A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  The jimjams tittered: Why haven’t they been seen?

  I squinted across the foyer, to the darkness where the center hall was. Thirty feet into that hall, then into the living room, to the wall above the fireplace, and I’d know the Monet was gone. Then I could run.

  I started moving along the foyer wall.

  POP. POP. Loud, like gunshots, from upstairs. I stopped, pressed back against the foyer wall.

  POP. POP. Closer now, right above my head, but not gunshots. Worse. They were nails, ripping out of the walls upstairs. The house was coming down.

  Behind me, the orange glow beckoned through the open, ruined front doors. Perversely, it was now a beacon to safety. I turned away from it.

  POP, this time followed by the long rip of wood splitting.

  I turned and pressed my chest against the wall, hoping it was safer there, away from the center of the falling ceiling. Following my outstretched fingertips like a blind man, I pushed into the dark along the foyer wall. Fist-sized chunks of plaster nudged at my feet. I kicked at them, unseeing, sending them skittering noisily across the ceramic tile. The rubble on the floor was getting thicker the farther I got from the support of the outside walls.

  I got to the entrance to the hall. Ten shuffle-steps, then twenty; my hand found the edge of the arch to the living room.

  Something heavy crashed above, a ceiling joist or a roof rafter. I pressed under the arch, holding my breath, certain whatever had broken loose was going to come through the hall ceiling. A minute passed, then another. The house settled and went still.

  I moved around the arch, following the wall into the living room, struggling to remember the location of every chair, table, and sofa.

  My fingers nudged cold, curved metal. It was the first of a pair of wall sconces, directly across the room from the Monet. I moved faster along the wall, sure now of where I was in the room. I touched the other sconce, then next to it, the lined brocade fabric of the living room draperies. I felt past the window and found the frame of a small print. It wasn’t valuable; she could have left it. The wall ended. I turned right. Five more paces and my hand struck something, knocking it to a soft thud on the thick carpet. A pewter candleholder, late seventeenth century. Valuable, but not something she’d grab in a crisis. I moved on.

  My foot kicked a table leg, setting something wobbling. I stabbed my hand at the noise in the dark, found the lampshade, stopped the wobbling. It was the Chinese red lamp on the wine table. Below the small Renoir oil.

  My fingers moved up the wall, tentative, afraid, and too quickly found the little bumps on the beaded frame. The jimjams danced on the skin of my scalp. Shut up, I heard myself shout, maybe aloud, maybe only in my mind. She could have left the Renoir, if there’d been no time. It was not the grand prize.

  I was almost there.

  If there were ever a fire, I would get the Monet out of the house before I’d call the fire department.

  Five steps and I bumped the glossy, carved wood of the fireplace mantel, the fireplace she would never use because of the risk of smoke. Palms curled, I worked my fingers upward, willing them to find nothing but the smoothness of bare plaster.

  I touched wood.

  I felt along the gilded surface, needing to distrust my touch, to be wrong, but there was no doubting the double curve or the intricacy of the outer edge. My fingers came to the lower right corner, followed the odd angle. The hexagonal angle.

  The Monet was still on the wall.

  The jimjams roared.

  She and Stanley had come into the house. The car on the drive and the yawning entry doors had told me that.

  But they’d never left.

  A staccato burst of pops from upstairs echoed through the house like machine-gun fire. Then the rips came, four or five of them, each one long and loud and groaning, like the bones of the house were being ripped out by some giant, unseen hand. Something crashed and shattered on the foyer floor.

  I tried to take deep breaths, tried to think. Amanda and Stanley had come to the house. They’d unlocked the doors. There’d be time, they would have thought, time to get it all; the Monet first, of course, but the Renoir, too, then the Remington bronze, the other oils.

  She hadn’t even gotten to the Monet. She’d been stopped the minute they had entered the house—and been kept from leaving.

  The house groaned.

  I put my ear hard against the wall, heard the distant sirens, the idling diesel engines, sounds transmitted from outside. Mixed in with them, I thought I heard the almost imperceptible sounds of wood and steel shifting. But maybe that was the sound of my own fear.

