The Winslow Incident (61 page)

“He came for me, all right,” Sarah
says. “All it took was a bottle of Randall’s aged Scotch to buy him off.”

Samuel looks hurt. “I protected
you, old woman. I would never let Mathers hurt you.”

Sarah nods. “I know that, Samuel.”

Hazel glances down at Kenny’s body.
Red blossoms from his cracked head, yet more blood soaking into The Winslow.

Sarah must be looking at it too
because she says, “We’ll never get it clean.”

Hazel sighs. “We can’t let this
ghost live here.” She looks at her grandmother. “Remember what you told me
about the Silver Hill Hotel in Matherston burning to the ground?”

A glint of understanding sparks in
Sarah’s blue eyes.

“And about how that night finally
put an end to the reign of lawlessness in Matherston?”

Her grandmother nods, slowly,
sadly.

“There’s no other way,” Hazel
says. “I am so sorry.”

Sarah shuts her eyes, and Hazel
imagines the flood of memories that must be playing behind those closed lids.
At last her grandmother reopens them. “All right, sweetheart. But be
careful.
”

“I will.” Hazel turns to Sean.
“Take my grandmother and your dad out. I’ll be right behind you.”

“No way am I leaving without you,”
he protests.

“Please, Sean, we have to hurry!”
Hazel turns him by the shoulders and points him toward the stairway. “I need to
be sure that you’ll all be out. I promise I’ll be right behind you.”

With obvious reluctance, Sean
takes Sarah by the arm. And as soon as they start down the hallway, Samuel
pulling up the rear, Hazel dashes back into her grandmother’s quarters.

She beelines it for the mantle and
grabs the wick lamp that’s always there next to the photograph of Anabel
smiling and Hazel ogling her dad.
Third time’s a charm
, she thinks,
remembering the delight on her mother’s pretty face, both of them giggling as
Anabel plucked her out of Ruby Creek after Hazel succeeded on her third attempt
at a somersault on a hot day like today.

They’ll come in threes,
Patience predicted. Three days, three murders . . .

She throws the lamp hard against
the window ledge and the glass base bursts open, soaking the cranberry velvet
drapes in kerosene.

Three fires: Holloway Ranch,
Rhone Bakery, The Winslow—it has to be next.

From her pocket she retrieves the
matchbook she took from Honey yesterday, the one with the pig in a bib eating
ribs. She strikes several matches at once and lights the drapes at the hem.

The whoosh that follows sucks all
the air out of the room with a sound like diving underwater.

All are guilty, but some are
guiltier than others
, she thinks, and
laughs out loud. Her grandfather had easily foiled her attempt in the gazebo;
this time she has to succeed. The drapes go up so easily she cannot believe
that in over a hundred years it never happened by accident. The fire leaps from
floor to ceiling in one fluid motion and Hazel watches, fascinated, as flames
stretch greedily to the next set of curtains before fanning out across the
carpet.

She beats the flames to the
mantle—she has to save the photograph. Because now, it’s the only part of
Anabel she wants to hold onto, the only memory worth saving. After snatching
the picture, she races out of the burning room.

The fire is spreading so much
faster than she imagined it would. She bolts and the fire chases her not down
the hallway, but through the rooms—like ghosts walking through
walls—devouring bone-dry timber, moving unimpeded toward the staircase,
up to the tower, and down to the first floor, snapping like a million
firecrackers.

“Fire!” Samuel is yelling at the top
of his lungs as Hazel flies down the staircase toward her grandmother in the
lobby. People scream and run around pell-mell. Frantic, they pour out from the
ballroom—some limping, some crawling, Owen dragging the chaise lounge by
one ankle—and cram into the lobby where they bottleneck at the black
walnut doors. When the jam loosens everyone funnels out, including her
grandmother and Samuel.

Except Hazel doesn’t see Sean with
them, and she vows then and there never to lose sight of him again.

She races back into the ballroom
where Ben Mathers is still pounding the podium, bellowing with upraised fist, “Where
are you going? We’re not finished!”

