A Quiet Death (27 page)

Tendrils of smoke drifted through the narrow opening I'd made between the door and its frame.

‘Wait here.' I escorted Lilith to the bed, shrouded by mountains of clothing except for a small, semi-circular nest she'd dug out for herself. ‘I'll be right back.'

Heart pounding, I eased into the hallway, stumbled along, following the smoke down the hall and into the kitchen.

‘Jesus!' The passageway leading to the back door was engulfed in flames, the boxes it had contained burning brightly, buckling, collapsing in on one another. Flames licked greedily at the stove. Was it gas or electric? I couldn't remember.

On the floor near the refrigerator, a stray issue of
Life
magazine from December 1989 smoldered, its cover gradually blackened and curled, the image of a smiling Jane Pauley transformed bit by bit into a negative of gray ash.

Did Lilith have a fire extinguisher? I gripped the back of a kitchen chair and laughed hysterically. Of course she had a fire extinguisher. Maybe two, maybe a hundred! Somewhere under all this crap!

In the kitchen, the heat was intense. A wall of flame blocked the back door, our only exit. Somewhere in the basement, a smoke alarm began to scream.

Keeping my head low, I made my way to the bathroom, scooping up a couple of towels along the way. I tossed the towels in the bathtub and turned on the shower, soaking them with water. When they were thoroughly wet, I returned to the bedroom where I'd left Lilith.

‘That crazy bastard set your kitchen on fire,' I told her, my voice urgent. ‘Here, you may need this.' I draped a wet towel over Lilith's head, put one over my own head, then grabbed her by the hand. ‘We'll have to go out through the front door!' I croaked, dragging her down the cluttered hallway after me. ‘Keep low. Crawl if you have to.'

When we reached the perimeter of the living room, I dropped her hand so that I could use both of mine to shove boxes aside. ‘Help me!' I yelled when I noticed that Lilith had simply plopped herself down among the ruins. ‘We've got to get to the door!'

‘That's my new coffee-maker!' Lilith moaned as I sent one biggish box flying into the piano. Seemingly oblivious to the smoke and the heat, she held another box in her hands and was gazing at it, looking morose. ‘This is a tide clock!'

I knocked the box out of her hands. ‘Lilith!' I screamed. ‘Screw the tide clock! We have to get out of here!'

It seemed like hours, but it probably took only a few adrenaline-fueled minutes for Lilith and me to clear a path to the front door. It was then that I understood what Hoffner had been doing while he was crashing around Lilith's living room. He'd engaged the deadbolt. Stolen the key.

Son of a bitch!

I began searching desperately for an object I could hammer against the living-room window.

Maybe all of Lilith's junk was working in our favor, I thought as I floundered around, flinging boxes aside. I didn't know how long it would take for the fire to consume all the magazines and newspapers that were stacked in the back hallway, spilling over into the kitchen. What worried me was the smoke, swirling, growing thicker, gathering in a dense black cloud that pushed against the ceiling, descending more quickly than I thought we had time for.

‘Lie down on the floor!' I yelled to Lilith. I yanked the drapes off the windows, grabbed a lamp, shade and all, and took a swing. The lamp shattered, but the window remained intact. ‘Shit!'

From her spot on the floor next to the front door, Lilith coughed. ‘Fireplace poker!'

‘Where?'

With one hand covering her mouth, she used the other to point toward the far wall. With all of Lilith's goddam rubbish in the way, the fireplace and its tools might as well have been in Siberia.

My clothing clung to me, wet and hot. My skin smarted. I surveyed the room, eyes stinging, spotted what I thought might be a coffee table under a mound of quilts and thrashed my way toward it. I swept the quilts aside, pulled the table toward me and flipped it over. A cheap table, thank God, with screw-on legs. I wrenched off one of the legs and was crawling toward the window with my head protected by the wet towel when someone began pounding on the outside of the front door. ‘Mother! Mother! Are you in there?'

‘It's Nick!' Lilith croaked.

I didn't have a second to waste in wondering how Nicholas had gotten there. I pressed my cheek to the door. ‘Nick! The deadbolt's thrown and we don't have a key. Can you break down the door?'

‘Wait a minute!' Lilith cried. ‘There's a spare key in the flowerpot!'

