Unexpected Son

by Marisa Carroll

  The explosion rattled the windows in the garage door and set the branches of the dying maple chattering overhead. Sarah spun out of his arms as an orange fireball lit the sky behind them.

  “My God,” Sarah said, her hands to her mouth. “What is it? What happened?” Already the fire siren on top of the city hall had begun to wail. All around them lights were going on in bedroom windows up and down the street.

  Michael narrowed his eyes against the blinding light of the fireball. “Something sure as hell blew up.”

  Sarah grabbed his arm. “It’s the F and M. It has to be coming from that direction.” She was already hurrying down the driveway.

  Michael reached out to grab her arm. “I’ll get the car.”

  “Yes, get the car. They might need help. Thank God this was Sunday, and no one should be in there. What in God’s name could have happened?”

  “Come on,” he said, his voice grim. “We’ll find out.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE FIRE WAS finally out. Sarah’s eyes felt as dry and as gritty as the soot-darkened snow and ice around the blackened shell of the F and M. She held her fingers before her face for a moment to relieve the strain, then looked out of the window of the shelter house at Sugar Creek Park and saw with a small jolt of surprise that the sun was fully above the horizon. She had been here all night. She blinked in the red-gold light glinting off the layers of ice that glazed the cinder-block walls and made the area around the building a danger to life and limb, but she didn’t look away.

  Only the Tyler fire crew remained at the scene. During the hours when the fire had been at its height, Sugar Creek and Belton engines had been called in to help fight the blaze, but they had returned to their stations just before dawn. When she saw them leave, Sarah had finally let herself believe the worst was over. For one terrifying hour, soon after the first explosion, it had seemed they would have to evacuate the Green Woods Motel next door, and several houses that were downwind, because of the chemicals stored in the back portion of the building. But fast thinking and coordination among the fire units had prevented that from happening.

  Much of the factory, the main source of income for a large number of Tyler residents, was in ruins, but Sarah could only be thankful that it had not been worse. As incredible as it seemed, no one had been seriously injured or killed in the blast. The night watchman, the only person in the building, had been at the other end of the factory from where the fire apparently started.

  He was still here, holding court—a plump, middle-aged man Sarah didn’t know very well, sitting on one of the hard, wooden bench seats beside his tearful wife, talking to the weary fire fighters and concerned townspeople gathered round eating sandwiches and drinking strong, black coffee. Talk was always the best therapy, Sarah had found, and even though she’d heard his story twice already, she turned away from the window to listen again.

  “I’d have been a goner for sure if I’d been in the part of the building where old Judson’s lab’s located,” he said, shaking his head, wincing as the bandage pulled across a cut on his forehead. “I always make a round of the offices and lab just about two every night. But tonight? Well, tonight I guess the Good Lord was looking out for me. I thought I heard something out on the work floor and I went that way ‘round. Saved my life for sure. I’d a been smack in the middle of the old man’s lab when it blew sky-high. I’d probably still be coming down in pieces all over the place.”

  “William Benson, that is enough! Don’t talk like that,” his wife said, but she squeezed his arm and laid her head on his shoulder. “Let’s go home, honey. You need some rest.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” William returned. “Too wound up.” He signaled for another cup of coffee. “The vet, young Dr. Phelps, driving by just then sure didn’t hurt. I didn’t know what direction was up when I crawled out that door. I could just as easy have turned around and gone back inside, that’s how shook up I was. He helped me away from the building. Lucky for me, one of Myron Hansen’s cows decided to go and have a breech calf in the middle of the night. Phelps called in the alarm on the phone in his truck.”

  “Everyone in town was awake by then, Will,” Murphy reminded him. “Fire dispatcher got half-a-dozen calls. Jolted me right out of my bed.”

  “How do you think it started?” Will asked Gabe Atwood, one of Tyler’s firefighters, who had just entered the building for a cup of coffee.

  Gabe pulled off his helmet. His eyes were red-rimmed and his face smudged with soot and smoke. “Don’t know yet, Will. It’s still too hot to get inside the lab, but that looks like where it started.”

  “Find any trace of that guy I told you I saw running through the park?” Several heads swiveled in the direction Will indicated, although from where they were sitting there was nothing to see but plank walls. “I know I wasn’t dreaming. Roger Phelps saw him, too.”

  “Half the town’s been tramping around out here tonight, Will,” Murphy stated. “There are forty cars parked out front of this building right now. There were ten more here an hour ago. If there was any trace of this guy you say you saw, it’s long gone.”

  “Murphy’s right about that.” The whole room smelled strongly of smoke from the fire, but when Gabe stepped closer, Sarah wrinkled her nose at the combination of smoke and chemicals and burned oil that came from his turnout coat.

  She filled a cup with hot coffee and handed it over. “Cream or sugar?” she asked.

  “Black’s fine. I’ll drink this outside if the smell bothers you,” Gabe offered with a tired smile.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Sarah said. “My nose just has a mind of its own.”

  He smiled more broadly. “I know what you mean.”

  “Have a seat. How about a sandwich? We’ve plenty here.”

