by Nancy Rue
I flipped back through my mind to find the one she was talking about.
“But it backfired. People started gossiping about the affair instead of defending Dr. Kaye.” Her eyes shifted miserably. “So the other day, when Zachary Archer had the gall to come and see me, I threw him out, and I wrote another anonymous letter.”
That one I could pinpoint. The one I thought Zach had written. I shook my head. Anybody tainted by Zach came away sounding exactly like him.
“Of course the paper printed my letters,” she said, stumbling for the first time in the thickness of her voice. “After all, the Estes family does own it.” She pressed her beautiful, hurting lips together and released them only to add, “That’s all I have to say.”
She darted for the door, shoving people aside. The doorway cleared, and as the buzz rose in the room and Peter Lamb pointlessly pounded his gavel, I blinked at what appeared to be steam wisping in through the top of the opening.
As if he were moving in slow motion, Brandon Stires covered his mouth and twisted his head to look up and then out the door. “Dude!” he shouted above the din. “There’s a fire!”
CHAPTER THIRTY - NINE
The students bolted as one from the doorway, opening up the room to a haze of smoke that swelled the rest of the crowd into a frenzy. As bodies surged for the door, I heard my voice rise above the panic, kicking in with the response that had been hammered into my children and me.
“Stay calm!” I barked at them. “Get low!”
“Are you all right, Demi?” someone called to me.
Ethan, just a few feet from me, held back two flailing women.
“Tell them to stay low!” I called back to him.
He leaned over from the waist, shoved both women against him, and disappeared into the smoke. I looked around to be sure I was the last one out. The smoke was already making it hard to see.
Rich’s voice was in my head. Move steady and quick. Don’t run. It’ll be the hardest thing in the world to do, but you have to.
I bent from the hips and forced myself to take a steady pace toward the door, but the smoke was thick in my face, coming down like a second ceiling. I dropped to my knees and crawled. Ahead of me in the hallway, people coughed and floundered in eddies.
“Get low!” I screamed at them.
I could hardly see my hands as I walked them out in front of me, one after the other. The floor was hot on my palms, which meant the fire was coming from below.
Plastering my hand over my nose and lips, I flattened to my stomach and got to the wall. Inch by inch I felt my way along, the shrieks and choking standing my nerves on end, Rich’s voice in my ear holding me back from joining the terror.
Take the stairs. Then you can get help.
Ahead of me, the mob forced its way toward the main stairs. No one, apparently, had thought of the small staircase closer to the boardroom. They were lost in the fear of the pack.
I continued to inch, forcing myself not to cry so I wouldn’t use up what little air was still left near the hot floor. My left hand slipped down. “The steps! Back here!”
My voice only croaked, and the now muddled thunder of frantic footsteps left me behind. I scooted forward until my whole arm was on the step, and I let myself roll to the next one, squinting to find the propped-open door to the hallway that I needed to close behind me. The heel of my hand protested in pain as I used it to dislodge the doorstop. The door labored stubbornly, letting in a downpour of smoke from the hall into the stairwell until I could get it closed. The stairwell ceiling filled, and I pushed my way down on my belly, head first.
The heat and smoke would rise and bank down the edges from the ceiling, Rich had told me. You want to get out before it pulls the oxygen out of the room.
I took in a gasp of air and held it. My eyes burned, and I squeezed them in and tried to remember what I was making my way into.
Plaster walls. What had Rich said about plaster? It held the heat more, didn’t it, more than Sheetrock? I had to stay away from the wall.
Those ratty couches—synthetic and foam-filled. Once the heat hit them, they would erupt and chew everything around them.
I fought back rising horror and pressed my hands to the landing I’d now reached. The floor grew warmer—not yet hot enough to make me to pull away. But I could feel the heat on my back, and I didn’t have to look to know the smoke was banking. If I could roll down to the second floor I could get out the window. That’s what Rich said. Now . . . get as low as you can and get out.
Squinting through the stream from my eyes, I tried to see down and ahead to the turn in the stairs. Dark fog slid down the wall. Don’t breathe it in. Find the next steps and roll down.
But as I pawed at the floor, my hands found no steps, and I had to take another gulp of acrid air to keep from hurling myself in every direction. The stairs were there, ahead of me. They had to be.
“Dear God,” I said out loud. “Oh, dear God, please help.”
My mouth filled with smoke, and I spit and coughed and pulled the neckline of my top up until it covered my nose. I tried to make my way down and slipped. As I went into a painful downward slide, black smoke fingered across the ceiling. I heard glass shatter. Dear Lord . . .
“Anybody up here—is anybody up here?”
God . . . had I heard a voice . . .
“Rich? Rich?”
“Demitria.”
I got up on my elbows and made out a murky form emerging from below. His eyes were suddenly there, inches from mine, streaming at me from over a cloth that covered the lower half of his face like a bandit.
“Get down!” he shouted.
I flung myself to the step below. Sobs tore their way up my throat, and I choked them back.
“Lie down on your side and roll and keep going.”
But I couldn’t move. Above us the air split into titian flames that licked and groped for something to eat.
“Rich—the couch!” I screamed, and then gagged until I was doubled over.
