The Book of Old Houses (25 page)

Through the smoke and flame I saw the blade tips, black in silhouette, against the enlarging fire. Hearing the tool's busy whirring I thanked my stars the flames hadn't yet burst through.

But that's all the stars granted; I couldn't see Ellie. Or hear her.
Don't panic,
I told myself, but we were locked in a box and it was on fire; any instant those flames would erupt.

Terror flooded me, drowning me in grief; the roaring in my ears built to a howl, rising and falling, and still the door didn't open.

No air, just a desperate absence of it. Heat, smoke . . . The flames faded. I hit the floor hard, grasping for some handhold to pull myself up again but not finding one.

The smothering dark closed in, blacking out everything else. I fought for another breath, just one more sweet, precious gulp of fresh air, but there was no air.

There just wasn't any.

Chapter
17

J
ake? Come on, damn it.”

It was Wade, coming out of the darkness at me . . . the darkness of death, I supposed, because surely this was it.

Fuzziness, flares of light, incomprehensible sounds mingled strangely with voices of the living. . . . I couldn't find my body and I guessed this must be what it was like to be a ghost.

Ellie.
A wailing ghost, because I'd killed her, too, hadn't I? Brought her along on a damn-fool errand . . .

“Oh!” I lurched up, fumbling at the cool moisture on my face. Not dead, but if this was living there was one crucial adjustment that needed to be made right this instant . . .

I ripped the oxygen mask off, leaned sideways, and let my stomach turn itself violently inside-out. “Oh, god . . .”

“Here, put this back on,” Wade said, wiping my face with a damp towel and replacing the mask.

I don't know what else they put in those oxygen tanks, but it tasted like champagne. “Thank you,” I murmured, unable to muster the breath for anything more, and fell back on the grass.

My throat was afire, my head felt like tons of wet concrete had been dropped on it and left there to harden, and an elephant sat on my chest.

And that was nothing compared to the way my conscience felt. Bob Arnold, Ellie, and probably Bert Merkle, too . . .

Gone.
“I'm so sorry,” I muttered.

Wade bent over me. “Sorry? I don't—”

Somebody pushed him aside: Ellie. Her red hair, fluffed out around her face, resembled a halo.

“Jake? Can you hear me? Oh, my god, she's awake. Oh, Jake, I thought you were dead!”

She crouched and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “Oh,” she wept, “I'm so glad you're alive, I thought—”

I pushed her away just far enough to see her face again; her beautiful,
living
face. “I thought
you
were . . .”

“Yeah, well, you both almost were. And me, too,” growled Bob Arnold, fingering the back of his head. “Somebody must have hit me with a two-by-four or something, knocked me right out cold.”

“Merkle?” I whispered. Bob's look turned grave.

“Took him in the ambulance, they were workin' on him when they left. Can't tell, from what I saw, whether he's gonna make it or not. But it didn't look good.”

I sat up, still dizzy and nauseated. “Ouch.”

Wade was working on my hand, cleaning and taping the places I'd crunched by punching that window with it. Ordinarily it would have been one of the med techs' jobs, but Wade wasn't letting anyone else near me.

“Who?” I grated at him through a throat that felt shredded from the smoke and the screaming. “Have they . . . ?”

He shook his head grimly. My knuckles were very painful but his touch wasn't. Sitting there, I thought that if I could only keep my hand in his forever, I might be all right.

“No,” he said, applying a gauze pad. “Whoever hit Bob and started the fire must've been following you. But they got away.”

He finished securing the gauze with tape. “You might end up needing an X-ray on that,” he said, not meeting my gaze.

He was crying, his breath coming in gasps he was trying hard to control. He kept looking down at my hand, then leaned forward to wrap his arms around me and hold me, his tears leaking down my neck.

“Don't let me lose you,” Wade whispered. “Please don't.”

By then I was weeping, too, because it had been close, hadn't it? It had been so terribly close, our losing each other. Which of course we would do someday; everyone must.

But not today. “I won't,” I whispered, his warm arms wrapped tightly around me feeling like a gift I didn't deserve.

