August Heat

by Billings, Hildred

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Keep Up With Hildred

  August Heat

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  August Heat

  A Year In Paradise #8

  Hildred Billings

  BARACHOU PRESS

  August Heat

  Copyright: Hildred Billings

  Published: August 10th, 2019

  Publisher: Barachou Press

  This is a work of fiction. Any and all similarities to any characters, settings, or situations are purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  Keep up with Hildred’s latest releases by joining her mailing list! Behind the scenes, first looks, and even some free snippets!

  August Heat

  Chapter 1

  KRYS

  The smoldering remains of the Longfellows’ barn was not the prettiest sight to the behold. Only the oncoming gray clouds gave any hope that the worst of it was over, since two hours’ worth of dousing had barely been enough to put out the flames.

  “Never gets any easier,” Sean Quimby said. He sat in the dry earth that would soon glisten with freshly fallen rains. Beside him, Krys Madison removed her helmet and ran her hand through her flattened hair. Sweat gleamed on her brow and tickled her skin beneath her uniform. Nothing like fighting a raging fire on a day already thick with humidity. “At least it’s over.”

  “For us, anyway.” Only a few yards away stood Ethan Longfellow, one hand on his pale face and the other clutching his cell phone. He lamented that he didn’t have decent reception that far away from his house, but he didn’t have the heart to call his wife and tell her what had happened to the barn. “The Longfellows are gonna have fun with their insurance.”

  “At least there was nothing living in the barn.” Ethan shrugged. “Aside from some rats, maybe. Ugh. Great. Now I’m gonna think of cooked rats. I’m gonna figure out when we’re good to go so we can get outta here and have a shower.”

  “You do that.” Krys was too tired to get up. She had been up half the night tossing and turning, thanks to her oscillating fan dying a grand death in the middle of summer. While that season had been milder than recent years, the humidity had been killing Krys, who wasn’t used to wet, moist summers. Some of her fellow firefighters came from the east coast, be it New England or the South, and they loved to pick on the locals for succumbing to the sweats more easily than most. Never mind a damn tornado touching down in Portland last month. Hail wasn’t supposed to mean anything more than some rain in those parts. Yet when the Midwestern transplants began to shake in their sandals and ran for the nearest cellar (only to discover a lack of cellars in Paradise Valley) Krys finally got her turn to laugh.

  She wasn’t laughing much today.

  Between the lack of sleep and crushing sense of futility, Krys had been battling the kind of seasonal depression that didn’t often affect those in the northwest. While everyone else turned on their specialty lights in the winter, Krys shuttered up her windows in the summer and pretended the sun wasn’t up until 8:30 PM most of the season. She blamed her PNW nature that discredited the sun as a fabrication of the cosmic mind. No, she wasn’t sickly pale and lacking in Vitamin D. If anything, she tanned too easily. Krys’s problem wasn’t about the weather, necessarily… although the dry heat and droughts that had plagued the northwest for the past few years certainly didn’t make her job easier.

  She hated how happy it made everyone.

  All right, so I hate seeing that long face more. That was the hardest part of this job. Approaching property owners and giving them the bad news. “Sorry, Mr. Longfellow. We couldn’t save your house, your barn, or your family.” So, it hadn’t been that bad this time. The barn hadn’t been used for years and had fallen into disrepair. Still, it was a massive cleanup the Longfellows would have to pay for, and if Ethan hadn’t happened to be driving by when the fire began to rage, it could have spread to the nearby woods or the family house. No, the worst was the house fires that completely obliterated a whole family’s life. Even if nobody died, it was like something had. A few months ago two little girls lost the only home they ever knew. Krys had gone back after that housefire to help them scavenge for anything that might still be salvageable, knowing how fruitless it often was. What wasn’t charred was ruined by smoke damage. Still, when a six-year-old cried about the stuffed bunny that had helped her survive life so far, Krys was inclined to follow the sounds of her heartstrings and do what she could. Sometimes that meant digging into her own toy closet back in her parents’ house in Portland and unearthing a few stuffed animals she no longer needed. She figured it was better than touring little kids around thrift stores.

  “Madison!” called the chief. “You done sitting on your ass yet? I need you to do a sweep of the area.”

  She raised her hand in acknowledgment, but was in no hurry to leap up and get back to work. If anything, her legs were sorer than ever, and the depressing need to go to sleep seeped into her bones.

  That was probably why the chief put her on sweep. All she had to do was look for anything out of place, embers in need of quashing, and creatures requiring aid. Most of her coworkers were already sifting through the debris of the barn in case someone had been in there. The most likely starts of abandoned barn fires were high school kids smoking and getting up to no good. But that was for the fire marshal to figure out when he got there. Krys was simply grateful it was toward the end of her shift. With any luck, she’d be in bed within three hours.

  Luck was not on her side that day. It was on someone else’s.

  Or should I say someones… At first, Krys hadn’t heard the pathetic mewling coming from the tall grass by the woods. She was so focused on her own problems and crappy feelings that she almost stepped on the box of kittens halfway through her sweep.

