Heat (The Firefighters of Darling Bay Book 4)

by Rachael Herron

  The entire set would be bought, of course, and the single cup would go back into pride of place, living to lure another sucker the next day.

  The funny thing was that Bonnie had asked her mother once, “Where is that old tea set now?”

  “What?”

  “The tea set Gramma held the umbrellas over?”

  Marge had laughed. “Oh, honey, that was just a story. I had chronic bronchitis as a kid, she would never have let me be outside in a rainstorm. Besides, remember how she only used plastic plates? She liked things to be unbreakable.”

  Now, she listened to her mother suggest to a woman holding a small baby that the hand-knitted christening gown would be the thing that made her mother-in-law take her seriously. “Is she overbearing? Oh, yes, my mother-in-law was, too. Let me tell you how I won her over to my side…It was with a gown much like this, in fact.” Bonnie’s mother never even knew her own mother-in-law—she had died years before she married Bonnie’s father.

  Marge Maddern told a good whopper. And everyone loved her for it, including her daughter. It was comforting to hear them retold—those bedtime, big-fish stories.

  They were what she needed to hear. Bonnie had a sinking feeling that wouldn’t go away. Her heart felt like it was located somewhere below her bellybutton. The chief had yelled at them for being children. They were so stupid. She was so stupid, it wasn’t just Caz. They’d both known better. Who argued like that, in front of everyone? She was so disappointed in herself, and that was the hardest part.

  Bonnie yawned and rubbed her eyes, trying to push back both the embarrassment of her actions and the sadness of the last call of the shift. She’d gotten off duty at eight that morning after a busy night—they’d had four calls after midnight, back to back. Two had been simple difficulty breathing, one had been a fall, but one had been a forty-year-old guy who just woke up dead. Well, his girlfriend had woken up, anyway. Shelley told them she’d kissed his cheek when her alarm went off and found his skin cold. Judging by lividity and body temp, he’d probably died shortly after they’d gone to bed the night before. “All night?” Shelley kept gasping. “He was dead all night? And I was right next to him? I could have saved him. That means I killed him. I killed him.” Her eyes had been so wide and panicked. “I killed the man I loved.”

  She’d done nothing of the sort. The man had epilepsy, and even though he’d been on his meds, he’d probably had a massive seizure and just stopped breathing. “It wasn’t your fault,” Bonnie had said over and over. “It was good you were with him. That’s what matters. You were with him.”

  “I wasn’t,” Shelley gasped. “I was asleep. When he needed me most. I slept through losing him. We’re getting married in a week. How can I—?”

  Caz had been primary on that run—there had been no arguing about that for the rest of their tour. They’d taken turns, no discussion. Once they’d decided they wouldn’t transport the patient’s body to the hospital and the cops got on scene and called the coroner, technically there was no need for the ambulance to stay on scene, but in unspoken agreement, they sat with Shelley, Caz on one side of her, Bonnie on the other. Bonnie handed her tissues and rubbed her back. When the woman fell sideways, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, Caz caught her, wrapping his arms around her. Their eyes had met over her head, and Caz had such a look. It was as if he were feeling Shelley’s pain with her, as if he’d feel it for her if he could.

  Bonnie had wanted to touch his arm then. It was such a surprising feeling she’d stayed still and dropped her eyes to the woman mourning between them.

  Bonnie knew Shelley wouldn’t remember a minute of it later. She’d never know they were there, and if they ran into her at the grocery store, she’d smile vaguely at them, unsure why their faces made her feel like crying. That was the way it should be. Bonnie and Caz were there for support, until Shelley’s mother arrived. When she did, they left quietly.

  They didn’t talk in the rig on the way back to the station. After they pulled in and finished cleanup, Caz had simply said, “We need to talk about the fundraiser.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Next shift.”

  “Yeah.” Their eyes hadn’t met again. They hadn’t said goodbye. They’d just walked away from each other.