I felt a shove, and I bumped shoulder over shoulder to the landing. Rich was on me before I could crab-crawl toward the door, which was wide open and billowing smoke.
“Put this on.”
Something wet came around my face and I gasped into it. A thin stream of air reached my lungs.
“We have about thirty seconds—do what I say.”
His voice went into me, and I nodded. This was Rich—this was the 9/11 hero.
“I’m going to get on top of you and crawl you down,” he said into my hot ear.
I couldn’t see anything but a black fog, so I closed my eyes and made myself move forward and down. Rich’s body hovered over me and he put his hands over mine like paws and picked them up and put them down, steering me around another corner and down again. His chest heaved against my back, wet and hot right through to my skin. I kept my head tucked under and let him move me like a toy, and still my face above the bandana burned. I couldn’t help buckling.
“Rich—are we on fire?” I tried to say.
His face came down next to mine and shook, searing my cheek. “It’s just the heat. We’re almost there.”
His voice was unmuffled and raspy, and I knew he’d given me his own face cloth. And then there was air—cool and rich and on my head and in my face.
“Costanas—what are you doing?”
I felt myself being rolled over and picked up in jacket-bulky, unfamiliar arms.
“Give me a line,” Rich said. “I can go back in.”
“You need your gear.”
“No, man, you need a medic—hey, over here! We’ve got a fireman down!”
I convulsed in the arms that held me. Rich lay at our feet, face to the ground. Even as I watched, his shirt melted away, and his skin hung like glue from his back. When his hair dissolved into ashes, I screamed, until someone put a mask on my face.
Sully stacked the last of the 10-W-40 on the shelf and glanced at the clock. The board meeting should be winding down by no
w—or exploding, depending on whether Tatum made the decision he hoped she’d made.
Wiping his palms on the back of his jeans, he went to the radio and snapped it on. Martina McBride filled the garage, and Sully let her take it on into news time. Maybe there would be a report—something to tell him whether dinner with Ethan would be a celebration or a wake.
Martina cut off so abruptly, Sully looked up to make sure the lights were still on.
“This is a KWOW Newsbreak.”
Sully lunged for the radio, turned it up.
“A fire has been reported on the Covenant Christian College campus. Firefighters are currently on the scene, and it is reported that an estimated one hundred twenty people were in the school’s administration building when it caught fire. Several engines have arrived, and we have Connye Lester live at Huntington Hall.”
A roar came over the waves, with the static voice of a young woman yelling to be heard over it.
Sully snatched up his keys and left her behind.
He was halfway to Port Orchard, willing himself not to stitch frantically in and out of traffic, when the crackly radio voice lifted to the next level of rehearsed panic.
“Doug—we’ve just been told that the fire apparently started on both ends of the building simultaneously, which would suggest arson. Firefighters can’t be sure of that yet, but all indications are . . .”
Sully jerked the wheel and screeched into a strip-mall parking lot, horns complaining behind him.
Arson. He closed his eyes, rapped his knuckles on his upper lip.
I wish it would just burn to the ground.
That was what she’d said.
In my mind, they are all getting what they deserve—including Dr. Costanas, who, if you must know, took away the man I loved.
There was no way—and yet Sully jerked the car into gear and crossed traffic to head back toward Callow. This time he did weave, leaning on his own horn as he tore for the bakery.
He saw her Volkswagen parked in front—at a rakish angle as if she’d been drunk when she pulled in. The CLOSED sign swung in the window, but the door was halfway open, and as he inserted himself inside he heard a voice from behind the counter, as if its owner were on the floor.
“Go away.”
“Tatum—it’s Sullivan.”
He heard the sound of scrambling and the crinkling of paper and a cry that wrenched through his chest. Tatum’s sob-swollen face appeared above the counter. Rivulets striped the dark smudges on her cheeks.
“Were you there, Tatum?” Sully asked. He picked his words gingerly. “At the fire?”
“I did it.” She closed her eyes.
Sully took a quiet pace toward her. “You did what?”
“I went,” Tatum said. “And I told them—and then the fire . . .”
“Okay, okay. Slow down.”
He stepped closer, but she didn’t move.
“Tatum,” he said, “I’m going to help you sit down, okay?”
She was a post in his hands as she moved woodenly with him to the first table. He could feel the shock pulsing through her.
“Were you hurt in the fire?” he said.
“No. I ran out—I got away.”
Sully swallowed. “You didn’t inhale any smoke?”
“Did they all die?” She turned to him slowly, eyes shot with strain. “Did they all burn?”
“I don’t think so, Tatum—the firemen are there.” Sully put his hand carefully on top of hers. Only then did he realize she was clutching a paper that poked between her clenched fingers.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “If they die, it’s my fault.”
She opened her hand and looked down at a damp, crumpled ball. Sweat sparkled in the creases of her palm, and Sully drew in a long breath.
“Read it,” she said. Her voice trembled at the edges. “You’ll see— it’s my fault.”
Sully kept his eyes on her as he lifted the paper wad and spread it on the table. He looked down to see black calligraphy ink smeared at the edges of words that had been precisely penned.