  “No,” he said, the smile disappearing as quickly as it had come. “I can only stay a minute.” He lowered his voice. “The chief’s talking to Brick now.”

  “Then it’s true? They’re going to call in the state fire marshal’s office to investigate?” The news of Will and Roger Phelps spotting a figure running away from the fire and the rumor that it might have been deliberately set had started circulating not long after Sarah and Michael arrived on the scene.

  “I don’t think we have any other choice. A fire like this one just doesn’t start by itself.”

  Sarah couldn’t help herself. She looked past Gabe’s shoulder to where she had last seen Michael, helping two other men clear debris from the parking lot. He was gone. She wondered where he was. She had seen him only off and on after they arrived at the fire scene. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. It had been all chaos and confusion. There had been food to fetch and prepare, coffee to brew, hungry, tired people to feed and comfort. But now that the hectic pace had slowed, she missed him. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? Surely, what had happened tonight had recalled painful memories of the fire that had sent him to prison.

  “Do you think we need to make another pot of coffee, Sarah?”

  “What did you say, Moira? My mind wandered for a moment.” Turning toward the speaker, Sarah wrapped her arms beneath her breasts and hugged herself against the chill of the unheated room.

  “I said, do you think we need to brew another pot of coffee?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, managing a tired smile. “Almost everyone’s gone home to try and catch a few hours’ sleep.”

  Moira Schweinhagen looked almost as tired as Sarah felt. Her husband worked at the F and M. It had been a long, hard night for her, too. Her face crumpled and she sniffed back tears. “I feel just like Will. I’m too worked up to sleep. All I can think of is what is Pat going to do for a job? How are we going to make the mortgage payment or buy groceries for next week? I don’t make enough at the Hair Affair to support us all.”

  “Oh, Moira, I know that’s
a terrible worry. But don’t borrow trouble.” Sarah hated mouthing platitudes, but sometimes the old way still worked the best. “You know the Ingallses will do everything they can for their employees. And the government. There are loans you can get. Pat will be eligible for unemployment, and—”

  “I’m still worried, Sarah.” Her eyes swept past Sarah’s shoulder. “Look at that place. It’s a wreck. I wouldn’t blame Alyssa Wocheck if she threw up her hands and said forget it, called in the bulldozers and razed it to the ground.”

  “Alyssa won’t give up that easily,” Sarah said, forcing herself to sound far more convincing than she felt. “She’s Judson Ingalls’s daughter, isn’t she?”

  Moira put her hand to her mouth to hold back a sob. “That poor old man. He’s had too much trouble these past years. And now this. He loved this place. He built it up from nothing. He fought to keep from having to sell out to the Japanese. I wonder who’s going to tell him it’s burned to the ground?”

  * * *

  ALYSSA PUSHED A strand of hair from her eyes and bent to lift a desk drawer full of soggy papers into the back of someone’s pickup, which had been driven as close to the office entrance as Chief Sorenson would allow. The cold morning air was finally free of smoke, but the smell of fire was still strong in her nostrils. There was nothing she could do for the time being but supervise the loading of salvaged materials. The firefighters wouldn’t let her inside the building until it could be evaluated for structural damage, but those who weren’t needed elsewhere to keep hot spots under control had volunteered to remove records and computer equipment from the building.

  “Let me help you with that, Mrs. Wocheck.”

  Michael Kenton appeared at her shoulder and took the heavy drawer from her hands. “Where do you want it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said wearily. “It belongs to my secretary’s desk. I don’t even know if there’s anything worth salvaging in there.”

  “It’s a big job.” He placed the drawer next to two others that had already been loaded.

  “I don’t know how we’ll ever sort this all out,” Alyssa said. “The one thing I’m thankful for is that Jeff was able to move the clinic to the hospital last year. I don’t think I could bear to see him have to start his father’s clinic over from scratch again. He’s worked so hard...” She turned just in time to see her new computer being carried through the doorway. “Oh no,” she said, as close to tears as she’d been all night. “It’s ruined.”

  Michael spoke quietly from behind her. “If your backup disks were someplace safe you can always run the program on another computer.”

  Alyssa nodded and looked up at him, managing a smile. “You’re right. We keep the disks in the safe. It’s older than the building, and practically impregnable. Gabe Atwood said it looks as if it hasn’t been touched, thank God. And the accountant has copies of everything else. Thanks for reminding me. It just looks so bad.”

  “There’s a lot of heavy machinery in there. It’s pretty hard to put out of commission.” Michael Kenton looked as tired as she felt. There were sharp lines etched at the corners of his mouth and his hair was grayed with ash. Had he been here all night? A lot of townspeople had—employees, old friends, strangers. Their faces had all begun to blur together.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said. She’d tried to thank everyone she could, but it was hard to keep it all straight.

  “Chief Sorenson told me they’ll be able to get inside and inspect the production area in another hour or so,” a male voice interjected. Alyssa turned at the welcome sound and greeted her husband.

  “How bad is it? Do they know how it started? Did he say?”

  Edward shook his head. “They don’t know anything for certain yet, Lyssa.”

