Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

There was no sun out, and the temperature was at fifty, so he’d be fine, but she cracked all the windows anyway.

  As she got out, she looked up at the second floor. Her parents’ room had been on the right, hers on the left, her brother’s in the rear. In the middle, there was the bathroom she and Tom had shared. Downstairs, there was the bay that anchored the living room and then the kitchen and the family room opened to the porch and the backyard.

  The bushes were all clipped precisely. The walkway was free of weeds. The lawn was trimmed like it was a rug.

  Going up to the front door, she propped the storm door open with her hip and fiddled with her key chain, her fingers sifting through to find the right one. It had seemed odd to have the key with her, especially as it was a symbol of everything that had been lost: Her father no longer the hero she had thought he was, her mother a weak person she couldn’t understand.

  God, it still smelled the same. Her mom loved scented candles, the sweeter and more flowery the better, and as a result, the house was like a Yankee Candle store, all cloying gardenias and lilies.

  She was going to be smelling the stuff for like an hour after she left.

  “Tom?” She closed the door. “Where are you?”

  The living room was not arranged the same, the furniture she was familiar with having been moved around into different corners and straightaways. The drapes had been changed, too. Now they were peach. Rug was new as well.

  Guess Nancy Janice couldn’t stand her own decorating and had to shift her things around.

  “Tom?”

  When there was a soft answer, she went through into the kitchen and expected an addition to have been blown out the back or something. Nope. Decorator lust had not inspired a reformation to the dated, pickled pine cabinets or the white-Stormtrooper appliances.

  Didn’t her mother know everything was gray and stainless now?

  Then again, the house was a blue only her mom seemed to appreciate, so fads, based on the opinions of others, might not hold much weight. Anne had never bothered to ask how it all worked, and she wasn’t about to start now.

  The door to the back porch was slightly ajar, but she checked out the damage to the family room’s flat roof first. The tree had been removed; there was fresh Sheetrock on the ceiling, and a new window set into a freshly mounted, unpainted jamb.

  Nice work, and she wondered who over at the 617 had done it. Probably Vic. He was the carpenter of the bunch.

  There would be no charge for the labor. The NBFD took care of the widows and orphans of fallen firefighters. It was part of the pension system. Her mom never had to call in plumbers, roofers, electricians, or woodworkers; someone was always ready to help from the extended blue family.

  Stepping out, she found her brother sitting in a lawn chair by the grill, his hands linked in his lap, his knees out to the sides, his eyes trained on the square of mowed grass yet not focused. His NBFD T-shirt had flecks of sawdust on it—so did his navy blue work pants. And his boots were smudged with drying mud.

  Behind him, the outside of the house showed where the repair had been made, the bald wood and feathered-in siding like a scar in mid-healing.

  “Guess you did the reno.”

  As she spoke, he jerked as if she’d surprised him. But he didn’t look over. “Yeah.”

  Frowning, she went over and sat in the chair next to him. For no reason, she noted that the pair, along with the lounger and the two little tables, were going to have to be taken in for the winter. The grill would go in the garage. The swing across the way would stay.

  Just as it had always been, the rotation of the outdoor furniture tracking the seasons. Measuring the years. Fading over time until their utility was lost and they required replacing.

  Like people, she decided, the old generations passing as new ones were born, the cycle repeating.

  She looked at her brother. His icy blue eyes scared her. So did his stillness. “Tell me. Is Mom sick? Are you?”

  “What?” He finally glanced at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You need to talk to me. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “Do you find me . . .” He cleared his throat. “Am I hard to deal with? You know, about . . . anything.”

  Anne’s brows shot up, and she momentarily blanked. Of all the things she had ever expected him to say, that was not it.

  Not even close.

  chapter

  40

  As Tom put the question out there, he knew Anne’s answer by the way she straightened and stared at him like she’d temporarily forgotten the English language. And then there was a silence that suggested she was trying to find an appropriate way to answer.

  Treading carefully.

  Which was reply enough, wasn’t it.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he muttered.

  God, he was tired, and not just because he hadn’t slept since Mayor Mahoney had tuned up her size-whatever stiletto and kicked him in the can. He was exhausted on a molecular level.

  “Where is this coming from, Tom?”

  “Just wondering you, know you. Just . . . thinking.”

  As the silence stretched out, he waited. Sister never shied away from conflict.

  “You can be a challenge,” she said after a while. “You’ve got your own way of doing things and that tends to supersede everything and everyone else around you.”

  “I’ve got to keep people safe. There are lives in danger every day on the job, and if I don’t make sure things are done correctly—”

  She put her palm up to stop him. “Hey, you asked me. If you didn’t want my opinion, you should have kept quiet.”

  “Sorry.” He scrubbed his face with his dirty hand, and his eyes stung from the sawdust on his palm. “The house is fine for Mom to move back in, by the way.”

  “So I see.”

  “You must be relieved.”

  “I guess.”

  Now he was the surprised one. “You don’t actually want her to stay with you.”

  “Not really. But I want her safe above all. That’s what I worry about.”

