The Woman for Dusty Conrad Read online

  He’d slept on the sofa. Or did what Jolie had been doing curled up in the bed upstairs—pretended to sleep. And continued to do so even when he’d heard her get up at seven, readying herself for her next twenty-four-hour shift at the fire station. It wasn’t until sometime after the door had closed behind her that he’d gotten up, filled a cup with the strong coffee that she’d left for him, and headed straight upstairs to finish what he should have long ago.

  Now, as he headed downstairs for the first time in five hours, he remembered that he hadn’t thought to look for the divorce papers last night when he’d returned to the house. To check whether or not she’d signed them yet. But he did so now.

  They weren’t on the kitchen table where she had been reading through them the day before. They weren’t in the desk drawer in the cluttered office they once shared. Nor were they anywhere in the living room or dining room. It wasn’t until he’d basically given up the hunt, deciding that she must have taken them with her and in the middle of making himself a sandwich for lunch, that he found the folded papers in the silverware drawer.

  Dusty forgot about the butter knife he’d been in search of and slowly took the papers out. Why had she put them there? He smoothed them out next to his makeshift hero sandwich and stared down at the top page. Conrad v. Conrad. The words made him shudder in disgust.

  Since his return two days ago, very little about their predicament had seemed real somehow. But just reading the words brought everything back into focus. He’d officially petitioned the courts to end his marriage to the only woman he’d ever loved. To finally sever the ties that had bound them for so long, but had threatened to choke him in the end.

  He slowly turned the pages, reading them one by one. There was no mention of property division, except for a notation about equitable distribution. Aside from the house. Which he’d decided to give to Jolie once the divorce was final. He glanced around the old, familiar kitchen, remembering the Realtor’s sign he’d found out front, and his own sense of anger at discovering she’d intended to sell it.

  He’d somehow imagined Jolie living in the place forever. Growing old there. Perhaps remarrying and adopting the children they had been unable to have. Never once had he thought she’d sell the place.

  And why not? Hadn’t he been the one anxious to push the past aside and start anew? At least she had stayed in town. He…couldn’t. He’d had to leave. Old Orchard was full of too many painful reminders of what had once been. And what would never be again.

  He closed his eyes and breathed in the lingering scent of toast and coffee and crisp autumn leaves and knew he had to do what he came here to do, and then leave. The continuation of his work on the master bathroom was a way of wasting time. He’d contract out and have Branson and his company see to the work that remained. It wasn’t good for either him or Jolie for him to stay one minute longer than he had to. Because the fact was he would be going again…and this time he wouldn’t be coming back.

  Suddenly not hungry, Dusty tossed the makings of his sandwich away then closed the silverware drawer. Staring down at the unsigned papers, he folded them up and tucked them into the back pocket of his jeans. A half hour later he had cleaned up the tools he’d been using on the master bath, packed up his few items of clothing, then closed the front door after himself. A quick stop at the fire station, and he’d be on his way out of town in no time.

  He climbed into his truck. But before he could close the door, the shrill sound of a siren pierced his eardrums. He jerked to stare at the crossroads two blocks down, instantly spotting the pumper from the station. A truck Jolie would be on.

  Dusty’s gut tied into knots and he broke out in a cold sweat. Would he ever be able to hear a siren again without seeing his brother’s lifeless face? Without the image of Jolie on a stretcher, a paramedic trying adamantly to breathe life into her still lungs?

  He slammed the door and jerkily turned the key, the images and his reaction to them enough to spur him into action.

  Chapter 6

  “Get that intake line hooked up! Now!” Chief Gary Jones shouted over the roar of water from the attack lines and fire.

