Molly: House on Fire

by R. E. Bradshaw

  Molly jumped up and ran toward the door. Before she reached it, Joe came out with Sarah leaning against him. He led them away from the house, toward his car. He did not reach for the radio to call for help. Joe sat Sarah down on the backseat and stepped aside so Molly could get closer to her mother. Molly looked into her mother’s bloody, disfigured face, her clothes spattered crimson.

  “What happened, Momma?”

  Sarah gripped Molly’s shoulders so tightly it pinched. “Molly Sharon Harris, now you listen to me. You were not here. You came up when you saw the smoke. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Molly forgot her rule about crying and started to sob.

  “He was beatin’ me. He was beating me and I ran from him. He tripped over the kerosene heater and caught himself on fire. That’s what happened. You got that? You don’t ever tell a single soul what you did today, nobody!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” choked out of Molly’s throat.

  “They’re gonna make me give you up for good this time. I’m gonna find a nice place for you, Molly girl. You’re gettin’ the hell out of this town and I don’t want you to ever look back.” Sarah pulled Molly close to her and whispered in her ear, “You have the key to my heart and when you look at it, promise me you’ll remember how much I love you. One day you’ll understand.”

  The words were barely audible, when Molly asked through her tears, “Am I going away forever, Momma?”

  “Honey, there’s a whole world out there waitin’ on you. You don’t need to come back here. I’m gonna go to the hospital and try to get well, but the folks aren’t gonna want you’re your old momma comin’ to see you.”

  In Molly’s childish mind, she thought of a solution, “Why cain’t I tell the truth? He was gonna kill you. I’ll go to prison, but at least you can come see me.”

  Her mother shook her. “Don’t you ever say that again! He died in a fire by his own hand. You were not here. Promise me, no matter who asks, you were not here!”

  “Owww!” Molly shrank from the pain in her shoulders. “Okay, okay, I wasn’t here.”

  Her mother released the pressure and pulled her into a hug. “You’re smart, kid. You know how to survive. You’re gonna be somebody one day. I just know it.”

  Joe reached for the radio and called in the fire while Molly watched the now raging flames burn her world to the ground. By the time the fire trucks came, there was nothing left but the cinder blocks and crumbling brick piers that made up the foundation.

  “Honey, can I help you?”

  A voice cut through Molly’s memory. Suddenly, she was back in Joe’s hospital room and realized that she had been sitting on the bed, crying. The voice belonged to the nurse she saw earlier. Molly stood up, quickly.

  “No, no. I’m okay. I’ll go now.”

  “Leslie told me you were still in here. That girl’s been here every day since they brought Mr. Joe in this time. Sure hope she can get some rest now. He didn’t have no family ’cept his daughter and grandson. Leslie stayed with him ’cause no one else cared or was brave enough, after what they say his grandson done.” She studied Molly while she spoke. “You were in here so long, I thought I ought to check on you. You’re that Molly girl Joe always went on about, aren’t you?”

  The nurse held out a tissue, which Molly took. Her nametag said Delilah. Delilah was a very large woman and apparently was the other voice Molly heard speaking with Joe when she called earlier.

  She proved it by saying, “I’m sorry Mr. Joe passed before you got here. That phone call seemed to be all he was holdin’ on for.”

  Here was another person who knew Joe wanted to see her. Molly closed off her emotions and started using her brain. She thought about the email that warned her to stay out of Dobbs County. How many people knew Joe called her? She knew of two so far. Leslie Walker, who would probably never speak to her again, and Delilah. Molly carefully worded her next question.

  “When Joe talked about me, did he say why he needed to see me?”

  Delilah answered, “I was with Mr. Joe almost every night this last stay. He’d been in before a few times. The cancer took him quick. That boy gettin’ in trouble was just too much stress on him. He had no more fight left in him.”

