Adam moved toward the resort, but Mendelson was already running out along the deck.
“Is anyone else in there?” Adam shouted.
Mendelson shook his head.
Adam then turned toward the stables.
“I’ve got to get the animals,” he yelled to Paige. “Go back to the road. Take Amanda. Start heading down the mountain.”
“But my mom!”
“Your mom is back there?”
“She’s in the kitchen.”
A few more whispered oaths flew out of his mouth as he stared across the meadow, but—within seconds—he was running in that direction.
“Adam!” Paige screamed.
He turned. “Go back toward the road,” he repeated. “Take Amanda.”
Paige didn’t need to question where he was going. There wasn’t a clear way out for her mother. There were some back trails that led away from the house on the other side—the trail the intruder took weeks ago—but her mother wouldn’t know where to find them. Fear clogged her throat as Paige watched Adam disappear into the smoke. But she had to get Amanda out of here.
She ushered Amanda back toward the house on a jog. Denny was barking frantically. Paige scoured the house for Click. She was starting to have flashbacks to the fires before. But even those hadn’t been so close to homes. To her home. To animals and memories and life and the people she loved.
Once they found Click, they grabbed the struggling kitten and dashed across the pasture toward the stables. Paige’s pulse raced erratically as she watched a pickup truck come the other way, then another and another, lining up along the ridge to help. But then she coughed. The sky was filling with dark smoke and ash.
“Amanda, put your shirt over your mouth.” She showed her how to pull the collar up and breathe through the fabric as they ran toward the trucks. Paige found it easier to wrap Click in the hem of her shirt, also.
They arrived at the stables near the main road just as the wranglers were pulling the horses out of the stalls and directing them toward one of the three trailers they’d brought. Amanda rushed forward to help, and keep the horses calm. When they were loaded up, the wranglers jumped back into their trucks, waving Amanda and Paige toward them. Smoke was everywhere.
“Amanda, go with Gabe!”
“I want you to come, too.” Amanda looked at her with panic. “And I want to wait for Adam.”
“Adam went back for my mom. He’ll probably try to evacuate her the other way. He’ll come out of the woods trail down by the harbor, and he’ll be okay. We have to get you to safety.” She guided Amanda toward Gabe’s truck.
“I saw you guys fighting.”
Paige blinked through the smoke at yet another of Amanda’s non sequiturs. “What?”
“I saw you fighting. Out the window. You’re not breaking up, are you?”
“Amanda, we can talk about this later. I need you to go. Take Denny. Go with Gabe.”
“I want to help.”
“You can help by leaving so we don’t have to worry about you.”
Paige ran up to Gabe’s truck and opened the passenger door for Amanda, urging her in along with Denny and Click. She looked at Gabe. “You two, hurry!”
“There’s room for you!” Amanda scooted over.
Paige looked up at the long line of trucks pulling up. “There’s a bucket brigade coming. I want to help.”
Paige saw the entire community spilling out of pickup trucks—Rosa, Little, Joseph, Sherryl, Antonio, John from town, Billy Joe from down the block, Mendelson, and Mendelson’s son, David, and about fifty others—all with buckets or hoses. This community was wonderful. They’d never let anything happen to one another. As much as Paige disparaged the small-town mentality of Lavender Island, in times like these, she realized its value. That mentality might include rumors and gossip and everyone knowing everyone else’s business, but it also meant that when someone was in trouble, everyone was there to help. Her eyes welled up again as she saw them move quickly toward the pond. Just then the island’s two fire trucks pulled up the dirt road.
“I promise I’ll be safe,” she told Amanda. “I’ll see you in an hour or so.” She tapped the side of the truck for Gabe to leave and then turned and ran toward the brigade.
At three in the morning, word went out that the fire was contained.
