The Last Chance Olive Ranch

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “So?” I pulled my nightie over my head and wiggled it down around my hips. “You’ve never told him you’re interested?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t, before. While he was still engaged, I mean. I knew he was involved with that girl, and he’s such a true-blue guy. I figured I’d only embarrass him and make a great big fool of myself. So I just sort of admired him from afar. Quietly. Anonymously. Until tonight.” She clasped her hands and her voice became dreamy. “Tonight, I got to admire him up close. And I was right. He’s everything I thought. And more. Lots more.”

  “So what do you think?” I was watching her face. “Is Mr. Basic Nice Guy interested in you?”

  The smile faded again. “I . . . I don’t know, China. I usually know when a guy is interested, but not this time. We laughed and sang along with the band and danced all the slow dances, every one of them—he’s got great moves. He dances like he loves dancing. With me.” She took a breath. “He kissed me good night, and I don’t think he goes around kissing . . . well, everybody. But I don’t know if he’s interested.” She turned away, but not before I saw the look in her eyes, a look I hadn’t seen since Colin died. “Actually, I got the feeling he wasn’t. Seriously, I mean.”

  “It may be just too soon,” I said, trying to be comforting. “If this girl really broke his heart, he may not be ready to lay it all on the line again so soon. He was counting on getting married in a few months and now that’s gone, poof. He may not trust himself to make another choice just yet. Or trust you.” Which brought us back to where we’d started, but with the shoe on the other foot. I gave her a careful, scrutinizing look. “Are you prepared to have your heart broken?”

  Ruby is always quick with words, but she didn’t answer me for the space of several long breaths. And then, very quietly, she said, “Yes.” She closed her eyes. “Yes. If that’s what it takes. Yes. Yes.”

  “Omigod, Ruby,” I said, not quite believing it. “Really?”

  “Really.” She opened her eyes. “We’re going out again tomorrow night. But Pete wants it to be a crowd scene—like maybe he’s making sure we’re not alone. Anyway, he said to tell you that you’re invited. And Chet. He’s asking Andrea and Jason, too.”

  “Understandable,” I said. “He probably wants to see how you get along with his friends. Anyway, Chet and Andrea will want to check this out, make sure Pete isn’t lining up for another big disappointment.” I looked at her, frowning a little. “This could get complicated, couldn’t it? I mean, you have a house and a shop in Pecan Springs, and Pete has a job out here. If this goes anywhere, it’s going to be hard for you to get together.”

  “I know.” She narrowed her eyes, considering what I’d said. “But the best things in life are usually the hard things, don’t you think?”

  I had to agree. I remember how hard it had been for me to say yes to McQuaid because I was afraid of losing my independence, my personal autonomy, my control over my life. Now I knew how silly that was. McQuaid was the best thing that had happened to me, ever. If Pete was good for Ruby and Ruby was good for Pete, they would work it out, no matter what compromises it took to make it happen.

  At the thought of McQuaid, my insides knotted up. Tomorrow, he was offering himself as bait to lure Mantel out into the open where he could be captured. I hoped he knew what he was doing. I hoped he’d be safe. I swallowed the thought and managed a smile.

  “Well, gosh,” I said, “this calls for a celebration.” Barefoot, I padded over to the compact refrigerator where I had stowed the bottle of white wine Andrea had given me. I took two glasses out of the cupboard, found a corkscrew, and did the honors.

  “To you and Pete,” I said, handing Ruby her glass. I held up mine in a toast. “Here’s hoping that both of you get what each of you wants most.”

  “Here’s hoping,” she agreed fervently, and clinked her glass to mine.

  The wine was very nice. One toast deserved another, we decided, and another after that, while we talked about life and love and how amazingly difficult it is to find a relationship flexible and strong enough to survive whatever the universe throws at it. We found ourselves talking about the couples we knew—and I told her about Boyd wanting to marry Maddie, which surprised her.

