Falling for the Fireman Page 15

  When she turned, hands on her pounding heart, Chad was in full emergency response mode. Calm, clear and determined. “He can’t have gone far. He’s not in any danger.”

  “You know what he’s thinking. I thought it. He’s running, Chad. He’s scared and I don’t know what he’ll do. You said it yourself. He’s barely able to control himself and all that anger, and I’ve just made it ten times worse.”

  “He’s upset, yes, but I don’t think he’ll hurt himself or anyone.”

  Jeannie doubled back into her room to fumble through her purse and speed-dialed Nicky’s phone. From Nicky’s bedroom, she heard the cell phone ring, telling her he’d left it behind. He didn’t want to hear from her. When she made it back into the room, Chad had dumped Nicky’s backpack out onto the bedroom floor, revealing the still-ringing phone and two more lighters. Chad took her hand. “Let’s figure out where he might have gone. Can you call Abby’s or a few friends’ houses where he might be? If you want, I’ll scout around the building and up the block.”

  “Yes, go. I’ll get on the phone.”

  Abby had no help to give. “Oh, Jeannie, no. Not now, not with those papers!” She and Abby divided up friends to call as Jeannie tried not to give into worry. How could he have gotten so far so fast?

  Fear had gripped her the first time she saw those papers. How could it be any different for Nicky? They were wordy documents, filled with psychological terms, but even Nicky would know what words like “arsonist” and “offender” implied. “Nicky!” she called at the window, praying he’d answer, “Nicky, we need to talk. It’s not what you’re thinking!” Another five minutes of searching produced nothing but mounting fear as the daylight faded. Her cell phone rang and Chad’s number came on screen. “Is his bike around?” he asked without greeting. “He can’t have gone far if he’s on foot.”

  Jeannie checked and found the bike gone. “Chad, his bike is gone. That means he could be anywhere by now. It’s getting dark.”

  “Or it could mean he’s riding around blowing off steam. Try not to jump to conclusions, okay? Does Nick have keys to the shop?”

  It took her a moment to get her brain to work. “Yes, I gave him a key to the back door padlock last week.”

  “I’m just around the corner. Give your shop keys to me and I’ll send George over to wait if he shows up there.”

  She fumbled to pull the key from her ring while she waited for Chad. Was Nicky reading those frightening descriptions right now, thinking that’s how people saw him? Would he do something drastic if he jumped to any of the wrong conclusions? Who knew what a frightened, angry thirteen-year-old could do?

  “Keep that panic at bay, Jeannie.” Chad was beside her, wrapping his hands around hers as she handed him the keys. “He’ll be okay,” he said, piercing her fog of worry with his gaze. “We’ll find him, we’ll get him to understand. He’ll be okay.” He took her face in his hands, and she felt his calm feed hers. His quick kiss had a sense of strength, as if he were breathing courage into her.

  “Try school and any other place you can think of. I’ll start at the river and go north.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s seven-thirty. I’ll check in with you in twenty minutes no matter what, but we’ll call if either one of us hears or finds anything.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  He regretted leaving her. If it weren’t the fastest way to find Nick, he’d never have left her side. He was planning to be the one to tell Nick about the program, hoping Nick would take any anger out on him rather than put his mother through more strife.

  Don’t let anything happen to him, Lord. His affection for Nick was tangled up—in the best of ways—with the powerful things he felt for Jeannie. He’d never saw himself as the “dad” type, but his thoughts traveled to what it would be like to go to Nick’s baseball games, to take him fishing, maybe buy him a dog of his own. Find him, hummed in his lungs with every breath, until the gut-level desire became a continual prayer: Let me find him, help me find him, show me where he is, keep him safe until I get there.

  Gravel spun under his tires as Chad pulled up beside the riverbank. It was getting darker, which wasn’t helping things at all.

  “Nick!” he called, hearing his voice echo off the water. “Talk to me, Nick.” The boy was smart, it could get tricky if he didn’t want to be found. In half an hour the full dark would only make it harder to find him.