Adam dragged himself to Rosa’s, where everyone had gathered. He’d raced toward Helen’s house, found Ginger, and literally carried her down the side trail toward town. She seemed to only weigh about eighty pounds, weak with her chemo treatments, perhaps, and his adrenaline made short work of getting her down the hill. About a fourth of the way, he’d met four men from the Carmelita Hotel—old Mr. Perry and his three burly sons—who’d come up to see what the smoke was. He’d handed Ginger off to them.
“Take her to the hotel,” he’d panted. “I have to get the Grumman.”
They’d nodded and started back down with Ginger as Adam flew back up the hill and across the meadow, choking on the smoke, to get to his Grumman S-2T. They’d used the plane to put out many fires in the past, but he never thought he’d have to use it for his own property. Sweat had dripped from his forehead as he maneuvered the plane back and forth, first dropping the twelve hundred gallons of retardant across four acres, then returning to the ocean for additional bucket drops. Between the plane and the fire trucks, and the bucket brigade saving the outlaying properties, the fire was contained in about an hour.
Rosa had supplied everyone with free food and drinks in her cantina to keep them going through the night. The moon was still on the horizon, hovering, not quite ready to give up her reign. Adam headed through the bar, shouldering his way through the crowd, looking for Amanda and Paige.
Everyone clapped him on the back and told him what a great job he’d done. But he didn’t feel he had. He knew they’d lost the gazebo and most of the meadow. The trees on the perimeter of Paige’s house were blackened to scraggly spokes of branches. And his job was in no way complete until he laid eyes on both Amanda and Paige.
He suddenly caught sight of Paige coming out of the women’s restroom in a flurry, her eyes looking ravaged and panicked.
“Paige!” he shouted across the room.
She didn’t hear him and seemed to be moving toward the front door.
“Paige!” he tried again.
He pushed his way through the crowd, trying to get to her. He had to tell her so many things—he wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted to tell her he was furious with her. He wanted to tell her he could forgive her for what she’d done in the past, but he had to work through the fact that she hadn’t trusted him enough in the last couple of weeks to tell him the truth about it. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her she infuriated him. He wanted to tell her she made him feel a thousand emotions he’d been shut off to for far too long. And mostly he wanted to tell her he was glad she was alive.
When he finally caught her elbow and turned her around, she still had the panicked look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
Her eyes looked wild; her mascara had blackened the rims of her eyes, and one streak stained her cheek.
“Adam, we need to go!”
“What? Why?”
“No one can find Amanda,” she said.
CHAPTER 27
No one knew where to look first. Everyone was in Rosa’s Cantina or around it, having all participated in the fire containment, but it was hard to find anyone in particular. Gabe was missing, too. It didn’t make sense that they’d have gone anywhere but Rosa’s. Paige scrambled to think if she had his phone number. She’d already texted Amanda about eight times, but the teen wasn’t replying. And Adam didn’t have his phone any longer—he confessed he may have dropped it when he ran across the meadow to get her mom.
“I’m going to find Bob,” Adam said.
Paige nodded. That was smart. And she would search for Gabe.
She pushed through the crowd and asked if a
nyone had Gabe’s number. When no one said yes, she wondered if Amanda might have asked Gabe to take her down to Garrett.
Adam found her again. “Bob went back home to keep an eye on Gert. I’m going over there,” he said.
He looked exhausted, spent, with rivulets of soot coming out of his hair. She felt terrible for him, but she also felt awful about what had happened between them. She was desperate to apologize, but now was not the time.
“Will you wait here for her?” His eyes were tired, pleading.
“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to stay here and try to find Gabe. I also wonder if she might be with Garrett.”
“Why would she be with him right now?”
Paige stalled. She probably should have told Adam about this, too.
“Paige?” he asked again. “What do you know about Garrett?”
“Did you ask her about him like I told you to?”
“No. What do you know?”
“She had a crush on him,” Paige admitted in a whoosh. “That’s who she was seeing when she was going down to the sea-lion center.”
He looked stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I just . . . I didn’t want to betray her confidence.”
