Fletcher's Woman

by Linda Lael Miller

  There is a fire, she thought, mildly.

  But no. It was all a part of the nightmare. Rachel raised her chin and kept going.

  • • •

  Vaulting over the O’Rileys’ fence, Griffin saw the plume of black smoke rising against the placid blue sky and swore.

  John appeared beside him, medical bag in hand, eyes trained on the dark cloud centering in the heart of Seattle. “Come on, Griffin,” he said. “We’ll be needed.”

  Griffin didn’t give a damn about being needed; for the first time in his career, he turned his back on all his training and skill. Until he found Rachel, nothing else would matter.

  Ignoring John, he bolted into a dead run. The distant cacophony of the firebells ringing in his ears, he raced into the O’Rileys’ stables, thrust a bridle over the head of the first horse he came to, and swung onto its back.

  “Griffin!” the old man roared, as he prodded the startled gelding into a run. “Griffin, stop!”

  The paddock fence loomed, and Griffin urged the horse on, felt relief as it cleared the top railing and ran at full speed down the dry, rutted road.

  Griffin never knew how he navigated the congested traffic clogging the street leading down toward the business district; he only knew that Rachel was not among those who scrambled up the hill, or those who scrambled down. He was in the center of things within minutes of leaving the O’Rileys’.

  The Pontius Building, a two-story wooden structure, was at the heart of the disaster. Flames roared through its roof, crimson against the blue of the sky.

  People milled in the streets, some captivated, others whimpering or frozen with fear. Men and boys manned a hosecart in one block, a steam-driven fire engine in the next. But the fire mocked the paltry sprays of water trickling from the hoses.

  Rachel, Griffin pleaded, searching the faces in the crowd without success.

  Men were prying off the clapboards edging the Pontius Building at street level now, revealing a roaring inferno in its basement. Griffin slid off the gelding’s back and abandoned it.

  The flames were spreading now—moving into a liquor store. The crowd surged back as the walls went up, and then the whiskey barrels stored inside. There were explosions, and showers of flaming alcohol raged like the seas of hell, carrying the fire to two nearby saloons.

  It was hot—intolerably hot—and Griffin felt sweat move down his face, gather at the center of his chest, and bead on the back of his neck. Coughing, he pushed through the crowd, searching every face.

  And then he saw her. She was stumbling down the plank-lined street about a hundred yards away, looking as though she hadn’t even noticed the fire.

  Griffin screamed her name, over the clang of bells, the shouts of panic, the deafening roar of the fire. The crowd shifted, and she was gone.

  Throat raw from the thickening smoke and the incredible heat, Griffin made his way through the throng. “Please,” he whispered, raising his eyes to the brassy glare of the sky.

  The prayer was answered. He found Rachel huddled in an alleyway, clutching her handbag, staring at nothing. He grasped her shoulders, shook her. “Rachel!”

  Slowly, she raised her eyes to his, and the look he saw there turned his blood to ice. She didn’t seem to recognize him.

  Frantic, he shook her again, again said her name.

  But the lavender eyes were flat, dull. “They’ve locked the bank!” she said, incredulously.

  Griffin wrenched her close and held her, tears mingling with the sweat on his face. “God,” he whispered, “Oh, my God—”

  There were more explosions, and men shouted in the streets. Wagon wheels hammered at the planking, and bells pealed all over the city, but Griffin Fletcher did not move. He stood still, cradling the stricken girl in his arms, battling a terror not even remotely related to the fire.

  And then, incredibly, Jonas was there. He looked cool, unruffled, as though he’d been out for a quiet walk, as though Seattle wasn’t in imminent danger of burning down around him. He held out Griffin’s medical bag in silent challenge.

  Griffin clung to Rachel, trying to ignore the bag and its attendant responsibility, Jonas, the world.

  Jonas’s voice was even. “Give Rachel to me, Griffin. Let me take her out of here before she’s hurt.”

  “No.” The word was a hoarse sob.

  “Griffin.”

  Griffin shook his head, held Rachel closer.

  “You took an oath,” Jonas reminded him quietly.