  Delilah was not answering the question, but Molly let her ramble. Sometimes it was best to give the witness some storytelling latitude. They would eventually get back to the point. Not a safe practice in trial, since Molly never knew what would come out of someone’s mouth in the stressful environment of the courtroom, but in pretrial interviews, it made witnesses comfortable if she acted interested in their narrative. She gave Delilah all of her attention.

  The big woman continued, “He was pretty heavily medicated here toward the end. Sometimes at night, he would talk about you. Said you were the smartest little girl he ever knew. Said you made it to the Big Time. He was so proud, like you were his own child. He was sure you would help his grandson, if you knew what had happened.”

  Molly’s interest in the narrative waned. She interrupted. “Did he ever mention a woman named Sarah?”

  Delilah looked at the ceiling while thinking. “You know, when I heard him say that on the phone, I wondered if he was talking about her.”

  Molly jumped at this news. “You heard him say Sarah, too?”

  “I thought he was just confused because of the drugs, but he mentioned a Sarah just the other night, during one of his bad spells. He would forget where he was sometimes. He started telling me about a woman named Sarah, found dead. Said she wasn’t drunk. Just kept saying that over and over, she wasn’t drunk. Do you know who he was talking about?”

  Molly was moving toward the door as she spoke. “Thank you for taking care of Joe. I’m sure he appreciated it.”

  Delilah turned as Molly passed. “You gonna stay and help Joe’s grandson?”

  Molly stopped at the door, but she did not turn around.

  Delilah was not finished. “Leslie said you weren’t going to help that boy, but I believe that man’s dyin’ words are gonna haunt you, if you don’t. You might leave here now, but them words will bring you back. Joe loved you for a reason that’s only known by one person on this earth and that’s you. You won’t have a minute’s peace until you put his soul to rest.”

  Molly walked back down the corridor without acknowledging Delilah’s parting comment.

  “You mark my words, you’ll be back.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Molly reached the parking lot, her car had drawn a small crowd of mostly men with their jaws dropped. Owning a vehicle like the LFA had its drawbacks. Dispensing of drooling car enthusiasts graciously had become a skill. Politeness was not Molly’s priority at the moment. She pushed through the onlookers, hit the remote door lock in her pocket, and opened the door, exposing the red leather racing seats and cockpit-like interior to a hushed gasp.

  “Now, I never would’ve expected that,” said one of the men, in a flannel shirt and dirty John Deere hat, a wad of tobacco the size of a golf ball pressing against the inside of his cheek. “Hey darlin’, can I take a ride in sugar-daddy’s car with you?” He followed the question with a trail of spit into a nearby bush, then chuckled and elbowed his friend in the ribs.

  Molly shot back, “I make my own sugar, and Daddy was a redneck asshole just like you. He did us all a favor and died young.”

  She sat down, slammed the door, jerked the three-point seatbelt into position, and buckled it. She hit the start button on the steering wheel and the engine roared to life. The crowd stepped back as Molly gunned it out of the parking lot, leaving smoke and the smell of burning rubber in her wake. Only seconds after pulling back out on the street, Molly let off the accelerator, realizing she was already doing nearly seventy in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. She should have been in the right lane, ready to make the turn onto highway US 70 toward Durham. Instead, she stayed on Memorial Drive, heading south toward a place she never thought she would see again. Molly made the trip from the hospital to
home many times in her ten years in this town. She could have used the car’s mapping computer, but she was sure her memory would guide her.

  Turning west on King Avenue, she knew it was the correct way because the railroad tracks were paralleling her route. Those tracks branched off and came right by her old house at the end of Central Avenue, so named because the town grew up around the north-south passage. Modern roads replaced the south end of the major thoroughfare out of town, and a portion of the road was forgotten. Molly had lived on the remnants of that abandoned section of street, in the only house on a deserted little curve, a dead end to nowhere when Molly and her mother lived there. The way Waitesville had grown, Molly thought it was unlikely that an empty plot of land still existed there. The trapezoid shaped field was formed by the railroad tracks to the east, industrial parks and more tracks to the north and west, and a deep ditch surrounded by forest on the south end. Molly used to follow the ditch out of town almost a mile, through intermittent thick patches of swamp and Pine Barrens, just to fish all day on the Neuse River. She smiled at the memories. They were not all bad.