  “What the…” Her foot had kicked aside the box. Four fuzzy heads jerked to left, mouths opening and cries of helplessness stabbing Krys right in the heart. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Who the hell left a box of kittens here?”

  Seriously. Kittens.

  Now, Krys was a dog person, not that it meant she purposely went around kicking boxes of kittens for fun and slander, but she knew way more about puppies and dogs than she did about kittens. She couldn’t gauge how old they were. All she knew was that there were four, with no mama cat in sight.

  “Here, kitty kitty.” She looked around, including in the tall grass and a few steps into the woods. Between the sounds of birds kicking up a fuss in the trees and her fellow firefighters shouting things to one another in the distance, Krys couldn’t hear the potential cries of an injured mama cat. Don’t tell me these fuzzballs were dumped. Unfortunately, that was common out in those parts. Farmers and ranchers would bundle up barn kittens they didn’t want and take them elsewhere, sometimes way too early. These kittens looked barely weaned, if at all. They were big enough to hop out of their box, but either fear or a lack of energy kept them contained.

  Well, there was only one thing for Krys to do.

  She removed her jacket and draped it over the bo
x, careful to leave a big enough hole for air. Gingerly, she picked up the box and carried it back toward the burn site, where Ethan Longfellow spoke with the fire chief.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Longfellow,” Krys interrupted, when there was a brief lull in their conversation. “I found this box of kittens a few yards away from here, toward the woods. Do you know anything about them?” Please tell me they’re yours. Please tell me they’re your barn cats that magically escaped with their lives. This would make things so much easier. Boom. Congrats, Mr. Longfellow, you have a smoldering barn on your hands, but the kittens survived! It’s the miracle of life! (Honestly, it was a better outcome than most barn fires. Krys had a tough stomach, but still had the occasional flashback to what poor animal was found in the cinders.)

  He blankly looked between her and the kittens crying in their box. One particularly fluffy cat had climbed on its sibling and attempted to poke its head out of the box. All that happened was them both crumbling to the bottom.

  “I’ve never seen them before in my life,” Ethan said.

  Great.

  “You found them in a box like that?” the chief asked.

  “Yup. Right over yonder.”

  Both the chief and Ethan looked in the direction Krys pointed. When they put the focus back on Ethan, he shrugged and said, “No idea about it. They’re not my cats. Glad they weren’t in the fire, though.”

  The chief shrugged. “Get ‘em to the shelter.”

  That was the proper course around there, but Krys also knew how overcrowded the county shelter was. While kittens were more likely to be adopted than grown cats, the odds still weren’t great. You know, I may not be a cat person, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable taking them to more of the same.

  Ethan stopped her before she turned away. “There’s the vet, you know. I hear she takes in some of the smaller critters sometimes, especially if they’re really young or hurt. Nice lady. She helped us when our chickens were going crazy.”

  “What vet?” Did he mean Dr. Global in town? His clinic was the closest thing to an animal hospital in their corner of the county, but Krys didn’t know much about him, other than the clinic was tiny and some people in town complained that he took the easy way out of diagnoses. Most pet owners drove a few extra miles to the county seat for a “proper” vet clinic.

  “You know, the farm vet.” Ethan looked at her as if she were nuts. “I mean, don’t she live in town? I know I see here there all the time. Dr. O’Connor!”

  “O… connor?” Krys didn’t know anyone with that last name. Not in Paradise Valley, anyway. Here I thought I knew as many people as the mayor did. Came with the territory of fighting fires. If you weren’t putting out everyone’s messes every other week, you were entertaining their kids at school.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sigh-o-vaughn or something.”

  “Sighovaughn O’Connor?” That wasn’t a real name. No way.

  “Know what? Think I got her card here in my wallet.” Ethan looked plenty appreciative to have something take his mind off the death of his old barn. He fished out that wallet like he was about to give Krys some candy.

  The card was soon between her fingers, although her arms continued to prop up the box of kittens. One of them had taken to rubbing its face against her hand. Poor buddy must have been cold and scared. Damn poor, scared animals. Didn’t matter if Krys were a cat person or not. She saw a scared, helpless baby animal? She did something about it. The guys at the firehouse would give her crap, but deep down they were all softies, too. Took a big ol’ softie to do a job like theirs.

  “Siobhan O’Connor – Agricultural Veterinarian.”

  “She look as Irish as this name sounds?” Krys asked Ethan.

  “Is that what it is? No wonder I can’t say her name. It’s all Greek to me.”

  More like Gaelic. “I’ll try her. Thanks.”

  She took the box of kittens back to the truck, where she kicked open a door and shoved the box onto the seat first. After reclaiming her jacket and making sure the kittens wouldn’t fall from any untimely heights, she slammed the door shut and approached Quimby by the cinders.

  “I’ve got cats, man,” she told him.

  “Cats?” Quimby whipped his head toward her. “So, we’re jumping over the P word now and going straight to cats, huh?”