  I could hear no voices.

  There was no time now to hug the wall. The house was coming down. I started into the center of the living room, arms outstretched like a fool playing at blind man’s bluff, kicking at the dark first with one foot, then the other. A dozen steps and I found the arch. Far to the right, down the hall, a faint orange haze came from the foyer. I turned to the left, toward the kitchen. Amanda kept a flashlight there, in a drawer next to the sink.

  I followed the hall as quickly as I dared, finger touching the wallpaper in front of me. A right turn and I saw more orange light, stronger, flickering from the doorway to the kitchen.

  The kitchen windows faced the burning house next door. The blinds were drawn, but enough light crept between the slats to make out the outlines of the counters. I walked across the room. More grit, more chunks of plaster. Every ceiling in the house was falling. I felt along the granite countertop, covered like the floor with fallen plaster, following its edge to the cold steel of the stainless refrigerator, then to the sink. I reached down and found the drawer handle on the lacquered birch front. I pulled it open. The round black rechargeable flashlight was in front.

  I switched it on and aimed it low, sweeping across the debris on the kitchen floor—and stopped.

  Blue pant legs powdered talcum white by plaster dust. Silver tape at the ankles, below the knees, and around the chest, binding her upright to the bentwood kitchen chair. Arms taped together behind the chair back. Funny bracelet with a single charm, a gold question mark, dangling loosely on an unmoving wrist. I’d given her that bracelet.

  And, grotesquely, a brown paper shopping bag, a hole ripped for a mouth, jammed on her head. A wet splotch of something red seeped through the paper above the left ear, where it pressed against her skin. She didn’t move.

  Two steps and I ripped the bag up and off. Aimed the flashlight at the far wall, enough for me to see, but not enough to blind her. Bent down to look in the eyes I saw every night when I couldn’t sleep. Sparkling eyes, laughing eyes. But not now. Now they were lifeless, unseeing, the blacks of the pupils crowding out almost all of the brown. My heart chattered. They were dead eyes.

  Something was jammed in her mouth.

  I dropped to my knees, holding the flashlight under my chin so she could see my face as I worked the fragment of towel out of her mouth. She was as rigid as stone. Then her eyelids fluttered, closed, jerked open to look again, and comprehended. Her breathing came faster then, and she started making rapid sideways motions with her eyes, wildly trying to see around the room. “Don’t talk,” I whispered.

  I got up, stepped quickly to the knife block on the counter, and took the first one my fingers closed on. I cut away the tape from her legs, waist, chest, and arms.

  “Don’t talk until we’re outside.” I reached for her arms.

  She stopped me, pulling my head down with cold hands. “Stanley,” she whispered in a cracked, dry voice. “Stanley.”

  “We have to get out of here.” I put my arms around her and pulled her up. Caught again the scent of her perfume, felt the familiar weight of her. For one crazy moment, I didn’t want to move.

  “Can you walk?” I said into her ear.

  She nodded.

  I held her for the first slow steps, then moved in front of her so she could walk with her hands on my shoulders. The flashlight beam was dimming as we
followed it out of the kitchen and down the hall. She dropped her hands away when we got to the living room arch.

  “No,” I whispered behind me, but she had already turned. I hurried to catch up to her, aiming the weakening beam in front of us as we crossed the living room to the Monet. “Just that,” I said. She nodded.

  She’d never installed security hangers, saying once that she couldn’t bear the thought of a thief damaging the Monet trying to get it off the wall. I handed her the flashlight, reached up, and took it down.

  The flashlight was dying as I followed her out of the living room.

  Pop. Pop. POP.

  I grabbed her arm and pulled her under the arch.

  “What is that?”

  “Nails from the roof.”

  The upstairs went silent. We hurried out from the arch, through the hall and the foyer, and out into the orange light. She looked down Chanticleer and stopped.

