To Darkness and to Death (47 page)

Then he did something that amazed her. With dozens of people still struggling through the lobby, he kissed her, lightly, briefly, and then he put her away from him, stripped off his dinner jacket, and draped it over her shoulders.

“I can hear you now,” she said inanely.

“Go on. I’m going to make sure Mom and Cousin Nane got out okay.” She nodded. Turned. And found a frightened-looking elderly man, wearing dress shoes and pajamas and a black overcoat, watching her. She shrugged her arms into Russ’s jacket and crossed the lobby. She took the old man’s hand. “Father Aberforth,” she said. “Let me help you.”

9:10 P.M.

Jeremy allowed himself sixty seconds to curse, kick the ground, and imagine what a roasting his dad was going to give him: letting one of the blackmailers get away by stealing his own freaking BMW.

After a minute had gone by, he put it aside and focused on the task at hand. The small, dark-haired woman who had screamed that her husband was inside stood by the lazily burning doorway, sobbing and hiccupping and calling, “Randy! Randy!” in an aching voice.

Jeremy crossed to her side. She looked up at him, her face wet. “Please,” she begged. “Help him.”

“I will,” he promised. “But I want you to help, too.” She nodded fiercely. “Go up to the new mill. There’s a phone inside the employees’ entrance. Call 911.” She nodded again. “Find the foreman. Tell him to have the men collect all the extinguishers we have in the building and bring them here. You got that?”

“Foreman. Extinguishers.”

“Tell him Jeremy Reid told you so.” Her wide-eyed shock at his name would have been comical under different circumstances. “That’s right, Jeremy Reid. So lay off my father.”

She bolted without another word. Jeremy looked toward the old mill. If he could get inside, he should be able to break through a window on the river side and jump. He was a strong swimmer, confident of his ability to keep even a scared and injured man afloat for the time it would take to reach the riverbank downstream from the building. If he could get past the fire. Into the water. Fire. Water.

He grinned to himself and dashed toward the river rolling past the old mill. He scrambled down the steep bank faster than he intended and wound up staggering the first few steps into the black water. It was dark down here, dark and fast-moving and steeply angled. He was afraid he would lose his footing or become disoriented if he waded in, so he forced himself to sit in the knee-deep water, sit, stretch out, and duck his head beneath the surface.

He came up gasping and yelping with pain. Christ, it felt like someone had taken a nutcracker to him. He staggered, dripping, up the bank, cupping his poor beleaguered balls. It would be a miracle if he was able to father children after this.

Facing the fiery door, he wondered if a good drenching was enough. Then he thought of the poor bastard stuck in there. It would have to be good enough. He took off his sopping suit jacket, draped it over his head, and ran inside.

Running through flame: crackling and hissing and a smell, not of smoke but of gas; heat coiling about him, his shirtsleeves crinkling, his pants legs stiffening; and then he was out, steaming but unharmed. He stumbled forward, sidestepping the antiquated machinery, wondering what was going to happen when the fire hit those monsters. Would they melt? Explode? “Hello!” he called. “Randy? Are you in here?”

Over the consuming growl of the fire, he heard a noise like a cross between a gulp and a cry. “Here! I’m over here!”

Jeremy followed the sound toward the back wall. He was expecting—He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t a guy his own age, lying on the dusty floor, surrounded by a backpack and pieces of food, bleeding from an iron stake shoved into his gut. Jeremy dropped to his knees. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What happened?”

“Millie. She had this thing…” Randy waved toward the wound. A palm’s width of black iron stuck up from the side of his abdomen. “I didn’t pull it out,” he said weakly. “I thought it might bleed more.”

Jeremy rested his hand gently on Randy’s shoulder. “That was good, man. Good thinking.” He glanced up and saw right away that his breaking-the-windows idea had a serious flaw in it. The casement-style windows facing the river were a good twelve or thirteen feet above his head. “You just take it easy, man. I’m going to get you out of here. I need to take a look around, but I’m not leaving you. You got that?”

