To Darkness and to Death

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  The mayor nodded. “Good luck.” He slipped away.

  Russ snagged Clare by the arm. “Why the hell aren’t you outside?” He spoke loudly. It sounded as if the entire population of Millers Kill were jammed inside the lobby.

  She laughed. “I didn’t know we had all this time,” she yelled. “Now I wish I had let Hugh get the wine out of—”

  The ballroom behind them exploded.

  9:00 P.M.

  Shaun’s cell phone burbled just as Russ Van Alstyne took the podium. He glanced at the number displayed and flipped the phone open. Usually, Courtney would have handed him his head on a platter for taking a call at the table, but she was staring, transfixed, at where Russ was going on about something and didn’t seem to notice anything else.

  “Hi, Jeremy,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “God, Dad, you were right! I followed her car, and she drove straight to the mill.”

  “The old mill? Or the new mill?”

  Jeremy sounded confused. “The new mill. I mean, she can probably see the old mill from where she’s parked, but it wouldn’t do her much good to stage an accident there. What’s that noise in the background?”

  That noise was two hundred and forty chairs scraping, thumping, falling over as their occupants scrambled to get out of the ballroom. Courtney grabbed Shaun by the hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go!”

  “Dad?”

  Courtney plowed through the crowd, elbows flying, hauling Shaun along in her wake. “I’m here, son,” he said into the phone.

  “What’s going on?”

  Christ, if he told Jeremy the truth, he’d do ninety all the way up from town to be here for the crisis. And Shaun needed him at Reid-Gruyn, keeping an eye on the blackmailing bitch, making sure they didn’t move Millie van der Hoeven out of the old mill.

  “It’s sort of like intermission,” he said. “Everyone’s up and stretching their legs before the dancing starts.” He and Courtney squeezed through the entryway shoulder to shoulder with at least ten others. The lobby was filling up rapidly. He clamped his hand over the phone. “Look, you head outside and get your coat. I’m going to step down the hall a ways and finish this call.”

  “Shaun, the police chief said to get out!”

  “Honey, it’s probably just a prank. Most of these bomb threats are. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

  She looked doubtful, but she released him. He strode quickly away from the noisy, panicked hubbub of the lobby.

  “Jeremy?”

  “Yeah. Are you sure everything is okay?”

  “Yes. It’s quieter now. People are going back inside. Look, have you seen anyone leave the old mill?”

  “No.” Jeremy’s voice was equal parts confusion and suspicion. “Why would there be?”

  “I think the woman you followed has at least two accomplices and that they’re hiding out in there.”

  “Dad, are these employees? ’Cause if they are—”

  “No, they’re not.” He looked behind him. The mob in the lobby was flexing like a living thing now, one part desperately trying to get out, the other part determined to stay put. He could see uniformed staff forcibly preventing guests from getting onto the elevators, presumably in order to retrieve their belongings. “But I suspect they’re working with someone inside. If we’re going to find out who, we can’t call the police.” He came down hard on those last words. “I want you to—”

  But he didn’t get out what he wanted Jeremy to do. There was a horrific sound, a death scream of wood and glass, a percussive wave that boxed his ears and shoved him against the wall, and then, swallowing it all, the hungry howl of a monstrous fire.

  He was amazed to find he still had the phone pressed against his temple. Jeremy was screaming something. He lifted the phone higher. “What?” he rasped.

  “Dad! Oh, my God, Dad! There’s just been an explosion inside the old mill!”

  9:00 P.M.

  The explosion knocked Millie to the floor. She lay stunned and aching for a moment and then crawled to her hands and feet. She was scraped and battered but whole. Bracing her hand against the tarp-covered machine that had served to protect her from the blast, she got to her feet. The wide front door Shaun Reid had carried her through a lifetime ago was in flames. Fire splashed in all directions from it, clawing up tarpaulins, feasting on empty pallets, inching across the old wooden floor.

