Page 1 of August Heat
Chapter 1
KRYS
The smoldering remains of the Longfellows’ barn was not the prettiest sight to the behold. Only the oncoming gray clouds gave any hope that the worst of it was over, since two hours’ worth of dousing had barely been enough to put out the flames.
“Never gets any easier,” Sean Quimby said. He sat in the dry earth that would soon glisten with freshly fallen rains. Beside him, Krys Madison removed her helmet and ran her hand through her flattened hair. Sweat gleamed on her brow and tickled her skin beneath her uniform. Nothing like fighting a raging fire on a day already thick with humidity. “At least it’s over.”
“For us, anyway.” Only a few yards away stood Ethan Longfellow, one hand on his pale face and the other clutching his cell phone. He lamented that he didn’t have decent reception that far away from his house, but he didn’t have the heart to call his wife and tell her what had happened to the barn. “The Longfellows are gonna have fun with their insurance.”
“At least there was nothing living in the barn.” Ethan shrugged. “Aside from some rats, maybe. Ugh. Great. Now I’m gonna think of cooked rats. I’m gonna figure out when we’re good to go so we can get outta here and have a shower.”
“You do that.” Krys was too tired to get up. She had been up half the night tossing and turning, thanks to her oscillating fan dying a grand death in the middle of summer. While that season had been milder than recent years, the humidity had been killing Krys, who wasn’t used to wet, moist summers. Some of her fellow firefighters came from the east coast, be it New England or the South, and they loved to pick on the locals for succumbing to the sweats more easily than most.Never mind a damn tornado touching down in Portland last month.Hail wasn’t supposed to mean anything more than some rain in those parts. Yet when the Midwestern transplants began to shake in their sandals and ran for the nearest cellar (only to discover alackof cellars in Paradise Valley) Krys finally got her turn to laugh.
She wasn’t laughing much today.
Between the lack of sleep and crushing sense of futility, Krys had been battling the kind of seasonal depression that didn’t often affect those in the northwest. While everyone else turned on their specialty lights in the winter, Krys shuttered up her windows in the summer and pretended the sun wasn’t up until 8:30 PM most of the season. She blamed her PNW nature that discredited the sun as a fabrication of the cosmic mind. No, she wasn’t sickly pale and lacking in Vitamin D. If anything, she tanned too easily. Krys’s problem wasn’t about theweather,necessarily… although the dry heat and droughts that had plagued the northwest for the past few years certainly didn’t make her job easier.
She hated howhappyit made everyone.
All right, so I hate seeing that long face more.That was the hardest part of this job. Approaching property owners and giving them the bad news.“Sorry, Mr. Longfellow. We couldn’t save your house, your barn, or your family.”So, it hadn’t been that bad this time. The barn hadn’t been used for years and had fallen into disrepair. Still, it was a massive cleanup the Longfellows would have to pay for, and if Ethan hadn’t happened to be driving by when the fire began to rage, it could have spread to the nearby woods or the family house. No, the worst was the house fires that completely obliterated a whole family’s life. Even if nobody died, it was like something had.A few months ago two little girls lost the only home they ever knew.Krys had gone back after that housefire to help them scavenge for anything that might still be salvageable, knowing how fruitless it often was. What wasn’t charred was ruined by smoke damage. Still, when a six-year-old cried about the stuffed bunny that had helped her survive life so far, Krys was inclined to follow the sounds of her heartstrings and do what she could. Sometimes that meant digging into her own toy closet back in her parents’ house in Portland and unearthing a few stuffed animals she no longer needed. She figured it was better than touring little kids around thrift stores.
“Madison!” called the chief. “You done sitting on your ass yet? I need you to do a sweep of the area.”
She raised her hand in acknowledgment, but was in no hurry to leap up and get back to work. If anything, her legs were sorer than ever, and the depressing need to go to sleep seeped into her bones.
That was probably why the chief put her on sweep. All she had to do was look for anything out of place, embers in need of quashing, and creatures requiring aid. Most of her coworkers were already sifting through the debris of the barn in case someonehadbeen in there. The most likely starts of abandoned barn fires were high school kids smoking and getting up to no good. But that was for the fire marshal to figure out when he got there. Krys was simply grateful it was toward the end of her shift. With any luck, she’d be in bed within three hours.
Luck was not on her side that day. It was on someone else’s.
Or should I say someones…At first, Krys hadn’t heard the pathetic mewling coming from the tall grass by the woods. She was so focused on her own problems and crappy feelings that she almost stepped on the box of kittens halfway through her sweep.
“What the…” Her foot had kicked aside the box. Four fuzzy heads jerked to left, mouths opening and cries of helplessness stabbing Krys right in the heart. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Who the hell left a box of kittens here?”
Seriously. Kittens.
Now, Krys was a dog person, not that it meant she purposely went around kicking boxes of kittens for fun and slander, but she knew way more about puppies and dogs than she did about kittens. She couldn’t gauge how old they were. All she knew was that there were four, with no mama cat in sight.
“Here, kitty kitty.” She looked around, including in the tall grass and a few steps into the woods. Between the sounds of birds kicking up a fuss in the trees and her fellow firefighters shouting things to one another in the distance, Krys couldn’t hear the potential cries of an injured mama cat.Don’t tell me these fuzzballs were dumped.Unfortunately, that was common out in those parts. Farmers and ranchers would bundle up barn kittens they didn’t want and take them elsewhere, sometimes way too early. These kittens looked barely weaned, if at all. They were big enough to hop out of their box, but either fear or a lack of energy kept them contained.
Well, there was only one thing for Krys to do.
She removed her jacket and draped it over the box, careful to leave a big enough hole for air. Gingerly, she picked up the box and carried it back toward the burn site, where Ethan Longfellow spoke with the fire chief.
“Excuse me, Mr. Longfellow,” Krys interrupted, when there was a brief lull in their conversation. “I found this box of kittens a few yards away from here, toward the woods. Do you know anything about them?”Please tell me they’re yours. Please tell me they’re your barn cats that magically escaped with their lives.This would make things so much easier. Boom. Congrats, Mr. Longfellow, you have a smoldering barn on your hands, but the kittens survived! It’s the miracle of life! (Honestly, it was a better outcome than most barn fires. Krys had a tough stomach, but still had the occasional flashback to what poor animal was found in the cinders.)
He blankly looked between her and the kittens crying in their box. One particularly fluffy cat had climbed on its sibling and attempted to poke its head out of the box. All that happened was them both crumbling to the bottom.
“I’ve never seen them before in my life,” Ethan said.
Great.
“You found them in a box like that?” the chief asked.
“Yup. Right over yonder.”
Both the chief and Ethan looked in the direction Krys pointed. When they put the focus back on Ethan, he shrugged and said, “No idea about it. They’re not my cats. Glad they weren’t in the fire, though.”
The chief shrugged. “Get ‘em to the shelter.”
