Before the Storm. Diane Chamberlain

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СКАЧАТЬ you see anyone else outside beside the person on fire?” the agent asked.

      “Emily.”

      “Okay. So you went back in.”

      “You went back in, Andy?” I repeated, wondering whatever possessed him to reenter the burning church.

      Andy nodded. “I climbed on the metal box and got into the boys’ room and then called for everyone to follow me.”

      “And they did?” the agent asked.

      “Did they what?”

      “Follow you?”

      “Not exactly. I let some of them, like my friend Layla, go first.” He pulled the cannula from his nostrils and looked at me. “Do I still have to wear this?”

      “A little longer,” I said. “Until the nurse comes back and says you can take it off.”

      “So you let Layla go out the window first?” Agent Foley nudged.

      “And some other kids. Then I followed them. But some were still following me, too.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s hard to explain.”

      “You’re doing fine, sweetie,” I said.

      “How did you know the…metal box was there?” the agent asked.

      “I don’t remember.”

      “Try to remember,” I said.

      “I saw it when I went to the bathroom.”

      “When was that?” the agent asked.

      “When I had to pee.”

      Agent Foley gave up, closing his notepad with the flick of a wrist.

      “Sounds like you are a hero, Andy,” he said.

      “I know.”

      The agent motioned me to follow him. We walked outside the curtained cubicle. He looked at me curiously.

      “What’s his, uh, disability?” he asked. “Brain injury?”

      “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder,” I said, the words as familiar to me as my own name.

      “Really?” He looked surprised, glancing over my shoulder as though he could see through the curtain. “Don’t those kids usually…you know, have a look to them?”

      “Not always,” I said. “Depends on what part of them was developing when the alcohol affected them.”

      “You’re his adoptive mother then?”

      The police on Topsail Island know me and they know Andy and they know our story. An ATF agent in Wilmington, though, was a world away.

      “No, I’m his biological mother,” I said. “Sober fifteen years.”

      His smile was small. Tentative. Finally he spoke. “You’ve got a year on me,” he said. “Congratulations.”

      “You, too.” I smiled back.

      “So—” he looked down at his closed notepad “—how much of what he says can I believe?”

      “All of it,” I said with certainty. “Andy’s honest to a fault.”

      “He’s an unusual kid.” He looked over my shoulder again.

      “You don’t need to tell me that.”

      “No, I mean, in a fire, seventy-five percent of the people try to get out the front door. That’s their first reaction. They’re like a flock of sheep. One starts in that direction and they all follow. The other twenty-five percent look for an alternate exit. A back door. Bash open a window. Who’s the bald-headed guy he was talking about?”

      “I have no idea.”

      “Anyway, so Andy here goes for the window in the men’s room. Strange choice, but turns out to be the right one.”

      “Well,” I said, “kids like Andy don’t think like that first seventy-five percent, or even the twenty-five percent. It was sheer luck. He could just as easily have gone for…I don’t know, the ladies’ room window, let’s say, and still be stuck there.” I hugged my arms across my chest at the thought. “Do you know if everyone got out okay? I heard rumors that some didn’t.”

      He shook his head. “This was a bad one,” he said. “Last report, three dead.”

      I sucked in my breath, hand to my mouth. “Oh, no.” Some parents wouldn’t have the luxury of hearing their children tell what happened tonight. “Do you know who?” I thought of Keith. Of Marcus.

      “No names yet,” he said. “Two of the kids and one adult is all I know. A lot of serious burns and smoke inhalation. This E.R.’s packed tight as a can of sardines.”

      “What’s the metal box?” I asked.

      “The AC unit. Whoever laid the fire skipped around it.”

      “Whoever…You’re saying this was arson?”

      He held up a hand as if to erase his words. “Not for me to say.”

      “I know there was an electrical problem at the youth building. Could that have affected the church?”

      “There’ll be a full investigation,” he said.

      “Is that why you asked Andy if he saw anyone else outside the church?”

      “Like I said, there’ll be a full investigation,” he repeated, and I knew that would now be his answer, no matter what question I asked.

      I opened the curtain around Andy’s bed once I returned to his cubicle, and noticed a man sitting on the edge of a bed on the other side of the room. His head was bandaged and his T-shirt-clad broad shoulders drooped. When he looked up to say something to his nurse, the movement made him wince. I recognized the dark hair, the thick-lashed brown eyes. He passed a tremulous hand over his face and I saw the sheen of tears on his cheek.

      Andy’s nurse was listening to his lungs. She asked him to breathe deeply. To cough. I took that moment to whisper to Maggie.

      “Ben Trippett’s over there,” I said. Ben was a volunteer firefighter, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He was also Andy’s swim-team coach and I wasn’t sure how Andy would react to seeing him there, injured and upset.

      Maggie started as if I’d awakened her from a dream, then followed my gaze to the other side of the room. She knew Ben fairly well, since she coached the younger kids’ swim team.

      Maggie got up, and before I could stop her, walked across the room toward Ben. He’d be embarrassed that we’d seen him crying, but Maggie was seventeen and I had to let her make her own errors in judgment. Her back was to me as she greeted Ben and I couldn’t see СКАЧАТЬ