Surely no longer than that.
And she’d be home any day now! Of that, Emily was absolutely certain.
She moved slowly around the room, touching the objects on Cynthia’s vanity table, all the perfume and lipstick and eye shadow and mascara that Cynthia loved so much.
Every one of them was in its place, waiting for Cynthia.
She opened one of the drawers of Cynthia’s bureau, her trembling fingers caressing the soft cashmere of the sweater that lay within, her eyes oblivious to the depredations of the moths and the yellowing of the fraying fabric.
She closed the drawer and let her eyes sweep over the room one last time.
All was as it should be, exactly as Cynthia had left it.
Emily left the room then and headed toward the sewing room, but as she passed the top of the stairs, an acrid odor filled her nostrils.
Smoke?
She frowned, trying to remember if she’d lit the fire that morning.
She couldn’t remember.
If fact, she wasn’t quite sure she’d even been downstairs that morning.
Clutching the banister, she started down the steep flight.
The odor grew stronger as she came to the foot of the stairs, but when she peered into the parlor, the fireplace was dark.
But she was certain she smelled smoke!
The kitchen?
Why would there be smoke in the kitchen? She’d just come downstairs, hadn’t she?
She moved toward the kitchen, pushed open the door that separated it from the dining room. She saw it: flames boiling up from a skillet someone had left on the stove. More flames consuming the curtains around the window and charring the wood of the cupboards.
Hurrying across to the stove, Emily picked up the frying pan and started toward the sink, but the skillet slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. The burning oil quickly spread across the linoleum, and an instant later the floor was covered with a sheet of fire.
Emily stared at the flames in frozen horror for a moment, then turned and fled from the kitchen. “Cynthia!” she called out. “The house is on fire! Hurry!”
Moving as quickly as her old legs would carry her, Emily made her way to the front door, pulled it opened, and lurched out onto the front porch.
From the other side of the fence that separated her yard from the one next door, an elderly man — whom Emily was certain she’d never seen before — looked at her worriedly.
“Emily?” asked Ralph Gunderson, who had lived next door to Emily for nearly thirty years. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Fire,” Emily managed to say, looking back at her house. “Someone set my house on fire!”
As Ralph Gunderson’s gaze followed Emily’s the first tongues of flame flicked out the kitchen window. Feeding voraciously on the wind, the fire began climbing the dried wooden siding of Emily’s old frame house.
* * *
MATT MOORE CROUCHED at the scrimmage line, his eyes looking straight through the boy opposite him, knowing his refusal even to acknowledge his opponent’s presence was already undermining Eric Holmes’s confidence. It was a trick he’d been using on Eric since they’d first started playing football in fourth grade, and even eight years later Eric hadn’t figured out exactly what it was that made Matt’s movements so hard to predict. Matt’s body tensed as he listened to the quarterback call the signal to the center, and the second the ball was snapped, he sprang into action, feinting to the left then reversing to the right so quickly and smoothly that Eric, already rattled by Matt’s patented blank stare, had thrown himself off balance and was unable to throw a block that might knock Matt off stride. Matt streaked downfield toward the goal line, faked right and went left, then spun around as he crossed into the end zone and reached up, his hands closing on the ball, which seemed to have been placed there by some kind of magic.
Except there was no magic involved.
Rather, it was nothing more than Pete Arneson playing his role with the same precision that Matt had performed his own maneuvers. Though neither Pete nor Matt had so much as glanced at each other during the play, the quarterback had trusted Matt to be at the right position at the right moment.
A moment, both of them knew, that was absolutely predetermined by the silent counting they had perfected over the years they’d been playing together. They’d started counting together in seventh grade, practicing out loud until they found the fastest pace they could both comfortably maintain. Then they began working in silence. Whenever they were together — hiking, or going to a movie, or just hanging out — sooner or later one of them would say “Go!” and both of them would begin silently counting in their heads. After a few seconds one of them would say “Stop!” and they’d compare where they were. By the time they got to high school, the two were never more than a couple of digits off at the stop signal, and the system had given them an edge. They’d simply decide where Matt would be when they hit a certain number, and Pete would throw the ball to that spot, no matter where Matt was when he cocked his throwing arm. By last summer their coordination was so good that the coach had put Matt in the starting lineup despite the fact that his lithe frame carried at least thirty pounds less than any of his teammates.
“I don’t get it,” Eric Holmes groused to Matt afterward.“He wasn’t even looking at you! Everyone thought he was going to pass to Brett Haynes. And you weren’t paying any attention at all — you didn’t even look until you turned around to grab the ball!”
“Never count us out,” Matt said, cryptically repeating the only phrase he and Pete ever used when anyone asked how they managed to communicate without looking at each other. So far, no one had figured it out, not even their coach.
Eric’s eyes rolled as he heard the answer for the billionth time, but he knew better than to try to worm the secret out of either one of his friends. Even though Pete told him practically everything else, he’d always ducked the question of how he knew exactly when to throw the ball. As for Matt, there’d always been things Matt wouldn’t talk about — secrets Matt kept from him and Pete.
Eric eventually decided there wasn’t any secret to Pete and Matt’s precision at all — that they probably didn’t know how they did it themselves. Besides, all that mattered was that if they kept it up, there was no way anyone was going to beat Granite Falls on the football field this year. As Matt joined his team’s huddle, half a dozen boys gathered around Eric. “Well?” someone asked.
Eric shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”
“Maybe we should just always take Matt out,” Mark Ryerson suggested, flexing his huge tackle’s body to let Eric know he was prepared to do exactly what he’d suggested. “There’s always been something weird about that guy.”
Eric eyed Ryerson balefully. “You break one of his legs and there goes our shot at the championship.”
“I didn’t mean
“If that’s what you meant, why didn’t you say it? Just make sure that’s all you do,” Eric replied. Though he was playing opposite Matt and Pete today, Pete was still his best friend. And even if he didn’t care that much about Matt, there was still no way he would let Mark Ryerson mess up their shot at the school’s first winning season in more years than Eric could remember. He saw a flicker of anger in Ryerson’s eyes, but before the other boy lost control of his temper, their attention was diverted by the wailing of a siren, which was quickly coming closer.
As the boys huddled around Matt Moore and Pete Arneson turned toward the blaring sound, a fire truck — immediately followed by a second one — came around the corner off Manchester Road onto Prospect Street, raced by the practice field, then braked hard and turned onto Burlington Avenue.
No more than a house or two from the corner, a curl of smoke was rising up into the afternoon sky. The sirens died away, and for a second an almost eerie silence fell over the football field. Then a girl’s voice called out.
“Matt? Matt!”
The boys on the field watched as Kelly Conroe — dressed in her gym clothes for song-leading practice —
