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CHAPTER 17

As I struggled to twist the stubborn shutoff valve, my mind sifted through the smidgen of information I could remember about liquid-propane gas, about what it is and how it behaves. LP gas remains liquid only when contained within highly pressurized tanks. After passing through a regulator, it is converted into gas that can then be used to run everything from outdoor barbecues to family clothes dryers.

While still contained in a tank, the mixture, too rich to burn, is relatively harmless. But once released, it grabs hold of any and all neighboring oxygen molecules to create a much leaner and much more volatile mixture. In that condition, even a single spark can set it off. When it goes, it burns at a temperature of 3,500 degrees.

Any fire can be frightening, but 3,500 degrees present a daunting possibility. The very idea scared the hell out of me.

Because propane is heavier than air, it tends to flow like moving water when let loose, pooling in gaseous clouds in low-lying areas, but responding to thermals and drafts as well. I knew that if the upstairs of the house was permeated with the stuff, the basement would be full of it. Propane isn't poisonous, but it displaces oxygen. Not only was the person in the basement in danger of being blown to bits, he was also at risk of suffocation-even if no explosion occurred.

When I finally finished closing the valve, I knew I had lessened the danger somewhat. At least the gas concentration couldn't grow any worse. But that was small consolation. Being killed in a small explosion offers no appreciable advantage to dying in a larger one.

"I'm coming," I called as I ran back through the side yard. "Hang on."

I listened, but there was no answering response. Turning off the valve had occupied only a matter of seconds, but it was possible I was already too late.

I looked despairingly at the solid wood of the basement door where Gordon Fraymore's crime-scene tape had all been removed. My heart fell when I saw the official-looking padlock was still safely in place. If I tried breaking it, would I risk an explosion-detonating spark? I sniffed the air.

Propane itself is odorless, so an evil-smelling sulfur-based compound, ethyl-something-or-other, is added as an odorant at a ratio of about 1 to 80,000, giving the gas its distinctive, carrion-like stench and making it readily detectable. Even outside the door I caught a whiff of the stuff. If the smell was everywhere, so was the propane. Beads of cold sweat trickled down the inside of my shirt, watering the hairs that pricked erect beneath my collar.

I tugged tentatively on the padlock and was astonished when it fell open in my hand. The top had been sawed in half and then repositioned in a way that made it look as though it were still intact. With a single motion, I pulled it off the hasp and threw it down in the grass behind me before wrenching open the door. Immediately, a cloud of propane filled my nostrils as gas trapped in the basement caught the updraft and boiled up into my face.

Looking down the stairs-the same stairs where Kelly had fallen only days before-I saw the figure of a man slumped against the banister at the bottom landing. Taking a deep breath of outside air, I plunged down the stairway.

"Come on," I urged, grabbing the man by one shoulder and shaking him. "Wake up. We've got to get out of here."

Guy Lewis' head lolled limply from side to side. He was out cold. Only when I tried to raise him to his feet did I realize that both hands were tied to the banister.

Last year, Scott gave me a Swiss Army knife for Christmas. I keep it on my key ring so it's always handy. Groping in my pocket, I found the knife and fumbled it open. By then I was beginning to feel dizzy. I stood up, raising my head out of the pooled propane, and took another breath.

I knelt back down and concentrated my whole being in the blade of that knife. The cutting edge is tiny, but I keep it razor sharp. It didn't take more than a few seconds to hack through the gnarly strands of rope, but it seemed forever. I felt myself growing dizzy again, but I resisted the temptation to grab another breath of air. There was no time.

When the little blade finally severed the rope bindings, Guy Lewis fell over and would have tumbled all the way to the hardpacked earthen floor, if I hadn't grabbed him by the shirt and held on.

Guy must have outweighed me by a good fifty pounds, but somehow I hauled him-deadweight that he was-up the stairs and out the door. Then, walking backward, I dragged him through the side yard. His heels scuffed matching trails in the grass. In front of the house, the Mazda and the Porsche were parked side by side. I pulled Guy around the cars until we were on the far side of the Miata. I figured if the house did go up, having the two cars between us and it would provide a little bit of cover and help shield us from the full force of the blast.

When I stopped, I eased him down on the ground and knelt beside him. Starting to come around, he squinted up into the overhead sun.

"Beaumont!" he choked. "Thank God you made it in time. What about the girl? Did you get her out, too?"

"The girl? What girl? I didn't see any girl."

"Tanya. Isn't that her name? Tanya? She's in there somewhere. I don't know where. You've got to find her."

My mother had seen to it that I spent almost every miserable Sunday morning of my childhood imprisoned in one interminable Sunday school class after another. I know all about turning the other cheek, but this was ridiculous.

"You want me to go back in there?"

"We can't just leave her to die, can we?"

I looked at the house. There was no movement around it, nothing to indicate that it was a deadly powder keg waiting for the slightest spark to blow it into oblivion.

"How do you know she's inside?" I asked.

"She said she would be," Guy Lewis said. "She told me."

Mrs. Reeder, my English teacher from Ballard High School, used to complain bitterly about faulty pronoun reference. "Faulty pronoun reference indicates faulty thinking," she would say.

