The Perfect Match (16 page)

Bruce ran forward with the hose, Guthrie on his tail.

Dan climbed to the roof, planted his feet, and ripped the cord on his saw. Smoke billowed out of the ventilation as he cut a line. “Be careful, Dan,” he heard softly in his ear. He didn’t look at Ellie and wondered if he’d actually heard it, but the words slowed his heartbeat, made him check his footing. He wasn’t unaware that the trusses could already be weakened, and he could plunge right through to the ground.

“Mitch, what are you doing?”

Dan looked up. He spied Mitch on top of the engine, fixing the monitor for a master stream shot at the building. Designed to blanket the building with water, the fixed sprayer atop the pumper was only used for surround and drown, a last-ditch effort to put out the fire when containment was the only goal.

“Mitch, get down!” Dan saw Ellie running toward the engine, scramble up it. “Are you crazy? If you put water on the smoke, it’ll drive the fire down, right at our men.” She reached him and grabbed at his jacket.

Dan nearly leaped from the roof when Mitch pushed her back. She landed hard on the cab of the engine. Mitch’s words over the open radio made Dan wince. “I’ve been fighting fires in this town for nearly a decade. You’re the idiot who keeps sending our men in there to—”

“I found a body. A woman.” Joe’s voice stopped them all short. “Upstairs.”

Ellie bounced to her feet. “Simon, get an egress ladder up to that window. Bruce, Guthrie, I want water on that staircase. Keep the fire away from the second floor while Joe and Doug bring her down.”

She pointed at Mitch, her face fierce, and even Mitch stopped. Dan recalled the day in the hospital when she’d verbally mopped the floor with him, and he silently hoo-yahed his girlfriend.
Get ’em, Ellie!

“You wanna help?” she barked at Mitch. “Help Dan on the roof.” She stalked past him and climbed down from the rig. “I need a second line! Where’s my squad?”

John Benson ran up, pulling on his turnout coat. Dan chewed out another hole while John laid down another hose line. A cheer went up from the crowd in the park
ing lot when Joe and Doug appeared at a window. Joe climbed out to the ladder, then reached for the victim and carried her down over his shoulder, fireman style. John helped hand her over to Steve Lund, paramedic. The two firemen then turned to run back inside.

“Look out!” Ellie hollered.

In a collective breath, everyone froze as the front entrance of the store, an archway of river rock, collapsed.

“Bruce!” Ellie’s voice betrayed panic.

Dan crossed the roof on pure adrenaline. “Bruce!”

No reply.

Dan stopped long enough to connect gazes with Ellie. He saw in them his worst nightmares. “No, Ellie, don’t.”

“We’re shorthanded, Dan. Keep cutting,” she said into the radio. Crisp. Tight. Low and dangerous. He watched in paralyzed fear as she dashed to the engine and grabbed her SCBA gear. “Joe, help me.”

Instinct took over.
Sorry, honey, but there is no way you’re going in there.
Fire licked out of the first-story windows, and smoke billowed from the second story like a giant coal furnace. “No, Ellie!”

Ellie didn’t even look up. She dropped her helmet and pulled on her mask, her Nomex hood, then grabbed her helmet back up and reached for her axe.

Dan didn’t take a full breath as he slid down the ladder. He hit the ground running. John Benson and Joe had seized the other hose line and were wrestling it toward the side entrance of the building. Ellie hustled one step behind them, ready to spring forward the second they turned on the water.

“The first rule in firefighting—don’t go in without a buddy!” Dan screamed while he rounded the building.

Ellie whirled, and for a second her eyes widened, shock written on the small square of her face behind her mask. Then Dan tackled her. Full out, down to the ground. Pinned her tight.

He shocked even himself. Pulling a deep breath, he scrambled off her. “You’re not going in there.”

She sprang to her feet, hustler that she was, and if it weren’t for the fact that Joe and John were already moving into the building, he had no doubt she’d have decked him right there.

“C’mon,” he said roughly and charged into the house.

Ellie stood there, gasping. Her bones ached, and her pride smarted. First Mitch and now Dan? Tightening her grip around her axe, she followed him into the fiery tomb, pressed through gray smoke, and immediately dropped to her knees. In a blink, the daylight vanished. Her flashlight dug out a lit path barely large enough to make out her hand in front of her face. A swirl of writhing smoke pressed against her mask, separating her from Joe, John, and Dan. Their voices cut out, eaten by the fire, and the immediate isolation turned her skin clammy.

