Into the Whirlwind (11 page)

She guided Frank to the cleared space. “If you lie straight back, it is clear of rubble,” she whispered.

“Thank you, Mollie-girl,” he said as he lay down. “Thank you for everything. Your dad would be proud of you, lass.”

Her lip started to tremble, and she turned away. If her
breathing became ragged again, Frank would hear and know she was crying.

Despite her exhaustion, Mollie was too tense to lie down to sleep. Her business was gone. Her home was lost. She had nothing but a scorched dress and a pocket watch that didn’t work.

And a deed.

Mollie reached up to unwind the heavy coil anchored to the back of her head, letting the scrap of paper fall out. It was a little rumpled, but the deed was in perfect shape. Aching with weariness, she tucked it inside her bodice.

She wished that sniveling woman in the corner would quit crying. Weren’t they all miserable enough without having to listen to that? Normally at a time like this she would pray, but the spirit was not with her. Why would God rob her of everything? Mollie closed her eyes and turned away, tears trickling down her face. Now she was no better than the woman in the corner.

A noise outside caught her attention. Was someone shouting out there? The voice came from far away, but it was definitely the sound of a man shouting in the distance.

If there was some new calamity on the horizon, Mollie didn’t want to know. But . . . was the man laughing?

She pushed herself to her feet and walked to the opening of a window. Bracing her hands on the grainy ledge, she cocked an ear to hear.

“Don’t despair!” the distant voice called out. “The sun is going to rise tomorrow and shine on this city.” The wind carried his voice away, and Mollie could only hear fragments of what he was calling out with such vigor. Rain spattered her face as she leaned out the opening of the window, desperate to hear more.

“We will rebuild! A new start!”

Mollie sucked in a breath of air. Was it possible someone could have such energy on a night like tonight? The man was
getting closer and easier to hear. Zack came to stand behind her, and the reassuring weight of his hands settled on her shoulders. Frank sat up to listen as well.

“I’ve got nothing left,” the strange man yelled into the wind. “I have lost everything but my wife and my two hands and my hope,” he shouted. “God gives every one of us hope, brothers. Tonight we sleep, tomorrow we rebuild. This is Chicago! Do you hear me, brothers?
This is Chicago!
”

“Amen!” a woman called from somewhere across the street.

“Amen to
you
, sister,” the man responded as he kept walking down the street, getting closer to the church. “We are a city of broad shoulders and strong backs. We are alive, and God is good. Mark my words—in one year this city will be bigger and stronger than before. Don’t despair!”

Mollie squinted as she tried to see the man as he strode past the church. The light of the fire was fading and he was just a shadowy, faceless figure striding through the street, like a town crier from days of old. He brought a beam of light slicing through the darkness. Others in the church stood to listen as well.

“God has given the soul of man wings,” the town crier said. “We will use those wings to carry us into daylight. The clouds are lifting.
The clouds are lifting
, brother, and tomorrow sunlight will break through.”

The man walked farther down the street, calling out words of comfort to the thousands of people huddled behind walls and beneath blankets. Mollie clutched at the opening of the window, wishing he would return. “Keep talking, brother,” a man called out from somewhere across the street. Mollie strained to hear the town crier as he continued calling out into the ruined landscape.

“Our city will rise again!” he shouted. “Out of tragedy we will build something great. Don’t despair, Chicago. Don’t despair!”

The woman in the corner had stopped weeping. Zack leaned
over to whisper in her ear. “It’s true, Mollie,” he said. “Everything that man said is true. Tomorrow we begin rebuilding. Playing music. Dancing. I promise you.”

She leaned against him, drawing on his strength and thanking God for sending that strange messenger out onto the streets. She had been wrong to despair, and already her strength was beginning to rally. She wanted to say something, but her throat was too clogged with emotion to speak. She didn’t know if she was about to laugh or cry, but she knew one thing to the marrow of her bones.

This fire would not be the end of her.