  Jolie leapt immediately into action as Sal strung the intake line from the hydrant on the corner of Orchard and Washington. She opened the hydrant connection to the pumper, her heart beating a million miles a minute. Her turnout gear weighed sixty-eight pounds, but after seven years with the fire department, she didn’t pay attention to the extra weight anymore. It was just part of the scenery. No firefighter went anywhere without the essentials. And that included her fire-resistant boots, fluorescent-striped coat and helmet, along with her gloves and bunker pants, while her face mask and air cylinder were nearby and easily accessible should she be called on to go inside. As it was, fellow firefighters Martinez and Holden were on search-and-rescue rotation now. She glanced at the house behind her. A familiar house she’d visited dozens of times, along with nearly every other house in the small town. A house that belonged to Angela Johansen, whom she had just spoken to at the general store just the day before. A house that would be little more than ash in five minutes flat if they couldn’t bring the fire under control. A task looking less and less likely with every passing minute. And so far they’d been on the scene for fifteen.

  “They’re still in there!” a woman shouted. “Angela and little Ellie are still in the house. Why doesn’t somebody get them out?”

  Jolie shot a glance over her shoulder, her hand slipping on the nozzle through her protective gloves. Her heart leapt up into her throat as Mrs. O’Riley came rushing from across the street, wildly waving her arms and ignoring Sheriff John Sparks and one of his deputies as they tried to stop her from rushing into the burning building.

  Jolie frantically looked back at the one-story clapboard house. Red-and-yellow flames lapped out of the two broken front windows over the porch, and gray-and-black smoke swirled up in angry eddies toward the cold, cloudless sky.

  “They’ve got two guys in there now, Mrs. O’Riley,” John was telling the hysterical woman. “If anyone can get them out, they can. You’re not going to do anyone any good if you get in the way.”

  Jolie forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. What if Martinez and Holden couldn’t get to the young family in time? Dread slunk thick and steely through her tense frame.

  She hated these fires the most. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the fires they were called on to put out weren’t serious. Contained grease fires. Somebody who hadn’t taken the wind direction into consideration while burning leaves. The odd mishap with the family grill. Most often they were called on to aid in situations that didn’t include fire at all, performing in a strictly EMS capacity. Or helping attend to other miscellaneous mishaps, like the chicken incident.

  But this…this was definitely a real fire. And that it was happening in a house that she was not only very familiar with, but that looked so very similar to the one she had grown up in but that no longer existed, the one that had claimed her parents’ lives…well, this type of fire made her heart pump doubly hard and her stomach lodge in her throat.

  Jimmying the valve switch to open the hydrant connection, she checked the gauges, then switched open the discharge gates to allow pressurized water to flow from four discharge lines. “Hoses a go!” she shouted, giving a thumbs-up in case Jones couldn’t hear her but could see her.

  She finished her task and helped Sal run the additional hoses toward the inferno. Sal took the line from her and straddled it in order to take the full pressure of it with his legs. Within moments another heavy stream of water was focused on the open door Martinez and Holden had disappeared into moments ago.

  “Hold up!” Jones shouted, waving his arms.

  Both hoses were turned immediately away toward the windows as a figure appeared in the doorway. Jolie’s heart nearly leapt straight from her chest as she noticed Martinez…and he was carrying a lifeless form over his right shoulder. He stumbled out onto the porch, then down to the g
rass, where he laid Angela Johansen’s inert form on the ground in front of him.

  The paramedics rushed forward as Martinez pushed his face mask off and dropped to his knees. Moments later, Holden came out empty-handed and knelt down next to him.

  Tires eating the cement sounded behind Jolie. She ripped her gaze away from where the paramedics were inserting a breathing tube into Angela’s trachea to find Jeff Johansen stumbling from his truck and rushing to his young wife’s side. “Angela! Oh, dear Lord, Angela!”

  “Get him back,” Chief Jones commanded.

  John Sparks grasped him by the arms when he threatened to get in the way of the paramedics. “Let them work, Jeff.”

  The expression on Jeff’s face was that of a rabid animal as his wide eyes took in the scene surrounding him. Jolie found it impossible to pull in a breath as he finally came to the conclusion she had.

  “Where’s Ellie? Where’s my little girl?” Jeff shouted over the roar of the water, fighting John’s attempts to restrain him.

  Holden shook his head. “We couldn’t find her, Jeff.”