  Ten minutes of searching proved fruitless. A pass around the riverbank in the dwindling daylight, and then another with a flashlight, produced nothing but an old newspaper and one discarded sneaker. Chad’s heart sank as he checked his watch, realizing he’d reached the check-in time empty-handed. Let her have found him, he groaned as he flipped open his phone and dialed Jeannie.

  “Did you find him?” Her voice was tight, which told him instantly she’d had no results, either.

  “No.” The word stuck in his throat. “But it will be okay. He’ll come home, or we’ll find him.” He said the words as much to himself as to Jeannie. He wanted to believe his God-given instinct would lead him to Nick.

  “He has to be somewhere nearby. Look for a bike, a red bike with black stripes.” She was losing her fight to stay calm, he could hear it in her voice.

  “Hang on, Jeannie. He’ll be okay. He’s just being clueless, running on emotion and not even thinking what this is doing to you. I’m going to hang up now so I can keep looking. You do the same. And…”

  “And what?” Her voice was so thin.

  “And try to remember God’s still watching over Nick. Even now.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, sniffling, “but it’s hard.”

  The small click of his phone shutting echoed through the darkness of the riverbank where once he’d basked in Jeannie’s glow. He stood for a moment in frustration. Find him. Help me find him. Nothing. Chad heard nothing except the sound of his own teeth grinding. His gut told him Nick was here. Kids set fires in important places. He knew this place was important to Nick. He wants to be found, Chad prayed as he swept his flashlight again around the long, narrow park. Even if he doesn’t realize it. Come on, God. Cut that boy a break. Chad cupped his hands and yelled, “Nick! Nick, I’m sure you’re here and your mom is worried. Whatever it is it can’t be so bad we you and I can’t figure it out, okay?”

  Something glimmered in his flashlight beam. The spoke of a bicycle tire. Then a red fender with black stripes.

  Off to his left, a burst of orange flames shot up off a rock by the water. A boy’s yelp, then a splash as the flames surged high and fast. Burning paper.

  “Nick!” Chad broke into a run, finding Nick standing knee-deep in the river watching a small pile of leaves and white papers burn on a flat rock. Without even thinking, Chad nudged the boy aside and bent down to push his arms into the water, forcing a wave to wash up over the rock and douse the flame.

  They stood there for a moment, puffing and wet, both too shocked to say anything. “Are you okay?” Chad finally pulled out of his stunned silence to grab Nick by the shoulders. “What on earth were you doing?”

  “Proving you right!” Nick shouted, scrambling out of the water. “Go away.”

  “I need to talk to you about what’s on those papers.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you. You just think I belong in jail.”

  Chad followed him up the bank. “I don’t. I think you need help.”

  “Oh, great, you, too. Why won’t everyone just leave me alone?”

  “Because we care about you.”

  “Oh, yeah, I hear that all the time. You care enough to ship me off to jail. I’m not dumb, I read what’s in those papers. You think I set my house on fire, just like Scott. The school assigned you to watch me, didn’t they?”

  “Is that what you think?” Chad sat down on the riverbank, hoping it would induce Nick to do the same.

  “You’re sending me off to some fire program.”

  “I know for a fact you didn’t start the fire at your house, Nick, and I c
an prove it.”

  Nick just looked at him with narrowed eyes. Chad could see behind the anger, however, to a scared little boy who just wanted to know he wasn’t going to jail. “Nick, sit down.”

  He paced for a moment, fidgety and resistant. Chad waited. Half of him wanted to pull out the phone and let Jeannie know, but another half of him recognized the need stay in the moment. “I knew you thought you did, so I went back and checked the records. It wasn’t you.”

  “I know that.” Nick sat down.

