The Fireman: A Novel Part 46

Don tossed his rod aside, took Harper's arm, and began to help her down into the rowboat. "'S'already cleared or Mama Carol never woulda let the nurse even come down here! Now I ain't gonna let a lady fackin' eight months pregnant try to row herself out there alone in this chop."

"Mr. Lewiston-Mr. Lewiston, you got to hang on-" Cargill said, taking a step toward them, but still holding his rod, which was now curved in a long parabolic arc, the line straining at the end of it.

"You got a hit, Chuckie!" Don cried, stepping into the rowboat himself. "Don't you dare lose this one, that's Ben Patchett's supper you got on your line! I'll be back by the time you reel her in!"

Don bent to the oars and the boat took a herky-jerky jump away from the dock.

As he swept them out across the water, leaning all the way forward and then pitching himself all the way back, the oars banging in their iron rings and plunging into the water, Harper told him what she knew. When she got to the part about Carol setting Harold up, Don made a face like a man who has caught a whiff of something corrupt. Which was more or less the case, she supposed.

"And Ben Patchett was the triggerman for her?"

"It seems."

He shook his head.

"What?"

"I can just about believe Ben would shoot the nasty little fatboy for her. Ben Patchett can talk himself into doin' just about anything in the name of fackin' protecting his people. But I can't see him callin' a Cremation Crew on Harold. Too many ways that coulda gone south. What if Harold squawked about Camp Wyndham before Ben had a chance to nail him? What if the Cremation Crew was heavily armed and put up a fight? Nope. I can see Carol doin' it. She's a hysteric. She don't think through the consequences of her actions. But Ben has a careful mind. He's half cop, half bean counter."

"Maybe Carol called the Cremation Crew first and only told Ben her plan after. Then he was stuck trying to clean up her mess?"

Don nodded glumly.

"You still don't like it."

"Not by half," Don said.

"Why not?"

"Because she don't have the fackin' cell phones," Don said. "Ben does. How was she gonna call anyone? How would she even know who to call?"

Don took a last heave at the oars and drove the rowboat up into the muck. He hopped out and steadied her as she came to her feet.

"G.o.d, you got big alla sudden," he said.

"I like it," she said. "I look silly, I can't run, and I can't wear anything except sweatpants and extra-extra-large hoodies. But I like the idea of being so big I can easily trample over lesser beings. I don't want to fight my enemies, I want to squash them beneath my tremendous girth."

Don squinted back in toward sh.o.r.e, but it was too dark for either of them to see what Chuck Cargill was up to. Then he glanced past the shed, up to the top of the ridge. "This camp is about to turn into a fackin' madhouse. I don't think I'll be missed for a few hours. I wanta look over the boat while I'm out here. See how sea-ready she is. Maybe I'll even put 'er in the drink." He cast another glance down at her belly. "If I had my druthers, we'd be on the water by tomorrow afternoon. That baby isn't goin' to wait and we might need a week or two t'get up the coast."

"Go examine the boat. I can paddle back with Mr. Rookwood."

Don walked her to the door of the shed, hand on her elbow, as if she were a recovering invalid. The Fireman answered the knock wearing polka dot pajama bottoms and his black-and-yellow rubber fireman's coat over a grimy undershirt. He was starved, sweaty, needed a shave and a haircut, and he smelled like a campfire. Harper fought down the urge to burrow her face into his chest.

"Lazarus done rose from his fackin' tomb," Don said. He was almost quivering with pleasure, his big craggy face flushed with color. "The Father is awake. He asked for you. He wants to see you . . . and then he wants to see Carol. He got a sermon to preach to her, and lemme tell you, Johnny, I think this one might have some fire and brimstone in it."

The Fireman scratched his hairy throat in an absentminded way, looking from Don to Harper. "I better put something on," he said. Harper expected him to shut the door so he could change into a better pair of pants and maybe a sweater. Instead, he looked around in a kind of daze, until he spotted his helmet hanging off a nail by the door. He set it firmly on his head and breathed a sigh of relief. He glanced at himself in the square of mirror nailed up by the door, turned the helmet two imperceptible centimeters to the left, and beamed in delight. "There. Perfect. Shall we go?"

"Don is staying on the island. He's going to put the boat in the water."

The Fireman looked more surprised at this than at the news that Father Storey was conscious.

"Ah. I suppose you'll be going as soon as possible."

