FIREBRAND

by Paula Detmer Riggs

  He struggled to free himself, then sucked in as pain lanced through his legs. The groan that broke from his lips dragged him from the lingering fog of sleep, and he realized that he'd been dreaming again.

  He was sprawled on his stomach in an ornate brass bed in the Grantley Hotel. Sleep had buried his face smotheringly deep in the pillow, and his heart galloped as he struggled for air.

  At nearly the same moment, he realized that the room was really filled with black, acrid wood smoke, swirling in miniature eddies around the bed and clogging his lungs for real this time.

  Even as he shot to a sitting position, he was racked by a violent spasm of coughing. Instinctively, he rolled off the bed and reached back for the trousers he'd been too exhausted to do more than shuck off before he'd sacked out sometime after midnight.

  Two seconds later found him in the bathroom, wetting a towel. Hurriedly, his eyes already streaming, he tied the towel cowboy fashion around his mouth and nose. Two seconds after that he had tested the door for heat and, having found the wood cool to the touch, left the room. Hugging the floor, he started crawling along the corridor on his belly toward the end of the hall, where he knew there was a window overlooking the street and an old iron fire escape.

  Smoke was thicker now, trapped like smog in a tunnel. From somewhere overhead came the faint glow of battery-powered emergency lights. Beneath him, the heat of the carpet seared his hands, indicating fire on the floor below. Already the temperature was rising. Soon the fire would flash into the walls and from there to the roof.

  With his right arm extended, he traced the baseboard as he crawled. He found a door, tested the knob. Locked. He knocked and shouted. No one answered.

  Another spasm of coughing took him, losing precious seconds before he could drag himself farther along the corridor. His groping fingers found a break in the wall. Another door, locked like the one before. Again he shouted. This time he received a faint cry in return.

  He froze, instantly alert. "Where are you?" he shouted. "Sing out so I can hear you!"

  "Here," cried a wavering voice. Female and elderly, he registered, and no doubt close to panic. What had the clerk told him when he registered? That he would have the second floor to himself, with the exception of the owner's mother, who had a room there.

  "Keep talking so I can locate you!"

  He heard a siren wailing in the distance and mentally urged the guys to hurry.

  "Hurry! I … can't … breathe." He heard a gasp, followed by a violent retching.

  "Put your face next to the floor," he shouted again, and then tasted soot from the towel.

  The temperature was rising rapidly, meaning that the fire was spreading fast. Any second now the flames would come bursting through the walls, incinerating everything in their path.

  The siren's wail drew close, then abruptly shut off. Feeling his way in nearly total darkness, Judd searched for the doorknob.

  Locked! Didn't the woman have any sense left at all? If he only had his ax, he'd have her out of there in two shakes.

  Yeah, and guys died saying "if only."

  He took as deep a breath as the sooty towel allowed, then got to his feet, swaying violently at the effort. Pain came at him from all sides—his lungs, his head, his bare feet.

  Now or never, slick, he told himself as he braced himself and kicked. The door shook, but held. He figured he had enough juice left for one more try. After that, they'd both be goners. This time the door gave, springing inward with a screech of old hinges.

  Things went fast now. Using only the sense of touch, he located the woman, who began screaming hysterically as soon as his fingers wrapped around her arm. Her bones were as small and fragile as a bird's, which meant that she would be easy to carry. That much at least was in their favor.

  Not wasting time trying to calm her, Judd heaved her over his shoulder, backed out of the door and half ran, half stumbled toward the oblong of faint white light to his right.

  Heat seared his skin and tore at his throat with every breath he took. He was nearly spent, his breath all but gone and his legs rubbery, when, miraculously, he found himself staring at the street below. He had time to notice one engine and one ladder truck before he lowered the lady to the floor.

  "We're in luck, lady," he rasped, one painful word at a time.

  She remained where he'd put her, crumpled like a rag doll. Coughing violently, he ripped the towel from his face to use as padding for his fist. Sweat dripped into his eyes, adding to the stinging pain of the acrid smoke as he smashed his wrapped fist through the pane, sending it exploding outward to spray the air with needle-sharp glass.