  King Avenue turned into Grant Street. Molly recognized the name. She took the next left onto Williams Street, because she knew where she was. There was little traffic. Almost all of the warehouses and businesses in this part of town were closed for the night. The lights were on in the big chain-store distribution hub’s parking lot, lines of big blue trucks pulled up to the loading docks. Molly knew she was close when her headlights lit the building on the right. The familiar “Williams Bros.” sign meant she had only to cross the train tracks and take a left, which she did.

  The street sign had been changed, a new name given to the little stretch of paved road. The lights in the house that faced Williams Street were still on. Molly hoped they did not notice, but doubted they missed the sound of her high performance engine slowing and turning onto the old road. The pavement ended just one hundred yards from the street, where a sign warned, “Road Closed.” There was barely any pavement left when Molly lived there. She was not surprised it was a rutted out, sandy path now.

  Molly slowed the car to a crawl when she left the pavement, hearing sand and rocks scrape the smooth undercarriage of the LFA, as she dipped in and out of the deep ruts. There were no streetlights glowing, just the high beams on Molly’s car cutting through the thick night. Nothing had been built here. In fact, there were more trees than before. The car rolled through low hills and shallow valleys in the road, her headlights sweeping up and down the terrain in front of her. Eye-level wild grasses and weeds grew on both sides of the worn path, littered with unwanted items. Molly saw toilets, dilapidated couches, cardboard boxes with their contents strewn about, and groupings of black plastic bags. She started to laugh. Her former home had become an unauthorized dumpsite. How appropriate.

  Molly reached the end of the path, where it formed a loop that lead back the way she came. She remembered playing for hours in the sand on this part of the path. She could play there because no one ever came down to the dead end back then, no one but Evan Branch, Joe, and an occasional social worker. She and her mother might as well have lived miles from town, yet they were just across the tracks, merely on the wrong side. As a grown woman, Molly knew Evan kept her mother there for that very reason. Out of sight, out of mind, alone and captive, Sarah Harris simply saw no way out.

  A few minutes passed before Molly realized she had stopped the car. She shut down the engine and the lights. Faint moonlight fell on the landscape, softly illuminating only the tips of the grass near her, fading to impenetrable black just feet from her window. Molly reached in the console between the seats, pulling out a flashlight. She paused at the sight of her Walther PPK .380 pistol. Molly heard the voice of her investigator, Rainey Bell, in her head. A former FBI behavioral analyst, Rainey was always armed, sometimes rather heavily.

  “I’m not paranoid, just prepared. There is a distinct difference and a higher survival rate for the latter.”

  Molly picked up the pistol and put it in her jacket pocket. She carried the weapon with her everywhere it was legal. The concealed carry license she possessed had been a necessity after she slightly angered, okay, really pissed off a lower level, but still dangerous South American cocaine distributor. In the process of clearing his youngest son of murder charges, she proved the drug lord’s favored older son actually committed the crime. Then she seized his private jet for non-payment of the remainder of his son’s bill. The jet was worth far more than he owed, but he signed it over as collateral for Molly’s retainer due to a cash flow problem involving the DEA. She refused his offer of an untraceable payment, and only represented the younger son because he was trying to break free of his father. She helped him change his identity and get lost after the trial. The drug lord swore he would have his revenge and occasionally sent someone to make an attempt on her life. So far, the incidents had been laughable, carried out by inept drugged-up hit men that the DEA spotted right away. Still, she carried the Walther and had a few more weapons behind the highly secured walls of her mansion.

  Molly opened the door and stepped on the soil that spawned her. The familiar smell hit her right away, a mixture of pine forest and axel grease. Closing the car door, she turned on the flashlight and trailed it over the landscape. The old oak tree was still standing, but not doing well. Other trees were starting to sprout spring colors, while the big oak stood leafless, covered in Virginia Creeper almost to its top. The vine had sucked the life out of the tree, much like the rest of this abandoned area. There was no life here, just the detritus of human existence tossed out of the back of pick-up trucks.