"Not too soon," Harper said quickly.

"By the end of the week, if I have anything to say about it," Don told him. "That baby isn't going to wait around for when things are more convenient. It's on the way. She ain't got but four weeks at most. Sooner we get Nurse Willowes to Martha Quinn's island and the hospital there, the better I'm goin' to feel. But that isn't the half of it. The nurse reckons Carol Storey might be leavin' with us. After word gets out about what she's done, she might like to take her leave under her own power . . . 'fore they run her out on a rail."

The Fireman turned his gaze back to Harper, fixing her with a stare that had gone from foggy to fascinated in a very short time. "What has she done? I mean, besides using nineteenth-century punishments on her enemies, keeping Harper confined to the infirmary, and threatening to abduct her baby?"

"Two words." Don waggled his overgrown eyebrows. "Harold fackin' Cross."

"I'll tell you in the boat," Harper said.

22.

He was aghast at the idea that she would row them into sh.o.r.e alone.

"I'll sit on the left," he said. "It doesn't hurt to use my left arm. You sit on the right. We'll row together."

"It'll never work. The two of us will never be in sync. We'll just go around and around in circles together."

"Oh, it won't be so bad. We've been doing that for months."

She glared at him, thought he was having a laugh at her, but then he was bending to the bow of the boat, shoving it into the water, and she had to get beside him to help. A woman eight months pregnant and a man recovering from a chest full of busted ribs. To think Carol was afraid of either of them.

When they were out in the shallows she fell in over the side and then reached across the gunwale to take his hands and pull him in after her. His fireman boots squealed on the hull, grabbing for traction, and he thumped his lousy wrist, and his face went white. He squirmed onto the thwart beside her and she pretended she didn't see him thumbing tears out of his eyes. She reached over and gently straightened his helmet.

They rowed, leaning forward and back, slowly and carefully, shoulders touching. The boat creaked and slid through the water in the night.

"Tell me about Harold Cross," the Fireman said.

He listened with head inclined while she went through it again. When she was done, he said, "Harold didn't have many friends in this camp, but I agree-when word gets out about what Carol did, calling the Cremation Crew on him and all, well. That'll be the end for her. Sending her away with you is a great act of mercy, really. It's easy to imagine it could be much worse."

"She'll come with me," Harper said. "And you'll stay here."

"Yes. I'll have to. Father Storey will be too weak to look after camp alone. I expect that's why I'm being summoned to his bedside. I'm being enlisted." His mouth twisted in a sour frown.

"You wouldn't leave anyway. You have to tend your private fire."

"No one else would understand."

"You should let her go out, and come away with me." Harper found she could not look at him when she said this. She had to turn her face toward the ocean. The wind was spooning the foam off the tops of the waves and she could pretend the water on her face was spray. "It isn't safe here. It hasn't been safe for a long time. They're going to find Camp Wyndham. The Marlboro Man and my husband, or men like them. Sooner or later." She thought of the dreams, of Nelson Heinrich in a bloodstained candy-cane-print sweater, grinning out of a skinless face, and shuddered.

She didn't believe in a fixed future, didn't believe in precognition. Didn't even believe in the Marlboro Man's psychic radio station, although it seemed like awfully good luck, him turning up on the exact day she returned home. But she believed in the subconscious and she believed in paying attention when it started waving red flags. She had left Nelson alive-she was almost sure of it now-and that was bad news for all of them. And even if Nelson never recovered to lead the Seacoast Incinerators to camp, then it would be something else. You could hide a small village only for so long.

They drifted, had stopped rowing. After a moment, at some silent, unspoken signal between them, they took up the oars and began to move again.

"I'll be taking Nick and Allie with me," she told him. "No matter how things shake out with Carol. I love that little boy. I'm going to take him someplace safe-safer than here."

"Good."

"Sarah would want you to come with them, you know. She'd want you to look after them."

"You know I can't. The old man is going to need my help around here."

"Then come as soon as he's better."

"We'll see," he said, in a way that meant no.

"John. Her life is over. Yours is not."

"Her life isn't-"

"It is. She told you so herself. You've been keeping her a prisoner. Trapped in a rusted can. You aren't any different than Carol, keeping me locked up in the infirmary all winter."

He turned on her suddenly, his face rippling with pain. "What pestilent, flyblown bulls.h.i.t. I am nothing like-and how could Sarah tell me anything? She's a creature of flame. She can't tell me what she wants or feels. She lost her power of speech when she lost her body."