How she wished for a thermal imager—a handheld device that could pinpoint temperatures and help her crosshair a body or two. But Deep Haven’s firefighting funds had already dipped in the red after her purchase of PASS devices for every man. Something she would never regret, especially hearing the full alarm of Bruce’s PASS screaming, telling her he’d been down longer than ninety seconds.

Taking a deep breath and deliberately slowing her breathing, she recited her thermal layering—three hundred degrees one foot above the floor, five hundred degrees five feet up, and twelve hundred at the ceiling. She hugged the floor, one hand on her axe, the other reaching out for the hose line. Inching forward, she veered toward what she hoped was the wall, aiming to keep one hand against it. Dan crawled ahead of her somewhere in the cloying heat, lost in the blackness. She kept her breathing calm, refused to try and discern the objects she ran against—a table, a chair, a rack of clothes?

“Find anything, Dan?” she yelled.

“Negative.” Dan’s voice sounded constricted, as if terror had him by the throat. But she knew him better—the only terror that choked him was the fact that she’d darted in on his tail.

She’d have to fix that.

She bumped into something, wondered if it could be the stairs. Climbing up she immediately felt the heat press against her, then the hard bump of a wall. A chair. She dropped to her knees and pressed on.

Blackness swirled around her, despite the steam John and Joe churned up with their spray. Her flashlight a pitiful beacon, she fought the sense that the room might be shrinking, trapping her, and crawled faster.

The wall ended, whatever hallway they’d traversed now merging into a larger room. She aimed for the hose line Bruce and Guthrie had dragged in, praying she’d trip over it.

When something fell hard against her, she instinctively threw up her arm in a protective move, expecting the ceiling to rain down. Instead, an arm ranged past her
peripheral vision. She clamped onto it, reeled him in. She nearly cried when Guthrie shoved his mask up against hers. She squeezed his shoulder, turned, and hauled him toward the door.

Heading away from the fire seemed easier, less like having to tug her courage along with her body. She followed the hose line toward the dent of light, the ease of heat. Ellie muscled Guthrie out into the smoke-filled sunshine just as the man began gasping, his air pack near its last puffs.

She tore off his mask. “You okay?” She clutched his coat and yanked him away from the fire, while he backpedaled to keep up. “Steve! C’mere and check on Guthrie!”

A second later, the nurse from the hospital, complete with a helmet and a turnout coat, rushed over to Guthrie as he crumpled onto the street. Ellie didn’t miss the mix of pure fear and hero worship on the young firefighter’s face as he stared up at her. She crouched beside him and patted his arm. “You did well, Guthrie. A real hero.”

He smiled and coughed as his lungs spewed out the toxins that had seeped through his mask.

Ellie sprinted back toward the building, and Dan nearly bowled her over, dragging Bruce out, holding one of Bruce’s arms over his shoulder. Barely conscious, Bruce had lost his helmet. Burns laced his neck, ugly red and black curls of skin. Ellie dropped her axe and grabbed Bruce’s other arm. Together she and Dan carried him to the rescue squad. Steve had already affixed an oxygen mask to the victim Joe had rescued and had her on a litter, ready for transport.

Monte, an on-call paramedic from St. Francis Township, ran over and helped them lower Bruce to the ground. The man had lost consciousness, and his body sagged like a dead man’s. Ellie removed her mask and helped Monte ease off Bruce’s equipment. Bruce had suffered second-degree burns on his ears, forehead, and scalp.

“I found him facedown, a part of the ceiling joist pinning him to the stairs.” Dan flashed a look of agony at Ellie, and she too easily remembered the day Dan had found her, similarly pinned.

“He may have a spinal injury.” Steve ran over with a C-collar and snapped it on while Monte opened Bruce’s jacket.

Steve looked up at Ellie. “We’ll take it from here. Go.”

Ellie had frozen as she stared at Bruce. The man was a carpenter by trade. What would he do if he’d been seriously injured? If he couldn’t walk again? The image of his blue-haired wife, Ruth, her round, smiling face telling her that she’d heard good things about Ellie filled her mind. Oh yeah, great things. Like how she put her men in danger.

She turned away and hurried to the front of the building, her radio to her mouth. “Joe, John, you’d better be on your way out.”

“Right behind you, Ellie,” came Joe’s voice, and she glanced over her shoulder to see them running away from the blaze.