  A hundred yards east, a small knot of men, some holding flashlights aimed at the ground, had stopped behind two idling fire trucks. She stared at the cluster of men standing in the flashing red lights, then looked at the flames leaping from the shell of the gutted house next door. She turned to me, a question forming on her lips.

  “Not now,” I said. “Come on.” I reached for her arm.

  She stepped back, touching her head where the blood had dried. The words came in a rush. “I made Stanley take me up here when I found out about the bombs. He didn’t want to. He said it wasn’t safe.” Her eyes locked on mine. “I made him, Dek. I made him bring me up here.”

  “Did Stanley hit you?”

  “Stanley?” Her eyes flickered from me to the knot of men down the road and back to me. “Why would you think—”

  “He’s got to be in this, Amanda.” Saying aloud for the first time what had been working at me since I realized Till didn’t know about the tunnels. “Did Stanley hit you?”

  “I don’t know who hit me.”

  Again I reached for her with my free hand. “No,” she screamed, taking two full steps back. “Can’t you understand? I made Stanley take me here. We were finding our way in the dark, to the kitchen to get my flashlight, when something hit me. Stanley must have been hit, too. It couldn’t have been Stanley.”

  “We’ve got to find Till.” This time I got her arm. I started pulling her with my free hand, toward the street, toward the men and the fire trucks stopped a hundred yards down Chanticleer.

  The new blast flared high into the air, showering sparks into the night. At first I thought it was from the house next door, but then my eyes registered the dark space between the two fires. It was another house, the one beyond the burning pile next door. Something clattered behind us. I turned to see one of Amanda’s front doors break away from its top hinge and fall to the ground.

  “I made him, Dek,” Amanda shouted. “I made Stanley take me up here.”

  I looked at her face, saw fear and panic, but saw the future, too. I saw the guilt that would haunt her for the rest of her life if Stanley died inside her house.

  I grabbed the flashlight she was holding and shoved the Monet at her.

  “Find Till,” I shouted, pointing at the cluster of men behind the fire engines. “Tell him the bomber is in a tunnel that leads from your basement. Tell him everything is going to go up. Tell him Stanley is in the house.”

  “But where will you—”

  “Do it,” I yelled.

  She hesitated, nodding her head, but still frozen. I grabbed her shoulders and shook them hard. Then she ran, the Monet swinging under one arm, stumbling in a contorted, hobbled jog down Chanticleer toward the group of men huddled behind the two fire engines.

  I ran back into the house.

  Twenty-seven

  Grotesque black shadows danced in pantomime on the walls of the foyer, dark reflections of the trees and the smoke and the flames in the new light of the second explosion. There was no noise. No sirens, no firemen yelling, no big engines racing up Chanticleer. They weren’t coming. They’d been held back, away from the explosions at the west end.

  More debris had fallen in the foyer. The plaster dust was thicker now, making the foyer look like a barnacle-encrusted stateroom caught in the glare of an underwater shipwreck photograph. Jagged cracks ran up the walls. Soon, the walls would start falling.

  I crossed the foyer in the strange new light, to the base of the stairs going up. The staircase canted downward, loose from the wall. A main support had given way. I looked up. The crack in the ceiling had grown to be a foot wide. Beyond it, a trace of orange peeked from the second-floor landing. New firelight, showing through the collapsing roof.

  My shoes ground at the debris as I hurried into the central hall. The house was dead quiet now. Chillingly, the pops and groans of just a few minutes before had stopped, as if the house were holding its breath for one last shudder, one final exhalation, before it let go and collapsed.

  I moved down the hall, past the living room arch. Outside the dining room, my foot struck something that wasn’t plaster. I looked down, then bent to pick it up. It was an old Army flashlight, olive plastic, with its head set at a right angle to the body. The lens and the bulb were gone. My finger touched something damp. I turned the Army flashlight around and held it to the light coming from the foyer. It was blood, mixed with plaster and several short strands of dark hair. I threw it down. It had been used to strike Amanda.

  I switched on the rechargeable flashlight and went into the dining room. The beam flickered and then died as I swept it around the empty room. I shut the light off, rapped it hard against my leg, and turned it on again. No beam. I dropped it on the floor. Without a charge, it was worthless.

