HF01 - Almost Forever Page 3

  Zach and Lucas had gone in only seconds ago. She hadn’t seen them come out. Manny was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t remember anyone coming out, but things were so crazy, maybe she just missed it. Maybe they’d left through the back door like she had earlier.

  Most of the crew were working the fire from the outside. Surely Manny had ordered them all to evacuate the building by now. Adam had a lot of respect for the captain. All the firefighters did. He wouldn’t have let them stay if they were in danger. Adam always said Manny’s motto was “Risk a lot to save a lot; risk nothing to save nothing.” So why weren’t they coming out?

  Three fire engines were parked beneath the building now, one of them blocking her view of the main entrance. A ladder truck from Station 2 backed slowly around behind the building, ladder extended high into the night. Bryn held her breath as two firefighters scaled the rungs and disappeared over the ledge of the roof. She didn’t think Adam was one of them, but from such a distance she couldn’t be sure. What were they doing?

  The fire roared, spilling from identical rows of arched windows on the northern and eastern sides of the building. There was an eerie hissing as the water from the fire hoses hit its mark.

  The battle seemed to go on forever, yet it seemed the more the hoses doused the fire, the larger it grew. Droplets of water pelted her head. Bryn glanced up, thinking it must be raining. Then she realized the gutters were flowing with runoff from the fire hoses. The gutter across the street started to fill with water, whirls of steam lifting off the surface of the black brine.

  Someone shouted, and suddenly the whole world seemed to tilt. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought they were having an earthquake.

  Across the street, a groan like something from the throat of a living beast split the air. Wood against metal, creaking, splintering. And then another explosion. Like seeing a train wreck in slow motion, she watched her world tumble around her.

  As if they shared one voice, a shout went up from the crews below. And before all their eyes, the building buckled and caved. Beams fell away, piercing what was left of the roof, angling against girders and rafters, and piling up on each other in slow motion, like the pickup sticks game she used to play when she was a kid.

  The sounds that tormented her ears morphed into something otherworldly. The structure screamed and moaned as it collapsed, as if it had a life of its own.

  If anyone was still inside—

  Bryn couldn’t let herself finish the thought. No one could have survived that inferno, let alone the weight of the old building crashing in on itself.

  On her knees in the tough grass, she stared into the flames, her thoughts as lucid as they’d ever been, and yet somehow, at the same time, completely chaotic. Someone was screaming. It took her a minute to realize the sound was coming from her own throat.

  The Gomez children huddled in front of her, and she spread her arms and leaned over them, trying to protect them from the debris. Someone pressed heavily against her back. Linda? She couldn’t hold steady any longer. She went down on her side, rolling to the left so she wouldn’t crush the children.

  She struggled to her knees again and gathered the youngest girls close. Shivering, panting for oxygen, she watched the thick, ash-pocked smoke billow up into a black November sky.

  They had to get the kids to safety, had to get the clients farther away from the building before another explosion rocked them.

  She passed Miguel off to someone, and held the little Gomez girl on her hip as she helped Susan herd people around the east side of the office building.

  But she worked with a numb certainty. Somehow she knew: Adam was dead.

  And she was to blame.

  A hush fell over the crowd

  milling at the edge

  of the parking lot.

  And then Bryn saw why.

  3

  The sun sketched a thin line of scarlet on the eastern horizon between the office park and the Co-op’s grain elevators. The charred skeleton that had been the Grove Street Homeless Shelter stretched its bones against the dim glow, puffs of smoke still rising from the debris. Bryn viewed the scene through slits of eyes swollen with smoke. She felt numb, unwilling to let her mind function, for fear it would reveal a truth she could not bear.

  Less than three hours ago, she’d been playing gin rummy with Charlie, oblivious to the horror this sunrise would lay bare. Now she was as empty as the smoldering ruins across the street.

  Moments ago two pastors from one of the Hanover Falls churches had taken Linda Gomez and her children away in a van. Said they’d put them up in a hotel for a few days until something could be worked out.

  Somehow Bryn managed to stand of her own volition and answer the queries of the police officers and investigators who questioned her and Susan and the others at the scene. No, she hadn’t seen Zeke since she came on duty at eleven tonight. No, she hadn’t smelled smoke . . . not until the alarms were already going off and the first floor hallway was rolling with it. Yes, she’d seen several firefighters go into the building. Molly Edmonds was among them. And she thought she’d recognized Zach Morgan. But she could identify only one of them with absolute certainty.

  Adam Hennesey. Her husband.

  Inexplicably a hush fell over the crowd milling at the edge of the parking lot.

  And then Bryn saw why. A stretcher was being carried from the ruins of the shelter. And then another. And a third. Even from across the street where she stood, there was no doubt that it was bodies—dead bodies—that weighted the canvas. Not survivors.

  Where was Adam? Oh, dear God, where was he? Maybe he had gotten out after all. Maybe he was inside, helping them bring out the survivors. Please, God.

  Even the wind ceased as the stretchers were carried from the building and lined up in the parking lot like so many funeral biers.

  Dozens of firefighters and emergency crews clustered at the site. And as the stretchers lined up, one by one, the men and women lifted hands to soot-blackened, tear-stained faces and saluted.

