House of Fire (Unraveled Series) (19 page)

“Jesus, James,” she
yelled as she flipped around.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” she
said.

“What can I do to
help?” James offered, putting his hand around her hip and pulling her in. She
rested her head on his chest, feeling the warmth of his body. She breathed in
his smell, letting it comfort her as she gripped the phone in her hand. She
needed Evie’s help.

“Trust me,” Delaney
said. “I need to know that whatever happens, you’ll always love me.”

“Of course, I will.
You know that,” James whispered, lightly kissing the top of her head. “We’ll
find her, and she’ll be fine.”

“I hope you’re
right,” Delaney replied, wanting nothing more than James’s words to be true.

“Your dad said a
police officer is coming,” James offered. “It’s a good start. Who is this
Holston Parker guy? What do you know about him?”

“I don’t know that
Sanchez is going to help,” Delaney said as she pulled away from him. “Holston
Parker is an extremely dangerous man. I know it’s hard to believe what I am
saying, James, but he has influences everywhere, including the police. We have
to be careful.”

“Delaney, this is
crazy,” James replied.

“I know it is. You
promised you would trust me.”

“I will, but I think
the truth needs to come out. Your dad needs to tell us what happened twenty
years ago. You need to tell us how you know Holston Parker. The secrets need to
come out if we ever want to find Ann,” James urged. “If there are clues that
can lead us to her, then we need to figure those out.”

“I know,” Delaney
agreed. She walked forward before she stopped and wrapped her arms around his
waist. “I’ll always love you, too.”

24

June 17 - 10:00 a.m

The hum of the
machine buzzed in her ear, the blur of the screen making it difficult to read
the words. She made out the year, 1991. Evie would have been four. Ann and
Michael Jones’s barn was gone. She scanned the article again, looking at the demolished
ruins of the barn. It had gone to auction after they had failed to sell the
family farm for more than three years. It had been over sixty-years-old, aging
and in desperate need of expensive renovations. It couldn’t hold the amount of
cattle needed in a family farm that was profitable in the nineties. No house on
the premise. Evie sat back, exhaling as she processed the last fact. There was
no house. What had happened to the house?

The anonymous bidder
had purchased the farm without any of the equipment and cattle, for the sum of
twenty-five thousand dollars. It seemed low to Evie, but it had been more than
twenty years ago. The building was dilapidated and the anonymous bidder had
torn it down with no immediate plans for using the land. It didn’t make any
sense. She was missing something.

She flipped through
the years, settling back on 1988. She would have been two - the year that
Holston had adopted her. She leaned forward, wiping her brow as she studied the
blurry headlines. She paused to look at her phone. 10:03 a.m. She had been
there for almost an hour; she couldn’t stay for much longer, but she needed
something to go off of before she made her first visit. She vowed to give
herself fifteen more minutes. She was close; she could sense it. As she
continued to scan through the articles, her disposable phone buzzed on the
table, the vibration rattling with a low thud.

“Ryan,” Evie
answered, feeling her pulse quicken at the thought of hearing Ryan’s voice.

“I saw you called
while I was out on the boat. Are you okay?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I
just needed to hear your voice,” Evie said as she looked at the fuzzy screen
ahead of her. She exhaled, falling back into her seat to let his voice comfort
her.

“Have you found
anything yet?”

“Not exactly, but I’m
close. I can feel it. Holston took out the President of Leighton last night. I
have to do it soon before…” Evie replied.

“Before what?”

“Before something
else happens. He’s not finished. I know he’s not. It has something to do with
Ann and Delaney Jones. I know they’re in danger. I just don’t know what he has
planned,” Evie said.

“Go back to the
beginning like you said,” Ryan offered.

“I am. I’m real
close, Ryan.”

“Good. End it all.
For Elizabeth and my dad.” Ryan paused before adding, “And Ethan.”

“I will,” Evie
replied, ending the call with Ryan. Evie smiled, sitting back up to the edge of
her seat. She needed to be reminded of the pain Holston had brought to so many
lives. Evie wasn’t only doing this for herself, she was doing it for them.