Then she spots Sean in front of
the fireplace, gathering bones. “Sean!” she screams and he looks up, startled.
“Let’s go!”

“I can’t leave him here!” Sean
plucks the skull from the mantle, shoves it inside the canvas bag, then rushes
to bundle it all up.

“Hurry!” she shrieks.

She runs to Mathers and grabs him
by one loose-skinned arm and pulls him out of the ballroom just behind Sean who
is dragging the big bag. All around them, wallpaper bubbles and the ceiling
warps down, as together they cross the lobby, pass over the threshold, and
leave the hotel forever. In their wake, history crashes down in an explosion of
red embers.

There was no other way
, Hazel thinks as she leaps across the dead goat on the
porch and trips down into the yard. It was the only way to get everybody
out—the lunacy was feeding on itself, growing hungrier. It was the only
way to alert the rest of the world that something is
very wrong
up in
Winslow.

There’s shrieking and outrage as
people spill across the yard with hot cinders and ash sticking to their sweaty
bodies. Many dash for the shelter of the gazebo to escape the rain of debris.

Trailing Sean, Hazel flies down
the stone staircase and lands on the gravel driveway, where they watch in
silence as windows explode in protest of the heat and the weight of the past
bearing down upon aged frames. The smell is caustic and sulfurish and the
leaves of fall burning all at once. In the blistering heat, Hazel wonders if
the whole mountainside might erupt, spewing bits and pieces of itself all over
Stepstone Valley.

Ornate eave brackets detach from
The Winslow’s flat roof and crash into the porch balustrade, while old-growth
siding warps and buckles. When the tower collapses, Hazel thinks,
The only
way.
The crackling grows louder, the heat intensifies. Her throat and lungs
feel seared.

After the top floors cave in, the
staircase hangs for a moment in open space—its steps leading to nothing
but thin air—until it too relinquishes to the growing mountain of cinders
in a deafening crash.

Then the fire eats the southern
portion of the ground floor as though it’s tissue paper, pausing to gnaw on the
parlor where her grandfather used to pop out waving his arms high over his head
and shouting at her and Sean, “Bogeyman’s gonna get ya!” and they’d run out
back screeching until they’d reach the safety of the giant oak where they’d
split their sides laughing.

The bay window bursts into the
yard, sending shards of glass into the trunk of the birch tree her father
planted when he was a Boy Scout. Her dad and Samuel Adair had already worried
about the prospect of fire during the dry season and had consequently cleared
brush and trimmed the other trees away from the hotel. As a result, the fire is
starved for fuel after devouring the tall birch and refocuses its fury on the
remaining structure.

At least the kids don’t have to
worry about this place anymore
, Hazel
thinks.
The Pest House of Horrors is no more.

“Get the fire hose!” Tiny Clemshaw
shouts.

“It’s too late for that,” Hap
Hotchkiss says.

“Let it burn,” Hazel whispers,
“just let it burn.”

She glances at her grandmother
standing next to Honey and Samuel at the entrance to the gazebo. Honey’s hands
are full of blackberries, the juice staining her fingers purple and dripping on
her feet. Together, the three of them watch their home and livelihood burn to
the ground.

Catching her grandmother’s eye,
Hazel grimaces apologetically.

Sarah dismisses Hazel’s second
apology with a stern shake of her head. Then she places a hand over her heart
and closes her eyes, her breast swelling with a deep breath. A gesture of
relief.

The cloud of smoke billows beautifully
black, thick and high into the clear sky.

Hazel squints south in the
direction of the fire lookout. “This time, Sparks, you’ll see. You’ll see and
you’ll send help.”

At Hazel’s side, Sean is wiping
his sweaty, sooty face with the back of his filthy hand. “Guess we’ll both be
sent across the creek now.”

“Can’t think of anyone I’d rather
share exile with,” she says. Their voices sound hoarse from all the smoke.
“We’ll fix up Hawkin Rhone’s cabin. New curtains, a little paint. Adopt Bandit.
And eat lots of berries and squirrels.”

