Last Lie (29 page)

He kept his hands, and his weight, on my back the whole time.

"Okay. Now climb back onto me, Jonas. When you have your arms locked around my neck, you can take your feet off those rocks."

"They're not really rocks," he said.

I knew that Jonas, like his mom, could get argumentative when he was anxious.

I was pretty sure he was anxious.

41

"
W
here we heading?" I asked.

"The pantry in the kitchen, where the dumbwaiter door used to be. There's a secret entrance in the back of the pantry. A closet for the closet."

I said, "Of course it has a secret entrance."

"Ma used to tell me that Dad would go into the pantry to get a box of cereal and then he'd completely disappear. Two minutes later he'd walk into the kitchen from the other side with a box of Froot Loops. She calls him Houdini."

I noted the present tense. At some times Adrienne was deader to Jonas than at others.

"She never knew?" I asked.

"Nope."

I was sure Adrienne knew. But it was a great story for Jonas to remember about his father.

"I looked Houdini up online."

"Show me later?" I said.

"Yep."

For the next ninety seconds, I continued to descend the shaft. We were both coughing and trying not to cough as Jonas felt along the walls for indications that we'd reached the back side of the magic pantry. "Here," he said finally. "To the right. It's a ledge."

"You go. I'll follow you."

He scrambled off my back onto the ledge. I felt like I'd just shed a ton. "Is there room for me?" I asked.

"Come on," he said.

I squeezed in beside him. I could not feel either my fingers or my toes. The smoke was starting to burn my lungs.

"How does it open?" I asked, fearing that the answer would be that Jonas didn't know.

"There's a latch," he said.

"Great."

"But I can't find it. I thought it was . . . here."

The cavalry was arriving downstairs, in the basement. I could hear men and women yelling. Radios crackling. Someone said, "Too hot. Back out. Back . . . out. Wait for the firefighters."

At that moment, I couldn't think of a worse place to be trapped during a fire than where we were. Rescuers would never find us in this hidden, sealed shaft.

"Here it is," Jonas said.

"Terrific."

"I can't move it. But I found my phone. It was on the ledge."

Yes!
"Do you have a signal?"

Seconds passed. The screen illuminated. "Nope," he said. "No bars."

"Let me try the latch." I contorted myself to reach past him.

"I've been here before. You pull it out," Jonas said.

"Gotcha." The latch was smooth and carved from hardwood to fit a hand like a glove fits a hand. Perfectly. But I could not get it to budge either.

"Are you pressed against the door, Jonas?" I asked. I was hoping the mechanism was a pressure latch and that the solution to the problem was simple.

"Yes," he said.

"Maybe that's the problem. I'm going to go back out into the shaft so you have some room to scoot away from the door. It should open right up then."

I did not want to go back out into the shaft. But I found footholds and I eased myself back out.

Immediately, Jonas said, "Got it. Only two more steps to open it."

Two more steps? What the fuck, Peter?
"Two more steps?"

"Dad liked puzzles."

Peter, I swear--
The door swung open. Through the thick smoke, I could see a band of light down at floor level. Jonas tumbled out. "Stay close. Stay low," I said. "Breathe only down near the floor." I launched myself onto the ledge and then scrambled headfirst out the secret door into the pantry.

Suddenly, behind me, a loud
swooooosh
erupted but was instantly enveloped by an explosive roar. Bright flames rose like Satan's breath up the dumbwaiter shaft from the basement. Intuitively, I guessed what had happened. Someone in the basement had opened the old dumbwaiter door, creating a chimney effect in the core.

If that had happened five seconds sooner . . . I would have been rotisseried.

As I slammed the door closed behind us, Jonas said, "Holy shit. That was close."

The profanity surprised me. But, in context, I had no problem with it. I asked, "What's nearer? The front door? Or the french doors to the deck?"

"Same same." Another Adrienne-ism.

"We have to get out of here fast." The front door was solid wood. If it had a keyed dead bolt on each side, as the asshole had warned us, it did us no good. We could get all the way there and still wouldn't be able to get outside.

The french doors in back were glass. Even if they were locked, we could bust our way out. "Help me find something to break glass," I said. "Something heavy and hard. A frying pan, a . . ."

We were working by touch, searching the shelves in the pantry. "What's this?" Jonas said a moment later.