  “She’s not a geriatric who’s a slip-and-fall risk. She can move back in tonight.”

  “Is the security system fully functional?”

  “Not yet. They need to come and put contacts on the new window.”

  “Then she’ll stay with me until that happens.”

  Off in the distance, a dog barked and the neighbor on the right came home from work, plugging their Kia into their garage. He hoped they didn’t see through the bushes that there were people out here and decide to come over and talk about the tree falling.

  “Are you okay?” Sis asked. “I’m worried about you. You’re too quiet.”

  “Nah, I’m fine. It’s no problem. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Okay.”

  In the back of his mind, he was aware that they were following procedure, and as he thought about Emilio in that hospital bed, and Danny going rogue-crazy, and Chuckie P’s drinking problem, he felt compelled to bang on the closed door of stoic privacy.

  Not on his own, though. No, no, not tonight, motherfuckers.

  “Can you please tell me why you hate her so much?” he asked. And before she could shoot him down, he put his hand up to his sister. “I just want to understand. I’m not asking to try to change your mind or where you’re at or to judge you. I just don’t get it. Maybe if I did, I could stop bugging you about her.”

  As Anne’s eyes drifted over to the grill to avoid his own, he shrugged. “And if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, that’s your business.”

  The way she looked back at him in downright shock made him think about the mayor’s diatribe on his failings as a manager. Shit. He really was the problem, wasn’t he.

  Anne took a deep breath, like she was bracing herself to l
ift a car off the ground. “Do you remember, two days after the funeral, when you and Uncle Aaron went on that biking trip? The one dad was supposed to go on with you.”

  There was only one “funeral” in this context. And he hated the memories he had of that day, the hundreds of firefighters in dress, walking behind an engine bearing his father’s draped coffin. His mother red-eyed and tragic. Him, just graduated from college and ready to enter the Academy in the fall. Anne . . . stoic as ever even at thirteen, refusing to cry.

  Funny, he hadn’t thought about it until now, but he’d considered that disrespectful of her. And he’d resented her because of it since that day.

  He shook himself back to the present. “We were raising money for the benevolence fund. Dad was supposed to be there.” Images of him and their father’s best friend, “Uncle” Aaron, pedaling like hell through Connecticut reminded him of how they’d both had anger to work out on those ribbons of asphalt through the countryside. “We made like fifteen hundred bucks for them.”

  “I stayed behind.”

  “You wanted to go.”

  “I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed.” As anger tightened his sister’s features, he realized he’d rarely seen her without that expression hovering close by, a driver waiting to take the wheel. “You were supposed to be home the next night.”

  “We decided to hang at the campground.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long pause. “So?”

  “A woman showed up at the house the next afternoon. She was young. Pretty for a townie. She was frantic, so Mom invited her inside. When I heard the voices, I tiptoed down the stairs and listened out of sight. The girl was pregnant. She said it was Dad’s.”

  A cold shaft went down Tom’s spine. “What are you— who the hell was she?”

  “She was his girlfriend. That’s what she told Mom.”

  “Jesus . . . Christ. What did Mom do?”

  “She wasn’t surprised.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Anne shrugged and sat back in the lawn chair. “I gathered this wasn’t the first time this had happened. That a woman showed up at the house. Also got the feeling that the girl had been banking on a very different outcome than carrying the baby of a dead fireman. She was looking for money. For an abortion. She’d just turned twenty.”

  Tom stared at his sister, looking for signs that this had been blown out of proportion, improperly extrapolated, falsely reported.

  “I’d spent my life trying to impress that man,” she said. “And he knocks up a nineteen-year-old? And then Mom . . . she gave the girl the money. She didn’t even seem upset. It was like paying off a yardman for godsakes. I didn’t sleep all night. I just kind of was done with them both at that point. Mom, I’d never had anything in common with. She was always pushing me into these frilly, flowery dresses, and trying to get me to go to dance class. I’d been sick of her for a while, but after that? I just lost all respect for the woman. Like, yell. Throw things. Stand up for yourself. Leave the bastard. But don’t roll over like you don’t have a voice in your own life. It’s like she was just cleaning up a mess for him—how the hell could she live with herself?”

  Nineteen? Tom thought. Nineteen.

  As he did the math, he figured his father had been just two years older than he was. The thought of a relationship like that made his stomach roll.

  “I just refused to buy into the lie.” Anne shook her head. “Dad was supposed to be this hero down at the station, this stand-up guy who rescued people and saved pets by running into burning buildings. All I’d ever wanted to be was him. And then Mom was this cardboard cutout of a woman, this pretty piece of fluff with no opinions of her own and no direction except for what he gave her. They brought me into this world. I guess I owe them for that. But I don’t like either as people, and wouldn’t choose to associate with them otherwise. At the end of the day, he fucked a teenager and she enabled him, and it wasn’t the first time. And that’s too ugly for me to bother trying to rationalize.”

  Tom exhaled like somebody was standing on his chest, the breath leaving him in a rush with no inhale in the cue behind the expulsion.

