Into the Whirlwind (10 page)

No one wanted to go into the lake. The fire heated the air, but it was October and the water was chilly. Mollie sank to the soft earth, the grass cool beneath her fingers and her muscles trembling with fatigue. What a motley collection they were. The fire was a great leveler. A woman in a silk gown with a triple strand of pearls around her neck sat beside a family of gypsies. Unlike on the street, where people had been trading rumors, everyone on the lakeshore was exhausted, watching the horizon in grim silence as eerie orange light flickered in their eyes.

One after another, the bells ceased ringing. The bell towers had either collapsed or the men ringing the bells could no longer afford to linger. In the absence of those clarion bells, all that could be heard was the deafening roar of the flames. If Mollie lived to be a hundred, she knew she’d never hear a more fearsome sound than that incessant roar.

Frank sat down beside her. “Are we going to need to go in the lake?” he whispered.

Mollie glanced around. The fire was now on three sides of them, the closest of which was about a half mile away. “I don’t know.”

“Then we’ve got a problem,” he said quietly. “That deed won’t survive a dunking. We’ve got to find a place to hide it. Somewhere the lawyer won’t see.”

It was hard to worry about the deed when all Mollie really cared about was getting a decent lungful of air. In weary exhaustion, she rested her forehead on her bent knees, beaten and spent. “I am not entitled to that store. I doubt it even exists anymore. I think most of the city is gone.”

Frank reached out, fumbling until he grabbed her hand. “Those men tried to cheat you,” he said in an angry whisper. “I owe your father more than I could ever repay, but the best I
can do for him now is to make sure his daughter is taken care of. I won’t stand by while someone swindles her. Mollie, we need to hide this deed somewhere safe. Now. Before that snake of a lawyer realizes we still have it.”

Mollie looked around her. Burying the deed was impossible. Water would begin pooling after they scratched only a few feet into the sand.

“How long is your hair?” Frank whispered.

She grinned. When her hair was liberated from the twist coiled atop her head, it fell to her waist. Surely, even if they needed to escape the flames in the lake, she would not need to submerge her head.

“Pass me the deed,” Mollie whispered. She would need to get away from Zack to unwind her hair and roll the deed inside. “Come along, Sophie. Let’s go for a stroll. Maybe you’ll see a familiar face in the crowd.”

Zack turned to look at her in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“We will just walk along the shore,” she told Sophie, then tugged the girl to her feet.

Zack rolled his eyes but still didn’t move. “Suit yourself,” he mumbled, turning his attention to the ominous line of fire coming closer.

“Come along quickly,” she urged Sophie. She ought to feel horrible about instilling hope in this child, but she needed an excuse to get away from Zack.

They hadn’t even traveled a hundred feet when Sophie turned sullen. “I’m tired. I want something to eat.”

So did Mollie. She didn’t know what time it was, but they had walked through the night, all morning, and well into the afternoon. It had been a full day since she had had anything to eat, but she ignored the pangs of hunger as she knelt in the sand. Yanking the scarf from her head, she unwound her long
swath of hair. With half a dozen hairpins held in her mouth, she rolled the deed into her hair and pinned it into place.

Sophie got in front of her face and stamped her foot. “I said I want something to eat. Now!”

Mollie had never been spoken to in that tone of voice in her entire life, and now this ungrateful little child was glaring at her like a miniature queen from a dark fairy tale. Mollie shoved the remaining pin into her hair, rose to her feet, and pointed to the lake. “Then dive in and catch us a fish. Otherwise, follow me back to Frank and Zack.”

Sophie plopped to the ground like a rag doll, her heavy boots sticking out from beneath her lacy white nightgown. “This place is good enough. I’m tired of walking and won’t do it anymore.”

Mollie draped the scarf around her head and turned to walk away.

“Where are you going?” Sophie shot to her feet. “Don’t you dare leave me here!”

“Sophie, you can follow me back to the others or you can wait it out here on your own. I will not argue with you.”

She hadn’t even finished speaking before Sophie scooted forward. “I don’t like you people very much,” she said as she came alongside Mollie.

Mollie swiped a tendril of hair out of her eyes. The deed was safe, and she was determined to live another day, if for nothing else than to beat the Hartmans in court. “And here I think of you as an endless fount of delight and good cheer,” she said amiably.

“Huh?”

Mollie reached out for Sophie’s hand. “Never mind. Let’s go find the others.”

It was dark by the time she arrived back at the lake, where Frank and Zack had once again reverted to bickering with each
other. This time they were arguing about the tides on Lake Michigan.

“We need to pull back from the bank,” Frank said. “High tide will be setting in soon, and that water is bound to be ice cold.”

“Are you telling me you think there are tides on Lake Michigan?
Lake Michigan
?” Zack’s voice dripped with incredulity, and given his background as a longshoreman, Mollie was inclined to side with Zack on a matter of lake tides.

“Tides are caused by the moon’s pull on a large body of water,” Frank said. “I’m surprised they didn’t teach you that in college.”

“Your scarf is burning!” Sophie said.

A cinder had landed on the trailing edge of Mollie’s scarf, a rim of orange beginning to spread. Mollie whipped the scarf off and rolled it against the ground until the flame was snuffed out. Then she replaced the scarf. Better for the scarf to catch fire than her hair.

She met Zack’s gaze. The cinders were floating through the air like large flakes of snow, impossible to avoid. The heat blowing from the south was scorching, and the fire had reached the stretch of trees bordering the lake. No one wanted to go into the water, but it was time.

Suction pulled at her boots as she plodded into the mud along the bank. It took a moment for the frigid water to penetrate her boots, and she tried not to wince. She pushed forward, water weighing down the hem of her skirts, chilling her ankles, her calves, then rushing around her thighs. It was freezing!