I couldn't see it. I felt the shape of what he was holding. I said, "It's a sharpening steel. It's perfect. We're going to go out on our bellies toward the glass doors in back. You're leading. Go. I'll be on your heels."

The smoke was thick everywhere in the room. I thought I could see the bright lights of flames dancing from burning draperies on the walls. Even bigger flames were shooting up the outside of the house. The black smoke was billowing, drifting. The supply seemed endless.

Jonas crawled like an infantryman, leading us directly to a pair of glass doors at the back of the house. I passed by him right at the end, reminding him to stay down. I reached up to try the latch. The door was dead bolted, as the asshole had promised.

I couldn't stop coughing. Breathing at all was becoming a major concern. I kept telling myself we were almost out. I tried to say
I hope this is safety glass,
but I failed to get the words out of my throat. I put my lips next to Jonas's ears and rasped, "Move to the side. Cover your face."

I hoped Jonas did as I asked. I whacked the glass with the steel. Breaking the glass was much harder than I thought it should have been. It took me half a dozen blows with the heavy steel to get enough glass to break to make an opening that would allow us to fit outside. I helped Jonas scramble out onto the deck. I tasted a little fresh air.

"Get away from the house as fast as you can," I yelled.

He immediately collapsed as his lungs revolted in a coughing fit.

I could feel heat behind me. I turned my head to see a big upholstered chair erupt in flames. I started to follow Jonas outside.

Breathing a big gulp of what I thought was fresh air was a bad idea. It wasn't fresh. My lungs spasmed. I collapsed in the opening in the door in a fresh fit of coughing.

Through the drifting smoke outside, I watched a firefighter emerge. He was wearing one of those big firefighter's jackets. He scooped up Jonas and began to carry him away from the danger on the deck.

The fire department had arrived.
Thank God.
The relief I felt that Jonas was safe felt better than oxygen. But the firefighter was carrying Jonas in the wrong direction. He was heading up the hill
away
from the house. Not toward the rescue vehicles that would be parked on the lane in the other direction.

I heard someone yell, "Stop! Right now! Stop!"

It felt like bad advice. I decided I would stop
after
I made it outside the burning house.

"Stop! Put . . . that child . . . down. Now!"

I knew the voice. I knew the tone.
Lauren?

"Take another step and I swear I will shoot. Put him down!"

I put all my energy into moving a few more feet. Just before I made it out through the opening in the french door, I realized I was slowly passing out. The awareness that I was losing consciousness, and my inability to do anything about it, was the strangest sensation for me. I felt as though I was heading down a slide at a water park, unable to influence my momentum. I would splash down when I would splash down.

"Stop!
No!
"

I heard a shot.

Through my cerebral haze, a second or two later, I heard a second shot. At least, I thought I did. Part of my brain was trying to convince the rest of my brain that the shots I'd heard were merely an echo of the shots that had been fired earlier inside the house.

The gunshots made no sense to me. Not then.
Help had arrived. The danger was over. Right?
Nothing was making much sense.

Fighting what felt like an inexorable slide to unconsciousness, I looked back toward Jonas. I didn't quite trust what I was seeing. The firefighter holding Jonas in his arms had one leg of his jeans turning from blue to black. No, not black.
Red.

Why so much blood? Why is the fireman wearing jeans?

Jonas remained in the man's arms. Jonas's face was nothing but fear and soot. He was screaming and coughing. Screaming and coughing.

All around me, the house was painted in flames. Parts of the deck were on fire, too.

The firefighter took an additional step toward the stairs that would lead off the deck and up the hill. He tried to take another, but his next movement was more of a lurch than a step. He made one more lurching motion as he fell forward onto the decking, landing partially on top of Jonas.

No! I have to be hallucinating this. Maybe I'm already unconscious. This can't be happening
.

The next thing I saw seemed more like an apparition than an event. Lauren emerged from the distance and entered the narrow frame of my vision. She was almost ghostlike as she hobbled through the smoke toward the distant part of the wooden deck. Her Glock was in her right hand. Her cane was in her left, but she was holding it as a weapon, not as a mobility aid.

She limped directly up to the fallen firefighter. Without any hesitation, she put the foot of her weak leg hard onto the man's throat. I mean
hard.
She was using all of her relatively insubstantial weight to pin the wounded man to the planks with the sole of her shoe. With the tip of her cane, she scooted a revolver away over the planked decking. It disappeared over the edge.

