Hodges wants to run to Peter and his sister, but the best he can manage is a drunken shamble. The pain in his groin is spreading down his legs, loosening the muscles he has worked so hard to build up. Nevertheless, he gets to work on one of the knots in the orange electrical cord. He again wishes for a knife, but it would take a cleaver to cut this stuff. The shit is thick.
More blazing strips of insulation fall around them. Hodges bats them away from the girl, terrified that her gauzy blouse will catch fire. The knot is letting go, finally letting go, but the girl is struggling—
“Stop, Teens,” Pete says. Sweat is pouring down his face. The basement is getting hot. “They’re slipknots, you’re pulling them tight again, you have to stop.”
Morris’s screams are changing into howls of pain. Hodges has no time to look at him. The loop he’s pulling on abruptly loosens. He pulls Tina away from the furnace, her hands still tied behind her.
There’s going to be no exit by way of the stairs; the lower ones are burning and the upper ones are catching. The tables, the chairs, the boxes of stored paperwork: all on fire. Morris Bellamy is also on fire. Both his sportcoat and the shirt beneath are blazing. Yet he continues to root his way into the bonfire, trying to get at any unburned notebooks still left at the bottom. His fingers are turning black. Although the pain must be excruciating, he keeps going. Hodges has time to think of the fairy tale where the wolf came down the chimney and landed in a pot of boiling water. His daughter, Alison, didn’t want to hear that one. She said it was too sca—
“Bill! Bill! Over here!”
Hodges sees Jerome at one of the basement windows. Hodges remembers saying Neither one of you minds worth a tinker’s dam, and now he’s delighted that they don’t. Jerome is on his belly, sticking his arms through and down.
“Lift her! Lift her up! Quick, before you all cook!”
It’s mostly Pete who carries Tina across to the basement window, through the falling sparks and burning scarves of insulation. One lands on the kid’s back, and Hodges swipes it away. Pete lifts her. Jerome grabs her under the arms and hauls her out, the plug of the computer cord Morris used to tie her hands trailing and bumping behind.
“Now you,” Hodges gasps.
Pete shakes his head. “You first.” He looks up at Jerome. “You pull. I’ll push.”
“Okay,” Jerome says. “Lift your arms, Bill.”
There’s no time to argue. Hodges lifts his arms and feels them grabbed. He has time to think, Feels like wearing handcuffs, and then he’s being hoisted. It’s slow at first—he’s a lot heavier than the girl—but then two hands plant themselves firmly on his ass and shove. He rises into clear, clean air—hot, but cooler than the basement—and lands next to Tina Saubers. Jerome reaches through again. “Come on, kid! Move it!”
Pete lifts his arms, and Jerome seizes his wrists. The basement is filling with smoke and Pete begins coughing, almost retching, as he uses his feet to pedal his way up the wall. He slides through the window, turns over, and peers back into the basement.
A charred scarecrow kneels in there, digging into the burning notebooks with arms made of fire. Morris’s face is melting. He shrieks and begins hugging the blazing, dissolving remnants of Rothstein’s work to his burning chest.
“Don’t look at that, kid,” Hodges says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t.”
But Pete wants to look. Needs to look.
He thinks, That could have been me on fire.
He thinks, No. Because I know the difference. I know what matters.
He thinks, Please God, if you’re there . . . let that be true.
55
Pete lets Jerome carry Tina as far as the baseball field, then says, “Give her to me, please.”
Jerome surveys him—Pete’s pale, shocked face, the one blistered ear, the holes charred in his shirt. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Tina is already holding out her arms. She has been quiet since being hauled from the burning basement, but when Pete takes her, she puts her arms around his neck, her face against his shoulder, and begins to cry loudly.
Holly comes running down the path. “Thank God!” she says. “There you are! Where’s Bellamy?”
“Back there, in the basement,” Hodges says. “And if he isn’t dead yet, he wishes he was. Have you got your cell phone? Call the fire department.”
“Is our mother okay?” Pete asks.
“I think she’s going to be fine,” Holly says, pulling her phone off her belt. “The ambulance is taking her to Kiner Memorial. She was alert and talking. The paramedics said her vital signs are good.”
“Thank God,” Pete says. Now he also starts to cry, the tears cutting clean tracks through the smears of soot on his cheeks. “If she died, I’d kill myself. Because this is all my fault.”
“No,” Hodges says.
Pete looks at him. Tina is looking, too, her arms still linked around her brother’s neck.
“You found the notebooks and the money, didn’t you?”
“Yes. By accident. They were buried in a trunk by the stream.”
“Anyone would have done what you did,” Jerome says. “Isn’t that right, Bill?”
“Yes,” Bill says. “For your family, you do all that you can. The way you went after Bellamy when he took Tina.”
“I wish I’d never found that trunk,” Pete says. What he doesn’t say, will never say, is how much it hurts to know that the notebooks are gone. Knowing that burns like fire. He does understand how Morris felt, and that burns like fire, too. “I wish it had stayed buried.”
“Wish in one hand,” Hodges says, “spit in the other. Let’s go. I need to use an icepack before the swelling gets too bad.”
“Swelling where?” Holly asks. “You look okay to me.”
Hodges puts an arm around her shoulders. Sometimes Holly stiffens when he does this, but not today, so he kisses her cheek, too. It raises a doubtful smile.
“Did he get you where it hurts boys?”
“Yes. Now hush.”
They walk slowly, partly for Hodges’s benefit, partly for Pete’s. His sister is getting heavy, but he doesn’t want to put her down. He wants to carry her all the way home.
AFTER
PICNIC
On the Friday that kicks off the Labor Day weekend, a Jeep Wrangler—getting on in years but loved by its owner—pulls into the parking lot above the McGinnis Park Little League fields and stops next to a blue Mercedes that is also getting on in years. Jerome Robinson makes his way down the grassy slope toward a picnic table where food has already been set out. A paper bag swings from one of his hands.
“Yo, Hollyberry!”
She turns. “How many times have I told you not to call me that? A hundred? A thousand?” But she’s smiling as she says it, and when he hugs her, she hugs back. Jerome doesn’t press his luck; he gives one good squeeze, then asks what’s for lunch.
“There’s chicken salad, tuna salad, and coleslaw. I also brought a roast beef sandwich. That’s for you, if you want it. I’m off red meat. It upsets my circadian rhythms.”
“I’ll make sure you’re not tempted, then.”