Montana Fire_A Small Town Romance

by Vanessa Vale

  “I’ll drive,” he said. “Be right back.”

  “Um, sure.” As I slipped on my sunglasses, I made a mental note to wear nicer underwear tomorrow. If he were going to undress me with his eyes, I might as well be dressed to impress.

  “Sure you don’t want me to drive?” I asked after he locked his front door.

  He lifted one eyebrow in a look that screamed I was nuts to even consider it. “If I’m going with you, I’m driving.”

  “Control freak?” I asked.

  “Definitely.” He beeped his truck open with the lock remote. It was a very nice and new four door pickup truck that could haul anything and everything. Silver. Typical rugged, outdoors guy car. Immaculately clean as if he spent hours washing and buffing it. Even smelled brand new. If I locked him in my house for a couple hours, I’d bet it would be super clean, too. Something to remember.

  Ty wore navy shorts that came to just above his knee, a BAHA T-shirt and running shoes. BAHA was Bozeman’s amateur hockey league. I warmed in all the right places thinking about how hot that was. A hockey player and a fireman. My kind of guy. Ty opened the passenger door for me. Holy chivalry! I hadn’t seen that one in a while. Or ever. Nate had been obnoxious, not chivalrous.

  We took Kagy to 19th and headed south. The windows were open and sunshine was on my face. We skipped small talk for the drive, which suited me fine. I enjoyed the peace and quiet with no kids yakking away from the back seat. But with Ty, the silence was a little unnerving because I knew he wasn’t super excited about this outing. I felt a little bad. Not enough to change my mind though. My mission was to find Gnome Stealer and kick his ass. Reality would be different, as I had no expertise in ass kicking, but I could dream. Ty’s mission was to keep me safe. Or at least that’s what he’d alluded to the night before. A knight in shining armor under duress.

  Minutes later, I directed him to a seventies era subdivision. Houses had been built on two roads running perpendicular to 19th. They had big lots, close to an acre, with established landscaping. A few trees dotted the lawns here and there, but none were taller than fifteen feet. The winds and snow hammered down all winter long and they were afraid to get any taller. Most of the homes were vintage, no remodels or exterior updates to the split-level style. Without any type of zoning or HOA, the homes were painted an eclectic mix ranging from light tan to a bright turquoise. Full sized RVs were in driveways and stuck out above backyard fences.

  The garage sale house was half brick, half wood siding painted dark green. An attached two car garage jutted off the left side. Black shutters graced the average looking windows. Junipers grew large and scraggly around the foundation. Enormous lilac bushes bordered the neighbors on both sides.

  Ty pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. “This is it? Looks like they’re on vacation.”

  No signs of life were apparent. Windows were closed on a hot summer day. No trash cans at the curb like the neighbors. Must be trash day. Several newspapers rested on the mat by the front door and the grass could have used a mow.

  I took off my seatbelt and climbed from the car. Away from town the wind was stronger. It blew my hair into my eyes and I swiped it behind an ear. Ty stood behind me when I knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again. Still nothing. I looked around as I waited.

  “They must have put all the stuff that didn’t sell in the garage,” I guessed.

  Ty walked up to the garage door and peeked in the dirty windows. He tilted his sunglasses up to get a better look. “No car. A workbench, an old fridge. You’re right. There’s a pile of junk in the middle of the floor.”

  By then I’d joined him. I wasn’t as tall and didn’t get the same view, but I got the gist. Nothing interesting. “Now what?” I asked, disappointed. Frustrated.

  “Let’s look around back.” Ty slipped his sunglasses back on.

  Montanans were very particular about their personal liberties, especially gun rights. Everyone had a gun and they knew how to use them. Mostly for hunting and a lot because they were constitutionally able. When it came to personal protection, in other states people shot first and asked questions later. In Montana, people were so friendly to a stranger they’d give them a cup of coffee before they shot them. So I wasn’t too concerned about being shot while exploring around a stranger’s house. But I let Ty go first.

