” Rafe’s voice said from the dark beside the stairs.
I crept carefully down the top few steps. The flames were already getting closer, and the heat was intense. But I went as far down as I thought I safely could, while the flames crackled and the heat seared half of my body, and held the baby over the railing. She was still squalling, and more so once she left what she probably felt was the safety of being held close to my body.
Rafe lifted his hands, and I dropped the baby into them. It wasn’t a far drop, and when she landed, she let out a surprised squawk and then was silent.
For a second before the screaming started again, more loudly than before.
Rafe passed her to Wendell, and turned back to me. “Now you.”
Great. But there was no other choice, of course. I couldn’t go down through the flames. They’d engulfed the bottom of the stairs and the whole area in front of the front door. The jagged hole in the window was probably helping to fan them. And while I could run two flights up to the third floor and hope that someone would come to put out the flames before I suffocated or burned to a crisp, it didn’t seem like a good idea.
I climbed over the railing, grateful I had started wearing pajama pants and camisole tops to bed since Carrie was born. The short tops were so much easier to deal with when it came time to feed her than the full length nightgowns I used to wear, and now there was the added benefit that Wendell wouldn’t be able to look up the bottom of my skirt while I was balancing on the outside of the staircase, waiting to jump.
You can thank my mother—or I can—that a thought like that even crossed my mind at a time like this.
“C’mon,” Rafe said. His voice was calm again, all the panic gone now that he was in the middle of the situation and dealing with it rather than just looking at it. “I’ll catch you.”
Of course he would. And my daughter was down there. I jumped. And was caught halfway down, my fall broken, so by the time I landed—a little heavily, but with plenty of help—my feet didn’t bang painfully against the hardwood floor, but floated down almost like a feather.
He let me go again immediately. “Take the baby. Go out the back.”
I grabbed the baby from Wendell. “What about you?”
“I spent too much time working on this house to watch it burn,” Rafe said grimly, giving me a push down the hallway. “Go.”
I went, with Wendell right behind. Directly through the kitchen to the back door. The old skeleton key was in the lock, along with a new and shiny deadbolt Rafe had installed when he came to live here. I turned the key and flipped the deadbolt and pulled on the door.
It didn’t budge.
“Rafe!”
This time the panic was in my own voice, and he turned from where he was rooting in the area under the sink for the tiny fire extinguisher we keep there. I had no idea what good he thought that would do against the ocean of flames currently occupying our foyer, but I didn’t say anything about it. I had more important things to worry about.
He looked from me to the door. After a second he left the pantry and waved me aside. I moved out of the way so he could throw himself at the door.
There was the splintering of wood from outside—whatever had kept the door closed was gone—and then he stumbled through the opening. Straight into another fire.
I screamed, and in the foyer, the original fire roared higher as more oxygen flooded into the house. Flames from the back porch licked at the edges of the kitchen door. Wendell plunged through the opening and grabbed Rafe by the arm and dragged him back inside. And slammed the door behind him, leaving the second fire—currently engulfing the small wooden porch attached to the back of our brick house—burning merrily.
“Fuck.” Rafe’s voice was weak.
“Did you get burned? Did you get hurt?”
I couldn’t drop the baby, or I would have been all over him to see for myself.
“Not so much it matters.” Which wasn’t exactly a no, but whatever had happened didn’t slow him down. He swung in a circle, and then zeroed in on the basement door. “Down here.”
He yanked it open and flipped on the light. By some miracle it still worked. I guess the flames hadn’t devoured the whole electrical panel yet. “Get in the tunnel.”
“It’s boarded up!”
“We’ll take the boards off first,” Rafe said.
We? “You’re coming?” Instead of risking his life trying to save the house he’d spent too much time working on?
Not that I was happy to see all the original woodwork and plaster and Victorian finishes—and our furniture and clothes and everything else—go up in flames. But it was wood and plaster and stuff. It could be replaced. He couldn’t.
He nodded. “Hopefully somebody’s called the fire department and they’re coming, but this is too much for me to deal with. We gotta get outta here before we can’t.”
Thank you, God.
I scrambled down the stairs with Wendell behind me. Rafe shut the door—one more barrier between us and the flames—before he followed. Wendell was already digging through the tools on the bench in the corner, and Rafe armed himself with a crowbar, and the two of them disappeared into the dark space under the stairs.
I stood on the cold dirt in my bare feet clutching the baby and waited. And while I tried to listen for sirens, I couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the tools, and the two of them cursing, and the muted roar of the flames.
It felt like an eternity. I imagine it was really just a couple of minutes before Rafe stuck his head around the stairs. “C’mon. Wendell’s already in. You go next.”
