“We’ll get him son, don’t worry,” Eddie shouted over the sound of the rotors, but he looked questioningly at Jonni, who was already positioning the stretcher on its cords. “Can you lift him?” he asked her.
She gave a second thumbs-up and then was gone again, and within seconds Eddie was lowering the stretcher on its winch. Jonni held the wavering stretcher just to one side of the ladder, securing it quickly at both ends with hiker’s clamps. Then she rolled Sheldon’s unresisting form onto it, quickly strapped him down, released the clamps, and motioned for them to take him up. She was right behind it, almost running up the swinging ladder, and Eddie hauled her in before they both secured the stretcher and gave Weston the all-clear signal. With a stomach-lurching swoop, they took off toward the hospital. Eddie hovered over the motionless form of Sheldon; he had strapped an oxygen mask over Sheldon’s nose and mouth. The old man’s eyes were closed, and one arm hung limply off the side of the stretcher.
Jonni took off her helmet; her thick, short-cropped blonde hair was plastered to her head with sweat. She sucked in a deep breath and moved to sit on the bench next to the child, who was staring with fascinated eyes at these mythological heroes surrounding him.
In all his eight long years, in all his preadolescent dreams and fantasies, he had never imagined something as exciting as this. But before he could succumb to the awe of relief and amazement, he had to know: “Is my grampa going to be all right?”
“We’re going to get him to a hospital in a few minutes, and they’re going to take care of him,” she said with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. But she couldn’t help glancing nervously at Eddie, who had a stethoscope pressed it firmly to the naked skin of Sheldon’s chest where he had ripped open the shirt. His face was a picture of concentration, and impossible to read.
In truth, Jonni had worked so fast and under such duress that she had no idea if the boy’s grandfather was alive or dead.
Chapter 48
Joshua had been given a once-over in the emergency room and told to go home and expect to spend the next few days coughing up some lovely yellow mucus. That, the intern had informed him and his mother dispassionately, would be a good thing. It would mean that his lungs were cleansing themselves. If it turned green, he should see a doctor.
Simon’s lungs were in worse shape, and after an MRI scan of his head for internal bleeding, he was admitted to a room. Joshua insisted on waiting for him and the inevitable appearance of Detectives Sheridan and Wright. After all, he had called them himself.
When they came, Joshua was sitting next to Simon’s bed, where the other boy was sleeping fitfully, an oxygen mask fitted tightly over his nose and mouth with an elastic strap, but his breathing was constantly interrupted by a raucous cough that made Joshua’s croupy one sound tame by comparison. He rose to greet the two men, who were grim faced and bore their exhaustion like sacks of gravel on both shoulders.
Joshua motioned for them to step into the hall; with a sour look at the figure in the bed, Sheridan turned and went out.
“So, you found him, just by accident, I’m going to assume,” Sheridan said by way of letting Joshua know how they were going to play it, “at the source of the most recent arson. Is that right?”
“Well, yes, sir, but . . .”
“And”—Sheridan held up a finger—“he was at your house the day I came looking for him, but you didn’t tell me.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, but . . .”
“And you still think he didn’t do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Joshua said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Detective Wright cleared his throat but said nothing, and Joshua wondered if he was trying to keep himself from making a more disdainful noise.
Sheridan’s eyes bored into Joshua’s. “Go home,” he said in a hard voice. “Go home before I arrest you for aiding and abetting.”
“I don’t think he did it.” Joshua could hear the pathetic tone of his own voice. He had no proof, other than his visions, and those were worth nothing in the harsh world in which Sheridan lived.
Sheridan seemed to lose patience. “Okay, that’s it. You listen to me, and you listen good. There have been four arson fires that we know of. All of them he”—Sheridan pointed a finger at the ward door behind which Simon lay—“was close to. One of them either killed or covered the death of the man who sent him away to probation camp, and witnesses have testified that Simon Gomez had vowed to pay him back.”
“I—I know,” stuttered Joshua. “But you don’t have any proof that he would do anything so extreme. I know he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I know it looks suspicious, but I don’t think he’s capable of murder!”
Both detectives looked at Joshua now with such fixed intensity that it shut him up. Sheridan said in a dangerously soft voice, “Don’t you?”
“No!” insisted Joshua, but there was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him they knew something he didn’t.
“What?” he asked.
Detective Wright glanced at his partner and received a curt nod. He said, “Simon Gomez was originally made a ward of the court and placed in supervised foster homes for three years because of something he did when he was ten years old.”
Sheridan’s face was glacial. “You have no idea of what this boy is capable of. Go home.”
Joshua’s mouth had gone dry. He tried to swallow, but it didn’t help. When he spoke, it came out as a whisper. “What did he do?” Both men stared at him with closed, icy expressions. “Please tell me,” Joshua pleaded. “Please.”
Sheridan’s barrel chest went up and down with a huge sigh, and though his face did not change, Joshua thought that he detected something in the granite eyes. Something that might have been pity, but he did not know for whom. Then, with the flat intonation of an expert observer who has trained himself to watch but not to feel, not even distantly, he spoke.