  Ty’s long legs ate up the distance around the garage and beat me to the concrete patio out back. He wasn’t in a rush, but he wasn’t one for dilly-dallying either. He peered in the glass of the back door then shook his head. I was walking up to join him when the wind kicked up again and I smelled eggs. Rotten eggs, and lots of them. It was overwhelming. I froze in my tracks. My heart stopped. Uh-oh.

  “Ty,” I said. He must have heard something in my tone because he turned to look at me from the patio without hesitation. “I smell—”

  I saw his eyes change with awareness to an ‘oh shit’ look.

  “Gas!” Ty grabbed my arm in a heartbeat and we bolted around the house away from the garage, opposite of the way we’d come. “Propane tank,” he said, breathing heavily as we jumped over an old lawnmower. “On the back side of the garage. We walked right past it. Not always dangerous, but we’re not sticking around to find out.”

  I practically sprinted to keep up with him, my arm still in his grip. We’d turned the corner and were back in front of the house when I heard a whoomph. Not overly loud, but a weird sound as if a balloon had imploded. Ty practically yanked my arm from the socket as we sprinted to the drainage ditch by the road. Obviously, he knew what whoomph meant and it wasn’t good. One second I was vertical, the next I was face down in weeds and dirt with all of Ty’s weight crushing me. I contemplated how his heavy breathing tickled my ear when…KABOOM.

  It was a Batman comic KABOOM with the big word bubble and big capital letters—make that HUGE. Debris rained down on us for a full ten seconds. Ty slowly extricated himself from me and raised up onto one knee, brushing small bits of drywall and pink insulation from his back. I pushed myself up on my hands to see what had happened even though I had a pretty good idea.

  “Not dangerous?” I questioned.

  The left side of the house was no more. The garage had been blown to kingdom come. Only stumps of the lower walls remained attached to the foundation. The main part of the house was mostly intact, but the side closest to the garage was now nothing but a bunch of pieces all over the yard, the driveway and out into the street. Only the far right side remained intact, although most of the windows were blown out. Furniture and other household items littered the yard. A blender was three feet in front of us on the grass.

  “Your truck,” I said, pointing to what was left of it. Somehow, the old fridge we’d seen in the garage had been hurled through the air in the explosion. And landed dead center on top of Ty’s truck.

  5

  Ty looked over his shoulder at the new addition to his truck. The avocado green side-by-side fridge was lodged in the front windshield and roof at a forty-five-degree angle. One door was wide open and frozen foods spilled out. He shook his head and swore. I only heard a few cuss words as he’d done it so quietly and the neighbor’s car alarm was going off. It could have been the ringing in my ears. It was hard to tell the difference.

  A small fire sent black smoke up into the air where the back of the garage had been, but was minor enough not to set the whole house ablaze. The smell of cooked house blew on the breeze. As I couldn’t smell gas anymore, I had to assume it was all used up in the explosion when it launched the fridge through the air twenty feet.

  Ty’s body was rigid, strung tight like a bow, but he didn’t shout or rant his anger like I would have if my car had been smooshed. When he turned to face me, he’d bottled it up tightly.

  “Are you hurt?” He took my shoulders in his big hands and looked me up and down, probably checking for any broken bones, bowel evisceration or hangnails. Exposed nipples. His voice had a rough edge, his grip strong. I’d never seen
such intensity in his eyes before. This must’ve been the look he had in battle in the Middle East. No doubt he’d seen worse in war.

  My sunglasses were no longer on my face. I’d scraped my knees and hands where I’d skidded in the dirt. It stung, but I felt lucky with just that. He pulled a weed from my hair. Dirt covered my shirt and I noticed there was a small rip at the shoulder.

  I shook my head. Stunned. “The house just blew up.” Duh.

  Ty pulled me into his arms in a fierce hug, my face pressed against his chest. His rock-hard chest. He smelled like soap, dirt and fire. I could feel his heartbeat pound against his ribs. At least the explosion affected him on a cardiovascular level.

  God, it felt good to be held, to be comforted by a man. A man who was actually worried about me, that the reason for his tight grip was because he was reassuring himself I was whole.

