Susan Wiggs - The Hostage

Armageddon had arrived, she thought. And Satan himself had come to escort her through the flames. To what purpose, she had no idea. Terror swept through her with the same swift and unrelenting fury of the firestorm.

Caught up in the flow of humanity, they surged with the crowd past grand buildings and residences with flames shooting out of the windows. Bundles of blankets were being dropped from upper storeys. To her horrified amazement, she realized that the hastily bound bundles of mattresses and bedding contained valuables. And some of them, insanely, contained children.

A little girl in a red nightgown fought her way free of one of the bundles and raced blindly into the street, wailing in terror. Panic-stricken, she headed into the path of a careening express wagon.

The wild man made a sound of impatience. He dropped Deborah’s arm and plunged into the middle of the road, snatching up the child with a single bear-paw swipe. Moving quickly for a creature of such immense size, he bore the crying child to the walkway.

For a moment Deborah was so surprised that she simply froze, though rushing people jostled her. Dear heaven, a kidnaper. He was a deadly madman, preying upon helpless women and children.

Deborah watched as he set the hysterical child on his shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed a black wrought iron light post and stepped up on its concrete base, rising high above the throng. The girl in red waved her arms frantically, and a man with a sweat-stained face broke free of the crowd and rushed toward her.

“Poppa,” the little girl squealed as the looter surrendered her to her father.

Deborah gathered her wits about her, covered her bare head with her shawl to conceal her blond hair and plunged into the thick of the crowd. She had no thought but to flee, to lose herself in the ocean of humanity surging through the streets. The maelstrom of noise thundered so loudly that her senses seemed to shut down, filtering out the chaos. Her only awareness was of the thin, high-pitched sound that came unbidden from her own throat. She had never seen a rabbit hunted down by a wolf, but knew now what the rabbit sounded like, felt like, when fleeing a predator. Two days ago she had understood her life. She had known who she was and where she fit in. And if, from time to time, she had felt a small, traitorous prodding of discontent, she had quelled it easily enough by reminding herself of all the unearned privileges she enjoyed. The past two days had disengaged her from that comfortable spot like a snail being pried from its shell. And like the snail she was uprooted, lost in an alien world, longing to crawl back into her shell but unable to find the way back.

She forced herself to look ahead to the open square of the intersection. Hurrying in that direction, she slammed into a stout, screaming woman wearing a housekeeper’s black muslin dress and a white lace cap. With a feather duster clutched in her hand, she stood paralyzed by terror except for the misshapen, screaming mouth. Instinctively Deborah grabbed the woman’s hand and propelled her along the walkway. She felt a strong urge to rush away, but the frightened woman clung to her. Ahead of them, a man pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow slowed their progress.

Deborah spoke aloud, but she couldn’t even hear herself. She gritted her teeth and sucked in breath after breath of the hot, filthy air. They reached an intersection where the crowd thickened. A runaway cart, driverless and pulled by a panic-stricken horse, careened into the crowd. Deborah felt the maid’s hand torn from her own, and for a moment a gap separated them. Then a flood of people flowed into the gap, engulfing the lost woman, and Deborah could only go on.

She recognized the street that ran along the edge of the Catholic cemetery. Two blocks beyond that lay the lakefront park. People hurried faster, eager to reach the safety of the water. Deborah kept her head down, the shawl pulled up over her hair. She darted glances here and there, praying the wild man would not see her. Perhaps she had managed to elude him. If so, it was the only lucky thing that had happened to her in days.

She wondered what in heaven’s name the man could have been thinking. What would prompt him to burst upon her father, intent on murdering him in the midst of a catastrophe? Her father had assumed the man was a looter. No doubt there was plenty of that going on in the city tonight. But the insane man had not shown any interest in robbing the Sinclair house. He seemed focused only on killing her father. He had known her father’s name. Had mentioned a place…an island?

The memory of the intruder made her recoil, and bitter bile rose in her throat. She fought down the need to be sick, wishing, not for the first time in her life, that she was made of sterner stuff. No one had ever taught her how to contend with matters such as how to escape an insane murderer in the midst of a fire of Biblical proportions. Or how to find her father, borne God-knew-where in a runaway carriage. Or how to survive the night.

Each time she heard the clop of hooves or the grind of cart wheels, she checked to see if it was her father. But she never saw him. She could do no more than hope he had brought the team under control and headed toward the lake. From there, he would travel northward to his summer estate. The trouble was, the streets were clogged with fallen rubble and fleeing people. Landmarks crumbled even as she passed.

She wondered what he thought had become of her. In the sudden confusion of the collapsing roof, the gunman and the spooked horses, he might be imagining any number of fates. She hoped madly that he had not tried to fight his way back to the house on Huron Avenue to search for her. The whole district, once a tree-lined bastion of fashionable mansions, was now engulfed in flames.

“I’ll be all right, Father,” she said under her breath, then nearly choked on the irony of her own words. “If tonight doesn’t kill me, I’ll be all right.” She intended to get to the lakeshore and work her way northward. Perhaps she would find a driver to take her to the summer place. She would find her father at Avalon. She had to believe that.

She hoped he would believe it, too. But there was no reason for him to consider her capable of surviving. Arthur Sinclair had raised her to be as useless and ornamental as a rose in a corn patch. All she was and all she knew were those things useful to the wife of a wealthy man. She was known to be accomplished, according to the glowing reports from Miss Boylan’s. But those accomplishments had to do with ballroom dancing or doing needlepoint or reciting poetry in French. None of which was likely to help her survive the fire destroying a whole city.

Her thin-soled Italian shoes were not made for trudging any distance, and her feet quickly grew blistered and sore on the rubble-strewn roadway. She had little sense of direction, having been chauffeured all her life, so she simply followed the general direction of the surging mob. A man leading a brace of horses thrust her aside. Something in the way he pushed at her shoulder made her jump back and scream with panic, slamming against a building. She shut her eyes as the horses passed, telling herself to calm down.

At a fork in the road, she saw people rushing along each branch of the split. A decision. She had to make a decision. What a remarkably novel notion.

She had no idea which was the quickest path to the lake. It was dark up ahead, indicating that the fire had not yet reached the north shore. For no particular reason, she took the left branch and found herself hurrying in a crowd of people, some of them in nightclothes, their arms burdened with hastily snatched possessions, their sooty faces pinched with fright. No one had been prepared for a fire of this speed and intensity.