  Griffin began to come back inside himself, back to everything he believed. Slowly, he released his hold on the dazed, speechless Rachel.

  Jonas drew her from him cautiously, as a man might draw meat from the paws of a lion. “I’ll take care of her, Griffin. I swear that by everything our mothers meant to each other.”

  Griffin closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again to find that Jonas and Rachel were gone.

  Medical bag in hand, Griffin reeled back into the wild confusion surrounding the fire. He had no choice but to trust Jonas——no choice. The doctor within him, for a time imprisoned in some dark part of his mind, was back in control again.

  The wind was from the northeast now. The fire was sweeping toward the Commercial Mill, another business building, and the Opera House. Frantic workers were pumping water from the bay, climbing along the steaming roof of the mill with wet blankets and gunny sacks.

  Griffin knelt in the river of people to tend a fireman’s burned arm. “What the hell happened?” he asked, as he snapped open his bag and began work that did not require thought.

  The fireman was in pain, but he was excited, too, in a ghoulish sort of way. “Somebody spilled some glue on a stove, Doc,” he said. And then, incredibly, he laughed. “And the chief’s away. Guess where our fire chief is, Doc? He’s in San Francisco, learnin’ all the newest techniques.”

  Griffin’s work was finished. “Go home,” he said, standing up again, turning his burning eyes toward the wharfs. A steam engine was stationed on one dock, behind the Colman Building, but the tide was out and the pumps were drawing little more than a dribble from the bay. Worse, the hoses were too short.

  Shaking his head, Griffin turned to see a firebrand carried into the sky by the shimmering heat. As if by design, it fell onto the Opera House roof and caught. There was a roar, and the Colman Building went up with a vengeance.

  A woman was tugging at Griffin’s shirtsleeve. “Doctor? Sir—you are a doctor, aren’t you? It’s my husband—”

  Griffin followed her through the ever-growing crowd to find a middle-aged man slumped on the ground, against a wagon wheel. There was so much noise that, even through his stethoscope, he could hardly make out the thready beat of the man’s heart.

  “Mayor’s takin’ charge now,” someone said.

  Griffin stood, faced the woman. “Your husband will be all right, if you get him out of here. He’s overexcited.”

  “He wanted to watch—”

  Griffin was impatient; his eyes darted to the wagon. “I’ll help him up. You get him away from here.”

  Dynamite was being laid under the Palace Restaurant, in the hope of creating a fire gap. The horses hitched to the couple’s wagon danced in panic as the blast reverberated through the acrid, hazy air, but the woman, her husband limp on the seat beside her, brought them under control.

  Griffin watched in dull amazement as the fire swept across the wreckage of the restaurant, spreading to the wharfs beside the blazing mill.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Griffin wandered for a long time, helping in the hopeless battle where he could, competently treating firemen and spectators who had succumbed to the excitement and the smoke.

  A boy appeared beside him, grinning at the raging spectacle. “Ain’t it somethin’?” he cried, wide-eyed. “We could see the smoke clear from Tacoma!”

  “Wonderful,” Griffin snapped, weak with heat exhaustion and worry over Rachel. Was she safe? Or had he subjected her to a danger far beyond that of any
fire by handing her over to Jonas?

  “Yes, sir!” the boy went on, undaunted by Griffin’s terse reaction. “You can hear them flames snappin’ and roarin’ way out on the bay. We wasn’t hardly out of Commencement Bay afore we could hear ’em.”

  Griffin drew his watch from his vest pocket and consulted it. Four o’clock, and the battle was lost.

  Church bells tolled the news, as did the whistles of steamers moored along the waterfront. The incessant clang of the firebells echoed in Griffin’s aching head.

  The flight had begun. Business men were dragging their belongings outside, loading them into wagons. Some, having no wagons, carried cash registers in their arms, while others staggered under crates and bundles. Along the wharfs, ships accepted what merchandise they could, for safekeeping, and then moved out into deeper water as the docks themselves went up.

  Hell, Griffin thought wryly. Who would have thought hell was right here in Seattle?