He released me as George's truck skidded to a halt down on the street and George jumped out. Spotting Ellie he ran to her. His embrace nearly knocked her off her feet.

By now it was late in the afternoon, the setting sun a pale disk in the gathering fog. I tried to get up and couldn't; not on the first try.

The medical technicians were gathering their equipment. “Any word on the other fellow?” I asked.

Whispered, actually. Other than my knuckles the worst injury seemed to be to my voice.

If you didn't count my conscience. Because even though no one was dead on account of it—yet—this all still felt like my fault.

The ambulance tech shook her head. “No, we haven't heard.”

She might've said more, but Bob Arnold broke in. “When you feel better, Jacobia,” he began, his eyes like ice chips. “And by that I mean tonight at the very latest.”

I nodded obediently. The gesture only made the whole world tilt a few sickening times. “You want to talk to me,” I finished.

Or listen, more likely. Because this wasn't a mugging, or an accidental drowning, or a suicide. This was attempted murder.

Or if Bert Merkle didn't survive, never mind the
attempted
part. “I want to know each and every single solitary thing you and Ellie have done, what you saw and heard, who you talked to and what you told them and what they said back, since this whole mess started. Have you got that?” Bob inquired grimly.

Peering at me not with his friend face on, but with his cop face: no fooling around.

“I've got it, Bob,” I replied. A fresh wave of guilt washed over me. Because if I'd let all this alone, who knew what might've happened?

Not this. This wouldn't have happened.

“How'd we get out?” I asked as Wade helped me into the truck.

Through the rear window, Merkle's trailer was a blackened heap of junk.
The neighbors are probably thrilled,
I thought distantly.

“Merkle.” He threw the truck into reverse, backed out of the trash-heaped lot.

The fire still crackled in my ears. “But . . . I don't get it. I thought the smoke . . .”

“Took him down, right. But he was out, first. He went back in after you and Ellie. That's when it got him. According to the EMT guys, Merkle shoved you two out the hole.”

Those snippers . . . Bert had done what I told him to. “And then he collapsed. EMTs pulled him out,” Wade said.

“Oh.” It was coming back to me, Merkle and the tin snippers, hands gripping my shoulders in the dark, a hard shove.

“Wade, if Merkle wanted to, he could've left us in there. Besides DiMaio we're the only ones who know . . .”

“Jake. Maybe you should rest for a while.”

Let it rest,
he meant. Because Wade was a patient man, and a kind one, and to his mind a fully formed independent spirit was necessary equipment in a wife. He'd married me in part because I was, as Bella would've said, as independent as a hog on ice.

But this was bad. He turned onto Key Street. In the dusk our own house-lights glowed, yellow bars slanting onto the lawn.

We pulled into the driveway. “I can't,” I said.

Because Merkle hadn't struck Bob, or started that fire. Or left Ellie and me to die in it; someone else had.

Someone who would try again. “I can't let it rest,” I repeated. But Wade was already out of the truck and coming around to open my door, so he didn't hear me.

Inside, I learned that the news of my narrow escape was already all over the island. “That phone,” Bella grumbled irritably as it rang again.

“Give it to me,” I said as once more she went into her “Missus Tiptree can't be disturbed” speech.

She'd already mouthed
Merrie Fargeorge,
at me, and if I told Merrie the truth maybe that would start setting the gossip-wires humming with facts, instead of the nonsense burning them up now.

That Bert Merkle and I were having an affair I'd tried to end, for instance, or that he and Ellie were having ditto, or in the most extreme version that both Ellie and I were . . .

You get the idea. “Hello, Merrie,” I whispered. My throat felt like steel wool. “I guess you've heard all the excitement.”

“I have,” she replied crisply. In the background an old cuckoo clock sounded the hour; six o'clock. “I trust that you and Ellie weren't badly injured?”

“We're shaken up,” I admitted. Also my hair, skin, clothes, shoes, and the insides of my eyeballs stank of smoke.

Which I'd have taken care of already, but the shower still wasn't working. So I'd been contemplating another washtub bath.

That is, until I heard what Merrie said next.

