Stranded (27 page)

I suddenly realized I should call Kelli too. This was her house. But I didn’t have the number . . . Yes, I did. I’d dialed it any number of times that weekend when I’d tried to call her about the utility bills and finally added it to my list on the cell phone. With shaky hands, I pulled it up from the list and dialed it. Ring, ring, ring, ring.
C’mon, Kelli, answer!
Finally she did, after a good dozen rings, a sleepy, “Hello?”

“Kelli, this is Ivy. The house is on fire—”

“On fire? Oh no! Where are you? Are you okay?”

“We’re outside, all three of us. We’re okay. I’ve called 911—”

“I’ll be right over.”

Then we retreated to the far side of the hedge and watched and waited. I could feel Abilene still wanting to rush inside and do something, and I held on tight to her arm to keep her from it. Koop kept squirming, but Abilene held on tight to him too. The glow behind the etched windows in the double front doors grew brighter, and now it flickered through the living room windows too.

Finally, finally, somewhere in the distance I heard the wail of a siren. At the same time I realized we were both barefoot, me still in my nightgown, Abilene in her pajamas. But firemen had undoubtedly seen underdressed people before. I was just grateful I wasn’t wearing those skimpy things from Victoria’s Secret that Sandy had once given me.

The fire engine arrived. Some of the men ran through the front door dragging a hose. Others raced around the back way. Crashing noises. Glass breaking. Yells. With the front door open, we could see full-fledged flames down the hallway, like looking into a roaring furnace.

Kelli arrived a few seconds later, running. “I parked down the street so I wouldn’t be in the way!” By now, other people were congregating on the street. I didn’t realize I was shivering until Kelli whipped off her coat and wrapped it around me.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know. We were asleep. Koop woke me up—” I broke off, for the first time realizing Koop may well have saved our lives. Thankfully for us, his aversion to cigarette smoke apparently extended to other kinds of smoke as well.

“Where did it start?”

“In the trash room. We’ve been working in there on a Styrofoam fire hydrant for the ’20s Revue—” I broke off again. Had we somehow started the fire? But we hadn’t been in there since last evening. Unless we’d somehow started something smoldering then, and tonight it had burst into flame . . .

“I was in there earlier this evening to get some plastic bags to take to the clinic. I didn’t see anything then, no smoke, nothing,” Abilene said.

“It doesn’t matter. Just so you’re both safe. And Koop too.” Kelli put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed reassuringly. “If the house burns, let ’er burn.”

As well it might. Flames shot up from the back side of the house, and the crackle exploded to a roar. Smoke rose, a black blot against the starry sky. Sparks created stars within the blot. Ashes fell around and on us. I smacked one that burned my arm.

Koop wasn’t acting like a hero at the moment. He squirmed and twisted in Abilene’s arms, even hissed at a passing fireman.

“Why don’t you put him in the Bronco?” Kelli said. “He’ll be safe there and can’t run away.”

Abilene left to do that, her tread steady in spite of the bare feet. A second fire engine arrived. More firemen dragged another hose around to the back of the house.

I don’t know how long we stood out there. Not as long as it felt, I’m sure. But long enough for my toes to feel like something out of the freezer case at the supermarket. Gradually the flames at the rear of the house died back. The roar dropped to a pop and crackle. It was some minutes after all sign of flames had disappeared when a stocky man in fireman’s gear came up to us. He loosened the strap on his sloping yellow hat. An ugly scent of burned, wet wood hung in the air.

Kelli stepped forward. “I’m Kelli Keifer, the owner of the house.”

“The McLeod place, isn’t it? Where old Hiram McLeod was killed a while back?”

He didn’t say it, but I wondered if he was connecting the two, the death and the fire.

“Yes. Hiram was my uncle. Great-uncle, actually. Ivy Malone and Abilene Tyler have been living here.” Kelli motioned to us. “Is everything okay?”

