The stable, built of wood, except for the roof, was now fully involved. “Gotta call Fire, you get Honus,” she shouted at Sam. The entire yard was lit by the inferno, and she ran to the house, ignoring the pain in her feet, and up the stairs to her cell phone and called the volunteer fire department and shouted, “We have a fire!”
“Frankie? This is Clark. We’re coming! Stay clear. Olaf called us. You need an ambulance?”
“Sam’s shirt was on fire, but we got it off him.”
“I’m sending an ambulance, but it’ll be coming from town…”
“Hurry!” At the back of her brain, she could hear the twins crying in their shared bedroom, and she headed that way.
Inside the house, she hushed the twins, quickly—harshly, she thought later, maybe had frightened them. She ran to her bedroom, her phone still in her hand, pulled on a tee-shirt—it occurred to her only then that she was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants, not that she cared—and she snatched up a pair of jeans and carried them with her as she ran back down the stairs, into the kitchen, where she grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran back outside. Even inside the kitchen, she could hear the fire roaring.
Sam was holding Honus by the collar; the dog was barking at the fire and Frankie stumbled up and shouted over the dog’s bark, “Are you burned?”
“My hands and I think my arms, I stepped on some hot stuff,” Samsaid. “You’re burned too, I could see your shirt on fire, I think you’re burned.”
“Fire is on the way, and an ambulance,” she shouted, looking at the stable. The fire had gotten to bales of bedding, which added heat and velocity to the blaze. They could see the steel roof beginning to distort in the heat. She began pulling on the jeans, felt a finger of pain along a thigh, another burn she didn’t want to think about yet.
“Got the horses out,” Sam said. “I hope they’re not burned, but they might be: it was hot outside the stalls, I don’t know about inside.”
“You stupid little shit, you should never have gone into that stable…” She hugged him and started crying and hugged him harder. “Thank you, you saved the horses…”
At that moment, a white pickup roared up the driveway, and Olaf Nilsson and his wife Jean spilled out, and jogged toward them: “At least you’re okay. I thought it was the house. I called Fire.”
“Yeah, thank you. We got the horses out, but we might have gotten a little singed,” Frankie said. She’d been too excited before, but now she felt the pain coming on, in her arms and across her back, in her feet. She turned to her son: “Are you hurting?”
“Some,” he said. And then, “Yeah.”
“I’ll call an ambulance,” Jean Nilsson said.
“One’s already coming,” she said. To her son: “When you finished the lawn, where’d you put the mower?”
“Machine shed,” Sam said. “When you went inside the stable…did you smell gas?”
“Yes! There was no gasoline in there, but I smelled it,” Frankie said.
“Did somebody set us on fire, Mom?”
“If somebody did, Virgil will kill them.”
They could hear the fire trucks coming, two of them. Frankie had worked with a volunteer fire department in another part of the state, earlier in life, and she knew what they were going to tell her: there was no saving any part of the stable. Their job was simply to keep the fire from spreading to the other buildings.
And that’s what the chief told them when the trucks arrived. A tall man with shoulder-length brown hair, his name was Lon Carpenter, and he got out of the lead truck and walked toward them and said, “Not much we can do about it, honey.”
“I know, Lonnie,” she said. “We got the horses out…”
“Thank God for that.” The other men on the two trucks were unreeling foam hoses, in case they needed to quench something other than the stable; the stable would simply be a waste of good chemicals.
“When we went inside, we smelled gasoline,” Frankie said.
Carpenter: “Gasoline? You didn’t keep…”
“Not a goddamn thing in there to start a fire,” Frankie said, staring at the blaze, which was beginning to slow. “All the wiring is inside conduits. Never a sign of trouble.”
“Virgil’s a cop,” Carpenter said.
Frankie: “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Hands hurt,” Sam said.
