Into the Inferno (26 page)

49. THINK AGAIN

“They came close to killing you.”

I took a deep breath, my first conscious inhalation in some time. A nasal cannula was dangling off my ears, the prongs in my nose. I felt the compressed air bottle I was wearing, as it dug into my spine. I rolled over and managed to get an elbow under me. “I wish they had.”

Tears trickling down her face, Stephanie knelt beside me. “Are they in there? Are your girls inside?”

Viewing the conflagration the house had become, I refused to answer. My home was a mountain of flame now. Nothing could have survived. Not the sharpest firefighter in full bunkers on air. Not a dog. Not a flea on the ass end of a dog. Certainly not a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old in cotton shorty pajamas.

The house was a fireball. The roof had caved in over the living-room area. As we watched, another portion of the roof collapsed, sending up a shower of sparks thirty feet into the night. Angels going to heaven, I thought. Little angels going to wait for me.

There were now five hose lines shooting water into the building.

But it was too late.

My house was destroyed. Morgan was dead. Everything I owned or ever would own had been obliterated. Everyone I loved was gone.

“Allyson,” I said weakly. “Britney.” Once again, I tried to get to my feet. Whether I’d been injured in the melee, was half-dead from oxygen starvation, or had simply used up my reserves I had no way of knowing. But I couldn’t get up. I wondered if I’d been without oxygen long enough to incur brain damage. As if it made any difference.

In two days I’d be the all-American poster boy for brain damage.

“They
might
have gotten out,” Stephanie said. “Don’t you think there’s a chance?”

“Same chance as a Popsicle in hell.”

There is no way to estimate how long I wept. I cried a river, while the radiant heat from the fire warmed the left side of my body and dried my tears. Stephanie whispered to me, but I didn’t hear what she said. There was no consolation. Nobody could save me now.

I’d made my own hell.

I’d traded sex in a motel room for my daughters.

I’d swapped two innocent lives for fifteen minutes of lust.

I was still weeping when one of the volunteers came running around to the front of the house, exclaiming loudly, “I made a rescue. I got one!”

He was behind a cluster of people, moving quickly, a bundle in his arms.

I got up and began moving.

A moment later he was behind a pair of burly volunteers, and then I couldn’t see what he had in his arms because the stack of flame behind him was so bright I was blinded by it. The man who’d made the rescue was Gil Cuthousen, one of our volunteers. I was pretty sure Gil didn’t know I lived here. I also found it odd he’d made a rescue I couldn’t. He’d never been much of a firefighter. When I saw what he had cradled in his arms, I actually felt my heart beating behind my Adam’s apple.

Gil was laughing.

He held Eustace, our cat.

Dead and stiff. The hair on his back singed.

Black humor often took bizarre turns at a fire, and in the past I may have been guilty of similar insensitivities myself, though right now I hoped not.

Stepping close, I doubled up my gloved fist and coldcocked him. Cuthousen fell to the ground, as stiff as the dead cat, which landed on top of him.

This time nobody grabbed me.

In front of us one of my outer bedroom walls collapsed inward with a fiery roar. We all turned to the house, transfixed. Five minutes later, water streams began getting a toehold on the flames. Ten minutes after that, the rubble that had been my home was pretty much extinguished.

North Bend Fire and Rescue had saved another foundation.

I knew we wouldn’t find my daughters without digging through a significant amount of debris, just as I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stand to look at my girls when we finally found them—still, I could think of no way to stop myself. In fact, I would have a shovel in my hands when we went into the back bedroom. I felt as if I’d been repeatedly clubbed senseless and was about to have it happen again.

Analyzing the sequence of the fire, I knew they had probably been dead before we arrived, probably before we even left the motel. Death by smoke inhalation frequently occurred in the early stages of a fire.

I stumbled around the periphery of the house in a daze. Anything to keep my mind off my daughters.

Somewhere under all that char and rubble, investigators would find two tiny bodies, most likely huddled together. Perhaps hidden under the lower bunk. Or below the window.

I struggled to avoid thinking about their final moments, but the visions came crashing in anyway.

My only consolation, feeble as it might be, was that my failed efforts at rescue had not been the cause of their deaths, that they’d probably died before I entered the structure. Jesus, I was such a fool! Had I not been screwing a woman I’d just met, I would have been home with them.

