And Mike was moving fast, squirting more flammable
stuff, its fumes thickly choking.
"If you light a match now, there'll be an explosion.
You'll go up along with us. Think: There's got to be a
way to settle all this without--"
He looked pityingly at me, shaking his head, then
went to a panel of switches at the end of the work area
and examined them. Finally he flipped one of them,
and I heard an electric motor begin turning somewhere,
felt cool air moving against my face.
"Ventilation," Paddy said defeatedly. "For working
with dye and solvents and so on. With the
draft ..."
He slumped against his bonds. I got it: That fan
would suck the fire into an inferno, just like a chimney.
"Mike," Ellie began sternly. "I want you to stop all
this nonsense right this--"
He began lighting the sparklers, quickly, one after
the other. I thought he might say something more, but
he didn't. Not a word. Everything had already been
said.
Finally he approached me with the syringe, its
wicked tip glittering, stepped behind me, and stabbed
me abruptly with it.
"Sorry," he said softly. "I really did like you." I
felt the stuff going in, a brilliant shot of anguish and a
hot, swelling lump in my shoulder. His hand hovered
over a switch by the door.
The lights went out. The door slammed. He was
gone.
Instantly, we were shouting, struggling, fighting to
escape that damned macrame twine, but without,
please God, tipping over one of the sparklers, whose
heads fizzed glaringly in the darkness and reflected
from the flammable pools around them.
"Damn it, Sondergard, you wimp," Paddy grated
out, his voice tight with the pain of pulling against the
rough cords that held him. "You should've--"
"What?" Willow demanded, the word a sob. "Let
that bastard get his knife into me? Paddy, you always
were a heartless ..."
"Quiet." Wade's deep voice sounded authoritatively
in the flame-punctured darkness. "Just work on
these ties. Tear your skin off if you have to, there's fire
extinguishers all around, on the walls. Just get to one,
and--"
The injection hadn't hit me yet. Apparently it had
all gone into my shoulder muscle, and not into a vein.
But in the next few moments I wondered if that was
lucky or not:
A spark fell. Instantly, flame billowed up. In its
glow, all the room filled up with shadows, dancing
evilly as lines of blue flame skittered horridly from one
pool to the next.
A whump! of fire exploded to the ceiling, blocking
my last view of Ellie, her eyes dark pools of fright.
Willow began to scream, a high, wordless shriek of
protest.
Blood slicked my wrists. The cords slid, only the
tiniest amount. Wade bumped his chair toward me,
wanting, I supposed, to help me, but nothing was helping.
And nothing was going to. Through a rising haze
of whatever it was he'd shot me up with a puddle of
fire crept toward me, pausing nastily for an instant,
then coming on with a rush. The air was choking, searing
my eyes and throat. Somewhere a bottle exploded,
and a worse reek filled my nose stingingly: fabric dyeing
chemicals.
With a tearing sound that I realized only distantly
was my own flesh ripping, one of my hands came free.
But I couldn't do anything with it, the other and my
ankles were still bound, and what I smelled now, hideously,
was the stink of burning hair.
Howling from somewhere. Another explosion.
Scalding-hot air like a lungful of boiling water ripped
down my windpipe.
Suffocation, I realized; hot smoke and burning
chemicals. Then it seemed I was being carried away.
Something inside me dug its heels in, wouldn't go.
But there was no help for it.
People say having a near-death experience is
fascinating: the white light, your relatives all
beckoning to you, and so on.
Personally, I've seen enough white lights
in my life not to be unduly impressed by another one,
and if you knew my relatives, you would know why I
don't find the notion of them waving to me particularly
attractive, either. In my youth, before I got on that
Greyhound, when any of my relatives beckoned it was
usually to get some fool to pull over so they could
hijack his truck.
"Mom," Sam said from his chair in the corner of
my bedroom; since what we had taken to calling "the
incident," he refused to let me out of his sight for very
long.
"What?" I opened my eyes. It had been three days,
and I was beginning to get a little concerned about
him.
"Are you sure a Ouija board takes two people to
operate?" He frowned at the card table where he had
the dratted thing set up. "Because ..."
"Sam," I said patiently, as well as I could through
my sore, smoke-rasped vocal cords. My hand was bandaged,
and the injected sedative had made me sick as a
dog; I didn't remember what the emergency people had
done about it, only that it hadn't been pleasant.
