McKettricks of Texas: Garrett (23 page)

Calvin shook his head. “She's at the cottage, packing up our stuff. What happened to your eye?”

“I ran into something,” Garrett hedged, his gaze snagging on Esperanza's and then breaking away. He opened one of the refrigerators and pulled out a bottle of beer.

“Want a cookie?” Calvin asked, pushing the plate toward him.

“Ought to go great with beer,” Garrett grinned, taking the stool next to Calvin's and accepting the offer by helping himself to a couple of oatmeal-raisin cookies. He munched a while before speaking again. “How come your mom is packing up all your stuff?” he asked.

Calvin leaned in a little, squinting up at Garrett's shiner with the sort of interest little boys usually reserved for dead bugs and dried-up snakeskins. “We have to move,” he answered. “You didn't really run into something, did you? You got in a
fight.
”

Esperanza glared at Garrett over the top of Calvin's blond head. Her expression said he was setting a poor example for the boy.

“It wasn't a fight,” Garrett told Calvin. “Not exactly, anyhow. Where are you moving to?”

Calvin's small shoulders stooped a little then, and he ducked his head. “Don't know,” he mumbled. “Aunt Paige didn't tell me that.”

Garrett frowned, confused.

“She thought Mom was here,” Calvin explained. “Aunt Paige did, I mean. That's why she brought me to the Silver Spur. When Mom called her on her cell phone and told her she was at the cottage instead, Aunt Paige asked Esperanza to watch me for a while, so she could go help Mom.”

“I see,” Garrett said, though he was still pretty much in the dark.

Calvin sighed. “I wish we could live here,” he said in a small voice, after a long time had passed. “I wish Mom and Harry and me could stay on the Silver Spur forever.”

The earnest way the kid spoke wrenched at something deep inside Garrett.

Maybe because he was starting to wish the same thing.

E
XCEPT FOR THE MARSHAL'S OFFICE
,
which was a minor tourist attraction, the fire station was the oldest public building in Blue River. The engine itself dated back to 1957, but it still ran, and so did the old-fashioned, hand-cranked siren.

Harry howled when the alarm sounded the first long, tinny wail, and Paige and Julie, busy in Julie's kitchen, both stopped wrapping dishes in newspaper to press their hands to their ears.

The siren droned to silence, then wound up again.

Harry did his beagle-best to drown it out, singing along.

Paige rushed for the back door, that being the nearest exit, and Julie followed, after leaning down to give Harry a brief and reassuring pat on the head and instructing him, in vain, to hush up.

By tradition, the intended warning could be anything from a lost child to a full-scale invasion by space aliens.

The smell of smoke was sharp in the air, but Julie couldn't tell where it was coming from until she and Paige ran around to the front yard.

A black, roiling cloud of the stuff loomed against the afternoon sky.

Fire,
Julie thought, strangely slow-witted. Then, of
course
it was fire.

She gave in to a moment of pure panic before pulling herself together to focus on her first and highest priority—Calvin.

Her son, she reminded herself, as if by rote, was on the ranch. Paige had taken him there before returning to town to help Julie get ready for her imminent move. The smoke, to her relief, was rising in the opposite direction from the Silver Spur.

The siren revved up once more, and Harry bayed in concert.

Around town, other dogs had joined in, a yip here, a yelp there. The bell on the fire engine clamored in the near distance, a resonant clang in the heat-weighted, acrid air.

The volunteers, rallied by the emergency siren, were on the job then, already racing down Main Street. The old truck rarely saw action, except each year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when it carried the Lions Club Santa to the tree-lighting ceremony in the park.

Paige, shading her eyes with one hand, assessed the growing plume.

“What do you suppose is burning?” Julie asked. She was good at a lot of things, but reading smoke signals wasn't among them.

Mercifully, the siren had finally gone silent, having alerted everybody in the county that there was Some Kind of Trouble, and so had Harry and the canine chorus.

“Probably, it's Chudley and Minnie Wilkes's place, or somewhere pretty near it,” Paige answered, looking worried.

Cars and pickup trucks raced by, two streets over on the main drag.

Paige dashed into the cottage, summoned Harry to
follow, shut him inside and came out jingling her car keys at Julie. “The dog will be fine,” she said. “Let's go!”

Julie nodded, feeling slightly sick as she scrambled into Paige's car on the passenger side and snapped on her seat belt. Chudley and Minnie lived in a pair of single-wide trailers, welded together, just a few miles outside of town.

The Wilkeses' home was surrounded by several acres of rusted-out wrecks, most of them up on blocks, but it was the mountain of old tires that worried Julie now. If all that rubber caught fire, it might literally burn for
weeks,
and the greasy smoke would be a respiratory hazard for just about everybody.

