“Jake! We have to-”
“I know, Janey. Dispatch, this is Brogan. Requesting all available fire and rescue units.” To Jane. “I’m going in. But it’s-All units. You copy?”
Orange flames licked from the basement window, and then another sound, another whoosh, and another window exploded with black smoke, flames following the darkness out of the shattered glass.
“Go, go, go!” Keefer yelled, one fist pumping the air as Kellianne’s head slammed into the seatback. Kevin must have floored it. The van lurched forward, sliding on the slick street, tires slipping in the slush, Kev ignoring the stop sign again and hitting the gas, careening onto Mass Ave.
Looking out the back window as Kev hit full speed ahead, Kellianne had seen the fire. So that’s what they were doing.
“You set-”
“The house was empty, right? But full of our stuff. Only Hennessey knew we were there, right, and not like he’s gonna rat us out. Get him in as much trouble as us. So, adiós, house. We started in the basement. One match to that disinfectant stuff alone’s enough to-hey-whoa, watch it, bro! That’s a goddamn bus!”
Kev yanked the wheel and slammed on brakes, as a T bus turned a corner right into them. The van lurched to the right, up the curb onto the sidewalk. Kellianne clutched the side strap with one hand, her tote bag to her chest with the other, closed her eyes, felt the van bump back on the street. She risked opening her eyes, but couldn’t let go of the strap. They were fine. Driving again. Holy shit.
To cover up what they did when that old guy died, her stupid brothers had set the whole freaking house on fire.
The tote bag of ’bilia seemed to get heavier on her lap.
No one would connect them to that house, right? There’d been no contract, no formal business deal except with the Hennessey cop, and Kev was right, he sure wasn’t gonna rat. Their cleaning supplies would burn up in the fire.
She guessed that was the whole point.
The streets of Boston whizzed by, snow splatting on the windshield. Kevin finally keeping to the speed limit. The fire was way behind them, out of their lives. Who’d ever blame them for it?
She nodded, grudgingly giving her brothers some props.
This could work.
68
Plumes of white steam hissed from the remains of 27 Margolin Street. Snaking canvas fire hoses connected hydrants up the sidewalk and across the street. Neighbors clustered on the sidewalk, faces bundled against the cold, shielding their eyes from the glaring daylight-bright spots the firefighters switched on to help them in the darkness.
Jane could no longer feel her feet, but could not bear to wait in the car. She stood with the others, behind the firefighter lines, watching, mesmerized, as the water froze almost as quickly as it hit what was left of the roof and puffed white into the dark night. The snow had stopped, but the temperature had plummeted, Jane could tell by her fingers and tingling face. Firefighters, some with icicles on their helmets, stood red-faced and determined, rooted, aiming their powerful hoses.
“Losing battle,” Jane heard one guy mutter. “The place went up like a-”
“Miss Ryland? Jane?” The incident commander touched her coat sleeve. Jane recognized Sergeant Monahan from her general assignment reporter days. Her heart clenched. This was going to be about Ella. It could not be good. And it was her fault. Jane’s own fault.
She’d watched, tears streaming down her face, as a canvas-clad firefighter emerged from the still-black smoke, emerged from where the front door used to be, carrying a blanket-draped-well, a person. Jane saw feet poking from under the edge of whatever covered it. Had to be Ella. Ella’s body. Motionless. The firefighter had not been running. Might Jane have been able to save her?
Jane lunged forward, toward the figures silhouetted in the flames, but Jake had held her back, one hand wrapped around her arm, his body pressed against her back. Stronger than she was.
“Honey, Janey, stop. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing you could have done. Just-let’s see what happened.”
“But I could have… should have…”
“No. You shouldn’t have,” Jake said. “Trying to help is one thing. Being an idiot is another.”
“But what if-”
“There’s no ‘what if,’” Jake told her. “There’s what is. And that we don’t know yet.”
The commander was saying something. She had to focus.
“Ma’am? Jane?”
Jane turned. The air still reeked of fire and smoke, the choking darkness blanketing the night. Jane could taste it, and could smell nothing else.
“She’s asking for you,” the sergeant said. “She’s getting oxygen, she shouldn’t remove the mask. We’re transporting her any second. But she was trying to tell us something, pretty upset, so we gave her paper. She wrote ‘find Jane Ryland.’ And here you are.”
Monahan touched his mustache with the tip of a finger. “Is there something you’d like to tell us? You have ID on her? Could she have set this fire? This one’s clearly suspicious. Arson’s on the way.”
“Huh?” Jane tried to sort this out. Of course the firefighters couldn’t know who Ella was. How could they? “Her name is Ella Gavin. She works at-She’s a friend of the person who-She’s asking for me? I’m sure she couldn’t have-wouldn’t have-She’ll be okay?”
“She’d covered herself with a thick tablecloth of some kind,” Monahan told her. The glare from the emergency lights made elongated shadows on the snow and slickening ice as Jane and Monahan picked their way toward the ambulance, stepping over an obstacle course of engorged canvas hoses.
“She was trying to carry a bunch of papers, something like that, but O’Toole says they dropped as he carried her out.” He gestured at the smoky destruction. “Hope they weren’t important.”
“Hello, Detective Brogan, I remember you. Do you remember me?”
Jake felt a tug on his sleeve as he watched Jane follow Monahan toward Ella Gavin. He knew how Jane felt. He, too, had stood there, helpless and surprised, as freaking Hennessey shot Curtis Ricker. Barely a moment had gone by since the shooting when he hadn’t wondered-Might I have prevented it? Was there something I could have done? To hear Jane express the same wish and know she felt exactly the same remorse made him care about her even more. If that was possible. Such a genuinely good-
“Detective?” The tug grew more insistent. “Remember?”
He turned. In the bright circle of the street light, wearing a white crocheted hat and too much rouge, stood-Dorothy. Debbie. “Dolly,” he said. “Dolly… Richards.”
“Yes, exactly, Detective Brogan.” Dolly poked his arm with a finger. “I told you something was going on here, didn’t I? Now don’t you agree? Don’t you suspect it might be those people in the van?”
“People in the van?” Jake’s peripheral memory dragged up the image of a gray van driving away from the fire when he’d been focused on yanking Jane out of the burning house. He turned to Mrs. Richards with narrowed eyes. “What van, ma’am?”
“Ella?” Jane’s whisper was almost more to herself than to the blanketed form on the gurney. Ella’s face was covered with a plastic oxygen mask, her body silvered with a space-blanket throw. Her eyes were closed. Was she-?
“Ma’am?” The EMT beside the gurney, brush-cut and zipped into a parka yellow-stenciled DONALD CANNON, stepped between them. “We’re transporting her now. Please contact Mass General for more information. She’s on oh-two, she cannot take off that mask to talk to you.”