Where would Jake go? What was he planning? What could he do with a bag of sugar?
Sugar that had come from her kitchen.
“Well, you should call Rob, then, he’ll believe you.”
“I have, Mom, a dozen times. I really did. It just goes to voice mail. He won’t answer. He hates me. He blames me...” Kari put her hand to her head. All she could think about was Rob’s devastated expression when he’d told her she’d taken his father from him.
And you did.
All those papers, all those forms on Rob’s table—Rob had been looking for his father’s killer ever since it had happened, and it had been Jake, all along.
Wait. The table. Rob’s apartment. Did Jake know where Rob lived? How hard could it be to find out? It had taken her one call to get the location, granted from a woman who’d trusted her.
She won’t trust me now. That was before anyone told her that I took her husband from her.
No. There would be no more deaths. No more fires. Kari would go to Rob’s—maybe, even if Jake wasn’t there, Rob might be, or someone would. She had to do something.
Because she couldn’t stand by and do nothing, not anymore.
* * *
KARI STEERED THE car beneath the leafy canopy arching over Rob’s street, craning her neck this way and that. People hadn’t come in from work yet, and school hadn’t let out. It was deserted.
Then, on a side street, she spotted Jake’s little two-door sports car. He’d been so proud of it when his mom had given him the key for his seventeenth birthday, but now it bore dings and scrapes and a hasty repair job of a front headlight with a plenteous amount of duct tape.
He’d been after his mom to help him buy a new car, Kari remembered.
Was that why he torched my bakery? Because I told Mom not to get him the car?
She parked her own car behind his and got out. Leaning against the window, she peered in. The car was empty of people, but a dumping ground of assorted fast food wrappers, gym shorts, towels, drink bottles, energy drink cans and game discs.
She stood up and touched the palm of her hand to the hood. The metal was still warm. Jake must have walked to Rob’s.
Kari tried dialing Rob’s number one last time, but again got his voice mail message: “You’ve reached Rob Monroe with the Levi County Fire Department. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. If it can wait a bit, leave a message after the beep.”
She disconnected and dialed her mom, who answered in hiccupping sobs. “Please tell me you found him before he’s done anything stupid,” her mom got out.
“I found his car—it’s near Rob’s. I’m going to walk down there and try to talk some sense into him—maybe he just went to talk to him.” But Kari didn’t believe that, not in her heart of hearts. “Maybe he’ll listen to you if not me—he’s really bitter, Mom, about the loan you gave me.”
“Wait—Kari, somebody’s at the door—oh! Call me back when you talk to him. I’ve gotta go.”
Kari stared at the phone in disbelief. Once again, her mother was letting her deal with the fallout from Jake all by herself. Still, this time?
This time, I’m scared. This is not the same Jake I grew up with.
Rob’s truck wasn’t in the parking space in front of the duplex when she approached the house. The house appeared empty. At least there was no smoke coming out of it, she told herself.
The door was closed, but it creaked open when she put her hand to the door to knock on it. Her heart sank. Rob had not been one to leave doors unlocked, if his actions the other night had been anything to go by. No, he’d unlocked both the door lock and the separate deadbolt.
“Jake?” Kari called out.
The living room and kitchen area was as spare and neat as she’d seen it the other night—even neater, because now there were no papers scattered across the table.
The difference between Rob and Jake, almost the same age, couldn’t have been any more apparent. Jake was still locked into a seventeen-year-old’s mentality. Rob valued his space, valued his things.
I wish he could have valued me. I wish I’d been worth valuing.
“Jake? Are you here? It’s me, Kari,” she called.
Still no reply came. She pushed farther into the apartment, past the seating area on the left, opening a closet across from the kitchen to see a broom and some cleaning supplies, but no Jake lurking.
The bathroom door was open—and empty, even behind the shower curtain. It felt strange and wrong to Kari to be seeing Rob’s home like this—somehow seeing his brand of shampoo felt like a huge invasion of his privacy. She would hate it if anybody poked through her stuff without her permission.
Had Jake come and gone? Had he changed his mind? Kari ducked into the apartment’s one bedroom, with its bed jammed on one side close to a dresser, the closet on the wall opposite the living room. It was neat and undisturbed, the bed even made—surprising for a bachelor.
But Rob’s not like Jake. He understands responsibility. He understands he’s accountable to himself.
How had she missed that about him? No—staring at Rob’s well-ordered space, remembering his cheerful willingness to help her with dishes and cakes and deliveries, she realized she had known that about him. She’d been drawn to his integrity, to his moral code that showed so plainly in his actions.
Kari had let that moral code down. She had betrayed Rob, not the other way around.
A flash in the dresser mirror caught her eye—just as a hand clamped over her mouth and fingers twined in her hair to yank her head back. She found herself staring into Jake’s enraged face.
“Should have known you’d stick your nose into it. Got to rescue everybody, huh, Saint Karina?”
“Jake, please—”
“Jake, please,” he mocked her. He twisted her around. “Maybe this is a good thing after all. I’ll just leave you here when I torch the place, and they’ll think you didn’t get out in time. Kill two birds with one stone.”