If I hadn’t been such a slut, my daughters would be alive.

I was a crappy father, a whore, an inept firefighter. In short, I was an asshole, and this syndrome was exactly what I deserved.

I walked to the backyard, past Morgan’s corpse, past a pair of solemn volunteers standing guard over her body, and when I got far enough out in the field where nobody would hear me, I wailed in the moonlight.

I knew now what I had to do.

It was early Friday morning.

Sometime before Sunday, before I lost my mind, I would kill myself.

50. THE KIND OF GUY I AM

I was sitting on a stump sixty feet from where my front door had once stood.

It was after midnight, and the trees and field beside my house had turned surreal with the blinking red lights and the ghostlike waves of smoke rolling over everything, my terrors complemented by the rumble of diesel motors, the sleep of the dead punctuated by the staccato bark of radio traffic. By now everyone on scene knew my daughters were inside. Clusters of firefighters, friends and coworkers alike, avoided me while they awaited directions from the fire investigation team on where and when to begin digging. Normally, I suppose, people would have come around to offer their condolences, but I’d been rude to the first couple of people who’d tried it, so the word had gone out: Leave him alone. He’s not feeling too good. Wisps of toxic smoke snaked off the remains of the house. Digging them out was going to be a long, arduous task. A gruesome one. Everybody was thinking about it.

I’d been told Helen Neumann was being comforted by neighbors, but I knew that to be a lie. There would be no comfort for Helen, just as there was none for me. Besides, Helen didn’t know any of our neighbors.

Everything else on the fire ground took a backseat to the investigation. Even if my girls had not been buried inside, the half-collapsed structure would have been dismantled piece-by-piece in an effort to understand how the fire had started and why Morgan failed to escape.

Until fire investigators deemed otherwise, my home would be a crime scene.

Just my luck—the county fire investigators who caught this case turned out to be Shad and Stevenson. They asked me a series of questions before going into the ruins. How many in the house? Where did I think their bodies might be? Where was I when the fire broke out? Who was with me? Why had I slugged Gil Cuthousen? Where had I found Morgan’s body? Why had I moved it? Did I have any enemies? Had anybody ever threatened me?

Then they went in, Shad and Stevenson, with four firefighters to do the grunt work, garbage cans and shovels in hand, picking through the living room, working the area where I’d found Morgan. Forty minutes later Shad and Stevenson came out, having cleared the floor where I’d found the body, taken photos, and removed large amounts of debris one shovelful at a time. They went around the periphery of the smoking ruins with Captain Pulaski from the Snoqualmie department and stopped in the backyard to examine Morgan’s corpse. They were back there for a while.

From time to time others approached and asked questions. Could they get me something to drink? Was I warm enough? Was there anyone I wanted called? I shrugged off the questions without answering. When asked whether I had a place to stay, I mumbled, “The Sunset Motel.”

I was a fool for leaving my daughters. But then, I’d been a fool all my life. I’d been a fool to invest so much faith in the teachings at Six Points. I’d been a fool to join the army. A fool to marry Lorie Tindale. I’d been a fool to screw around with all those women, and I’d been a fool to sleep with Stephanie. I’d been a fool to let my daughters out of my sight.

When anybody blocked my view of the smoldering house, I stared through them. I’d been helped off with my bunking clothes, my Nomex hood, my heavy coat, the thick trousers and suspenders along with the knee-high rubber boots. The jeans and T-shirt I’d worn underneath were still wet with sweat. Somebody found my civilian shoes and put them on me—Stephanie, I guess.

It was cool now, that middle-of-the-summer, nighttime chill that descends on towns near the mountains, yet I remained sopping, sweat trickling along my brow and off the tip of my nose.

In the next few days there would be four funerals. Allyson. Britney. Morgan. Me. My friends at the firehouse could arrange ours. God knows Wes and Lillian weren’t up to the task. Besides the alcohol problem, Wes had already suffered a myocardial infarction and Lillian a minor stroke, precipitated, she said, by a visit from an FBI agent with a bad hairpiece, who’d talked endlessly about her daughter’s check-kiting scams in the Midwest and in Florida.

