Sisters in the Wind(17)
“That’s where I’m headed,” I said. Stopping by the storage unit before the cemetery wouldn’t derail my plans. I was merely switching the order of events.
“You got weapons in there?” he asked, looking at my backpack.
I laughed.
“As long as you put that in the trunk, I’ll take you,” he said.
The trunk popped open. In went my backpack.
His name was Blake. I told him mine was Mary Clancy. He tried talking to me, but I worried about maintaining the accent. Plus, I had never been alone in a car with a boy. And I feared saying anything that indicated I was a fourteen-year-old runaway intent on breaking into a secret storage unit.
“A quiet chick,” he commented to himself.
I turned to gaze out the window, grinning brightly. I had disguised myself with a foreign accent and invented a different background. It had worked.
He dropped me off at a fast-food restaurant not far from the storage business. Best if he didn’t know my exact destination. I thanked him for the ride as he handed over the backpack.
“Wow. That’s a heavy one,” he said.
“Weapons,” I replied with a grin.
He laughed, which felt like I’d passed a test. I had behaved as a quiet chick who got into fights and joked about weapons.
I waited for him to drive away. Waited another fifteen minutes in the bathroom in case he returned. Then, I walked—knee still painful—to the storage unit. I needed to see everything in unit 92 that Bridget had spent my dad’s money on. Maybe I’d leave the door open for people to help themselves to the luxury items I expected she was hiding from me. After I returned to Harbor Springs, I would light the fireworks at my dad’s grave.
And after that? I’d figure it out.
The storage buildings were well lit by an abundance of floodlights. Unit 92 was easy to find. Holding my breath, I tried the key. The lock snapped open. I lifted the garage door. A single light bulb overhead automatically illuminated the interior.
It was a mini department store. Wire storage racks were filled with boxes from Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Christian Louboutin. I opened a robin’s-egg-blue box labeled TIFFANY & CO. and found a set of champagne flutes.
My dad never drank. His mom had been killed in a drunk-driving accident when he was twelve. We had no alcohol in our house. Not even a champagne toast after the small wedding where Bridget had worn a knee-length white dress that looked like it came from the 1950s. I remembered standing in front of the mirror with my dad before the ceremony: him in his best suit, me in a pink dress with embroidered daisies. It was our final moment together as just us, just my true family.
My dad was intelligent. How could he have been so stupid as to believe Bridget’s false version of herself? Had she been that good at weaving a web to entangle the fly?
But hadn’t she caught me in her web as well?
I wanted to destroy everything Bridget had bought. Everything she cared about. My teeth stopped chattering. The world went quiet and still as I remembered the fireworks.
My dad set up the fireworks launch far away from our bonfire and picnic blanket. I had to remain on the blanket; he wanted me to be safe. He’d light the fuse and sprint from the launch location. It was like seeing him from his college baseball days before I was born. He would race back to the blanket and execute a perfect slide into home base before the fireworks burst in the sky. After the last of the fireworks, he’d dance and sing around the bonfire. His Dolce Lucy.
With an eerie calmness, I arranged the fireworks so the fuse to one would feed the other fuses before reaching its canister. Digging through the backpack again for the lighter, one book fell to the concrete floor. It was Sarah, Plain and Tall, the book my dad had given me for my twelfth birthday. The story was about a girl whose father advertises for a mail-order bride, Sarah, who ends up loving the stepchildren, the farm, and the father.
Kneeling to pick up the well-worn hardcover, I opened it to the title page. My dad’s inscription read:
To Dolce Lucy on her twelfth birthday.
July 3, 2002
With Love, from Dad
I had stayed up late on my birthday, too excited to finish reading my new book to go to sleep. My dad had known about my birthday book ritual. And he had given me this particular book in preparation for asking me the next day for permission to marry Bridget. His choice of book had been a message, a clue that I had missed. It was perfectly clear to me only now, as I kissed my dad’s handwriting and breathed in the oxygen that no longer felt cold.
I placed the book on top of the empty, robin’s-egg-blue box and used the champagne flutes like bookends. It looked like an altar in the middle of the storage room. Then, I lit the fuse to the first canister and pulled down the door to unit 92. I ran as fast as I could, hoping I had inherited at least some of my dad’s speed.
What had I inherited from my birth mother?
Why had my dad lied to me about being Native American?
How could he have picked Bridget to keep me safe?
Something exploded. I felt it rage within me.
PART TWO
GROWTH
Understanding the four stages of fire growth—Incipient, Growth, Fully Developed, and Decay—is essential for effective wildfire management … The beginning stage of a fire is the easiest to extinguish or control …
—Western Fire Chiefs Association: The Four Stages of Fire Growth Explained Wind has one of the largest (and most unpredictable) impacts on how quickly a wildfire spreads.