Dosed to Death

by P. D. Workman

  Behind the house were three shadows, three silhouettes against the light of the fire. Three people, safe. Kenzie hurried toward them.

  “Mrs. Hubbard? Is everyone okay? Everyone got out?”

  As she got close, she could see it was Mrs. Hubbard, Samantha, and Jack. Their faces were a little sooty from smoke, but they seemed unharmed. They weren’t even coughing from smoke inhalation. Kenzie took Mrs. Hubbard’s hand, wanting to reassure herself that the woman was safe and sound. She was a medical professional, but not one who often treated living patients. Her hand went automatically to Mrs. Hubbard’s pulse. Fast as a train engine, but hammering away nice and strong and even. Mrs. Hubbard had the constitution of an ox. She would live to be a hundred. Kenzie looked at Samantha and Jack. They both seemed fine as well.

  “How did you get here so fast?” Kenzie asked Jack.

  “I was up to the bathroom. Saw a reflection in the window, and when I looked out... I could see a fire in one of the windows. Thought I must be seeing things. That it was just the fireplace. But... I had to go see.” He blew out his breath in a puff of white vapor. “I got up here in enough time to make sure that everyone got out.”

  “There’s no one else in there, right?” Kenzie asked Mrs. Hubbard and Samantha. “It was just the two of you?”

  “Mr. Burknall sleeps down at the barn,” Samantha said, her voice a little breathless. “In case anyone needs anything.”

  “So it was just the two of you.”

  Samantha nodded.

  “We should tell the others. They’re out around front.” Kenzie looked behind her at the dark woods. She mentally gauged the distance from the house to the woods. Far enough that there was no danger of an ember or flame reaching any of the trees? She wasn’t so sure.

  “Jack... you want to stay back here to make sure it doesn’t spread into the woods? I need to talk to the others... then maybe we need to set up a perimeter, or get Mr. Burknall to help us make a firebreak... I don’t know.”

  “With all of this snow?” Jack gestured around. “I don’t think we need to worry about the fire spreading.”

  “It could, though. Mr. Dewey said it was a fire hazard. The cold dries everything out... even though it’s snowy, the air and the trees are so dry...” She couldn’t help thinking about Zachary, as a little boy, watching the dry branches of their Christmas tree going up in flames. She shuddered, and it wasn’t because of the cold. “Just wait here, I’ll talk to the others.”

  Kenzie returned to the front of the house. The others were spreading out, some of them starting to check around the sides of the house as well, moving toward the back.

  “Everyone is out,” she announced. “Mrs. Hubbard and Samantha, they’re both okay.”

  Raven looked up at the burning building, pulling her coat tight around her. “It’s so... primal. I don’t know.”

  “It’s scary,” Kenzie agreed.

  “Is there no way to get outside help?” a man demanded.

  Kenzie turned her head to see who the query came from, but she knew before she saw that it was Vance Stiller.

  He had pulled out his phone and was looking at the useless brick. He looked at the house, then down the hill at the barn. “Doesn’t anybody have... a short-wave radio? A sat phone? There should be some way to reach help in the event of an emergency!”

  “If there was, don’t you think we would have done it in the last few days?” Kenzie asked, irritated.

  “But that was just...” Stiller waved his hand. “Nonsense and speculation. This is serious. This could spread to the forest, to the other buildings on the property. It could decimate the business.”

  “Yes, it could,” Kenzie agreed. She didn’t make any comment on the fact that he thought the murder of one of the guests and possibly his own poisoning as nonsense and speculation.

  Kenzie heard the growl of an engine starting and looked around. At first, she couldn’t see anything, but eventually, she could see a large, dark shape coming into view down by the barn. Her spirits lifted. It was Burknall, coming to the rescue. Always competent, he knew exactly what to do.

