J. Jance - Failure to appear

Now the house stood naked in a cloud of dust and rubble. For several seconds, it seemed to ripple, like distant desert mountains viewed through waves of shimmering heat. And then, with a thunderous groan and the collective screech of a thousand tortured nails, the loosened roof began to fall. The sound was so wild and fierce it might have been the death cry of some living thing.

Pieces of roof avalanched down to the place where the broken porch was no more. Careening down, it rained wood and shingles and broken glass everywhere. Finally, when it stopped-when there was nothing left moving-I was struck by the terrible stillness all around me. In that silence, I realized Guy Lewis had disappeared. So had both the Miata and the Porsche. All three, two cars and the man, were buried beneath a mountain of debris. Meanwhile, from where the porch had once been, I saw the first ominous curlings of smoke.

What should I do? I was torn. I know now how emergency medical personnel must feel when they make the triage call-the life-and-death decision you can spend the entire rest of your lifetime second-guessing, rationalizing, debating, or justifying.

The choice was mine alone to make. Guy Lewis had been moving when I last saw him. Chances were he could fight his way free of the rubble, but I had no idea how long Tanya had been deprived of oxygen. She lay flat on the ground beside me, still limp, still unmoving, still blue, but a thin stream of blood flowed from a tiny cut on her face. With oxygen deprivation, seconds, not minutes, mean the difference between survival and death; recovery or permanent brain damage.

Guy Lewis had wanted her saved-had begged me to save her. I had to try.

Incapable of walking, I crawled over to her on my hands and knees. I checked her airways and began administering CPR. Knowing from experience that adrenaline can fuel a man, giving him fleeting but inhuman strength, I held back deliberately, hoping not to break her ribs or do more damage in my desperate attempt to revive her.

I don't know how long I worked at it. A minute? Two? Several? There was no sense of time. Behind me, I heard the ominous crackle of hungry flames biting into tinder-dry wood, but I concentrated solely on what I was doing. At last Tanya's breast heaved, and her eyelids fluttered open.

By then the heat was more intense. I pulled her to her feet. "Come on. We have to move farther away."

She tried to take a step or two, but then she stumbled and fell. I had caught my second wind, so I picked her up and carried her again, running another twenty or thirty yards beyond where we had first come to rest. There, I felt I could lay her on the ground in relative safety.

"Stay here," I ordered. "Don't move."

She nodded weakly and made no effort to rise. I turned back toward the house, thinking that now maybe I'd go drag Guy Lewis from the wreckage. But even as I looked, I realized that the fire was much worse than I expected. It was already too late.

The burning couch had landed on what was left of the shattered porch, and the aged wood exploded in flame like so much tinder-dry kindling. Fed by fallen cedar-shake shingles, the entire front of the house was now a roaring inferno. Not only was the house itself fully involved; so was the pile of wood and rubble that had rained down on the two parked cars. On the parked cars and Guy Lewis.

I started forward, screaming at the top of my lungs. "Guy! Guy Lewis! Can you hear me? Get the hell out of there now. It's going to blow!"

The next explosion came even as I screamed out the warning. The gas tank of the Miata must have been broken or damaged by a falling beam. The Mazda went up first in a giant, eye-singeing fireball. I stood there stunned-seeing the flames, feeling the heat of them, and knowing for sure that Guy Lewis was a dead man. There was no way to get him out. No way to help.

My only hope then, as now, was that maybe Guy Lewis was already dead by the time the flames reached him. Otherwise, wouldn't he have screamed or cried out? Wouldn't I have heard him? Or were my ears still too damaged and traumatized by the noise of the preceding explosions? I don't know. Won't ever know.

I wonder about that sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm lying wide awake, when I'm haunted by the idea that it's my fault, my responsibility, that Guy Lewis is dead. After all, I'm the one who sent him on the fool's errand. He was out of danger and would have been perfectly safe if I hadn't sent him to the car phone to make that deadly 911 call.

Maybe it's a good thing that I'll never know for sure.

By then I could hear sounds of sirens in the background. I knew help was coming, but it would be too little and far too late. The second rocking explosion took me by surprise. For a moment, I was too disoriented to realize exactly what had happened, but finally I did.

The Porsche had gone up in a roar of flames. Anne Corley's beloved Guard-red 928-my 928-was a thing of the past.

Filled with a surge of blinding anguish and bellowing with rage, I spun on my heel and went looking for Tanya Dunseth.

Fortunately, the medics reached Tanya Dunseth before I did. They carted her off to the relative safety of the hospital. For a while, I was part of a small crowd that stood around gaping and watching the fire and the fire fighters who were dealing with it.

Even though there was no point in trying to save the house itself, there was still plenty for the overworked fire fighters to do. For one thing, they set up a safety perimeter and kept everyone well on the other side of it.

Since no one knew how much propane remained in the tank, there was still some danger of another BLEVE. A Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion, the fire fighter's worst nightmare. When BLEVEs happen, they are eruptive killers that take out both fire personnel and unsuspecting bystanders.

The farmhouse itself was clearly a total loss, so they let that burn to a cinder while attempting to keep the flames confined to that one building. Because of the tinder-dry conditions in the surrounding grasslands and forests, they didn't want the fire to get away from them; to spread to outbuildings or to that collection of junked cars with its supply of highly combustible dead tires.

Being careful to stay out of the way, I nonetheless spoke to several police officers-Jackson County sheriff's deputies this time. This may have been rural Pacific Northwest, timber-and-wine country, but they let me know that a professional arson investigator from Medford, a guy by the name of Darryl Dandridge, was already en route to the scene. Although it would be days before the ashes cooled enough for sifting, the investigator would be taking statements from any and all eyewitnesses.

Soon after Dandridge arrived, one of the deputies took it upon himself to introduce us. As a consequence, he started his investigation with me. In the course of answering the series of questions, I soon realized that Darryl Dandridge was working on a theory about how the fire might have been ignited by someone who was outside the house at the time. When I happened to mention the presence of that old-fashioned telephone, I thought the guy was going to haul off and kiss me. Darryl acted as though I had handed him an outright gift.

Once he explained the mechanics of it, we both realized that someone who wasn't Tanya Dunseth must have been involved. There was no way to tell for sure about Tanya's possible involvement. If she was part of it, whoever placed the call couldn't have known that Tanya had been overcome by the gas and was about to become a victim of her own fire. If she wasn't, then she, too, had been an intended victim.

I spent almost an hour talking with the arson investigator. About the time we finished, a 1967 Mercury Montego convertible pulled into the yard. Gordon Fraymore, dressed in khaki shirt and pants and wearing both a fishing hat and vest, climbed out of the car. He spoke to several people-fire and police personnel both-before sauntering over to me.