Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, 1903

‘We’ve done what we can,’ I told the women after I hung up on Jack Ames’s voicemail. ‘We’ve saved a few of the important records, and I took photographs of some of the others.’

We were leaning against the front of Fran’s car, its hood still warm against my backside. ‘I wish I had a shotgun,’ Fran muttered. ‘I’d pick them off, one at a time as they come out the door. All that history! Don’t they realize that once it’s gone it’s gone forever?’

I laid a hand on Fran’s arm. ‘Maybe Jack Ames will get my message and show up. I’d like to believe that when he approved that work order he simply didn’t understand the historical significance of what we have here.’

Fran scowled. ‘Can he really be that stupid?’

I checked my watch, well aware that the clock on our records was ticking down. ‘Fran, why don’t you stay here with Kim? In the meantime, I’m going to the animal shelter. Fingers crossed I can stop the burning.’

It occurred to me that I didn’t even know where the animal shelter was. I could have waited and followed one of the BioClean vans, of course, but for what I planned to do I needed to beat them to the draw. Kim filled me in.

Ten minutes later, following Kim’s directions, I pulled into a parking lot on the outskirts of Elizabethtown where a large sign read: Tilghman County Humane Society. Deliveries in Rear. A single car was parked in the lot. From the humane society decal on the rear window I figured Grace had arrived.

As I climbed out of my car, I noticed that the property adjoined a vineyard. Rows of vines stood like silent sentinels in the gathering dark.

Someone was in the shelter; a light shone in one of the windows.

I parked and tried the front door, but it was locked. ‘Good girl,’ I muttered. Grace responded to my knock almost immediately, pushed the panic bar and let me in.

‘I was right, it is propane,’ she told me breathlessly. I followed Grace down a hallway and through two rooms of cages housing dogs, cats and rabbits awaiting reassignment to their forever homes. A droopy-eared spaniel, head on paws, stared out at me through the bars mournfully. Another dog, a terrier, began to bark, setting off a chain reaction. By the time we got to the far end of the room we were accompanied by a canine chorus of barks, yips and howls.

‘Someone’s already turned the incinerator on,’ Grace said. ‘Warming it up.’

‘Isn’t anyone here with the animals?’ I asked.

‘On weekends, we have staff that come in every four hours during the day to feed the animals and check up on things.’ She glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s eight-thirty, so Sandy, our animal care assistant, will have been and gone.’

The door whooshed shut between us and the dogs. We were standing at one end of a long hallway.

‘There it is,’ Grace said, pointing to a large gray box installed in the wall at the opposite end. The door to the incinerator was at chest height. I paused, feeling ill, thinking of all the animals that had perished there. I could almost hear their ghostly barks, pitiful meows, their agonized screams.

‘The controls are over here,’ she said, pointing to a wall panel where several indicators glowed green and orange. ‘I can switch it off by pushing this button, but when they get here they’ll just turn the gas on again.’

‘I’m surprised nobody is here from the shelter staff to supervise,’ I said. ‘I mean, if you or Sandy didn’t let them in, how did the incinerator get turned on in the first place?’

‘BioClean has a key,’ Grace explained. ‘Their contract with the shelter allows them to use the incinerator on weekends. Usually they’re getting rid of roadkill for the county. Raccoons, possums, deer. This is going to make you want to barf, but…’ She cocked an arm, deepened her voice and drawled, ‘This baby can process up to eight hundred pounds of euthanized companion animals at the rate of a hundred and fifty pounds per hour.’

Grace was right. I did feel like hurling, especially when she added, ‘We charge them twenty-five dollars for every one hundred pounds. Maintaining an incinerator can be expensive. There’s more to it than just fuel.’

‘Speaking of fuel,’ I said, ‘where’s the fuel tank?’

‘Follow me.’ Grace put the back door on the latch and flipped on an outside light.

The propane tank sat outside the building on a concrete slab. Pipes led from the bottom of the tank and through the wall into the back of the building. There was an on/off valve at the top but, like the furnace inside, that would be easy enough to turn back on. I knelt and examined the connectors. I tried turning one of the nuts that connected the threaded brass couplers with my fingers, but it wouldn’t budge.

I swiveled my head to look up at Grace. ‘Do you have any tools? A wrench, maybe?’

‘Who are you talking to? I’m a contractor’s wife. Dwight keeps a spare toolbox in the trunk.’

Grace came back a few minutes later carrying a wrench in one hand and a pair of vice grips in the other. ‘Let’s try the wrench first,’ I said.

She slapped it into my open palm like a surgical assistant.

I adjusted the wrench, tightened it around the connector and tugged it toward me. After two grunts and three swear words, it gave. I loosened the connector, separating the two pipes until there was a gentle whoosh and the distinctive smell of sulphur filled the air. ‘There,’ I said, standing up. ‘If we’re lucky, they won’t notice that the pipes aren’t quite connected.’

We were heading back into the shelter to turn out the lights when my cell phone rang. Fran. The BioClean vans were on their way.

‘If we use both our cars we can probably block the driveway,’ I told Grace.

Grace rubbed her hands together. ‘What fun! Do you think we’ll be arrested?’

‘Except for this explosion, the interview was very successfully conducted.’

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae , 1889

Grace and I parked our cars nose-to-nose at the entrance to the parking lot. If BioClean wanted access to the delivery doors at the back of the shelter they’d have to pry the car keys out of our cold, dead fingers, push our cars aside or have the vehicles towed. Either way, our historical records would gain a few precious minutes of life.

While we waited for their vans to arrive, we sat at a circular picnic table on the back lawn where, Grace explained, on pleasant days staff would gather to eat lunch and supervise the animals as they frisked and frolicked in the galvanized dog runs. As night gathered in around us, a full moon began its slow rise over the vineyard, casting long shadows and gilding the vines and the leaves on the nearby trees with silver.

I tried Jack Ames’s cell phone again, but failed to reach a live human being. After that, Grace and I talked, killing time. I told her about my family – my husband, daughters and grandchildren – and she outlined the long path to recovery that Rusty’s team of doctors and therapists had designed for him.

‘Will he be able to return to work?’ I asked, selfishly thinking about the renovation at Our Song that had been falling further and further behind schedule. During his absence, out of stubbornness, or perhaps deep denial, Dwight had refused to replace Rusty with a temporary worker.

‘Because of his inability to concentrate, he may require a bit more supervision, but, yes, Rusty should be able to go back to work eventually.’

I didn’t ask how long ‘eventually’ might be.

‘I’m praying for that boy,’ Grace told me. I thought she was referring to her own son until she added with a sigh, ‘It can’t have been Tad’s idea to hurt Rusty. Somebody must have put him up to it.’