  The thought led to other concerns. Were Field and his brand new bride lost in this inferno somewhere? Griffin strode in the direction of the courthouse; their hotel was just beyond it.

  People were dragging beds and chamber pots and babies into the streets in the residential section, while the courthouse itself was embroiled in a modicum of orderly panic. Shackled prisoners were being brought from the basement by members of the Home Guard, and a small company of men were trying to water down the roof and the outside walls. Harried clerks fled with stacks of records, and merchant-jurors abandoned their call to scramble back to their stores and shops.

  Griffin watched, without slowing his pace, as a young man climbed onto the courthouse roof and began drenching it with water from buckets hauled up by means of the halyards on the flagstaff.

  Fawn was helping a blustering innkeeper carry account books and blankets to a waiting wagon when Griffin reached the small hotel.

  He caught her arm. “Where’s Field?”

  Fawn’s wide brown eyes were haunted with worry as she looked toward the furnace that was the business district. “He’s down there, somewhere.”

  Griffin’s fear for his friend sharpened his voice to a razor edge. “That idiot—what a time to save souls!”

  Fawn Hollister looked as though she was going to kick him. Instead, she flung her armload of goods into the wagon and snapped, “He’s helping, Griffin. Same as you were, by the looks of you.”

  Griffin looked down at himself then, unmoved by the soot covering his hands, his clothes, and probably his face. “I’m sorry,”

  There was another roar as the roof and bell tower of the Trinity Church, across from the courthouse, fell in. Countless rounds of ammunition went off when the fire spread into two nearby hardware companies, and the noise accentuated the feeling that some kind of vicious war was being fought.

  Fawn’s hand rose to touch his face. “I know you meant well,” she said, her voice rising, somehow, over the deafening clamor.

  He closed his hand over hers and shouted back, “Will you be all right?”

  Fawn nodded.

  The streets were choked with wagons now, as Griffin made his way back toward the fire. He looked into what must have been a thousand faces, and saw a thousand different nightmares.

  The battle had moved to Yesler Way now. A bystander informed Griffin that the mayor had ordered the shacks and buildings along it to be torn down or dynamited. Even the board planks were wrenched up from the street itself.

  But the early evening wind was rising, and it carried the fire across the gap and onto the Skid Road. Griffin watched helplessly as the notorious center of sin blazed, driving prostitutes and barkeepers out into the clamoring confusion.

  There were more cases of heat exhaustion, more burns, more accidents caused by the crushing madness of the crowd itself. Just before eight o’clock, the crimson sun fell behind the mountains.

  Above, the sky glowed hellishly, the light of the fire lending garish color to wispy clouds.

  Griffin worked on, forgetting time, forgetting everything but the tasks at hand. He did not encounter either Field or John O’Riley during the hours to come, but he knew that they were nearby.

  By three o’clock in the morning, the fire had consumed itself. The destruction was awesome in scope; every mill and wharf between Union and Jackson streets had been reduced to sizzling rubble, and some twenty-five city blocks lay ravaged.

  Bone-weary, Griffin stumbled up the hill, toward the O’Riley house. His mind, like his heart, kept racing ahead, making the long walk all the more frustrating. Had Jonas taken Rachel there?

  Griffin hoped that he had and then, conversely, hoped that he hadn’t. Athena was there, and he felt certain that she’d been responsible for the frightening, almost catatonic state Rachel had been in.

  He stepped up his pace.

  There were whole families camped on street corners, their possessions stacked around them. Every lawn harbored a share of the homeless, and Griffin saw lean-tos built against blackened buildings and the trunks of trees.

  Those most fortunate slept in tents, the others had taken refuge in crops of fern alongside the roads.

  Feeling a compelling need for haste, despite his weariness, Griffin stepped over sleeping bodies to cut across a cow pasture. The field was a ragtag version of Tent Town, though here the tents were assembled from blankets or branches or even clothing.

  Griffin zigzagged between the makeshift structures and took care not to walk on those who had no shelter at all.

  At last, the brick house came into sight. Griffin broke into a stumbling run, drawn by the lights shining from the first-floor windows, drawn by Rachel.