‘Did you hear that, Nick?' I shouted. ‘Spare key! Flowerpot!'

Nick heard. In seconds the deadbolt turned and the door flew open. A tsunami of air whooshed past us as we stumbled out of the burning house and collapsed on the brick steps, coughing until our lungs ached.

Supporting himself on a cane, Nick backed away from us, limping painfully, face sweaty and streaked with soot. ‘We tried the front door, we tried the back! Burned my hand on the doorknob. Jesus, Jesus!'

‘It was Hoffner,' I screamed, too preoccupied to wonder who ‘we' were. ‘He's crazy, Nick! He set the fire. Have you called 9-1-1?'

Nick wore a soft neck brace, held on by Velcro straps, so he nodded with difficulty. ‘I came in a cab. The cabby called it in.'

A metered cab all the way from Baltimore? How much did that cost, I wondered as I guided Lilith down the steps. I couldn't help it. Must have been my New England genes, frugal down to the last molecule.

After Nick had paid off the cab driver and insisted he be on his way, I said, ‘Thank you, Nick. If you hadn't showed up . . .' I let the sentence die.

‘I telephoned, Mother didn't answer, and I got worried. Hoffner'd been acting so squirrelly.'

Lilith and I staggered past Nick, across the driveway and on to the grass. With tears streaming down her face, Lilith watched her house burn. ‘My things! All my precious things!'

I thought about all the ‘precious' handbags, shoes and wicker baskets, all the indispensable toiletries, medical supplies and cross-stitch kits. The four Crock-Pots still in their original boxes, more than a dozen different flavors of Kraft salad dressing – from Asian Toasted Sesame to Zesty Italian – the sixteen-ounce bottles arranged on her kitchen window sill like mismatched chessmen. I grabbed Lilith's arms in case she took it into her head to dash back into the inferno to try to save them. I dragged her across the lawn, forced her to sit down against a tree, well away from the blazing house.

Out in the driveway, every door of Lilith's Toyota stood open; its trunk yawned. Hoffner had torn her car apart looking for the letters. Mercifully, he hadn't bothered with my Volvo.

I was rubbing sweat and soot off my face with the tail of my shirt, looking around, wondering where the bastard had gotten to. He had to be somewhere in the neighborhood, I knew, because his truck – GOTALAW – still sat at the edge of the drive not far from the tree where I had parked Lilith.

I wondered if Hoffner knew about Lilith's studio. No telling what he'd do to the studio – snap her brushes, squeeze paint out of the tubes, trash her paintings. If you had a giant yard sale, sold the entire contents of Lilith's house, you wouldn't equal the value of even one of her paintings, at least not in my opinion.

A sudden movement caught my eye, a flash of yellow at the perimeter of the woods. ‘What's out there?' I asked Lilith who was eyeing Hoffner's truck with murder on her mind.

‘A tool shed. Gardening stuff. A riding mower.'

‘Keep an eye on your mother,' I told Nick. ‘Don't let her anywhere near the house.'

I was glancing around the yard, looking for something I could use as a weapon, when Jim Hoffner stalked into view, bold as brass, heading for his truck and a quick getaway.

When he got within range, I flew at him like a banshee, attacking him with both fists, pummeling his chest like a jackhammer. ‘You bastard! You set that fire on purpose! We could have been burned alive!'

Hoffner laughed, a manic, Halloween funhouse cackle that chilled me to the bone.

Infuriated, I cocked my arm, but before I could get off a good left hook to his jaw, Hoffner grabbed me by the hair, twisted my head painfully, and threw me to the ground. His right hand dived beneath his jacket and, almost before I could blink, I was staring up into the business end of what looked like a 9mm Glock.

‘Bitch!' The arm holding the big black gun didn't waver.

‘Hoffner, don't!' Nick yelled.

Hoffner's lip curled nastily. ‘I have to, Aupry. Thanks to you and your big fat mouth, she knows.'

Lilith struggled to her feet, her eyes wild, wide. ‘Stop! Is everybody
crazy
?'

Nick limped toward Hoffner. ‘You can't, Hoffner! Hannah saved my life. She called the paramedics, she held my hand, she prayed with me, for Christ's sake, when we both thought I was dying.'

Sirens began to wail in the distance. With half my brain I willed them to hurry, with the other half, I prayed.
Please God, please, I'm not ready to go!