  “A surge in the wiring system started the fire. Anything could have set the spark—a toaster, a hair dryer, anything. Anything but you.” Sure, Nick had a host of other problems, but Chad was sure most of them stemmed from the need to hear this particular truth. Right now, when it counted most. “You didn’t do it, Nick. Listen to me. It’s not your fault. Things just happen sometimes. They’re bad things, and we’re part of them, but it doesn’t make us guilty.” His own words struck him. Chad realized he wasn’t just talking to Nick; he was talking to himself. About Laurie’s fire. The realization made him love the boy all the more. “I had something bad happen to me and I made a whole lot of mistakes because of it, so I get how this feels. I get how you’re all mixed up. It doesn’t make us bad. We’re just in pain, and people in pain don’t always think.” He pointed to the smoldering pile of wet ashes on the rocks.

  “It felt good to set them on fire. It was stupid—I know that—but I wanted to burn them away. I make the fire do what I want. I can make it start, I can make it stop.” He waited a long, raw moment before asking, “Is that why you’re sending me to jail?”

  He would have pulled the boy into a tight hug right there and then. “No. You aren’t going to jail. I’d like it, though, if you’d let some people help you with what’s going on. Inside, I mean. With the matches and the lighters and why that urge hits you the way it does.” Chad sighed, feeling like the two of them had climbed out of some black pit and could now rest at its edge. “You’ve had so much happen to you, I just want to do everything I can to make sure you come out of it okay. These people know how to do that.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I know it looks hard, and scary.” Chad could no longer help himself and put his arm around the boy, who shivered under his grasp and then finally leaned against him. “I promise you, Nick, I’ll be right there the whole time.” The moment was so real, so unbelievably deep, that Chad’s chest physically hurt. An actual heartache, he thought oddly to himself. Or maybe just healing hurts more than I thought.

  “Mom, too, right?”

  “Absolutely.” The promise was as much to Jeannie as to Nick. “Speaking of your mom…”

  “She’s pretty mad, isn’t she?”

  “She’ll be too relieved to be mad.”

  Nick looked up at him. “What bunch of mistakes did you make?”

  Explain eight years of guilt and regret to a thirteen-year-old? Is there a simple way to tell him about years of self-imposed exile? Foolish distance? Chad realized, with a sense of truth that struck hard, that he’d run off, too. He’d just done it on the inside. Maybe he’d sensed that in Nick all along, and that’s what drew him so inexplicably to the boy. “I thought I should have been able to stop Laurie from dying in that fire.” The words nearly caught in his throat. “But I realize now that I couldn’t have. I did lots of dumb things because I didn’t realize that before.”

  “So we’re sort of the same, huh?”

  Nick’s sheepish smile cut through the last of Chad’s reserve, and he pulled the boy into a fierce hug. “Yeah, we’re the same in lots of ways. I think that’s a good thing.”

  “It’s not so bad. Only…”

  Chad pulled back to look at the boy. Already Nick’s face had changed completely, the tension replaced by what he hoped was affection. “Only what?”

  “Only I think Mom will be a whole lot madder at me than she will be at you.”

  Chad laughed, relief flooding his chest. “If I wait any longer to get you over to her, I doubt that will be true.” He rose and extended his hand to pull Nick to his feet. “Let’s get going, okay?”

  Nick shook the leaves off his jacket. “Yep. I’m wet, anyways.”

  “I’m really glad I was the one to find you.” Chad pulled the phone from his pocket as they walked up over to Nick’s bike, preparing to deliver the best news possible to Jeannie.

  He was flipping it open when Nick reached out and stopped him. “She likes you, so you think you could put in a good word for me? You know, so maybe I’m not grounded for the rest of my life or anything?”

  “Now you’re way out of my jurisdiction, kid. I’ve got no pull…” Chad stopped short as the wail of the firehouse alarm filled the night. He and Nick looked at each other, their thoughts both going in the same direction: Jeannie.

  Looking and waiting was making Jeannie crazy. Everything that could be done was being done, and it still wasn’t enough. The sheer inactivity of driving around town looking for Nicky was torture. Lord, I can’t think of what else to do. You’ve got to help me think of what else to do, she prayed. She’d fought so hard to keep Nicky from sliding under the blackness of grief and loss. She’d dug her heels in, determined to muscle him through all the tragedies that his young life had endured, and it hadn’t worked.