“He killed his own father,” Sheridan told him. “Shot him.”
And Joshua felt that he too had taken a bullet.
Chapter 49
Leah was in the waiting room with Jenny and Greer when Joshua returned to them. He shook his head sadly at his mom, and she stood to put her arms around him.
“He’s going to arrest him,” Joshua said sadly.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Greer rocked him gently.
Jenny and Leah both felt intrusive and had the sensitivity to look away. At that moment, a woman with a determined, scrubbed look and a badge that declared her as a county-employed social worker came in leading a small boy by the hand. His face was white, his clothes were damp, and he was staring blankly as though he’d seen something so horrible that his eyes had refused to see anything more.
With a shock, Leah realized that this was the little boy she had met only that morning. “Tyler?” she asked tentatively. The boy did not respond, but the woman, a tough-looking matron, stopped and looked up sharply.
“Do you know this boy?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“Yes,” Leah said, and immediately dropped to her knees in front of Tyler. “Honey, do you remember me? You helped me this morning. My name is Leah.”
The matron pulled him back. “I’m sorry, I can’t permit you to speak with him.” She turned abruptly away.
“Where’s his grandfather?” The question came from Joshua; he had come to stand behind Leah. Tyler did not look up at him.
The matron’s eyes wavered with indecision; she glanced down at Tyler almost fearfully and then said, “I’m not at liberty to answer that.”
Joshua leaned forward and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Tyler, buddy? You okay?” The boy did not respond. He continued to stare, unseeing, at the air in front of him.
“Where are you going to take him?” Leah asked.
“I’m sorry, but unless you are family, I can’t tell you anything,” the matron said, and then, not unkindly, she pulled Tyler’s arm and he marched forward without seeming to know or care what was
happening to him. But as he reached the door, he turned and looked over his shoulder as though the voices that had spoken to him had finally found their way through a thick fog. For just a second his eyes connected with Joshua’s. And in that second, all the fear and misery of the world were in the tilt of his head and the fragility of his small hands. Then the glass doors slid shut behind them.
“Oh no. Oh my God,” Leah said, pressing her hands to her mouth. In the space of Tyler’s single glance back, a need to take that horrible blank look from his face and replace it with the joyful, mischievous smile she had seen that morning overpowered her. It seemed a desecration that she must stand there and do nothing. The emotion was so unfamiliar and so all-consuming that she actually swayed from the impact.
Greer and Jenny had turned to Joshua. “Who is that?” Jenny asked.
“The guy who drives the water truck,” Joshua said in a mesmerized voice. “It’s his grandson. Joy and I watched him for a few hours the other day.” He was staring at the place just above where Tyler had disappeared, staring at the spot where he had seen—for a fleeting instant—the image of the waiflike little girl. She had been reaching a hand out toward and looking earnestly at—could it be?—Leah. In a kind of trance, Joshua turned to look at the career banker. “I thought that he might be in danger from his grandfather. I, uh, saw something.” He was squinting at Leah, trying to understand what the ethereally frail phantom child had meant. Why had she been reaching out to this childless executive as though for help? Leah was nice enough, Joshua thought, but she had always struck him as a person who, having been damaged by experience, used all her strength healing herself—and the rest of the world would have to take care of itself.
But Leah too was staring at the place where Tyler had disappeared. There was a look of revelation on her face, as though she had both discovered and lost something precious.
Slowly, she turned to the other three. And to Joshua’s utter surprise, instead of cowering away from the child’s pain, she spoke with absolute resolve. “We’ve got to find out where they’re taking him. We’ve got to help him.”
As they started out to the car, Joshua found himself thinking. You just never know about people. You just never know.
Chapter 50
The next morning, Greer could smell smoke as soon as her mind flickered out of a disturbing dream world and into the worrisome new day. She stood for a long moment at her window surveying a sky hazy with billions of particles, the belched refuse of a not-too-distant inferno. She searched vainly for clouds, moisture, some kind of relief, but she could see none. “If only it would rain.” She breathed the words like a prayer offered at the altar of a cruel god. An impartial, pitiless god for whom there was no benevolence without sacrifice.
Then she went downstairs and did something she was usually religious about not doing: She turned on the news.
The fires were raging out of control, and firefighters were being called in from other counties to set up a line of defense. As a precaution, some of the fringe neighborhoods had been asked to evacuate, and Joshua’s old high school gym was called into service as a temporary shelter. The Red Cross had shown up within half an hour with cots, blankets, and emergency food supplies. Video footage showed families pulling up in trucks and cars loaded down with everything from computers to baby books to sofas. The variety of valued items was fascinating.
Joshua came in wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama pants and sat down in front of the TV. Greer noted that his arms and chest were filling out; he had lost his teenaged scrawny look, and it was being replaced by solid musculature. She smiled to herself. Her boy had become a man.