"A Ouija board doesn't take any people to operate.
A Ouija board doesn't do anything."
He frowned stubbornly. "But ..."
Just then Ellie hurried up the stairs and came in,
looking lovely and au courant in her new short haircut.
Only a few small places on her ear still showed pink
where she had been burned.
Thirty seconds more, Bob Arnold had said, and it
would have been the ball game. As it was, Mike Car
pentier had managed a solid base hit: The building was
rubble, everything Paddy owned gone, the space nothing
but a blackened crater.
But everyone had made it out alive. "He's here,"
Ellie said. "Should I send him up?"
"Dad!" Sam rushed to the stairwell. "Hey, Dad--
you weren't supposed to get here until ..."
"Tonight," Victor agreed, coming in without being
invited to survey me in all my invalid splendor.
I'd been told to stay down. The lungfuls of vapors
I'd gotten had been pretty corrosive, and I was struggling
to obey. But what Victor said next made me want
to hop up and swat him mightily.
"I convinced them," he intoned loftily, "of my innocence,
at last." He glanced at me, caught my expression.
"Of course," he added hastily, "your mother did
help."
"Uh, yeah," Sam replied dubiously, glancing at me
also. "It was a real team effort."
Clearly, Sam was deciding whether he wanted to
get into this subject with his father right off the bat. I
shook my head--Victor was always at his most impossible,
following a narrow escape--and after a moment
Sam grinned at me, rolling his eyes.
"Yeah," he said, clapping Victor on the shoulder in
mock congratulations. "Good job, Dad."
Victor glanced suspiciously at him, seeming to
know he was being made sport of, then let it go.
"So what's this story Chief Arnold told me about a
burning building?" he wanted to know.
His tone conveyed clearly that this sort of thing
was little more than he expected of me, considering my
complete lack of any common sense whatsoever.
Which, looking at Victor and realizing that once upon
a time I had believed it was a good idea to marry him, I
thought was pretty much right on the money.
"It's a long story," I said. "But it was Sam and
Tommy Daigle who got us out of it. And Ellie. Without
her, we'd have been toast. Although," I added with a
sharp glance at Sam, "it sure took you long enough."
"Mom," he defended himself, spreading his hands.
"We had to find Bob Arnold. And then we had to convince
him, which on account of Clarissa was busy having
the baby--"
Clarissa, it turned out, had delivered a perfectly
lovely and absolutely healthy eight-pound girl, just at
the very moment that Ellie was in the act of having her
hair burned off. Furthermore, Clarissa had done it at
home after a labor of about ten minutes, so Bob Arnold
had been understandably distracted.
"But how did you know to go get Bob Arnold, is
what I don't see," Victor questioned, having apparently
already heard some of the story's details but not
all of them.
He frowned puzzledly. "You see them in a car and
they go one way, you go the other. So how ... ?"
"That's where Ellie came in," I said. Even for Ellie,
it had been amazingly quick thinking.
"The boys were behind us in their car. And on the
way down a hill, it would be normal to touch the
brakes. Mike wouldn't suspect any mischief. So Ellie
did touch them: Morse code. SOS."
The idea still blew me away: Sam and Tommy fooling
around with something, and later it saved all our
lives.
"Well, isn't that clever, now," Victor congratulated
Ellie patronizingly.
Fortunately for him, he didn't reach out and pat
her on the head. The gleam in her eye at the moment
reminded me that in the old days, Ellie's rascal ancestors
used to while away the time between looting
square-riggers and swigging rum by filing their teeth
into sharp points.
Now she only smiled, a thoughtful, private smile,
as Victor turned away. "But why would this Mike have
been suspicious?" he queried, and began picking
snoopily through the items ranged out across my
dresser top.
"From what Arnold told me," he went on, "until
he snapped, and began behaving in a somewhat suspicious
manner ..."
He picked up a silver button I had found between
two old floorboards in the attic, made a dismissive
face, and tossed it down onto the crocheted dresser
scarf.
"... no one suspected him," he finished. Then he
began poking into the jewelry box that Wade had built
for me, his attitude proprietary, as if he had a perfect,
inalienable right to do so.
"He shouldn't have been suspicious of us," Ellie
answered, seeing that I was speechless with fury. "But
he had a guilty conscience. So he thought we understood