Flames licked out of every window, smoke filled the harbor, blackened the sky. Mitch had ignored her—or perhaps seen the writing on the wall—and sprayed an arc of water from the monitor on the engine. Another
hose team composed of Ernie and Simon now doused the smoke shack. She hadn’t even known they’d arrived.

She stood watching her crew and knew she’d failed them. Mitch had been right. They should have remained on the perimeter and launched a big water attack. Instead she’d launched a Custer charge on the building and nearly gotten Bruce and Guthrie killed. In the distance, she heard the whine of the Moose Bay Fire Department. At least they could assist with the containment. She eyed the sparks that littered the Loon Café. “Joe, John, go lay some containment spray on the café before we have another catastrophe.”

She backed up to see the damage. The General Store was a bonfire, the fish house a charred frame, and nearly a hundred onlookers stared in disbelief at the buildings.

She wanted to drop to her knees and sob.

Dan came up to her, his mask over his face, his helmet in his hands. Concern darkened his already blackened, sweaty face. “You okay?”

She blinked at him, frowned. Then his meaning rushed back to her. He’d tackled her. Tried to keep her from going into the fire. Now that he mentioned it, she ached from head to toe and right down to her heart. “Yes. I’m fine.”

She turned away from him, watching the inferno, trying to gather the shards of her command and fighting the bitter nip of tears. “But after we’re done here, you need to turn in your gear and your pager. You’re fired.”

D
an sat on a chair in the ER waiting room, his elbows on his knees, running his hand around the inside of his helmet. Joe had elected to pace away the stress of waiting for Bruce’s prognosis, and Mona sat beside Ruth, holding her hands in a tight supportive clench. Only the second hand of the clock and the occasional ringing telephone dared interrupt their silent vigil. As usual, profound words eluded him, and the best Dan could muster for himself or Ruth was, “Please, God, let Bruce live.”

Mona seemed to have the ability he lacked in comforting the elderly woman. She had wrapped her in a hug, squeezed tight, shed tears, and reminded her that God loved them. Mona should be the town pastor.

He tried not to think of Ellie’s parting shot—
you’re fired
. He deserved it, the rottweiler he’d turned out to be. He’d broken his promise to her; he’d done a flying tackle, right between her and her job. No wonder she looked like she wanted to chew him up and spit him out.

He’d kept his wary distance as they fought to contain
the fire. The Moose Bay Fire Department had helped them wet down the café and World’s Best Donuts, located just behind the General Trading Store. Neither building had been lost, although the store burned to its frame. He’d left shortly after the St. Francis Township Department arrived to help with the overhaul, the scraping up and turning over of the smoldering beams, opening the furniture and standing walls to reveal embers that might reignite. Ellie had picked up a long-handled axe and joined the crew, regardless of the fact that her own firefighters sat exhausted on their engine, drinking bottled water, defeat lining their faces.

Footsteps yanked him out of his despair, and he looked up to see Doc Simpson emerge from the ER rooms. His drawn expression betrayed the pain of treating two burn victims. The woman had been identified as a tourist. Her distraught husband had already called their physician in Minneapolis. Dr. Simpson wiped his hands on his wrinkled scrubs while he walked toward them. Dan stood, and Joe stopped pacing. They drew close to Ruth and Mona, a tight circle of concern.

Dan nearly fainted with relief when the Doc gave a grim but hopeful smile. “He’s going to make it. His burns aren’t as bad as we thought. Second degree mostly, one section that will need some grafting.” He folded his arms across his lanky body and pursed his lips. “But his back has me worried. He cracked one of his lumbar vertebrae.”

“Is he . . . ?” Ruth started, her hand shaking as she held it to her mouth.

“We’re hoping his paralysis is temporary. Sometimes, with time, the swelling reduces and movement returns. He has sensory functions; we know that. That is a good sign.”

Ruth nodded, but Dan felt as if he wanted to find a broom closet, lock himself inside, and scream. Bruce, paralyzed? His stomach twisted and he was about to be sick.

“Excuse me,” he said and nearly ran to the bathroom. Breathing hard and sweating, he banged into the room, locked himself in a stall, and braced his arms against the flimsy walls. Breaths came long and loud as he fought his writhing stomach. Bruce—kind, hopeful Bruce—didn’t deserve this. But God didn’t deal in fairness—if He did, ladies like Mona wouldn’t lose their babies, men like Bruce wouldn’t become paralyzed, and sweet children like the Simmons babies wouldn’t suffer for their father’s crimes. God dealt in comfort. In hope.

