Part 32 (1/2)

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 cl.u.s.ter 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 coldc.o.c.ked him. Cuthousen fell to the ground, as stiff as the dead cat, which landed on top of him.

This time n.o.body 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.

a.n.a.lyzing 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a woman I'd just met, I would have been home with them.

If I hadn't been such a s.l.u.t, my daughters would be alive.

I was a c.r.a.ppy father, a wh.o.r.e, an inept firefighter. In short, I was an a.s.shole, 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 n.o.body 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. Cl.u.s.ters 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-s.h.i.+rt 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. G.o.d 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 cus.h.i.+ons. 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 p.i.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l. 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.”