When Brenda opened her eyes, the sun was too bright. Everything was blurry. Where am I? She caught only glimpses of colors and moving forms that must have been people. In the distance, she thought she saw her husband, Glen, with a garden hose standing next to her best friend, Jane, who was busy tying animals’ leashes to far off trees. Then she remembered the fire.
Brenda was numb. She didn’t even feel the paramedics put an intravenous needle in her arm, but she did hear the fire chief yell to his men, “We’ve got to contain the blaze on the west side of the house. Get in there and form a barrier between the flames and the east side of the house before the rest of the structure goes.”
A loud crack hurt her ears. The entire roof above the bedroom crashed to the ground. Brenda felt the ground beneath her vibrate from the noise. Smoke and cinders mushroomed into the sky. Flickering embers floated through the air like fireflies. If it wasn’t so devastating, it would be beautiful, she thought.
Thank you, God, for getting me out of there before the roof caved in. I’d have been trapped.
Tears spilled out of Brenda’s scorched eyes. The salt stung, but the tears were also soothing. She could feel them washing away the smoky grit. When she tried to rub her forehead, she felt her eyebrows. They were wiry from being singed.
Glen’s voice drifted closer to her. She tried to look in that direction but kept slipping in and out of consciousness. The paramedics were trying to keep him away, but he wasn’t cooperating.
“She’s my wife!” Brenda heard him yell. “I’ll stay out of your way, but I’m damned-well going to see her!”
Glen’s shadowy form shoved past the paramedics. He took her limp hand in his, looked at the paramedic and asked in a grim tone, “Is she—?”
“No, she’s hanging in now, but she came close to dying in there. She’s suffering from smoke inhalation and there may have been lung damage. We’re going to take her to the hospital,” the paramedic said.
Brenda looked into Glen’s face and thought she saw tears forming in his eyes. She was so moved by his concern that she tried to reach up to hug him. When she did, she saw the bedroom, bathroom and guest bedroom burning beyond control. She buried her face in Glen’s chest and cried, “All my hard work is going up in flames.”
Glen stroked her hair to comfort her. “Baby, I’m so-o-o sorry.”
The sheriff, Dan Gilbert, who had just arrived on the scene, strode over. He cleared his throat noisily to make his presence known. Glen gently laid Brenda back on the stretcher and looked up at him questioningly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Brumbaugh? I need to speak with you. Do you have insurance?” the huge, stocky man asked in a deep baritone voice.
“My wife works for an insurance company. They’d kill her if she didn’t have plenty of insurance,” Glen answered curtly.
“Do you smoke?” the sheriff asked.
“Glen does, but he wasn’t home,” she wheezed.
“You two have any enemies?” the sheriff asked.
Brenda shook her head no. Even through the oxygen mask, she could smell the foul odor of his rattlesnake skin boots.
“No one that I know of,” Glen said.
Brenda saw the sheriff look at her then Glen. Brenda could tell the sheriff was trying to size them up.
“The fire chief thinks that because of the odor and intense flames, it might have been started by chemicals, so he called me.”
“Chemicals,” Glen echoed.
“It can’t be,” Brenda shook her head.
“More likely it was electrical or gas or something else,” the sheriff shrugged.
Brenda gasped for breath between each word. “It has to be an accident. I can’t think of anybody who’d want to do this to us.”
“Wait a minute.” Glen scratched his chin. “What about the renters at the house your Grandma gave you? They were two months behind on their rent,” Glen said.
Brenda nodded and tried to say something, but Glen put his hand on her shoulder to indicate she should rest.
“Brenda had to get ugly with them yesterday and threatened to evict them,” he told the sheriff.
“I’ll question ’em. Can you think of anybody else—exspouses, angry relatives or neighbors, disgruntled employees?” the sheriff asked.
“There’s this one guy that keeps following me,” Brenda said hoarsely. “He’s one of our company’s clients. He made a pass at me when I was giving him a physical but I turned him down. Also, I had to give the company a negative medical report on him. I don’t know if he’s learned of the bad report yet but it means he he won’t get a million dollar policy. Anyway, ever since the day he came on to me, I’ve been seeing his car everywhere I go, even here at the house.”
“What’s his name?” the sheriff asked.
“Something…Morgan. My boss will know,” she said.
“Say, I saw a blue car with ‘Morgan’ on the license plate just this morning,” Glen said.
“We’ll check it all out,” the sheriff said and walked over to his deputy.
“Mr. Brumbaugh, we’re ready to take your wife to the hospital. You’ll need to take your own car and follow the ambulance,” the paramedic said.
Brenda felt Glen squeeze her hand as he said, “I’ll be right behind you, darlin’.”
As the paramedics lifted Brenda onto a new, stark white stretcher, she saw the devastation the fire had wrought and began to weep again. They raised the stretcher and locked it into place with a snapping sound. As they wheeled her toward the ambulance, Brenda saw that Glen had walked back toward Jane. Their heads were bent together and Jane’s voice wafting back sounded angry. She hoped Jane wasn’t blaming Glen for not having been home. It would be just like her protective best friend. But it wasn’t Glen’s fault, Brenda wanted to tell her. He was fixing a neighbor’s fence to earn some extra money so they could take a long, romantic weekend away. Glen was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
On the way to the hospital, as the ambulance’s siren careened in and out of her ears, Brenda’s groggy mind drifted back to the happiest day of her life.
It was the day she had waited for, dreamed about, for years. Now everything would be sublime. Brenda had polished the house to a high gloss and worked day and night to get caught up at work so she could take some time off.
After applying a little gray eye shadow and some lip gloss, Brenda checked her watch and fluffed her shoulder length brown hair with her fingertips. She kept her hair long enough to dress up when she had a date yet short enough to sweep back out of her way when she wore her nurse’s uniform. The movement was just enough to release the scent of her shampoo—vanilla.
She took an Art Deco hair comb from the vanity. It was gold, shaped into a fluted leaf and highlighted with