She flipped through
the pages of the small paper, only a few more months left in the year until the
words caught her eye. “3 dead, 1 survivor in house fire.” Her throat clenched,
her eyes glued to the screen as the vibration buzzed once again on the table.
Only two people knew the number to her phone. Ryan was one. She picked it up with
her eyes still scanning the words in front of her. The only survivor had been
Delaney Jones. She finally looked down to read the message on her phone:
Ann
is gone. I need your help. 456 Nature Lane. The police are on their way. - D.

Evie’s body clenched
as she shot her eyes back to the screen. She scanned through the rest of the
article before punching the address into her notes on her phone. N874. Hwy 54.
Amberg. Her sweaty finger slipped back to her texting screen and responded:
I’ll
be there in 10. - V

25

June 17 - 10:05 a.m

Delaney looked down
at her beeping phone, reading the text and quickly closing it before Mark could
get a look at it. She had ten minutes to get something from her father,
anything that would help her put the pieces together. Delaney glanced at the
faces of James, Mark and Michael, all standing in the middle of the kitchen,
helpless and frustrated. They were the type of men that wanted to fix things,
make things better, and they had no way of fixing this situation. They didn’t
know how to find Ann.

“Let’s go back to the
beginning, Dad,” Delaney started. “I know Mom’s not here, but it seems like the
past is going to come out, whether you like it or not. Maybe this is all tied
together?”

“Your mother wouldn’t
want me to,” he replied, rubbing his forehead again.

“We know that, but
she’s not exactly here. That’s the reason why we need to know,” Mark added as
he leaned against the counter.

“I’m going to need to
sit down,” Michael said as he pulled out a stool for himself and collapsed into
it as if he had already exhausted himself.

“It can’t be that
bad,” Delaney suggested as Michael looked up at her with his head tilted,
“We’ll understand, whatever it is.”

Michael paused,
drawing in a deep breath.

“The reason why your
mother left with you is because she couldn’t stand to be in Amberg anymore. She
couldn’t stand to live there, be in the barn. Be anywhere near that town after
what had happened,” Michael started, his voice shaking as he struggled to form
the words. “Your mom and I were in the barn, milking the cows when it happened.
We had no idea. We really didn’t. If we did, we would have done something. It
was electrical they told us - an accident with faulty wiring in the house. The
house was old. I had promised your mother that we would fix it up, but I never
knew the electric work was bad. Had I known, I would have never…”

The silence sliced
through the air. Michael put his head into his hands and let out a large
breath. Delaney stood tensed next to him as she looked up at Mark and James,
their faces drained of any color they had. They all hung on his last words, not
sure if they wanted to hear what he had to say. He finally lifted his head,
emerging from his trembling hands.

“There was a -” his
voice barely audible, “a fire. It was in the morning, before six, when the kids
were asleep. The house was engulfed by the time we noticed. Your mom had ventured
off to feed the cats outside when she saw it. The smoke filled the sky. The
flames were so high. The house. Everything was so black. We tried. I ran in to
get you, Delaney. You were sleeping on a couch in the front sunroom because you
loved feeling the sun on your face in the morning. You begged every night to
sleep on that couch and your mother had let you that night. I came out with you
in my arms, but your mother wasn’t there. She was in the back of the house,
trying to get in, but she couldn’t. The flames were too hot. The smoke too
thick. I tried to go back in the front, but there was too much smoke. I
couldn’t get to them.”

“The kids?” Delaney
whispered, feeling her knees weaken beneath her.

“You were three,
Delaney,” Michael said as he turned to her, his face pale and his eyes red. “So
you don’t remember any of this. Your mother didn’t have the heart to tell you
or Mark or Ben. She couldn’t, so I followed her lead.”

“The kids?” Delaney
felt like someone had reached in and clamped her heart.

“You had a sister and
two other brothers,” Michael’s voice cracked, now looking at Mark who had
leaned against the refrigerator. Tears began streaming down Michael’s face.
“Seth, Owen and Anna. They all died in the fire.”