She fumbled for her phone, tried to get it unlocked to dial 911. Jake yanked it from her fingers and slung it against the mirror. The pane of glass shattered. “Oops. Think that gives me seven years’ bad luck?” he smirked.
Kari kicked at him in a desperate attempt to get free. She had to get out and find help.
But as she did, he let go of his hold on her, and she went spiraling backward, falling, falling.
She heard a crack as she hit the sharp corner of Rob’s dresser and felt a blossom of pain in her head. The last thing Kari saw before blackness was Jake leaning over her, a packet of matches in his hand.
* * *
ROB HEARD THE sirens two blocks over. Despite his seatbelt, Tim lurched forward and braced himself against the dash of the truck as Rob screeched to a stop in front of his apartment.
“Hey, buddy—wait for backup—if this guy’s gone as five-alarm crazy as his mama says—”
Rob ignored him and almost fell out of the cab. “You are my backup—Kari’s in there with that lunatic. He didn’t burn her bakery because of insurance. He did it to get back at Kari.” He slammed the truck door.
He smelled smoke—the acrid smell of a house on fire. But he saw no telltale puffs. Was it his imagination in overdrive?
Rob pounded up the steps and laid a hand on the door. Cool. He tested the doorknob. It was cool to the touch, too.
He’d paged out the engines and a squad car before they’d left Chelle’s—who wasn’t making a whole heap of sense, the shape she was in. He had managed to get one coherent thought out of her—that Jake was at his place, and Kari had gone there to stop him from torching it.
Tim was behind him, his gun out. “You need a weapon, Rob, why don’t you carry a weapon?”
“Maybe because I’m not really a cop?”
�
��That’s right, you nozzle jockey. Oh, well, the reason they made cops is so that firefighters would have heroes, too.” Tim pushed ahead of him, his weapon out in front of him.
“Wait—go around the back, tell me if anything’s burning. Or if Jake bailed out a back window.”
For once, Tim didn’t argue. As he rounded the side of the duplex, he called out, “Wait for the backup—don’t be a glory-hound.”
The sirens were closer still, a block if he was judging right. But any minute the place could go up in flames—or explode if Jake had cobbled together some other homemade explosive.
And Kari could be in there.
“Hey, we got smoke!” Tim hollered.
It decided matters for Rob.
The crew was coming. They’d have his back. He shoved in the front door with his shoulder and stayed low. Smoke was already pooling in the front room, making visibility hard. He coughed on the pungent taste of it.
“Kari!” he called. “Kari! Are you in here?”
The stove was all right—no burners lit, nothing on fire in the oven. What had Jake used to get the fire started so quickly? Had he had a chance to get a propane tank? Rob stumbled deeper into the apartment.
“Kari!” he screamed.
The smoke was dense and thick, and now there was heat. Rob dropped to his knees and crawled toward the bedroom door. What he’d give for turnout gear.
The bedroom door was hot to touch. Open it? Don’t open it? Somewhere outside, over the all-too-familiar sound of crackling flames and arcing electrical currents, came the screech of airbrakes and the rattle of the engines setting up. He heard the volley of calls from one crewmember to another.
“Kari!”
He couldn’t leave it to chance—he had to know if she was on the other side of that door. Rob nudged it open.
Fire crawled up the drapes from a mountain of bedclothes aflame in his closet and spilling out into the center of the room. In the eerie yellow light of the flames, he saw Kari’s pale crumpled form on the floor.
Rob inched forward, closer, closer, until he could begin to drag her out. Was she dead? He couldn’t take the time to see if she was breathing. They had to get out of this place now, before they both succumbed to smoke inhalation.
He had her in the hallway and would have hollered for help from the firemen storming through the front door,
But out of the dim recess of the bathroom a form exploded: Jake. They tussled and fought, hitting, punching. Rob felt his lungs spasm as he choked for breath in the midst of the smoke and dimly wondered where Jake’s superhuman stamina was coming from.
Rage. Pure animal rage, from the string of curses Jake was uttering. Now Jake was between him and Kari, and Rob fought back, trying to get past him. He had to get Kari out.
He dug deep for the strength for one last punch, one more uppercut to Jake’s glamour-boy jaw. Rob sent him pinwheeling back against the bathroom door, then scrabbled for Kari’s limp form.
He had her up in his arms when he heard a sound that filled him with relief: the thump of boots on the kitchen floor. Rob turned, saw a firefighter in turnout gear and presented Kari to him like a broken ragdoll.
“Get her some help. Now!” Rob shouted over the noise of a fire rapidly becoming out of control.
He turned back for Jake.
But Jake was up again. Kari’s brother’s face was white and taut as he saw the firefighter secure Kari in his arms and head for the door.
“Give it up, Jake! You got nowhere to go! There’s no exit back here!” Rob told him.
Jake twisted with the panic of a cornered animal. “I’m not going to jail!”
Rob lunged for him, but Jake slipped from his grasp.
Instead of the front door, Jake leapt for the burning bedroom.
No. Jake Hendrix would not do this to his sister. He’d face up to his crimes, finally. He’d be accountable, if it was the last thing Rob ever made him do.