  Bonnie had gone straight from the station to her mother’s house. Marge hadn’t looked surprised to find her daughter on the sofa when she wandered through the house.

  “Bad night?” was all her mother had said.

  “I guess.”

  Marge said simply, “Your father’s sleeping. Want to come with me to the store?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Coffee. Then we’ll go.”

  Two hours after Darling Trinkets opened, Bonnie was almost ready to head home for a real nap. She waited until her mother finished telling a customer a story about how that exact brand of electric candle had prompted a marriage proposal once, and then said, “Hey, Mom. I’m gonna split.”

  “Dinner tonight?”

  Bonnie wanted to. That was the embarrassing part. She was thirty-one. She had plenty of friends, both in the department and out. Mike, a systems analyst she’d been dating off and on for six months, wanted to go to the movies tonight. Then he would want to make out and maybe more, and all Bonnie could think of when she pictured his face was yawn. What she really wanted to do was spend the day with her mother at the store and then lounge on her parents’ back patio and watch her father char burgers into lumps of coal while he made the same dumb jokes that he’d been making her entire life. What’s brown and sticky, daughter? A pause. A stick!

  She almost never reacted to bad calls this way. In the fire service, you weren’t supposed to take things home. And for the most part, Bonnie didn’t. She could run three DOAs and then have dinner, more worried about whether they were almost out of steak sauce than how the new widows were doing. Compartmentalizing was part of the job.

  But the woman who woke up with her boyfriend not breathing next to her—Shelley—wasn’t leaving her for some reason. The panicked look of terror, which Shelley had worn for the first hour they were there, had given way to emptiness by the time they’d driven away. Shelley’s mother had arrived and had wrapped her arms around her daughter, but instead of falling to the floor in wails—as Bonnie had seen so many times before—Shelley stayed stock still, swaying rigidly as she appeared to hold her mother up. Her eyes had been blank, her gaze bleak.

  What would it be like, to love so hard you became a shell of a person when you lost that love?

  “I’m not sure. Mike and I might have plans…” Quickly, just for a second, Bonnie saw Caz’s pale blue eyes in her mind.

  Her mother smiled. “Ditch that guy and have burgers with us. Cheesy fries on bacon burgers. Your favorite.”

  “I can’t do that…”

  “You’re not the slightest bit serious about him. A mother knows.”

  Well, there was really nothing to say to that. Her mother was right. She wasn’t serious. She was just killing time with Mike.

  “Tell me what happened last night.” Marge dropped into the soft chair next to Bonnie.

  “Why do you think something happened?”

  “Because you have that look.”

  “Which one?” Bonnie tried to put her expression back in order.

  “Your sad one.”

  “I’m not sad.” Sadness was for other people. Bonnie was cheerful. Chipper. Always positive. That was, literally, her job.

  Marge just looked at her, her dark eyebrows raised.

  Fine. “Okay, we lost a guy this morning.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  Bonnie felt something burn the backs of her eyes. It was surprising and unwelcome. She might feel things sometimes, but she never cried. Crying was what normal people did. Not firefighters, not paramedics. “Yeah.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty. We didn’t even work him up. He was cold when we got there.”

  “Marr
ied?”

  “Girlfriend. Fiancée. They were getting married in a week.”

  Marge covered her mouth and said softly, “Oh.”

  “Her face…” Bonnie took a deep, slow breath. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone lose someone they were so in love with. I mean, I’ve seen hundreds of people lose their spouses, and it’s always terrible. But to be so excited…”

  Her mother nodded. “About the life in front of them, and then to lose that.”

  “I just can’t imagine.”

  “That’s the problem with your job. You don’t have to imagine it. The rest of us have to watch fake stuff on TV and cry about it. You actually have to see it, day in, day out. What if you….what if you went to see someone?”

  Bonnie felt an ache behind her eyes. “What, like a therapist? No.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I could help you find someone…”

  “We have counseling at work if we need it. I don’t need it.”