7

Z
ack dreaded waking Mollie up. Morning light illuminated the filthy, dilapidated chaos inside the church. None of the pews or stained glass windows had survived. Mounds of slate and rock from the collapsed roof were strewn across the ground. Exhausted refugees slept propped against the walls of the church, their soot-stained faces slack with exhaustion. Everyone here was homeless. Mollie didn’t even have the paltry belongings she’d stuffed into the pillowcase, only the clothes on her back and a scorched green scarf balled up beneath her sleeping head. He hoped her dreams were peaceful, for in a few moments she would awaken to the catastrophe that had befallen her.

Could he persuade her to return home with him? Rumor had it that everything west of the river was untouched by the fire, which meant his townhouse had survived. He wanted to extend the protection of his home to Mollie. Never had he seen a woman as brave as she had been for the last thirty-six hours, and it confirmed what he had believed about her all along. She was worth fighting for, and he wanted her to be a part of his life.

With each step, gravel and cinders crunched beneath his boots as he moved to Mollie’s side and hunkered down beside her. He
gently shook her shoulder. “Mollie, it is morning,” he whispered. He braced himself to see her peaceful face cloud over with despair, but she surprised him. Pushing herself up on an elbow, Mollie winced through aching muscles and scanned the wreckage in the church.

“What a mess,” she said. “Such a lot of unsavory debris.”

Relief trickled through him. She couldn’t be too devastated if she had the strength to summon up a sense of humor. “I need to get home and check on my parents. They are probably tearing their hair out by now.”

“I understand.” She rolled into a sitting position and moaned. The lawyer, Frank, had awoken and was gingerly moving to sit up.

“Take it easy, Frank,” Mollie warned. “It’s a mess in here, so don’t try to move around until I can clear some space.”

Others were rousing in the church as well, and it would only be a matter of time before Princess Sophie would awaken and start issuing orders. Zack needed to talk to Mollie, and he didn’t want an audience.

“Let’s go outside,” he said, grasping her elbow and helping her rise. “We’ve got a few things to discuss before I leave.”

It was tricky navigating toward the street. Each footstep brought a smoky stench from the rubble crunching beneath his feet. The uneven ground made him balance each step, but at last they made it to the street.
Can this really be Chicago?
By daylight, the city looked even worse than the previous night. A few skeletal walls of buildings dotted the destroyed landscape. The rubble was covered in a layer of ash and soot, casting the world into ghostly shades of gray. Even the sky was a dull, leaden gray.

“Listen, Mollie, I need to get home and let my parents know I’m alive. Then I am coming back for you. If my home is still
standing, I’ll provide a place for you and Frank as long as you need.”

“Why would you do that?” She looked a little taken aback, which surprised him.

Because he loved her. Because they had just experienced the worst two days imaginable, and the bond that had been forged between them was not something to be tossed away. If Louis Hartman didn’t like it, he would quit. The fire had just taught Zack what was most important in this world, and she was looking straight at him.

“Look around you,” he said. “Half the city is homeless, and you will need a place to stay.”

She pulled a few inches away, drawing her green scarf tighter around her shoulders. “The other night,” she began hesitantly.

“Yes?” he said softly. The other night he had flung caution to the wind and shouted his true feelings for her. He ought to be embarrassed, but he wasn’t. In those few moments after the turpentine plant had blown, she had clung to him when they thought they were about to die. They had established their first tentative steps toward building a foundation for their future. The breeze coming in from the east ruffled her hair, and he had to restrain himself from stroking it away from her face.

“The other night I went to your house about a deed to a piece of land on Columbus Street.”

His face hardened. “Not that again.”

“Yes, that again.”

Frustration rippled through him. He dragged a hand through his rumpled hair and scanned the horizon. “I don’t want to talk about this. We’ve both got more important things to worry about.”

“I know what I saw,” she insisted. “I read the document word for word to Frank, and he says it is a legitimate deed. He said a
properly executed deed would have been filed at the courthouse the moment the deal had closed, not sitting in a trunk at the foot of my father’s bed.”

