A Safe Place for Dying

Twenty-six

Amanda’s house loomed out of the smoke, dark against the backdrop of leaping fire. Its massive double front doors gaped open, sprung out on their hinges like huge hands, framing the black mouth of the entry. In the pulsating orange light from the inferno next door, the house looked like it was screaming.

Stanley’s station wagon was parked in the driveway, colorless, strewn with charred pieces of wood and roof tile and ash. I pulled open the front passenger door. It was empty. I ran up the brick walk to the entry.

“Amanda? Stanley?” I yelled. There was no light inside; none of the windows faced the flames. I shouted their names again, holding my breath to hear above the pounding in my chest and the rumbling of the motors at the other end of Gateville.

Only cold air came back at me from the darkness inside.

I stepped into the foyer. Grit crunched under my shoes like I was walking on pulverized glass. I turned to shut the ruined doors to the noise outside so I could hear in the house, but they’d been knocked loose on their hinges and wouldn’t pull back. I moved further into the foyer.

Something creaked above my head, and suddenly a curtain of coarse grit, some of it the size of hailstones, started raining from the ceiling. I threw up my hands to shield my face and slammed back against the wall, eyes shut tight. Dust filled the foyer. Then, just as suddenly as it started, the shower of grit stopped. Coughing, I peered through my fingers. Barely visible in the faint light from outside, a massive crack, two inches wide, had split the ceiling, running from above the entry doors into the blackness of the center hall. It had been plaster that had fallen, bits and chunks of it. The blast next door had shaken Amanda’s house loose on its foundation.

The jimjams started in my head, taunting: Why was the station wagon still in the driveway?

I tried to force them away. The station wagon meant nothing. They could have left on foot, carried the art the few hundred yards to the guardhouse. Simpler, and quicker because they wouldn’t have stopped to load the car.

The jimjams tittered: Why haven’t they been seen?

I squinted across the foyer, to the darkness where the center hall was. Thirty feet into that hall, then into the living room, to the wall above the fireplace, and I’d know the Monet was gone. Then I could run.

I started moving along the foyer wall.

POP. POP. Loud, like gunshots, from upstairs. I stopped, pressed back against the foyer wall.

POP. POP. Closer now, right above my head, but not gunshots. Worse. They were nails, ripping out of the walls upstairs. The house was coming down.

Behind me, the orange glow beckoned through the open, ruined front doors. Perversely, it was now a beacon to safety. I turned away from it.

POP, this time followed by the long rip of wood splitting.

I turned and pressed my chest against the wall, hoping it was safer there, away from the center of the falling ceiling. Followingmy outstretched fingertips like a blind man, I pushed into the dark along the foyer wall. Fist-sized chunks of plaster nudged at my feet. I kicked at them, unseeing, sending them skittering noisily across the ceramic tile. The rubble on the floor was getting thicker the farther I got from the support of the outside walls.

I got to the entrance to the hall. Ten shuffle-steps, then twenty; my hand found the edge of the arch to the living room.

Something heavy crashed above, a ceiling joist or a roof rafter. I pressed under the arch, holding my breath, certain whatever had broken loose was going to come through the hall ceiling. A minute passed, then another. The house settled and went still.

I moved around the arch, following the wall into the living room, struggling to remember the location of every chair, table, and sofa.

My fingers nudged cold, curved metal. It was the first of a pair of wall sconces, directly across the room from the Monet. I moved faster along the wall, sure now of where I was in the room. I touched the other sconce, then next to it, the lined brocade fabric of the living room draperies. I felt past the window and found the frame of a small print. It wasn’t valuable; she could have left it. The wall ended. I turned right. Five more paces and my hand struck something, knocking it to a soft thud on the thick carpet. A pewter candleholder, late seventeenth century. Valuable, but not something she’d grab in a crisis. I moved on.

My foot kicked a table leg, setting something wobbling. I stabbed my hand at the noise in the dark, found the lampshade, stopped the wobbling. It was the Chinese red lamp on the wine table. Below the small Renoir oil.

