Into the Flames

by Multi-Author

  “Believe it or not the restaurant will continue to function without you.”

  Frowning, she placed a hand over her heart. “You wound me.”

  He laughed good-naturedly. Sitting on the edge of the desk, Adam let the humor fade from his expression. “You look tired, Hildy. Are you okay? What can I do to help?”

  She set her pencil down and sat back, dropping the happy pretense. “I am tired. And a little depressed. But I’m sure that’s to be expected. I just need to work through this…get my house back together. Then I’ll be fine.”

  He watched her for a moment, a slight frown lining his brow. “Well, take all the time you want and if you need money…”

  Hilda shook her head. “No. Thank you. But I’m sure insurance will cover everything.”

  “Moral support…a shoulder to cry on…booze to drown your sorrows?”

  He waggled his eyebrows and Hilda couldn’t help laughing. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “I do try.” He started out of the room. “I’m serious, though, Hildy. Anything you need. I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He disappeared from the door and, a beat later, his head popped back around. “Oh, I meant to tell you…your brother came by a couple of days ago looking for you. He seemed surprised to hear about the fire.”

  She nodded. “I saw him. Thanks again.”

  “He was hurt, Hilda. You should keep him in the loop on your life.” Adam frowned slightly before lifting a hand. “End of lecture.” He waved goodbye and headed on down the hallway.

  Hilda stared into space after Adam left, listening to him exit out the back door and lock it behind him. She rested her head against the back of her chair, suddenly almost too weary to move. She hadn’t been lying when she told Adam she was depressed. And she knew from dealing with a depression-prone friend for years that weariness was one of the symptoms. But it was more than that. She was having trouble sleeping at her friend’s house. She didn’t know if it was Duncan’s revelation the last time they spoke, that a man had deliberately torched her pretty little house…probably after staking her out beforehand…or if it was as simple as different surroundings, different noises, and the worries of trying to rebuild her life after having it devastated.

  Then there was Duncan himself. It was amazing to have found him again. And exciting. He’d brought back so many memories and created expectations for the possibility of new ones. But she had no reason to assume he saw her as anything more than a younger sister and that was troubling. Because her feelings were anything but chaste.

  It was no wonder her mind was reeling. She’d only been half honest with Adam. She was interested in making sure her work at the restaurant didn’t fall too far behind. But she was also there because sleep seemed to be eluding her. Her goal was to work long enough to exhaust herself. Then maybe she’d be tired enough to sleep.

  That thought pushed her from her lethargy and Hilda sat up, reaching for her pencil. Then she realized she was thirsty. She decided to make a quick trip to the kitchen for an iced tea before finishing up the inventory work she’d started.

  Feeling good about her plan, she left her office, padding down the darkened hallway on bare feet. It was one of the things she loved about working at the restaurant after hours. She could wear tank tops and cutoffs with flip flops, padding around bare footed, and nobody would be the wiser.

  She flipped the light on in the large commercial kitchen, heading for the wall-sized refrigerator. She poured herself a glass of tea from an icy pitcher and replaced it in the refrigerator. Then she burrowed through a sea of plastic containers looking for lemons. When she found what she was looking for, she placed it on the counter and reached for a knife.

  A soft ding told her she’d received a text. Hilda dug her phone out of the front pocket of her shorts and read the text.

  A cold fist wrapped around her heart.

  An artist’s pallet is his soul. Mine cleanses as it burns. A

  Hilda leaned against the counter as her knees suddenly gave out on her. What the hell…? The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and a chill swirled down her spine.

  Her first thought was to call Duncan. In fact, she’d started punching in his number when the room exploded into flame.

  * * *

  Duncan spread the contents of Investigation number two-twenty across his desk, pushing the report aside and moving to the pictures. Several large photos showed the origin of the fire, a kitchen whose stove was charred and ravaged, its glossy paint burned away under the incredible heat of the blaze.

  Number two-twenty had been his first solo investigation. He’d had a gut feeling throughout the investigative process that something wasn’t quite right. Something was a tiny bit off. He picked up the photo of the wall next to the stove, peering at it for probably the hundredth time. It looked just about like he’d expect a wall just a few feet from the origin of a kitchen fire to look. The subway style tile was cracked and blackened by soot. The wall behind the tile was exposed in several places, the studs showing behind the ravages like bones beneath skin.

  That wall had bothered Duncan from the very beginning. More specifically the smudge of pink wax over several of the tiles had bothered him. He’d interviewed the homeowners extensively and they had no explanation for it, except that maybe their five-year-old son had drawn on the tiles with a red crayon.

  Unfortunately that theory didn’t make sense. The place with the smudge was above a countertop, behind a sink. Hardly an easy spot for a five year old to reach. Especially when there were yards of blank wall just a few feet away for him to write on if he was so inclined.

  But Duncan couldn’t get anyone interested in the irregularity. He’d gone back and forth on it with his chief but, in the end his boss had told him to close the case. The other investigators at the Fire Prevention Bureau told him he was being anal. So Duncan had finally been forced to agree with them that, as unlikely at it appeared, the smudge was probably crayon and the child had been the artist.

