‘Lie down on the floor!’ I yelled to Lilith. I yanked the drapes off the windows, grabbed a lamp, shade and all, and took a swing. The lamp shattered, but the window remained intact. ‘Shit!’
From her spot on the floor next to the front door, Lilith coughed. ‘Fireplace poker!’
‘Where?’
With one hand covering her mouth, she used the other to point toward the far wall. With all of Lilith’s goddam rubbish in the way, the fireplace and its tools might as well have been in Siberia.
My clothing clung to me, wet and hot. My skin smarted. I surveyed the room, eyes stinging, spotted what I thought might be a coffee table under a mound of quilts and thrashed my way toward it. I swept the quilts aside, pulled the table toward me and flipped it over. A cheap table, thank God, with screw-on legs. I wrenched off one of the legs and was crawling toward the window with my head protected by the wet towel when someone began pounding on the outside of the front door. ‘Mother! Mother! Are you in there?’
‘It’s Nick!’ Lilith croaked.
I didn’t have a second to waste in wondering how Nicholas had gotten there. I pressed my cheek to the door. ‘Nick! The deadbolt’s thrown and we don’t have a key. Can you break down the door?’
‘Wait a minute!’ Lilith cried. ‘There’s a spare key in the flowerpot!’
‘Did you hear that, Nick?’ I shouted. ‘Spare key! Flowerpot!’
Nick heard. In seconds the deadbolt turned and the door flew open. A tsunami of air whooshed past us as we stumbled out of the burning house and collapsed on the brick steps, coughing until our lungs ached.
Supporting himself on a cane, Nick backed away from us, limping painfully, face sweaty and streaked with soot. ‘We tried the front door, we tried the back! Burned my hand on the doorknob. Jesus, Jesus!’
‘It was Hoffner,’ I screamed, too preoccupied to wonder who ‘we’ were. ‘He’s crazy, Nick! He set the fire. Have you called 9-1-1?’
Nick wore a soft neck brace, held on by Velcro straps, so he nodded with difficulty. ‘I came in a cab. The cabby called it in.’
A metered cab all the way from Baltimore? How much did that cost, I wondered as I guided Lilith down the steps. I couldn’t help it. Must have been my New England genes, frugal down to the last molecule.
After Nick had paid off the cab driver and insisted he be on his way, I said, ‘Thank you, Nick. If you hadn’t showed up…’ I let the sentence die.
‘I telephoned, Mother didn’t answer, and I got worried. Hoffner’d been acting so squirrelly.’
Lilith and I staggered past Nick, across the driveway and on to the grass. With tears streaming down her face, Lilith watched her house burn. ‘My things! All my precious things!’
I thought about all the ‘precious’ handbags, shoes and wicker baskets, all the indispensable toiletries, medical supplies and cross-stitch kits. The four Crock-Pots still in their original boxes, more than a dozen different flavors of Kraft salad dressing – from Asian Toasted Sesame to Zesty Italian – the sixteen-ounce bottles arranged on her kitchen window sill like mismatched chessmen. I grabbed Lilith’s arms in case she took it into her head to dash back into the inferno to try to save them. I dragged her across the lawn, forced her to sit down against a tree, well away from the blazing house.
Out in the driveway, every door of Lilith’s Toyota stood open; its trunk yawned. Hoffner had torn her car apart looking for the letters. Mercifully, he hadn’t bothered with my Volvo.
I was rubbing sweat and soot off my face with the tail of my shirt, looking around, wondering where the bastard had gotten to. He had to be somewhere in the neighborhood, I knew, because his truck – GOTALAW – still sat at the edge of the drive not far from the tree where I had parked Lilith.
I wondered if Hoffner knew about Lilith’s studio. No telling what he’d do to the studio – snap her brushes, squeeze paint out of the tubes, trash her paintings. If you had a giant yard sale, sold the entire contents of Lilith’s house, you wouldn’t equal the value of even one of her paintings, at least not in my opinion.
A sudden movement caught my eye, a flash of yellow at the perimeter of the woods. ‘What’s out there?’ I asked Lilith who was eyeing Hoffner’s truck with murder on her mind.
‘A tool shed. Gardening stuff. A riding mower.’
‘Keep an eye on your mother,’ I told Nick. ‘Don’t let her anywhere near the house.’
I was glancing around the yard, looking for something I could use as a weapon, when Jim Hoffner stalked into view, bold as brass, heading for his truck and a quick getaway.
When he got within range, I flew at him like a banshee, attacking him with both fists, pummeling his chest like a jackhammer. ‘You bastard! You set that fire on purpose! We could have been burned alive!’
Hoffner laughed, a manic, Halloween funhouse cackle that chilled me to the bone.
Infuriated, I cocked my arm, but before I could get off a good left hook to his jaw, Hoffner grabbed me by the hair, twisted my head painfully, and threw me to the ground. His right hand dived beneath his jacket and, almost before I could blink, I was staring up into the business end of what looked like a 9mm Glock.
‘Bitch!’ The arm holding the big black gun didn’t waver.
‘Hoffner, don’t!’ Nick yelled.
Hoffner’s lip curled nastily. ‘I have to, Aupry. Thanks to you and your big fat mouth, she knows.’
Lilith struggled to her feet, her eyes wild, wide. ‘Stop! Is everybody crazy?’
Nick limped toward Hoffner. ‘You can’t, Hoffner! Hannah saved my life. She called the paramedics, she held my hand, she prayed with me, for Christ’s sake, when we both thought I was dying.’
Sirens began to wail in the distance. With half my brain I willed them to hurry, with the other half, I prayed. Please God, please, I’m not ready to go!
It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that if Hoffner wanted to weasel out of the mess he’d created, he’d have to dispose of three witnesses, not just one.
‘What’s that man talking about, Nicholas?’
Nick faced his mother. ‘Hoffner believes your letters will be worth a lot of money to a certain party who will pay anything to keep his dirty little secret.’
Lilith opened her mouth, but nothing came out. I could almost see the wheels going around, taking it all in. The ‘dirty little secret’ was Lilith herself.
‘Tell him where the letters are, Mother. Nothing’s worth getting shot over.’
Lilith stiffened. ‘I put them in a safety deposit box where they can’t do anybody harm.’
Suddenly the gun wasn’t pointing at me, but at Lilith. ‘I don’t believe you! Let’s go. Get them!’
Lilith folded her arms across her chest, set her jaw. ‘No.’
Hoffner took a step in Lilith’s direction. ‘You’re coming with me. Now.’
Without warning, Nick’s cane shot out, knocking the gun out of Hoffner’s hand. The gun landed on the grass at my feet. I snatched it up, cocked my arm and threw the gun as hard as I could, watching with pleasure as it spiraled into the flaming house.
‘God dammit!’ Hoffner bolted for his truck, gunned the engine and fishtailed down the drive. Before he had driven more than one hundred yards, the brake lights flashed red, the truck skewed sideways, and he leapt out of the cab. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked aloud.
Lilith held up a box cutter, shrugged. ‘When he wasn’t looking, I messed with his tires.’
‘Lilith, how…?’ I indicated the box cutter.
‘I picked it up when we were in the living room.’
I could have hugged her.
Hoffner bobbed like an apple, hesitating, caught between an oncoming fire truck on the one hand and an angry mob of three on the other, one armed with a box cutter, a second with a cane, and me with a rage so hot and intense that if I tore Hoffner to shreds with my teeth and bare hands, no court in the world would have held me responsible. Hoffner sprinted toward the woods, heading in the direction of Fishing Creek.