TRIAL BY FIRE (13 page)

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Ali asked.

“Just fill it out,” the woman said with a shrug. “Sister Anselm likes to keep a record of visitors for the patients and their families.
That way they have some idea of who came by to visit, and why.”

“What’s the reason for doing that?” Ali asked.

“For many family members it’s a comfort to know that someone cared—that at the very least their loved one wasn’t all alone here in the hospital, alone and forgotten.”

Returning to her chair, Ali opened the notebook to the first page and jotted down her name, department, and contact information. Writing those snippets of official information was the easy part. After that she spent several minutes staring off into space and trying to decide what else to write.

If she told the actual truth, she would be obliged to say something to the effect that she was the injured woman’s sole visitor because there was a turf war brewing between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Family members reading those words after the fact weren’t likely to find much comfort or solace in them. Finally, after several long moments of consideration, Ali took up her pen and continued:

I witnessed the fire the other night. It’s a miracle anyone survived. Sheriff Maxwell asked me to come here to handle any Phoenix-area media concerns regarding the unidentified patient or the hospital.

When she finished, Ali read through what she had written. It wasn’t much, but it was close enough to the truth to pass muster.

If a grieving family member read it later, she hoped they might find comfort in knowing Sheriff Maxwell had seen fit to dispatch a representative from his office, someone who was there
in person. And even though Ali was in the burn unit in an official capacity, she was also a legitimate visitor.

Closing the book, Ali returned it to the nurses’ station. Then she went back to her chair and opened her laptop. While she waited for her computer to boot up, a text message came in on her cell phone from her friend and homegrown cyber-security guru, Bartholomew Simpson. Cursed with sharing his name with a cartoon character and teased mercilessly about it by his classmates, B. Simpson had abandoned his given name by the time he reached junior high. He had also dropped out of high school and thrown himself into the world of computer science. He had put his natural genius and self-taught computer skills to work in Seattle’s computer-gaming world, where he had made a name for himself as well as a fortune.

In the aftermath of a tough divorce, B., like Ali, had returned to his hometown roots in Sedona, where he started a computer-security company called High Noon Enterprises. Months after Ali had signed on to become one of his clients, he had come to her rescue when she had been the subject of a cyber-stalking event. Her computer had been hacked by a serial killer who used an Internet dating service to target and harass unsuspecting victims. B. Simpson had played an integral part in taking the bad guy down.

In the months since then, High Noon Enterprises had become wildly successful. B. had, in fact, spent the last three weeks in Washington, D.C., doing something he couldn’t discuss, with someone at Homeland Security whose name was classified and couldn’t be mentioned.

While B. had been gone, he had sent the occasional text message, several of them hinting that when he got back, he would like to look into the possibility of their being more than friends.
That was another issue entirely. Ali had kept her responses breezy and noncommittal. Admittedly, she was attracted to the man. Why wouldn’t she be? He was smart and had plenty of money and a disposition that reminded her of a gentle giant (he towered over her at six foot five). Ali liked him, her parents adored him, and Chris thought B. was slick. As far as Ali was concerned, however, the difficulty lay in the difference in their ages. She couldn’t quite get beyond the fact that B. Simpson was closer in age to Christopher and Athena than he was to Ali.

That disparity seemed to have no effect at all on B.’s apparent interest in her. She scanned through his text message:

Bak n Sed. Bfast @ SLC. Prnts say u r in PHX. Kno u r workn 4 Sheriff Max, PHX in June! R U NUTS?

Smiling, Ali texted him back:

Nuts R U!

The elevator door swished open. Ali looked up from her cell phone in time to see a stocky young man step into the hallway and stride purposefully toward the nurses’ station.

“I’m here about the burn victim from Camp Verde,” he announced.

Ali was suddenly all ears. Closing her phone, she turned her attention to what was happening at the nurses’ station.

“Are you a relative?” the charge nurse asked.

“No,” the man said impatiently, pulling out his wallet and displaying his identification. “My name is Caleb Moore, and I’m with the Camp Verde Fire Department. I’m the one who carried the victim out of the burning house.”

The nurse glanced at his ID. Ali more than half expected that the man would be given the bum’s rush. Before the nurse could do so, Caleb rushed on.

“I already know that you can’t give me any information about her condition. You probably can’t even confirm she’s here, not officially anyway, but I know this is where the helicopter brought her. I know that nun is here, too. You know, the one who takes care of dying patients. So I’d like to sign the logbook, please—the one Sister Anselm keeps. I want to let the woman and her family know that I was here and that I was thinking about them.”

If Ali was surprised that Caleb Moore knew of the existence of Sister Anselm’s logbook, the charge nurse was not. Without a word, she handed over the notebook.

While Ali watched curiously, Caleb Moore clutched the notebook to his chest and marched past her to a table in the far corner of the room. Tossing the notebook onto the table, he settled heavily into a chair, removed a pen from his shirt pocket, and began to write.

Oblivious to everyone else in the room, he hunched over the notebook with an air of painstaking concentration, like a student dealing with difficult questions on a final exam. He wrote slowly and carefully, as though the words he put on paper would be judged as much for penmanship as for content.

Had Caleb glanced up from his task, he might have seen Ali studying him. She realized then that she might have caught a glimpse of him the night before at the fire, but the scene had been chaotic, so she wasn’t sure. The man she had seen in full firefighting regalia had been hustled into an ambulance. Today, clad in ordinary jeans and a dark blue golf shirt rather than his firefighting garb, and with his crewcut brown hair, Lieutenant
Moore looked perfectly ordinary, like a young neighbor who might stop by in the hope of borrowing a lawn mower or a rake.