The fire department put up a portable generator in the front yard, a light string plugged into it, so that the black guts of what remained of my house were lit up like a picture shoot, while the investigators continued to poke around the periphery. They still hadn’t gone into the bedroom area.

Both my kids had been emotionally traumatized today, and in hindsight I could see I typically had bungled it. Six months earlier I’d found Britney playing with matches, as it happened, not long after one of her mother’s erratic phone calls. We’d talked about it, and I’d made it clear how dangerous playing with matches was.

What if she had started this, lit a book of matches in the closet, lost control of the flames, closed the door, and tried to pretend it didn’t happen? She wouldn’t be the first kid to play out that scenario.

Or maybe Morgan had been smoking on the sofa and fell asleep, dropped a lighted cigarette into the cushions. I’d seen Morgan sneak cigarettes behind her mother’s house.

And then it struck me.

My ex was the one with the hidden agendas. She’d been gone three years, but what if she’d chosen tonight to return? Was it possible Lorie held enough of a grudge against me to do this? Was it possible she’d sneaked inside using her key, which still fit the locks, and torched the place? I’d spoken to her on the phone as recently as Easter and believed we were on amicable terms, but I thought we were on amicable terms when she scrammed out of town with the original Mayor Haston.

One of my greatest weaknesses was not knowing when people were pissed at me.

Was Lorie angry enough to have done this?

Generally, an amateur torch uses an accelerant, most often gasoline. I’d never seen that much heat in a house that hadn’t been torched. Two winters ago we’d responded to a stubborn house fire that turned out to be fed by five gallons of high-octane gasoline splashed around liberally by the ex-husband of the resident. The resident survived; her canaries, pet llama, and house didn’t. Neither did the ex, who lit a match while he was still enveloped in the fumes. Blown into the backyard by the initial blast, he died in the hospital four days later. Burned all to hell. Poetic justice, we thought.

Two shadows stopped in front of me. “Need to ask a few questions,” said Shad, the shorter of the shadows, the one I didn’t like. What am I saying? I had no use for either of them.

Without averting my gaze from the house, I said, “You find any trace of my daughters?”

“We were just working in the living-room area. But we came up with a few questions.”

“I answered your questions.”

“We got more.”

“When are you going to start digging for my daughters?”

“Where were you tonight?”

“I already told you. When are you going to dig?”

“Listen,” Shad said. “We’re going to cool the place off and go in carefully. We don’t want to disrupt the evidence. This was an arson.”

“How do you know?”

“Hey, numb nuts. We’re asking the questions.” I looked up. It was Stevenson, the tall man with the pale face and the Cupid’s bow mouth. The grin made me want to hit him.

“How do you know it was arson?”

Sensing that there was some bad history between us, a third man, a homicide detective, walked over and interceded. His name, I later learned, was Ron Holgate. He was of medium height, had short, curly brown hair and a rotund torso. He wore a suit and tie. He said, “The neighbors think they saw it start. They heard a vehicle leaving out of here at a high rate of speed. When they went outside to investigate, all they could see was a dust cloud. At that point there was only a small orange glow in the front window. They went inside and called nine-one-one. By the time they came out again, maybe a minute later, there were flames shooting out both sides of the house. You know as well as I do a house fire doesn’t progress like that unless an accelerant was involved.”

Stevenson said, “You keep a five-gallon can of gasoline around?”

“No.”

“We found one in your living room.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not far from the clean spot on the floor where the body was. Burned everything around but the outline of that girl. Too bad. The question is, where were you when this went up?”

“He was with me,” Stephanie said. “We got home late. He had a baby-sitter staying with the girls.”

“We saw your baby-sitter,” Holgate said. “You have any enemies?”

“Just these two.” I looked at Shad and Stevenson.

“What were your daughters up to tonight?” Holgate asked.

“Went to a movie with the baby-sitter.”

“In her car?”

“My truck.” We all looked over at my truck, which had caught fire from the radiant heat and was now a burned-out hulk.

“You’ve got two days left, and your kids are with a baby-sitter?” Stevenson asked.

“That’s the kind of guy I am.”

“That girl in there have any reason to be angry with you?”

“What girl?”

“The dead girl. Neumann. Morgan Neumann. Your baby-sitter.”