  Walking in the direction of her old home, Molly picked her way through the tall grass and garbage. The beam of her flashlight hit a rectangle shape, rising up from the grass. It too was covered in the deep green leaves of the bellicose creeping vines. Molly stopped walking. She examined the shape, probing it with her flashlight. Yes, that was it. Under the living vine rested the burned out remains of the shack’s foundation. Molly was startled at the small square footage of the structure. The floor of her pool cabana was larger than the crumbling foundation before her. She walked up to the structure, pulled some vines away, and verified that this was indeed the scene of the crime. The cinder block steps to the front door were still there, blackened by fire.

  Molly dropped to her knees and tugged at one of the blocks. After a minute or two of struggling with the vines and dirt encasing the block, she managed to break it lose. Moving it to the side, she dug into the dirt beneath it. A few inches down, she hit the hard aluminum top of a cookie tin. She scraped the dirt away and pulled the tin out of the ground. The box had rusted and the bottom was nearly eaten away, but the contents were still there. Molly buried the box not long before the house burned. She wiped her hands on her jeans, carefully extracted the lid, and peered inside. The cloth she wrapped her treasure in had begun to rot. When she touched it, it crumbled in her fingers and out fell a single gold coin, still sealed tightly in a small plastic case.

  Sarah had taken Molly to meet an old man, several months before the fire. She was told that this man was her grandfather, but she did not believe it. If he was Evan Branch’s father, then Molly was the Queen of England. No man as evil as Evan could have been related to the kind old man with wisps of white hair on his mostly balding head. He talked to Sarah alone for a few minutes, first. Then he spent about thirty minutes with Molly, asking her about school and what she wanted to be when she grew up. Molly told him she wanted to be the President, so she could make a law to put people like Evan Branch in jail. Molly’s mother reprimanded her and apologized for her comment, but the old man had smiled at Molly.

  “That’s a mighty fine thing to think of. I hope you do that. I hope you change this world.”

  On her way out the door, the old man called Molly to him. Her mother waited outside on his porch, while the he talked to Molly. He reached in his pocket, producing a gold coin in a small, clear plastic case.r />
  “Now, you put this somewhere safe. Don’t let nobody know you got it. It might come in handy some day.”

  Molly brought the coin home and buried it under the steps. After the fire, she had not been able to retrieve it. Now, Molly held the plastic case up in front of her, shining the flashlight over its surface. The coin inside was a bit smaller than a modern day nickel, but larger than a dime and still pristine, its polished surface gleaming back through the clear plastic window. The profile appeared to be of Liberty’s head, but could have been a Native American in headdress, with the words “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” encircling it. The reverse had a large number three in the center, over the word “DOLLAR” and the date “1861,” surrounded by a closed wreath.

  Molly could barely make out the details in the beam of her flashlight. She had no idea what the coin was worth now, and was amazed that the poor child she had been did not spend it, but hid it as part of her childish escape plan. A plan she never had a chance to use. She left the tin on the ground and stood up, dropping the coin case in the right front pocket of her jeans. The sound of a vehicle door slamming snapped her back to reality. She was standing in a dark field alone. Enamored with her recovered treasure, Molly had not noticed the pick-up truck approach. The driver had done so with the headlights off and stopped just around the bend, a designed stealthy approach.

  Molly’s right hand slipped into the pocket of her jacket. She gripped the Walther and disengaged the safety with practiced skill. Molly could see only the man’s shadowy figure framed against the glow of industrial lights from the warehouse beyond the tracks, but that was enough. Her heart rate sped up and her hands began to tremble. The black silhouette was the same size, shape, and approached with the familiar gait of Molly’s worst nightmare. The spirit of Evan Branch was heading straight for her. Instantly, she was a scared child about to face the embodiment of her fears. Just as quickly, Molly came back to the present. She was not that child anymore.