Chapter Eight
Anne groped her way to the bedroom door and pressed
both palms against the wood. The door was warm—too warm. Local firefighters had
given a fire safety talk at the school earlier this year. She remembered their
warning to never open a warm door in a fire, that doing so could send the flames
rushing into the room. If the door was warm, you were supposed to find a window
and escape that way.
But Jake was on the other side of that door. The love seat
where he slept was near the woodstove, where the fire had likely started. Had he
awakened in time and fled out the front door—or was he already dead, overcome by
smoke? She pushed the thought away and hurried to the window. She’d go around to
the front of the cabin and try to reach Jake that way. Or maybe she’d find him
outside, safe and trying to reach her.
She tugged hard at the window, until it opened with a
screeching protest. Bitterly cold air rushed in—air that might feed the fire and
engulf the bedroom. She started to climb out, then reached back and yanked the
heavy wool blanket off the bed. Maybe she could use it to beat out flames, or as
an extra layer of protection if she had to go in after Jake.
Dragging the blanket behind her, she jumped out the window and
made her way through the snow to the front of the cabin. The brilliant glow of
the blaze momentarily blinded her as she rounded the corner of the house. She
shaded her eyes with one hand, and stumbled on, but when she reached the front
of the house, she drew back, gasping. The entire front wall of the cabin was
ablaze, flames licking at the windows and door, and swiftly devouring the wooden
shingles of the roof. “Jake!” she screamed above the roar of the inferno.
No answer came to her cries, and she saw no sign of him in the
area illuminated by the fire. He must still be inside. Reaching him through the
front door would be impossible. But the side walls remained intact. There was a
chance she might get to him through the window. Still dragging the blanket, she
ran back the way she’d come, and stopped at the window that opened into the
cabin’s main room. The sash refused to yield to her tugging, so she raced to the
wood pile, grabbed a length of stove wood and ran back and swung it at the
window, shattering the glass. Then she draped the blanket across the sash and
boosted herself inside.
The flames that engulfed the front of the cabin illuminated a
cavern of swirling smoke and shadows. “Jake!” she shouted.
Harsh coughing answered her. “Over here!” said a hoarse
voice.
She wrapped herself in the blanket and shuffled toward the
voice, trying to hold her breath, but unable to avoid the choking smoke. “Jake!”
she called again, and began to cough.
“Here!”
She stumbled forward once more and almost fell over him. He
pulled her down beside her. “Stay low. The air is better down here.”
Not much better that she could tell, but now wasn’t the time to
argue. She handed him a corner of the blanket. “Use this to shield your face.
We’ve got to get to the window.”
“I was trying to get to you in the bedroom, but I couldn’t find
the door in the smoke and darkness.”
“Don’t talk. Just move.”
Together, they crawled across the floor, toward where she hoped
the window was situated. A current of colder air told her they were getting
close, so she stood, and helped Jake to stand also. They rushed to the window
and half jumped, half fell onto the snow outside.
They lay side by side, wrapped in the singed blanket and
gasping for breath. She felt Jake’s hand, heavy on her back. “Are you...all
right?” he gasped.
“I’m fine. The smell of smoke must have woken me and I climbed
out the bedroom window.”
“I planned to sit up all night, keeping watch, but I must have
drifted off. I didn’t wake up until the front wall was on fire. By then the
smoke was so thick, and I was disoriented.” He raised himself up on his elbows
and looked at her. “I don’t think I’d have made it if you hadn’t come after
me.”
“I couldn’t leave you.” She blinked, trying to hold back a
sudden flood of stinging tears. She’d been alone so long. Jake was the first
person in a year who really knew her story, who had some inkling of what she was
going through. For that reason alone, she couldn’t turn her back on him, not
yet.
He sat and helped her to sit, too. “Should we call 9-1-1?” she
asked.
“With what? My cell phone is in the cabin.”
“Mine, too. And my purse and, oh no—the car keys.”
