“You’re going to want to leave now, June. I’m not going to say it again. Go.”
“No! Don’t do this. Please.” She was frantic, desperate to make Law see reason. Juniper took a few quick steps toward him, but he exhaled a single smoke ring and then held the cigar out over the gasoline-soaked floor.
“It’s better this way,” he said. And then, he let go.
The whoosh of fuel as it caught was so instant, and so ferocious, it sucked the oxygen out of the barn. One moment Juniper could see, could breathe, and the next the world was on fire. There was a wall of flame between her and Lawrence, and already the inferno was feeding on sawdust, old boards, moldy hay. Juniper reached for the only father she had ever known, but instead of stepping toward her, he backed away. In a heartbeat, he was gone, devoured by the black smoke that roiled all around them.
Juniper could feel smoldering fingers claw into her nostrils, her mouth, forcing fumes deep inside her lungs. She didn’t know how long the barn had been burning, but she could hardly see anymore, and what little air she had left was gone. She had tried to save Law and failed, but if she didn’t find the door soon, she wouldn’t make it out herself.
The problem was, Juniper didn’t know which way was out anymore. Everything looked the same, a black and orange living hell. But through the roar, Juniper thought she could hear something that wasn’t the world ending. It was outside the blaze, a sound that was man-made and that heralded help. The sound of sirens.
It didn’t make sense. Had her mother called 911? She wouldn’t do that, would she? Juniper just didn’t know, but in her fevered, smothered state, she believed there were fire engines outside. Water and air and life. When she fell to her knees, she wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or if it was real, but there seemed to be a breath of cool in the place where her fingertips met concrete. Juniper crawled toward it. Scraping her knees along the floor, dragging a body that wanted nothing more than to just lie down and sleep, she kept going one inch at a time. When Juniper felt something solid, she pushed it with one hand. The wind caught the door and flung it wide, ushering in cold night air and drawing the flames toward the place where Juniper crouched. She gulped a ragged breath and fell down the single step as a wave of firemen leapt off the first truck.
She was lying with her cheek in the snow, fire nipping at her heels, when one of them caught her under the shoulder and flipped her over. Scooping her up like a child, he ran, and Juniper buried her face in the stiff folds of his fire gear.
“I loved him,” she said. Sullivan. Jonathan. Her unknown father. Even Lawrence Baker.
But when he yelled back, “What?” she was already gone.
* * *
It took the volunteer fire department hours to put out the blaze, and nearly as long to comb through the wreckage.
Juniper watched them from the back of the open ambulance where they made her sit with an oxygen mask and a Mylar blanket. The EMTs wanted to transport her to the hospital in Munroe for observation, but after blacking out for a couple of seconds and coming to on a stretcher, Juniper insisted she would be fine and signed a waiver refusing further treatment. She couldn’t leave. Not with Lawrence unaccounted for and her mother sedated on the couch inside the farmhouse. An EMT assured her that Reb was not alone, so Juniper sat on the back deck of the ambulance and bore witness to the Bakers’ barn burning to the ground.
Law wasn’t in it.
Afterward, the emergency workers all gathered in the yard, passing around a thermos of coffee and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups, and Juniper felt gratitude roll off her in waves. It was pure luck that they had come at all. Her mother’s 911 call was incoherent at best, but rather than assuming it was a prank, the emergency operator took a chance and sent the full cavalry, including the ambulance and two local squad cars plus a deputy sheriff. No Everett. And when Juniper told the deputy everything she knew, he placed some calls and brought in the state. They arrived just in time to learn that there was no one in the barn—incinerated remains or otherwise—so they organized a search. Over a dozen law enforcement officers, fire department volunteers, and even a couple of EMTs stood shoulder to shoulder in the purple predawn light and walked the field beyond the barn, hunting for fresh footprints in the snow.
Juniper could see the search and rescue mission framed in the ruined skeleton of the smoldering barn, and she knew the exact moment they found him. One emergency worker raised his hand and they all gathered round at the apex of the hill. Juniper could close her eyes and picture the view from that height: the slow rise and fall of fallow fields, and in the distance, the scrub and trees of Jericho Lake giving way to the Murphys’ barren acreage.