Consumed (Firefighters #1)(80)

His smile was that of a boy who’d been told he got the answer right in school. The teenager with the hard-to-get concert tickets. The grown man who had something special and shared it with someone who mattered.

“How much acreage do you have?” she asked.

Danny’s knees cracked as he got down on his haunches to greet Soot—who welcomed him like a close friend, well missed.

“Fifty.” Danny put his face right into the dog’s. “I missed you, boy. How’s tricks. You ready to mark my property?”

“But where’s the mess?” Anne tried to keep the suspicion out of her voice. “I mean, everything looks great out here.”

As she motioned to the mowed meadow around the house, Danny rose and thumped over his shoulder. “Wait for it. But first, lemme show you the house.” He went over and held the door open for her. “I’ve got running water and electricity, but other than that, this is a work in progress.”

He wasn’t kidding. Every window was hung with shredded drapes, and what little of the panes showed was so layered with dust you couldn’t see out of them. The floorboards were scuffed, and the wallpaper was so old and faded, it was hard to tell what its original colors had been. The kitchen was a discordant seventies-era harvest gold and pea green, the appliances all throwbacks out of a Sears catalogue from the Jimmy Carter years. But God, the potential. The woodwork throughout was incredible, the molding heavy on the ceiling, around the fireplaces and up the staircase—a wonder of artistic flourish. There were also no stains on the ceilings, which suggested the roof was sound, and so was the flashing around the chimneys, and the doors were all plumb. Upstairs there were three little bedrooms, and just one bathroom for all to share—but holy crap, that claw-foot tub.

It was deep enough to qualify as a lap pool, and she could just imagine what the water would feel like.

“So who’d you buy this from?” she said as they went back to the first floor.

Soot was leading the charge, his nails clipping down the bare, creaking steps in hops.

“It hasn’t been lived in in forever. It was in a trust and the woman who had the life estate lived for decades in a nursing home. I look at it as a long-term project. I shouldn’t have bought it, but sometimes you just do things.”

“You must have bought it after . . . the fire.”

“When I got out of the rehab hospital. I needed something to do.”

“I get that.”

“So you wanna meet the problem?”

He took her out the kitchen’s back door, and that was when she got a load of what he was talking about. The bank or whoever had been looking after the property had only paid attention to the front. Everything behind the house was a tangled mess—or had been. He’d obviously been hard at work, piles of brambles, vines, and saplings grouped here and there around an old barn, what appeared to be an icehouse, and then a storage building.

As Soot wandered over to a bush and did his business, she shook her head. “We are going to need more than just a day.”

When she realized what she’d said, she shook her head. “You’re going to need that, I mean.”



* * *



It wasn’t until Danny saw Anne step up onto the porch that he realized he’d bought the house for her.

In some crazy, delusional part of his mind, he’d seen it advertised in the back of the New Brunswick Post one Sunday and decided to do it. He’d had to stretch to make the money work, but it was amazing what he’d saved living in that shit hole with the boys.

“Where are the saws?” Anne asked.

“In the barn, come on.”

The sunshine was warm on his face and the air was cool on his bare arms. Having Anne at his side paled even the splendor of the morning.

Sliding back the barn door, he spooked a couple of doves from the rafters. “Here’s what I got.” He showed her the array laid out on two rough boards between a pair of sawhorses. “Choose your weapon.”

He was not surprised she went right for one of the chain saws, picking the heavy weight up with her right hand and steadying it was her prosthesis. As she warmed up with it, he could tell she was testing out how she would handle things, making sure she could retain control before she cranked the power on.

“I brought a couple of different prostheses options,” she murmured as she braced her legs and moved the static blade through the air. “But I think this will work fine.”

I love you, he thought.

Instead of speaking his mind, he grabbed the other chain saw and gave her ear protection. “You ready?”

She nodded as she put in her bright orange plugs. Then frowned. “I’m wondering if I shouldn’t secure Soot with his whizzer lead. What if he spooks.”

“Believe it or not, it’s all fenced in. See the gate over there? Well, the gate under those bushes.”

She looked in the direction he pointed, and he got to enjoy the way the sunshine streaming into the barn, hazy with fine dust, bathed her in golden light.

“I walked the line this morning soon as I got here because you said you were bringing him. It’s a wire fence, but it’s sound and he can’t get over it or through it. Also, no barbs, so he won’t get hurt.”

She glanced down at the dog. “You hear that? You can roam. Don’t worry about the noise.”