At the time, I should have thought to ask Guy Lewis, "She who? Who are you talking about?" But who worries about grammar at a time like that? Besides, I was far too busy fighting my interior ethical battle to pay that much attention to Guy Lewis' exact words.

I did not want to help Tanya Dunseth. My first reaction, plain and simple, was: "Like hell! Why should I risk my life and limb? No way, Jose! Let Tanya find her own damn way out."

At best, she was a liar and a cheat. At worst, she was a two-time killer with yet a third and fourth attempted homicide chalked up on the scoreboard at that very minute. But when I made no effort to move, Guy Lewis began struggling to his feet.

"If you won't go, I will," he said determinedly. Even though he was still gasping and wheezing, he strove to right himself.

"Never mind," I said in disgust. "I'll go. You stay here and keep your head low." I started away, then had another thought. I turned back to him. "Do you have a cellular phone in that Miata of yours?"

Lewis shook his head. "No. Why?"

"I do. In the 928. Here are the keys. Whatever you do, don't start the engine. It'll set off a spark and blow us to kingdom come. Once you're inside all you have to do is reach inside and hit the power button on the phone to turn it on. Call nine-one-one and let them know we've got a serious problem out here. Tell them to stop all traffic, not to let any but emergency fire and police vehicles down Live Oak Lane. Got that?"

With Guy nodding in understanding, I set off for the house at a brisk trot. I didn't want to be winded when I got there. On the front porch, I inhaled another deep clear breath before opening the door.

I had no idea where to start. I had walked through the house to collect Amber's things from Tanya's upstairs room, but other than that one straight-through shot, the entire house was unfamiliar. I was afraid I'd have to race through the whole place to find her.

I dashed first through the main rooms of the ground-floor level-the living room, dining room, kitchen, and utility room-seeing no one. I came back into the living room and paused there prior to starting up the stairway to the second story. That's when I noticed a pair of glass-paned French doors in a wall just to the left of the front door.

In my hurry to get inside the house, I had darted past without even noticing them. Now, though, when I looked through the doors, that's where I found Tanya Dunseth, lying facedown on an outdated couch-the old-fashioned folding kind my mother used to call a davenport.

Coming into the side room, I realized it had once been a formal parlor now converted to an in-home office complete with bookshelves, a regular desk, a movable computer workstation, easy chair, and couch. As soon as I opened the doors, the stench of gas was far more powerful than it had been elsewhere in the house. Because the room was smaller than the others and totally closed off, the invisible gaseous cloud had risen to a higher level. Tanya was lying on the couch, not the floor, but the bluish tinge of her skin told me that she was suffering from oxygen deprivation.

"Tanya!" I called.

She didn't move. One bare arm trailed off down the front of the couch with the tips of her fingers almost touching the face of an ugly old dial-type telephone that sat on the floor only inches from the couch. Had I been thinking with my brain instead of my lungs right about then, I might have noticed the significance in the location of that museum-piece telephone. Instead, I had only one purpose and focus in life-to grab Tanya Dunseth up off that couch and get us both out of there. Fast!

I tried picking her up, hefting her once to test the weight of her in my arms. She was solid enough, but much lighter than Guy Lewis. Compared to hauling him, Tanya was easy. Holding her in front of me, I headed outside. When I reached the doorway, I kicked open the screen door.

Guy Lewis stood beside the Porsche, leaning heavily against it, as if the exertion of scrambling around the cars and making the phone call had worn him out. When he saw me, though, he smiled and gave me a thumbs-up sign. I don't know if it was for my finding Tanya or if it was because he had managed to make the call. Maybe both.

I had been holding my breath for a long time. Now, as I stumbled down the steps, I gasped fresh air into my oxygen-starved lungs. We're home free, I thought. We made it.

To this day, I'm still not sure if I actually heard the beginning of that abortive telephone ring, or if it was only my vivid imagination. Maybe the noise I heard was just the ringing in my ears-the pounding of my own overworked heart. Later, the arson experts told me, whether I heard it or not, the clapper in that old-fashioned ringer provided the needed spark-the only one necessary to set off a huge conflagration.

I was on the ground, carrying Tanya and moving away from the house as fast as I could, when the explosion hit. The force of the concussion jarred Tanya out of my arms and sent us both sprawling and plunging head over heels, rolling us along like a pair of wind-driven tumbleweeds.

I was already halfway across the road when the explosion occurred, but even that far away, an incredible blast of heat seared the backs of my eyeballs. I landed facedown. I stumbled to my feet and turned around, staring up at the steeply gabled roof. For an eerie, soundless moment, the entire surface of the roof seemed to rise in the air a good foot or so. It hovered there for what seemed like forever, then it settled gracefully back down-like a huge comforter falling back on a bed-in what appeared to be its original position.

My first thought then was that the worst was over. But I was looking at the roof. I hadn't noticed the burning sofa that had come shooting out of the house through a gaping hole that had been blown clear through the front outside wall. Propane burns hot and clean. Unless it soaks into some combustible material, it won't do a sustained burn. Unfortunately, the upholstered couch provided just the right kind of material to hold the gas and burn like crazy.