Especially Calvin, with his asthma.

Practically everybody in the county was headed for that fire, or so it seemed—more than a few were gawkers, like Paige and Julie, with no real business showing up at all—but many wanted to help put out the flames and contain the blaze before it spread. Or simply be on hand to do whatever might need doing.

Wildfire was always a danger in dry country—it could race overland for miles, in all directions, if it got out of hand, gobbling up people, livestock and property, anything in its path.

Up ahead, Brent Brogan and his two deputies were running what amounted to a roadblock, letting only certain vehicles through.

Julie peered through the windshield of Paige's car, watching as the chief of police lifted a megaphone to his mouth.

“Folks,” his voice boomed out, full of good-natured authority, “we just can't have all these rigs clogging up the road now. There's an ambulance on its way over from the clinic right this minute, and you don't want to hold it up, do you?”

Paige, a registered nurse with a lot of experience in emergency medicine, nosed her car right up to the front, tooting her horn.

Chief Brogan looked furious, until he recognized Paige. Immediately after that, he gestured for her to proceed.

Paige rolled down her window as they pulled up beside the frazzled lawman.

“It's that trailer Chudley rents whenever he can find a sucker,” Brent said, bending to look inside the car. His fine-featured brown face glistened with sweat. “Everybody's out, but the girl and the little boys are pretty shaken up. For my money, all three of those kids are in shock.”

Paige nodded and drove on, while Julie sat rigid on the seat, Brent's words echoing in her mind.

The girl—the little boys—all three of those kids are in shock.

It finally penetrated. Rachel Strivens and her brothers—they were the kids Brent had been talking about. They lived, with their father, in a house trailer rented from Chudley Wilkes.

“Oh, my God,” Julie said. “Rachel—she's in one of my English classes—”

The fire engine was parked broadside, its bulky hose bulging with water, helmeted volunteers all around.

Paige got out of the car and ran forward, and Julie was right behind her.

The flames were out, though smoke churned through the roof of the trailer, having burned part of it away. The structure had been reduced to a blackened ruin, with strips of charred metal curling from it like oddly placed antennae. Hometown firemen, ranchers and farmers and store owners and insurance agents, among others, were everywhere,
wielding axes and shovels, and there seemed to be no air left for breathing.

Julie's eyes burned as though acid had splashed into them, and so did her lungs and her throat, and she was so frightened for Rachel and her brothers that her heart began to pound in painful thuds.

She and Paige spotted the three children at the same moment, sitting huddled together on the ground under a tree on the far side of the property. Norvel Collier, a retired pharmacist who looked like he might need medical attention at any moment himself, kept thrusting an oxygen mask at them, and getting no takers.

“Norvel,” Paige greeted the old man, with a businesslike nod.

Norvel nodded back. “Hello, Paige,” he said, blinking at her, his eyes reddened from the smoke.

“You'd best let me take over there,” Paige told him. “You go rustle up some more oxygen for me, why don't you? And a few blankets, maybe?”

Norvel didn't protest. He nodded, and Julie helped him to his feet. She received a grateful, faltering smile for her effort.

“Much obliged,” he said.

“What can I do to help?” Julie asked Paige.

Paige had already persuaded the smaller of the two boys to let her place the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. “Stay out of the way,” Paige answered, her tone brisk but not unkind.

Rachel sat slumped, with one arm around each of her brothers, her clothes sooty and her hair singed. She locked gazes with Julie, but said nothing.

Despite Paige's instructions, Julie knelt to pull Rachel into a brief hug.

“Everything will be all right,” she told the child. “I promise.”

And then she got to her feet again, and stepped back out of the way.

The ambulance was making its way through the traffic on the gravel road, its siren giving short, uncertain bleats, like a confused sheep separated from the flock and calling out to be found.

“My kids!” a man's voice yelled, full of anguish.
“Where are my kids?”

An instant later, Ron Strivens came into view, having torn his way through the crowd of firemen and able-bodied locals. He looked around wildly, spotted Rachel and the boys, and hurried toward his children.

Dropping to his knees, but not touching any of them, Strivens focused on the oxygen mask covering his youngest son's face. The glance he threw at Paige, who was overseeing the process and lightly stroking the boy's hair in an effort to keep him calm, was nothing short of frantic.

The man's skin was gray with fear, his lips pressed into a tight blue line.

“They'll be fine,” Paige assured him, with the firm, in-control confidence Julie and Libby had always admired in their younger sister. Even before she'd gone through nursing school, graduating at the top of her class, Paige had been the type to keep her head in any kind of emergency.