  Down the hall, to the library. Like the dining room’s, its windows were on the other side of the house from the fires. I made the circle around the walls, then crossed the carpet on a diagonal to make sure Stanley wasn’t trussed up in the middle. The room was empty.

  I hurried down the central hall, toward the little corridor that led to the family room. And stopped at the turn. A pale sliver of green light ran up the wall ahead. The basement door was ajar. The greenish light was coming from down below.

  I wanted to run then, run like a man on fire. It was Till’s job I was doing, hunting to save a man trapped in a collapsing house. I turned, started for the foyer. And saw Amanda, in the dark, in my mind, as she’d been outside her house, tormented by guilt, and pleading. I could give the basement a quick look from the top of the stairs, and then run to get Till. He could send his men into the basement of that collapsing house to find Stanley. I turned back.

  But I wasn’t going anywhere near that green sliver of light without a knife.

  There was a door to the kitchen off that short hall. I eased past the basement door, went into the kitchen. It was brighter now, from the second fire; the light coming in through the slats was strong enough to bathe everything in soft, ghostly illumination. I went to the knife block, found the big-handled carving knife. I’d never been in a knife fight, and I doubted I could cut a man, but it might give me enough courage to make it a step or two down the basement stairs. I went out to the short hall.

  Ten feet from the basement door, I got down on my knees, crawled as silently as I could through the grit to the sliver of green light. I reached with the blade of the knife to ease open the basement door. A cold draft of air came up, dry, as if from a crypt. Dropping to my belly, I pushed forward and looked down. The base of the stairs was dark, barely visible in the soft green gloom. For a second, I let myself hope that the green light was coming in from outside, but then I remembered that the houses in Gateville didn’t have basement windows.

  Someone was down there.

  Head first, still on my belly, I pulled myself down one step, but I could see nothing. I was too high up. I pulled myself down another step. Still the walls blocked my view. I pushed back, got to my feet. I’d have to go down. At the third step, the staircase was open at the sides; no walls, just handrails.
I could see there. But I’d be vulnerable. If somebody were waiting, a grab from either side would send me tumbling down onto the concrete.

  Something crashed upstairs, shaking the whole house. A roof rafter or a ceiling joist had broken away. Down or out, I had to do it now.

  I gripped the carving knife tight in my right hand, eased onto the first step, then stopped, partially hunched to slash at a first touch at my ankle. But nothing moved. I took a second step, then a third. Each time I stopped, tensed to cut at a hand coming out of the strange green glow. But only the faraway shiftings of the joists and rafters, vague and restless, stirred the house. I took the rest of the steps down, and moved behind the stairs.

  The green light came from an opening cut into the center of the south basement wall. The cutout was roughly chiseled and about two feet square. Rock-sized, irregular chunks of cement lay on the floor underneath, where they’d fallen when the hole was cut.

  It was the entrance to the tunnel to the bomb shelter.

  I looked around the basement and saw the familiar outlines of the wicker lawn furniture that her father had left behind, the few boxes of Christmas ornaments, the couple of extra suitcases, and, toward the cutout, the black upright coffin shapes of the two furnaces. Nothing moved; the basement seemed empty.

  I looked back at the cutout wall, and caught my breath at what I’d missed. A man was hunched in the corner of the south wall, huddled down, twenty feet from the cutout.

  The green light dimmed, then surged brighter, then dimmed again.

  And then it went out.

  I stayed stock-still behind the stairs, tensed for any rustling in the corner. I clutched the carving knife, but I was wrapped in black gauze; in the darkness, I couldn’t have defended myself against a blind man. I felt for the stair rail, then let my hand fall away. He’d expect that, expect me to run back up the stairs. I’d never make it to the top before he’d stab me, or shoot me, from behind. He wouldn’t even have to aim. In the narrow stairwell, I’d be a rat in a tiny tunnel. All he’d have to do is slash or shoot at the sound of the fear coming ragged out of my lungs.