  The shape lumbered toward them. Kenzie squinted, trying to make out the shape in the darkness. As it drew closer, the light of the fire illuminated a John Deere tractor with some kind of digger attachment. Kenzie’s heart fell again. She was hoping for a fire truck pumper, or something similar. She knew it was probably ridiculous to think that a resort might have their own fire engine, but maybe something used to spray chemicals on crops or on fields they needed cleared of weeds? There must be a need for such things.

  The heat of the fire swelled up behind Kenzie. She turned to look at the house and saw that the flames were no longer just behind the windows, but had eaten their way through the roof and were reaching up to the sky. She murmured a curse under her breath. Without a fire hose, they had no hope of being able to save the house.

  There had probably been no hope by the time Zachary had woken her up. Mrs. Hubbard and Samantha were lucky to have gotten out of the building unharmed. They were lucky that Jack had been up and around and had noticed the flames.

  The tractor emitted several loud beeps, and Kenzie and the others decided to get out of Burknall’s way. He rolled up to the house, engine growling loudly, and circled around it, moving toward the back of the house. Kenzie followed at a distance to see what he would do. More horn honks to get Mrs. Hubbard, Samantha, and Jack out of the way. Then Burknall started to dig a trench across the back yard between the house and the trees. Dark clumps of dirt were piled up on the snow.

  “What is he doing?” Raven demanded, watching from a few feet away from Kenzie.

  “It’s a firebreak. To try to keep the fire from spreading into the trees. If there isn’t any fuel between the house and the trees for the fire to burn, it can’t spread. As long as no embers from the fire float up over into the trees...”

  “Why isn’t he trying to put the fire out?”

  “He probably can’t do anything about it at this point. Even if the fire department was here, it would take several trucks to get this under control.”

  “So he’s just going to let it burn?” Raven sounded outraged at the idea.

  “Yes. If there’s no way to put it out, then the best thing to do is to keep it confined and let it burn itself out.”

  Kenzie wondered if there were anything that the fire department—if there were one that served the outlying areas—would do if they had been called. There were no fire hydrants to hook their hoses up to. Maybe they would have been able to put an intake hose into a stream somewhere. But if there were one, it would have been frozen over. She supposed all they would be able to do was to watch it burn, like the rest of them were doing.

  She turned away from the tractor and moved back to the front of the house where she could see down to the cabins and barn. A figure was making its way up the hill. Hunched over, moving slowly as if in pain. With his bulky coat on and slow, pained movements, Kenzie barely recognized Zachary. She walked down the hill to meet him part way.

  “Zachary. How are you? Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer, but kept moving toward her. Eventually, he was close enough to touch. She couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness.

  “Zachary.” She reached out and took his arm. “Hey. Are you with me?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. From calling out to everyone else to warn them of the fire? From crying? From dragging the cold, smoky air into his lungs as he tried to get enough oxygen, lost in flashbacks? “I’m here.”

  She pulled him close and put her arm around him. “This must be awful for you. I’m so sorry. Do you want to go back to the cabin? You don’t need to go up there.”

  “No.” He looked up toward the house, then put his head down again, marching forward like he was walking into a strong wind. “I want to go up.”

  Kenzie didn’t argue with him. He knew what was best for him. His fear of fire was something that had plagued him for decades. If he was rea
dy to face it now, she wouldn’t get in his way.

  62

  This time... everyone else can see it.”

  Zachary and Kenzie stood arm in arm, watching the flames consume the farmhouse. Zachary’s voice was still hoarse. She could feel how tense his body was, feel his limbs quivering from standing in such close proximity to the fire.

  “You can see it,” Zachary said.

  “Yes,” Kenzie agreed. “We can all see it.” She gave him a squeeze. “Is this what it was like, watching your house burn?”

  He shook his head. “No... when they got me out... I couldn’t really see anything. Too many people around me. An oxygen mask on my face... people talking about me, cutting my clothes off.” He clutched his coat against him, as if trying to convince himself that he was fully dressed and no one was going to cut his clothes off this time. Kenzie thought about what she knew of the fire. It had been Christmas Eve. It would have been cold outside. Snow on the ground. Being taken from the heat of the fire to the chill of the winter air outside and having the clothes cut away from his body so they could treat him, he must have been freezing. At least, the skin that wasn’t burned. Maybe the cold air had helped to soothe his burns and to stop further damage.

