Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) (40 page)

She remembered what Mario had said to her. He wanted her to suffer; he wanted her to feel the terror of a slow and painful death. And by recreating the fire that had undone all of his plans, he would succeed.

Pete.

He’d said help was on the way, but that didn’t mean he’d sent a fire truck. How long had she been unconscious? Five minutes? Ten? San Francisco took fire seriously; how long would it take for the fire department to get to the apartment?

People were probably trying to get to her right this very minute,
right?
But Sadie couldn’t lay there and hope for that.

Think,
she told herself, forcing herself to remain calm.
Think.

One of the things Pete had taught her, and that her own experiences had solidified, was the importance of knowing your environment. She looked around at the newly tiled walls and stared at the small frosted window above the tub; it would be too small and too high to crawl through, and it only opened a few inches. Then she looked up at the ceiling, where she saw the grate of the bathroom fan. If she could turn that on, it would draw the smoke out better than the window would, right? It might also draw the oxygen out, but she couldn’t breathe with all the smoke anyway.

Was the bathroom door open?
She took a breath and held it as she forced herself to lift enough to look over the edge of the tub toward the doorway through which smoke was coming in fast. Her instinct was to try to escape this room, this apartment, this building, but the fire was between her and the way out. And could she even make it to the stairs in the condition she was in?

She whimpered behind her gag as she lowered herself back down, her whole side on fire—though not literally. Not yet. She
had
to shut that door. This room had contained the smell of Wendy decomposing; closing that door might buy her a few more minutes too. To close it, though, she would have to get out of the tub, cross the room, and push it closed. Sitting up had taken everything she had, and yet if she stayed there, she would die.

She said a pleading prayer in her mind and then moved as quickly as she could to sit up, throw her arms over the side of the tub, and pull herself over the edge. She crumpled onto the newly tiled floor, screaming in pain behind her gag and feeling tears trailing down her face, which was pressed against the floor. She’d sustained a lot of injury in recent years—far more than she’d have ever thought possible for a fifty-something-year-old woman to survive—but she’d never felt anything like this. Already blood was pooling on the tile. How much blood had she already lost?

She attempted to army crawl to the door, but the pain of using her torso for momentum was impossible. Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, gritting her teeth and crying out, though she made very little sound. There was no time to let the pain ebb away, so she braced her shoulder on the wall and used it to push up against until she was standing.

The smoke was thicker when she stood, but of course it would be. She’d taught school for twenty-five years, and her second grade students knew to crawl beneath smoke should they ever be caught in a house fire. But she couldn’t crawl. Still bracing herself with the wall, she walked to the door and used her foot to slam it closed. Perhaps she should have also closed the bedroom door but maybe the fire was
in
the bedroom. She could hear crackles and pops, and the apartment wasn’t big enough for the fire to be too far away, regardless of where Mario had started it.

The closed door and thick rubber strip along the bottom prevented more smoke from getting in, but the room was still filled with it, and she could barely breathe. Sadie flipped the switch for the bathroom fan. A whirring sound filled the room, and she carefully lowered herself to the floor, short of breath, sick to her stomach, and shaking from the pain in her side. She feared she would lose consciousness at any moment. Sweat dripped from her hairline and prickled beneath her skin. She knew that paper burned at a temperature of 451 degrees—thank you, Ray Bradbury—but did apartments also burn at that heat? How hot would it get before the heat alone killed her? She used her fingers to pull her shirt over her nose again.

Pete,
she called out in her mind.
You’re here, right? You’re coming for me?

He would know she was in the building, but he wouldn’t know exactly where. Was there anything more Sadie could do? On another occasion she’d found herself locked somewhere she shouldn’t have been, with no way out and few options, but there had been pipes which she’d hit over and over until someone followed the sound to find her.

With that in mind, she moved as quickly as she could to the new cupboard beneath the new sink and pulled open the door. She wondered if Mario had felt any regret destroying the work he’d done in the room. Would he have felt more regret over that than for killing her?

The pipes were plastic, but even if they’d been metal, she realized she had nothing to hit them with. There was nothing in this newly remodeled bathroom: not a plunger or a toilet paper holder or even tools left behind. She leaned against the cabinet, tempted to collapse on the floor and wait for rescue, but her experience had taught her that any form of giving up could mean the end of everything.

She scanned the bathroom again, and her eyes landed on the back of the toilet, specifically the lid covering the tank. She pushed herself to her feet—the pain was excruciating—then fit her fingers underneath the porcelain lid. She counted to three in her mind and then pulled up on the edge of the lid as hard as she could. It cartwheeled off the top of the toilet, toward the tub, and hit the knob of the faucet on the way down before it hit the tub itself and broke into three pieces.

The broken knob started spraying water. Sadie hadn’t expected that—she’d just been trying to break the lid—and pulled away from the spray until she realized it was cold water. Beautifully cold. She stepped into the spray and let it drench her, hopefully buying her a little more time in the rising heat.

She hobbled toward the bathtub and picked up the smallest piece of broken porcelain, which was roughly the size of half a dinner plate. She looked around for something she could brace it with and saw the toilet bowl. After reminding herself that it was brand-new and therefore as clean as it would ever be, she dropped the piece of porcelain inside it and propped it against the side of the bowl. Then she started moving her wrists back and forth on the sharp edge, cutting through the duct tape and, too often, through her skin as well. She bit back a scream every time she cut herself, and the toilet water turned pinker and pinker. It felt like forever before she could wrestle one hand out of the tape and use it to pull off the rest.