  The light, after so many hours of darkness, was almost unbearable. Millie threw her hands up, blocking the worst of the blaze from view. A bomb. Shaun Reid had planted some kind of bomb. He had never intended to come back for her. He had left her here to burn to death. Despite the heat from the flames, she felt cold inside. As cold as the stone tower where her brother had died. Oh, God—what about Louisa? Was he after her sister, too? She had to get out. She had to.

  “Help me.” The cry from the outer edges of darkness shivered down her spine. “Please. Don’t leave me.”

  There, at the far edge of the growing circle of flame, she saw what she was looking for. A narrow door. She looked behind her. If she went back for him, if she tried to carry him out, the fire would swallow the door before she could make it. It’s him or me, she thought, desperation rising like vomit in her throat. It’s him or me.

  “I’ll call the fire department when I get out,” she yelled. “They’ll help you.”

  “Please!”

  She skirted the flames, refusing to look at the raging heart of them, focusing on avoiding the questing tendrils and embers pinwheeling through the air. There it was. The door. Within reach. The heat was already hammering at its surface, and she cried out in pain as she grasped the doorknob. She thought she heard a final “Please!” but that might have been the eager, air-sucking hiss of the fire.

  She staggered out into the cool darkness, blind again.

  She heard shrieking, and as her eyes adjusted to the faint light thrown off by the parking lot lights, she saw the outline of a woman, running and stumbling across the scrubland dividing the old mill from the new.

  “Randy!” the woman screamed. “Randy!”

  A brilliant bobbing light tore Millie’s attention away from the sight. A car was jouncing down the rough drive toward them, bouncing up and down in the same pattern she had felt, locked in her captor’s trunk.

  “Where is he?” The woman scrambled over the last stretch of hillocky ground. “Where’s my husband!”

  “Where’s Shaun Reid?” Millie demanded.

  The woman looked at her as if she had gone mad.

  “Where is he?” Millie strode to where the woman was standing. “I know you went to see him!” She grabbed her by the arms and shook her hard enough to rattle her back teeth. “Tell me where he is, and I’ll tell you where your husband is!”

  “At the new resort! He’s at the new resort!” The woman burst into tears.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Millie spun around. A young man she might have recognized as handsome stood there, his immaculate suit looking ridiculous in the lurid glow of the fire. Behind him, his car was still running, the driver’s door open.

  “My husband’s in there!” The woman, still sobbing, pointed toward the now-burning mill door.

  Millie made her decision in an instant. “He’s hurt!” she said to the young man. “Please, please help him!”

  He turned to look at the door and actually stepped toward it, which was more than she had thought he would do. Millie shoved him, hard, and was pounding toward his car before he had hit the ground. She slammed the door on his indignant shout, yanked the gearshift into reverse, and careened up the driveway. She spun around in the parking lot, tires screaming, and accelerated out the gate.

  9:05 P.M.

  Clare rolled into a sitting position. Her head felt as if she were the clapper in a bell, ringing so loudly she couldn’t hear anything else.

  Russ was pushing himself off the floor, rubbing the back of his neck. He turned to her, relief in his eyes. Clare? She
could see his mouth move, but no noise came out.

  She shook her head and pointed to her ear. He nodded and held out his hand, and together they staggered to their feet.

  A table had overturned behind them, partially sheltering them from the brutal heat emanating in waves from the inferno that had been the dance floor. Only a few feet away, ragged tablecloths trembled from the violence of their destruction. Clare clutched Russ’s hand. If he had been a little bit farther from the door . . . She had just enough time to witness one of the magnificent antler chandeliers plunging into the maelstrom before Russ jerked her past the entryway and into the lobby.

  Guests were surging, clotting, battering at the exits. She heard them faintly, shouts and crying from very far away. Mostly she heard the high-pitched ringing. Staff blocked the elevators, and the emergency stair had been chained open. As she watched, a middle-aged Asian woman emerged from the stairway, wide-eyed and shaking. Clare remembered what she had been going to do.

  “The staff needs help making sure everyone gets out of their rooms.” Russ’s wince told her she needed to tone the volume down. “I’m going to go help.”

