Fire and Rain

a novel by

Diane Chamberlain

Copyright © 2010 Diane Chamberlain

Cover by Kimberly Killion

Ebook creation by Design

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Originally published by HarperCollins, 1993

Dedication

To the unsung heroines in my life—my women friends—who are, quite simply, always there.

THE HOUSE GLOWED IN
the darkness. Thick smoke billowed from broken windows and jagged holes in the roof, forming black smudges against the eerie, orange-tinged sky. Carmen stepped out of the
News Nine
van, wincing from the sting of soot in the air and the blare of sirens. A weariness settled over her, an exhaustion more emotional than physical that she couldn’t allow to show in her face. In the past few days she had watched twelve houses burn. It had been exciting at first. Something for her to report. Something for her to
do
. But now she’d had enough.

Over breakfast that morning, she’d noticed that the scent of smoke still clung to her hair despite her shower. Her ears still rang from the nighttime howling of coyotes driven from the canyon by the fires, and outside her kitchen window, the sun beat hot and yellow on the sparse vegetation in her yard. The sun had become an enemy, a relentless killer of everything that had once been beautiful in Valle Rosa.

This house, like the others burned in the past few days, was set on the rim of Cinnamon Canyon, a beautiful pristine chasm that carved a wide, deep path through the sprawling reaches of Valle Rosa. The canyon was thick with crackling dry chaparral, so thick that in the shadows of dusk and dawn it looked as though someone had dropped a soft, nubby quilt over the earth. But Cinnamon Canyon was no longer beautiful, no longer unspoiled. These days the residents of Valle Rosa awakened with damp palms and racing hearts. They looked out their windows to see how the fires had changed the canyons overnight, to see how much of the earth had been blackened, how close the plume of smoke was to them now.

Carmen held Craig Morrow’s dampened handkerchief over her nose as she stood in front of the burning house. The camera crew was setting up, and Craig scrambled around, talking to fire fighters, ambulance drivers, gathering information for her. The ranch-style house, barely larger than a trailer, didn’t look well cared for, but that was hard to determine after what it had suffered tonight. It perched on a small plateau jutting up above the canyon. The side yard was barely large enough to hold a swing set and a sliding board, which looked like a strip of molten steel as it reflected the glow from the fire. A tricycle lay on its side near the swings, and toys were scattered across the narrow thread of dirt that served as a front yard. A few bulging black garbage bags lay in the middle of the short driveway. Behind the house, Cinnamon Canyon was an enormous bowl of fire. Carmen took a few steps toward the canyon, mesmerized, shuddering. If hell existed, it could be no worse than this.

A small plane buzzed above the conflagration, spewing its cargo of chemicals, and behind her, the fire fighters sprayed their precious water on the few other houses that rimmed this part of the canyon, struggling to hold off the flames. How small they seemed—the fire fighters, the planes. How insignificant.

Craig was suddenly beside her, rattling off the address of the house, the time the fire started, the gloomy prognosis for the surrounding homes. His thinning dark hair stood away from his scalp in crazy tufts and he was wild-eyed.
He loves this
, she thought as she jotted down the information on her pad.

“The dead kids were two, four, and five,” Craig said.

“Dead kids?” she asked, startled. Houses had been lost, true, but so far no one had died.

“Yeah.” Craig motioned toward the bags in the driveway, and Carmen realized with a jolt they were not garbage bags at all, but small body bags. Her knees turned to rubber, and she pressed the handkerchief to her face again.

“Hey!” Craig called out to the
News Nine
crew. “What’s the names on the three kids?”

Someone yelled back at him, “Joseph, Edward, and Hazel,” and Craig shook his head, actually chuckling to himself.

“Hazel,” he said. “Can you imagine naming a kid Hazel?” His voice seemed to come from very far away.

Carmen wrote down the names, the pad and her hands glowing like hot coals. She was trapped, by the fire, by Craig, by the smoky golden air. By what was expected of her in the next few minutes. Her mouth was dry, the air a hot poker in her throat. She glanced toward the camera crew. They were nearly ready for her.

“We’ll put you right about here, in front of the house,” Craig pointed with his pencil to a spot a few feet from where she stood. “We’ll cut to the dead kids there.” He whisked his pencil toward the driveway, where the orange light from the canyon licked at the smooth black vinyl of the bags, making Carmen think of Halloween, of children in costume, of candy corn. “Then you can have a word with the mother.”

