The Fireman (24 page)

“Take us back down to third gear, Nurse Willowes—brilliant.”

John swayed from side to side as the fire truck ran up the hill, slowing as it went. Harper began to go over in her mind what had to be done when she got him into the infirmary. She would need medical tape, gauze, Advil, scissors, a sling for his arm, compression bandages, a plastic splint. Beyond the Advil and the tape, she wasn’t sure how much of that they had. They crested the hill—

—and continued on down the lane. The chapel flashed by on the left. The tires churned up a glittering spray of icy snow.

“You missed the turn to the infirmary,” she said.

“We’re not going to the infirmary. I can’t be away from home all night. My fire will go out.”

“So what? Mr. Rookwood, you’re not making any sense. You have smashed ribs and a dislocated or broken wrist—with possibly a fracture to the forearm or the elbow as well—and you need to turn this thing around.”

“I am long past the point where I could turn anything around, ’m’afraid, Nurse Willowes.”

The truck continued to slow, thudding and rocking from side to side, as it passed through a gap in a thick band of fir trees and came out by the boathouse. He effortfully pulled at the wheel, braking as they rolled inside, past shelves of kayaks and canoes, and parked the truck in the center of the bare concrete apron.

He turned the key and they sat in cold, silent darkness. John sank forward until his forehead rested on the steering wheel.

“I have to get across the water, Nurse Willowes,” he said, without looking at her. “I
have
to. Please. You said you want to help me. If you meant it, you’ll get me back onto my island where I belong.”

She climbed out and went around the truck to help him down.

He got his good arm over her shoulders and she lowered him, laboriously, first to the running board, then to the ground. His face was so pale, it shone in the dark. His eyes widened with sudden wonder. Harper had seen that often enough in her days as a nurse. When the hurt came in full, it often left the injured as amazed as if they had seen a magician levitate.

They hobbled together over the glassy white surface of the snow, clinging to each other and creeping along in the mincing steps of the elderly.

A rowboat sat on the bank, oars stood up inside it. No canoes and no sign of Father Storey and the others. But then they wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. It had been about that long getting to South Mill Pond in the boats, and they hadn’t had to contend with fog.

A mist had come up and was piled atop the water, smothering the horizon. John’s little island was no more than three hundred feet off shore (at low tide it was almost possible to walk to it) but now Harper could see no sign of it.

“I hope they can find their way home in this,” Harper said. “And that they’ll figure out I went with you.”

“Father Storey knows the way,” John said. “He’s been taking kids paddling along this shore since you were a kid yourself. Probably longer. And he knows I wouldn’t have left you behind, either.” Ignoring, Harper thought, that if it wasn’t for her,
he
would’ve been left behind.

John lowered himself gingerly into the bow and Harper shoved the rowboat off the bank, then clambered into the stern. She settled on the thwart and took the oars.

“Row,” he said. “Take us across the River Lethe, ferryman. Ferrygirl. Ferrybabe.” He laughed.
“Allons-y!”

He reached for an oil lamp, set on the floor between the seats, raised the glass chimney, and stroked the wick with his finger. It ignited: a hot lick of blue flame. He glanced at her to make sure she was watching. Even hurt as he was, he loved the attention.

The oars clanked in their locks. She had a sensation of gliding out, not across the sea, but into the sky, across an impossibly buoyant acre of cloud. The mist parted before them, curling from the bow in luminous feathers.

Harper was still peering into the pale, cool, billowing fog, looking for the island, when they struck ground, jarred to a hard stop.

“Going to be a bit sloppy when we step out, but I don’t imagine either of us will drown in the mud,” he said. “Follow me and step where I step.”

He got one leg over the side of the boat before she could get to him, and then fell sideways. He was holding the lamp and it flew from his hand, shattered somewhere in the dark, and went out. He shouted in pain, then laughed—a bad, drunken cackle that both frightened and irritated her.

She sprang from the boat and sank past her ankles into the tidal mud. It was like stepping into icy, sticky pudding. Harper lost a boot, struggling through the rank muck to his side. She lost the other boot as she helped him to higher ground. It was sucked off her foot with a wet smack of suction and she tromped on without it.

They made their unsteady way up onto damp, firm sand, through the cool wet. Harper spied the shed, a dim green wall with a white door set in it, and steered them toward it.

“You’ll have to come back and drag the boat up.” John lifted the latch and put his shoulder to the door. “The tide will come in and it will drift off if you don’t.”

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the gloom. She saw a cot; clothes hanging from a line; stacks of paperbacks that looked as if they had been soaked and dried many times, and were now swollen out of shape. A silvery fog-glow came through a pair of skylights, the only windows in the room.