I scrambled under the stairs and over to the small opening. There was no part of me that wanted to make this trip again. I’d made it once before, nine months pregnant, and it had been the stuff that nightmares are made of. I’d dreamed about suffocating and being buried alive for weeks afterwards. But I’d rather do that than burn to a crisp. So I got on my knees, while I clutched the baby to my chest with one arm. “Bring the crowbar. You’re going to have to bust through the wood at the top of the shaft when we get there. You nailed that shut, too, remember?”
“Wendell’s got it,” Rafe said. “Gimme the baby.”
I wasn’t proud. I handed her over. He was better equipped to hold her and crawl on one arm than I was. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
He gave me a nudge. “Go on, darlin’. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said. And started crawling. Without a single thought as to how big my derriere was going to look to the man behind me.
* * *
I won’t lie. The trip through the tunnel was worse this time. I didn’t have to worry about getting stuck, so that was a good thing. Last time I’d made this crawl, I’d been worried at every turn that my pregnant stomach would be too big to make it to the end, and I’d be stuck down here and would starve to death before anyone found me. Rafe had no idea where I was, or even that the tunnel existed, and Mrs. Jenkins—who was with me—was too weak to unstick me if I did get stuck. And if she had to leave me behind in the tunnel, I wasn�
�t sure she’d remember that I was there, so she could tell anyone.
I didn’t have that problem this time. I was smaller all around, and wearing less, so getting stuck wasn’t an issue. If I’d made it through pregnant, I could make it through now. But I was cold, in my bare feet and bare arms. I’d been wearing a coat last time.
Not that I was the only one of us in that predicament. Rafe was wearing less than I was, and Wendell wasn’t wearing much more. He’d slept in both pajama jacket and pants, or had taken the time to shrug them on before he came out of his room, but that still wasn’t a lot of clothes for early January.
And unlike last time, I had to worry about the fire behind us. I kept getting this vision of what would happen when the fire—or fires—combined in the kitchen. When the one from the foyer burned down the hallway and the one on the back porch burned through the door, and they engulfed the kitchen. And burned through the door to the basement and then the wooden stairs.
When Wendell burst through the floor of the pavilion and reached the back yard, would the influx of oxygen through the tunnel act as a sort of funnel, and we’d get a ball of flames sucked through behind us, before Rafe and Carrie and I could make it up and out? Would the three of us burn to a crisp at the bottom of the shaft before we could make it safety?
I didn’t know enough about the physics and chemistry of it to know for sure, and I didn’t want to ask, since I might not like the answer. So I just kept crawling, while the worst case scenario looped, over and over in my head.
“I’m here,” Wendell’s voice said in front of me. It felt like it had taken a year, but it’s actually not that long a trip. We were still on our own property. I can walk from the house to the pavilion in less than a minute. Crawling through a narrow hole in the ground takes longer, but it hadn’t taken the eternity it felt like.
“There are wooden slats on the side of the shaft,” I said, and coughed. “Sorry. You have to climb, and then hang on while you break through.”
He was already moving, and it was the little particles of whatever—dirt, dust, earth—raining down that made me cough. I buried my mouth in my elbow as my chest heaved.
“You OK, darlin’?” Rafe’s hand descended on my back, warm and hard through the thin cotton of the camisole.
I nodded. Not that he could see me in the dark. So I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Just a cough. You?”
“Fine. Not the best night’s sleep, but we’ll make it.”
We would. “What’ll happen when the air from outside hits the tunnel?”
“We’ll climb up,” Rafe said.
“It won’t pull the fire through the tunnel?”
He shook his head. I couldn’t see it, but I felt the displacement of the air. And heard the negation in his voice. “I don’t think the fire’s made it to the kitchen yet. It wasn’t burning that fast.”
It looked like it had burned plenty fast to me, but who was I to argue? The last thing I wanted to believe, was that we were about to go up in flames, just as we thought we’d made it to safety.
“Someone set that fire,” I said. And changed it to, “Set both of them.”
He nodded. For good measure he added, “Yeah. Set the one on the back porch, boarded up the back door so we couldn’t get out that way, and threw a bottle with something flammable through the front window.”
“Deliberately. Someone tried to kill us.”
He nodded again. “We should figure out who dug this tunnel, so we can pay our respects.”
We should. If it hadn’t been for the tunnel, and the lucky break of Mrs. Jenkins showing it to me the week Carrie was born, we’d still be standing in the kitchen wondering what to do. “First thing tomorrow I’ll call the Historical Commission and ask.” If we made it out alive, and it looked like we might.
“I figure we’ll have other things to do first thing tomorrow,” Rafe said. “But sometime after that.”
He raised his voice. “You need help up there?”
Wendell grunted. “You nailed’em in good, boy.”
Rafe grinned. By now Wendell had removed one or two of the boards from the opening, and there was enough light for me to see his face.
“I love you,” I said.