Carmen followed Craig’s pencil as he pointed toward the ambulance. The broad rear doors were open and someone was wrapping gauze around the hand of a dazed-looking woman. A little girl—a delicate, dark-eyed cherub—clung to the woman’s leg, pressing her free hand against her ear as another fire truck, siren blasting, pulled into the cul-de-sac.

“You going to be able to talk over all this?” Craig asked.

“No problem.” She was perspiring. Her face, no doubt, glistened. She hoped Craig would think it was from the heat of the fire pit behind her, nothing more. She lifted her heavy dark hair and coiled it loosely at the back of her neck, securing it with a clip from the pocket of her skirt.

“Mother’s name is Janice Reisko.” Craig held out his own pad for her to copy. “You okay?” he asked as she wrote. “I mean, do you think you can handle this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” Had they told him to keep an eye on her? She didn’t look up at him. She wouldn’t let her eyes betray her. Surely he knew that in her two shaky months back at
News Nine
, nothing of this magnitude had happened.

She looked again at the mother, whose sooty pale face was streaked with tears, at the little girl who now had her thumb rooted firmly in her mouth, and she turned her eyes away, toward the sickly glowing sky above the canyon. Five years ago she would have hungered to know the story of this woman and her children, hungered to take the facts and embellish them, to feed them, inflated and sizzling, to her audience. She couldn’t let on to Craig that she had any doubts about her ability to get through this. One weak moment. That was all they’d need to get rid of her.

“Ready?” Craig held the microphone out to her.

She took the mike from his hand and stepped in front of the camera, remembering too late that her hair was still up.
Damn
. Between that and the ever-widening streak of silver on her crown, she would look like an old woman. Washed up.

The red light appeared on the camera. “This is Carmen Perez,” she said. “I’m in Valle Rosa, at the edge of Cinnamon Canyon, where the drought-spawned fires that have burned out of control all week tonight claimed their first young victims.” She glanced down at her notepad. “Fire fighters were able to rescue three-year-old Jennifer Reisko and her mother, Janice, from the flames that quickly engulfed their home, but they were unable to reach five-year-old Edward, four-year-old Joseph and two-year-old Hazel.”

The camera panned to the three small body bags in the driveway, then slipped to the open rear of the ambulance as Carmen approached Janice Reisko, too quickly, as though she could make this less painful by rushing through it. “Mrs. Reisko, can you tell us what happened here tonight?”

The off-camera flames from the canyon cast a yellow sheen on Janice Reisko’s damp skin. Her thin brown hair was unattractively cut to fall just below her ears, and her bangs were short and stubby.

“My babies,” she rasped into Carmen’s microphone. She turned her head slowly from side to side, her eyes dark and blank. “My
babies
.”

Carmen saw Craig out of camera range, signaling her wildly with his hands to ask the woman another question, but she pretended not to see him. She managed to make some insignificant closing statement into the microphone before lowering it to her side and stepping away from Janice Reisko and her one surviving child.

Once off camera, she slipped quietly into the empty van, taking a seat near the front to wait for the others. Craig was first to climb in after her.

“Why didn’t you ask the kid anything?” he asked as he sat down. “You know, ‘Were you scared?’ Shit like that.”

“Didn’t occur to me,” she said. The rest of the crew, three men and two women, squeezed into the van and quickly drew Craig into their conversation. They had little to say to her. Except for Craig, they were all younger than she, by a decade or more. They opened cans of soda and began passing a bag of popcorn between them, its buttery scent suffocating in the close air of the van. Carmen leaned her head against the back of the seat, trying to shut out their voices and the nearly rancid smell of the popcorn. She knew she was going to be sick.

“Hazel,” Craig said. “Can you picture it? Ten-to-one they’re on welfare, churning those kids out one after the other. Ran out of decent names.”

Carmen leaned forward and clutched the driver’s shoulder. “Stop for a second, Pete,” she said. “I thought I saw something on the road back there.”

Pete jerked the van over to the side of the road, and Carmen slid the door open.

“Where the hell are you going?” Craig asked her.

She didn’t answer. Her stomach churned. She stepped out of the van and walked as far behind it as she could before kneeling down by the shoulder to get sick. How clearly could they see her? Could they hear her? It was so quiet here above this dark, cool sweep of Cinnamon Canyon, this section as yet untouched by the fires.

“Hey, Carmen,” Craig called. “What is it?”