Silk and Stone (49 page)

They must have gotten out. Her mind refused to believe that Sarah, Hugh, and Ellie were inside the inferno. She staggered forward, her arms shielding her face. A suffocating wall of heat drove her back. She punched the air. Screaming their names, she circled the house, falling over the stone edge of Sarah’s flower beds, crawling, shoving herself up again.

They must be here somewhere. They must have gotten out.
Oh, Jake. We can’t lose them. I won’t let them die
. She stumbled through a hedge of evergreen shrubs along the backyard, then fell to her knees beside a spigot and a coiled hose. Sam wrenched the spigot’s handle and dug her hands into the hose, grabbing the free end triumphantly. She lunged to her feet and pointed it at the rear porch. Flames burst under the roof, and the roof collapsed with sickening metallic shrieks as sheets of tin ripped from the rafters.

Sam heard her own shrieks of fury and despair. Not a drop of water came from the hose. She shook it, cursed it violently, then realized with galling defeat that the well pump ran off electricity from the house.

The upstairs roof caved in, and shards of burning wood rained down on her. Sam covered her head and stumbled back, coughing, blinded by smoke. She fell again and crawled until the air cooled and she could breathe. Rolling onto her hands and knees, she stared at the house and beat the ground with one fist.

“
Sammie!
” Charlotte collapsed beside her, shaking her. “They didn’t answer the phone! Where are they?”

“Inside. Oh, Jake,
Jake
. I can’t get them out!”

Charlotte clung to her, sobbing wildly. Sam sank back on her heels and rocked, one hand latched in Charlotte’s nightgown, the other clawing at the silent scream in her own throat.

Somewhere in the distance the high, thin wails of sirens began.

Jake fell against a sheriff’s car, his knees buckling. He was covered in sweat, weighed down by a horror he couldn’t comprehend. The glare from portable floods and the headlights of a dozen police and emergency vehicles pierced his dazed vision.

Someone clamped a hand on his shoulder. There were people around him, talking loudly. He’d burst from the woods at a run with Bo galloping beside him. “What’s wrong with you, son?” Jake braced his arms on the car’s hood and stared into a deputy’s florid, worried face. “Found him,” Jake said, shuddering. “He’s all right. Left him asleep beside a creek. About a mile back.” He gasped. A band of unfathomable terror squeezed his chest. He knew only that something was wrong, something terrible that had closed in on him as he stopped to let the bewildered, exhausted old man lie down to rest. He had to get home.

“I need a phone,” he said loudly, pushing himself away from the car, swaying. “Goddammit, give me a phone.”

“All right, son, whatever your problem is, come on. We got a mobile unit.”

Jake was dimly aware of the hustle of startled men around him, of pushing ahead of the deputy, of lunging inside a van and grabbing the phone someone held out to him. He called Samantha first. He shook the receiver as if it were lying to him as he listened to their phone ring repeatedly with no answer. Neither Sam nor Charlotte could sleep through so much. He choked back the bile rising in his throat and called his folks’ house next.

That line was silent. Jake fought an urge to slam the receiver against the van’s floor. “What is it, son?” the deputy asked. Jake barely heard him. He knew the number at the sheriff’s office in Pandora, had memorized it years ago, when he began tracking for the department. His fingers shaking, he punched it into a console. The moment the dispatcher’s familiar voice answered, he said, “Get somebody down to the Raincrow place.
Now.
”

“Jake? Is that you?” The woman’s maternal voice was a moan of tearful recognition. “
Yes
. Send somebody down there. I can’t explain. You’ve got to—”

“They’ve already gone. Everybody’s gone down there. Oh, hon, get here as fast as you can. I don’t know how bad things are yet. But there’s a fire.”

Jake dropped the phone and lunged out of the van. He ran to his car, not daring to think about anything. Bo leapt ahead of him as he slung the door open.

Samantha was all right. He could feel that much, that certainty.

But the rest was a terrifying blank.

This was how hell looked. How it smelled, and tasted, and sounded. Fire trucks and ambulances. Police cruisers. Pickup trucks and cars. Plumes of water shooting from hoses into the hissing, smoldering ruins of the house. The glare of headlights and huge portable lamps. People hurrying around in no apparent order, shouting at one another. Strangers everywhere—no, some of them were
people she knew, friends of the family—but when they tried to hug her or talk to her, she stared back at them without responding. She couldn’t take her eyes off the house. The roof had caved in, flattening the upstairs bedrooms. The upper walls had collapsed inward, and the wide roof of the front porch tilted crazily to one side. The windows of the bottom level had shattered, and smoke boiled out of them.