A quick inspection showed a dozen or more cuts, some of them pretty deep, but her hands were free. She ripped the duct tape off her face, sure she’d taken a layer of skin with it, and howled with pent-up pain as she fell against the wall, breathless, dizzy, and exhausted.

She pressed her hands against her side and began crying in earnest, babbling prayers and pleadings and thinking about her children, the wedding that wouldn’t happen, all the life she had left to live, and the fact that she was going to die just like her sister had. Surely the police would find a way to tie this back to Stephen Pilings—lawyer or not they would be able to prove he was part of this, right? It was little consolation if it took her life to put him away.

The heat was getting intense, and though a lot of the smoke had cleared out, it was getting harder to breathe. She backed into the spray of water again and stepped over the side of the tub before sinking into it. She plugged the drain, hoping it would help retain the cold water. She picked up one of the pieces of the toilet lid, but when she hit the faucet with it, it barely made a sound. She let it drop back into the tub that was filling up with water made pink from the blood draining out of her body. She lay down, half of her face in the rising water. She began to shiver, which she found terribly ironic, and wondered if having her side wound in the water would cause her to bleed out faster.

More thoughts came to mind, and the tears that leaked out of her eyes had nothing to do with the pain she felt almost numb to now. Would Pete ever fall in love again, now with two women to mourn? This was so unfair to him.

And then she heard something.

A voice?

“I’m here!” she shouted, and pushed herself awkwardly and painfully to her feet. She stepped out of the wet tub and felt assaulted by the heat, but moved to the door and started knocking rapidly. “I’m here!” she yelled again, feeling the heat through the door. She paused and listened. Nothing. She said it again, “I’m in here!” She banged on the door five times, listened. Nothing. Yelled, banged, listened. Nothing. Again and again and again she did it, certain she’d heard something earlier and determined that if she died in here she would be found with her hand in a fist and her mouth open in a scream. Then she heard something else. A chopping kind of tearing sound. She took a step away from the door, but is that where it had come from?

The sound continued, filling the room, confusing her as to where it was coming from until a piece of the ceiling fell into the tub. She looked up then, and backed as far against the wall as she could. They were coming from above.

Like angels.

“I’m here!” she screamed. Her chest shuddered into a sob as she looked up through the growing hole in the roof. “I’m here!”

Chapter 38

The nurse finished taking Sadie’s vital signs and double-checked the IV bag hanging at the top of the apparatus next to Sadie’s bed. Sadie thanked her and then relaxed against the pillows once the nurse left, hoping she could fall asleep again. Pete had been in the chair next to her bed the last time she’d been awakened by the nurses, but he wasn’t there now. Daylight peeked through the edges of the mini-blinds on the windows of her hospital room. Perhaps he went down for breakfast, or to call their families.

The pain meds made it impossible for her to stop the tears that normally she would have avoided. But this was the first time in almost sixteen hours that she’d been alone with her thoughts. Mario had meant for her to die. He’d orchestrated it even though he wouldn’t be there to see her panic. Apparently, just knowing she’d feel the true terror of her situation was enough satisfaction for him.

And Pete had saved her. He’d insisted she was still inside even after Shasta and Annie were brought out and Shasta said the building was empty. She’d confirmed that she’d heard a struggle above her prior to the fire, though she’d turned up her TV in an attempt to drown it out.

The firefighters couldn’t access the third floor by then, and it was Pete who demanded they go in through the roof, which typically they wouldn’t risk with an active fire still going.

Amid the drama of the evening and night, Sadie had managed to tell the police that Mario and Rodger were meeting outside the wax museum at 8:00 that night. The police had arrested the two men, and a solid force of half a dozen detectives were now collecting statements, reviewing documents, and piecing together the convoluted investigation. Stephen Pilings had been arrested; his attorney couldn’t stop things now.

Justice would be done, and there was some satisfaction in that. Sadie reflected on the fact that she’d come to San Francisco to learn about her sister, and, though she’d hoped for a redemption she hadn’t found, she
had
learned about the life Wendy had lived. And, ultimately, she had learned who—of the many people in Wendy’s life who had reason to want her gone—had killed her. It was all so sad, and though Sadie knew she would never overcome the regret of what Wendy had done with the life she’d been given, at least she could be laid to rest. At least Sadie could say she did her best by her to the very end.

At some point last night—she wasn’t sure when—Jack had called Pete. He was worried when Sadie hadn’t returned his messages. With her phone broken and burned, she hadn’t even known he was trying to reach her. Pete filled Jack in on what had happened and reassured him that Sadie was going to be okay.

Jack had already talked to Ji and taken over the arrangements for Wendy’s body. The two of them had decided to have Wendy cremated and her ashes interred in a burial plot shared by Jack and Sadie’s parents in Colorado. Sadie thought that was a fitting choice. They could visit her resting place together and continue to work through the complexities of their feelings toward their sister. Sadie had not found closure, not yet, but she was hopeful that if the concept really existed, she would find it one day.

Beyond that, Sadie knew that having Wendy close to home was precisely what her parents would have wanted. They had never stopped loving their daughter.

There was a light knock on her door, and Sadie began frantically wiping at her eyes as the door opened. She didn’t want Pete to see her upset. She wasn’t entirely sure where things were between the two of them, but she knew she didn’t want to appear undone. It was a taller, darker man who stepped inside her room, however. Ji carried a bouquet of flowers Sadie felt sure were from the hospital gift shop.