It took me
about two minutes to put together a kit bag of soap, shampoo, towels, and an outfit of fresh clothes. Trying to talk Wade into letting me walk to Merrie's was harder, though, and in the end I gave up.

“Sorry, but you can get your fresh air by rolling the window down, and as for solitude, you're not getting any of that until I know for sure some lousy son of a bitch is behind bars.”

He started the truck. “You can call me when you're ready to come home, Jake, and I'll pick you up again,” he finished stubbornly.

Well, I couldn't blame him. So with my bath kit on my lap we set off for Merrie's house and more specifically for her tub and shower, which she'd generously offered to let me use.

Downtown we passed the fish pier with the tugboats tied up alongside it, their deck lamps glowing against the darkening sky. Across the water the lights of Campobello gleamed fuzzily through the gathering fog; approaching Dog Island, the fog thickened to a gray curtain.

“Wade, what's that?” Nearly to Merrie's house, a dim light bobbed alongside the road.

I stuck my head out the window. Quiet here; houses set back from the pavement peeped from between ancient lilac bushes, the ghost of their springtime perfume still seeming to linger in the murk.

Then I gasped as a figure suddenly took shape beside me and Dave DiMaio's face loomed out of the fog.

Wade slowed the truck. “I've lost my tie pin,” Dave said to me. “Horace gave it to me and I'm looking for it.”

“Here? In the dark?”

“Yes. I called your house a little while ago in case by some chance it was there. But it's not, and—”

He must've called right after we left; Bella might even have told him where I was going.

And now here he was. “My tie pin,” he uttered, his flashlight beam probing the road's sandy shoulder. “It's got to be here somewhere.”

Then the fog swallowed him up. “I think I'll sit out in the truck and wait at Miss Fargeorge's,” Wade said as we drove on.

“Fine with me,” I replied, suddenly glad I hadn't pulled the girl-in-a-nightgown-goes-into-the-dark-basement trick.

Because it was very dark out here, indeed. And Prill the Doberman might still trust DiMaio, but I didn't.

Not anymore. A foghorn hooted lonesomely. DiMaio was out looking for something; his tie pin, supposedly. But another idea seemed more plausible.

Scarier, too.

Maybe he'd been looking for me.

“
Merrie, this is
so good of you.” I set my bag down in her warm, delightfully cozy kitchen.

Inside, Caspar greeted me less effusively than the previous time; first meetings were the animal's specialty, I gathered.

“My dear, I am delighted to do it,” Merrie said, bustling from the stove to the kitchen table where she poured me a cup of tea.

Her mood had improved substantially since the last time I'd seen her, and if she noticed the way I kept glancing at the door—one look at my face and the hurried way I entered, as if even in her dooryard some creeping fog-wraiths might be after me, and she'd thrown the bolt with a decisive, fear-banishing
click!—
she didn't mention it. “Old Eastport houses like yours are delightful, filled with history and atmosphere,” she went on as she poured her own cup.

A plate of pastries appeared; gratefully, I took one. “But they can be full of other things, too,” she added with a touch of asperity.

Right, like busted plumbing parts. Not that Merrie seemed to have any of those, or anything else that was broken, either. On the mantel the clock ticked peacefully. From the hall another one tocked, then suddenly cuckooed.

I jumped, spilling tea. “I'm so sorry,” I began.

“Never mind, never mind.” She got up and fetched a dishcloth with which she wiped away every drop.

“After what you've been through I can't say I'm surprised. I told people Bert Merkle was a bad man, but nobody listened. And I warned Jason's mother that
she
should put a stop to it. Whatever he was up to over there, it was no good.” She sighed, folding the dishcloth. “Not that she
could
put a stop to anything. Or make Jason do anything, either.”

“No. Nobody could, I guess.”

I didn't add that whoever had started the trailer fire, it hadn't been Jason; instead I suddenly wanted to get my bath taken and go home with Wade, who waited outside as promised.

Merrie Fargeorge's warm kitchen with its good-food smells, beautifully tended houseplants, and shining-clean surfaces still felt like a safe haven. But DiMaio was out there somewhere, too, and I'd already pushed my luck too far once tonight.