Tanya and I were some distance beyond the cars. Guy Lewis had been knocked to the ground, but he was struggling to regain his footing at the same time I caught sight of the burning couch on the porch. My first thought was that maybe we could get to it and somehow put it out, but before my body could respond and put thought to action, a series of secondary explosions echoed through the house, rocking it on its foundations.

Those several blasts shook the already weakened structure so severely that some of the supporting columns on the front porch, weight-bearing beams designed to hold up the second story, tottered out of their moorings, came loose, and crumpled. It was like watching a line of dominoes fall. As the columns collapsed, the added weight crushed the construction jack that valiantly had held up the one still-unrepaired corner of the porch. When the jack went, the floor above it disintegrated in a long, slow-moving wave, taking with it the rest of the porch. The burning couch dropped out of sight into a void.

Now the house stood naked in a cloud of dust and rubble. For several seconds, it seemed to ripple, like distant desert mountains viewed through waves of shimmering heat. And then, with a thunderous groan and the collective screech of a thousand tortured nails, the loosened roof began to fall. The sound was so wild and fierce it might have been the death cry of some living thing.

Pieces of roof avalanched down to the place where the broken porch was no more. Careening down, it rained wood and shingles and broken glass everywhere. Finally, when it stopped-when there was nothing left moving-I was struck by the terrible stillness all around me. In that silence, I realized Guy Lewis had disappeared. So had both the Miata and the Porsche. All three, two cars and the man, were buried beneath a mountain of debris. Meanwhile, from where the porch had once been, I saw the first ominous curlings of smoke.

What should I do? I was torn. I know now how emergency medical personnel must feel when they make the triage call-the life-and-death decision you can spend the entire rest of your lifetime second-guessing, rationalizing, debating, or justifying.

The choice was mine alone to make. Guy Lewis had been moving when I last saw him. Chances were he could fight his way free of the rubble, but I had no idea how long Tanya had been deprived of oxygen. She lay flat on the ground beside me, still limp, still unmoving, still blue, but a thin stream of blood flowed from a tiny cut on her face. With oxygen deprivation, seconds, not minutes, mean the difference between survival and death; recovery or permanent brain damage.

Guy Lewis had wanted her saved-had begged me to save her. I had to try.

Incapable of walking, I crawled over to her on my hands and knees. I checked her airways and began administering CPR. Knowing from experience that adrenaline can fuel a man, giving him fleeting but inhuman strength, I held back deliberately, hoping not to break her ribs or do more damage in my desperate attempt to revive her.

I don't know how long I worked at it. A minute? Two? Several? There was no sense of time. Behind me, I heard the ominous crackle of hungry flames biting into tinder-dry wood, but I concentrated solely on what I was doing. At last Tanya's breast heaved, and her eyelids fluttered open.

By then the heat was more intense. I pulled her to her feet. "Come on. We have to move farther away."

She tried to take a step or two, but then she stumbled and fell. I had caught my second wind, so I picked her up and carried her again, running another twenty or thirty yards beyond where we had first come to rest. There, I felt I could lay her on the ground in relative safety.

"Stay here," I ordered. "Don't move."

She nodded weakly and made no effort to rise. I turned back toward the house, thinking that now maybe I'd go drag Guy Lewis from the wreckage. But even as I looked, I realized that the fire was much worse than I expected. It was already too late.

The burning couch had landed on what was left of the shattered porch, and the aged wood exploded in flame like so much tinder-dry kindling. Fed by fallen cedar-shake shingles, the entire front of the house was now a roaring inferno. Not only was the house itself fully involved; so was the pile of wood and rubble that had rained down on the two parked cars. On the parked cars and Guy Lewis.

I started forward, screaming at the top of my lungs. "Guy! Guy Lewis! Can you hear me? Get the hell out of there now. It's going to blow!"

The next explosion came even as I screamed out the warning. The gas tank of the Miata must have been broken or damaged by a falling beam. The Mazda went up first in a giant, eye-singeing fireball. I stood there stunned-seeing the flames, feeling the heat of them, and knowing for sure that Guy Lewis was a dead man. There was no way to get him out. No way to help.

My only hope then, as now, was that maybe Guy Lewis was already dead by the time the flames reached him. Otherwise, wouldn't he have screamed or cried out? Wouldn't I have heard him? Or were my ears still too damaged and traumatized by the noise of the preceding explosions? I don't know. Won't ever know.

I wonder about that sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm lying wide awake, when I'm haunted by the idea that it's my fault, my responsibility, that Guy Lewis is dead. After all, I'm the one who sent him on the fool's errand. He was out of danger and would have been perfectly safe if I hadn't sent him to the car phone to make that deadly 911 call.

Maybe it's a good thing that I'll never know for sure.

By then I could hear sounds of sirens in the background. I knew help was coming, but it would be too little and far too late. The second rocking explosion took me by surprise. For a moment, I was too disoriented to realize exactly what had happened, but finally I did.

The Porsche had gone up in a roar of flames. Anne Corley's beloved Guard-red 928-my 928-was a thing of the past.

Filled with a surge of blinding anguish and bellowing with rage, I spun on my heel and went looking for Tanya Dunseth.