The Winter Lodge Read online

  “Other than these clothes,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s focus on today. On right now. We’ll deal with things one by one.”

  “I’m all ears. See, I don’t know the drill. No idea what happens after the house burns down.”

  “You make a new start,” he said. “That’s what.”

  His words took hold of her. For the first time since Gram died, she began to see the situation in a new light. Drowning in grief, she had focused on the fact that she was all alone now. Rourke’s comment caused a paradigm shift. Alone became independent. She had never experienced that before. When her grandfather died, she’d been needed at the bakery. After her grandmother’s stroke, she’d been needed at home. Following her own path had never been an option...until now. But here was something so terrible, she wished she could hide it from herself—she was afraid of independence. She might screw up and it would be all her fault.

  * * *

  Although she’d stood around the previous day and watched her house burn, even feeling warmth from the embers, she felt a fresh wave of shock when she got out of the car. With all the equipment gone, there was nothing but the scaly black skeleton surrounded by a moat of trampled mud, now frozen into hard chunks and ridges.

  “What happened to the garage?” she asked.

  “A pumper backed into it. It’s a good thing we got your car out yesterday.”

  The loss barely registered with her. It seemed minuscule in the face of everything else. She could only shake her head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, patting her shoulder a bit awkwardly. “The fire investigators will be here soon, and you can have a look around.”

  She felt an unpleasant chill. “Are you thinking this fire was set deliberately?”

  “This is standard. If things don’t add up for the fire investigator, he’ll call for an arson investigation. The insurance adjuster said he’d be here soon. First thing he’ll do is give you a debit card so you can get the basics.”

  She nodded, though a shudder went through her. A swath of black-and-yellow tape surrounded the house at the property line.

  Seeing the house was like probing a fresh wound. The place was a grotesque mutation of its former self. Against the pale morning sky, it resembled a crude charcoal drawing. The porch, once a white smile of railing across the front of the house, had blackened and blistered into nothing. A couple of tenuous beams leaned crazily out over the yard. There was no front door to speak of. All the remaining windows were shattered.

  The plumbing formed a strange, Terminator-like skeleton from which everything else had burned away. In the charred ruins, she could pick out the kitchen—the heart of the house. Her grandparents had been frugal people, but they had splurged on a double-door commercial fridge and a huge double oven. More than five decades ago, Gram had created her first commercial baked goods right in that kitchen.

  The upstairs was down now, for the most part, and some of the downstairs was in the basement. Jenny could see straight through to the backyard fence, now a field of snow, including a rippled blanket of white over the garden bed. Throughout Gram’s life, the garden had been her pride and joy. After her grandmother’s stroke, Jenny had worked hard to keep it the way it was, a glorious and artful profusion of flowers and vegetables.

  The high-pressure stream from the firefighters’ hoses had criss-crossed the yard in clean, arching swaths. The spray had formed icicles on the back fence and gate, turning the backyard into a sculpture garden.

  Heavy boots had tamped down the snow on the perimeter of the property. The entire area smelled of wet charcoal, a harsh and stinging assault on the nostrils.

  “I don’t even know where to begin,” she said. “Interesting question, huh? When you lose everything you own in a fire, what’s the first thing you buy?”

  “A toothbrush,” he said simply, as if the answer was obvious.

  “I’ll make a note of that.”

  “There’s a method. The adjuster will hook you up with a salvage company, and they’ll walk you through the process.”

  Cars trolled past slowly. She could feel the sting of gawking eyes. People always stared at other people’s troubles and breathed a sigh of relief, grateful it wasn’t them.

  Jenny put on protective gear and followed the fire investigator and insurance adjuster up a plank that sloped up to the threshold of the front door in place of the ruined steps. She could pick out the layout of the rooms, could see the filthy remains of familiar furniture and possessions. The whole place had been transformed into alien territory.

  She was the alien. She didn’t recognize herself as she tonelessly responded to questions about her routine the night before. She answered questions until her head was about to explode. They ran through all the usual scenarios. She hadn’t fallen asleep smoking in bed. The only sin she’d committed was unintentional and inadvertent. She tried to detach herself, pretend it was someone else explaining that she’d been up late working at her computer. That she’d felt as if she were about to jump out of her skin, so she went to the bakery, knowing someone would be there on the early-morning shift. She answered their questions as truthfully as possible—no, she didn’t recall leaving any appliances on, not the coffeemaker, hair dryer, toaster oven. She had not left a burner on, hadn’t forgotten a burning candle, couldn’t even recall where she kept a supply of kitchen matches. (Under the sink, one of the investigator’s techs informed her.) Her grandmother used to take votive candles to church, lighting row upon row in front of the statue of Saint Casimir, patron of both Poland and of bachelors.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  “Miss?” the fire investigator prodded her.

  “I did it,” she said. “The fire’s my fault. My grandmother had a tin box filled with things from Poland—letters, recipes, articles she’d clipped. The night of the fire, I was... I couldn’t sleep so I was doing some research for my column. I got it out, and—oh, God.” She stopped, feeling sick with guilt.