It didn't seem to occur to anybody that if Hoffner wanted to weasel out of the mess he'd created, he'd have to dispose of three witnesses, not just one.

‘What's that man talking about, Nicholas?'

Nick faced his mother. ‘Hoffner believes your letters will be worth a lot of money to a certain party who will pay anything to keep his dirty little secret.'

Lilith opened her mouth, but nothing came out. I could almost see the wheels going around, taking it all in. The ‘dirty little secret' was Lilith herself.

‘Tell him where the letters are, Mother. Nothing's worth getting shot over.'

Lilith stiffened. ‘I put them in a safety deposit box where they can't do anybody harm.'

Suddenly the gun wasn't pointing at me, but at Lilith. ‘I don't believe you! Let's go. Get them!'

Lilith folded her arms across her chest, set her jaw. ‘No.'

Hoffner took a step in Lilith's direction. ‘You're coming with me. Now.'

Without warning, Nick's cane shot out, knocking the gun out of Hoffner's hand. The gun landed on the grass at my feet. I snatched it up, cocked my arm and threw the gun as hard as I could, watching with pleasure as it spiraled into the flaming house.

‘God dammit!' Hoffner bolted for his truck, gunned the engine and fishtailed down the drive. Before he had driven more than one hundred yards, the brake lights flashed red, the truck skewed sideways, and he leapt out of the cab. ‘What's wrong with him?' I asked aloud.

Lilith held up a box cutter, shrugged. ‘When he wasn't looking, I messed with his tires.'

‘Lilith, how . . . ?' I indicated the box cutter.

‘I picked it up when we were in the living room.'

I could have hugged her.

Hoffner bobbed like an apple, hesitating, caught between an oncoming fire truck on the one hand and an angry mob of three on the other, one armed with a box cutter, a second with a cane, and me with a rage so hot and intense that if I tore Hoffner to shreds with my teeth and bare hands, no court in the world would have held me responsible. Hoffner sprinted toward the woods, heading in the direction of Fishing Creek.

The pumper unit from the Church Creek Fire Company screeched to a halt at the foot of the drive, inches from Hoffner's front bumper. His truck was blocking their way.

A radio crackled. Permission apparently asked and granted, because seconds later the fire truck advanced, made contact with Hoffner's vehicle and shoved it, grinding and lurching, into a stand of trees where it sat, slewed sideways between two giant tulip poplars.

Hoffner's yellow jacket disappeared into the trees. If he continued in that direction, I worried, no way he'd miss Lilith's studio.

‘Is everyone out of the house?' a fireman asked as he hopped out of the truck.

‘Yes. We're all here.' I said.

‘Good,' he said as his colleagues busily unrolled their hoses. The pumper roared to life and water began to play against what remained of the roof of Lilith's cottage, sizzling, changing the smoke from black to white as clouds of steam arose from the ashes.

‘Injuries?'

Nobody spoke. Nick leaned on his cane, Lilith against a tree, leg bent, stork-like, at the knee. With the exception of the firemen who clearly had other priorities, I was the only able-bodied person in the neighborhood. If anybody was going to stop Hoffner, it had to be me.

‘Nick, I need to borrow your cane.' With Hoffner's gun gone, I hoped the weapon would give me some tactical advantage.

Nick looked confused.

‘Wait a minute,' his mother said. She uncurled her fingers revealing the box cutter cradled in her palm.

‘My God,' I whispered, considering the implications. Slashing tires was one thing, but a living human being? I shivered. Yet Hoffner had just proved how dangerous he could be. I took the box cutter from Lilith, opened and closed it experimentally a few times, admiring the way the razor moved smoothly in and out of its casing. ‘Just in case,' I told her, securing the blade and slipping the cutter into my pocket.

Then I sprinted into the woods after James Hoffner.

As I suspected, Hoffner had found Lilith's studio hideaway. When I charged through the door, his back was to me and he appeared to be studying ‘Sailboat 23,' still clamped to Lilith's easel.

‘The police are on the way, Hoffner. I'd blow this joint if I were you.'

He turned to face me, slowly, as if he hadn't a care in the world. He grinned malevolently. ‘It's just you and me, then, Mrs Ives? Mano-a-mano?'