  Below, men in helmets and dung-colored turnout coats scurried right and left in an attempt to escape the falling shards. High-powered lights on both trucks aimed upward, blinding him momentarily.

  "Victim on the second floor!" he shouted before another spasm of coughing seized him.

  "We're coming, buddy. Stay right where you are."

  Judd waved, then used the flat of his wrapped hand to clear away the glass still clinging to the frame. Seconds later, he had both the woman and himself perched on the fire escape landing, waiting for the end of the ladder to reach them.

  Twenty minutes later Judd was sitting on the curb, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a cup of steaming coffee gripped between both hands.

  Crews from two trucks had accounted for the hotel's night staffers and the guests on the first floor and had two-inch hoses strung to both floors. In the distance, he heard the undulating wail of the ambulance taking Mrs. Billings to the hospital. Her son, a guy about Judd's age named Tom, had gone with her.

  Before he'd gone, though, he had thanked Judd profusely for saving his mother's life. With tears in his eyes, he'd gone on to say, "If there's anything I can do to repay you, just ask."

  How about rolling the clock back about twenty years? Judd thought now. To the night he graduated from high school. To the night Pat died.

  No matter what the cost, he would have saved Pat, even if it meant he himself would have had to die.

  He gulped half the coffee and waited for it to warm him inside. It was scalding hot and burned all the way down. But when the cup was empty, he was still cold.

  By the time the sun came up, Darcy had been at her desk for an hour, drinking coffee and yawning. The only thing she hated more than paperwork was the foster care system that required it.

  At the moment she had two foster children in her care and was trying to add two more. Everyone from the overworked caseworkers in Eugene to the equally overworked officials in Portland were rooting for her. The problem was space.

  The law said no more than two children to a room. At the moment, all of the bedrooms in the house were full. She was working on converting the attic, but that took money, money she didn't have.

  Mike had promised to help, and in fact she was his only heir, but now with his estate tied up in court, it could be months before the will was probated and she had the money.

  "Nobody said it was going to be easy, Darlene Clancy," she muttered as she padded barefoot down the long narrow hall to the kitchen.

  She had just poured the last of the coffee into her mug when the screen door to the service porch screeched open, admitting a perfect barrel of a man with florid cheeks and an outrageous glint in his faded blue eyes.

  "Top o' the morning to you, Darcy me love. Although if you don't mind my saying so, you look like you should still be in bed."

  "Thanks, Sean-O," she said, pushing back a tumble of unbrushed hair from her face. "I needed that this morning."

  Housecoat flapping, she stalked to the table and sat down. "I drank all the coffee. You'll have to make a fresh pot."

  "Imagine that." Chuckling to himself, the old man opened the cupboard and took down the coffee tin.

  A boyhood friend of the Kerrigan brothers and an employee of Kerrigan Orchards since he'd been sixteen, Sean O'Casey had been making coffee in this kitchen before she'd been born.r />
  "I'm thinkin' we could both use a little hair of the dog," he said as he watched the dark steaming liquid drizzle through the filter into the pot until there was enough to fill his waiting mug.

  Sean-O never waited until the coffeemaker finished brewing an entire pot before pouring his first cup. The hiss and sizzle of the liquid hitting the hot plate was as familiar to Darcy as the tick of the clock over the mantel in the living room.

  "Not me," Darcy muttered, watching him slide the pot deftly into place again. "After all the spills I wiped up last night, I never want to smell Irish whiskey again."

  "Don't blaspheme, girl!" the old man muttered with a mournful shake of his fluffy white pompadour. "Your sainted pa and uncle might be listening."

  Darcy gave him the smile he wanted, but it was halfhearted. "I noticed you made sure you sent Uncle Mike off right."

  "That I did, and with pleasure, too. And don't be giving me one of those disapproving looks, either. He would have done the same for me if I'd been unlucky enough to go first."