My fingers moved up the wall, tentative, afraid, and too quickly found the little bumps on the beaded frame. The jimjams danced on the skin of my scalp. Shut up, I heard myself shout, maybe aloud, maybe only in my mind. She could have left the Renoir, if there’d been no time. It was not the grand prize.

I was almost there.

If there were ever a fire, I would get the Monet out of the house before I’d call the fire department.

Five steps and I bumped the glossy, carved wood of the fireplace mantel, the fireplace she would never use because of the risk of smoke. Palms curled, I worked my fingers upward, willing them to find nothing but the smoothness of bare plaster.

I touched wood.

I felt along the gilded surface, needing to distrust my touch, to be wrong, but there was no doubting the double curve or the intricacy of the outer edge. My fingers came to the lower right corner, followed the odd angle. The hexagonal angle.

The Monet was still on the wall.

The jimjams roared.

She and Stanley had come into the house. The car on the drive and the yawning entry doors had told me that.

But they’d never left.

A staccato burst of pops from upstairs echoed through the house like machine-gun fire. Then the rips came, four or five of them, each one long and loud and groaning, like the bones of the house were being ripped out by some giant, unseen hand. Something crashed and shattered on the foyer floor.

I tried to take deep breaths, tried to think. Amanda and Stanley had come to the house. They’d unlocked the doors. There’d be time, they would have thought, time to get it all; the Monet first, of course, but the Renoir, too, then the Remington bronze, the other oils.

She hadn’t even gotten to the Monet. She’d been stopped the minute they had entered the house-and been kept from leaving.

The house groaned.

I put my ear hard against the wall, heard the distant sirens, the idling diesel engines, sounds transmitted from outside. Mixed in with them, I thought I heard the almost imperceptible sounds of wood and steel shifting. But maybe that was the sound of my own fear.

I could hear no voices.

There was no time now to hug the wall. The house was coming down. I started into the center of the living room, arms outstretched like a fool playing at blind man’s bluff, kicking at the dark first with one foot, then the other. A dozen steps and I found the arch. Far to the right, down the hall, a faint orange haze came from the foyer. I turned to the left, toward the kitchen. Amanda kept a flashlight there, in a drawer next to the sink.

I followed the hall as quickly as I dared, finger touching the wallpaper in front of me. A right turn and I saw more orange light, stronger, flickering from the doorway to the kitchen.

The kitchen windows faced the burning house next door. The blinds were drawn, but enough light crept between the slats to make out the outlines of the counters. I walked across the room. More grit, more chunks of plaster. Every ceiling in the house was falling. I felt along the granite countertop, covered like the floor with fallen plaster, following its edge to the cold steel of the stainless refrigerator, then to the sink. I reached down and found the drawer handle on the lacquered birch front. I pulled it open. The round black rechargeable flashlight was in front.

I switched it on and aimed it low, sweeping across the debris on the kitchen floor-and stopped.

Blue pant legs powdered talcum white by plaster dust. Silver tape at the ankles, below the knees, and around the chest, binding her upright to the bentwood kitchen chair. Arms taped together behind the chair back. Funny bracelet with a single charm, a gold question mark, dangling loosely on an unmoving wrist. I’d given her that bracelet.

And, grotesquely, a brown paper shopping bag, a hole ripped for a mouth, jammed on her head. A wet splotch of something red seeped through the paper above the left ear, where it pressed against her skin. She didn’t move.

Two steps and I ripped the bag up and off. Aimed the flashlightat the far wall, enough for me to see, but not enough to blind her. Bent down to look in the eyes I saw every night when I couldn’t sleep. Sparkling eyes, laughing eyes. But not now. Now they were lifeless, unseeing, the blacks of the pupils crowding out almost all of the brown. My heart chattered. They were dead eyes.

Something was jammed in her mouth.

