As soon as I saw her standing at eye level with the window, I realized that there was no way Sarah would fit through the small opening with her pregnant belly. She realized it too, blind terror in her eyes as a smoke detector somewhere in the basement started going off over the anxious hiss of flames right above us. Smoke must have been seeping through the crack under the basement door.
“You’re going to leave me here,” she whispered.
“No. Sarah, I’m not.”
“You are. You are you are you are.”
She coughed so hard she had to lean against the wall for support. I felt sick. Sarah had lived through hell on earth only to now face dying in a house fire. And that was because of me.
“Veronica,” I said. I had to raise my voice over the growing crackle of the flames. I braced against the freezer as I pulled off my boots and thrust them at her. “Can you run to one of the houses and get help?”
She was bewildered for a second, but then she nodded and stepped into my boots.
“It doesn’t matter which house. Just get help. Say—” I stopped for a second, not even sure now. “Say there’s a fire. There’s a fire and you need the fire department and the sheriff’s department, okay? Not the Belmont police.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I scrambled on top of the freezer and helped Veronica up through the window. Then she stood there in the damp grass of Derrow’s backyard and looked down at me like a mistake had been made.
“What is it, Veronica?” I said. “Do you see him?”
She shook her head.
“Okay,” I said. “Just go. Run.”
She turned and ran.
“Sarah,” I said, turning to her now. Her shoulders were heaving, her breath coming way too fast. The air was too tight in my own lungs, and the chill from the open window seemed to increase as the temperature in the basement crept up. “You need to calm down.”
“I’m going to die down here,” she said. She grabbed on to my forearm, not for comfort but as if to prevent me from leaving. “And this, my—” She looked down at her belly.
“You’re not going to die down here,” I said. I wiped roughly at my eyes, watering from the acrid smoke. Heat radiated from the ceiling. I squinted through the darkness, hoping for a sign that Veronica was able to get help. I didn’t know how long it would take until the basement filled with hot, black smoke, until the air was unbreathable. I didn’t want to stick around to find out. “We’re not going to die down here. We’re going to be fine. I’m not going to leave you. We’re going to get out of here together.”
Sarah was shaking her head. “All the times I wished for it, that I just wouldn’t wake up,” she said. “And now, now—” She leaned against the cinder-block wall, coughing. “Why did you even do this?”
I gritted my teeth and said nothing. The fire above us was angry now, raging, hungry for fuel. Over the roar of the flames, I heard him dragging something across his kitchen to the garage. It sounded like a suitcase. He had an escape bag packed. He was prepared. I wasn’t. Sarah was right. I wasn’t helping her at all.
“Sarah,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I’m going to get us out of here.”
She looked back at me, her nostrils flaring, furious.
“I know I just made things worse for you, but I’m trying to make them better. I’m going to. You have to trust me.”
She said nothing.
“If I go up there, I can get back into the house and open the door,” I said.
Sarah shook her head, still holding on to my arm with all the strength she had.
“I will do that,” I said, “I will come and open the basement door so you can get out. Okay?”
She didn’t believe me. I wasn’t going to leave her until she did.
“I will,” I said. “You have to trust me.”
Finally, she let go of my arm and leaned against the wall. She started to slide down into a sitting position on top of the freezer, but I caught her by the elbow.
“You have to stay by the window, you have to keep breathing,” I said.
She stood up again, her face tense in the moonlight.
“I will be right back,” I told her.
I holstered the revolver. Then I set my palms on the concrete lip of the foundation and pulled myself up until my torso was in the well. It wasn’t easy. I balanced on my pelvis against the foundation and pushed my elbows up to the grass until I had enough leverage to pull my head above ground, then get my knees up into the well. Then I could stand, dizzily gulping lungfuls of clean night air as I pulled my gun out again and ran around the side of the house and into the garage—
I got there just as Derrow opened the door from the kitchen and stepped out.
A handgun in one hand, a suitcase in the other.
He looked at me, angry and stunned as he raised the arm with the gun.
I shot him twice.
They weren’t good shots, but I hit him. Once in the shoulder and once in the thigh. He went down, blood spurting from his leg. The gun he was holding clattered to the concrete floor and I grabbed it before he could. I left him moaning in the garage and pushed into the house, which was no longer even a house but instead a wall of black smoke and orange flames, the floor a roiling plane of heat. I felt the vinyl flooring stick to my wool socks. I couldn’t see a thing. I pulled my coat over my head and dashed through the kitchen, trying to remember how far down I needed to go. Luckily, not very. I bumped into a chair, the one Derrow had wedged under the knob of the basement door. I shrieked at the touch, the chair metal and white hot. Using my coat to protect my hands, I wrenched it out of the way and threw the door open. “Sarah,” I coughed, “come on.”
I didn’t see her through the smoke, so I ran down the steps. The basement was at least forty degrees cooler than the upstairs. “Sarah.”
She was still standing on the freezer, her face tipped up to the window. Her expression was one of eerie peace.
I grabbed her hand, and she turned to me, startled. “You came back,” she whispered.
I helped her down from the freezer and gave her my coat to put over her head. “Follow me,” I said. “There’s no time.”
Her hand in mine, we ran back up the steps and into the kitchen. The curtains had caught now, flames shivering up the wall. She followed me out into the garage, gasping at the sight of Derrow bleeding on the floor. There were sirens approaching, lots of them, fast.
I fell to my knees in the yard, just as a squad car flew down the street and jumped the curb, stopping inches from me. “Put down the gun,” a sheriff’s deputy was shouting, and it took me a minute to realize he was shouting it at me.
I lowered it slowly to the grass, then felt his weight on top of me as he pushed me face-first to the ground, followed by the bite of handcuffs. Sarah was screaming no over and over. The rest of the sirens wailed down the street and cast a flickering light show across the pavement.
It was almost beautiful.