That thought and a multitude of deep breaths slowed the waves of nausea. Dan closed his eyes, dislodging the tears gathered there. They fell down his cheeks and off his chin.
Oh, Lord, what do I say to them? What?

Silence pressed against him, spliced only by the dripping of a sink as Dan searched for words. None came. Finally feeling like his lunch might stay in his stomach, he left the stall, ran water from the sink, and splashed it on his face. Looking in the mirror, he decided he’d aged about three hundred years in the last two hours. Bags of worry sagged under his eyes, his unshaven chin had collected grime and ash from the fire, his hair stuck out in all the wrong places, looking as if it had been trampled by a moose.

He looked so unpastoral, the sight threatened hysterical laughter. What a joke. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to comfort and lead his flock. They didn’t teach Burn Victim 101 in seminary. He knew his theology . . . but how did a person quote Romans 8:28, even
if he believed it to the marrow of his existence, when a man like Bruce faced a future in a wheelchair? Dan’s attempts to comfort felt hollow and lined with failure and fear of rejection.

He looked uncannily and painfully like the man Charlene had left bruised and bleeding fifteen years ago. Obviously, he was as hardheaded as she’d accused him of being—and even less bright. “You’re an island, Dan. You don’t need anyone,” she’d said, as sunshine brightened her green eyes and kissed the freckles on her nose, looking like a dream just outside his grasp. She’d stood there, hands on her hips, tears running down her face, and severed their relationship with the sensitivity of a hooded executioner. “And until you learn to reach out with authenticity, you’ll never be the pastor you hope to be.”

Ouch. Her words still made him wince. So he wasn’t stellar at sharing his feelings or living on the cusp of his emotions. He liked to think that his temperate nature made him wise, respectable.

Hadn’t Paul admonished them to be temperate and self-controlled? Then again, this was the same man who said he’d rather go to the fires of hell than see his fellow Israelites miss out on salvation. That didn’t sound like a temperate man. Or perhaps passionate and temperate weren’t opposites but two sides of a man’s godly character.

Dan
did
reach out. He visited the poor, the sick. Wasn’t he hiding out in the bathroom now, sweating out Bruce’s pain?

Charlene’s words dug at him while he scrubbed his face dry with a paper towel, making his appearance dreadfully worse, then marched out of the bathroom and down the hall. In the waiting room, Joe had Mona
in a tight clasp as they leaned against each other. Although Mona looked like she’d aged a decade, she managed a weak smile. “Are you okay, Dan?”

His face twitched and he warred between the truth and his stock, pastoral answer. “No, actually. I’m . . .” He sank into a chair, buried his face in his hands. “I’m at a loss. I don’t have any comforting Scripture, anything profound for Ruth or Bruce.”

Mona knelt in front of him. She put her hands on his knees. “You don’t have to say a word. Just do what you did when we lost the baby.”

He frowned at her. He’d done nothing. Absolutely nothing. Words, theology, training failed him.

She smiled. “Dan, you cried. You knelt by our bed and wept. And that act alone told us how much you cared. How much God cared. You reminded us that we weren’t going through this alone.”

Dan stared at her, the frown tightening on his brow.

She shook her head. “Sometimes words aren’t enough. Just
show
them that you love them.”

The words from his sermon preparation flooded into his mind:
“This is My command: Love each other.”

Love? Of course he loved Bruce and Mona and his entire congregation.

“Love each other as I have loved you.”

The thought swept through him like a hot breath. Love like God loved him. Sacrificially. With passion and mind-blowing dedication. Love enough to risk becoming a baby to a teen mother. Love enough to weep for Lazarus, enough to raise the son of the widow of Nain. Love enough to sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane wrestling with His painful purpose. Fully wise. Fully
self-controlled. Fully emotional. Fully God, reaching out with perfect love.

Charlene’s words nailed him:
An island.
Dan never once stepped over his own line in the sand to risk his heart. His service to his flock was polite, not passionate. If he wanted to impact them, he had to invest in them. Perhaps he didn’t have to produce the right words but rather show the right emotions. He had to embrace them with the perfect, passionate, agape love of the Almighty.

Mona took his helmet and stared at it, resting it in her hands. “Sometimes I think you hero types give yourselves too much credit.” She had a smirk on her face, but it faded in a second. “You know, you’re just the messenger. You only need to deliver God’s love. God will do the rest.”