  “Not like that, you dumb perv.” Krys had heard every lesbian joke under the sun, having lived in Paradise Valley, but nothing compared to working with a bunch of grown men who spent too much time staring at naked-lady posters and pitching in to get Cinemax for the station TV. They were polite to every lesbian in town. Except Krys. Because she was one of them, which meant she was up for ribbing about anything and everything. The fact she looked like them probably didn’t help her case. “I mean actual cats. Found a bunch of kittens in a box over by the woods. Longfellow says he doesn’t know anything about them, so I’m taking them to a vet as soon as we get out of here.”

  “You mean Dr. Global? Not sure how much help he’s gonna be. I took a stray dog in once to look for a microchip, and he acted like he never heard of the damn things.”

  “No, some other animal doc. Here, he gave me a card.” She passed it to Quimby, who looked it over with mild interest. “You ever heard of her before?”

  “No clue. But if she’s half as cute as her name, you should hook me up, yeah? Assuming you’re not gonna make your move before I do, Madison.”

  “Very funny.” The ribbing came from a real place, after all. Until that year, Krys had been an unapologetic womanizer who knew every woman in town. That means I know most of them. Even if her carnal knowledge was not complete, she knew some pretty juicy drama. This was a woman who had always slept with her friends. More like she slept with them first, then they became friends… and those friends ran off with celebrities…

  “You know I just josh you.”

  Krys decided that was a good time to check on the kittens again. How long until she figured out who this Dr. O’Connor was?

  How long until the distraction was over, and she returned to her seasonal mope-fest?

  Chapter 2

  SIOBHAN

  “That’s a pretty determined girl right there.” The porch creaked beneath Siobhan’s weight as she leaned forward and brushed her fingers against the cat’s arching back. Giant pads for paws swatted at her before the cat scampered away. “She must have a giant will to live.”

  “You think so?” asked Rita Mills, the lucky new owner of the cat pouncing on a bug.

  “Animals are a lot like people in many ways. Some have a greater will to live than others. Not every cat who gets hit by a car like that one is gonna bounce back. You can take two cats of the same physical health, hurt them in the same stupid way, and one will live while the other dies. Like people.”

  “Huh. Never thought of it that way.” Rita gazed at the gray American shorthair with new appreciation. “I was gonna name her Angel, you know, ‘cause it’s like she had a guardian angel watching over her, but now maybe I’ll name her after my grandma who lived to be one hundred despite all her health problems. Real spiteful one, that lady was.”

  Siobhan chuckled. “Careful that you’re not summoning your grandmother’s spirit in that cat. She might have been sent to spy on you.”

  “Oh, now don’t go putting that crazy stuff in my head! I’ll totally believe it!”

  The cat raced back with a trill in her throat. Rita gave her a light pat to the rump while Siobhan took another look at the twisted tail crinkling up into the air. The poor baby had been hit and ran over in such a way that she would have lifelong hip problems and lose half her tail, as soon as it got around to falling off. But she seemed to be in good spirits and better shape than most cats like her would be. Like I said to Rita, it’s a will to live. This cat had bugs to catch and sun to sleep in. Sooner or later she’d succumb to the end like every living creature, but with any luck, she’d enjoy a nice, full life first, because there was no way she was any older than a few months right now.
Her growth will be stunted because of her injury, and she has extra toes, which means she’s probably inbred somewhere in her recent genetics. Good golly, maybe the cat is too stupid to realize she shouldn’t have made a full recovery. She certainly would look goofy once she fully grew into forced-munchkin status and lost half her tail. Siobhan hoped for plenty of photo updates. Hell, was this an awkward time to suggest Rita learn how to use Instagram and get to photo-taking?

  Siobhan didn’t treat a lot of house pets in her career as a big animal vet, but there were more than a few rural pet owners who couldn’t afford to drop everything and take Fluffy to the only vet clinic for thirty miles. So they called Siobhan, who dropped by whenever she had a chance. In the case of surgery, though, she referred them to an animal hospital on the coast. Not like I can perform surgery right there in their living room, anyway. It was easier for her to charge a little extra for a house call than to convince some people to take their pregnant dog to the vet to make sure everything was in order. Besides, if she had the time, dropping by to say, “Yes, take the dog to the damn clinic,” at no charge usually got people moving.

  Cases like Rita’s cat, though, were exactly what she made time for in her busy schedule of hopping from farm to farm to check on livestock. She occasionally got a call to help a sick or injured wild animal as well. The bigger, the better! Never forget the time I looked an elk right in the eye and saved his leg, and therefore his life. Rita, on the other hand, had called her two weeks ago bawling that she had found this poor, injured cat in the middle of the road. “Thought it was dead first, so I kept on driving,” she said between sobs. “Then I look in the mirror and she pokes her little head up like she’s saying help me! I had to turn around and now I’ve got this cat on my porch that I don’t know is gonna make it. You gotta come at least look at her, doc!”