The Protector

  Pulling a piece of paper from the pad, he wrote Kate a note and put it under a magnet on her refrigerator. She’d need a laugh by the time her day was done. Somehow he didn’t think her dinner with Dave was going to happen on time and uninterrupted. He understood the hope though; he had major plans for his own evening if he could keep the workday under control. A plaintive howl came from the bathroom. Jack locked Kate’s apartment and headed to work, taking the coffee with him, relieved to leave the cat behind.

  The Smokehouse Eatery parking lot was crowded tonight. Jack slapped mud off his slacks, splattered from an attempt to stop a dog from darting across a ditch into tollway traffic. He’d rearranged his schedule in order to be here early, even if it meant coming with mud-splattered slacks. He didn’t see Cassie’s car, but there was always a chance she’d caught a ride with someone.

  It was a typical firemen’s holiday. They were crowding into Charles and Sandra’s restaurant, taking over the Smokehouse Eatery to celebrate Thanksgiving together. The firehouse down the street might have been closed in the department consolidations, but the restaurant had been a tradition for decades and the holiday was just a good excuse to come back.

  He worked his way through the crowd, and within moments confirmed Cassie was nowhere in sight. Jack paused to greet their host and was waved with a laugh toward the buffet table. He was grateful; lunch had been a long time ago.

  Twenty minutes later he found Cole. “Think Cassie will come?” Jack asked his friend while he watched the door to the restaurant.

  Cole picked up a toothpick and stabbed another Swedish meatball from the buffet hot pot to add to his plate. “She won’t come.”

  Jack looked at his friend, hearing the certainty.

  “She’s tired, Jack.”

  “She shouldn’t be alone on Thanksgiving.”

  “Her choice. Let her make it. She hasn’t been able to make many of them in the last year and a half.”

  “She won’t cook Thanksgiving dinner for one.”

  “I took her a pumpkin pie,” Cole said.

  “She was home?”

  “I left it at the bookstore. Knowing Cassie, she’ll end up there.”

  Jack fought the disappointment. He had really been hoping to see her here tonight.

  Jack kept one eye on the local news, still worrying about Kate in a quiet corner of his attention. The liquor store crisis had ended about noon, but he knew the likelihood that it had just been followed by another page. He kept expecting to see the breaking news banner and a reporter pushing a microphone in Kate’s face.

  As a substitute for a day with his family, this party was a pretty good replacement. But while the celebration wasn’t muted, neither was it complete. They were missing Cassie and Ash.

  Tony was here, in his wheelchair from a fall six years before. Chad had come. Ben’s nephew was now on temporary disability from smoke damage to his lungs, for fires made no allowance for rookie mistakes. Cassie Ellis and Ash Hamilton needed to be here—to know they still had a place, to know they were still part of the family. And Jack needed to see Cassie, make sure she was doing okay. The guilt from a busy summer and unfulfilled plans didn’t sit well.

  He turned to reach for a chip he didn’t want to cover the emotions that surged back.

  He’d been in some tough fires over the years, but nothing that could compare to the event they simply called The Fire. The nursing home had burned, trapping patients and staff alike. Over a dozen firefighters had been hurt by the time it was over but only two still haunted everyone involved. Cassie and Ash.

  The ceiling had come down. Burning plaster and beams, chairs, tables, and filing cabinets from the floor above had trapped them. Cassie had been pinned and burned. Ash hadn’t been able to shift the debris to get her free.

  For an agonizing eighteen minutes, a battle that had been focused on rescuing patients and staff had been overlaid with the grim reality of a missing team. The frantic calls from Ash had been chilling, and then they had gone silent.

  Jack had joined up with Rescue 12 for the search, penetrating into the heart of the fire through pitch-black corridors, thick toxic smoke, trying to find a way around the collapsed section of the hallway. The heat had been so oppressive it broiled what it touched.

  They had found them just past the commons area. Cassie, facedown with her right arm twisted, pinned down in agonizing pain. And Ash— buddy breathing with Cassie to get her oxygen as her tanks had chimed and went empty, tears pouring from the man as she tried to die on him.

  “Has anybody heard from Ash?”

  Cole shook his head. “He disappeared after Cassie’s final surgery and doesn’t want to be found. He left no forwarding address.”

  “It’s been three months.”

  “He’ll be back,” Cole replied. “Knowing Ash, he’s out on his bike traveling the country, blowing the cobwebs out of his brain. He won’t do anything crazy.”

  Jack had been there. He still occasionally disappeared on his two days off to ride as far as his bike would take him. But three months was a little steep.

  “I thought Rachel was coming with you tonight?” Cole asked casually.

  Jack narrowed his eyes as he watched his friend reach over to stab a turkey rollup. He’d never been able to figure out if there was something there or not. “She decided to track down Gage,” Jack replied, not bothering to hide his opinion of that. Rachel was going to get herself hurt in that relationship, but there was no reasoning with her.

  He watched for a reaction, but Cole merely glanced over at him. “Does Gage still hate your guts?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a lot like Ash. Feeling guilt you figure you deserve to carry.”