  “You had no idea, huh,” his sister said quietly.

  He just shook his head. “Is it wrong to say . . . I liked the hero image better?”

  “No, it’s honest.”

  “Do you know who the girl was?”

  “No. I’d never seen her before. And as far as I know, she never came back.” Anne cursed. “How many others were there, you know? I mean, you don’t just start there. That girl was the culmination of a pattern. Of a predator.”

  Images of their father, tall and strong, in turnouts at the station came to him. Like Anne, Tom had molded a life on living up to those memories, and the fact that the man had been killed early had turned those recollections into legend.

  Taken the man and made him a god.

  The Bible had a point about not worshipping false idols, didn’t it.

  * * *

  When Anne finally left the house, she was nervous leaving her brother on that porch. He was too still, too composed, for the bomb she’d just dropped on his head.

  Pent-up anger had made her speak, but as she got into her car, she wondered whether she’d done the right thing. There had never been anyone else to go to about it all, although now she wondered why she’d stayed silent. Didn’t that make her as bad as her mother, who’d covered up things? Looking at it like that, she should have told Tom long ago.

  But she hadn’t. When would she have had the chance? Tom was just like she was, behind a fence of barbed wire when it came to things of a personal nature.

  She’d finally done the right thing, she guessed. Pulled back the curtain. Cut the shit. Spoken the truth.

  So why did she feel so goddamn awful.

  Driving through familiar streets, she got caught up in the past, remembering running after her brother, being left out from things because she was a girl, looking up to her father. She had ended up sidelined with her mother, relegated to cheerleader instead of participant because of something she couldn’t change and hadn’t volunteered for.

  And her mom had been perfectly fine with all that, content to raise a daughter in her image of pretty possession instead of equal partner.

  Then again, to do it any other way would shine light on how fucking lame her own existence was. And we wouldn’t want to do that, especially not when there was furniture to move around and clothes to pick out.

  That funeral of her father’s had been a somber display of firefighters coming out to honor one of their dead, and that was the last afternoon Anne had been proud to be an Ashburn. After the service at St. Mary’s, she and her mom and Tom had gotten in a Lincoln Town Car that had a pair of purple flags on either side of its front grille. As her mother had insisted that everyone have a Certs so that their breath was clean, they gone to the Catholic cemetery where the family plot was.

  It had been a spring day, cold and bracing, the wind eating through coats and chilling ears and noses in spite of the sun in the sky. After disembarking from the limo with her minty-fresh breath, she had stood in her black dress, next to her mother in a black dress, by her brother in a black suit, in front of the black hole of the grave. The slow parade of men trooping by the grave site had been split into two halves, with the fire engine bearing her father’s coffin in the middle. The truck had been the one he had crewed, and it had been draped in black bunting.

  Not one of those men had cried.

  And so neither had Anne. Even as the men had shifted her father off that engine’s top deck and carried him over to the grave that was waiting for him, even as the little girl inside of her had wept and been lost, she had refused to break with the decorum that was all around her.

  She had searched for women on the service. Been relieved to find four or five in the two hundred or so people in u
niform because that meant that she had a shot.

  Even Tom had cried. Not her, though. Not even after the priest in the black robes with the white scarf hanging down his torso had said words and then her father, her hero, the head of their family, had been lowered into the greedy earth.

  And then the girl had shown up at the house.

  She had stayed about an hour. Anne had tiptoed back to her room when the conversation had come to an end, the price of $582 given, the question of a check answered, her mother heading to the kitchen for her purse.

  The windows by Anne’s bed had looked out on the front yard, and the crappy car parked across from the house had been one she’d never seen in the neighborhood.

  The girl had left and walked over to it. She’d put the check in the pocket of her jeans as she’d gotten in, and as she’d turned around, Anne had seen her face. If it had been a put-on, then she’d been a terrific actress.

  She’d been crying so hard, it had been a wonder she could drive, her face contorted into a mask of pain and suffering.

  No, Anne thought. It hadn’t been a lie.

  Coming back to the present, she saw where she had driven to and cursed. “Shit.”

  It was the 499 stationhouse. Somehow, in her distraction, her hand and feet had taken here. Then again, it had been her father’s house, too.

  Putting the Subaru in park, she sat back and stared across the road. The old red fire station was framed by the gray sky, its windows clean, the sidewalk swept free of fallen leaves, the bay doors down.

  They were probably on a call. Even though it was cool, going on cold, the doors would be open for the fresh air if they were on-site.

  Breath mints.

  Anne, her brother, and her mother had been left without a father and a husband . . . and the woman had worried about Certs during the funeral.

  It would have been so much easier to connect to her mother if Nancy Janice had wept and wailed. But appearances had always been the most important thing, not true strength. Inner conviction. Personal power.

  By the time Tom had returned from that bike ride, Anne had hated both of their parents, her father for being a philanderer instead of a hero and her mother for enabling him. And in the decade and a half that followed, all of her emotions had gotten locked into that one-note of righteous anger and she’d fanned those flames ever since.