of the house, others would point with macabre fascination to the spot where Teri’s mother had plunged to her death. The newcomers would stare at the driveway for a few seconds, visualizing the corpse and imagining, with a shudder, the panic Polly must have felt as she died.
Did she know, at least, that her daughter had survived the fire?
No, of course not.
Heads shook sadly; tongues clucked with sympathy. Then the attention of the crowd shifted back to the smoking wreckage. Most of the beams still stood, and parts of the second floor had remained intact even when the roof collapsed. Now, as sunlight cast the ruins into sharp relief, the house looked like a desiccated, blackened skeleton.
Teri, who had spent the last two hours sitting mutely in the Barrows’ living room, unable to pull her eyes away from the spectacle of the fire, finally emerged onto the porch. Next to her, Lucy Barrow hovered protectively, her voice trembling as she tried to convince Teri to go back inside.
“I can’t,” whispered Teri. “I have to find my father. He—He’s—” Her voice broke off, but her eyes returned to the ruins across the street.
Lucy Barrow unconsciously bit her lip, as if to take some of Teri’s pain onto herself. “He might have gotten out,” she ventured, her quavering voice belying her words.
Teri said nothing, but started once more across the street, still clad in the bathrobe she’d worn when she escaped the inferno. An eerie silence fell over the block, the murmurs of the bystanders dying away as she moved steadily through the crowd, which parted silently to let her pass.
At last Teri came to the front yard of what had been her home. She stood still, staring at the charred wood of the house’s framework and the blackened bricks of its still-standing chimney. She took a tentative step toward the remains of the front porch, then felt a firm hand on her arm.
“You can’t go in there, miss.”
Teri’s breath caught, but she turned to look into the kindly gray eyes of one of the firemen. “M-My father—” she began.
“We’re going in now,” the fireman said. “If he’s in there, we’ll find him.”
Without a word, Teri watched as two firefighters, clad in heavily padded overcoats, their hands protected by thick gloves, worked their way carefully into the wreckage. The front door had been chopped away, and inside, the base of the stairway was clearly visible. The men started up, testing each step before trusting it to hold their weight. After what seemed an eternity, they finally reached the second floor. They moved through the house, visible first through one window, then another. From one of the rooms an entire wall, along with most of the floor, had burned away. As the firemen gingerly moved from beam to beam, they appeared to be balanced on some kind of blackened scaffolding. At last they moved out of Teri’s sight as they carefully worked their way toward her room at the back of the house.
Ten minutes later the fireman with the kind, gray eyes emerged from the front door and approached Teri, who stood waiting, her eyes fixed on him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice made gruff by the memory of the charred remains of Tom MacIver, which he had found in front of the still-closed door to Teri’s bedroom at the back of the house. “He was trying to get you out. He didn’t know you’d already gotten away.” His large hand rested reassuringly on Teri’s shoulder for a moment, but then he turned away and began issuing the orders for Tom MacIver’s body to be removed from the ruins.
Teri stood where she was for a few more seconds. Her eyes remained fixed on the house as if she were still uncertain of the truth of what she had just been told. Finally Lucy Barrow’s voice penetrated her thoughts.
“We have to call someone for you,” Lucy said. “We have to call your family.”
Teri turned away from the smoldering rubble. She stared blankly at Lucy. For a moment Lucy wasn’t certain Teri had heard her, but then Teri spoke.
“My father,” she breathed. “Will someone please call my father?”
Dear Lord, Lucy thought. She doesn’t understand. She hasn’t grasped what happened. She slipped her arms around Teri and held her close. “Oh, darling,” she whispered. “He didn’t get out. That’s what the fireman was telling you. I—I’m sorry,” she finished, wondering at the helpless inadequacy of the words. “I’m just so sorry.”