  Wincing, Darcy got up to pour another cup of coffee. "Don't mind me, Sean-O. For some reason I woke up in a rotten mood this morning, and the longer I'm up, the worse it gets."

  An old man's sharp curiosity kindled like a thin blue flame in Sean-O's eyes as he followed her to the table and sat in his usual place to her left.

  "That wouldn't be havin' anythin' to do with the return of a certain Judd Calhoun, now would it?"

  Darcy shook her head, her expression rueful as she meshed her gaze with Sean-O's knowing one. "Is there anything that goes on around here you don't know?"

  "I wouldn't be knowin' about that. I do know that your uncle had been taking an interest in the boy for a long time now. Saw him a time or two when the department sent him to California on business. Wrote a few letters, too, I'm recallin' now."

  "But why, Sean-O? He was just as angry at Judd as I was, as we all were." And still are, if she wanted to be honest with herself.

  "As for Mike's feelings, I'd not be knowin' those. As to the why, because it was somethin' your pa would have wanted. Like it or not, girl, Pat loved that boy like the son your ma died try in' to give him."

  I loved him, too, she wanted to cry. But her pride wouldn't let her. "If you knew Uncle Mike was keeping up with him, why didn't I know?"

  Sean-O sipped his coffee with noisy gusto, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "From the moment the boy left this house, you made your feelings plain. He caused your father's death, and you hated him for it. We went along with you because you were grievin' so hard we were afraid not to."

  Darcy noticed that her hands weren't quite steady and cupped them around her mug. "Do you think I was wrong, Sean-O? Feeling that way, I mean?"

  The old man cocked one eyebrow and regarded her for several moments in silence. Then, letting out a long sigh, he pried loose one of her hands and pressed it between his. "Let me ask you something first, okay?"

  Darcy nodded.

  "What would you be thinkin' of a professional fire fighter who's so terrified of fire that he throws up every time he goes on a call?"

  "I'd think he was a very brave man or trying to prove something or maybe both. Why?"

  "Because that fire fighter is Judd Calhoun."

  Too stunned to speak, she stared into Sean-O's faded blue eyes, searching for the truth and finding it.

  "Judd's a fireman?"

  "Yes. Mike discovered that when they ran into each other at a union meeting in San Francisco about ten years back. Accordin' to what Mike told me later, he was about as shocked as you look right now. Made it a point to drop in at the station where Judd worked, timed it so he wasn't on duty so's he could ask questions of the guys who worked alongside him."

  Darcy tried to swallow away the sick feeling in her throat, but it only grew worse. "And that's what he found out, that … that Judd is afraid of fire."

  "Scared spitless is what Mike was told. Seems it's some kind of phobia, like fear of heights or snakes or those wee spiders you hate."

  Darcy tried to respond to his attempt to lighten the mood, but her facial muscles felt cold and stiff. Her fear was a minor one, scarcely more than an inconvenience. Nothing she'd ever felt or experienced came close to the relentless agony Judd had inflicted on himself for half his life.

  "Is … that all Mike found out?"

  Sean-O dropped his gaze to the table, where his hands still pressed hers. "Seems to me he mentioned something about the boy being a whiz at rescuin' folks. Always first to volunteer, asks for the worst jobs, the most dangerous."

  He patted her hand one more time, then withdrew his and sat back before adding in a slightly more emphatic tone, "According to Mike, he has the medals—and the scars—to prove it."

  Darcy stared at her hands, feeling ten years old again and ashamed of herself. "Judd told me last night that he would … miss Mike."

  "No doubt he will. Mike was the last family he had left, if we aren't countin' you, that is." His expression was as guileless as a child's, but his eyes were filled with a gentle rebuke.

  "After last night, I have a feeling he's certainly not counting me."

  "A tad sharp with him, were you?"

  Darcy drew a shaky breath. "I was a bitch. Worse, I was so … so self-righteous. And in front of half of Grantley, too. No wonder he looked disgusted when he walked out. I'm feeling pretty disgusted myself right now."