  When he had first told her about being rescued by the firefighters, she had imagined him standing outside, safe like he was now. Upset, even devastated by the fire, but walking away under his own power. It wasn’t until later that she learned about the hospital stay, debriding, skin grafts, and rehabilitation he had gone through before going to the Petersons, his first foster family.

  “You’re safe here,” Kenzie assured him. “You’re not burned, and neither is anyone else.”

  “Everyone got out?” His voice was a little choked as he asked the question.

  “Yes. Everything is fine. Jack woke up before you did and he got up here in time to make sure that Mrs. Hubbard and Samantha got out of the house.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “And Mr. Burknall is digging a trench around the house, to keep it from spreading. Everyone will be okay. Everyone is safe.”

  He nodded again. He pressed his face into her knit hat and the wild, curly hair that puffed out all around the bottom edge of it. He breathed in, his mouth close to her ear and neck and making her shiver, goosebumps running down her neck. But she didn’t pull away from him. He needed her there, calm and giving him strength to face the fire. To see his memories clearly and process them instead of running away from them as he had for years.

  “Everyone got out,” Zachary repeated. “Everyone got out.”

  A couple of the guests went back to their cabins when it became clear that the rest of the Lodge was safe. Kenzie couldn’t imagine how they could go back to sleep. And maybe they didn’t, but just wanted to be away from the cold and the smoke and the other guests huddling together and speculating on what had happened.

  She had a pretty good idea that Zachary would not be going back to bed. No hope of that. Even on a normal night when he was awakened by a dream or a noise outside, he wouldn’t go back to sleep. No chance he would be able to after dealing with a fire.

  “What do you think happened?” Kenzie asked Burknall, when he had finished trenching around the house and parked his tractor. “A gas line? Propane leak?”

  He stared at the house. The fire was beginning to settle down instead of getting bigger. Starting to burn itself out. But it would still be a long time before it was completely extinguished and the ruins cool enough to examine.

  “We’ve had propane appliances for decades,” he said, giving his head a shake. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them. They were perfectly safe. Same with the boiler. It was inspected regularly, never had any problems. Fireplaces, same thing, we got the chimneys cleaned and kept everything in perfect condition.”

  “So you don’t know what could have caused the fire,” Kenzie said.

  “What about candles?” Zachary asked.

  Burknall looked at him, brows drawn down. “We only use candles if someone is in the room to keep an eye on them. And never sleeping with a candle lit. Mrs. Hubbard knows that. Samantha too. She didn’t even like candles. That’s why we had the glow-sticks.”

  “Something started it,” Zachary observed.

  Burknall nodded his agreement. “Something.”

  There was something more in his expression. Something that he was not saying. Maybe he had suspicions, but he wasn’t sharing them. Kenzie watched the burning house. All of that history. The families that had grown up in there. Mr. Dewey’s pictures and all the reminders of the wife he had lost.

  It wasn’t until that point that Kenzie thought about Mr. Dewey.

  And Brooke.

  It wasn’t just Mr. Dewey’s memories that had been burned up, but his remains as well. Maybe they wouldn’t be completely destroyed, but all of Kenzie’s efforts to preserve the scene and the trace evidence was for naught.

  They couldn’t even test Brooke’s body now to see whether it had been Jimson weed that had caused all of the trouble that night. Brooke’s remains were probably damaged past any hopes of retrieving evidence of toxins. Kenzie turned her gaze toward Zachary to see if he had twigged on to this as well. He was probably light-years ahead of her in sorting out the implications. He had wanted to go up to the house before they went to bed, hoping that Mrs. Hubbard could help them or that there would be some evidence of the use of Jimson weed. But it was too late. Now, Mrs. Hubbard was the only possible avenue. If she knew anything.