  He’d closed the investigation, declaring it an accident. Someone had bumped the knob on the gas stove and it had ignited under a random spark. Duncan had tried to put the investigation behind him, but he’d never been able to do it. The doubt lurked at the back of his mind, coloring every investigation he performed from that point forward.

  He shoved the pictures back into the folder and picked up the report on Hilda’s peeper. He’d perused several months of police reports for the area within a five mile radius of Hilda’s house and hadn’t found anything on a peeper immediately preceding a fire over the last year. He’d also gone into the Firehouse database and looked at all of the fire reports at the bureau over the same time frame. There had been no mention of footprints or any reports that anyone had been hanging around who shouldn’t have been.

  He’d read reports until his eyes were gritty and his brain was mush. Finally, shoving paper into folders, Duncan sat back in his chair, thinking he should probably call it a day.

  The knock on his door was a welcome distraction. He looked up and smiled as Ash entered his office. “Hey, buddy.”

  “Dunc. What are you doing here so late? It’s after eleven.” His friend dropped into a chair near the door and sat back, sprawling his long legs across the floor.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I’m going over some old O&C cases. You just get off duty?”

  “Yeah.” Ash narrowed his light-blue gaze. “Why are you looking at origin and cause cases?”

  “I’m looking for a connection to the Bennet fire.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re still on the serial arsonist kick?”

  “It’s not a kick. There is an arsonist, buddy. The fire at Hilda’s house was incendiary.”

  Ash held his friend’s gaze for a long moment and then sighed. “Do you like being ridiculed? Is that it?”

  Duncan’s temper spiked. “So you think I should just ignore the facts because some small minded idiots do
n’t want to believe them?”

  Ash sat forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. “Everybody else is wrong and you’re right?”

  Duncan slammed the folder closed. “Yup. It appears that way.”

  Shaking his head, Ash stood up and started to pace the room. “I’ve been trying to support you, Dunc. To the guys. Taking up for you. But the heat’s getting to the point where even I can’t take it anymore.”

  Duncan felt bad for his friend. He knew the pressure he was putting him under. But that didn’t mean he was going to let an arsonist run rampant over the city. “I’m sorry, Ash. Don’t stick up for me anymore. I don’t want you to. As soon as we catch this guy they’ll all owe you an apology.”

  After careful consideration about the intelligence of giving a firefighter information regarding his case, Duncan decided that, if he couldn’t trust Ashland Kurtz he might as well hang it up. He pulled out the picture he’d snapped at Hilda’s house, handing it across his desk. “This was in the origin room, just far enough away from the initiation point that it was partially preserved. Can you see it?”

  Ash studied the photo for a moment, looking bored. Duncan spotted the exact moment his friend saw it. “What is that? Is that the letter A?”

  Duncan smiled. “In red wax. Just like the marks I saw on the tile at two-twenty and two-twenty-two.”

  Ash looked up. “I remember two-twenty but refresh my memory on the second one?”

  “Kids playing with matches. Except the kids denied up and down they even had matches. The fire started in the basement playroom, spread through the whole house before we could stop it. There was one, small patch of concrete behind a wood-burning stove that wasn’t charred to smithereens. I found something written in red wax there.”

  “An A?”

  Duncan pulled a picture from a second file and handed it to Ash. “The concrete was painted so, with the heat, the wax ran instead of soaking in. I couldn’t be sure what it was, but there was definitely something.”

  Frowning, Ash handed the picture back. “It’s weak, man. Kids who play with matches are gonna deny they did it. And there’s a real good chance what you’re seeing there is red crayon.”

  Duncan nodded. “All by itself, yes. But I’m looking at three, possibly more cases now where I’ve found red wax, not only at the site of the fire but in the place of its origin. That’s too big a coincidence for me.”

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “I think it’s a signature of some kind. I think the guy we’re dealing with wants me to know he’s doing it.”

  Ash sighed, scrubbing a big hand over his jaw. “An arsonist.” He nodded. “Okay, I agree you have the start of something there. Now where the hell do we go with it?

  Chapter Six

  Flames leapt above the counter across the room, snatching onto a pile of clean towels and burrowing through them to fall, growling hungrily, onto an apron someone had flung over the counter.

  Smoke quickly filled the space and heat pressed her back.

  Coughing on the acrid smoke, Hilda typed Duncan a quick, three-word text. Fire. Restaurant. Help.

  She hit Send and grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher, spraying the fire that had eaten its way down the counter and was consuming several cardboard boxes filled with produce someone had left for the next day. The foam barely made a dent in the voracious stuff. It had found the drywall and was beginning to eat its way through the walls.

  She looked up at the fire extinguishing system in the ceiling, wondering why it hadn’t gone off. A huge whoosh told her another part of the kitchen had become enveloped. She looked toward the exterior door and frowned, realizing the fire had cut her off.

  She was quickly running out of time and the fire extinguisher obviously wasn’t going to work against the rapidly growing conflagration. She needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

  Hilda started toward the door leading into the restaurant. She’d have to work her way through the building and go out one of the other exits. But as she approached the door, something just above her head groaned. The dropped ceiling tiles flared into flame, and started raining down on her.