In the back of the single-room workshop—that was the word that best described the place—was a big cast-iron barrel, turned on its side and raised off the floor on metal legs. Her father had a similar sort of thing in Florida, in his backyard; he used it to slow-roast BBQ pork shoulder. A chimney pipe was welded to one end, and bent away to disappear through the back wall.

The barrel had a sliding hatch in the side. Driftwood and heaps of sea grass were set in neat piles next to the homemade furnace. John let go of her and lurched unsteadily across the floor of narrow wooden planks, stopping before it. He peered in at a flame that burned in weird hues of green and blue.

“I’m here, darling,” he said to the coals. “I’m home.”

He found a few dry planks of driftwood and pushed them in the fire, his hands extending into the flame up to the wrists. Then he retreated, holding his sides. His eyes were glazed and blank and he never looked away from the furnace. He backed all the way to the narrow cot. When his calves struck it, he sat down.

Harper reached him, helped him lie back, and began to unbutton his shirt. He looked past her at his barrel full of fire. It seemed to hold him fascinated.

“Close the hatch,” he whispered.

She ignored him, loosened his suspenders. “I want this shirt off.”

“Please,” he said and laughed weakly. “She might see us and get the wrong idea.”

Harper put her palm to the side of his face. She didn’t much care for the feverish heat she felt in his cheek. Harper tugged his shirt up, began to work it off him. It was no trouble to free his left arm, but when she began to wiggle it down the length of his right arm, he made a quick, gasping sound, somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

His right elbow was swollen, an ugly shade of purple mottled with darker, almost black spots.

“Can you bend it?” she asked.

The Fireman cried out when she lifted the arm gently, flexing the elbow, and moved her thumbs carefully over the knobs of bone. Nothing broken, but the soft tissues had gone fat and knotty, ligaments pulled into ragged threads. The wrist was worse than the elbow, already as thick around as his calf, with a deep blue bruise under the skin.

She took his right hand in one of hers and gripped his forearm with the other hand. She rotated the wrist, this way and that, looking for subluxation. A lump of bone—the lunate—had popped free from the others, come completely out of place.

“Is it bad?” he asked.

“Nothing serious,” she said. She was going to have to realign it, the sooner the better. She crossed her thumbs over his wrist. His pale, almost colorless face was dewy with sweat.

“Say,” he said. “You aren’t about to do something awful to me, are you?”

She smiled apologetically and
squeezed
. The lunate squirted back into place between the other bones with a wet little
sock!
He shivered violently and shut his eyes.

Harper looked past his arm at his right side, discolored with a grotesque patchwork of bruises. She traced her fingers along his ribs. Fracture there. Fracture here. Another. A fourth.

“Harper,” he breathed, gently. “I think I might pass out.”

“It’s all right if you do.”

But he didn’t. Not yet. He hunched on the edge of his mattress, shivering helplessly, battered arm clutched to his abused right side.

Harper wanted a sling for him. She shoved herself to her feet, began to sort through the clutter close to the bed. She found a box of dirty Frisbees, tennis balls, croquet hoops and mallets. Everything anyone would want for an afternoon of quiet fooling around outdoors. Tucked in behind the box was a camp longbow that had seen better days and—
there
. A canvas quiver with a few sad-looking, largely de-feathered arrows stuck in it. She dumped them clattering onto the floor. Another minute of hunting and she was able to turn up a pair of garden shears.

She snipped the quiver open from one end to the other, making a canvas trough. Harper loosened the strap that would’ve held the quiver to an archer’s back. When she returned to the bed, John had dropped onto his left side across the mattress. He was still shivering, but in weak little pulses now. His eyelids drooped.

Harper fitted his right arm into her better-than-nothing makeshift sling, working with patient, deliberate care not to unduly jostle his wrist or elbow. He took a few short gasping breaths, but otherwise endured without a sound. When the arm was settled into place, she picked up his feet and flopped them on the mattress, then arranged a blanket over him.

She thought he had drifted off to sleep while she was tucking him in, but he whispered, “Now the hatch, please. To conserve heat. It’ll keep the fire from burning down too quickly.”

Harper pushed a curl of brown hair back from his sweaty temple and whispered, “All right, John.”

She crossed to the furnace, but hesitated before clapping the hatch shut, her gaze drawn by the weird, vibrant hues of the blaze within: she saw flashes of jade and rose. She watched in a kind of peaceful trance for almost half a minute, and was just about to close the panel . . . when she saw her.