  Jolie’s knees threatened to give out as the impact of the news hit her. She started toward Jeff, instinct telling her what he was about to do…what she would have done had she been in his position. But before she could go two steps, he jerked himself free from John’s grasp and launched himself toward the front door and the fire inside, before anyone else could catch him.

  Oh, God, no.

  Sparks started after him, but the chief caught him around the waist. “Can’t let you do that, Sheriff. Dammit, we should have stopped him from going in. I’m not letting you in there, too.”

  Jolie’s gaze darted urgently to Holden and Martinez as they struggled to get to their feet to go after Jeff, but they were in no shape to go back into the house so soon after coming out of it. A quick assessing glance told Jolie that she and the chief were the only free ones. Without hesitating, she grabbed her mask and tank and began shrugging into them.

  The chief laid a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Martinez and Holden can handle him, Jolie.”

  She steadily held his gaze. “And Ellie? If they’re going after Jeff, who’s going to continue the search for Ellie?”

  “We’ll find out what happened to her…”

  After, he’d been about to say. They were the same words he’d uttered twenty years ago when her parents had perished in the fire at their house.

  She pushed past him, barely noticing a familiar truck pulling to a stop a short way away. Dusty. She pulled the mask over her face and motioned for Sal to proceed her in with a lead hose.

  Dusty leapt from the truck as if it was on fire rather than the house, his breath trapped in his lungs, the bitter, acrid smell of the fire permeating his nose. He immediately spotted Jolie and her combative stance as she stood in front of Chief Jones in full gear.

  A quick look around the scene told him more than five minutes’ worth of conversation with any of his former colleagues. There were civilians in the house. The fire wasn’t under control yet. His gaze fastened to his soon-to-be ex-wife.

  Jolie was going in.

  Fear, swift and complete, twisted like a set of knives in his stomach. Acting on it, he sprinted across the front lawn and grasped the back of Jolie’s collar before she could launch herself mask-first into the flames.

  “You’re not going in there.”

  She stared at him through the protective face mask, her eyes round and determined, her mouth pulled tight. “Get out of my way, Dusty.”

  His glance fell to the fire ax she held and the way she had her booted feet planted shoulder-length apart. “I’m not…I can’t let you go in there.”

  An unnamable something flickered in her eyes. Confusion. Curiosity. Anger. Perhaps equal measures of all. Then she was staring at him again. “Let me go so I can do my job.”

  He began shaking his head and she moved her arm so that he was forced to release his grip. “Jolie, I—”

  “No, Dusty. What you’re feeling right now is strictly personal. And as far as I’m concerned, you gave up any right to personal when you walked away from our marriage.” She leaned closer, her voice muffled through the mask. “This is neither the time nor the place for this conversation. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Dusty was pushed to decide between bodily stopping her from entering the house, in which case he had to accept the possibility that she might flatten him, and stepping aside.

  When Sal brushed by him with the hose, the decision was made for him. He’d done all he could. Now all that was left for him was to pray that everything would be okay. That Jolie would go in the house…and come back out again. In one piece. Unharmed. And alive.

  Jolie couldn’t see a thing. The interior of the house was pitch-black and the smoke choking the hallways was thick and impenetrable. Sal passed her, keeping the water aimed at the ceiling to cool the air and creating a minirainstorm inside the hall. In a slow, progressive crouch, Jolie checked the passageway to make sure a small form wasn’t hunkered down, rendered unconscious by the smoke. Nothing. Using the head of her fire ax, she pushed open doors already left ajar by Martinez and Holden, making quick rounds of the rooms snaking off the hallway. The first bedroom, the master, she guessed, yielded nothing. No Ellie hiding under the bed or in the closet, trembling and afraid for her life.

  An image flashed behind Jolie’s eyelids. An image of herself sitting in the middle of her bed, clutching her sheets, flames licking over the sides of the mattress, smoke billowing from everywhere, it seemed, making her room seem eerily unattached from reality. A parallel universe of sorts in which no one could break through and from which she couldn’t hope to free herself.