  Outside, a train whistle shrilled in the distance, and someplace above her a door slammed. The house was waking up. In a few minutes, the very walls would be shaking from the clatter and confusion of four girls getting themselves ready for school.

  Her day, too, was planned practically to the second. In fact, she should already be dressed and ready to greet the pruning crew.

  Sighing, she raised her head and discovered Sean-O watching her. "Don't be too hard on yourself, girl," he said, getting up slowly in deference to the arthritis that got worse every year. "You have every right to hold what he did against him. After all, he never said it wasn't his fault."

  He downed the last of his coffee before carrying the cup to the sink to rinse it. Bridget was as meticulous about her kitchen as he was about his trees.

  "Sean-O?"

  "Somethin' I can be doin' for you, girl?" he asked, his eyes once more innocent as a babe's.

  "Yes. You can tell me where he is."

  "Way I heard it, he was registered at the Grantley Hotel. For one night only."

  Ten to one it's arson, Judd thought, surveying the skeletal ruins that had been, until eight hours ago, the proud cornerstone of Grantley's newly rejuvenated historic section.

  Now, fallen plaster lay like lumps of charcoal amid the remnants of furniture, mostly tables and chairs from the main dining room, and the place reeked of dead ash and sodden wood, a smell that was as familiar to a fire fighter as air.

  Using the toe of his just purchased boot, he nudged a fallen timber to one side and studied the flame pattern etched into the wood. The fire had burned hot, consuming the outer grain while leaving a vein of aged oak intact.

  With meticulous care, he picked his way through the debris, his gaze slowly studying the bits and pieces that had escaped the flames. He was reaching for a fragile-looking teacup when he sensed that he was no longer alone.

  "Heck of a mess, isn't it?"

  "I've seen worse," Judd said as he watched owner Tom Billings duck under the yellow tape stretched around the blackened shell. Scowling at the mess, Billings began to navigate the maze of fallen timbers.

  "You have? Where?"

  "Where I work, the Mission District in San Francisco."

  Interest sparked behind Billings's rimless glasses, giving him the look of an earnest six-year-old. "Oh yeah? What kind of work do you do?"

  "Fight fires." Or he had, until his last accident.

  Even after the months of therapy and the exhausting body-building exercises he'd performed faithfully every single day, the doctors had warned him that
it would take time to regain his former strength.

  By the time the paramedics got him to the trauma center, he'd been technically dead. Everyone said that it was a miracle that the doctors had been able to bring him back to life. Only Judd didn't believe in miracles. At the moment, he wasn't sure he believed in much of anything.

  "I suppose you were in town for Mike Kerrigan's funeral," Billings asked, his expression suitably somber.

  "Something like that, yes."

  "He was a good man, been with the department a long time. Some said too long, but I thought he was doing a damn fine job on a very limited budget." There was a moment of silence before his gaze zoomed to the red slash on Judd's forehead.

  "That looks nasty. You sure you're okay?"

  "Fine."

  Judd himself hadn't noticed the raw patch until he'd showered at the motel where he'd spent the remaining hours of the night. It was a second-degree burn, but how and when he got it, he didn't know. Like a number of the injuries he'd suffered over the years, he never would.

  "How's your mother?"

  Billings grinned. "Anxious to get out of bed, according to the nurse."

  "No ill effects?"

  "Not to her. Of course, she's already complaining about losing her seventy years of 'treasures.'"

  "Did she have many?"

  "Enough, although my wife and I put most of her things in storage when we moved her up here from Orange County."

  "Tough to lose anything."

  Billings grunted agreement. "She would like you to stop by the hospital before you leave so that she can thank you personally for saving her life, if you have time."

  "Sure, but it's not really necessary. It's my job."

  "All the same, she would have died if you hadn't been staying on the floor."

  "No problem. I'll be happy to stop by before I leave."

  Uncomfortable with praise, earned or not, Judd edged toward the sidewalk, intending to gas up the rental car and head for Eugene. He would stay the night there, then catch the plane back to Kauai the next morning.