Halfway down the page, he paused long enough to cough a horribly wracking cough. When he turned to cough into his armpit, Ali noticed the hospital identification bracelet he wore on his arm. Ali had assumed that the injured firefighter had suffered burns as well. Now she realized that his injuries were more likely related to smoke inhalation. He had been admitted and treated. Now, after being released, he had come straight to the burn unit.

Unwilling to interrupt his process, Ali waited until Caleb finished writing. Then she sat and watched while he read over what he had written. Only when he seemed satisfied with the result and started to return the notebook to the nurses’ station did Ali move to intercept him.

“Mr. Moore?” she asked. “Do you have a moment?”

He turned to face her as if noticing her presence for the first time. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?” he demanded. “How do you know who I am?”

Startled by his apparent anger, Ali held up her sheriff’s department ID. “I overheard you give your name to the nurse. I’m Ali Reynolds,” she explained. “I was at the scene of last night’s fire.”

He looked up from examining her ID with an expression of ill-concealed fury on his face.

“Media Relations?” he demanded. “I’m not interested in talking to someone from the media. Not at all!”

“I’m not a reporter,” Ali said quickly. “My job right now is to keep reporters away from everyone involved, including you, but I do want to offer my personal congratulations about what you did last night. Your efforts to save the woman were wonderful . . .”

He tossed the book onto the counter and then whirled to face Ali. “You think what I did was wonderful?” he demanded with a bitter snort. “Pardon the hell out of me if I beg to disagree. It would have been wonderful if we had gotten there sooner and I’d been able to carry her out of that burning building before the fire got to her instead of after the fact. Wonderful my ass!”

With that he turned and marched away, carrying his own burden of undeserved anguish with him and leaving Ali with the half-uttered compliment still stuck in her throat.

The rest of the world might regard Lieutenant Caleb Moore as a hero, but that wasn’t how he saw himself. Despite his valiant efforts to save her, to him the unidentified burn-unit patient in room 814 represented a terrible failure on his part. As far as he was concerned, what he and the rest of the Camp Verde Fire Department had done on her behalf was much too little and way too late.

Ali turned back to the nurses’ station. The charge nurse shook her head sadly as the elevator doors closed behind him.

“That’s not unusual,” she explained in response to Ali’s unspoken question. “Firefighters tend to take their losses very personally.”

“Could I see that book again for a moment?” Ali asked.

With a shrug, the nurse handed over the notebook and then turned away to answer a ringing telephone. Ali took the logbook back to her chair and opened the journal to the second entry.

My name is Caleb Moore. I’m a volunteer firefighter for the Camp Verde Volunteer Fire Department. I’m the one who carried you out of the burning house last night.

Thirty years ago, when I was little, my younger
brother, Benjamin, and I were playing with matches. His clothing caught fire. I was only two years older than he was. I didn’t know enough to roll him around on the ground to put out the fire. All I could do was stand there and watch. I have nightmares about that to this day. I wake up in a cold sweat still hearing his screams. He was burned over ninety percent of his body. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital, where he died two days later.

My parents forgave me but I have never forgiven myself, and I’ve never forgotten it, either. Everyone tried to tell me that what happened to Benjy wasn’t my fault, but I know better. I was four. He was only two. I’m the one who got the matches down from the cupboard. I’m the one who lit the first one.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to make up for what I did. That’s one of the reasons I joined the fire department. I’m here to tell you how sorry I am that we didn’t come to help you sooner. I hope they catch whoever did this to you.

You and your family will be in my prayers every day. I wish I knew your name, but God knows it even if I don’t. If there’s anything I can do to help, beyond donating blood and praying, please let me know.

I’m leaving my card here with a phone number. If you or someone in your family would like to talk to me, please feel free to call anytime, day or night.

Sincerely,
Caleb Moore

Fighting back tears, Ali closed the logbook. Then she walked back over to the nurses’ station and deposited it on the counter.

“Are you all right?” the charge nurse asked.

“I’m okay,” Ali answered.

But she wasn’t okay. Not really. Over the years, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, she had found herself wondering what kind of person would walk into a burning building in the hope of saving another. Now she had met one, a real American hero. She knew she was lucky to have done so, and so was the woman in room 814.

Regardless of whether the patient lived or died, she and her unknown family owed a huge debt to a man who, despite his personal history or maybe because of it, had chosen to become a firefighter, placing himself in a position where he would have to face his worst fears on a daily basis.

Maybe Caleb Moore’s previous night’s rescue attempt hadn’t lived up to his own high expectations, but Ali couldn’t help but admire the man’s raw courage and his continuing effort to right an unrightable wrong.

Once more she emerged from a drugged sleep into a world of impossible pain. Unbelievable pain. She looked around, hoping to see the woman—the nun or the sister or the nurse—and hoping she would come and push the button.

Who was she again? Right then, she couldn’t remember the woman’s name or what it was she had called herself. Not a nurse or doctor. Something else, but the pain blotted out any memory of those words just as it blotted out everything else. Everything.

With some dismay she realized that beyond the fire—beyond the world of flame that should have been hell but wasn’t—she remembered nothing. The fire was all she could recall. Only the
fire. It was as though she had come into existence in the fire. Before that she had been nothing.