  Bryn couldn’t look at that row of bodies any longer, but her eyes darted from one uniformed firefighter to the next. They stood at attention, horror and overwhelming grief turning their expressions to stone. She watched two of the men sink back onto the bumper of a ladder truck and bury their faces in their hands.

  A wave of horror surged through her, shoved her to her knees. How many men had died today? How could it all have happened so fast?

  As if in a vision, she saw herself in the office early in her shift, filling out admission papers for a homeless man who smelled like a garbage truck. Disgusted, she had leaned away from him, attempted to breathe through her mouth. The stench was so bad she’d started to feel queasy. In her mind’s eye, she watched herself open a book of matches, tear one off, and strike it on the cover. The man—she couldn’t even remember his name now—had watched her light the cinnamon-scented candle and extinguish the match. She hadn’t even thought about whether he knew she’d lit it because of his body odor.

  A cloak of dread hovered over her, and she racked her brain to remember if she’d blown that candle out before she and Charlie rode the service elevator down together. Her heart stuttered. Surely she had. You couldn’t be married to a firefighter for two years without getting the candle lectures. The one she’d lit was a cheap pillar candle, but it sat on an acrylic coaster on a clear surface of the desk. It should have been safe even if she had left it burning. But sometimes those cheap candles smoked like crazy—especially in that drafty office.

  Susan kept a couple of candles in the office to help with the odors. Technically, the candles weren’t supposed to be lit, but Bryn wasn’t the only one who sometimes put a match to the wick when the person sitting across the desk smelled like they hadn’t bathed in weeks.

  They were always careful, but Adam would have a fit if he knew a candle had even been allowed in the building, let alone lit.

  A chilling thought sliced through her. The fire alarm
system in the hospital hadn’t worked properly when Susan bought the building, and she’d replaced it with a series of individual units, but they were touchy and triggered by the least bit of smoke or dust. A couple of weeks ago the alarm in the office had gone off at one o’clock in the morning when one of the volunteers burned a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Bryn reset it, but it started blaring again. She must have climbed up on the desk half a dozen times, resetting the detector and trying different batteries. But every time she thought she’d fixed it, it would start shrieking again. She’d finally popped out the batteries just to shut the thing up.

  The office was small, and there were smoke detectors just outside in the hallway. Susan hadn’t been on duty that night, and she hated to wake her up at home in the middle of the night over a stupid faulty smoke detector. She’d scribbled a note to herself to leave a message for one of the trustees to take a look at the smoke detector, but she couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually delivered that message.

  A reporter thrust a microphone in Bryn’s face, yanking her back to the present. Another young man stood by with a TV camera. But Bryn turned her back on them. She couldn’t have formed a coherent sentence if she’d wanted to.

  Her breath hitched. Had she left that candle burning? Oh, dear God. Please. No. But . . . she couldn’t have. She rubbed her temples as if she could somehow magically make her brain call forth the memory of blowing that candle out. She needed that memory. Needed it the way she needed oxygen.

  But even if that memory crystallized in her mind, she wasn’t entirely innocent. The thought almost sent her to her knees. Adam had only been on duty tonight because she’d talked him into working overtime, told him they needed the money with Christmas coming. Which was true. But it wasn’t the real reason. She’d convinced him because Susan had asked her to fill in for another volunteer. And the only way she could be at the shelter was if Adam didn’t know.

  Even though it had been Adam’s boss, David Marlowe—Susan’s husband—who had suggested Bryn volunteer at the shelter in the first place, after the first time Adam picked her up at the shelter and saw the motley group of men smoking and leering outside the entrance, he had been on a campaign to get her to resign. Then last month, after one of the shelter’s teenage resident-volunteers was assaulted and nearly raped by another resident, Adam forbade Bryn to come back.

  “It’s too dangerous,” he declared. “If you think you have to have more hours, tell them at the library. At least there you’d be getting paid for your time.”

  Adam just didn’t get it. Even if the city library had the extra hours to give her, they closed at eight every night. Filling those lonely nights at home was the reason she’d been attracted to the volunteer shifts at the shelter in the first place. She’d grown to love the work for so many other reasons.

  But since the day they’d started thinking seriously about having a baby, Adam had gone overboard worrying about her. If the sidewalks were slick, he walked her to the car. If she got out a ladder to change a lightbulb, he jumped in and did it for her. He’d about come unhinged when she got a speeding ticket a couple of months ago. And this time it wasn’t about the money. “If you’re going to be a mom, you’ve got to start taking care of yourself, babe.” His expression had been so serious when he said it. It was kind of sweet, really.

  This thing with the shelter, though, wasn’t negotiable for her. They were desperate for volunteers. They needed her. And she needed them. From the first day she’d started working with the clients at the Grove Street Homeless Shelter, she’d felt like she had something to offer, that her life counted for something for the first time in a long time. And so, for the last few weeks, she’d secretly continued to come, arranging her shifts around Adam’s so he wouldn’t know. She hated having to be secretive. But what was she supposed to do when he was so pig-headed about this?