  “I can’t sit here and do nothing!” she said aloud, banging at the steering wheel with her hands. “You can’t let him go through this awful mess and sit there doing nothing.”

  Her panic, yelled so nakedly to God, shocked her into remembering Who and what she believed. When had she lost the rock-hard truth that all things still fell under God’s sovereign hand? Maybe Nick needed to go through this awful mess. In her endless shouts at God tonight, had she ever prayed for God to do whatever He needed to do in Nicky’s soul tonight? Or in hers or Chad’s?

  The fire had burned her trust, robbed her of the strength to say “Thy will be done.” That trust had been what had held her up during her grief. During the slow climb back into life, that kind of trust would have let her see Nicky needed help long before Chad had to force the realization on her. She’d substituted that trust with a scurrying, solution-grasping frenzy.

  God was trustworthy and always had been. Even tonight. All the time working. He’d never once pulled His gaze from her. He knew where Nicky was at this very moment and knew what would happen next.

  That new peace was shattered by the worst possible interruption: the fire siren. No, it can’t be. He can’t have gone and set something on fire.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jeannie slammed on the brakes and dialed Chad with shaking fingers. “Chad!” It was a yelp of pure fear.

  “I’ve got him!” Chad’s voice burst through the crackling connection. “He’s here and he’s fine and I’ve got him.”

  “Oh, Lord, thank You!” Gratitude melted the tension of the past hour. Jeannie couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry. “Just what did he think he was doing?”

  “Mom....” Evidently she’d shouted it loud enough for Nicky to hear. Even at a whine, the sound of his voice was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.

  “He just wasn’t thinking,” she heard Chad say.

  “The sirens…”

  “It’s not him, but I haven’t reached George on the phone so I don’t know what it is.”

  “Is he okay?” Concern still warred with anger, with no clear winner as yet.

  “Yes,” Chad answered, “and I don’t think he’ll pull a stunt like that again anytime soon.”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” Nicky chimed in and she could almost laugh with the relief of hearing his voice.

  “And what else are you, Nick?” Chad cued her son.

  Nicky’s voice replied from a distance. “I’m…sorry.”

  He sounded so small and reluctant, Jeannie could nearly cry for the bliss of knowing it was over. How clearly she could imagine them driving toward her, together. What a wonderful picture they made in her head. “You�
��d better be,” she said. “Don’t you ever, ever do something like that again, you hear me?”

  “Where are you?”

  Jeannie had to take a moment and look around, having lost track of where she was. “At school. On the corner by the baseball fields.”

  “I’ll meet you at Sweet Treats. We should be there in five minutes. I’ll tell George and you can call Abby. Drive safely now, okay? The engines might still be coming out of the bay and you’re all wound up. The last thing we need is an accident.”

  The man of constant protection. While it had chafed at her before, right now it was a comfort. The smile on her face grew wider—something she hadn’t thought possible. After a jubilant call to Abby she put the Jeep in gear and made her way down to Tyler Street. Still a crazy pendulum, her emotions swung between not being able to concoct a sufficiently painful punishment and wanting to never let Nicky leave her sight again.

  She was closer than Chad, and pulled up to the shop to see a flurry of activity in the firehouse. A second set of engines was prepping to leave. They weren’t huge red monsters anymore. They were her friends and neighbors, her fellow citizens and…and the man she loved. All of them working together to keep Gordon Falls safe. All she could feel as she stared at the trucks was deep gratitude.

  Chad’s pickup pulled up and the two of them piled out of the cab. Nicky looked older, darker somehow. He was slumped inside his jacket, head down, hands stuffed in his pockets. When he looked up, the shadows melted off his face to reveal the frightened, sorry baby boy of years gone by. Chad had somehow gotten through to him. She ran toward him in a flurry of need.

  He stiffened in her hug at first, the way boys his age do, but it was only moments before he softened against her. She pulled back to inspect him, running her hands into his mussed hair, wiping away a smudge on his cheek, scowling at his wet jeans. He rolled his eyes, but they glistened, too. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She gave his head a little shake. “Why? Why, Nicholas?”