  “What am I going to tell Dad?”

  He ran his hand through his tousled hair, steel-gray now, but just as thick and fine as it had been when he was a boy. “Don’t think of that just yet. It’s still too early to call Arizona. When you call him, you’ll want to have all the facts that are available. It’s not fair to upset him otherwise.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” She watched as Gabe Atwood, with the help of Nate Cummings, the assistant manager she’d hired the year before, carried out a set of half-melted file cabinets. “Oh, Edward.” Alyssa couldn’t stand it anymore. The enormity of what had happened almost overwhelmed her. She was tired and dirty and sick at heart. “What will we do?” She let herself be pulled against his chest, drawing strength from the warmth of his body and the security of his arms around her.

  “Why don’t you go home, take a hot shower, have a good breakfast and get some sleep?” Michael Kenton was standing directly in front of her now, the newly risen sun at his back. His breath made smoke clouds in the frosty morning air and his nose was red from the cold.

  “That’s a good idea,” Edward said, but Alyssa sensed a sudden tenseness in his arms and heard a note of restraint in his voice. Michael Kenton noticed, too. His eyes, so blue they were almost black—eyes the same color as Jeff’s, she noticed for the first time—narrowed. “Liza and Cece are at the house with the girls. Jeff just told me,” Edward continued. “Why don’t you go home, fill them in on what we know and then take young Kenton’s advice—get something to eat and some rest? We can cope here. Amanda and Devon are still around, if any decisions have to be made. And Cliff’s somewhere on the scene.”

  “Your husband’s plan makes sense, Mrs. Wocheck.”

  “Alyssa,” she said automatically. He nodded. She felt Edward still watching the younger man, although she didn’t look up to see her husband’s face. “I—I don’t know.” She was tired and confused, and she couldn’t begin to understand the tension radiating between the two men.

  “Go home, Lyssa,” Edward said more gently than he had before. “Let Cece and Liza fuss over you. It will do them good, make them feel useful. Look, here comes Anna. She can take you home.”

  “But Dad... And someone will have to inform the insurance company.”

  “Let me handle the insurance people, and we’ll call Judson together as soon as I get home. Hi, Anna,” he said, greeting Alyssa’s lifelong best friend. “Lyssa’s about had it. Would you take her home?”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Johnny’s going to be busy with Chief Sorenson and the investigators from the fire marshal’s office.”

  Alyssa lifted her head, although the sun’s rays hurt her burning eyes. The words struck like tiny daggers in her heart. “Why does there have to be an investigation? Just because Will Benson thinks he saw someone running away from the building? He was half-unconscious, in shock.”

  “It’s just routine,” Edward said, too quickly to be convincing.

  “It’s not routine.”

  “It’s a big fire, Alyssa,” Anna Kelsey soothed. She put her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “There has to be an investigation. Johnny’s going to be here. And Edward. There’s nothing you can tell them. You were asleep in your bed just like I was when it started. C’mon. Let’s go home.”

  “All right,” she said, giving up because she was just too tired to fight with all of them. “Did I thank Mi-chael—?” She looked around, but he was gone.

  “You thanked him, Lyssa,” Edward said, brushing his hand across her cheek. “Go home.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But come as soon as you can. I want you there when I call Dad.”

  * * *

  “I COULDN’T FIND YOU anywhere,” Sarah said from behind him. “So I came home.”

  He turned away from the stove in her kitchen, where he’d been heating water for oatmeal. She liked oatmeal for breakfast. She ate it nearly every day and always brought him a bowl on his breakfast tray. “I was getting in the way,” he said. She came toward him, the smell of smoke and fire strong in her hair. Michael swallowed hard, took a deep breath to con
trol the nausea that threatened to rise up and choke him.

  “No,” she said, stopping an arm’s length away. “You weren’t in the way. You were helping. Other people noticed, too. I heard them talking.”

  “Sweeping up broken glass and moving furniture is no big deal.”

  “Yes, it is. It shows you care.”

  “It shows I have a strong back.”

  She took another step closer. “You left because of the fire. The fire your partner set. You left because of the memories.”

  He felt trapped. He could brush her aside like a fly and take off for his apartment, but she’d probably just come after him. She was stubborn like that—wonderfully, gloriously stubborn when she felt she was in the right. She was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to think about, to remember. He couldn’t let himself weaken.... “For God’s sake, Sarah. Not now. Go take a shower, get into something comfortable. I’ll fix us breakfast and then we can crash, sleep this off like a bad hangover.”

  She stared into his eyes, her own gold-green, like the soft, new grass in a spring meadow. “All right. I’ll go take a shower. I’m sick of the smell of smoke and fire, too. But I won’t be pushed away, Michael. Last night you told me you loved me. That means something.” She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and bit down hard. “Even if I have to battle your memories every inch of the way to get you to say it again.”

  He rested his forehead on hers, fighting to regain control of his emotions. It was the only way he knew how to survive, to shut down, to think and not feel. “Go take a shower,” he repeated. “We’ll talk when you get back.” By then maybe he would be able to deal with the past, and with the secrets.