Isolation (27 page)

Faye knew that she was not meant to be a killer, because she wasn't capable of pulling a trigger without first taking the time to think through the consequences. Sometimes a critical moment didn't leave time for thought.

Delia saw Faye hesitate and she let a silvery laugh pass from her perfect lips. “Put the gun down or I'll grind this thing into his eyes. First one, then the other.” She waved the burning stick around. Bits of ash fell in Joe's face and he closed his eyes tight to protect them. “I'll probably mess up his pretty face while I'm doing it, and you don't want that. But if burning the skin off his face isn't enough to make you put that weapon down, I will do this.”

She lifted her hand and let Joe gasp for breath while she again held the branch perpendicular like a spear over the soft spot at the base of his throat. “I will open up his throat with this thing. Poking, burning, tearing…whatever it takes, I will kill this man with nothing but a stick…a burning hot little stick.”

Maybe it was just the drugs talking. Maybe Delia really did think that she still had the upper hand, even though Faye possessed all the firepower. Maybe she had a death wish, but Faye thought that the woman had no inkling that a mild-mannered archaeologist might really kill her. Maybe she was thinking, “Nice girls don't shoot.”

If so, then Delia was thinking wrong. It took nothing more than a glance at her suffering husband to make up Faye's mind. She pulled the trigger.

The bullet struck Delia in the chest and traveled out her back, poetically taking the opposite path of the bullet she'd pumped into Liz. Its momentum took Delia's body backward and left her sprawled against a tree. Bits of bone and flesh surrounded her, and the ground was splashed with blood. Faye would have stood staring, stunned at what she'd done, but Joe needed her.

She threw the rifle aside in her thoughtless hurry to get to her husband's side. Then she straddled him, just as Delia had done. Unlike Delia, she was careful to keep her weight on her knees so that she wouldn't impede his breathing. And he was breathing, thank God. The wound on his neck didn't pierce his trachea, and Faye counted herself lucky that she hadn't given Delia the extra seconds she'd needed to do just that.

His eyes were closed and she was so afraid of hurting him, but she gently kissed his lips and his jaw and, finally, the eyelids that Delia had threatened to gouge away. Then she pulled away to let him breathe. As she stood, she felt his big hand close on her ankle, as if he were making sure she was still there. Leaning down, she took that hand and helped him to his feet. He moved like a man who was going to be okay.

Only after she saw that Joe was back to himself did she look around her. A dozen small fires licked across the forest floor. The coals from Delia's branch had landed among the dry leaf litter and pine straw that lay thick over all of Joyeuse Island. The fires were moving as fast as a human being could run, maybe faster.

They needed to be at home, and it was time to run. Once again, Joe was leading the way through the night and, once again, Faye was sprinting barefoot over uneven ground. The moon had still not shown its face, but the fires behind them and on either side lent enough light to put Faye in terror.

In the flickering firelight, Faye and Joe ran for home.

Chapter Thirty-three

Sly stood in the cupola, practically hanging out the open window. The smell of smoke had grown steadily since he heard the gunshot. He wanted to find his son and help him. He had learned the island's paths pretty well, so he thought he probably could get to Joe in the dark, but first he had to have some inkling of where he was.

The smoke seemed to be coming from the east, and his half-century-old eyes were not telling him what he wanted to know.

How bad was it?

When a warm glow lit the eastern horizon, many hours before dawn would light those same skies, he knew the answer. It was bad.

***

Joe extended a hand back to help Faye and she slapped it away.

“Don't wait for me,” she said. “Get back to the house and save our…”

She swallowed, and he knew she was unable to spit out all the things she wanted him to save. Son. Father. Friends. Home.

When Faye found her voice, she flapped her hand in the direction of their big old house, still running. “We have to save it all. Go. I'll be right behind you.”

He stretched out his stride and ran for home.

***

Gerry had wandered the house, finding Emma and Michael in the basement but no one in the rest of the house or on the porches. There was only one more place to look, the cupola, and he was heading there when the sound of a single gunshot drew him away from the staircase, toward an east-facing window.