Turning her attention to the news, she was much less impressed. As usual, there was an abundance of trauma-laced sound bites delivered in ill-disguised, hopeful tones, interviews with people predominated by questions of what they would feel if the worst happened, generic shots of burning trees in undisclosed locations, paid experts who expounded on the deadly horrors of fires in general, and an almost complete absence of factual information. As a result, they spent twenty minutes watching before they both threw up their hands in disgust and turned off the TV, and Joshua went to phone the forest service fire station to talk to someone who had no commercial time to sell and an audience that wanted information and not sensationalized entertainment.
After he had told the ranger, a Mr. Layton, where they lived, his response was reassuring, for now.
“You’re not in any immediate danger. The fire is burning west of you and expanding north and south. It’s the south we’re concentrating on putting out at this point.”
The second line beeped just as Joshua was thanking the mercifully practical ranger. He clicked over.
“Hi, Joshua. Is your mom there?” It was Jenny.
“Sure, hold on. How’s things up at your house?” he asked as he gestured to his mother, who had come into the kitchen and was making coffee.
“Grim, but not on the middle of the grill. Did you hear about Golden Door?”
“No.”
“It’s toast. Everything is gone, nothing but a bunch of blackened toothpicks sticking up out of slabs on the ground.”
Joshua’s skin prickled as he thought of the Caseys just a few miles away. “What about the houses nearby?”
“Everybody else seems to have survived so far; they set up a line of defense between the development and the existing neighborhoods. I guess the mowed-down acreage of Golden Door created enough of a dead zone for them to turn it.”
“Wow,” Joshua said, trying to get his brain around the fact that almost three hundred not-yet-completed, but happily uninhabited, homes were now gone. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He was very relieved for the Caseys.
Greer had come to stand near him. She was watching his face with a concerned, questioning expression.
“Here’s my mom. Let us know if you hear anything more, okay?”
“You betcha.”
Greer took the phone from her son as he said, “Golden Door is gone.” She felt a swelling of fear for its proximity to the rest of the community, but a chord twanged of justice about the fate of the greedy, land-grabbing development itself.
“Jenny? Hi. Everybody okay?”
“So far.” Greer could hear her friend’s compassionate sigh. “But you know they’ve evacuated all of Alpine Village, upper Black Oak, and Vogel Flats, right?”
“Yes, that much I saw on the news. It made for a tragic thirty seconds, though they had to keep cutting away from people who were smiling and waving at the camera to get that much.”
“I know. People’s spirits are still really good. Only one home has been lost and that was uninhabited, nobody there. But it’s been brutal for the people fighting it. The firefighters have been at it all night, and more are coming in from the surrounding counties. They’re working in twelve-hour shifts and sleeping in Red Cross tents on the high school playing field. I think we should do something for them.”
Greer couldn’t have agreed more, and helping would go a long way to alleviating the excruciating helplessness that she was experiencing. “What?” she asked eagerly.
“Well, I’m going to pack up every cake and muffin I’ve got, plus about a hundred gallons of fresh coffee, and go set up in the cafeteria. That’s where they’re feeding them—so far cold sandwiches and water, from what I’ve heard. I’ve called everybody who has a business or a restaurant I know in the area to enlist them, and now I’m activating the phone tree to see if we can bring in some volunteers and hot meals. Wanna come?”
“I’m on my way. Anything I can do to help, I’ll do it.” Greer hung up the phone.
“What are you going to do?” Joshua asked her with a tremor of trepidation.
Greer looked at him with firm determination written on her charming face. “I’m going to make a casserole.”
Chapter 51
As evening fell, so did the spirits of the people assembled at the high school. The firefighters were com
ing in, grateful for the huge outlay of food provided by the citizens and for a cool shower in the locker rooms, but then they stumbled to the large tents and collapsed into unconsciousness on the uncomfortable makeshift bedding in the hot, airless shelters.
In the gym, the temporary inhabitants were also rapidly losing their sense of humor. The first night and day had been filled with greeting friends, hopefulness, and cooperation, but as the hours had worn on and the novelty had worn off, patience had worn thin. Arguments were breaking out over sleeping arrangements, noise, supplies, and the lack of news about when they could go home.
Leah stood surveying the mass of humanity and wondered how long it would be before a fistfight, or worse, broke out. She’d been there since she got off work at five, and so far she’d had little to do except help Jenny deliver industrial-sized vats of coffee and hand out bottled water. There were far too many people in the space, and the air-conditioning was insufficient to fight the relentless heat outside. Though NO SMOKING signs were on every door, there were still people standing in groups with lit cigarettes, and she had seen more than one bottle of some god-awful rotgut being passed around, the result being an increase in volume, rage, and indignation from those trying to maintain a respectful decorum.
Leah suspected that a small number of the people weren’t evacuees at all, but just lost souls who had found three free meals, beds, and something interesting going on.
There were quite a few children. Most of the kids had grouped up and were playing on the stage end of the auditorium, but a few cowered close to their parents in this unfamiliar and frightening place.
Leah was leaning against the swinging door, half-in and half-out of the now pungently funky atmosphere in the gym, wondering what she could possibly do to help, when she saw him. Tyler was seated on one of the cots at the far end of the room. He was leaning back against the bleacher wall with his knees drawn up under him, his arms wrapped protectively around himself.
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