"No she didn't. I don't know what's worse, you lying to me or you lying to yourself. I heard you screaming at her. All the way back in the fall. She's already asked you to let her go out."

"And how-"

"Sign language. She's at least as fluent as you."

They had both stopped rowing, although the dock was in sight.

John Rookwood was trembling. "You little spy. Listening in on my-"

"Spare me your paranoid insinuations. You were drunk at the time. I could hear it in your voice. Anyone could've heard it in your voice, from half a mile off, the way you were shouting."

Some terrible struggle was taking place in the muscles beneath his face. He kept tightening and untightening his jaw, and breathing strangely.

"It's time to let that fire go out, John. Time to leave your island behind. Allie and Nick are still in this world and they need you. I do, too. I can never be her-I can never be what she meant to you-but I can still try to be worth your time."

"Shh," he said, looking away and blinking at his tears. "That's an awful thing to say. Don't you dare put yourself down. You think I don't love you to pieces, Nurse Willowes? You and your ridiculous, pregnant belly and weird yen for Julie Andrews? I just hate-hate-the disloyalty of it. The sickening disloyalty of-of-"

"Being alive when she isn't," Harper said. "Of going on."

"Yes. Exactly," he said and lowered his chin to his chest. Tears dripped off the end of his nose. "Falling in love: what a horrible thing. For what it's worth, I tried to have as little to do with you as possible. To see you as little as possible. Not just because I didn't want to fall in love. I didn't want you to fall in love, either. I was aware just how difficult it might be for you to resist my abundant charms."

"You do grow on a girl," Harper said. "Kind of like the spore."

BOOK EIGHT.

ALL FALL DOWN.

1.

When the rowboat clouted against the side of the dock, Harper scanned the sh.o.r.e, but Cargill was gone. He had left his rod on the rocks. He had taken his rifle.

Probably he had gone to tell Carol something was afoot. That was fine. She was going to know in a few minutes anyway.

It was hard work for a seriously pregnant woman to climb that steep hill, and she was breathing heavily by the time they reached the infirmary. She had a nasty sweat on her face and just as they reached the steps to the front door she was struck with a leg-buckling contraction. She bent, gripping her lower abdomen in one hand, and exhaled a harsh breath through clenched teeth.

"Are you all right?" John asked her.

She nodded and waved him on. She didn't have the air to speak, although already the contraction was subsiding, leaving behind a dull ache and a feeling like she had swallowed a rock.

Harper followed him into the waiting room, which was empty, Michael presumably in the next room. The Fireman held open the moss-colored curtain and ducked into the ward, Harper right behind him.

"Father-" the Fireman said, and a rifle b.u.t.t shot into the side of his neck with a dull, stomach-turning thud. He went down as if he had been cut in half.

Harper opened her mouth to scream, but Michael had already turned the gun around to point the barrel at Nick. The boy was asleep on his bed, his hands folded neatly across his stomach, his chin almost touching his chest. He frowned, thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something he felt he should know.

"Please, don't. I wouldn't like to have to shoot a kid," Michael said.

Father Storey's head was turned so he seemed to be staring at her, but whatever he was seeing now, it wasn't in the room with them. His face had darkened to a hue that brought to mind summer storm clouds. The IV had toppled over. The needle had come out of his arm. Bright red spots showed on the white sheets.

Michael went on, in an almost apologetic tone, "Here in the next few hours it's gonna come out you murdered Father Storey to keep him quiet. That you were gonna kill Carol and Ben to take over the camp. I got everything I need to make people believe it, but it would help if you'd say it's true, ma'am. I know you don't have any reason to trust me right now. But I swear, if you'll do that for me-if you'll admit you and Rookwood were out to finish Carol off-I swear I'll keep Allie and Nick from dying with you. I'll look after them."

Harper bent down next to John, who had collapsed on his side. She took his pulse, found it steady and slow. She was trembling. At first she thought it was with grief, but when she spoke, she discovered it was rage.

"You and Carol had Harold Cross murdered."

"I didn't shoot him. Ben Patchett did," Michael said. "I was gonna shoot him, then figured it might look better if Ben took the shot. So I handed him the rifle. Besides. The last couple months he was here, I kinda got to liking Harold a little. He was teaching me how to play chess. I got sentimental feelings like anyone else. I didn't really want to be the one who gunned him down."