The front door was still shut. Smoke curled around its edges, outlining it in obscene detail, as if taunting her to open the door and find what waited inside.

Which she could not think about anymore. Not if she wanted to keep her sanity. Sam knew she was covered in soot and dirt, that embers had burned holes in her robe, that her bare feet were bleeding. But shock had taken over—a surreal and emotionless stupor that let her stand on the edge of the chaos, dry-eyed and unflinching. A paramedic had placed blankets around her and Charlotte’s shoulders; Charlotte sat at her feet, staring blankly into space.

Only one dread could penetrate the haze in Sam’s mind. The thought of Jake coming home to this.

Sam stiffened as several firemen approached the porch gingerly, pulling shields over their faces, their axes raised. The blanket slid, unheeded, from her shoulders.
Please, let this only be a nightmare. Please let the house be empty. Please let me wake up. Please don’t do this to Jake
.

“They went somewhere.” She heard Charlotte’s voice, hollow and pleading. “They got up and drove to the all-night diner in Owessa. Sure. We did that two or three times. To get waffles. Sarah says it’s an adventure to eat when everybody else is asleep.”

Sam fought an urge to scream.
The cars are still parked in the barn. I checked
. “Yes, I bet that’s where they are. Eating waffles.” She shuffled forward. Charlotte grabbed the bottom of her robe. “Where are you—don’t go. I’m telling you, they’re eating waffles.” Her voice broke. “Don’t go over there, Sammie.”

The firemen ducked under the lopsided porch roof.
One of them swung his ax at the door. The heavy old wood refused to give. He slammed the ax into it again. The sound nearly shattered Sam’s control. The door swung inward. The firemen disappeared into the house.

Sam distractedly pulled her robe away from Charlotte’s anxious grip, then put a hand on her sister’s bowed head. A group of women converged on them, tugging at Sam’s arms, urging her to stay put. Sam shrugged them off. “I’ll be back in a minute. Stay with my sister, please.”

“Oh, Sammie,” Charlotte moaned.

Sam walked toward the house slowly, bumping against the fenders of closely parked vehicles, her gaze riveted to the open door. She edged past a crowd of men in the yard, who were watching and waiting so intently, they didn’t notice her. Sam halted near the firemen controlling the hoses. There was now nothing to block her view.

She was a dreamcatcher. The weave of her web was unbreakable. She would catch this nightmare before it reached Jake, and when dawn came, the sunlight would whisk it away.

The first fireman backed out the door, his movements labored. Sam hunched over, desperate to see under the sunken porch roof and know what heavy weight he pulled.

He dragged his burden by its blackened arm.

“
Keep her away,
” Sam yelled. Her voice was a raw groan. She huddled on the ground beside the three bodies and slung her hands fiercely. People had stopped trying to lift her up. “Keep my sister away from this! I don’t want her to see them this way!”

Sam hugged herself and rocked slowly, forcing herself to look, wishing she were blind. She had to see what Jake would see, as if she could make it easier for him by knowing first.

Each second left its brutal mark.

I can tell them apart
.

They’re still wearing their bed clothes
.

They didn’t burn
.

They suffocated in the smoke
.

They choked to death in the heat and the smoke
.

“For God’s sake, get the sheets over them,” someone ordered. The sheriff spoke close to her ear gently. “It’s not your sister we’re worried about. The women got a hold on her. You come on now. Get up.”

“
No.
”

“Jake’s here,” someone said loudly.

Sam lurched to her feet and pushed through the crowd, searching the confusion of vehicles and people for him. He appeared from behind an ambulance, dodging everything in his path with the frantic grace of an athlete. When he saw her, the stark agony in his face tore her apart.

Sam threw herself at him, making incoherent sounds of pain and comfort. She wanted to hold him back. He gripped her around the waist and carried her with him, lodged against his side. People leapt out of their way. Sam put her arms around him and held him with all her strength.

A terrible raw shout of despair came from him when he saw the bodies. He and Sam sank to the ground together. She wound her arms around his neck, trying to shield him, trying to hold him so close, his pain would flow into her.

His hands convulsed in the back of her robe, and he shuddered against her. Like everything else about him, his grief was a private torture only she could share.

Crying, Sam pressed her cheek against his hair. Nothing she could say would reach him.
We’ll get through this somehow. I love you. I love you. We can survive anything together. We always have
.

Clara Big Stick’s misgivings suddenly loomed in her mind, blacking out everything else, making her retch helplessly against Jake’s shoulder.

What if Clara’s original warnings were true?
No, I don’t believe, I never seriously believed …

She and Jake couldn’t have brought this on his family.