The next hours would always be a blur in Mollie’s memory. The water was too cold to stand in for any length of time. Teeth chattering, standing in the water up to her waist, she watched her city burn. A solid wall of angry red flame towering into the night sky. By this time tomorrow, the prettiest waterfront
in America would be a burned-over wasteland. When the cold became intolerable, she trudged back onto the banks, her sodden clothing keeping her safe from the falling embers for a short while.

As the hours passed, the fire continued its journey north. Weary and exhausted, Mollie pulled herself up to the bank a final time. She was filthy, bruised, and exhausted. Lying down on the ashy dirt, she slept.

6

S
omeone was shaking her shoulder. “Mollie, it is raining.”

There was so much grit under her lids it was hard to open her eyes. What had happened to her? Every muscle screamed with pain as she rolled over. “Frank?”

He looked awful, with a soot-stained face and bloodshot eyes, but he was smiling. “Mollie, it is raining,” he repeated.

She looked up, cool water spattering her face. She blinked, not sure if it was tears or rainwater that filled her eyes. Both, probably. All around the shore, people were rousing from their stupor, and Zack came to stand beside her. “It will all be over soon,” he said quietly.

Mollie nodded. She ought to feel relief that it was raining, but it had come too late for her. She had nothing left and nowhere to go.

As if sensing her despair, Frank draped an arm around her shoulder and gave her a little squeeze. “We will remember this moment for the rest of our lives,” he said. “What time is it?”

Mollie reached through the sodden fabric of her skirts to fumble for her father’s watch. As always, she pressed her thumb into the dent on its cover before flipping it open.

It had stopped ticking. She had forgotten the watch was in
her pocket when she went into the lake, and it could not survive the dunking. At 8:24 on the evening of Monday, October 9, 1871, her father’s magnificent watch had finally stopped working. This time when Mollie’s eyes filled, there was no doubt it was tears blurring her vision. This watch that had saved her father’s life kept ticking through three years of war, but could not survive being submerged in the lake during the great, terrible Chicago fire.

“What time is it?” Frank asked again.

She closed the cover, clutching the cool metal disk in her hand and instinctively pressing her thumb into the dent. “I don’t know.”

“It is a little after midnight on Tuesday morning,” Zack said. “We need to find shelter.”

Mollie nodded, but where could they go? Thousands of people were huddled on the shore, all stranded in the rain, all homeless. The fire was now far to the north, and it was cold. There would be no intact roof for miles, but even a wall would be good for taking shelter against this wind.

“We should head back into the city,” Zack said. “Some buildings may still be standing. In any event, the shore is going to be pure mud soon.”

They roused Sophie, who had managed to remain in a deep slumber despite the steady rain. She pushed Zack away. “Don’t want to go,” she mumbled.

Zack hauled her upright. “I’m willing to carry you piggyback or you can walk. But I’m not leaving you here in the mud. Now, which is it to be?” Sitting in the muck and covered in a layer of ashen filth, Sophie’s mutinous glare was imperious. “You can carry me,” she said.

Zack squatted down. “And won’t that be a treat for me.”

Mollie clutched Frank’s arm as they began heading back into town. Unlike the stampede earlier, the streets were nearly deserted as they left the lake. The farther they moved into the downtown area, the harder it was to endure. Her breath was shaky with sobs that would not come.

“Don’t cry,” Frank said.

If Frank could see what was all around them, he would be weeping too. Was it possible this was Chicago? There was nothing left. Nothing. Just heaps of smoldering rubble and tumbled-down walls. Not a single building remained standing as far as she could see. Not a tree or a blade of grass. The city she loved was gone. Miles and miles had been reduced to worthless wreckage.

Zack pointed farther west. “The damage doesn’t look so bad over there.”

Mollie squinted to peer through the darkness. In the diminishing light of the fire, she could barely see some crumbling walls in the distance. Her boots were wet, and each footstep brought shafts of pain from raw blisters. Zack didn’t complain, but given the way he was limping, he was suffering as well. That horrible little girl still clung to his back, and she must weigh plenty.

They kept walking toward the structures ahead of them. Mollie wasn’t certain how far they’d walked, but it was at least a couple of miles. “I think that is the Livingston Street Church,” she said.

The windows had been blown out, but the walls were still standing. The roof was gone, so the church was open to the elements, but something about the building called to her. The openings of the Gothic windows still maintained their shape, and it reminded her of the drawings she had seen of the ruined cathedrals of Europe. As they drew closer to Livingston Street, other structures appeared to have survived as well. None of
them had roofs or window glass, but at least the walls would provide some protection against the rain that was now falling sideways.

She blinked rainwater from her eyelashes as she glanced up at Zack. “I don’t think we can go much farther,” she said. “If it is safe inside the church, we should rest there.”

Zack nodded. Noises from inside the church told Mollie that others had also fled there for shelter. It was too dim to see much as she guided Frank inside. People were huddled along the interior walls, trying to keep clear of the rain. Zack groaned as he knelt down and peeled Sophie from his back. He collapsed onto the ground and leaned back, his lungs still breathing heavily. There were snores coming from others in the church, and someone with an Irish accent was murmuring the rosary. In a corner, a woman was weeping inconsolably.

Using her foot, Mollie pushed some of the fallen timbers aside. “Here is a spot for you to lie down,” she whispered to Sophie. The little girl looked dubiously at the spot, but must have been too tired to complain as she grimaced and cautiously lay down on the ground. Mollie was about to clear a spot for Frank when Sophie found her voice.

“It’s always clean where I sleep at home,” the little girl whispered.

Mollie decided not to comment, but kept pushing fragments of boards and glass aside. It was always clean where she slept too, but that was in the past. It was hard to believe anything would ever be clean again.