For a moment there was a face in the fire: a woman’s face, with wide, startled eyes set far apart, and the smooth features of classical statuary, a face very like Allie’s, but fuller and older and sadder. Her lips were parted as if she were about to speak. It was not a hallucination; not imagined; not a trick of the dancing firelight. The face in the flames stared at her for a full count of five.

Harper was trying to scream, but could not find the wind. By the time she was finally able to inhale, the woman she had glimpsed in the fire was gone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

13

Harper retreated, watching the flames for further wonders. Any thoughts of closing the hatch had been startled out of mind. She looked around for John, to ask him what she had just seen—to ask him what the
hell
was in the furnace—and saw he was asleep. His breath came in a thin, strained whistle.

She felt her own exhaustion deeply. Weariness was a dry, bitter ache in every joint. She settled in a soft chair with threadbare linen cushions, in a good position to watch the fire, to keep an eye on it in case it did anything else.

The flames rippled and flowed, casting their ancient hypnotic spell, draining the will and thought out of her head. It cast a blaze of heat, too, that was as agreeable as a comfortable old quilt. A part of her was afraid the woman would part those incarnadine curtains of fire and peer out at her once more. Another part of her longed to see her again.

She might’ve closed her eyes for a while.

A cry jolted her upright—a small sob of pain or terror. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, a minute or an hour, and didn’t know if the cry had been real or imagined. She listened intently, but heard nothing more.

The flames had burned down some and she recollected at last that John had wanted her to close the hatch. It took all of her energy to get up and shut the sliding steel door. After she sat again and for a long while she floated, untethered, in the peaceful gray zone between sleep and wakefulness. She was as free and adrift as an empty boat on an empty sea, a good way to feel, but a bad thing to think, and suddenly she sprang all the way awake. The boat. John had warned her it had to be pulled farther up on the beach or they would be stranded.

The thought of losing the boat startled her out of the chair and onto her feet. The rest of her mental cobwebs were blasted away the instant she stepped outside into an abrasive, salty gust of wind.

It was near dawn and the fog was pearly and silken in the first light. The breeze was scattering it, pulling it to silvery scarves, and through a great rent in the fabric of the mist, Harper could see to the opposite shore.

Three canoes had been hauled up onto the snow. Everyone had come back alive, then. Nick was on the beach, dragging one of the canoes across the sand. Harper wondered who would’ve sent a little boy, all by himself, to haul the boats back into the boathouse. This close to morning, he belonged in bed.

She waved. The instant he saw her, he gave up on what he was doing with the canoe and began waving himself, frantically, flailing both arms over his head in the universal gesture of distress. And at last she registered the wrongness of the moment. Nick was not dressed for the weather, wore only a light black fleece and his slippers. And the canoe—he had not been dragging it
toward
the boathouse, but down into the water. No one had sent him to stow the canoes. He had come to find her.

In two steps she was up to her ankles in the brackish, stinking muck once again. Her boots were in that slop somewhere. She didn’t look for them, just ran the rowboat into the water and stepped in.

By the time she pulled up alongside the dock, Nick was waiting with a mossy length of rope. He wound it around a cleat at the end of the boat, then seized her arm. She believed if he had been big enough he would’ve flung her up onto the pine boards, like a fisherman hauling in his catch.

He wanted to run but he didn’t want to let go of her, either, yanking her arm as they climbed the steep slope. Nick’s breath screamed in his throat. She couldn’t go as fast as he wanted, crunching along in the granular snow in her bare feet.

“Stop,” she said, and made him hold up with her, pretending she needed to catch her breath when really she intended for him to catch his. “Can you write? What’s happened, Nick?”

Harper slipped her arm out of his to mime the act of writing, scribbling an invisible pen on the foolscap of the milky air. But he shook his head, desperately, miserably, and ran on, not bothering to try and drag her anymore.

The mist rolled down through the trunks of the red pines, flowing like the ghost of a great flood, pouring over the ground, back toward the sea, in slow motion.

She followed him—pursued him, really—to the infirmary, where he had at last stopped to wait for her at the bottom of the steps. His aunt was beside him, dressed in thin flannel pajamas and barefoot herself.

“My father—” Carol said, her voice coming in savage bursts between sobs for air, as if she and not Harper were the one who had just charged half a mile up the hill through the snow. “It’s my father. I prayed, I
prayed
you’d come back and you’re here and you have to say you’ll save him, you have to
say
.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Harper said, taking Carol by the elbow, turning her toward the infirmary. “What happened?”

“He’s crying blood,” Carol said. “And he’s talking to God. When I left him he was begging God to forgive the person who murdered him.”