Delaney collapsed
onto the stool next to her father and wrapped her arm around his shoulders.
Tears flowed down her face as she rocked her body back and forth. Michael broke
down, his back heaving as he cried, unable to control the pain he had withheld
for more than twenty years.

“And you, Delaney,”
he sobbed and turned to her. “You were so small in my arms, your little face
still. I thought you were gone. The neighbors called it in; they saw the smoke
a mile away. They came plowing down with their truck and Patty, sweet Patty,
she knew what to do with you. She brought you onto the grass and laid you on
your back.” He paused, holding her arm as he shook.

“It’s okay. You can
stop, Dad,” Mark offered.

“No, just give me
second,” Michael said as he cleared this throat, trying to gain his composure.
“It’s just that your mother and I… we just don’t talk about it. We can’t talk
about it. It’s been twenty-five years, and it still feels like it was yesterday.
It’s just so ...”

“I can’t imagine,”
Delaney whispered, feeling the weight of the reality that she had three
siblings that she’d never known. That she had never grieved.
How could she
not remember them?

“The neighbor, Patty,
had taken a couple nursing classes at the technical college. She breathed into
your little mouth, giving you CPR, while your mother ran for cold water in the
barn. I can still see you lying on the grass in that little nightgown of yours,
and then you coughed,” Michael rasped. “God blessed us with that tiny, painful
cough of yours.”

Delaney turned to see
Mark crying behind her father. James stood on the side of Delaney, rubbing her
arm through red eyes. Her body shook beneath her as she tried to choke out
words, though nothing she could say would take the pain away. Nothing would
make this go away, to fill this aching, overwhelming realization that her
parents had sustained this loss by themselves for so long.

“And your mother, she
screamed and wept uncontrollably. I tried to go in again, but I just couldn’t.
We just couldn’t,” Michael said. “The firefighters told us later that by then,
it was too late anyway. They were already gone, the smoke inhalation had been
too much for them all. I held your mother as we watched the house burn with our
three sweet babies inside. There was nothing we could do, but sit and watch and
cradle our blessing, Delaney, until the ambulance came.”

“How old were they?”
Delaney asked through her tears. A box of Kleenex appeared over her shoulder,
James’s hand holding it steady as she pulled from the stash and handed a wad to
her father. She kept a handful herself, dabbing at her eyes.

“Seth and Owen were
twins. They were just five and Anna, our baby Anna, was almost two,” Michael
exhaled, wiping his eyes with the Kleenex. “They never got a chance to grow up
in this beautiful world, but we were beyond grateful that we got to spend the
time that we did with them.”

“And so when you saw
Ben and I in the hardware store, it was an easy decision,” Mark offered,
nodding his head as he realized the void that he and Ben had filled for the
Jones family. “And that’s why Mom accepted us with loving, open arms with no
questions asked.”

“We got a second
chance.” Michael pat Mark’s hand on his shoulder. “But you weren’t replacing Seth
and Owen. Your mother didn’t want you to feel that way; she never wanted either
of you to feel like you weren’t loved as much as Delaney or any of our other
children.”

“I never felt that
way. I’m sure Ben didn’t either. We were just so fortunate to have you take us
in. Two older boys with no family,” Mark said. “After what you had gone
through, it’s even more meaningful to me that you took us in, made us your
own.”

“We tried the best we
could,” Michael replied, inhaling as he attempted to control the overwhelming
grief of reliving the tragedy. “And I’m sorry that you had to hear it like
this. That your mother wasn’t here with us to tell you, but I felt like you
both had to know that your mother has lived a hard life. We both have, and
whatever it is that has to be put to rest with Holston Parker, whoever he is,
it needs to happen so she can put it to closure. She worked hard this past year
to settle her score, make peace with her life. Facing death has that sort of
effect on you. At least, that’s what she tells me.”

“I still can’t
imagine keeping it in for so long. Did Mom consider telling us ever?” Delaney
asked as she wiped the last few tears away. Her father’s steadied composure was
helping her gather her own.