They didn’t seem to know each other, because he also introduced himself. “Fire Chief Wally Burman. The fire’s out, but we’ll leave a man on watch for the night just to be sure.”

“Ivy says it started in the room my uncle used for storing all kinds of discarded materials and trash. Paper and plastic, pieces of wood, rags. Everything. I should have hauled it all to the dump a long time ago.”

He asked more questions. Kelli answered some, I answered others.

“Can you tell yet what started the fire?” she asked. “I’m thinking it may have been something electrical. The wiring in the house is really old.”

“That’s possible. We’ll do a more complete investigation in the morning. The back door on the house was locked, and we had to break our way in.” He looked at me. “You said you’d been working with paint in that room?”

“Yes, but—”

“And paint thinner?”

“Yes, but we didn’t spill any, and we didn’t have matches anywhere near the room.”

“Do either of you smoke?”

“No. Never.”

“What about a heater? Wasn’t it cold working out there?”

“Yes, we did have an electric heater with us. But we didn’t leave it there. And Abilene said she was out there earlier in the evening, and there was no sign of fire then.”

“The paint and paint thinner weren’t even in the trash room,” Abilene added. “I’d moved them back to the shelf in the laundry room.”

“Well, as I said, we’ll investigate further in the morning.”

“Don’t oily old rags sometimes spontaneously combust?” Kelli asked. “Uncle Hiram could have used some of those old rags for most anything.” I could see she didn’t want the fire chief blaming us. Neither did she want us to feel as if we were to blame.

“We’ll consider that when we investigate. It’s possible.” He started to turn away, then turned back as if he’d just thought of something. He gave Kelli a calculating appraisal. “Do you still have a key?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Were you in the house this evening?”

Kelli looked startled, as I was. Was he shifting from thinking accident as cause of the fire to a possibility of arson? And was he thinking about Hiram’s death here, and the town’s pre-judgment of Kelli as murderer? Murderer now turned arsonist?

“No, I haven’t been here in several days.”

“That’s right,” I put in.

“Is the house insured?”

“Yes. Of course. Putnam’s Insurance Agency, over on Calvin Street. Are you thinking it could be arson?”

“Our investigation will cover all possibilities.”

“If you’re thinking arson . . .” I began.

The fire chief and Kelli had been regarding each other warily, but now they both turned to look at me.

“Yes?” the fire chief prompted.

“The thing is, Abilene and I have reason to believe that someone could have, ummm, traced us here to Hello. Someone—someones, actually—who might start a fire. Actually, that’s why we’re here, because we were running away from . . . them.”

I stumbled through the awkward statement because I could see doubt written on the fire chief’s face.

“They could have traced you?”

“Yes. Possibly.”

“How? Why?”

“Well, I’m, uh, not sure. They had someone working in the post office once, I think, or they might use the license plate on our motor home . . . or something.” The statement sounded more flimsy and less believable the further I went.

“And you think these, ah, someones, got into the house and tried to burn it with you in it?”

“Yes. Exactly. They tried to do it to my house back in Missouri, and there have been threats on both our lives.” I made a little gesture toward Abilene.

“What she’s saying is true,” Abilene put in, which swiveled the fire chief in her direction. “My former husband . . . I mean, we’re in the process of getting a divorce, so he’s almost my former husband . . . has threatened to kill me. Kill both of us.”

“Maybe you should be telling this to the police chief.”

“Well, uh . . .” Now it was Abilene’s turn to stammer. “If Boone doesn’t already know where I’m at, he might find out, because his cousin is the sheriff, and then—”

“But the house wasn’t broken into. How could they have gotten inside?”

“We haven’t figured that out yet,” I put in.

“Look, it’s been a stressful night for all of you. Why don’t you just get a good night’s sleep, and things will look different in the morning.”