  One of the black shutters fell from the second floor and landed in a juniper.

  “I know you’ve seen lots of crazy things with the fire department and stuff I can’t even imagine with the army, but in my little world houses don’t just blow up,” I said into his shirt.

  “In everybody’s world houses don’t just blow up,” he said, his lips at my temple. “Not from a propane tank. This house had help.”

  * * *

  An hour later, I sat in a vintage lawn chair—the kind with the colored woven plastic from 1974—supplied by the elderly couple who lived across the street. I positioned myself in their driveway, a mug of coffee in hand—I told you Montanans were friendly—and watched the action across the street. The sun was warm and my shirt stuck to my body, damp with perspiration. The scalding hot coffee wasn’t very refreshing, but no one could see my hands still shaking while I held the cup. Mr. and Mrs. Huffman sat on either side of me, running a constant chatter about their suspicions.

  “Those propane tanks are such a danger. I lay in bed thinking we’ll be blown up any minute,” Mrs. Huffman said. She had long white hair pulled up into a bun at the back of her head in a style reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie. She had a sweet disposition and was a Nervous Nelly.

  Mr. Huffman was the complete opposite. Short and round, he’d be a great Santa Claus at the mall. Except for his carrot red hair and lack of beard. Even somewhere in his seventies, his hair was still red. “For Pete’s sake, Helen. You snore through this ridiculous worry of yours every night. Propane tanks don’t just blow up. There has to be some kind of ignition, a spark. I think we’re safer with our propane tank than on the city’s natural gas lines.” Mr. Huffman harrumphed and settled into his lawn chair, arms folded across his ample belly.

  I actually couldn’t blame Mrs. Huffman her worries, or Mr. Huffman his grievance with public works. The whole town had been on edge about gas explosions since 2009 when one morning, a block of Main Street blew up. No warnings, just boom. Sadly, a woman was killed and an entire city block blown to smithereens when, by accounts, she’d done nothing more than flip a light switch. The gas lines that ran to the downtown buildings were ancient, 1930s old and cracked. Gas had seeped into the ground and up into the building. I’d been just down the street at the time when it happened. I had been a bit too close for comfort on Main that morning, and now once again.

  I never really thought about how I got my furnace to work before the downtown explosion and realized I took quite a bit for granted. I lived in the city linked up to the public gas lines where, by all accounts, I shouldn’t be concerned. As my house was built in the fifties, my gas lines couldn’t be more than fifty-some years old. No problems. Or so I made myself believe.

  Out here, the garage sale house—the entire neighborhood—used propane. Propane heat, the stove and water heater. There weren’t any old underground pipes, just a separate tank behind each house. So, what caused this explosion?

  A county sheriff patrol car and one fire truck remained. It, of course, was from the volunteer fire department that had hosted the lovely pancake breakfast the weekend before. Outside of city boundaries, the home was serviced by the volunteers, not the paid city fire department.

  Once they remembered me from Zach’s horn incident, they quickly looked me over and I was deemed unharmed by the paramedics, then kindly removed to the Huffman’s yard across the street. Ample distance away from the fire truck and its horn. Obviously, they didn’t want a repeat performance from a member of the West family. As if.

  Ty remained with them, recapping what had happened. As he wasn’t a member of the department and the city hadn’t been called in for support, he only acted as witness to the incident. The sheriff took notes while the firemen poked with their tools through the rubble to make sure there were no hot spots. Often Ty would point to different parts of what remained of the house or his maimed truck. I was either too far away to hear what he said or my ears hadn’t recovered full function yet. On occasion, he pointed at me and they all had a good chuckle. Who knew what they were talking about, but I could only guess. They seemed to be enjoying themselves at my expense. I grumbled from my spectator seat as I imagined their words.

  “Do you know the people who live in that house?” I asked. Mrs. Huffman took my coffee cup and refilled it from a Thermos.

  “Cookie, dear?” she asked, holding out a plate.

  Of course, I took one. I never turned down a cookie from an old lady. And I was in shock. Sugar was good for shock. I contemplated adopting her as my grandma as I sipped my coffee.