“I have the keys.” He pulled them from his pocket. “I must have
automatically stuck them in my pants when I came back from getting your
bag.”
A section of the cabin roof collapsed in a shower of sparks and
she flinched. Even from a distance of ten yards, she could feel the intense heat
of the blaze. “I hope it doesn’t spread to the other cabins,” she said.
“I don’t think it will.” He stood and offered her his hand. She
grasped it and pulled herself up. “This cabin is set away from the others, and
there’s no wind. I think when the fuel—the cabin—is gone, the fire will burn
itself out.”
“I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “I checked the
woodstove before we went to bed and everything seemed fine. But I guess all it
takes is one spark—”
“The fire didn’t start from the woodstove,” he said.
She stared at him. “Then how?”
“Come on.” He grabbed her hand and urged her toward the front
of the cabin. “The fire started in the front.”
She nodded. “The whole front wall was burning—that’s why I had
to come through the window on the side.”
“For a whole wall to burn like that, so quickly, blocking the
main exit, I’d think it would take some kind of accelerant.”
“You mean—someone deliberately set the fire? But who? How?” She
looked around, fighting rising panic. She’d chosen this place because it was
safe. Now he was telling her danger had followed her even here?
“Look.” He pointed to twin lines of tire tracks in the snow.
“They weren’t here earlier, I’m sure.”
“But you heard a car earlier, and footsteps.”
“Maybe the same people, checking to make sure we were here.
They waited until we fell asleep and came back. Or maybe there was no connection
at all.”
She stared at the tracks, anger quickly overtaking panic. “You
think someone planned the fire, knowing we were the ones in the cabin?”
“Yes, but they probably haven’t gone far. They’ll be back soon,
to make sure the fire did its job.”
“They must have followed us here.”
“If they did, they’re much better at tailing someone than
anyone I’ve ever seen. I was watching and I never saw anyone, and you didn’t
either. On these deserted roads, any other vehicle would stand out.”
“They couldn’t have known I’d be here. I never told anyone—not
even Maggie.”
“We can’t worry about how they found you right now. The point
is, they did. And we have to leave before they come back.”
“You’re right.” She headed toward the car. He put his hands on
her shoulders and steered her toward the passenger side. “I’ll drive.”
She didn’t argue. She was too shaken to face negotiating the
narrow, snow-choked Forest Service road. She hoped Jake was up to the task; she
had no idea what kind of driver he was. In New York, they’d taken taxis or the
subway, or her father had sent one of his drivers to take them wherever they
needed to go. She kept her convertible for weekend trips upstate or to the
coast.
“Is there another way out of here?” he asked as he started the
car. “I meant to check the map, but I never did.”
“You have to take this road up to the gate, but there you can
turn right instead of left and take another series of forest roads that come out
near a little town called New Richmond. It’s a lot farther back to the highway
than the way we came in.”
“We’ll take it. I don’t want to risk running head-on into the
arsonist on these narrow pig trails.”
At the gate, he stopped and waited for her to dial in the
combination, but she’d only taken a few steps from the car when she saw there
was no need. The chain hung loose, the lock lying in the snow. She forced
herself to move forward and swing open the gate, then closed it and climbed in
the car again. “Someone cut the lock off,” she said.
“Whoever followed us didn’t have the combination.”
She hugged her arms across her chest and shivered. “We’ll buy
coats in Telluride,” he said. “Meanwhile, turn the heater up.”
“It’s not the weather making me cold,” she said. “I just can’t
believe someone followed us—and tried to burn us to death.”
“I’m guessing they think two accidental deaths would be easier
to deal with than two obvious murders.”
“They weren’t very smart,” she said. “An arson investigator
would have spotted the accelerant.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know what they used.”
“And we don’t know who they are.”
“Except they probably work for your father.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Do you have other enemies?”
