Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

His quiet gravity, the way he addressed them as adults and listened with genuine interest to what they had to say, the easy concern he showed when they were worried, the kindness when they were peevish or tired had won them over with a stunning rapidity. Another reason to proceed with caution: should she and Marshall separate, hers would not be the only heart broken. She pushed the glittering diamond back toward him. “Much as I would like to, I cannot,” she said simply. “This is too much, too soon.”

“Keep the ring. Think about it. Please. These chances don’t come often. For most people they never come.”

His urgency had the quality of a man who knows he’s dying-and wants to collect the brass ring before the Grim Reaper collects him.

“Maybe we should take a breather,” she said. “Take a little time apart. I need to collect my thoughts.” He looked so devastated, she softened her decision by saying, “A girl cannot think clearly around you, my darling.”

“Don’t reject it.” He nudged the ring back toward her. “Think about it.”

“Despite the wisdom of song and tradition, diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. Though I must admit, most women take better care of their diamonds than men do of their dogs.” Polly was trying to lighten a mood that had suddenly become fraught with storms she couldn’t see but only feel as a pressure behind her eyes.

“I will think about it,” she promised.

“Don’t think too long.”

The phone had been ringing for some time before the sound worked its way through Polly’s dreams and dragged her into the waking world. “Yes?” she said into the receiver as she felt around for her glasses.

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

Marshall. They’d not spoken in the week since he’d proposed. She switched on the bedside lamp and squinted at the clock. One-fifteen a.m. His intensity had scared her. The girls asked after him. She enjoyed her freedom. Her thoughts were only of him. Emotions hard to quantify during the day batted inside her head like birds in a chimney. “It’s late,” was all she could manage.

“I’m sorry. I woke up. I guess I heard a noise or something and… and I needed to hear your voice.” He sounded like a man who had awakened from a nightmare of hell fire and brimstone. He laughed ironically. “If you can’t stay awake, just put the phone on the pillow and let me listen to you breathing.”

A nightmare of fire and brimstone.

Polly smelled smoke. Gray-white tentacles were reaching under her bedroom door, curling up the dark wood of the door.

“Oh, my Lord!” she whispered.

“What, what is it?”

“Smoke.”

“Is the smoke alarm going off?”

Phone to her ear, Polly swung her legs from the bed and took two steps toward the door.

Like a blind hungry ghost, smoke reached for her feet. Peach-colored paint on the door began to crack, black fissures snapping through, blistering like burned skin. She opened her mouth to scream for the girls but stopped herself. If Gracie and Emma heard her voice, they would wake and try to come to her.

“Don’t open the door. Don’t hang up. I’m coming,” Marshall was saying. Polly disconnected and pushed 911.

“Please, please, please,” she murmured to whatever gods listened as she ran for the bedroom window, the phone pressed hard to her ear. “There’s a fire,” she said when the emergency dispatcher answered and gave her address.

“Get out of the house immediately,” the dispatcher said. “The fire station nearest you was flooded after Katrina and has not been reopened. The closest trucks are fifteen to twenty minutes away. Stay calm.”

The bedroom’s one window was the only way out and it had been painted shut when Polly bought the house. Without hesitation, she picked up her dressing chair and smashed the glass.

The 911 dispatcher was still talking as she threw the phone out onto the grass. Shards of glass the size and viciousness of shark’s teeth razored out from the broken mullions. She’d be gutted like a fish. Using the legs of the chair, she cleared out as much glass as she could. Behind her, all around her, she could hear the fire snickering, licking, devouring, a thinking beast that roasted and ate human flesh. Again and again she banged at the old window, its many layers of paint holding onto daggers of glass like stubborn old gums to the few remaining teeth. Screaming an obscenity she’d grounded Gracie two weeks for using she threw the chair against the wall. Spinning from the wreckage she dragged the bedspread off the bed and shoved it through the opening. Belly on the sill, Polly began pushing her body through the ruined window.

A shard raked her left shoulder. The first hot pierce of glass then the rip as it clawed into her. All Polly felt was fury that it slowed her down. Grasping fistfuls of a rhododendron bush, she wrenched herself free from the window’s jaws and fell. Stiff branches caught at her clothes and grabbed at her hair until, screaming with rage, she made it onto the lawn. Staggering to her feet, she began to run. The house was small: two bedrooms separated by a short hall, with a bathroom on one side and the living room and kitchen on the other. It was no more than forty feet from her bedroom window to that of her daughters. In true nightmare fashion, the distance lengthened. Polly felt as if she forged her way through waist-deep mud, yet when she reached the corner of the house, her speed snatched her feet from under her on the dew-wet grass and she fell.

Two feet, hands and feet, it was all one to Polly. She clawed her way through the dense wall of sharp-spiked holly she’d planted beneath the girls’ window as a natural security fence. Cupping her hands around her eyes to shut out the streetlight’s glare, she peered through the burglar bars she’d had installed on this one window so she could sleep nights, unafraid of someone creeping into her children’s room and taking them, as those girls in California and Utah had been taken.

Billowing smoke pushed down from the ceiling like alien clouds in an old science fiction movie. Wraithlike and malevolent, it poured upward in a sheet from underneath the door. Emma’s Tinkerbell nightlight flickered in and out of focus. Inanely Polly thought, Clap if you believe in fairies.

The girls were asleep, each in her own little bed.

Or dead.

The thought hit Polly’s brain with the force of a wrecking ball, and she cried out, grabbing the ornate cast iron as if she could rip the bars from their moorings. “Gracie!” she shouted. The window was open a few inches, enough to let in the breeze. Polly pressed her lips to the crack, “Emma, Gracie, wake up!”

“Momma?” came Gracie’s sleepy reply.

“Wake up, honey. We’ve got a fire in the house and we have to go outside.” Polly’s voice was higher than usual, but she sounded reassuring. “No need to panic,” she said as much to herself as her daughter.

“Momma? Where are you?” Gracie was sitting up in the bed now, staring at the smoke crawling up the far wall.

“At the window, honey. Here. That’s right. I’m going to get you out. Wake up your sister, but don’t scare her, okay?”

Polly pulled on the bars. They were iron and screwed into the side of the house. She tried to shake them. They didn’t even rattle.

“Firemen will be here in a minute,” she promised. The little house was old: shingled roof, oak floors, walls of wood and plaster. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar tinderbox.

“Gracie, stop,” Emma whined.

“Wake up, Momma said. The house is on fire.” Gracie’s voice quavered, but she was pretending not to be scared. She was being brave for her sister. Polly thought she would die of love for her. With a guttural cry that brought both children to the window, she wrenched on the bars. They didn’t so much as creak.