“Love you, too.” He leaned in to kiss me. The baby was squished between us. She wasn’t crying anymore, but sort of gently hiccupping. Hopefully she was too small for this experience to have scarred her forever. But if she grew up and developed a fear of the dark and tight places, I knew what to blame.
“I’ll take her,” I said. “You can climb up and help Wendell.”
“He’s got it.” And with no fireball bursting through the tunnel to fry us to a crisp, either. “And I’ll keep the baby. Give you both hands free to hold on.”
Fine. “Go up before me, then. You can probably climb faster than me, anyway.” Even with one hand. “I’ll just slow you down.”
He shrugged. But when Wendell knocked away the last of the wood covering the exit from the shaft and clambered through, Rafe didn’t insist on going last. Instead, he wiggled past me and headed up, hauling himself from step to step with one hand and cradling the baby to his chest with the other.
I stood at the bottom of the shaft and watched. I hadn’t said so, but if anything happened—if for some reason he couldn’t hold on to the baby—I wanted to be down here to catch her if she fell.
I should have known better. He made it to the top with no problems, still holding the baby. Once he was over the edge, he turned to peer down at me. “C’mon, darlin’. Almost there.”
I remembered this climb from last time, too, and there was no ‘almost there’ about it. Last time, I’d been crying by this point. But I climbed, with splinters digging into my palms and the bottoms of my naked feet from the rough, wooden boards. Climbed, toward my husband and baby girl cheering me on from the top of the ladder.
It took another eternity, but I made it. And came out into a world of craziness.
Wendell had already left the pavilion by the time I got to the top of the ladder. There were two big fire trucks outside the house, one in the driveway on the front, directing water from big hoses through the windows of the parlor and dining room, and one around the corner, still on the street, with a hose snaking over the fence and across the grass to the back of the house.
The wooden back porch sheltering the kitchen door was almost completely gone. A few smaller flames licked here and there, but the porch itself was just ash and charred timbers.
Flames were still flickering behind the windows in the dining room, which was the room closest to us. But they were smaller than I’d been afraid of, and the firemen, in heavy protective gear with boots and helmets, were directing a steady stream of water through the broken panes. The original hand blown glass from the 1880s was history, but I guess that was a small price to pay.
It wasn’t the only price we’d be paying, of course. It looked like the front of the first floor would be almost a total loss. The gingerbread trim on the porch roof was gone. The roof itself sagged, with only one porch post holding it up, and that one looking the worse for wear. But the flames hadn’t broken through the heavy security door in the back, and there were no flames in any of the upstairs windows, either. And we were all alive and mostly well. It could have been a lot worse.
Wendell had gone to talk to the fire crew, and was standing by the big rig in conversation with a tall guy with an impressive handlebar mustache. Probably the captain of whichever fire station the trucks had come from, or at least some sort of supervisor.
Hell—heck—he might have been an arson investigator, although it was a little early for one of those to be on the scene.
Rafe was sitting on the wooden floor of the pavilion next to me, barefoot and bare-chested and in nothing but a pair of plaid sleep pants with a drawstring waist. He had me in one arm and the baby in the other, and we were all trying to catch our collective breaths as two EMT’s—I recognized them from two nights ago, when they’d come to pick up Ma
lcolm—hurried across the grass toward us, bags in hand.
“We’re fine,” I said, as they thundered up the couple of steps to the pavilion floor on heavy boots. “Just shaken up.”
“Watch the hole,” Rafe added.
They ignored both of us. “Would you like us to take a look at that, sir?”
That?
And then I remembered. Rafe had burst through the kitchen door into the burning back porch, and Wendell had yanked him back inside. And when I’d asked if he’d been hurt, he’d told me it wasn’t bad enough to worry about.
I twitched out of his arm and scrambled a few feet away. “Oh, my God, Rafe. What did you do?”
He shot me a look. “I told you, it ain’t bad. Just some blisters.”
On the arm he’d kept around me as we sat here. The same arm he’d used to hold Carrie to his chest the whole way through the tunnel.
The paramedics went to work slathering the burns with salve and bandages, and I shook my head. “Why didn’t you say something? I wouldn’t have let you carry the baby all that way if I’d known you’d hurt yourself.”
“Easier to carry her than hold myself up,” Rafe said with a shrug. The female EMT watched the way his muscles moved with what I can only call appreciation, and then seemed to realize what she was doing, and shot me a slightly sheepish look.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “It happens all the time. I’m used to it. So is he.”
Rafe winked at her, and she blushed. Her partner smirked, but didn’t say anything. “How about you, ma’am. You OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “We were up and moving as soon as the fire started, so we didn’t inhale a lot of smoke. And I was nowhere near the flames.”
He nodded. “What about the baby? Its lungs are smaller than yours.”
I hadn’t thought about that, and now I realized, with a sick feeling curdling in my stomach, that she could be hurt.
Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16) Page 22