“So you betrayed mine?”
“It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t that easy, Adam. I wanted her to tell you herself.”
He looked as if someone had just stabbed him in the back. He actually winced and moved away from her.
“Adam—”
“I need to go.” He backed toward the door. “We need to find Amanda right now. I’m going to Bob’s.”
Adam raced to his truck, willing his brain to stay in the present and focus on the task at hand: he had to find Amanda. He tried not to think about how betrayed he felt by Paige, and her not telling him about being the one to seal his fate when he was eighteen. That moment had changed everything in his life—she must have known that. And the fact that she didn’t say anything until now—while they’d been growing closer and closer—felt like a huge chasm he couldn’t quite bridge in his mind. Here, he’d thought for a brief crazy second that he might have a relationship, maybe even something leaning toward marriage—did that word seriously enter his head? But he’d lost his mind when he’d thought that. That was insane. He clearly didn’t know her. And she clearly didn’t trust him. This latest, smaller secret about Garrett just made him wonder what other kinds of secrets she was keeping from him. He’d thought that maybe he’d been different, special to her somehow, someone she could trust with anything, but now he realized he wasn’t.
“Adam, wait!”
He turned to see Paige running toward him.
“Let me come with you!”
She didn’t wait for an answer but instead piled into his passenger seat.
He was glad she didn’t wait. Because right now, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be near her or as far from her as possible.
He climbed in the truck himself and roared down the street—Bob’s house wasn’t far, but Adam wanted his truck so he could tear down the mountain if necessary to turn up every rock and stone to find Amanda.
Once he screeched into the driveway, both he and Paige ran to the door.
When Bob opened it, he looked similarly alarmed. No, he hadn’t seen her. No, he hadn’t heard from her. He tried to remember if he’d seen Gabe.
Gert came into the living room in her robe and slippers, her hair piled on her head. She tapped her fingernails against her cheek in a nervous gesture while she listened to everyone trying to put together clues. She finally shouted, “Wait!”
They all turned toward her. “What about that thing Amanda did on our phone, Bobby? The GSS?”
“GPS?” Adam asked.
“Oh! Yes!” Bob got out his phone and started tapping buttons. “That’s right! Gert, do you remember how she did that?”
“Let me get my notes.” Gert came bustling back with a stenographer’s notepad filled with her scrolling handwriting and flipped the pages around. “Wait. Here. Okay, Bobby, go to ‘Contacts.’” She looked over Bob’s shoulder. “Then ‘Details.’” He did as she said. “Then hit ‘Location.’”
“Got it!” Bob said joyfully. “It says she’s down at the harbor! By the ferry. Or wait. No. It says she was there forty minutes ago.”
“Oh dear,” Gert said, flipping her notes another page forward. “Remember, that means her phone might have died then, and that’s the last location it has for her?”
“It’s a good place to start.” Bob looked up at Adam.
“Thanks, Bob. And I’m friggin’ impressed with both of you.” Adam tore back out of the house with Paige right behind him. They flung themselves back into the cab.
As they barreled down the mountain, Adam leaning forward with worry, Paige glanced at him and thought about how similar they probably looked to George and Ginger coming down the mountain for them during the fires sixteen years ago. Suddenly she could understand the worry and frustration their parents had gone through—and all the protection involved afterward.
“She’ll be okay,” Paige said.
Adam nodded and didn’t look at her.
Although cars weren’t allowed in the town, emergency vehicles were, and Adam drove as though his truck was one right now—running red lights, flying through empty intersections, and screeching into the harbor.
Hardly anyone was out moving around yet, and they still had a half hour until the first ferry left at dawn. As they squealed into the passenger disembarking area and skidded across empty pavement, they could see Amanda’s lone figure sitting on a low harbor pylon in the distance. Adam let out a relieved breath and slowed the car. He cut the headlights and jumped out.