Rob bolted after him, grabbed him by the thin fabric of his T-shirt and landed a hard hit to Jake’s blond head.
The arsonist slumped in Rob’s grasp. Only then did Rob make for safety, dragging Jake Hendrix out with him as he left his apartment burning down behind him.
He’d see his father’s killer brought to justice.
But had he been too late to save Kari?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RESTRAINTS.
They had her arms in restraints.
Kari fought, even though she knew it was futile. The guards would write her up, and it might add more time to her sentence.
They were pressing her down, sticking something in her throat—she couldn’t scream for help, couldn’t get even a syllable out.
“Open your eyes, hon!” one of the guards called. But Kari couldn’t bear to. She tried to recoil backward, but couldn’t move from the grasp of yet another guard.
“Don’t fight, sweetie! Just relax! We’ve got this breathing tube down your throat. You want it out, right? Open your eyes if you want it out.”
Breathing tube? Kari dared to open her eyes the tiniest sliver, sure it was a trick.
But no uniformed guards loomed over her. No inmates held her down.
Instead, a smiling woman in scrubs bent over her and smoothed a hand over Kari’s forehead. “You had us worried there for a bit, yes, you did. You’ve got a couple of people waiting on us to get this thing out of you, though gracious knows, you’re not going to be able to talk for a bit. Okay, you ready to follow my instructions? I’m going to take these restraints off you, but you can’t fight me. You listen to me, and we’ll have this tube out in a jiffy.”
Kari nodded. The woman bent over her again and released first one wrist and then the other. Kari couldn’t help it—she held up her hands to see them. Long Velcro strips dangled down from her wrists as she moved her fingers to her face.
“No, no—let me suction you out first. It won’t hurt, I promise.”
A loud noise came at Kari, and she felt a suction, exactly like at the dentist’s office, work around the plastic that was in her mouth, then a far worse pain deep in her chest that made her gag. “Okay, let’s get this mess off you—I know this can’t feel great. Yep, turn that way so that I can get this unfastened.”
Kari turned her head to the side. There was her mom, wringing her hands, smiling, tears streaking down her face.
And Rob.
She blinked. Rob? Here?
But before she could make sense of it all, the woman had asked her to turn her head back to the other side. More pressure, more fumbling, but she didn’t focus on them.
She focused on the fact that Rob was here. And he didn’t look angry or disappointed or anything at all like he had the last time they’d spoken.
Where was Jake? Had they found him?
Smoke. Matches. Jake leaning over her.
He had been going to kill her.
Her own brother.
“Okay, you’re doing good, so we’re going to suction you again—and then I need you to cough, and this time it will be out, okay?”
Kari felt hands grip her head, and realized another person was there, too, holding her. She gagged and coughed and the tube was out and her mouth no longer felt as though it were filled with plastic pipes.
In a flash, an oxygen mask was on her, the cold metal of a stethoscope pressed against her, and the woman in the scrubs was giving her a reassuring pat. “Your throat’s going to be sore for a bit, okay? That’s normal. Okay, guys, she’s all yours, but don’t wear her out.”
Mom crept up close to the bed and gripped Kari’s hands in hers. She was bawling in earnest now. “Oh, Kari, Kari... I’ll never forgive myself...”
Kari tried to speak. She could only get a rasp out.
Rob’s hand patted her on
her other shoulder.
She drank in his face. He was calm and cool. Grinning like a crazy man, but at least he wasn’t falling apart like her mom.
“Don’t try to talk. We couldn’t understand you anyway,” Rob told her. He crouched down so that he was at eye level. “I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of questions.”
Kari nodded.
“Do you remember the fire?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not really,” she husked.
“Shh,” he said. “Save your voice. You’ll get it back sooner if you don’t talk right now.”
“Rob saved you, honey,” her mom told her. “You nearly died...” She raised her eyes to meet Rob’s over Kari. “I can never, ever thank you enough.”
“Wha-what happened? Jake...hurt...you?” Kari managed to croak out to Rob. She reached up and touched a bandage on his forehead, let her fingertips slide to a greenish bruise on his cheek.
“I’m okay...but Jake...”
Another exchange of glances between her mom and Rob.
“Jake is in jail. Where he belongs,” her mother told her.
“The...fire?” Kari asked.
“Which fire? The downtown fire?” Rob scratched his head. “I don’t know where to start. Jake’s been charged with the downtown fire, and with manslaughter...for my dad. And he’s got a laundry list of charges in connection with burning my place.”
Kari felt a tear slip down her cheek. “Such...a...waste,” she whispered.
The tip of Rob’s finger caught the tear and wiped it away. “Yeah. He’s a smart guy. He could have had so much more. I don’t understand why he blew the opportunities your mom and you gave him. But he did, Kari. I’m sorry. I know you love him.”
Another tear—this one because the gentleness of Rob’s words cut her to the quick. How could he be so compassionate about the man who had taken his father?
“Oh—I can’t—” Her mother sprang up from the chair. “I’ll be back!” She ran from the room.
Out of the Ashes Page 22