  Jack acknowledged the hit with a slight raise of his punch glass but countered with the truth. “He really does hate my guts.”

  “His wife is dead. He’s sued the furnace repair company out of business. Money’s not going to solve the hurt. Hating you is one way to cope.”

  “We pulled back from the fire. We were late.”

  “Tabitha was dead long before you got your air tanks on,” Cole countered softly. “Long before the fire alarm came in. Someday he’ll accept the autopsy report.”

  “Kind of hard to read past the word pregnant.”

  “And you scold me for feeling guilty that Cassie got hurt on my watch.” Cole pointed to an empty table. “Sit. We’ll talk about our popcorn man and leave the past where it belongs for both of us. In the past.”

  The bookstore was closed for the holiday allowing Cassie a chance to work uninterrupted on shelving books and updating her inventory. She had begun to play Christmas music a month early. While the rest of the world enjoyed Thanksgiving Day, Cassie set her heart on Christmas and hummed along with “Silent Night.”

  Christmas was going to be her turning point. There was a new beginning waiting for her—to what she hadn’t figured out, but it would at least be a new beginning. She was out of the hospital and was never going back. She was thankful just to have the chance to move on. Last year, no one had been willing to give her odds she’d be through the surgeries within a year.

  She missed Rescue Squad 65. Oh, how she missed it. The rescues. The close-quarter recoveries. Cutting people out of car wrecks. Being first to go into the smoke while firefighters from the engine crews worked to get water on the flames. The job was gone for good. She had no illusions that she would ever recover sufficiently to go back on active duty.

  Cole wanted her to come work for him. It was a sincere offer but she couldn’t generate any enthusiasm for it. Being on the sidelines when rescue squads rolled out would cut into her heart. It was better to move on. But life was boring without Rescue Squad 65.

  She hated being bored.

  Like a coward, she hid from her friends in order to spend Thanksgiving as she chose to: alone, working. She needed the quiet peace of music, books to shelve, and paperwork to do. She needed the time to think.

  Lord,
You kept me alive for something, and all I’m doing at the moment is spinning my wheels, waiting…for what, I don’t know. What do You have in mind for the future? I know You love me too much to ask me to endure that last year of agony without already having a plan to turn into Your glory.

  The questions she’d been putting off until the end of the year were before her now and decisions had to be made. The vinyl records were thirty years old without a scratch on them, the music excellent. The books from the Sandoval estate auction were genuine gems. The paperwork…she planned to ignore it a while longer. Cassie shifted books to fit a copy of Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice, copyright 1911, onto the second shelf of the glass-enclosed bookcase. The store was hers, purchased two months ago.

  I don’t mind selling books, but is this it? For all its challenge, it’s a pale comparison to what I had.

  She’d been selling rare books on-line as her part-time hobby for years. But she never intended it to become more than a hobby that earned her pocket change. She loved books, but not enough to make them her life. For now, this was a compromise, a place to store her growing collection of books and keep herself busy while she figured out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  Thirty, single, burned. The dream of winning a beauty pageant someday could be scrapped.

  Her sense of humor was vicious when she was in a bad mood.

  Her right hand cramped as she reached down to pick up another book. Cassie closed her hand into a fist, watching the scars on her forearm flex. Fire did strange things to skin.

  She was thankful to be alive. She wanted no pity for the rest. Part of it was her independent streak that meant accepting the risks that went with the job. She’d had the misfortune of becoming one of the statistics. Complaining that it had been her and not Ash was anathema. She had pulled nine people from that nursing home and been on her way back for the tenth when the ceiling had come down. She didn’t regret the decision she had made.

  When she wore long sleeves, the evidence of the surgeries of the last year and a half disappeared. If her glasses were strong prescriptions, they at least allowed her to read. It was a vast improvement over the days of wondering if she would have use of her arm or if her sight would survive.

  She was recovering. Friends wanted her to be recovered. It was a fine line that took some maneuvering to manage. She could not yet stop the crushing fatigue that hit when she was around a crowd of caring people. Spending Thanksgiving alone had been the right decision, a necessary one. But not everyone had been fooled.

  Cassie was fairly certain Cole had left the pumpkin pie. Only a handful of people had a key to the store. The gift had been left on her desk in a white box with a blue bow on top. It was something her former captain would do.

  She should call him. Cole wouldn’t mind getting a call at home and it would do her good to make it, to talk with a friend who understood the fine tension that underscored the holidays.

  She didn’t call.

  She wasn’t the only one who needed to move on with life. Cole did too.

  And Ash. Cassie forced herself to pick up the next book. Her partner had stayed through the surgeries, kept her sane through the pain, only to disappear once she was released. To walk away and give her no clue where he was going…She knew Ash. He’d taken what happened personally. And she didn’t need either one of them carrying that guilt.

  She needed to see Ash for Christmas. After she hugged him, she was going to slug him for worrying her this way. Please, Jesus. She let the two words carry the prayer. The emotions were too deep for more words. She really needed to see Ash.

  She’d been a fair-weather Christian before the last eighteen months. But in the recent black days, she’d touched bottom, and God was still there. Still bigger than the problems. She hit Him with her anger, her pain, and He’d taken it in and not reflected it back. Cassie was clinging to that peace she had found. Life was tough, but God was tougher.