“No. Do you? Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. Maybe they’re
not after me at all. If my father knew you were still alive, he’d be very happy
to see you dead.” The idea that Jake might be the target of her father’s
wrath—that Sam Giardino might not even know anything about her—flooded her with
relief. Not that she wanted Jake to be in danger, but she dreaded starting life
over with yet another new name and profession.
“I don’t think you’re right,” Jake said.
“You don’t know that I’m wrong.”
“All right. I’ll concede it’s a possibility that whoever set
the fire was after me, and you were only a secondary target—a bonus. That still
leaves us with the same problem. Until your father is behind bars again, neither
one of us is safe.”
“He was behind bars before—I testified to put him there. But he
didn’t stay there for long.” Despair had engulfed her when Patrick had told her
of her father’s escape from prison. She’d given up everything in order to see
him convicted; his escape made her sacrifice worth nothing.
“He’ll stay there this time. The authorities won’t risk being
made to look like fools twice.”
“People will do a lot of foolish things when confronted with
the kind of money and power my father can offer.”
He fell silent, negotiating a particularly bad section of road.
Anne clenched her teeth, and prayed they wouldn’t end up stuck in a snowdrift
here in the middle of nowhere, with an unknown assailant out to silence
them.
She let out a sigh of relief as Jake turned onto a slightly
wider, smoother section of road.
“You’re right,” he said. “I can’t guarantee your father won’t
get out of prison again. But if we do nothing, he definitely won’t be arrested,
and he’ll continue to do everything in his power to see that both of us are
dead. You can go back into witness protection and hope he doesn’t find you
again, but he’s already beat the system once.”
Denying his words wouldn’t make them any less true. And if she
ran away again, without even trying to change things, she’d have one more thing
to regret. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can to help. But only for a
few days. I can’t give you any more time than that.”
“And I won’t ask for any more.”
His words should have made her feel relieved; instead, they
filled her with sadness. That’s what she got for thinking about regrets. Surely
she would regret the love she and Jake had had, and could never regain, for the
rest of her life.
“Patrick told me I should be careful of you,” she said.
“Oh? When did he tell you that?”
“When I talked to him last night. He said you’d been asking
about me and he thought you were looking for revenge.”
“I am looking for revenge, but on your father, not you.”
“I know that now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Setting a fire that you almost died in would be a pretty
stupid way to try to do away with me.”
“Thanks for agreeing that I’m not stupid.”
“You’re stubborn and reckless—but not stupid.” And the same
might have been said of her, once upon a time, back when she was daring
Elizabeth, not quiet and cautious Anne.
“
Nil opus captivis.
Do you still
believe that?” he asked.
The idea of doing whatever she had to in order to get what she
wanted had appealed to her when she was a young, spoiled socialite, to whom very
little had ever been denied. From the perspective of a woman who had paid the
price for that kind of ruthlessness, the words she’d once had tattooed on the
base of her spine struck her as a sick joke. “I’m ashamed I thought those words
were important,” she said.
“We’re both a little older and I hope a lot wiser now,” he
said. “Suffering and loss make you understand what’s really important in
life.”
But what if the really important things—love and home and
family—were all the things you had lost? “What’s important to you?” she
asked.
“Right now, what’s important is seeing that your father is back
behind bars, where he can never hurt anyone else again.”
So revenge was most important to Jake—not home or family or
love. For all he’d suffered after her father’s attack, he didn’t value the
things that were most precious to her. She shouldn’t have been surprised,
really. How could a man who had made a living out of lying and pretending to be
someone he was not ever be happy with simple truths?
She had to remember that, for all her strong feelings for Jake,
she hadn’t really loved him. She’d only loved a mirage he’d created to fool her.
The man she loved didn’t exist, and he never would.
* * *
A
N
HOUR
BEFORE
DAWN
, Jake stopped the car at the
intersection of the Forest Service road and the highway. True darkness had
receded, and the trees along the side of the road looked like black smudges
against a gray sky. They hadn’t seen another car since leaving the burning
cabin; maybe they’d lost whoever had been tracking them. “Which way do I turn?”
he asked.