  One eyebrow arched—her mother had always been able to convey a whole book with just that one eyebrow. “You’ve used it how many times?”

  Never. Her mom knew that.

  “All I’m saying is, think about it. It’s there for a reason.”

  “Meh.” Bonnie shook herself. “I’m fine. Thanks for listening. That’s all I needed, just a Mom-ear for a minute. I’m going to go home and catch some sleep.”

  Marge stood. “Come over tonight?”

  “Can I say maybe?”

  “I’m sure you have the ability to do so,” her mother said crisply. The doorbell chimed as three new customers piled into the store giving early exclamations of delight over the Darling Bay tea towels (decorated with the town’s iconic pier).

  “But I think you should say yes.” Her mother kissed her on the cheek, and Bonnie jumped in surprise. Their family wasn’t demonstrative—they weren’t the kind to hug and kiss. They didn’t say I love you. So the kiss undid Bonnie a little. Something prickled behind her eyes.

  She hurried out of the store, hoping her mother hadn’t noticed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Caz muttered a curse. He wasn’t trying to protect his father’s ears—God knew Tony Lloyd had been the man who taught Caz what a true swearfest was. But his dad hadn’t spoken in almost a year now. It wouldn’t be fair to say the words his father had loved to utter in front of him when he couldn’t repeat them back with satisfaction.

  His father had always been the best curser ever. He could make a bunkhouse full of cowboys blush like schoolgirls with his creative sentences that normally centered around the kind of hell the men would go to if they didn’t get the herd branded in time for market, or if they let one more coyote take down a calf.

  Now Tony Lloyd was in a wheelchair during the day and in a hospital bed at night. His eyes stayed open when he was awake, but there was no awareness behind them. His full-time caretaker, Joyce Castro, said that she could tell what he wanted by the tilt of his mouth, but Caz thought she was full of it. His father had been the strongest man he’d ever known. To see him reduced to this—slack jawed and empty eyed—Caz was just glad his dad was too out of it to really understand his own state.

  He and Joyce eased Tony into the wheelchair. Caz placed a small wooden horse he’d whittled at work into his father’s lap. Sometimes it seemed to help, something for Tony to hold, to work his fingers over.

  “There,” Joyce said. “You got your horsie now. You’re gonna feel great today, Mr. Tony. Just great. It’s your son’s day to take care of you, and I know those are your favorite days.”

  Caz knew they were her favorite days, her days off. She lived at the ranch in a room next to Tony’s, so she’d be back tonight, but two days a week, Joyce went into Darling Bay and saw her daughter and her friends. It was only fair. Everyone needed days off.

  It hadn’t stopped Caz from wanting to hire another part-time nurse for those two days.

  That would be stupid. He was a paramedic. Tony was his father, after all.

  “I think we should go sit on the porch this morning,” Joyce said. “It’s supposed to be spring out there, but it feels like summer’s coming. Would you like that, Mr. Tony?”

  As if he would answer. Caz pushed the chair, moving it smoothly across the old hardwood floors, over the planks his father had put in by hand. In a movie, his father would wake up every once in a while and say something soul-stirring. Sadly, though, this wasn’t a movie. Or if it was, it was the worst one he’d ever had to sit through.

  Today, Caz would spend the day on the covered porch with his father. He’d read an old paperback Western out loud, not because he thought his father cared, but because he hated it to be so quiet, with nothing but the harsh sounds of his father’s breathing to break the day into manageable pieces.

  “You go have a good day off, Joyce.” He tried to mean it.

  “Okay, I will. He had a rough night last night. He might be tired today.”

  Like father, like son, Caz figured. They’d lost a guy this morning who was supposed to get married on Saturday. He’d sat with the girlfriend on the couch for a while. It had been terrible.

  Bonnie had held the woman’s hand, she’d said those things that women always said, over and over. “There, there. We’re here. It’s going to be okay. We’re here. It’s okay.”