Randy nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Jeremy rose and turned around. He considered the machines. Could he shove one under the window? To serve as a platform? He pushed against a few tarp-covered shapes and found they weren’t going anywhere without the help of a forklift. He went closer to the fire, grabbed a pallet, and dragged it to the back wall. He returned, took another, and hauled it away. He got a third from the stack, but by then the fire had spread too far, and he lost the rest of them. He prowled the grotesquely lit floor, looking for more pallets amid the detritus of a hundred and thirty years of papermaking. There were maybe four that were sturdy enough to use. He mentally measured their height against the wall. Stacked up, they might boost him high enough to leap for the casement of one of the windows. They weren’t going to allow him to bring Randy with him.

He had noticed the washroom as he circled through the building. Now he walled away the tiny hammer-beat of panic that was thudding against his ribs and went to check it out. It was small and stinking, as if rodents had died in the walls. The one window was another impossible-to-reach casement. But, he was amazed to see, the gravity-flush toilet still worked, and when he pulled the chain, water gushed into the bowl.

For a moment, he thought about wetting himself down again and making a break for the door. The fire had spread—to his eye, it seemed to be spreading faster than was natural—but one man, soaked and running at top speed, could probably still make it. One unburdened man.

He looked at the water, visible in flashes of firelight. This had probably been the executive washroom in his great-great-grandfather’s day. He felt sad, and sick, and proud, all at once.

He returned to Randy’s side. He could feel the heat now, even back here at the edge of the river-side wall, harsh and oppressive. He knelt down. Randy’s eyes were closed. “Hey, man. Are you still with me?”

“Yep.”

“Great.” Jeremy tried to infuse his words with as much confidence as possible. “Look, we’re going to wait this out until the fire trucks get here. They’re on their way already. Your wife called them.”

“Lisa?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s okay?”

“She’s fine. We’re going to be fine, too. Hang on, I’m going to pick you up. It may hurt.”

Randy’s whimper as Jeremy hauled him off the floor was almost lost in Jeremy’s grunt. “Jeez, man,” he gasped, staggering across the room. “You must be solid muscle.”

“Yeah.” Randy gritted the word out.

Jeremy squeezed sideways through the door of the water closet and laid the other man on the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he said, panting. He grabbed the first tarp he could find and dragged it off its machine and over to the water-closet door. He did the same with another tarp, hurrying, because he could see the fire, literally see it leaping and flowing, claiming more and more of his great-greatgrandfather’s mill. Finally he snatched up a pickle jar he had seen half-revealed by Randy’s backpack. He unscrewed it, dumped the pickles and juice as he bolted for the water closet, and plunged it into the bowl. He poured water over Randy, over himself, over the floor, over the tarps. He poured and flushed, poured and flushed, until he realized that he could see the interior of the tiny room clearly by the light of the fire. The blaze had reached the far wall.

He abandoned the pickle jar in the toilet, heaved the tarps inside the water closet, and shut the door. Feeling his way in the dark, he edged to Randy’s side, tugging the dampened tarps over them until they were both completely covered.

“This reminds me of pretend camping as a kid,” he said. “You know, crawling under a blanket?”

Randy made a noise halfway between agreement and pain. Jeremy stripped off his jacket and, folding it, placed it under Randy’s head. “Don’t get discouraged, man,” Jeremy said. “Help is on the way.”

“I’m sorry,” Randy whispered.

“For trying to blackmail my dad? You should be. When we get out of here, you’re going to go straight, right?”

“I’m sorry… I thought you were a rich snot.”

“I am a rich snot,” Jeremy said, smiling.

“Why are you helping me?”

Jeremy thought for a moment. “Well, you know.” He didn’t know how to put it into words. “You, me, we’re all human beings. We have to do right by each other.”

There was a long pause. Jeremy listened to the muffled sound of the fire’s roar. He didn’t hear any sirens. He told himself he wouldn’t be able to, over the other noise. Finally Randy spoke again. “If you get out of this and I don’t, will you do me a favor?”

“You’re getting out of this. Don’t worry.”

“Will you?”

Jeremy squeezed his eyelids tightly closed. He could feel the hot tears pressing against them. “Yes,” he whispered.

“Tell Becky Castle I’m sorry.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

Jeremy placed his hand over Randy’s shoulder and pressed hard. Randy’s hand fluttered up and patted Jeremy’s hand. They waited, in the damp and stifling dark, two boys under the blanket. Less afraid because neither of them was alone.