  “And what?” he prompted.

  “I used a flashlight that night. Its batteries were dead so I took the ones out of the smoke detector in the kitchen and forgot to put them back. I disabled the smoke alarm.”

  Rourke seemed unconcerned. “You wouldn’t be the first to do that.”

  “But that means the fire was my fault.”

  “A smoke alarm only works when there’s someone to hear it,” Rourke pointed out. “Even if it had been wailing all night, the house would have burned. You weren’t present to hear the alarm, so it didn’t matter.”

  Oh, she wanted him to be right. She wanted not to be responsible for destroying the house. “I’ve heard that alarm go off,” she said. “It’s loud enough to wake the neighbors, if it’s working.”

  “It’s not your fault, Jen.”

  She thought of the tin box filled with irreplaceable documents and writings on onionskin paper. Gone now, forever. She felt as though she’d lost her grandmother all over again. Trying to hold herself together, she studied the fireplace, picturing the Christmases they’d shared in this house. She hadn’t used the fireplace since before her grandmother had died.

  Gram used to get so cold, she claimed only a cheery fire in the hearth could warm her. “I used to wrap her up like a ko-lache,” Jenny said, thinking aloud about how she and Gram had giggled as Jenny tucked layer after layer of crocheted afghan around the frail little body. “But she just kept shivering and I couldn’t get her to stop.” Then her face was tucked against Rourke’s shoulder, and it hurt to pull in a breath of air, the effort scraping her lungs.

  She felt an awkward pat on the back. Rourke probably hadn’t counted on finding his arms full of female despair this morning. Rumor had it he knew exactly what to do with a woman, but she suspected the rumors applied to sexy, attractive, willing women. That was
the only type he ever dated, as far as she could tell. Not that she was keeping track, but it was hard to ignore. More frequently than she cared to admit, she’d spotted him taking some stacked bimbo to the train station to get the early train to the city.

  “...go outside,” Rourke was saying in her ear. “We can do this another time.”

  “No.” She straightened up, pulled herself together, even forced a brave smile. What sort of person was she, thinking like that under these circumstances? She gave him a gentle slug on the upper arm, which seemed to be made of solid rock. “Excellent shoulder to cry on, Chief.”

  He joined her obvious attempt to lighten things up. “To protect and serve. Says so right on my badge.”

  She faced the fire investigator, brushing at her cheeks. “Sorry. I guess I needed a breakdown break.”

  “I understand, miss. The loss of a home is a major trauma. We advise an evaluation with a counselor as soon as possible.” He handed her a business card. “Dr. Barrett in Kingston comes highly recommended. Main thing is, don’t make any major decisions for a while. Take it slow.”

  She slipped the card into her back pocket. It was amazing that she could slip anything into that pocket. The borrowed jeans were constricting her in places she didn’t know she had. The tour continued and somehow she managed to hold it together despite the enormity of her loss. In less than a month, she’d lost Gram, and now the house where she had lived every day of her life.

  The official determination had yet to be made, but both the investigator and even the suspicious insurance adjuster seemed to agree that the fire had started in the crawlspace of the attic. Very likely faulty wiring had been the cause. The Sniffer had detected no accelerant and there were no obvious signs of deliberate mischief.

  “What next?” she asked the adjuster, exhausted after the tour of the ruins. She wondered if this was what the aftermath of battle was like, picking over the remains of something that had been whole and alive, vibrant with houseplants, family photos on the walls, mementos of milestones and gifts exchanged for birthdays and Christmases, one-of-a-kind keepsakes like handwritten recipes and old letters.

  The adjuster pointed out her computer, which lay amid a pile of ugly, scorched upholstery with batting that burst out of the melted holes like entrails.

  “That your laptop?” he asked.

  “Yes.” It was closed, the top blistered.

  “We can have a technician check it out. The hard drive might have survived.”

  Doubtful, though. He didn’t say so, but she could read it in his face. All her data was gone—WordPerfect files, financial records, photo albums, addresses, e-mail, the bakery’s QuickBooks. Her book project. She kept backups, but stored them in the drawers of a desk that was now a pile of ashes.

  Her shoulders slumped at the thought of trying to reconstruct everything.

  “She’s a writer,” Rourke told the investigator.

  “Really?” The man looked intrigued. “You don’t say. What do you write?”

  Jenny felt sheepish. She always did when people asked about her writing. Her dream was so big, so impossible, that sometimes she felt she had no right to it. She—small-town, uneducated Jenny Majesky, wanted to be a writer. It was one thing to publish a weekly recipe column, fantasizing in private about something bigger and better, yet quite another to own up to her ambitions to a stranger.

  “I do a recipe column for the local paper,” she mumbled.

  “Come on, Jen,” Rourke prodded. “You always said you’d write a book one day. A bestseller.”

  She couldn’t believe he remembered that—or that he’d say so in front of this guy.

  “I’m working on it,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

  “Yeah? I’ll have to look for it in the bookstore,” the adjuster remarked.