  “The Moores live there. Alma and Ted.”

  I had a terrible thought and tried to swallow the bit of homemade chocolate chip cookie past the lump in my throat. “You don’t think they were home, do you?”

  Firefighters had been in and out of the house. If they’d discovered someone—dead or alive—they’d have been brought out by now. Hopefully.

  “They moved to Arizona last fall. Had enough of the winters. Ted retired last year from the post office, Alma the year before,” Mr. Huffman told me. He too, ate a cookie. A few crumbs landed on his tummy that jiggled like a bowlful of jelly.

  “Alma was a school teacher. High school English,” added Mrs. Huffman, taking a sip of coffee.

  “Then who lives there? I came to a garage sale over the weekend, so someone has to be taking care of the place.” Although not that well. Unmowed grass, gas explosions.

  “Right, that was a good sale. Got myself one of those new-fangled quesadilla makers,” Mrs. Huffman said. She’d murdered the word quesadilla so the end sounded a lot like armadillo. “They have a son who stays there. Morty. Works at the Rocking Double D ranch.”

  “That boy’s always been a little…odd,” said Mr. Huffman.

  I wasn’t sure what odd meant to him. Even at the forty-fifth parallel this was still the Bible belt and so it could mean anything.

  “Odd?” I wondered, hoping he’d clarify.

  “He’s twenty-four and lives in his parents’ house. Never had a lot of motivation in life. Even as a little kid. Watched TV. Played those shoot-em-up video games all the time.”

  Did this Morty Moore have enough motivation as a grown up to steal a vial of semen off my stoop? Was he in over his head with something? Someone? Did he have enough smarts to take the semen from where he worked? If he did, why did he put it in a garden gnome? The gnome part really was odd. Maybe he did do it, after all.

  I’d had enough of being pampered by the Huffmans. I thanked them for the refreshments and headed back across the street.

  My phone rang from my pocket and I stopped in the middle of the blocked-off road. I read the display.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said brightly.

  “I just came from a sale at the mall. I was fixin’ to get some new lipstick at the makeup counter but picked up some jammies for the boys and some sun hats instead.” My mom sounded as pleased with a sale at the mall as I did by a good find at a garage sale. I’d learned it from her. Her malls were just better—and cooler. No sense sweating outside at garage sales in the summer in Savannah. No find was worth heat stroke.


  I caught Ty’s eye and he headed my way.

  His shorts had a pocket ripped at the seam. Dirt smeared his T-shirt on one broad shoulder. He still looked pretty grim and yet hot as hell. His biceps bulged, his forearms were corded. His legs were dusted with sandy-colored hair, but I ogled the well-defined calves. He worked out. A lot.

  “That’s great, Mom!” I replied, all of sudden very dry mouthed. “I…um…can’t really talk now. I’ll call you later.” Before she could get in a goodbye, I ended the call. Didn’t want her to learn anything about the little mishap with the house. There was a time and place to tell your mother you were almost exploded and it wasn’t now.

  “Thankfully no one was inside, no one was hurt.” Ty’s eyes grazed over every part of me that he could see. New nerves fluttered up and rattled me.

  “Sorry about your truck,” I said as I watched a small clump of firemen stand around it, probably contemplating how to get the fridge detached. A few bags of frozen vegetables were strewn on the ground by a front tire.

  He grimaced, rubbed his thumb over my forehead. I must’ve had some dirt smeared there. “It’s just a truck.”

  Why was he so nonchalant about it? I’d be super upset if my car just got leveled by a fridge. It reminded me a little of the Wicked Witch of the West. “I did offer to drive.”

  Ty glared at me and his jaw clenched tight. I realized I might have just poked a bear with a stick. He looked left and right, grabbed my upper arm, gently this time. “Come with me.”

  I followed him around to the back side of the fire truck, away from all the action, the people. He leaned in close so his eyes were level with mine.

  “It’s just a fucking car. I can get another one.” His blue eyes dropped to my mouth and back up again. “But you, you’re irreplaceable.”

  Oh. Heat and something else flared to life. Something…good.