  “Boyd and Maddie,” she said wonderingly. “Maddie and Chet I understood, and thought it was a pretty good idea. But Boyd and Maddie? After all he’s put her through over her inheritance? Why would she even consider it? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I gave her my theory: Boyd hoped that marrying Maddie would clinch his possession of the Last Chance and the West Texas oil property, and Maddie hoped that marrying Boyd would allow her to keep her olive orchards.

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” Ruby lamented. “Marriage is about love. It’s not about land and money and—”

  “Ruby,” I said, “over the course of human history, how many marriages have been made for land and money? The majority of them, I’ll bet.”

  She sighed. “It still doesn’t make sense.”

  It didn’t, I had to admit. So we had another glass of wine, thinking that might help us understand the situation a little better. Which took us to the bottom of that particular bottle.

  Which was no doubt why I was sleeping so soundly an hour or so later, when Ruby leaned over me, shaking me by the shoulder.

  “China, wake up,” she said, shaking me again, and harder. “Wake up, China! I’m smelling smoke.”

  “Smoke?” I said groggily. “You’re having a nightmare. Go back to bed.”

  “No, no, I mean it, China. Something’s burning. We need to— There!” She stopped, holding up her hand. “Did you hear that?”

  I did. It was the sound of breaking glass. A window. But not our window—must be next door. And now I could smell smoke, too, and a lot of it.

  I was already out of bed and skinnying into the clean jeans and T-shirt I’d laid out for Saturday and pulling on my sneakers, not bothering to lace them up. I glanced at the clock. Midnight. On the other side of the room, Ruby was tugging on her leggings under her Cowboys sleep shirt.

  “Hurry!” I cried, and we both ran out onto the front porch.

  The smell of smoke was stronger outside, harsh and acrid, and an eerie orange light glinted off the trembling leaves of the cottonwood trees. I heard a rumble of thunder from somewhere close by, and a vivid pulse of lightning skittered from cloud to cloud just to the south. The coming storm squall was pushing an erratic breeze. We could hear a muted roar, punctuated by a loud crackling.

  We ran to the end of the porch. That’s when we saw the flames, flickering around the back of Sofia’s log cabin and licking hungrily up under the eaves. Flames and sparks fountained against the black sky, and a nearby cedar tree suddenly exploded like a firebomb. The patchy showers that afternoon had dampened the foliage, but not nearly enough, and the wind was shoving the plume of fire up the tree- and brush-clad hill that rose sharply behind the row of cabins. The long drought had baked the thickets of elbow bush and yaupon holly and Texas mountain laurel to a dry, easily flammable tinder. If the fire wasn’t contained, the whole hillside would be an inferno in a matter of moments.

  “Ruby, call 911!” I vaulted over the railing and off the porch, thinking of Sofia. Was she still in the cabin? “Get EMS, too. This doesn’t look good.”

  “Can’t call from here,” Ruby said. “No cell phone signal! I’ll have to drive down to the ranch house and use the landline.” She turned and ran indoors for the keys to Big Red Mama.

  By the time she was out and starting the van, I was on Sofia’s front porch, pounding at her door. “Sofia!” I screamed. “Sofia, open the door!”

  But there was no answer, and even when I put my shoulder to it, the door refused to budge. I stepped to the window beside it. Through the glass I could see that sections of the cabin’s back wall—the kitchen corner, midway down the wall, beside the
bathroom door, and the corner nearest Sofia’s bed—were ablaze. In the corner nearest her bed, the licking flames had plumed upward into the rafters, and the fire illuminated the heavy smoke that billowed across the single room. I tried to push up the window sash, but it was locked. I reached down, snatched up the nearest flowerpot, and threw it through the widow, then felt inside for the lock, turned it, and pushed up the sash. I waited for an instant, fearing a sudden explosion of high-energy flame as oxygen from the open window fed the hungry fire. But it didn’t happen. Not yet.

  “Sofia!” I called and got a lungful of smoke. Coughing, I brushed the glass off the sill and dove headfirst through the window. I landed awkwardly on my shoulder, knocking over a bookshelf and pulling down a crashing cascade of books and Mexican pottery. As I scrambled to my hands and knees, I could see Sofia, clad in a thin white nightgown, lying unmoving, half on, half off her narrow bed.