  “You’ll be looking for a long time,” she told him ruefully. “I’m not published.” She sent Rourke a burning look. Blabbermouth. What was he thinking, telling her dreams to a total stranger?

  She figured it was because Rourke didn’t take her seriously. Didn’t think she had a snowball’s chance. She was a bakery owner in a small mountain town. She would probably always be a bakery owner, hunched over the bookkeeping or growing old and crusty at the counter of the store, maybe even learning to call customers “doll” and “hon.”

  “What?” Rourke demanded after the adjuster went to his car. “What’s that look?”

  “You didn’t have to say anything about the book.”

  “Why not?” His guileless expression was infuriating. “What’s got your panties in a twist?” he asked.

  The fact that they were men’s boxers was one problem, but she didn’t say anything. “Bestseller,” she muttered. “How stupid would it look if I went around telling people, ‘I’m writing a bestseller.’”

  He looked genuinely mystified. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s totally presumptuous. I write, okay? That’s all. It’s up to the people who buy books to make something a bestseller.”

  “Now you’re splitting hairs. It’s giving me a headache. You once told me that publishing a book would be a dream come true for you.”

  He really didn’t get it. “It is a dream,” she told him fiercely. “It’s the dream.”

  “I didn’t know it was some big secret.”

  “It’s not. It just isn’t something I go around blabbing to every Tom, Dick and Harry. It’s...to me, it’s something sacred. I don’t need to broadcast it.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Because if it doesn’t happen, I’ll look like an idiot.”

  He threw back his head and guffawed.

  She had a clear memory of herself fresh out of school, poised to leave town, telling people, “Next time you see my face, it’ll be on a book jacket.” And she’d truly believed that. “This is not some joke,” she said tightly.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “When was the last time you thought someone was an idiot for going for her dream?”

  “I don’t think that way.”

  He smiled at her. There was such kindness in his face that she felt her resentment fading. “Jenny. Nobody thinks that way. And the more people you tell your dream to, the more real it’s going to seem to you.”

  She couldn’t help smiling back. “You sound like a greeting card.”

  He chuckled. “Busted. It was on a card I got for my last birthday.”

  There was something about the way he was sticking so close by her. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” she asked. “Some police-chiefing to do here in Sin City?” She gestured at Maple Street, still pristine under its mantle of new-fallen snow.

  “I need to be right here with you,” he said simply.

  “To pick up the pieces if I fall apart.”

  “You’re not going to fall apart.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  He grinned again. “You’ve got a bestseller to write.”

  She thought about the ruined, blistered laptop. “Uh-huh. Here’s the thing, Rourke. The project I’ve been working on...it wasn’t on a hard drive. It was all there.” She indicated the blackened skeleton of the house, now a smoldering ruin. She felt physically sick when she thought of the box of her grandmother’s recipes and writings, which Jenny had so carelessly left on the kitchen table. Now those one-of-a-kind papers were lost forever, along with photographs and mementos of her grandparents’ lives. “I might as well give up,” she said.

  “Nope,” said Rourke. “If you quit writing because of a fire, then it probably wasn’t something you wanted that bad in the first place.” He took a step closer to her. He smelled of shaving soap and cold air. He was careful not to touch her here in broad daylight with people swarming everywhere. Yet the probing way he regarded her felt like an inti
mate caress. He was probably still mortified by the picture on the front page of the paper. She was not exactly lingerie model material.

  Then he did touch her, though not to pull her into his embrace. Instead, he took her by the shoulders and turned her to look at the burned-out house. “Look, the stories you need to write aren’t there,” he said. “They never were. You’ve already got them in your head. You just need to write them down, the way you’ve always done.”

  She nodded, trying her best to believe him, but the effort exhausted her. Everything exhausted her. She had a pounding headache that felt as though her brain was about to explode. “You weren’t kidding,” she said to Rourke, “about this being a busy day.”

  “You doing all right?” he asked her. “Still a five?”

  She was surprised he remembered that. “I’m too confused to feel anxious.”

  “The good news is, everyone’s breaking for lunch.”

  “Thank God.”

  They got in the car and he said, “Where to? The bakery? Back home to rest?”

  Home, she thought ruefully. “I’m homeless, remember?”

  “No, you’re not. You’re staying with me, for as long as it takes.”

  “Oh, that’ll look good. The chief of police shacking up with a homeless woman.”

  He grinned and started the car. “I’ve heard worse gossip than that in this town.”

  “I’m calling Nina. I can stay with her.”

  “She’s out of town at that mayors’ seminar, remember?”

  “I’ll call Laura.”

  “Her place is the size of a postage stamp.”

  He was right. Laura was content in a tiny apartment by the river, and Jenny didn’t relish the thought of squeezing in there. “Then I’ll use this debit card at a B&B—”

  “Hey, will you cut it out? It’s not like I’m Norman Bates. You’re staying with me, end of story.”

  She shifted in her seat to stare at him, amazed by his ease with the situation.