Nothing and no one had ever caused her to lose her composure.

No one except Austin McKettrick, that is.

“How did it start?” Strivens croaked, sparing a glance for what remained of the mobile home but mainly concerned, naturally, with the well-being of his family.

Rachel started to answer, but before she got a word out, her little brother pulled the oxygen mask from his face long enough to say, “It wasn't Rachel's fault, Dad—”

Gently, Paige shook her head and replaced the mask.

The older of the two boys took up where the younger one had left off. “Rachel brought half a pizza home from the bowling alley when she got off work,” he explained eagerly, his face as filthy as his sister's, his voice high and rapid. “She said we could have some, soon as she heated it up in the oven. But she wanted to change her clothes first, and that always means she's going to take forever. Me and Colley didn't want to wait, because we was
real
hungry, but the pilot light was out in the oven, so I lit it and—”

Once again, Colley pulled off the mask. He shouted, “Boom!” before Paige got it back in place.

Tears welled up in Rachel's eyes, already red and irritated from the smoke. “The place went up so fast,” she told her father. “All I could think of was getting Max and Colley out of there—”

“You did good,” Ron Strivens told her, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder.

By then, the paramedics had arrived.

Paige spoke to them briefly and went to stand with her upper arm pressing against Julie's. All their lives, the Remington sisters had communicated silent strength to each other in just that way.

The EMTs crouched to examine Rachel and the boys, and it was decided that while all three children were probably going to be fine, it couldn't hurt to take them on over to the clinic and let one of the doctors have a look to make sure.

“Where are we going to live, now that the trailer's
gone?” Colley asked his father, who had hoisted the younger boy into his arms to carry him to the ambulance.

A paramedic trotted behind, holding the oxygen tank.

Julie didn't hear Ron Strivens's reply, but her gaze connected with Paige's.

It was a good question. Where
was
the family going to live?

Julie knew well, of course, how hard it was to find housing in and around Blue River. Except for the town's one apartment complex, which was always full to capacity, there simply weren't any rentals.

Paige merely spread her hands.

Chudley Wilkes appeared in the junker-choked field, driving an ancient tractor with a high metal seat, Minnie riding on one running board, her heavy cloud of gray hair billowing in the sooty breeze. They made for a colorful sight, Chudley and Minnie on that tractor.

About to head for Paige's car, Julie stopped to watch their approach, as did her sister.

Chudley's grizzled old face was hidden in shadow, since he was wearing a billed cap, but his neck seemed to bulge above the collar of his grungy shirt, the veins engorged, the flesh a frightening mottle of purple and red.

“Lord,” Paige breathed, “that old fool is going to have a stroke right here if he doesn't calm down.” She went back to the car and returned quickly with a blood-pressure cuff and a stethoscope.

Chief Brogan, who was a hands-on sort of cop, walked over to meet Chudley, and because Paige followed him, so did Julie.

“Chudley Wilkes,” Paige said, as soon as he'd shut off the tractor motor and it had clunked and clattered and
popped to silence, “have you been taking your blood-pressure medicine?”

“Never mind my blood pressure!” Chudley yelled in response. “I'm ruined! I'm bankrupted! Why, there ain't nothin' left of my trailer but the axles!”

Shaking her head, Minnie got down off the running board to examine the wreckage. “You ain't ruined, you damn fool,” she said. Then, addressing Chief Brogan and the rest of them, she added, “Pay him no mind. He's just tightfisted, that's all. Why, he could bail out a middlin'-sized
country
with the money he's got stashed.”

“Now, you hush up, Chudley Wilkes,” Paige ordered, taking Minnie's place on the running board and wrapping the blood-pressure cuff around Chudley's tattooed upper arm with dispatch. She listened through the stethoscope and watched the digital meter while the inflated band slowly deflated.

“Just what I thought,” Paige clucked, turning to Brent. “You'd better get Chudley to the doctor right away, Chief. He's in real danger of blowing a gasket.”

Chudley grayed under his crimson flush and the grime that was probably as much a part of his skin as the pigment by this late date. He moved to fire up the tractor again.

“Minnie,” he called to his wife, “get back on here, right now! We got to get me to the clinic!”

Minnie started toward the tractor, but Brent stopped her. “I'll drive you in the squad car,” he said.

Chudley looked the chief over suspiciously, and Julie could just imagine what he was thinking. Never mind that Brent had been part of the community since he was a little boy—his dad had worked for Jim McKettrick out on the Silver Spur—never mind that he'd served
bravely in the military and done a creditable job as the chief of police.