Charlotte's Homecoming. Janice Johnson Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ but she was in a solitary mood.

      She’d put her questions out of her mind, too. Right now, she didn’t want to think about why she felt something was missing from the life she’d carved for herself. She just wanted to be.

      Rather than go out the front door, which looked toward the highway, Charlotte went through the kitchen. Rows and rows of jars still sat along the countertop, the glass reflecting glints of moonlight falling through the kitchen windows. Without turning on the overhead or porch light, she stepped out the back door, the screen door creaking as she let it snap shut behind her.

      The night air was as cool as she’d hoped, but with her first breath, she smelled smoke. Her head turned sharply. What was burning? Even as she hurried toward the corner of the house, her mind tried to find a good reason for a midnight fire. A woodstove? Not on a hot August day. Slash burning on cleared land, even just a neighbor who’d cut out blackberry vines. No, she’d seen the sign announcing a burn ban out in front of the fire station. And besides, she hadn’t smelled a fire when she’d gone to bed at ten or so. She rounded the house and stopped dead.

      Flames crawled up the side of the barn.

      Charlotte gasped, whirled around and ran back the way she’d come, stumbling once and barely noticing the pain. She flung herself up the couple of steps and through the kitchen.

      At the bottom of the stairs, she bellowed, “Faith! Wake up! The barn’s on fire!” She wheeled again and raced for the kitchen, grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. “Barn’s on fire,” she gasped and gave the address before dropping the telephone and bolting back outside. Heart pounding, she ran.

      The fire had already leaped higher, toward the roof, but it wasn’t huge yet. Oh, God—as old as this barn was, the wood was the perfect tinder. She’d done the watering tonight, and knew exactly where she’d dropped the nozzle and where the faucet was. She turned it on full blast and aimed the nozzle toward the barn wall. Even when she pulled the hose out taut, the stream barely reached the fire, and she could see that it wouldn’t be enough, but she kept spraying, above, around, below.

      The house lights had sprung on behind her, and Faith wasn’t a minute behind her, running in some kind of thin nightgown and flip-flops like Charlotte’s.

      “You called 9-1-1?” she yelled as she ran past, and Charlotte yelled back, “Yes!”

      There was another faucet round back, Charlotte remembered, but a minute, two minutes, passed before a second stream of water joined hers. Faith had probably had to hook up a hose.

      The scream of the siren wasn’t far behind. They were lucky, so lucky, that the volunteer fire station was less than half a mile away. The first truck roared in, the headlights spotlighting Charlotte but not her sister, who was behind the barn. She kept the stream of water aimed at the barn even as the firemen ran toward her pulling a hose that made hers look like a child’s toy.

      “Get back, ma’am, please get back!” she was told, and she let the nozzle fall from her shaking hand.

      Adrenaline roaring through her, she backed away and kept backing until she felt mown grass under her feet again. She was hugging herself when Faith reached her and they grabbed each other and held on, neither of them looking away from the fiery scene and the eerie sight of water soaring in great arcs to cascade down over their 100-year-old barn and the licking flames.

      “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” Faith moaned.

      “Everything inside will be wet,” Charlotte whispered.

      Faith whimpered and buried her face briefly against her sister’s neck, then lifted her head again as if she couldn’t stand not to watch her dreams burn.

      The smell now was stomach-turning: smoke and the wet, charred odor of a campfire doused in water. Something else, too, Charlotte thought in one corner of her mind. Gasoline, maybe from the fire trucks?

      The fire sank back quickly, not big enough to defy a drowning. Faith and Charlotte clung to each other and kept watching as firemen prowled outside and stepped through the hole burned in the side of the barn to check, presumably, for hidden embers.

      Eventually, one of the firemen, bulky in a cumbersome yellow suit, crossed the yard.

      “Faith, is that you?”

      “Yes, and Charlotte, too. Char, you remember Tim Crawford?”

      She nodded. “Of course I do. I’m … um, really glad you got here so quick, Tim.”

      He’d been one—two?—years ahead of them, and best friends with Jay Bridges, quarterback, whom Faith had gone with her freshman year. Charlotte had liked Tim better than Jay, not that either of them were her type.

      “We’re confident we’ve got the fire out,” Tim was saying. “It’s real lucky one of you noticed it before the whole barn was engaged.”

      “I couldn’t sleep,” Charlotte said. “I was just going to come out and sit on the back steps and admire the stars. But I smelled smoke the moment I got outside.”

      “Lucky,” he said again, nodding. “Five, ten more minutes, you’d have lost the barn.”

      A shudder ran through Faith. Charlotte tightened her arms around her sister.

      “How do you think it started?” Charlotte asked.

      “It’s arson,” he said bluntly. “Can’t you smell the gasoline? And I know it’s hard to see the smoke at night like this, but it was black. I’m going to make sure someone is out here in the morning to talk to you about it.”

      “Can we, um, look inside?” Faith asked shakily.

      Sounding kind, he said, “Why don’t you wait until daylight? Get a good night’s sleep. Didn’t look like that much damage to me.”

      “Oh.” Faith nodded, and kept nodding. “Oh, okay.”

      “Thanks, Tim,” Charlotte said, and steered her sister toward the house. Behind them, the volunteer firemen were reeling in their hoses and climbing aboard the two trucks. Engines started before the two women reached the house.

      In the kitchen, Charlotte said, “I don’t know about you, but I want a drink. Do you have anything?”

      “Daddy keeps some bourbon up top of the refrigerator, but I’d settle for tea.” Faith sank into a kitchen chair as if her legs had just failed her. “In a minute. When I can stand up again.”

      Charlotte shook her head. “I’ll make it.” She thought wistfully about a slug of the bourbon but instead got down two mugs, plopped in tea bags, filled them with water and stuck them in the microwave. One minute later, and the water was hot. Without asking Faith, she added more sugar than she liked to one of the mugs, then carried them both to the table.

      “Thank you.” Faith smiled wanly at her. Soot streaked her face, which was paler than it ought to be considering she had a good tan. Her thin nightgown had gotten a blast of water at some point and clung revealingly to her. Below the hem, her feet were filthy.

      Charlotte looked down and realized she looked just as awful. Her feet were not only filthy, but one of her toes was also bloody. She had a vague memory of stubbing it. “You know I had three showers today?” she said. “And СКАЧАТЬ