9:10 P.M.

Ed Castle’s beeper went off the same moment Lyle MacAuley’s radio crackled to life. Lyle muttered an excuse-me and walked into the hospital hallway.

“What is it?” Suzanne asked quietly. Becky had finally fallen asleep again. She lay folded into her bed like the little girl she had once been. Her fragile whiteness would have blended in with the sheets if not for the purpling bruises blooming across her face.

“Fire,” Ed said, checking the code.

“Do you have to go?”

“Lemme call in and check.” He crossed to Becky’s bedside phone and dialed the dispatch number. It rang, and rang, and rang again. Finally, the line picked up, but before he could say a word, he heard a blurted, “Holdplease” and was left listening to a recorded message giving him alternate numbers to call if he was looking for the town hall, the animal control officer, or the department of motor vehicles. By the time Dispatch came back on, he had worked up a good mad.

“Harlene, what the hell is going on over there? In all the years I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve never had to wait on a fire response call.”

“Who is this?”

He raised his eyebrows. He thought Harlene could recognize every volunteer firefighter by voice. “Ed. Ed Castle.”

“Sorry.” She sounded flustered. He started to worry. He had never, ever heard Harlene flustered. “We got two major fires. The Reid-Gruyn mill and the new resort. Meet your team A.S.A.P. You’ll be supported by Corinth, Glens Falls, and Hudson Falls.”

“Wait—” he said, but she had already clicked off. He was left staring at the phone in his hand.

“Ed?” Suzanne looked questioningly at him.

“The Reid-Gruyn mill’s on fire. And the new resort.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Sounds like they’re turning at least two counties out to respond.”

“The new resort?” Suzanne sucked in a breath, turning toward their daughter. “Oh, lord, Ed. What if Becky… ?”

He caught her in a quick one armed hug. “Don’t think about it. We’ve got her here. Whatever else happens, she’s safe now.”

Lyle MacAuley came back in from the hall. “You hear the news?”

Ed nodded. “Any idea what happened?”

Lyle’s face was an outcropping of Adirondack granite. “Chief thinks some sort of ecoterrorism. Who knows, nowadays.”

Ed turned toward his wife. “Suze—”

“Just go,” she said. “We’ll be here waiting when you get back.”

9:20 P.M.

He kept calling and calling Jeremy’s number, but the boy didn’t answer. Shaun was starting to get worried. He had gotten the hell out after the explosion and now was milling around the portico. He wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe he should get into the car with Courtney and head over to Reid-Gruyn. What the hell had Jeremy been on about? An explosion? It had sounded as if it were at the mill, but there was no way that could happen. Could it?

A firefighter shouldered him out of the way. “Excuse me, sir.” They had started arriving a few minutes ago, hook and ladders and water trucks and emergency response vehicles. Lights whirling, hoses unrolling, men and women stomping around in bulky turnout suits. The fire fighter turned at the door and held up a megaphone. “Folks,” he said, his voice electronically amplified. “Please move away from this area. Please move back into the parking lot. Please stay away from the fire equipment so we can do our jobs.”

Like the nearby parking lot was safe. Shaun could see the burned and smoking ruins of one car already. He retreated downslope, instead, crossing the border of large riverstones demarcating the garden area, treading carelessly on the decorative heathers planted below the curving drive. He tried calling the foreman’s desk on the mill floor, but no one answered. He tried Jeremy’s number again. The cool edges of fear stroked his spine and coiled in his belly.

Then he saw Jeremy’s car pull into the lower parking lot. He plunged through the newly landscaped garden, churning up plants and clots of earth. The BMW drove closer and closer to the portico, stopping only when it was blocked by a line of cones. Shaun galloped toward Jeremy, thanking God, promising to mend his ways, whatever they might be. His ankle almost turned on one of the riverstones, and he had to hop over them to catch his balance. The door swung open. “Jeremy!” he called out.

Millie van der Hoeven stepped out.

She seemed as shocked to see him as he was to see her. Then she laughed, a painful, racking laugh. “You thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”

He was speechless.

“You thought you had me tied up tight in that godforsaken warehouse. One fire, and you get rid of the only witness who could link you to my brother’s murder.”