“It was here when I got back,” Tatum said. “Stuck in the door.”
“Okay, it’s okay. You want me to read it?”
“Not out loud.”
Her hands went to her ears and she closed her eyes, as if Sully’s silent reading would penetrate.
My dear Tatum,
You once told me that you wished all of Covenant Christian College would burn and smolder in ashes because of the pain it caused you. I’ve come to agree with you, and have decided to make that wish come true. I think I owe you that much.
This one’s for you, Tatum.
It was signed with a flourish—Zach.
Sully turned it over and pushed it to the edge of the table, far from Tatum. When he put his hand on her arm, she startled and pulled her gaze painfully up to his.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I went to the hearing and I told them everything, and I thought it would help. I thought I had finally done something right. But if they all die, it’s my fault.”
Sully caught her in his arms before she could fly out of the chair. Without a struggle she caved against him and sobbed.
“It’s not your fault, Tatum,” he said into hair that smelled of smoke and sugar. “He’s a sick individual.”
“I can’t stand it!”
“Nobody can stand evil like that, sweet thing.” He pressed her face into his chest. “Nobody.”
And as she wept on, he wept with her.
By the time Sully arranged for her mother to come for her and explained to her what Tatum would need in the next twenty-four hours, in the next week, perhaps for a long time to come, he was afraid he’d be too late at the scene of the fire.
Too late for what, he wasn’t sure. He banned scenarios of Ethan and Demi being carried out on stretchers, and pictured finding them calmly reporting their easy escapes to eager reporters.
Police barriers prevented him from parking anywhere on campus. He left the car on a side street, hoisted himself over a hedge, and scaled a low wall to cross from behind Freedom Chapel. He was in an instant night of smoke, although he couldn’t see flames. When he emerged from its fog, there was only a great steaming skeleton of timber and stone that had once been Huntington Hall. The scenarios flashed, insistent, aggressive, as he pulled the neck of his T-shirt over his mouth and nose and loped the rest of the way.
At the top of the hill, a PBI-clad fireman in a shielded helmet stepped into his path, arms out.
“Sorry, pal—can’t let you get any closer.”
Sully peered at the name on his helmet. “Cauthen—I had friends in there. Were there any—”
“Cauthen—over here!”
The fireman moved away, one arm still stiff in Sully’s direction. “Stay back. This thing is still live.”
Sully waited until the man joined two other helmeted figures closer to the building before he made his way up the hill, breathing into his T-shirt. The toxic odors of gasoline and burned synthetics ate at the air as the mammoth thing steamed and dripped and heaved from a layer of smoldering coals. Tatum had indeed gotten her wish.
He got to another barrier and leaned against it, supporting himself with the heels of his hands. With his head hanging he gulped in air and fought back nausea.
“Found a body,” a male voice called out. “Could be the perp’s— it was handcuffed to a stair railing.”
Another deep, smoke-raspy voice swore, attaching an obscenity to “psycho.”
Sully strained to listen.
“One of those weird things—his briefcase was barely charred.”
“Anything they can ID him with?”
“Initials on it. ZDA.”
Sully let his arms go limp, head to the barrier. Something this grisly could not possibly be.
“Hey, you all right?”
Sully turned his head. The silhouette of an Afro took shape beside him in the smoke.
“I’m fine,” Sully lied.
&
nbsp; “I don’t think anybody could be fine in this mess. You sure you don’t need a little oxygen?”
Sully peered more closely at him. He wasn’t wearing a uniform— nor did he have an Afro. His face was in fact pale around a pair of small intense eyes and extended far up his forehead into a Brillo pad of hair. It rang a faint chime in Sully’s mind.
“I’m Fletcher Bassett with the Port Orchard Independent. Aren’t you Sullivan Crisp?”
Sully straightened. “Was anybody hurt—besides that body they just found?”
Bassett nodded. “One old guy evidently had a heart attack in there—probably died before the smoke got him. Only one other injury that they know of—a fireman. Everybody else that was in the building has pretty much been accounted for, except for one girl they think ran out.”
Sully nodded and scanned the scene, heart drumming.
“Too bad about the fireman too,” Bassett said. “He was off duty— wasn’t even wearing his equipment. He ran in there to save his wife.”
Before Sullivan could register, Bassett put a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I think you know her.”
Sully knocked his hand away and tore for the hill, half-running, half falling as he went.
“Richard Costanas!” he heard Fletcher shout after him. “They airlifted him to Seattle.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The hall in the Burn ICU at Harborview Medical Center was dim with an after-hours ghostly light as Sully hurried through it toward the two figures the nurse directed him to.
“Mrs. Costanas is down there,” she told him at the nurses’ station. “We don’t usually let anyone in after visiting hours except the family, but since you’re her doctor . . .”
As he strode closer, Sully saw that Demi’s hair was uncharacteristically plastered to her head and she was wrapped in a man’s tweed sport coat that hung off her shoulders and over her hands like a big brother’s. It looked like one of Ethan’s.
He slowed down when he took in the young man who faced her, his chin thrust at her, finger stabbing the air beside her ear. Everything about him lurched toward her in shapeless anger, and Sully’s antennae went up.
