Chain of Evidence

from her. As if he didn’t measure up. He had always wanted to hit her back. He had never lifted a hand. Her face all bloated, her eyes unfocused. Who could hit that? he wondered.

“You don’t have to talk about this,” she repeated. A few minutes had passed. He realized he hadn’t touched his food. “But I want to hear, if you do want to talk about it.”

“I ran,” he said. He felt the stinging in his eyes, and he wondered if he should leave the table. “I ran,” he said again. He swallowed. It felt as if a chicken bone were stuck in there. “And I learned to hide until she settled down. Passed out is more like it. Used to find her on the floor. Like a beached whale. Lying there. I couldn’t move her. Thought she was dead. Wishful thinking, I suppose.” He felt tears running, and powerless to do anything about it. Abby didn’t seem fazed. She was still staring at him intensely, but he felt no judgment coming from her. She’s trained for this shit, he thought, suddenly understanding why he had picked this particular woman to unload on. She’s the one who could handle it.

He continued, “So I hid. The broom closet. The basement. There was a piece of furniture in the dining room that I could fit into. But she found me. Almost always. Until I discovered the dryer. The clothes dryer.”

Her face remained impassive, revealing no opinion, no sympathy, no pity, and yet he knew that she had heard him. He wondered if she could be so objective, so internally calm, or was this some kind of act that she had learned as a professional?

“She never thought to look in the clothes dryer,” he explained. “It became my first choice. And more than once I had been doing a load of laundry, and I would yank that laundry out of there as fast as I could and climb inside and pull the door closed.”

“The heat,” she said. “Your lungs.”

He nodded. His throat felt scratchy, but he didn’t want to cough in front of her, for it suddenly felt as if it would seem he had forced it. So he swallowed it away and said roughly, “Yeah. I figure I fried them hiding in there.”

He drank. Something to do. Keep his hands busy. Stop them from shaking. Somewhere to avert his eyes. He thought that maybe five minutes passed in complete silence. It felt more like an hour.

“Thank you,” she said.

He felt embarrassed all of a sudden. He had lowered his mask, and felt incredibly vulnerable.

“Is she still alive?”

“No, but she lasted a long time. I was eighteen. And I was still living with her. Don’t ask me why.” He hesitated. “She had control. I suppose that’s why.”

Abby came out of her chair and approached him. She bumped his chair and slipped a leg over him and sat down in his lap, facing him. She stroked his hair back at his temples and repeated, “Thank you.” She rubbed away the snail tracks left by his tears.

He experienced a kind of giddy high, flooded by the relief of having told someone. The kiss that followed was gentle but by no means innocent. He kissed his way across her chin and down her neck, and as he did she whispered, “Harder,” and he sucked the soft skin of her neck into his lips, and she shuddered and purred, “Umm.”

He leaned her back and kissed down into the loose neck of the sweater, as her hands slipped behind him and pulled his shirt free, and warm fingers scrambled over his back, sending flashes up his spine and gooseflesh head to toe.

Abby knew his secret, and knew his pleasure as well. Her back was hot to touch, and the more he kissed her neck the more excited she grew until she muffled a knowing laugh of pleasure signaling that they had crossed a line. In an explosion of energy, she got out of the chair and led him down the hall and into the bedroom, undressing herself as she went.

At that moment, the building’s hallway fire alarm sounded loudly. Dart smelled smoke. A curling fear ran down his spine. He had a great fear of fire, stemming from his drunken mother being a smoker.

Perhaps it was the clothes dryer as a child, or the memory of a range fire he had witnessed out west as a teenager-great sheets of bright orange sweeping the plains and spewing a thick charcoal gray into the blue, boundless sky-or perhaps, he thought, it was simply an intuitive response to something that could kill so quickly, but Dart felt a surge of panic, and though he saw Abby’s horrified expression and her mouth moving, he heard no words. She pulled on her clothes. She searched the apartment door for heat, dropped to her knees, and sniffed between the carpet and door.

“It’s okay,” he heard her say.

“Ready?” he asked.

“We’re going,” she announced over the abrasive fire alarm. Far in the distance, the first wail of a siren was heard. “Ready?”

He nodded, his attention riveted on all that he was leaving behind, on memories and artifacts of his time here with Ginny. She took hold of the doorknob.

“Slowly,” he cautioned, stepping aside.

She nodded and eased the door open. There was no flash of flame, no billow of smoke, only the increased volume of the alarm and the sounds of harried shouting and racing footsteps. Mac took off down the stairs. A general sense of chaos surrounded them as they hurried to the central stairs and began their descent. The smell of oil smoke was overpowering. It smelled of fear and old paint and dust, of all those, years Dart had used these stairs, forsaking the tired elevator. It smelled final.

The smoke grew thicker as they descended, enveloping them like a fog. They checked for each other at each turn of the metal handrail. Her wide eyes glanced over at him. From below came sounds of panic. Two floors down, Dart caught sight of several familiar faces and wondered how he could live in the same place for so many years and know so few of his neighbors. They knew him, most knew he was a policeman, and though he knew some by name, not nearly enough.

“Mrs. Amory,” he said to Abby as he stopped at the fire door to the ground floor. Eleanor Amory went about in a motorized wheelchair and had picked this apartment building because of its location on a city bus route. She was in her late seventies and fiercely independent. Abby apparently understood just by the way he spoke, and she stopped and helped him check the door for heat before they passed through and into the downstairs hallway. The smoke was heavier here, and Dart believed that it was coming from the parking garage, that a car was on fire, and this lessened his panic because fire could be contained well in the concrete garage. They ran down the long hallway, and only then was Dart aware that the only light came from the emergency lights, a fact that had escaped him. All the training, he thought, wondering how panic had so easily engulfed him, feeling it behind him now, and glad to have it gone.

“Which apartment?” he heard Abby call from behind him.

He kicked the door in, signaled her inside, and motioned for Abby to take the rooms to the left. Dart took those to the right.

Eleanor Amory was not in the kitchen, or the small sitting room or in any of the three closets that Dart searched quickly.

“Joe!” Abby called out.

Eleanor Amory was in her bedroom coiled into a ball in the far corner, a nightgown bunched at her knees, a collapsible wheelchair propped against the wall alongside her. She was in shock, her dull blue eyes glassy and open wide in a fixed stare.

Abby stooped, tried to communicate with the woman, but it was of no use. She tentatively eased her arms into the fold of the woman’s bent knees, and behind her head, and together with Dart, they hoisted her, and Dart took her fully into his arms as Abby helped the woman to take hold around his neck.

A moment later they were outside, in the alley behind the building, and Eleanor Amory was in the care of emergency personnel. Abby stood holding the woman’s hand. The alley was dark, awash in the scattering, fractured light of emergency vehicles, and from the building’s garage a thick coiling plume of black smoke rushed into the night sky. The area was crowded with onlookers as well as with residents of the building, in pajamas, raincoats, and whatever else they had grabbed. Several held pets tightly in their arms. One woman was crying as she stared up at her windows. Mac was sitting away from the chaos like an old person watching a parade.

Dart felt the cold. He felt awkward and out of place, accustomed to being the one responding to an emergency rather than experiencing it firsthand. There were so many things he wished he’d taken. Photographs. Gifts. Letters. His first uniform as a patrolman. He ran down an inventory as he watched four fully clad firemen