“Of course not.”

“No reason? You sure? People say she had a crush on you. You weren’t fooling around with her, were you?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“Just a possibility that had to be raised.”

Holgate stepped forward, the voice of reason. “Why don’t we tell him how we think it went down?”

Shad and Stevenson looked at each other. Shad said, “You got a natural gas stove in there in your fireplace? You keep the pilot light on in the summer, or do you shut the whole thing down?”

“On. Every once in the while the girls get cold in the morning.”

Holgate said, “So the baby-sitter takes a five-gallon can into the house, douses gasoline all over everything, and before she can exit, the fumes reach your pilot light and . . . va-voom!”

“It didn’t happen that way,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because Morgan wouldn’t do that.”

“Did she or did she not have a crush on you?”

“I don’t see how that makes—”

“It gives us a motive, that’s what it gives us.”

“She didn’t do it.”

“So tell us who did.”

“I don’t know who.”

The three of them walked out of earshot and conversed. After a few moments, a King County Police deputy I’d seen them speaking to half an hour earlier showed up and joined their powwow.

Periodically, Stephanie mopped me with a towel. “Oh, God, Jim,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I just don’t believe Morgan would do anything like that. It’s crazy.”

“I only met her those few brief times, but I don’t think she would, either.”

I thought about the way Morgan had been looking daggers at Stephanie, thought about how hormones raced around inside a teenager, and then I wondered if I hadn’t underestimated her feelings for me. Was it possible Morgan had been so upset about Stephanie she’d decided to kill herself, and take my girls with her? Was that possible?

“It’s my fault,” I said. “This whole thing is my fault.”

“Don’t say that. You don’t know that.”

“And yours.”

“How do you—?”

“This was never about saving me. You wanted to alleviate all that guilt you felt for not being part of your sister’s life. This has been about you from the beginning.”

“That’s not true. That’s—”

“Taking me to bed was about you, too. If we slept together, you could off-load some of that guilt you felt for all the crap you threw at me when we first met. I veg out and you’re guilt-free.”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

“You fucked me in every way possible.”

“I’m sorry if you see it that way, but I was—”

“Keeping me from saving the lives of the only two people on this planet I ever loved.”

You had to give her points for sticking. I would have flown out of there like a broken promise. But then you already know I’m a stone-cold bastard. More and more I was realizing it, too.

A moment later we heard a disturbance in the dark field behind us, a volunteer from Snoqualmie’s department trying to turn back someone who was traipsing toward us across the grass from the paved road several hundred yards away. The interloper, a small, slender figure, went around the volunteer and proceeded directly toward our gathering.

It took me several moments to recognize her.

It was Morgan. My baby-sitter.

Morgan was alive.

Some yahoo blinded her with a spotlight from his pickup truck, causing her to stumble the last thirty yards. For the first time in almost an hour, I got up off the stump. When she got close, I hugged her. Out of gratitude, I guess, gratitude that she was alive. She hugged back with an uncertainty that was clear to all of us.

“Why weren’t you with my girls?”

“I . . . had to . . . What happened?” She was as confused as a butterfly at a cockfight. The fire investigators and the homicide detective approached, and all five of us began shooting questions at her simultaneously.

“Morgan,” Stephanie said, taking charge of the interrogation by virtue of her gender. “We thought you were in the house.”

“I was.” Morgan stepped out of my embrace and stared at the hulk that had been my home, her lower lip quivering. I knew what she was thinking, because I’d been thinking the same thing. She was thinking she’d just made the worst mistake of her life.

“Why did you leave my girls? And who did you leave them with?”

Turning to me in tears, Morgan said, “I didn’t leave them with anybody. We thought you were going to be home pretty soon. I didn’t mean to do anything—”

“If this is your baby-sitter, who the hell is in the backyard?” Stevenson asked.

“You have anything to do with setting this fire, young lady?” Shad glared at her.

“No. Of course not.”

Obviously Morgan had left my children with a friend while she’d gone off to be with a boyfriend or to a beer party or some such teenage nonsense. My girls were dead. I’d dragged the substitute baby-sitter out of the fire.

“Who was baby-sitting?” I asked.

“I was.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody else.”

“You didn’t leave my girls alone. I know that. We found her.”