I got an instant glimpse of us through his eyes. One LOL, which here meant “loony old lady,” and one younger woman, paranoid about an ex-husband, both imagining bogeymen in the dark. And what we really were, to his mind, were two scatterbrained women careless with paint thinner and flammable trash trying to wiggle out of responsibility for the fire with a wild story about being tracked down by killers and arsonists.

The only time our stories were going to be taken seriously, I could see, was after we were dead, when someone might say, “Well, how about that? Someone
was
out to get them.”

“Is the house livable?” I asked, partly as distraction, partly because his suggestion about getting a good night’s sleep reminded me we had no place to do that.

“The house isn’t a total loss, as you can see.” The fire chief motioned toward the untouched towers and gingerbread across the front porch. “But most of it is smoke and water damaged, and the addition on the back side is pretty well destroyed.” To Kelli he said, “I’d suggest you get your insurance people out here as soon as possible. We can’t allow anyone to stay here tonight, of course.”

Abilene and I looked at each other, with the question that passed between us every once in a while in our uncertain lives looming again.
Now what?

Kelli had a quick answer. “You can stay at my place. I have an extra room with twin beds.”

I didn’t protest that we didn’t want to put her to any bother. I was just grateful for her continuing generosity. “Can we go inside long enough to get a few things?” I asked.

The fire chief looked over our bare feet and night clothes. He called another fireman over and told him to escort us inside.

The wet, burned smell expanded to a nose-clutching stench as we made our way down the hall. The electricity had gone out by now, and the fireman used a flashlight to guide our way. The actual fire didn’t appear to have extended more than a half dozen feet forward in the hallway, but starlight made murky by lingering smoke showed through the roof farther back. The back door at the end of the hallway, with only a skeleton of a wall around it, dangled on its hinges. If the fire had moved forward rather than to the rear, and if Koop hadn’t awakened us . . .

The Lord had been looking out for us, and one of my favorite verses from Hebrews came to me, as it often did: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
Thank you for that promise, Lord. Thank you for fulfilling it.

Water squished in the carpet under our bare feet. Fire hadn’t harmed the bedrooms, although water from the hoses had drenched everything. The carousel horses glowed like eerie apparitions in the beam of the flashlight. The fireman actually jumped when he saw them.

We didn’t bother to dress, except to put on shoes. We grabbed only basic necessities: clothes, other shoes, toiletries, Koop’s cat carrier. We had nothing to carry anything in, but Kelli efficiently yanked sheets off the beds, and we bundled everything in those. All three of us were weighed down with the makeshift bags slung over our shoulders, Abilene with the addition of the cat carrier in one hand, by the time we staggered out of the house and down the street to the Bronco.

Abilene and I stayed in the vehicle while Kelli went back to the house to check with the fire chief again and make sure it was okay to leave. Koop had calmed down, and we put him in the cat carrier. Abilene forcefully repeated what she’d said earlier. “There was nothing, nothing burning in the trash room when I went out there. However the fire got started, it was after that.”

Neither of us had been out there flinging matches around. So how had the fire started? I remembered that shredded newspaper where Koop had napped. Oily rags. Old egg cartons. Plastic.

An arsonist’s delight. And, even if Fire Chief Wally Burman thought my story of being traced to Hello was just a loony old lady’s imagination, I had a pretty good idea who’d gleefully tossed a burning match into the trash room.

20

Kelli quickly got us settled in her guest room. It was a cozy room, chinked logs on the outside wall, painted wood paneling on the interior walls. Patchwork quilts covered the beds. Braided rag rugs beside each bed made colorful ovals on the wooden floors. Koop got a bed of his own, a plastic laundry basket filled with a pillow, although I doubted that was where he’d sleep.

Sandra Day had met us at the front door when we first arrived. She looked as if God had used creative imagination when putting her together: mottled Siamese coloring but long hair, six toes on each front foot, and a pug face, the odd combination all nicely held together with a queenly grace. She and Koop had sniffed warily through the screen of the cat carrier. No fireworks, but we were keeping him in the room with us for the time being.