God will do the rest.
Dan nodded, but the words stirred him. He’d been trying to be the picture of God in his flock’s life for so long, he’d forgotten he was only the messenger. Dan wasn’t responsible for solving their problems, just pointing them to the one who could.

Perhaps, instead of trying to solve their problems, instead of having the answers, he would simply be . . . himself. Transparent.

He touched Mona’s hand. “How are you? I haven’t . . . I should have . . .”

She turned her hand and held his. “Getting by, day by day, in God’s grace. I know He has a family out there for us. I’m just waiting to see how He is going to accomplish that.”

Dan stared into her green eyes, and her faith soothed the ragged edges of his heart. “God bless you, Mona.”

She smiled. “Oh, Dan. He already has.” She looked at
Joe, who stood a breath away. A tear caught on his lower lash. When he smiled at his bride, Dan’s throat thickened. Oh, how he longed for a love like theirs, a love that could ride out the storms, a love that wouldn’t fold against a stiff wind.

A love that would survive the refining fires. Obviously he hadn’t found that kind of love with Ellie.

Love?

As Mona stood to hug her husband, Dan closed his eyes, bridling a soft groan. Yes, he loved Ellie Karlson. She’d stormed into his life with all the gentleness of a hurricane, yet he had never felt so breathtakingly alive. So hungry for a person’s smile. So revived by her laughter. She challenged every assumption he held about women, but that seemed to only make his blood flow thicker, filling every gap in his chest. Ellie Karlson had leveled his defenses, and for the first time in his life, showing that love felt invigorating. Right.

And she’d just axed him out of her world.

He clenched his jaw against a rush of pain. Now was not the time to think about the gash she’d left in his heart. Opening his eyes, he swiped his fingers across them, then rose. He retrieved his helmet from Mona and, tucking it under his arm, made his way to the ER. He might not be able to tell Ellie how he felt, but Ruth and Bruce needed their pastor, their friend. He’d reach out with his emotions, mourn with them, and believe that God would do the rest.

Ellie stood in a huddle, conferring with the incident commanders from the St. Francis Township and Moose
Bay Fire Departments. Over their shoulders, she watched steam and wisps of smoke spiral into the deepening twilight. Moisture saturated the air like the cough of a primeval beast, and the smell of smoke, melted plastic, and charred furniture clogged every breath. She felt as if she’d run about thirty miles, laden with her air pack and bunker pants.

Right now she needed to interview witnesses or at least gather names and confirm that the overhaul process could be terminated. Tomorrow she’d do a walk-through and see if she could pinpoint the source of the fire. On her first glance, she suspected it might have been ignited by the smokehouse that abutted the General Store. Mack’s had burned clear down to the foundation, and only quick thinking on Mitch’s part had kept it from igniting the café and sending the blaze along Main Street.

She wanted to huddle in a ball, hide under her helmet, and cry. She felt sick. Not only had she gotten into a near fistfight with one of her firefighters—who happened to be right—but a man on her watch had been seriously injured.

She’d hand in her resignation as soon as she filed her report.

“How’s your man?” The fire chief from the Moose Bay Department, a squat, elderly, bear of a man who looked like he had a few thousand decades of firefighting under his belt, gave her a look of concern.

She shook her head. “I don’t know yet. I’m headed up there after we’re done here.”

“What a shame. Keep us posted, will you?”

Ellie nodded, making a mental note to ask Romey to keep her in the loop after she left.

The Moose Bay chief shook his head as he surveyed
the damage. “The General Store building has been a fireball waiting to ignite for years. I’m just surprised it took this long.”

Ellie frowned. “Why?”

“Proximity to the smokehouse, wiring that dates back to the fifties. No fire escapes. A fire chief’s nightmare. We were fortunate today. We could have lost more men.”

Ellie didn’t comment. One tragedy seemed sufficient. She stared at the steaming pile of charred timbers. The second story had finally caved in on itself, and the crew had to pull apart the timbers to douse the smoldering cinders. The onlookers had dispersed; only a handful remained to pull their coats around themselves and brave the slick wind to watch the process. Ellie noticed Bonnie in the crowd, her arm in a sling, her face red and puffy. Ellie couldn’t ignore the fact that the woman seemed to pop up at every fire she’d been at in the last month.

“You’ve set a new record here, Karlson,” said the chief from St. Francis Township, a burly Native American with the name Crow stitched to his jacket. He didn’t wear a turnout coat like Ellie and had kept his distance from the flames, preferring to command from afar. But
he
hadn’t lost any firefighters today.