  He shook his head and pointed to the reception desk, where four uniformed clerks were on phones. He turned her so she was facing him. They. Do. Job, he said.

  “But what if the guests think it’s a false alarm?”

  His eyebrows went up. He pointed behind him to where the ballroom was going up like a Christmas tree on a February bonfire.

  She took his point. “Still. I ought to help.”

  She saw rather than heard him sigh. Then he gathered her into his arms, held her tightly, and whispered into her ear. The ringing receded, and she heard him. “If you love me, you’ll leave. Now.”

  Then he did something that amazed her. With dozens of people still struggling through the lobby, he kissed her, lightly, briefly, and then he put her away from him, stripped off his dinner jacket, and draped it over her shoulders.

  “I can hear you now,” she said inanely.

  “Go on. I’m going to make sure Mom and Cousin Nane got out okay.” She nodded. Turned. And found a frightened-looking elderly man, wearing dress shoes and pajamas and a black overcoat, watching her. She shrugged her arms into Russ’s jacket and crossed the lobby. She took the old man’s hand. “Father Aberforth,” she said. “Let me help you.”

  9:10 P.M.

  Jeremy allowed himself sixty seconds to curse, kick the ground, and imagine what a roasting his dad was going to give him: letting one of the blackmailers get away by stealing his own freaking BMW.

  After a minute had gone by, he put it aside and focused on the task at hand. The small, dark-haired woman who had screamed that her husband was inside stood by the lazily burning doorway, sobbing and hiccupping and calling, “Randy! Randy!” in an aching voice.

  Jeremy crossed to her side. She looked up at him, her face wet. “Please,” she begged. “Help him.”

  “I will,” he promised. “But I want you to help, too.” She nodded fiercely. “Go up to the new mill. There’s a phone inside the employees’ entrance. Call 911.” She nodded again. “Find the foreman. Tell him to have the men collect all the extinguishers we have in the building and bring them here. You got that?”

  “Foreman. Extinguishers.”

  “Tell him Jeremy Reid told you so.” Her wide-eyed shock at his name would have been comical under different circumstances. “That’s right, Jeremy Reid. So lay off my father.”

  She bolted without another word. Jeremy looked toward the old mill. If he could get inside, he should be able to break through a window on the river side and jump. He was a strong swimmer, confident of his ability to keep even a scared and injured man afloat for the time it would take to reach the riverbank downstream from the building. If he could get past the fire. Into the water. Fire. Water.

  He grinned to himself and dashed toward the river rolling past the old mill. He scrambled down the steep bank faster than he intended and wound up staggering the first few steps into the black water. It was dark down here, dark and fast-moving and steeply angled. He was afraid he would lose his footing or become disoriented if he waded in, so he forced himself to sit in the knee-deep water, sit, stretch out, and duck his head beneath the surface.

  He came up gasping and yelping with pain. Christ, it felt like someone had taken a nutcracker to him. He staggered, dripping, up the bank, cupping his poor beleaguered balls. It would be a miracle if he was able to father children after this.

  Facing the fiery door, he wondered if a good drenching was enough. Then he thought of the poor bastard stuck in there. It would have to be good enough. He took off his sopping suit jacket, draped it over his head, and ran inside.

  Running through flame: crackling and hissing and a smell, not of smoke but of gas; heat coiling about him, his shirtsleeves crinkling, his pants legs stiffening; and then he was out, steaming but unharmed. He stumbled forward, sidestepping the antiquated machinery, wondering what was going to happen when the fire hit those monsters. Would they melt? Explode? “Hello!” he called. “Randy? Are you in here?”

  Over the consuming growl of the fire, he heard a noise like a cross between a gulp and a cry. “Here! I’m over here!”

  Jeremy followed the sound toward the back wall. He was expecting—He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t a guy his own age, lying on the dusty floor, surrounded by a backpack and pieces of food, bleeding from an iron stake shoved into his gut. Jeremy dropped to his knees. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What happened?”