“I’m in,” he says. Then he looks
her over. “Nice shirt.”

She glances down at the rainbow on
her tank top—the sign of hope emblazoned across her chest since Monday
night. “Thanks. I think so. Where’s yours?” She laughs. But just as suddenly,
she’s sobbing. “I wouldn’t blame you, Sean, if you’d let me drown in Three
Fools Creek.”

“Drown? Why would I? You protected
me, just like you promised you would.” He puts his arms around her and pulls
her close, careful not to crush her arm. “I think I’m starting to feel better
already.”

“Good.” She wishes they could stay
like this forever.

But he pulls back. “Let’s go.”

“No.” She hugs him to her again.

He gently pushes her away. “Let’s
go.”

Hazel raises her head to look at
him. “Go where?”

Sean pulls a handful of teeth out
of his pocket and hands them to her, then stoops to pick up the bag of bones.
“Let’s go put Hawkin Rhone to rest for good.”

“
W
ant to check out my tooth?” Hazel pulled back
her cheek to expose the shiny gold crown her cracked molar had earned her from
the dentist that morning.

Sean came in for a better look.
“Cool.”

She let go of her cheek. “Makes my
mouth feel weird. Like my tooth’s too big.”

“Let me see.” He leaned even
closer and kissed her.

Then he shrugged. “Feels all right
to me.”

They were stalling, Hazel
realized, standing outside of Hawkin Rhone’s cabin, reluctant to go inside. And
for what? After all they’d been through, certainly this was nothing they
couldn’t handle.

Emboldened, Hazel climbed the
steps to the porch, clearing away cobwebs with her good arm as she did. Her
other arm was still in a sling—a real, hospital-issue sling this
time—and the doctors had cautioned her that it might take yet another
surgery to set her elbow right. At least now she was armed with a full bottle
of Vicodin.

She glanced back at Sean where he
remained at the foot of the steps, eyeing the door to the cabin warily, as if
the bogeyman himself might suddenly burst out.

“Don’t worry,” Hazel told him,
“I’ll protect you.”

He laughed before joining her on
the porch. “You know what? I believe you now. At least when it comes to the
ghosts.”

“Oh, yeah? What else is haunting
you?” she asked.

“The long arm of the law.” He shot
a look over his shoulder as if lawmen might close in on him at any moment. Then
he returned his anxious gaze to Hazel. “That’s what.”

She hated that he still felt
distressed; he’d suffered enough. She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Sean, I
told you not to worry. It’s business as usual around here. My dad said that since
no one’s talking, there’s no way for Riley Washburn to sort it all out, let
alone determine any fault beyond Fritz Earley. Even Ben Mathers is smart enough
to keep his mouth shut.”

“Guess you’re right. Besides,
nobody
was in their right mind. Washburn would have to arrest every single person in
town.” He grinned, his brown eyes clear and bright.

Hazel couldn’t get enough of
seeing Sean, sturdy and sound again. It had taken him, her father, and the
others seven to nine days to crawl back into their minds. Aaron had been the
worst off—it took him two weeks to settle back into his body for good.
But everyone still alive at the time the forest service helicopter responded to
the fire did eventually recover.

Though Hazel knew that nobody in Winslow
would ever be the same.

She turned from her boyfriend and
placed her hand on the cabin’s roughhewn log door, saying, “Last one in has to
be rodeo queen.”

She pushed on the door but met
with resistance. Putting her weight behind it, the door finally swung open and
she stepped inside, Sean right behind her.

It was obvious that nobody had
been in the cabin for years, probably not since Hawkin Rhone himself was last
inside. On the cooktop of the potbellied stove, a single plate and rusted-out
percolator sat next to a metal mug stained dark with dried coffee. Positioned
in front of the stove was a chair with most of its stuffing scavenged by
rodents. A tattered blanket was wrapped over one arm of the chair, and on top
of that lay an open book, face down:
The Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.