I dropped to my knees, holding the flashlight under my chin so she could see my face as I worked the fragment of towel out of her mouth. She was as rigid as stone. Then her eyelids fluttered, closed, jerked open to look again, and comprehended. Her breathing came faster then, and she started making rapid sideways motions with her eyes, wildly trying to see around the room. “Don’t talk,” I whispered.

I got up, stepped quickly to the knife block on the counter, and took the first one my fingers closed on. I cut away the tape from her legs, waist, chest, and arms.

“Don’t talk until we’re outside.” I reached for her arms.

She stopped me, pulling my head down with cold hands. “Stanley,” she whispered in a cracked, dry voice. “Stanley.”

“We have to get out of here.” I put my arms around her and pulled her up. Caught again the scent of her perfume, felt the familiar weight of her. For one crazy moment, I didn’t want to move.

“Can you walk?” I said into her ear.

She nodded.

I held her for the first slow steps, then moved in front of her so she could walk with her hands on my shoulders. The flashlight beam was dimming as we followed it out of the kitchen and down the hall. She dropped her hands away when we got to the living room arch.

“No,” I whispered behind me, but she had already turned. I hurried to catch up to her, aiming the weakening beam in front of us as we crossed the living room to the Monet. “Just that,” I said. She nodded.

She’d never installed security hangers, saying once that she couldn’t bear the thought of a thief damaging the Monet trying to get it off the wall. I handed her the flashlight, reached up, and took it down.

The flashlight was dying as I followed her out of the living room.

Pop. Pop. POP.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her under the arch.

“What is that?”

“Nails from the roof.”

The upstairs went silent. We hurried out from the arch, through the hall and the foyer, and out into the orange light. She looked down Chanticleer and stopped.

A hundred yards east, a small knot of men, some holding flashlights aimed at the ground, had stopped behind two idling fire trucks. She stared at the cluster of men standing in the flashing red lights, then looked at the flames leaping from the shell of the gutted house next door. She turned to me, a question forming on her lips.

“Not now,” I said. “Come on.” I reached for her arm.

She stepped back, touching her head where the blood had dried. The words came in a rush. “I made Stanley take me up here when I found out about the bombs. He didn’t want to. He said it wasn’t safe.” Her eyes locked on mine. “I made him, Dek. I made him bring me up here.”

“Did Stanley hit you?”

“Stanley?” Her eyes flickered from me to the knot of men down the road and back to me. “Why would you think-”

“He’s got to be in this, Amanda.” Saying aloud for the first time what had been working at me since I realized Till didn’t know about the tunnels. “Did Stanley hit you?”

“I don’t know who hit me.”

Again I reached for her with my free hand. “No,” she screamed, taking two full steps back. “Can’t you understand? I made Stanley take me here. We were finding our way in the dark, to the kitchen toget my flashlight, when something hit me. Stanley must have been hit, too. It couldn’t have been Stanley.”

“We’ve got to find Till.” This time I got her arm. I started pulling her with my free hand, toward the street, toward the men and the fire trucks stopped a hundred yards down Chanticleer.

The new blast flared high into the air, showering sparks into the night. At first I thought it was from the house next door, but then my eyes registered the dark space between the two fires. It was another house, the one beyond the burning pile next door. Something clattered behind us. I turned to see one of Amanda’s front doors break away from its top hinge and fall to the ground.

“I made him, Dek,” Amanda shouted. “I made Stanley take me up here.”

I looked at her face, saw fear and panic, but saw the future, too. I saw the guilt that would haunt her for the rest of her life if Stanley died inside her house.

I grabbed the flashlight she was holding and shoved the Monet at her.

“Find Till,” I shouted, pointing at the cluster of men behind the fire engines. “Tell him the bomber is in a tunnel that leads from your basement. Tell him everything is going to go up. Tell him Stanley is in the house.”

“But where will you-”

“Do it,” I yelled.

She hesitated, nodding her head, but still frozen. I grabbed her shoulders and shook them hard. Then she ran, the Monet swinging under one arm, stumbling in a contorted, hobbled jog down Chanticleer toward the group of men huddled behind the two fire engines.

I ran back into the house.