  “Millie. She had this thing . . .” Randy waved toward the wound. A palm’s width of black iron stuck up from the side of his abdomen. “I didn’t pull it out,” he said weakly. “I thought it might bleed more.”

  Jeremy rested his hand gently on Randy’s shoulder. “That was good, man. Good thinking.” He glanced up and saw right away that his breaking-the-windows idea had a serious flaw in it. The casement-style windows facing the river were a good twelve or thirteen feet above his head. “You just take it easy, man. I’m going to get you out of here. I need to take a look around, but I’m not leaving you. You got that?”

  Randy nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Jeremy rose and turned around. He considered the machines. Could he shove one under the window? To serve as a platform? He pushed against a few tarp-covered shapes and found they weren’t going anywhere without the help of a forklift. He went closer to the fire, grabbed a pallet, and dragged it to the back wall. He returned, took another, and hauled it away. He got a third from the stack, but by then the fire had spread too far, and he lost the rest of them. He prowled the grotesquely lit floor, looking for more pallets amid the detritus of a hundred and thirty years of papermaking. There were maybe four that were sturdy enough to use. He mentally measured their height against the wall. Stacked up, they might boost him high enough to leap for the casement of one of the windows. They weren’t going to allow him to bring Randy with him.

  He had noticed the washroom as he circled through the building. Now he walled away the tiny hammer-beat of panic that was thudding against his ribs and went to check it out. It was small and stinking, as if rodents had died in the walls. The one window was another impossible-to-reach casement. But, he was amazed to see, the gravity-flush toilet still worked, and when he pulled the chain, water gushed into the bowl.

  For a moment, he thought about wetting himself down again and making a break for the door. The fire had spread—to his eye, it seemed to be spreading faster than was natural—but one man, soaked and running at top speed, could probably still make it. One unburdened man.

  He looked at the water, visible in flashes of firelight. This had probably been the executive washroom in his great-great-grandfather’s day. He felt sad, and sick, and proud, all at once.

  He returned to Randy’s side. He could feel the heat now, even back here at the edge of the river-side wall, harsh and oppressive. He knelt down. Randy’s eyes were closed. “Hey, man
. Are you still with me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Great.” Jeremy tried to infuse his words with as much confidence as possible. “Look, we’re going to wait this out until the fire trucks get here. They’re on their way already. Your wife called them.”

  “Lisa?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s okay?”

  “She’s fine. We’re going to be fine, too. Hang on, I’m going to pick you up. It may hurt.”

  Randy’s whimper as Jeremy hauled him off the floor was almost lost in Jeremy’s grunt. “Jeez, man,” he gasped, staggering across the room. “You must be solid muscle.”

  “Yeah.” Randy gritted the word out.

  Jeremy squeezed sideways through the door of the water closet and laid the other man on the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he said, panting. He grabbed the first tarp he could find and dragged it off its machine and over to the water-closet door. He did the same with another tarp, hurrying, because he could see the fire, literally see it leaping and flowing, claiming more and more of his great-greatgrandfather’s mill. Finally he snatched up a pickle jar he had seen half-revealed by Randy’s backpack. He unscrewed it, dumped the pickles and juice as he bolted for the water closet, and plunged it into the bowl. He poured water over Randy, over himself, over the floor, over the tarps. He poured and flushed, poured and flushed, until he realized that he could see the interior of the tiny room clearly by the light of the fire. The blaze had reached the far wall.

  He abandoned the pickle jar in the toilet, heaved the tarps inside the water closet, and shut the door. Feeling his way in the dark, he edged to Randy’s side, tugging the dampened tarps over them until they were both completely covered.

  “This reminds me of pretend camping as a kid,” he said. “You know, crawling under a blanket?”

  Randy made a noise halfway between agreement and pain. Jeremy stripped off his jacket and, folding it, placed it under Randy’s head. “Don’t get discouraged, man,” Jeremy said. “Help is on the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Randy whispered.

  “For trying to blackmail my dad? You should be. When we get out of here, you’re going to go straight, right?”