  I crawled quickly to her. The smoke hung like a hot, sooty blanket just over my head, tendrils curling downward, colored orange by the flickering, fitful flame. The air was thick and so acrid that it stung my eyes, but as long as I stayed on my hands and knees I could breathe, more or less. I grabbed Sofia and pulled her off the bed to the floor. Her eyes were closed and her head was lolling, but this wasn’t the place to try resuscitation. Crawling, I dragged her with me to the door, thinking only about getting us both safely out of there, dimly grateful that this was a small house and we didn’t have far to go. While the log construction was old and dry, the logs themselves were thick. The place would burn, but not as fast as a stud-wall building. I reached up to release the lock and pull the door open, then scrambled to my feet, grabbed Sofia under both arms, and hauled her down the porch steps and twenty feet down the path in front of the house, a safe distance from the fire.

  McQuaid and I had taken a course in CPR the year before, and I knelt on the ground beside her and began the rhythmic compression I had learned. I was tentative about it, since Sofia was elderly and her rib cage was fragile, but I kept at it, counting, pushing, pushing, counting. My shoulder—the one I had fallen on when I went through the window—was throbbing, and my eyes were gritty from the smoke. I seemed to have been working on her forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a few moments before she gasped, coughed, and began to gulp in air. I sat up straight and dropped my arms. She was breathing erratically, but she was breathing on her own. After another moment, her eyes opened and she tried to speak. But her voice was so smoke-roughened and hoarse that I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Just be quiet,” I said, smoothing the white hair back from her forehead. I could hear a truck in the distance. “Ruby has called EMS. You’ll be all right, Sofia.”

  “No!” Frantically, she pushed against me, raising herself on one elbow just high enough to see the cabin. I glanced over my shoulder. I could see the flames in the open front window now, and black smoke was pouring out. She coughed, cleared her throat, and managed, “The box! Go in and get it, China, before it burns! Please!”

  “Shh,” I said, and made her lie back down. “Just rest now, Sofia. Just be quiet. Everything will be fine.”

  “No, no, no!” she cried, struggling to sit up. “No, Maddie needs it! The papers—” She coughed. “Please,” she managed, her voice breaking up. “Oh, please get the box.”

  Get a box out of that burning cabin? The fire was so hot I could almost feel my hair crisping. What box was she talking about, anyway? What was so important that she was asking me to risk my life to get it?

  And then I remembered. She must be thinking of the heirloom olive-wood box that she had shown me that afternoon. The box from Spain, that held Eliza’s important documents. Deeds, perhaps. Legal documents. Letters.

  At that moment, Big Red Mama slid to a hard-braked stop in front of the cabin, a battered black pickup truck right behind her. The truck was pulling a white tanker rig—the 1,600-gallon water tanker trailer that Maddie had pointed out to me earlier that day, the one they used for irrigation and fighting brush fires. I thought of the burning hillside behind the cabin and felt a rush of relief. Out here, you couldn’t stand around and wait for the volunteer fire department, which could be twenty minutes or a half hour away, or more. You had to be ready to take on the job yourself.

  Pete was behind the wheel of the pickup, with Jerry on the seat beside him. He shoved it into low gear, turned sharply across the roadside ditch, and roared up the rise between the cabins, bouncing over rocks and smashing a couple of small cedar trees. He was headed toward the back of the cabin, I thought, to pour water on the back wall, where the fire seemed to have started. Or maybe he’d decided that the burning cabin—almost completely engulfed now—was beyond saving and that he should put his efforts into containing the wildfire racing up the hillside. I didn’t know how far 1,600 gallons of water would go against that kind of fire, but it would be a start.

  Ruby and Maddie had jumped out of Mama and were running frantically up the rock-lined path toward us.

  “Sofia!” Maddie cried, falling to her knees beside the old woman and gathering her into her arms. “Are you all right? What happened? How did it start?” She buried her face against Sofia’s shoulder and began to cry. “Never mind, dear. You’re safe. That’s all that matters. You’re safe.”

