Chapter Twenty-Five
Two weeks. It had been two weeks since Trey went to the authorities and told them what he knew about Trudy and her fascination with fire. They’d gone to the apartment she listed on her personnel paperwork at the restaurant where Mr. and Mrs. Smith had gotten her a job, but it was vacant. No one from the church had seen her either. She’d disappeared.
The fires had gone right with her. Nothing they could tie to her had happened since the South Side fire. Things seemed to be getting back to normal, though Trey still held tight to his insistence to accompany Charlotte everywhere. The closets in her apartment had quickly become stuffed with his clothes, though she didn’t remember there being a conversation about him leaving them there. They just started showing up.
After finding him waiting in the parking lot on several occasions, Charlotte made him a key, and now often came home to the scents of his cooking and Weasley standing by ready to accept scraps. Trey had even met her parents, who greeted him with their usual stoic disinterest, which he took in stride.
Slowly, Charlotte’s trust in him was rebuilding. The love she still hadn’t told him about deepened. The only thing holding her back now was pure fear.
The warmth of his solid body beside her each night had become so ingrained in her routine, that she woke as soon as he shifted away.
“Sugar, I got a call. Fire in a residence on Walnut. They’re asking for more man power.” His words had the same effect as a bucket of ice water pouring over her head.
Sitting up, she clutched the sheet to her naked chest, the space between her thighs still sore from the intense lovemaking from hours before. “Is it her?”
“I won’t know until I get there. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Trey leaned over and placed a gently kiss to her forehead. So different from the dominate way he’d taken her against the wall before dinner. “Get some sleep.”
Charlotte watched as he gathered his things and headed out for the scene of the fire. Just because Trudy had been silent for two weeks didn’t mean Trey was out of danger. His job would always be dangerous, and Charlotte would always worry about him when he left the comfort of her bed.
Unable to fall back asleep, Charlotte got up, pulled on the shirt that she had now claimed as hers, and padded over to her computer. It had been weeks since she checked in on the “Young and the Anxious” chatrooms, and she felt bad for neglecting her online friends. But more and more, she found she related to them less.
The new position had been an almost seamless transition, though she still hated having to present in front of the entire staff each morning. Nerves would always be something she had to deal with, but they no longer held her back from taking the life she wanted. Part of that was thanks to Trey, not to mention Bekah, Mira, and Michelle, but it was also her. Somewhere along the way, she began to trust herself. Her instincts. Her emotions. She wasn’t her mother, and she never would be.
The cell phone still laying on her nightstand lit up and danced around the table top with an incoming call. Dread seeped through her skin when she saw it was Kym. Her friend would never call this late unless something was wrong.
“What’s wrong?”
“Char, it’s the shop. There’s a fire. It’s gone.” Familiar panic laced Kym’s words, the woman’s normally sexy voice thin as gauze. “Please. I have nowhere. Please.”
Charlotte pulled on the jeans crumpled nearby on the floor, flying into action as soon as her closest friends pleading words reached her ears. “I’m coming. Just breathe, it will be okay.”
The phone buzzed in her hand with another incoming call. Work. “Kym, find a paramedic and tell him you are having a panic attack. I will be there as soon as I can.”
The call from WQUZ went to voicemail while Charlotte listened for Kym to follow her instructions. But another quickly came in right after the first. Confident her friend was getting help, Charlotte switched lines.
“Charlotte, you have to come in. I don’t know what to do.” It was her replacement on the overnight shift, Kennedy. “There are four active fire calls right now. Two in zone seven. Two in zone four. I don’t have enough people to send, and they all sound bad.”
“Okay, just breathe.” Charlotte had a sudden premonition that she would be saying those words a lot that night. “Call Mira. Get her and Chris to the zone four. They live closest, and Chris can pinch hit as a breaking news reporter. Get Rufus to meet Mira, and send Kyle to meet Chris. Send your photographer at the station to zone seven, call Bekah and Sean and get them there. Sean is going to have to shoot his own video until we find another photographer to meet him, so make sure he takes his camera. I’ll call Michelle and fill her in. But I can’t come to the station. One of the fires is at my friend’s place, and I need to go help her.”
Finally dressed and with the immediate needs under control, Charlotte grabbed her purse and headed for the front door. But the moment her hand touched the door knob, she pulled it back with a hiss, the palm of her hand immediately reddening with a severe burn.
Smoke.
The heat from the metal pressed against her skin forced her mind back to her apartment, and not to work and Kym’s studio. That’s when she smelled it. Gas. Smoke. Melting plastic. Placing her uninjured hand on the door, it radiated heat. A glance at her feet showed smoke seeping in under the door frame.
Slowly, she backed away, trying to think of another way out of the apartment. But she didn’t have a fire escape. Before her eyes, the smoke turned from a milky grey to inky black, flames licked up under the door, eating at the hollow wood like it barely existed.
Instinct kicked in, and Charlotte dropped to the ground on her stomach. A flash of Trey showing her how to use the extinguisher he had brought her ran through her mind. She crawled quickly to the kitchen, grabbing the heavy red canister in her hands.
The cool metal was like balm to her blistering palm, and part of her wanted to stay where she was, curled up in the kitchen and wait for help. Her lungs burned already, and she’d only been breathing in the smoke for no more than a minute. Her heart thud in her chest, seeming to fight for every beat.
A flash of orange down the hall got her moving. “Weasley, come here boy.” Charlotte coughed around the words, army crawling as best she could with her arms full, chasing after the cat to her bedroom.
Once in her bedroom, she kicked the door shut behind her. Weasley screeched and wailed under her bed, making Charlotte’s attempt to extract him twice as difficult. Finally, she managed to pull him from under the bed, and stuffed him into the duffle bag Trey had used for a while to transport his clothes back and forth from his apartment, zipping it over the protesting cat and flinging it over her shoulder.
So far, the smoke hadn’t made it to her room yet, and she looked around frantically for a way out. The bathroom windows weren’t big enough to fit through. The one and only window in her room was painted shut, something she had often thought about trying to fix every spring when she wanted fresh air in her room, but never got around to taking care of. While searching fruitlessly for an exit, the smoke increased, until she was once again hacking and coughing, needing to drop back down on the floor to get under the smoke.
With her cheek pressed to the floor, she could see the orange glow through the space under her door. Fear paralyzed her. The certainty that she would die here, on the floor of her cheap apartment while her best friend across town lost everything, and her boyfriend fought another fire miles away.
