J. Jance - Failure to appear

When I stopped, I eased him down on the ground and knelt beside him. Starting to come around, he squinted up into the overhead sun.

"Beaumont!" he choked. "Thank God you made it in time. What about the girl? Did you get her out, too?"

"The girl? What girl? I didn't see any girl."

"Tanya. Isn't that her name? Tanya? She's in there somewhere. I don't know where. You've got to find her."

My mother had seen to it that I spent almost every miserable Sunday morning of my childhood imprisoned in one interminable Sunday school class after another. I know all about turning the other cheek, but this was ridiculous.

"You want me to go back in there?"

"We can't just leave her to die, can we?"

I looked at the house. There was no movement around it, nothing to indicate that it was a deadly powder keg waiting for the slightest spark to blow it into oblivion.

"How do you know she's inside?" I asked.

"She said she would be," Guy Lewis said. "She told me."

Mrs. Reeder, my English teacher from Ballard High School, used to complain bitterly about faulty pronoun reference. "Faulty pronoun reference indicates faulty thinking," she would say.

At the time, I should have thought to ask Guy Lewis, "She who? Who are you talking about?" But who worries about grammar at a time like that? Besides, I was far too busy fighting my interior ethical battle to pay that much attention to Guy Lewis' exact words.

I did not want to help Tanya Dunseth. My first reaction, plain and simple, was: "Like hell! Why should I risk my life and limb? No way, Jose! Let Tanya find her own damn way out."

At best, she was a liar and a cheat. At worst, she was a two-time killer with yet a third and fourth attempted homicide chalked up on the scoreboard at that very minute. But when I made no effort to move, Guy Lewis began struggling to his feet.

"If you won't go, I will," he said determinedly. Even though he was still gasping and wheezing, he strove to right himself.

"Never mind," I said in disgust. "I'll go. You stay here and keep your head low." I started away, then had another thought. I turned back to him. "Do you have a cellular phone in that Miata of yours?"

Lewis shook his head. "No. Why?"

"I do. In the 928. Here are the keys. Whatever you do, don't start the engine. It'll set off a spark and blow us to kingdom come. Once you're inside all you have to do is reach inside and hit the power button on the phone to turn it on. Call nine-one-one and let them know we've got a serious problem out here. Tell them to stop all traffic, not to let any but emergency fire and police vehicles down Live Oak Lane. Got that?"

With Guy nodding in understanding, I set off for the house at a brisk trot. I didn't want to be winded when I got there. On the front porch, I inhaled another deep clear breath before opening the door.

I had no idea where to start. I had walked through the house to collect Amber's things from Tanya's upstairs room, but other than that one straight-through shot, the entire house was unfamiliar. I was afraid I'd have to race through the whole place to find her.

I dashed first through the main rooms of the ground-floor level-the living room, dining room, kitchen, and utility room-seeing no one. I came back into the living room and paused there prior to starting up the stairway to the second story. That's when I noticed a pair of glass-paned French doors in a wall just to the left of the front door.

In my hurry to get inside the house, I had darted past without even noticing them. Now, though, when I looked through the doors, that's where I found Tanya Dunseth, lying facedown on an outdated couch-the old-fashioned folding kind my mother used to call a davenport.

Coming into the side room, I realized it had once been a formal parlor now converted to an in-home office complete with bookshelves, a regular desk, a movable computer workstation, easy chair, and couch. As soon as I opened the doors, the stench of gas was far more powerful than it had been elsewhere in the house. Because the room was smaller than the others and totally closed off, the invisible gaseous cloud had risen to a higher level. Tanya was lying on the couch, not the floor, but the bluish tinge of her skin told me that she was suffering from oxygen deprivation.

"Tanya!" I called.

She didn't move. One bare arm trailed off down the front of the couch with the tips of her fingers almost touching the face of an ugly old dial-type telephone that sat on the floor only inches from the couch. Had I been thinking with my brain instead of my lungs right about then, I might have noticed the significance in the location of that museum-piece telephone. Instead, I had only one purpose and focus in life-to grab Tanya Dunseth up off that couch and get us both out of there. Fast!

I tried picking her up, hefting her once to test the weight of her in my arms. She was solid enough, but much lighter than Guy Lewis. Compared to hauling him, Tanya was easy. Holding her in front of me, I headed outside. When I reached the doorway, I kicked open the screen door.

Guy Lewis stood beside the Porsche, leaning heavily against it, as if the exertion of scrambling around the cars and making the phone call had worn him out. When he saw me, though, he smiled and gave me a thumbs-up sign. I don't know if it was for my finding Tanya or if it was because he had managed to make the call. Maybe both.

I had been holding my breath for a long time. Now, as I stumbled down the steps, I gasped fresh air into my oxygen-starved lungs. We're home free, I thought. We made it.

To this day, I'm still not sure if I actually heard the beginning of that abortive telephone ring, or if it was only my vivid imagination. Maybe the noise I heard was just the ringing in my ears-the pounding of my own overworked heart. Later, the arson experts told me, whether I heard it or not, the clapper in that old-fashioned ringer provided the needed spark-the only one necessary to set off a huge conflagration.

I was on the ground, carrying Tanya and moving away from the house as fast as I could, when the explosion hit. The force of the concussion jarred Tanya out of my arms and sent us both sprawling and plunging head over heels, rolling us along like a pair of wind-driven tumbleweeds.

I was already halfway across the road when the explosion occurred, but even that far away, an incredible blast of heat seared the backs of my eyeballs. I landed facedown. I stumbled to my feet and turned around, staring up at the steeply gabled roof. For an eerie, soundless moment, the entire surface of the roof seemed to rise in the air a good foot or so. It hovered there for what seemed like forever, then it settled gracefully back down-like a huge comforter falling back on a bed-in what appeared to be its original position.

My first thought then was that the worst was over. But I was looking at the roof. I hadn't noticed the burning sofa that had come shooting out of the house through a gaping hole that had been blown clear through the front outside wall. Propane burns hot and clean. Unless it soaks into some combustible material, it won't do a sustained burn. Unfortunately, the upholstered couch provided just the right kind of material to hold the gas and burn like crazy.

Tanya and I were some distance beyond the cars. Guy Lewis had been knocked to the ground, but he was struggling to regain his footing at the same time I caught sight of the burning couch on the porch. My first thought was that maybe we could get to it and somehow put it out, but before my body could respond and put thought to action, a series of secondary explosions echoed through the house, rocking it on its foundations.

Those several blasts shook the already weakened structure so severely that some of the supporting columns on the front porch, weight-bearing beams designed to hold up the second story, tottered out of their moorings, came loose, and crumpled. It was like watching a line of dominoes fall. As the columns collapsed, the added weight crushed the construction jack that valiantly had held up the one still-unrepaired corner of the porch. When the jack went, the floor above it disintegrated in a long, slow-moving wave, taking with it the rest of the porch. The burning couch dropped out of sight into a void.