  “You’re okay, China?” Ruby put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not burned or anything?”

  “Just a little smoky.” I got to my feet and bent over, trying to cough the smoke out of my lungs.

  “And Sofia’s all right? She’s breathing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I had to do CPR for a few moments, but she came around.” I coughed again. “Is EMS on the way?”

  “EMS and the volunteer fire department,” Ruby said. “Chet and Jason are on their way, too. They’re bringing a tractor with a front-end scraper blade, to build a fire line and keep the blaze from spreading.” She looked anxiously toward our cabin. “It’s a good thing the roof is metal. Shingles would probably go up in a hurry.”

  From behind the cabin, Pete was yelling, “Jerry, forget the cabin. You get on the pumper while I take the hose up the hill. There’s a lot of heavy fuel up there. It could go over the crest and into the orchard on the other side.”

  I turned back to Sofia, now cradled in Maddie’s arms. Maddie was wearing a pajama top over her jeans and her hair was a mass of tangles. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her face illuminated by the flames.

  “She keeps muttering something about a box,” she said. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  “This afternoon, she showed me an olive-wood box that belonged to Eliza,” I replied. “She wants me to go in there and get it. Do you know what might be in it?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” she said. “But whatever it is, it’s not worth risking your life, China.”

  I nodded, and thought of something. “Maddie, was Boyd with you this evening?”

  “Boyd?” She gave me a bewildered look. “No. I haven’t seen him all day. Why—” Sofia moaned and she pulled her attention back to the old lady.

  I turned to look at the cabin, trying to get a fix on the situation. I had been involved in only one serious fire in my life, a trailer fire on Limekiln Road, not far from my house. I had arrived too late to help the woman who had died inside. But I’d been on the scene—in fact, I had been standing right in front of the door—when the flashover happened. That’s what I was told later, anyway. Inside the structure, the flames and hot gasses had gotten hot enough to ignite everything in the whole place, all at once. The powerful explosion blew out the front window and tumbled me tail over teakettle down the hill. Was that likely to happen here?

  I didn’t think so. The front door hung open and thick black smoke was pouring out of the open window. The risk of flashover seemed low, and the last time I’d seen that box, it wasn’t far from the door. I took a step toward the porch and the old woman opened h
er eyes.

  “Get the box,” she said, and began coughing. “The box!” she moaned. “Please, please.”

  Still holding Sofia, Maddie reached for my hand. “No, China,” she cried urgently, and Ruby said, “Don’t be an idiot, China. Don’t go in there!”

  I pulled away from both of them. It would take me no more than ten seconds to get in and grab the box, ten seconds to get out. That is, assuming that the damn thing was still on the table beside Sofia’s chair. If it wasn’t . . . well, if it wasn’t, there wasn’t any possibility of searching for it.

  I looked up at the cabin again. The fire was blazing along both side walls toward the front and the metal roof was buckling along the edges from the heat. But the roof and the walls were still intact—for now. If I was going back in there, I couldn’t hesitate. It was now or never.

  I sucked in a lungful of air, pulled up my T-shirt to cover my mouth and nose, and went in with a rapid crouch. My eyes burned from the acrid smoke that was billowing just over my head. I could hear the snap, crackle, and pop of flames burning through the old, dry timbers of the cabin. I could barely see where I was going, but when I bumped into Sofia’s chair, I thought I knew where I was. After another moment or two of groping through the smoke, I found the table and put a hand on the box. I grabbed it, clutched it against my chest, and turned toward the door. I was only two quick strides away from safety when it happened.

  There was a sudden ear-splitting explosion. The hair on my head crackled, and I felt a scorching, searing heat through the back of my T-shirt. The force of the blast shoved me off my feet and tossed me through the open door and headfirst down the steps, still clinging to the box. I landed, hard, beside Sofia and Maddie, cracking my head against one of the river rocks that lined the path.

  I felt a blinding pain and saw a brilliant cascade of neon stars. And then there was only an infinite blackness.

  Chapter Fourteen