  Fire bit at her skin with greedy teeth, sizzling as she screamed under its rabid assault. An ember found her shirt and burned through, snapping at the tender skin of her belly.

  Hilda retreated, slapping at the burgeoning flames as she backed into the corner where the refrigerator met the walk-in freezer.

  Choking and gasping for air, Hilda pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth and dropped to her knees. Above her head, the fire continued to eat its way through the ceiling tiles, jettisoning them downward like deadly, blazing rockets.

  She huddled, coughing, in the corner, her mind trying to come up with a way out. But as death sizzled inexorably toward her across the room, nothing came to her. She was well and truly trapped.

  * * *

  “If I could just get the chief to sign off on it, I’d release the news to the press. What this investigation needs right now is the light of day,” Duncan told Ash.

  His friend shook his head. “I’d have a better chance of becoming Miss America, dude. Word is Chief Bitters thinks you’re just a glory hound, trying to create a boogie man to make yourself stand out from the crowd.”

  Ash’s statement wasn’t news to Duncan. His boss at the Fire Prevention Bureau hadn’t bothered to hide his disdain for Duncan’s belief that they were dealing with a firebug.

  Ashland was working on getting his Fire Investigator’s certification like Duncan, so he currently had a foot in all camps and hadn’t gained the distrust of any of them yet. Which made him a great source of information across the board.

  Duncan grimaced. “That’s asinine…” His cell phone chirped and he looked down, seeing he had a text from Hilda. “Hold that thought,” he told Ash. “I want to know what you’ll be wearing in the swimsuit competition.”

  Ash snorted as Duncan slid the bar to open the text. Three words exploded on the screen, sending his pulse sky high. “Shit!” He surged out of his chair, running toward the door.

  “Duncan?”

  He stopped just long enough to give instructions. “Send out an alarm for Standish’s on Main. Hilda’s there!” He didn’t wait to see if his friend did as he asked. He knew Ash would do what needed to be done. In that moment, Duncan couldn’t care less about the restaurant or the fire. All he wanted was to clap eyes on Hilda…to make sure she was all right.

  He sped recklessly through the night, glad for the nearly empty streets and the siren he’d slapped onto the top of his truck. As he barreled toward Standish’s on Main, Duncan kept one ear tuned to the radio, listening to hear how many alarms would be called for the fire.

  They were up to three by the time he arrived, skidding to a halt in the street just in front of a tanker and a fire truck. A quint roared toward the scene up the street, lights flashing.

  Black smoke poured from somewhere at the back of the building, and flames licked across the roof.

  He leapt out of his truck, grabbing a turnout jacket from the back seat before taking off running. He barked orders as he ran. “Subject trapped inside. 1033 on the net.” The firefighters quickly complied, leaving the radio open only for the fire and rescue team. Duncan dove inside the nearest fire truck and yanked the seat up, grabbing a breathing apparatus and slipping the shoulder straps over his arms. Shrugging it into place, he tugged the jacket over the SCBA as he ran. “I’m going in, I need an APW!”

  Someone shoved a pressurized water fire extinguisher into his hands.

  Amid shouts and activity, he ducked through the front door behind the firefighters who’d just broken it open with a Halligan bar.

  A wall of smoke greeted them. Duncan shoved the mask over his nose and mouth and pushed through the choking haze, looking for the origin of the fire. He followed the roar and crackle of flames to the back, screaming Hilda’s name as he ran.

  The kitchen appear
ed to be pure fire. Flame cavorted over everything flammable, gorging itself on the tender bones of the decades old building.

  “Hilda!”

  Duncan prayed she’d gotten out before the fire really kicked in. His brain told him she probably had. But her succinct, terrifying text kept replaying itself across his mind.

  Fire. Restaurant. Help.

  “Hilda!” Duncan knew as he screamed her name there was very little chance she’d hear him. The kitchen was almost fully engulfed.

  Fire tore a chunk out of his back and Duncan jerked under its sting. Then he realized he’d imagined it…his imagination fueled by a different time…a different fire. He shook his head, shoving back the nightmarish memory, and focused instead on finding Hilda. Duncan sprayed the dancing flames with the extinguisher, conscious of the men streaming into the room behind him.

  Agony ate a hole in his arm and Duncan nearly dropped the extinguisher. It sizzled across his flesh and Duncan fell to his knees, the canister clanging loudly against the floor.

  A hand touched his shoulder but he shook it off, shoving to his feet and glancing at his arm.

  Nothing.

  The pain had only existed in his mind.

  Duncan stood in place, shuddering with terror, as men shouted and the blaze spat under a full out assault around him. He coughed, feeling as if his lungs were jammed up into his trachea, and moisture slipped down his cheeks as his eyes burned.

  Somebody jerked on his arm. He shook them off, forcing himself to move forward.

  “Hilda!”

  The smoke dodged and thickened around him, causing him to lose his sense of place or direction. At one point he found himself facing the door again, heading out of the room instead of deeper inside. He turned around quickly, rage shoving the last of his confusion away.

  Dammit! He wasn’t going to let the ghosts of his past be the cause of Hilda’s death. He had to man up…shove the specters away. He needed to find her before it was too late.