Unless Faye, Joe, and Sly were all crowded into the cupola, some or all of them were out there in the dark. He wanted to help them and he wanted to know the answers to the questions that were holding him at the window. He was a scientist, so he lived for questions, but he was finding that unanswerable life-and-death questions left him paralyzed.

Where were Faye, Joe, and Sly?

Who pulled that trigger and what was the target?
Who
was the target?

Why was the air heavy with smoke?

Gerry stood indecisive, wishing desperately that he knew what his duty was, so that he could do it.

A tremendous clatter sounded behind him, and he turned to see Sly descending the spiral staircase at top speed, still carrying the ax. Halfway down, he put both big hands on the banister and lofted over the side, hitting the ground at a run. It was the action of a foolhardy and headstrong youth, not a man running on aging knees. Sly Mantooth would feel those knees tomorrow—and his hips and his neck and his lower back—but tonight he was moving like a young man running into battle.

More important in Gerry's mind, was this: Sly was moving like a man who knew where his duty lay and Gerry intended to help him do it.

Sly was still running, out the front door and down the stairs. He bellowed “Fire!” Seeing the question on Gerry's face, he wasted precious breath telling him how he could help. “Shovel's under the porch.”

Before Gerry could voice his question—“Where?”—Sly had answered it without wasting any more breath. He had pointed the big ax eastward toward the fire, while running as hard as he could in that direction.

***

Emma heard the shot and snatched a sleeping Michael out of his bed. She'd checked the back porch for Joe and the parlor for Faye, and she'd just reached the front door when Sly barreled past her.

She heard Sly cry out “Fire!” to Gerry, who was standing on the front porch, and she called after them. “I'll wet some towels down. We can use them to beat back the fire.”

This announcement stopped Sly cold. It actually made him turn around and walk a few steps in her direction, away from the emergency. “No, you will not be going near that fire.”

She was preparing to tell him that nobody, not even Douglass Everett in his prime, had ever told her what to do, but his next words stopped her. “It's too dark for you to even set that child down. He could wander two steps away and none of us would see him. When the fire is on us, and I'm here to tell you that it's coming fast, we can't be running around looking for that baby.”

He was right.

Sly took one more step in her direction. “I told my son I'd keep his family safe. You're family to him, too. You take that baby down to the beach. You walk out in the water with him in your arms and you stay there until the fire's done. That's the most important job of the night. Will you do it?”

She nodded.

Gerry came out from beneath the porch, carrying an armload of wet towels and a bucket of water. “I'll help here. You get the little boy someplace safe, ma'am.”

Without a word, she turned away and found the path that would get her to the water the quickest. It wasn't hard to follow, even in the dark, because so many feet had beaten it down over so many years. Emma herself had walked this path many times when she came out to visit Faye and Joe.

The wind brought a sudden gust of smoke. Michael coughed and so did she. She looked back over her shoulder at the house her friend Faye loved so much. Tall windows, shady porches, walls that were always as clean and white as Faye's paintbrush could keep them. Those walls were a dull red now, reflecting the coming flames.

Faye was going to lose it.

She was going to lose this heap of old wood that her ancestors had hewn with hand tools. Its roof was going to fall when the burning timbers could no longer support its weight. She was going to be left with nothing but memories of her mother and grandmother and the stories they'd told her about the people who had gone before. Photographs, clothes, furniture, books. It was all going to go up in flames.

Michael cuddled his sleepy face into Emma's neck, spurring her to walk faster. She couldn't save Faye's house, no more than she'd been able to stop the miscarriage that had wounded her friend's heart so deeply, but she could save this boy.

She had meant to linger, waiting until the fire got close before she took Michael into the water, but she didn't. The fire had grown close enough for her to see it in the short time it had taken her to walk to the shore. She was scared.

The sand made soft noises under her feet as she walked across the beach. When she reached the water's edge, she kept walking, shoes and clothes and all. The water was November-cold and it made Michael cry, but a little cold wasn't going to kill either of them. When it reached her waist, she turned around and saw that all the coastline to her right was alight. Straight ahead, where Gerry and Sly were defending the house with an ax and some towels, she saw only darkness. She had no idea where Faye and Joe were.