Zack took a moment to choose his words. He needed to handle this carefully. “Mollie, we both saw the courthouse burn to the ground, and there are no more city records to prove who owns what. Your apartment is gone. There is no way we can ever prove what you had because every record of the transaction no longer exists.”

“I still have it.”

His eyes widened, and he paused. “What?”

“I still have the deed. It was rolled into my hair when we went into the lake last night. I’ve still got it.”

That certainly changed things. He didn’t move a muscle and kept the expression on his face carefully neutral. “Can I see it?”

Mollie angled her body away from his view as she dug inside her bodice. After tugging the document free, she held it before her, the early morning light illuminating the engraved blue ink and embossed stamps. Her father’s signature was clearly on the bottom line. Zack reached out to take it.

“No!” She yanked it away, curling protectively around it.

He felt like she had slapped him. “What do you think I am going to do, snatch it and throw it in the lake?” he demanded in an angry voice. She took a step back, and he followed. “Do you?”

“Shhhh!” she said in a fierce whisper. “People are still sleeping!”

He stepped closer, his face inches from hers. “And I am dying here because a woman I have hankered after for years just kicked me in the teeth.
Again
.”

Mollie blanched. “Why do you keep talking like that? We barely know each other!”

He was mad enough to spit fire. “I couldn’t court a woman who did business with Hartman’s,” he ground out. “That was the quickest route for me to get canned, but after the fire, I don’t care anymore about rules. You are a woman I want in my life, but my hand to God, if you keep accusing me of trying to swindle you, I am liable to combust.”

Her eyes narrowed in distrust, and he was smart enough to know that blasted scrap of paper was going to be a wedge between them forever unless he could figure a way to dispose of it.

He settled his hands on her shoulders. “Mollie, you have a piece of paper. In the coming years, the court system in this city is going to be swamped with a legal quagmire the likes of which this country has never seen before. With the archives of the courthouse in ashes, there is no way to prove the legitimacy of that deed.”

“No way to
disprove
it either.”

“Exactly.” He turned her around and cupped the side of her face. He tried using a gentle pressure to nudge her face up to look at him, but she resisted. “Mollie, I have cared about you for years. I have made a great study of Mollie Knox and the way she runs her business, but you know nothing about me. I suppose it is not fair for me to expect you to trust me when I’ve never been more than the man signing off on your quarterly revenue statements. Come live at my house. Bring Frank. Heaven help me, you can even bring Sophie, but come. I can’t stand the thought of you shivering in that church. No matter what it takes, I intend to earn your trust, and after that, you’d better put an armed guard around your heart, because I plan on winning you and folding you into my life. Fair warning, woman.”

Mollie squinted at something over his shoulder, and Zack
realized she had not been paying attention to a single word he’d said. “I wonder what that boy is doing,” she said.

A block away, a boy with a stack of papers was walking down the street, handing out a piece of paper to the few people who were picking through the rubble. A newsboy? Mollie was already heading toward him, and Zack had no choice but to follow.

The newsboy saw Mollie and met her halfway. “Fresh news, no charge,” he said, as he pressed a single sheet of paper into Mollie’s hands. The
Chicago Tribune
banner graced the top of the single sheet of paper.

Mollie looked at the boy in amazement. “I saw your building go up in flames with my own eyes,” she said. “How can you be back in business so quickly?”

The boy grinned. “We found a building on Canal Street with a printing press ready for use. It will be a while before we can get a full issue out, but our equipment can produce newssheets. If you have anything that needs reporting, we are at Number 15 Canal Street.”

“Do you know if the fire jumped to the west of the river?” Zack asked, holding his breath.

“It did not,” he said. “We’ve got people out mapping the damage and will make a better report in tomorrow’s paper.” Then the boy’s good humor sank. “The fire got the Union Baseball Grounds. No more White Stockings for a while.”

Zack winced. Somehow losing the baseball stadium added insult to profound injury. The White Stockings meant a lot to this city. Last night as he was trying to sleep, he had toyed with the idea of sponsoring free baseball games to bring a tiny glimmer of enjoyment to the people. It couldn’t happen without a stadium.