She dropped the grocery sack in the drift beside the door and attempted to run toward the black billowing smoke and glowing landscape.
Running in heavy bunny boots proved fruitless. Adding the snow pants, oversized parka, it took more effort than Meghan had strength. She’d grown soft and a little puffy since assuming the mantle of police chief in a lost Alaskan town.
Maintaining a healthy weight, eating right, and exercising was a lot easier when she had training equipment and more idle time. Now drawing closer to the structure fire, seeing the gathered silhouettes encompassing the area, Meghan was out of breath and wheezing. Her thighs burned as hot as the blaze. Sweaty faced and bewildered, she joined the spectators watching the inferno.
Hilma’s house already had an unstoppable juggernaut of fiery death. Its lean, dry construction went up like a match head doused in gasoline. Volunteers with four-wheelers and plows pushed snow berms toward the burning wreckage.
The choking smoke washed over everyone as if baptized by fire. She saw Eric organizing fire crews. Anyone with a shovel or plow shoveled snow at the fire. At that point, it wasn’t about stopping the blaze; it was about containing the blaze from spreading.
Meghan remembered the heating oil tank on the far side of the house. Either it already detonated or was about to blow. She broke through the crowd and ran toward the house. The fire flashed. She saw it, the tank blistering and bowing. The intensity of the fire consumed the steel tank.
“Get back!” she screamed. “Get away from the house!”
Meghan pulled at some people, pushed at others. They suddenly understood why she’d panicked. It took less than a minute for the townspeople to evacuate the area.
Meghan found Eric and Lester. She saw Barbara clinging to another woman. She scanned the crowd, trying to memorize each of their faces in the flickering firelight. Illuminated in yellow-orange, they stared collectively at the burning structure, mesmerized and amazed.
Because of the distance between houses, and quick thinking, the residents contained the fire to the single building. She saw a group of young adults watching the blaze from a distance as if bleacher seats for a big game. She counted sixteen faces, standing in a row, watching the entertainment. Many of them recording the fire on their phones, they didn’t have texting or cellular activity in Noorvik, but they had smartphones, a progressive sign of the times.
When the heating fuel tank finally exploded, it was anticlimactic. The notable boom was little more than an amplified pop from an air-filled plastic bag.
It told Meghan the source of the fire was the home heating system. She’d stake her reputation on someone draining the tank, channeling the gas oil under the house. It pooled there, soaked the ground within the stilts. She smelled the fuel. The shell of the house collapsed. People cheered. It was hurtful and frustrating. The refurbished living room with its poured concrete floor remained intact. The wall to wall carpeting succumbed to the intense heat, turning into black tar.
They were the last to leave. Meghan, Lester, and Eric warmed themselves by the smoldering structure fire until the danger of burning or smoke inhalation subsided. The snowfall over remaining open flames sizzled as they lit on the burning shell.
“Give me a hand,” Meghan said, stepping into the muddy pit of melted snow and thawed ground where the stilt foundations poked out of the earth. She had the flashlight, washing the light over the remains.
The gravity flow storage tank stood on a steel stand four feet from the ground, three feet from the side of the house. Blackened and bubbled, the rupture in the tank happened through the gas pressure build-up. Not because fuel occupied the tank.
It was a futile measure, looking at the DEF kit that attached to the end of the 270-gallon tank. The fixture plating warped and melted.
“How much do you think was in the tank?” she asked, getting closer to the flow pipe at the end of the steel drum.
“Well, the house was hot,” Eric said. “We can check when Hilma had the tank filled last. But I’d say maybe 180 gallons.”
“That sounds right,” Lester said.
Meghan reached up. Lester took her glove and helped her. She stepped out of the gulley running between the spines of the house and the tank rack. Back on packed snow, her boots left soot prints leading away from the wreckage.
“Where are you going?” Eric asked.
“I’m going to check the storage container,” she said.
“Want company?”
“I’ll have company in the container, thanks anyway.”
Eric and Lester returned to public works, Meghan veered around the large warehouses, strolled through deep fresh snow between the backside of the water treatment building and the Quonset huts that housed the earthmoving equipment for the city.
She checked the area around the container for fresh tracks. Satisfied, no one disturbed the area; Meghan unlocked the shipping container. She had to use her leg to dig a hole in the berm to get the container door open.
Once inside, pulling the door closed behind, Meghan waited in the dark for several seconds. The ringing in her ears from the shouting crowds around the fire had remnants of people cheering. She remembered the group on the hill watching the spectacle. Meghan turned on the flashlight and looked around the interior of the twenty-foot storage container.
Her hair and clothes stank of burnt chemicals and structure fire.
Hilma lay curled inside the blanket on the floor of the conex. They used more bedding from the house to wrap the body and the bedspread, hoping to preserve evidence if they got her out of Noorvik.
The last fifteen feet of the container had collections of forgotten boxes, totes, outdoor equipment, and
