‘OK, but you’re a strong guy. Help me break this door down, will you?’
Hoffner simply glared. ‘Where are Chandler’s love letters?’
‘What’s going on out there?’ From her bedroom prison, Lilith sounded like a little girl lost.
I ignored Lilith and answered Hoffner instead. ‘How the hell am I supposed to know? I returned the letters to Lilith. You can ask her that question yourself, after we get her out of there.’
Hoffner’s eyes narrowed dangerously. When he raised a hand, I flinched. I pointed at my eye. ‘I’m already working on a hell of a shiner, Hoffner. You planning on giving me a matched pair?’
Hoffner kicked a pile of wicker baskets out of his way and strong-armed past me. He began pounding on Lilith’s bedroom door. ‘Where the hell did you put those letters?’
Her answer was simple. ‘In a safety deposit box.’
‘Where?’
‘They’re mine, Mr Hoffner,’ she shouted. ‘Why should I tell you?’
‘Fuck!’ Hoffner spun on his heel and careened down the hall, scattering Lilith’s things in his wake. Instead of leaving by way of the kitchen, though, he hung a right into the living room where I could hear him crashing about in frustration, swearing, giving every profanity in his vast vocabulary an airing before giving up and leaving via the back door, the way he had come.
No way Hoffner could make the mess in the living room any bigger than it already was, so I ignored his rampage and focused on the bedroom door. ‘I think he’s gone,’ I told Lilith after a while.
The gap between the door and its frame was now about twelve inches. I tried to squeeze my body through sideways, sucking and tucking and regretting, when it didn’t work, that I’d eaten three pancakes for breakfast.
Push, grab, toss.
Push, grab, pull.
I stopped work for a moment to catch my breath, inhaled deeply, smelled smoke. A neighbor burning early fall leaves, I thought, or cranking up the wood stove to ward off the morning’s chill.
‘Hannah? Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here.’
Just for the sake of variety, not because I thought it would work, I leaned against the bedroom door and tried shoving it with my back instead of my shoulder. Suddenly, something on the other side gave up the fight, the door yawned open another two inches and I was able to ease myself through.
I found myself standing knee-deep in a jumble of boxes and loose clothing. The bookshelf I’d been working against lay askew, its top butted against the footboard of the bed.
‘Lilith? Where are you?’
From around a lopsided aluminum rack hung with plastic-covered dry cleaning, a tiny hand waved like a flag of surrender. ‘Over here.’
I found Lilith, wearing pink silk pajamas, lying on her side between the bed and the window. It was immediately obvious what had happened. The elderly television stand – a K-Mart blue light special, unless I missed my guess – had collapsed, sending a DVD player, a cascade of DVDs and the television itself forward, pinning her legs.
I waded closer, slipping and sliding over plastic storage containers that shifted dangerously under my feet. The television was an ancient, wedge-shaped model, housing a giant cathode ray tube. It was still connected to the DVD player by old-style audio and video cables, snarled and tangled like a platter of colorful spaghetti. I kicked clothing aside until I was standing on solid floor, bent my knees, wrapped my arms around the massive set and tried to raise it. ‘Ooof!’ I said, defeated. ‘Damn thing weighs a ton.’
Bracing my back against the footboard of the bed, I shoved the television up and aside with my feet, freeing Lilith at long last.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ Lilith breathed. She dragged herself into a sitting position.
I kneeled down to check my friend for damage. Both her shins were scraped and bleeding, her left ankle purple and beginning to swell. I touched the ankle gently. ‘Can you move your foot?’
Wincing, Lilith rotated her foot. ‘It hurts, but I guess it’s not broken.’
‘Let me help you out of here.’
‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Lilith wept as I pulled her up until she was leaning against me, her injured leg crooked behind her. ‘I didn’t want anybody to see this terrible house. Nobody will understand, and I can’t explain.’ Tears streamed down her face.
‘Can you put weight on your foot?’
She tried it, yelped. ‘Ouch!’
‘Bad idea,’ I said.
‘No, I can do it.’ She set her foot down experimentally, winced. ‘Lend me a shoulder?’
With Lilith’s arm draped around my neck and my arm around her waist, we hobbled toward the bedroom door with me kicking obstructions aside like autumn leaves.
‘I smell smoke,’ Lilith said. With her free arm, she pointed. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look!’
Tendrils of smoke drifted through the narrow opening I’d made between the door and its frame.
‘Wait here.’ I escorted Lilith to the bed, shrouded by mountains of clothing except for a small, semi-circular nest she’d dug out for herself. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Heart pounding, I eased into the hallway, stumbled along, following the smoke down the hall and into the kitchen.
‘Jesus!’ The passageway leading to the back door was engulfed in flames, the boxes it had contained burning brightly, buckling, collapsing in on one another. Flames licked greedily at the stove. Was it gas or electric? I couldn’t remember.
On the floor near the refrigerator, a stray issue of Life magazine from December 1989 smoldered, its cover gradually blackened and curled, the image of a smiling Jane Pauley transformed bit by bit into a negative of gray ash.
Did Lilith have a fire extinguisher? I gripped the back of a kitchen chair and laughed hysterically. Of course she had a fire extinguisher. Maybe two, maybe a hundred! Somewhere under all this crap!
In the kitchen, the heat was intense. A wall of flame blocked the back door, our only exit. Somewhere in the basement, a smoke alarm began to scream.
Keeping my head low, I made my way to the bathroom, scooping up a couple of towels along the way. I tossed the towels in the bathtub and turned on the shower, soaking them with water. When they were thoroughly wet, I returned to the bedroom where I’d left Lilith.
‘That crazy bastard set your kitchen on fire,’ I told her, my voice urgent. ‘Here, you may need this.’ I draped a wet towel over Lilith’s head, put one over my own head, then grabbed her by the hand. ‘We’ll have to go out through the front door!’ I croaked, dragging her down the cluttered hallway after me. ‘Keep low. Crawl if you have to.’
When we reached the perimeter of the living room, I dropped her hand so that I could use both of mine to shove boxes aside. ‘Help me!’ I yelled when I noticed that Lilith had simply plopped herself down among the ruins. ‘We’ve got to get to the door!’
‘That’s my new coffee-maker!’ Lilith moaned as I sent one biggish box flying into the piano. Seemingly oblivious to the smoke and the heat, she held another box in her hands and was gazing at it, looking morose. ‘This is a tide clock!’
I knocked the box out of her hands. ‘Lilith!’ I screamed. ‘Screw the tide clock! We have to get out of here!’
It seemed like hours, but it probably took only a few adrenaline-fueled minutes for Lilith and me to clear a path to the front door. It was then that I understood what Hoffner had been doing while he was crashing around Lilith’s living room. He’d engaged the deadbolt. Stolen the key.
Son of a bitch!
I began searching desperately for an object I could hammer against the living-room window.
Maybe all of Lilith’s junk was working in our favor, I thought as I floundered around, flinging boxes aside. I didn’t know how long it would take for the fire to consume all the magazines and newspapers that were stacked in the back hallway, spilling over into the kitchen. What worried me was the smoke, swirling, growing thicker, gathering in a dense black cloud that pushed against the ceiling, descending more quickly than I thought we had time for.