  The wail of sirens started again, and Bryn looked up to see Chief Brennan crossing the street to where they were. His head was bowed, and his broad shoulders looked like they bore the weight of a thousand worlds.

  “Mrs. Marlowe? Susan . . . ?”

  Susan looked up, and Bryn didn’t think she had ever seen such dread, such knowing dread, in a pair of eyes before. Oh, dear God. David Marlowe must have been inside the building.

  Peter Brennan lifted his head, removed his fireman’s helmet, and clutched it in front of him like a shield. He held Susan’s gaze. “I’m sorry.”

  Bryn’s breath lodged in her lungs.

  Susan started shaking her head, a low moan seeping from her throat. Her knees buckled, and before Bryn could reach her, she slumped to the ground. Brennan went to her, and with Bryn on one side and the fire chief on the other, they helped Susan to her feet.

  “Maybe he got out,” Susan keened. “Maybe . . .” She sagged against Bryn, making her stagger to keep from losing her own footing.

  “We . . .” Peter Brennan cleared his throat. “We’ve identified him, Susan. I’m so sorry.”

  “No . . .” Susan shook her head again.

  “Do you want to see him?” He motioned to the makeshift morgue across the parking lot.

  Susan nodded and squared her shoulders.

  Peter offered his arm. “Come with me.”

  Susan let go of Bryn. Putting her arm through the crook of Peter’s elbow, the shelter director took a step into the street.

  Bryn watched, numb, a sure knowledge rising inside her. One of the ambulance attendants strode into the street, stopping to speak with Peter. She saw the chief motion behind him—toward her—and her breath caught.

  “No!” The word caught in her throat, strangling her. She sank to her knees in the dead grass, willing the man to walk on past her, pleading with heaven for this to all be a terrible mistake.

  She watched the street through a haze. When the man drew close enough for her to see the dread and regret in his eyes, she knew the truth.

  He would just have to find

  some way to go on

  without the woman

  he’d loved for as long as he

  could remember.

  4

  Monday, November 5

  The procession of caskets was almost more than Garrett Edmonds could stomach. Worse was the fact that his wife’s white coffin stood at the end of the row, in contrast to the sleek, dark mahogany and oak boxes lined up at the front of the auditorium. Molly’s coffin. Those were words he’d never dreamed of uttering. She was twenty-eight. And twenty years from now, when he was fifty-two, Molly would still be twenty-eight. Forever young, forever beautiful.

  Forever dead.

  The velvet seats in the Hanover Falls City Auditorium were nappy with age and abuse. Garrett sank deeper into the chair they’d escorted him to, in the second row with other family members of the fallen. Now he wished he’d insisted on sitting in the back.

  He felt vulnerable, claustrophobic, with so many people filing in behind him. It took everything he had not to stand up and walk to the back . . . keep on walking right out the door.

  But he would stay. For Molly, he would stay.

  The auditorium filled quickly, and within minutes, ushers were opening the banks of exit doors to the east and west to let the outside crowds spill in. The cold air offered a little relief, but the outside aisles quickly overflowed with mourners and curious onlookers, and the room grew stuffy again.

  It struck Garrett as a strange irony that they should be breaking fire codes left and right on an occasion like this. But no one dared suggest turning anyone away. This was history in the making, and every resident of Hanover Falls would be bragging twenty years from now, “I was there. I stood right here in this aisle at the funeral for the fallen firefighters of the Grove Street inferno.”

  Odd how the media had adopted that title for the event. Some of the newspapers had even taken to capitalizing the words, as if it were the title of a best-selling novel or a blockbuster movie. The Grove Street Inferno. Local reporters had to be in their glory with
reporters and camera crews from Good Morning America and Nightline and even, reportedly, Oprah’s people, descending on the Falls.

  This tragedy had put Hanover Falls on the map of the nation. Garrett winced to realize that he felt a twinge of pride that Molly was a part of it all. He’d glued himself to the TV over the weekend of interminable nights, clicking through channel after channel, searching for another story with a new angle about the fire, another flash of Molly’s picture on the wide screen, until he fell into a drugged stupor.

  Or maybe that was from the bottle of Ativan his friend Rick had pressed into his hand that first morning after Molly’s death. It didn’t really matter . . . as long as he didn’t have to feel anything.

  A commotion at one side of the auditorium caused him to look up. He spotted his principal, Barbara Cassman, and her husband, and Mary Brigmann, who taught with him at Hanover Falls Middle School.

  Behind Mary, in dress shirts and ties, Trevor Hanes and Mark Lohan trudged. And behind them, Jillian Payne and Michaela Morrison in fancy dresses, Michaela’s hair all done up in curls on top of her head. They kept coming, a dozen or more of his fifth-grade students filling the third row, sober expressions marring their youthful faces, their eyes searching the auditorium. Looking for him, he realized. Worried about him.

  He swallowed hard, looked away, and bowed his head. He couldn’t meet their eyes without breaking down. And they didn’t need to see that. They needed to know he would be okay. That he was strong. That he was getting through this.

  An overhead projector cast the names of the fallen firefighters onto a tattered scrim at the rear of the stage. The caskets—and thus the list of names projected onto the wall—were arranged by rank and seniority.