  The scarred flesh between her knee and shin seemed to burn as if injured anew as she blinked against the image and pressed on down the hallway. Ellie’s room lay to the right. A small room, no larger than ten by ten, with white furniture and stuffed animals even now smoldering in the far corner, smoke rising up from between their manufactured ears. The smoke edged its way under her mask and filled her nostrils with its acrid smell. There were days when it seemed she’d never rid herself of the smell. Days when she felt the odor permeated every cell of her body, was a part of her, a part that would remain forever.

  “Ellie!” she called, hating her limited vision and mobility with her mask and full uniform and making adjustments to it. She checked under the bed. Nothing. In the white plastic toy box. Nothing. In the tiny closet that held all sorts of tiny little dresses that would never be the same again. Nothing. Ellie, it seemed, had vanished into thin air.

  She turned at the door and took one last look around, her gaze riveted to the middle of the bed. It had been stripped of comforter by the team before her. But the pillows at the head remained. Pillows that suddenly moved.

  Jolie’s heart thundered in her chest as she made her way back toward the bed. Dropping the ax to the floor, she grabbed one of the pillows by the corner and flung it across the room. Her actions unearthed a tiny, pale foot that instantly disappeared beneath the other pillow, leaving only a hint of a lacy hem behind. Emotion choked Jolie’s throat as surely as the smoke as she snaked her arms around the pillow and the tiny, bony form beneath it, picking both up in one fell swoop.

  Arms instantly came around her neck, holding tight.

  “It’s okay, sweetie…Ellie…it’s okay. Everything’s going to be all right.” She pulled her mask free and fit it over Ellie’s wide-eyed face, thankful that the pillows had shielded her from taking in too much smoke. “Breathe normally. There you go. You’ll see…everything’s going to be fine.”

  Her gaze snapped onto Ellie’s and she knew in that moment that she was lying. Nothing would be fine in the little girl’s life again. She’d lost her mother. And her father, who was in the house somewhere looking for her, would either be seriously injured or fall victim to the fire himself. Nothing would ever be fine in little Ellie’s life again.

  Her blood racing through
her veins double time, she rushed for the door, screaming into her radio that she had the girl…she had Ellie. In fact, she had to force herself to loosen her grasp for fear of snapping the five-year-old in two, she was holding her so tight. But in this smoke, she knew that if she lost her grip, if Ellie slipped away from her, the chances of finding her again lay somewhere between zero and nil.

  “Hold on to me, baby,” she whispered, smoothing back Ellie’s blond curls and noting the lines of soot caused by the tracks of her tears. “That’s it. Hold on tight. And promise you won’t ever let go.”

  “She’s going to blow!” one of the men called from where he was ventilating the roof.

  Dusty rushed forward automatically. “No!” He wasn’t sure if he’d said the word aloud, or if it was lodged somewhere deep in his chest, alongside the same cry he’d shouted the day he’d lost his brother and thought he’d lost Jolie, as well.

  Not again. No…no…no. It couldn’t possibly happen again. The law of averages went against his losing two loved ones in one lifetime to violent deaths, much less within such a short time frame.

  Jolie’s still in there! his mind cried. He stalked first toward the house, staring at the flames growing larger and hearing the ominous creaks that foretold that it might fall in on itself any minute.

  Martinez and Holden trudged out, Holden dragging an unconscious and charred Jeff Johansen after him. Immediately after, Sal came out, pulling the hose out after him.

  Where’s Jolie? Oh, God, where’s Jolie?

  Dusty’s legs felt simultaneously like jelly and lead. He turned toward the truck and grabbed a jacket, then stormed the front of the house…just as the door opened and a cloud seemed to belch out Jolie in a puff of smoke and air, right into his arms. He stumbled backward against the weight, then knew to get her out of there as quickly as possible. He swept her up into his arms and glanced down into her soot-covered face. Where was her mask? Then he saw the bundle she clutched in her arms like a precious, priceless package.