  Zachary gazed back at Kenzie. He rubbed away a smudge on her face. He gave a little grimace, confirming that he understood they had just lost all of that evidence. Everything they had, other than what Kenzie had managed to record on her phone or Zachary’s digital recorder. They had no remains, no scene or trace, no weapon, and no pills. Everything was gone. Kenzie held on to Zachary, for her support this time rather than his. She felt sick at the thought of all they had lost.

  “At least everyone was okay,” she said weakly.

  Zachary nodded, holding her tight. “Yeah.”

  Kenzie took a few deep breaths. She looked around at those who remained, watching the destruction. She let go of Zachary and walked slowly over to Mrs. Hubbard, who was looking tired and worn, dark circles around her eyes.

  “Mrs. Hubbard, would you like to come back to our cabin? We have a spare room. You could go to sleep or just have some time to yourself.”

  Mrs. Hubbard smiled at her. “That’s very sweet of you, my dear. That would... I think that would be very nice.”

  Kenzie took her arm. “Why don’t we walk down, then?”

  The sky was starting to grow light. A column of smoke was still going up from the farmhouse.

  Zachary followed, saying nothing. Mrs. Hubbard clutched Kenzie’s arm, holding tightly as if she were afraid she might fall. Or maybe just as if everything else had slipped out of her grasp and she didn’t want to be left alone and anchorless. Kenzie didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

  “I can’t believe it,” the older woman said after a few minutes, as they made their way slowly down to the cabin. “I can’t believe that everything I own has just gone up in smoke. All of the memories. Everything I ever owned. What am I supposed to do now? I don’t have a job, a place to stay, even a spare shirt to my name. I got out of there with my life, but I don’t have anything. Even my purse.” She shook her head. “My ID, my bank cards. How am I going to survive?”

  Kenzie looked over at Zachary, walking a few feet away from them, giving them some privacy. “Zachary might be able to help you out there. He actually lost everything he had in a fire just a little while ago. His wallet and ID too. I know it was really hard to get things replaced, but he can tell you what to do. Where to start.”

  Mrs. Hubbard looked at Zachary. “Really? I thought that the fire you guys were talking about happened when you were a little boy. I didn’t realize that it was recent...”

  “Well...” Zachary cleared his throat. “Ther
e were two fires.”

  “Two of them.” Mrs. Hubbard looked overwhelmed by this thought, like it was too much to grasp.

  “Yeah. There was one when I was ten. An accident. That’s when I was injured.” Zachary indicated one of the scars visible on his neck. “And... I lost everything then. My whole family too. Then... two years ago, there was another fire, in my apartment. Arson. And like Kenzie said, my wallet and everything was burned up. I had to start from scratch. Lived with a friend while I was trying to get my ID reissued and to get access to my bank accounts and everything. I didn’t use any cloud storage, so I didn’t have my passwords to any of the online stuff. Had to get people who could verify my identity to the government.” Zachary rolled his eyes. “It’s arduous... but it’s possible. I can help you to sort it out.”

  “Oh, you’re a godsend. Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  “Someone else would help you,” he assured her. “There are a lot of helpful people in the world.” He looked at Kenzie, smiling a little. “People who you wouldn’t think had any reason to help you out... step up and become the best friends you ever had.”

  Kenzie’s cheeks warmed. She blamed it on the fire, even though they were getting farther away from it. They reached the cabin and Zachary dug out his key to let them in.

  “Whatever you need, just ask. In the next little while... you’re going to learn how to ask for things. Even if you’re a person who has never had to depend on anyone before. But we’ll help out however we can.”

  They stepped into the warm, welcoming space of the cabin. Mrs. Hubbard took off her coat and smoothed back her hair. She was, of course, in her night clothes, a matched set top and bottom of warm-looking purple velour with flowers embroidered on the left breast and hip. “I guess... the first thing is sleep. You would think that I would be too worried to sleep, but... I’m exhausted.”

  “Your brain doesn’t want to deal with all the trauma,” Zachary told her, nodding. “Go ahead and get some sleep while you can. You can worry about other things later.”