Then she used her leg to push the man off our son, and she helped Jonas to his feet.
Gotta be hallucinating.
She tucked her cane under her arm, and gripped our son as though she never planned to let him go. Her other hand continued to hold the Glock. She had it aimed at the chest of the fallen firefighter.

I had no idea what was going on, but I was wondering how any of this was going to end well. Lauren shooting a firefighter had to be something that had unwelcome consequences.

The last thought I had was in the form of a simple question:
What the hell does any of this have to do with an acquaintance rape at a housewarming party?

42

I
was in the back of an ambulance, parked on the lane not far from our front door, when the roof of the old ranch house collapsed.

I didn't know how I felt about it, other than the relief I felt that Jonas and I were no longer inside. Lauren was next to me. She had a hand on top of my head, smoothing my hair. Her skin was dotted with soot and ash.

"The kids?" I asked. It felt as though all the sound I made was swallowed by the oxygen mask on my face.

Lauren said, "Grace is with Diane. She's fine."

"Jonas?" I felt a small hand grip my hand.

"Right here. Hi, Dad," Jonas said from behind my head. "I'm glad you're okay."

Dad.
My heart healed. "You cool?" I asked.

Jonas said, "Cool enough for government work."

Oh God.
"Emily? How is Emily?" Lauren's eyes closed briefly. My heart felt like it broke anew while I waited for her to reopen her eyelids. She didn't want to tell me.
Oh my God.
"Please tell me she's okay. Please, please, please."

"She's in surgery. Sam drove her to the emergency vet. She was cut badly. It's deep. She bled . . . a lot."

"I tried to pack the wound. I tried to--But I had to go find Jonas. I had to--"

She squeezed my arm. "I know. The vet will call us as soon as the surgery is over. Emily would have died without your first aid. She has a . . . chance at least. You gave her that. She's a strong girl."

I couldn't imagine losing her. I forced myself back to the moment. I gripped Jonas's hand. "You were great in there," I said. "Terrific. So brave."

I couldn't see his face. "I shouldn't have been there," he said. "I screwed up. Big-time. I wanted to see the plans. For the house. From the architect. I wanted to know what they were doing."

Of course you did.
"You were great, Jonas. In that shaft? Unbelievable." The screwing-up part? The shouldn't-have-been-there part? There would be plenty of time for us to talk about that.

"You were, Jonas," Lauren said to Jonas. "Right to the end."

"Everybody else is fine?" I asked. I didn't even know whom else I was worried about.

"Well, you're not doing so good," Lauren said. "You inhaled a lot of smoke, much more than Jonas. They're going to take you to the ER. See what you might need."

"I'm fine," I said.

"No, you're not fine," she said. "You were almost blue when they pulled you out of that doorway."

I leaned in Lauren's direction, tilted the oxygen mask away from my mouth, and tried to whisper as I said, "Did I see you shoot that fireman?"

"Shhh," she said. "Later. We're not supposed to talk about that. The sheriff is only giving me a minute in here with you. Professional courtesy. It's a kind gesture; he could get reamed for it. But I agreed not to talk about what happened tonight until after I give my statement. I'll be gone for a while . . . while I'm being . . . interviewed."

I lifted my head far enough off the stretcher to see that Lauren was flanked inside the ambulance by a sheriff's deputy.
Oh shit.
I waved. She didn't wave back.

Jonas leaned over to my ear. He said, "It wasn't a fireman, Dad. Mom shot the asshole. In the leg. One shot. She's good."

I thought I heard two shots. I saw his revolver.
I turned back to Lauren. "What? You? The asshole was a fireman? How did you know--"

"Shhh. I made a commitment to the sheriff. We can't talk about this. I promised."

The deputy made a zip-it motion across her lip. She said, "One more word, we're gone."

Lauren leaned over and kissed me lightly. "We'll talk later. I should go with the deputy now."

"Do you need Cozy's help? You should have Cozy's help."

"No," she said. "I'm good. I am good."

"Call Cozy, Lauren. Call Cozy." My voice, I thought, sounded like an old lawn mower motor with a misfiring spark plug.

"Jonas? You still have your phone? Look up this name online: C-o-z-i-e-r M-a-i-t-l-i-n. Tell him what happened. Tell him your mom needs him at the sheriff's headquarters."