As the wet cold seeped into her bones, it occurred to her that she should have called the sheriff, 911, Sheriff Mike, somebody, but the phone and gun she'd tucked into her pocket were both drenched. It hadn't occurred to her to call the law, because Gerry was the law, but he was in as much trouble as the rest of them right now. They all needed help.

Sacrilegious though it might be, she always turned to Douglass for help in trying times, even before she asked God. She asked him to watch over Sly and Gerry and Joe and Michael and her and, especially, she asked him to watch over Faye. She didn't know how much more pain her friend could take.

***

Faye staggered on, falling further behind Joe but always moving forward.

The trees in front of her still seemed draped in black velvet. Where was the moon? It had to rise sometime. No disaster could stop the proper progression of the seasons and the tides.

Behind her, the fire forced a sighing wind through the trees. It blew hot on her back. Trees were crashing to the ground. The fire's roar grew louder with every breath she took.

A spot of white ahead of her said that she'd reached the opening in the trees where her house stood. It was too small. The clearing was too small for her to hope that the fire would miss her house as it leapt from tree to tree.

She saw Gerry standing at the edge of the clearing. A ditch stretched behind him, and he was making steady progress at lengthening it. A fire break was an excellent idea. In the absence of fire hydrants and a fire department, it was probably the best weapon they had, but it wasn't going to be enough. Gerry was smart enough to see that there was not going to be enough time for one man to separate her house from the blaze. The fact that he was out here digging anyway, instead of heading for the safety of the water, made him her friend for life. If Gerry ever needed help, his friend Faye would be there.

He kept digging as he said, “Emma took Michael to the beach. They'll be safe there.”

“Joe and his dad?”

He jerked his head in the direction of the house. “I don't know where they went. I lost them in the dark. I figure you've got other shovels and they're over there doing the same thing I am.”

A spark set off a small fire just a few feet away from where she stood. Gerry nodded at a bucket of wet towels. “I've been fighting hot spots with those. If you'll do that, I can dig faster.”

She picked up a towel and slapped at the flames until they went out. If she had a big enough towel, she could drop it over the whole island and snuff out all the danger. She could put the whole island out. Since she didn't, she just attacked the flames that were in her reach and tried not to think about the ones that weren't.

“I called the sheriff when I heard the shot,” Gerry said. “Several officers should be here any minute.”

Faye couldn't believe she hadn't already thought of calling for help. Her phone was on the windowsill where she left it, and that should have been the first place she went when she came out of the woods. Where was her mind?

It was stuck in the mode of fighting only the crisis directly in front of her, and it had been stuck there since she followed Joe out of the house to the place where she killed a woman.

With two words, “Delia's dead,” she told Gerry who had killed Liz and stalked Emma and Faye. Those two words told him who had been on the wrong end of the gunshot he'd heard. Later, she could explain to him how and why Delia did what she did, and she could take responsibility for shooting Delia dead. Right now, the important thing was this battle against a wildfire that was bound to beat them.

***

Joe saw his father and he saw the ax. He saw Sly running faster than any man his age had a right to run, and he knew where Sly was going.

His father went first to the biggest cistern, nearly as tall as the house itself. It collected all the rainwater that ran in gutters off the east side of the house, as if its long-ago designer had known where danger would someday arise. Its wood was just as old as the house's timbers, and Faye kept it painted just as white. Sly readied his ax and chose his spot. Drawing the ax back and turning his body hard to maximize its power, he swung hard and the ax hit the cistern in exactly the spot he had chosen. Wood chips and sawdust flew, and he drew back the ax again. He struck the cistern again and he struck it a third time.

Joe heard a loud crack, and water began to spray out of a hole opened up by his father's ax. It spewed hard, driven by the weight of twenty feet of water, and both men were instantly wet to the skin.

Sly swung his ax again, opening up the hole. The gush of water grew bigger and it began to flow down the sides of the cistern, rather than shooting out of its side in a single stream. He struck again and the power of this blow destroyed the old tank's structural integrity. It failed spectacularly, collapsing in a heap of wooden beams and loosing a gush of water that reached far enough into the woods to quench a large swath of flames.

Sly was fast, but he wasn't fast enough. Joe saw Sly collapse under the weight of the falling timbers, and he knew that he couldn't bear to lose his father when he'd just gotten him back.