“Naw,” he said, flicking his ashes into the Dumpster, “I’ll quit before that happens.”
“Huh.” She cleared her throat. “That’s what they all say.” She hated it when kids smoked. Sure, her grandfather had smoked, rolling his own cigarettes out of Velvet Tobacco. But back in his day, the dangers of the habit were unknown. Nowadays, there was simply no excuse. Grabbing a handful of snow, she tossed it at the cigarette, killing the red ash.
“Hey,” he said.
“You’re a smart boy, Zach. I heard you’re an honor student. So how come you’re so stupid about smoking?”
He shrugged and had the grace to look sheepish. “Ask my dad, I’m stupid about a lot of things. He wants me to spend next year working up at the racetrack in Saratoga to earn my own money for college.”
She knew, by the chintzy tips Matthew Alger left at the bakery’s coffee shop, that Alger—who worked as the city administrator—carried his stinginess into his personal life. Apparently, he applied it to his son’s as well.
Jenny had grown up without a father and had yearned for one more times than she could count. Matthew Alger was proof that the longed-for relationship might sometimes be overrated.
“I’ve heard that quitting smoking saves the average smoker five bucks a day,” she said. She wondered if her voice sounded strange to him, if he could tell she had to force each word past the tightness in her throat.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.” He flicked the damp cigarette into the Dumpster. “Don’t worry,” he said before she could scold him, “I’ll wash my hands before I go back to work.”
He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, though. She wondered if he wanted to talk. “Does your dad want you to work for a year before college?” she asked.
“He wants me working, period. Keeps telling me how he put himself through college with no help from his family, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and all that.” He said it with no admiration.
She wondered about Zach’s mother, who had remarried and moved to Seattle long ago. Zach never talked about her. “What do you want, Zach?” Jenny asked.
He looked startled, as though he hadn’t been asked that in a while. “To go far away to college,” he said. “Live somewhere different.”
Jenny could relate to that. At his age, she’d been certain an exciting life awaited her somewhere far away. She’d never even made it out the door, though. “Then that’s what you should do,” she said emphatically.
He shrugged. “I’ll give it a shot, I guess. I need to get back to work.”
He headed inside. Jenny lingered outside, blowing fake smoke rings with the frozen air. Although the conversation had distracted her briefly, it had done nothing to banish the churning panic. She was alone with the feeling now; it screamed through her like the sirens in the quiet of the night. And like the sirens, the feeling intensified, closing in on her. The ceiling of stars pressed down, an insurmountable weight on her shoulders.
I surrender, she thought and plunged her hand into the pocket of her chef pants, groping for the brown plastic prescription bottle. The pill wasn’t much bigger than a lead BB. She swallowed it without water, knowing it would take effect in a few minutes. It was kind of amazing, she thought, how a tiny pill could quiet the terrified knocking of her heart in her rib cage, and cool the frantic sizzle of her brain.
“Only when you need it,” the doctor had cautioned her. “This medication can be highly addictive, and it has a particularly nasty detox.”
Despite the warning, she already felt calmer as she tucked the bottle away. She smoothed her hand over her pants pocket.
Still thinking about Zach, she scanned the familiar neighborhood, a downtown of vintage brick buildings that housed businesses, shops and restaurants. Years ago, if someone had told Jenny she’d still be in Avalon, working at the bakery, she would have laughed all the way to the train station. She had big plans. She was leaving the small, insular place where she’d grown up. She was headed for the big city, an education, a career.
It probably wasn’t fair to let Zach in on an ugly little secret—life had a way of kicking the support out from under the best-laid plans. At the age of eighteen, Jenny had discovered the terrifying inadequacies of the healthcare system, especially when it came to the self-employed. By twenty-one, she was familiar with the process of declaring personal bankruptcy, and just barely managed to hang on to the house on Maple Street. There was no question of her leaving Gram, widowed and disabled from a massive stroke.
The pill kicked in, covering the sharp edges of her nerves like a blanket of snow over a jagged landscape. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching the cloud of mist until it disappeared.
The sky to the north, in the direction of Maple Street, seemed to flicker and glow with unnatural light. She blinked. Probably just the strange aftermath of the panic attack. She should be used to this by now.
Two
When the monitor in Rourke McKnight’s squad car sent out an urgent tone alert and “any unit about clear” for 472 Maple Street, it flash-froze his heart.
That was Jenny’s house.
He had been on the far side of town, but the moment the call came, he grabbed the handheld mike, gave his location and ETA to dispatch and fired the sedan into action. His tires spewing snow and sand, he peeled out, the back end fishtailing on the slippery road. At the same time, he put in a call to the dispatcher. “I’m en route. I’ll let you know when I’m code eleven.” His voice was curiously flat, considering the emotions now roaring through him.
A general page had gone out that the structure—God, Jenny’s house—was on fire and “fully involved.” Besides that, Jenny hadn’t been spotted.
By the time he reached the house on Maple Street, the entire home was wrapped in bright ribbons of flame, with curls of fire leaping out of every window and licking along the eaves.
He parked with one headlamp buried in a snowbank and exited his vehicle, not bothering to close the door behind him, and did a visual scan of the premises. The firefighters, their trucks and equipment, were bathed in flickering orange light. Two pumper hoses attacked the blaze; men struggled to excavate a hydrant from the snow. The scene was surprisingly quiet, not chaotic at all. Yet the wall of flame was impenetrable and unsafe for the firefighters—even fully equipped and clad in bunker gear—to enter.
“Where is she?” Rourke demanded of a firefighter who was relaying messages on a shoulder-mounted radio. “Where the hell is she?”
“Haven’t found the resident,” the guy said, flicking a glance at another emergency vehicle parked in the road—an ambulance, its crew standing ready. “We’re thinking she’s away. Except … her car’s in the garage.”
Rourke strode toward the flaming house, bellowing Jenny’s name. The place burned like a pile of tinder. A window burst, and hot glass rained down on him. Automatically his hand came up to shield his eyes. “Jenny!” he yelled again.
In one instant, all the years of silence fell away and regrets flooded in. As if he could fix anything by avoiding her. I’m an idiot, he thought. And then he bargained with anyone or anything that might be listening. Let her be okay. Please just let her be okay and I’ll keep her safe forever and never ask another thing.
He had to get inside. The front steps were gone. He raced around back, slipping in the snow, righting himself. Someone was shouting at him, but he kept going. The back of the house was in flames, too, but the door was gone, having been hacked through by a firefighter’s ax. More shouting, more guys in bunker gear running at him, waving their arms. Shit, thought Rourke. It was stupid, but it wasn’t the dumbest thing he’d ever done, not by a long