  Another record dropped on the turntable and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” began to play. She’d never taken the time to really celebrate Christmas before. She let the busyness of the season push aside the deeper meaning. Before this year she wasn’t even sure she understood what Christmas was really about.

  It wasn’t just about a baby in a manger, although that was what the world tried to limit it to. It was a day that had begun the final confrontation between good and evil.

  Jesus had won. And in the last year Cassie had met Him. Not the soft Jesus that a commercialized Christmas conveyed, but a Jesus so comfortable and secure in His authority He’d come to confront Satan on his own turf.

  Jesus had chosen to lay aside the trappings of power that were His right and come humble and approachable, a servant. Man saw it as weakness; Jesus did it from strength. He had arrived with nothing to prove but His Father’s love.

  It would be nice to spend this Christmas with a deeper appreciation for the celebration.

  What she was going to do that day was still an open question. She didn’t want to spend Christmas alone, but she didn’t want to get involved in the fire department activities either. She had no family in the area—her parents had died years before, and she’d talked her brother into accepting a job offer in Florida last year. She could get absorbed in events at church, but they would demand energy she really didn’t have.

  There was no good solution, just a lot of options with different drawbacks.

  She reached for another book.

  What she really wanted to do was spend Christmas with a couple good friends. Ash led that list. And if she had to spend Christmas without him, she was going to give his gift to Goodwill.

  “Gage, where have you disappeared to now?” Rachel O’Malley muttered the question to herself when leaning on the doorbell to his town house failed to get a response. Shifting the sack she carried, she pulled out her keys, flipped through the ring to the one marked with a gold crescent, and used it to let herself into Gage’s home.

  She was invading his space, but she’d done worse in the past. He’d finally given her a key after he found her sitting on the front stoop at 1 A.M., having waited patiently there since 8 P.M. for him to get home. He was shocked sober enough to bawl her out for being careless with her safety. The scowl and the anger had set her back on her heels, but still…it had been nice to see that he cared.

  After that, when he’d gone out drinking and knew she was in town, he wore his beeper and carried a phone. He wasn’t a man who wanted others to worry; he just wanted to passively kill himself.

  Rachel did not like to worry about friends and Gage had her worried. If he couldn’t handle Thanksgiving, there was no way he would be able to handle Christmas. She knew what it was like to grieve; Tabitha had been her best friend. And since losing his wife in the way he had, there was a big hole to grieve, but still, Gage was alive. Someday he had to start remembering that.

  He was a good man. An award-winning reporter with the Chicago Tribune, he fought his battles with the power of his words. And while burying himself in work was a decent short-term answer, it was a lousy long-term one.

  He’d fired the housekeeper again. Rachel knew it as soon as she walked into the kitchen and saw the dullness of the linoleum and the stacked, washed dishes in the draining rack. Gage was too neat a man to leave unwashed dishes around. But he wouldn’t see the rest of the small details that made a house a comfortable home; he’d only feel them as they accumulated.

  She opened the refrigerator to store the Cool Whip to go with the cherry pie she’d brought over. Gage had a sweet tooth.

  The milk was sour. She didn’t have to smell it to tell; she only had to pick up the plastic gallon to see it. It was the little things that made the grief intense: buying milk by the pint instead of the gallon, cooking for one. Her heart hurt to see the signs of continuing grief.

  She was half in love with Gage herself, had resigned herself to living with that fact. Friendships under the stress of the last two years either fractured or melded p
eople together, and Rachel felt like her heart had been soldered together with his. She was going to get him through this if it killed her. She owed it to Tabitha. She’d wrestle with her own emotions later when it was time to move on.

  She took off the cap and poured the milk down the sink.

  Getting Gage through this second year of holidays was going to be more difficult than she thought. She picked up his phone, saw there were six messages blinking on his answering machine, and since she knew five of them were hers, got further annoyed. The least he could do was listen to her worry about him.

  She was surprised when she caught her sister at home. She had expected to leave a message on the answering machine. “Kate, could you rescue my gray-and-white suitcase and shove it in a closet?” She had been planning to head back to Washington, D.C., and already had tickets for an early morning flight out of O’Hare. As Kate had offered to give her a ride to the airport, Rachel planned to spend the night at her sister’s place and had already moved her luggage to Kate’s trunk.

  It was best to put those plans on hold.

  On call with the Red Cross and the Emergency Services Disaster Agency to handle trauma situations involving children, Rachel traveled so much she kept apartments in both Chicago and Washington. Staying longer in Chicago would create headaches as she was serving on the presidential commission on school violence next year. The preparation work was just ramping up, but she would figure out a way to work around it.

  “That bad,” Kate commented.

  “If he didn’t love so deeply, he couldn’t grieve so deeply. But he’s drowning in it.”

  “Drinking?”

  Rachel checked Gage’s trash and didn’t see any liquor bottles. “Doesn’t look like it.” He’d promised her and he was a man of his word. “But he could use a friend. I’ll stick around for the holidays.”