  That was the problem with women—they didn’t tell the truth.

  It wouldn’t be okay for Shelley. It would probably never be okay again. Bonnie telling her it would didn’t help anything.

  Words never helped. They only hurt. He’d learned that young from his mother when she’d playfully asked, Who do you love more, Caswell? Me or your father? He’d said the wrong thing, thinking of the way his father let him sit on the horses saddle-less, the way his father let him hold his best carving knife. It had been a lie—he’d loved her the most, with her soft hands and the way she kissed him goodnight, the way her eyes lit to see him each and every time. Caz had been teasing his mother. Of course he loved her best.

  His mother had left after his flippant lie, had left the ranch and her husband and her kid, to go find stardom. Tony Lloyd had raised Caz the best he could on his own, which included TV dinners and a lot of swearing. Words had chased away Caz’s mother, and words—all the words he’d been able to fit into his letters to her in Nashville—hadn’t brought her back. She’d died there of an overdose, still trying to get a record deal. Sometimes Caz wondered how good the medics had been who’d responded to the call. How hard had they worked to try to save her? Did they know how incredible her voice was? She’d have been the next big star if she’d lived. Probably. If Caz hadn’t chased her away.

  Caz and his father both hated country music.

  Now, Joyce waved as she walked down the driveway and got in the pickup Caz had given her last year when her ancient Ford had broken down for the last time on the long driveway to the ranch. She hadn’t wanted to take it from him, but what the heck was he supposed to do with his dad’s old work truck? Sell it? It was tired, too, just like his dad, without quite as many miles. The truck was safe, even if it made funny noises, and it ran. He was glad someone was using it.

  Caz wondered—briefly—what kind of car Bonnie had. He’d only ever seen her arrive at work on a bicycle, which was kind of ridiculous given that they stayed at the station for forty-eight hours at a time. All of them lugged bags in with them when they came, fresh clothing, bedding (if they hadn’t gotten around to washing it at the station), and food, because even though they theoretically ate together, everyone had different food requirements. Caz liked a couple of handfuls of mixed nuts for breakfast instead of eggs, and sometimes he ate the same thing for lunch with a banana. Food was fuel. He couldn’t be bothered to think hard about it more than once a day, whereas some of the guys seemed to need to cook something on the stove three and four times a day.

  Bonnie, he’d noticed, loved the breads. All of them. No gluten-free silliness from her, which was refreshing. She made pancakes i
n the morning, feeding them to whoever walked by, then she ate a double-decker sandwich for lunch. If it was her turn to cook, she always made pasta—something extra rich with lots of cheese, and of course, heavily loaded garlic bread on the side. Carbs plus carbs and then more carbs. No wonder she rode her bike to work, now that he thought about it.

  She was a good cook, he had to admit. He looked forward to her nights of cooking way more than he did the nights of some of the other guys. Guy Mazanti seemed to think dinner was an iceberg lettuce salad with a rack of barbecue ribs. Well, of course, minus the salad, that wasn’t a bad dinner.

  Work. Dang it. He wished he hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t thought about her. Lately, it seemed like he was doing too much of that. He’d only been her partner for a month, and she was taking up way too much space in his brain.

  And what in the blazes were they going to do about that fundraiser?

  Caz thought long and hard before digging his cell phone out of his pocket. He made sure his father was covered warmly enough. He offered him some water, which his father managed better than he usually did. As his father fell asleep on the deck, Caz ran his fingers idly over the wooden rail of the porch. He should sand it down, put another coat of paint on. Maybe in the summer he’d do that. His father was fine, snoring lightly in his chair, so Caz wandered around the big house and back to the deck of the little cottage he’d been staying in. Joyce had said she should stay with them, in the front house, but this cottage had been the first thing Caz had ever built with his own two hands. He and his father had planned it, raised the walls and put on the roof (which could use redoing, he noticed. He’d do that as soon as the spring rains were done). Building the cottage had put the need in his hands to keep building.