  The front door swung open just as Griffin reached it, and Joanna O’Riley was standing there, fully dressed, her face pale with weariness and worry. “Thank God,” she sobbed, and then she flung both arms around his neck and held on as though she feared he would disappear.

  Behind her loomed Field Hollister, towering like a soot-covered specter in the half-light of the entry hall. He nodded in greeting, but Griffin could see a muscle work spasmodically in his jaw.

  “Is Rachel here?” he croaked, realizing for the first time that his voice was nearly gone.

  Joanna released him and stepped back, nodding, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes now.

  Field had no such difficulty; his gaze flared like blue fire, scoring Griffin soul-deep. “She’s in her room.”

  “I want to see her,” whispered Griffin, starting around the soft, trembling barrier of Joanna’s body.

  It was Field who stopped him, pressing one hand to his chest. “You’ve done enough, Griffin,” he said, in a terse whisper.

  “But—”

  Field’s hand did not move, yet the pressure of it increased. “No, Griff. Fawn is with her—leave her alone.”

  Griffin lowered his head. Whether the ragged sobs that tore themselves from his throat, one after another, were related to Rachel or to the pounding exhaustion he felt, he never knew.

  Field and Joanna clasped his arms, one on each side, and, by some unspoken agreement, led him toward the back of the house. The floors of the parlor and dining room were lined with sleeping refugees wrapped in blankets.

  By the time they reached the kitchen, Griffin had recovered his composure. He drank the hot coffee Joanna provided in stony silence, then consumed two mountainous ham sandwiches.

  His voice was still raw when he spoke. “Tell me, Field. Tell me why you don’t want me to see Rachel.”

  A look passed between Field and Joanna, and Joanna left the kitchen silently.

  For almost a minute, the only sound in the room was the steady tick-tock of the ancient clock on the mantelpiece.

  “Well?” Griffin rasped finally, helping himself to another cup of coffee at the stove and then sitting down at the table again.

  Field folded his arms across his chest. The fabric of his shirt was torn and stained with soot, even though his hands and face had been scrubbed to their usual wholesome shine. “Rememb
er the night you told Jonas you’d slept with Rachel? Well, it seems that Jonas told Athena, who, of course, couldn’t resist passing the word along. To say Rachel didn’t take the thing well would be the understatement of this century.”

  Griffin groaned. “My God, she doesn’t think—”

  “What do you think she thinks?” Field interrupted, his whisper echoing in the large room like a pistol shot.

  Griffin rolled to his feet, staggered slightly, and grasped the back of his chair. “I’ll tell her—I’ll explain—”

  Field had not moved from his chair, but his blue eyes snapped with warning. “You’ll leave her alone, Griffin. She’s in shock.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” corrected Field. “Sit down before you fall on your stupid face.”

  Griffin sank into his chair. “If you want to fight, Field, that can be arranged.”

  “Right now, you couldn’t best an old lady. Drink your coffee, and we’ll find a place for you to sleep.”

  The grief, the weariness—it was all tangled within Griffin, producing a state remarkably like drunkenness. “Remember the last time we fought, Field? We were kids, rolling around in that big mud puddle in front of your father’s church. Your pa and mine just stood by watching, ’til it was over. Then they dragged us out into the woods and beat the hell out of us.”

  Field rolled his eyes, but a grin twitched at one corner of his mouth. “I could have taken you, if you hadn’t flung that muddy water in my face.”

  “The hell,” retorted Griffin. “I had you from the first.”

  “What were we fighting about, anyway?”

  Griffin shrugged. “Who knows?”

  In spite of himself, Field laughed. “Drink your coffee,” he ordered.

  Calmly, Griffin complied.

  It was late when he awakened the next morning; the sun was hot in his face, compelling him to open his eyes. For a moment, Griffin was confused, but then he looked down at his tattered, smoke-blackened clothes and remembered everything—the fire, the verbal round with Field, Rachel.

  He sat up on John’s couch and shaded his eyes against the sun and the cruel normality of the study itself. His head ached, his throat was raw, and his stomach was roiling inside him.