“Amanda! What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
She twisted toward them, her face streaked with tears that glistened under the streetlight.
Adam stopped in his tracks. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Of course I’m mad at you! You had us worried to death!”
“No, I mean . . .” She looked over Adam’s shoulder and saw Paige. “Paige? What are you doing here?”
“I was worried, too.”
“But didn’t you guys break up?”
“Break up?” Adam looked as if he were going to tear his hair out. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought I was breaking you guys up. I saw you out the window. I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“How would you be breaking us up? And what are you doing down here? And where’s Gabe, or Garrett, or whoever was driving you?”
“Gabe and Garrett have nothing to do with this. I walked down the hill. I was going to leave the island. On the first ferry. I”—a sob racked her—“I thought you’d hate me once you found out.”
“Once I found out what?”
“About the fires.”
Adam froze. Even under a lone streetlight still aglow in the rising dawn, Paige could see the color drain from his face. “What are you talking about, Amanda?”
“The ones from a long time ago. I thought I heard you talking about them when you left the yard, and I thought you’d both break up, and then you’d”—another sob shook her shoulders—“you’d hate me, and especially when you figured out that . . .” She pressed her hands into her face.
“Figured out what?”
“That my mom started them,” she said from under her palms. “It wasn’t Paige. It wasn’t you. It was my mom.”
Adam recoiled in the rising daylight. Paige’s mouth dropped open.
They both stood in silence, Paige’s mind whirling back to the events of that summer so long ago. Her memory waded through the first fire, on the hill, by the boathouse, and the second one, and then . . . she glanced up and could see Adam staring into the pavement, too, his own memories probably flooding back.
“But . . .” Paige tried to remember the details. It couldn’t have been possible, could it? “Samantha was with yo
u during the first fire,” Paige said to Adam, her voice nearly a whisper. “In the boathouse.”
“No,” Adam said, turning back toward her. “She wasn’t. She’d lit some candles. She said she had to check on something, and she went out, back down the hill, and told me she’d be back. Once I smelled smoke, I busted out the door and tried to find her. She was running up toward me when I came out, and I grabbed her hand and got her out of there.”
Paige’s eyes widened. Could it be?
“But she wasn’t near the stables during the second fire,” he said. “You were, right? She said she’d been in town.”
“No. She was there,” Paige whispered. “I saw her. I thought she was waiting for you. You were there, weren’t you? Your horse was saddled.”
“No. I was on a ride that day. I’d saddled Bartlett for her.”
They both looked back at Amanda as the realization dawned slowly on both of them that this was probably the truth. The stories had been passed down to the next generation as half-truths and half-understandings, as rumors always were. And Adam and Paige had each had only half the story.
As Adam stared harder at Amanda, her face crumpled again.
“Amanda,” he said.
She sobbed harder.
“Amanda, it’s not your fault,” he said.
Her shoulders shook as the tears came in earnest, and she wiped at her face.
“Amanda? Look at me.”
She finally did.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I”—the crying racked her shoulders—“I thought you knew. I thought everyone in town knew. And I thought you, and they, would hate me when I got here. But then I realized you didn’t know. And they didn’t. And Paige didn’t. She was wearing disguises for another reason. And I felt like maybe you accepted me because you didn’t know. But when I heard you and Paige arguing about it, I thought you’d break up over it, and then that would be my fault, too, and then you’d know, and you’d hate me anyway, and—”
“Amanda, no.” Adam reached out for her and drew her toward him. “No. I will never hate you. And none of this is your fault. You are not breaking me and Paige up. We might need to talk, and we might have some arguments, but that’s between her and me. You never have to worry about that. And your mother’s mistakes are certainly not your fault. Got that? Just like my father’s mistakes are not my fault, and Paige’s mother’s mistakes are not her fault.” He glanced up at Paige over the top of Amanda’s head. “Okay?” He seemed to be asking Amanda, but he was looking right at Paige.
Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) Page 29