Chapter 23

23

Say you're in a tower in a mansion on an island and someone sets a fire on the stairs leading to your little tower and you are trapped, and you have a bad and altogether-too-recent history with fire. And you're already in a situation where you think you may be trapped with a murderer. What do you do?

"Call 911," I said.

" I have no signal. "

Neither did I, as it happened. Riki ran to open the window. Some inner voice told me to grab her and hold her back, so I did that, tackling her around the waist.

"What?" she said, screaming at me, her eyes glazed in panic.

"Don't open the window," I yelled back.

"The smoke!"

"Fires love oxygen," I said. "If you open that window, you're going to feed it. Where's your fire ladder?"

She looked at me hopelessly, and I remembered that she had taken the ladder from her room for our escapade to Dr. Henson's. Riki had a walkie-talkie. I grabbed it.

"If anyone can hear us," I said, "we're in the turret and it is on fire. The building is on fire. "

Nothing.

I entered a new phase of my first experience being high—calm. The situation was so serious and insane that I felt fine. Not good, but clear.

"Okay," I said. "Here's what we're going to do. Soak a towel and stick it at the bottom of the door so we can keep the smoke out as long as possible."

Riki was crying and not moving.

"Riki," I said, taking her by the shoulders. "Soak. A. Towel."

She nodded and rushed around the room looking for a towel. Meanwhile, I tried to solve this puzzle. We weren't going out the way we came in because the fire would come through the door soon. The windows were the only way out, but we had no ladder.

I tried to recall the facade of the house. Where were we? I hurried to the piles of gift shop supplies and clawed into a stack of photo brochures and posters. I flattened out one of the latter and found a picture that showed the turret we were in. There was nothing below us—this part of the building was a straight drop. We could, however, maybe get to the roof by climbing over to the part where the turret attached to the house. It wasn't that far. Riki had gone about that distance in her stunt with the ladder. We could do this.

Riki was stuffing the door crack with a wet towel while still crying. She turned to me. "What now?"

"We need to go out the window and get to the roof," I said as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

"You said not to open the window."

"Well, we're going to open it, and we're going to leave."

Perfect clarity now. Hyperfocus. I had reached flow state.

As soon as I opened the window, I heard a rush of air sucking through the room. The smoke began to reach fingers under the door. I looked down to see if there was something we could walk along. There was a lip edging this bit of rooftop, but it was four inches wide, at most. You couldn't get your whole foot on it. This was a surface that would have been treacherous in the best of times, and we were in the worst of them. The rain came down sideways. About two feet above me, there was a small bit of decoration on top of the window—an ornamental point. I stared at it for a moment and got fascinated watching the rain coming down at my face.

"Marlowe!"

Riki grabbed at me. The room had started to fill with smoke. I slammed the window shut.

"We're going to need to go on our toes around the lip of the roof," I said. "We'll need something to hold. I think we could swing something over the point above the window so we have something to hold on to. Do you have rope?"

No rope.

I considered the wind chimes, but they wouldn't work. The curtains. The ones Riki had sewn. They were long enough.

"Get these down," I said, tugging at them.

We almost tore the curtain rod from the wall in our efforts to get the curtains down. There was no time to think this through anymore. The door was blackening, and it was getting hard to breathe.

"We have to go," I said. "You go first."

"Why?"

"Or me, just... we have to go."

"You go," she said.

There was terror in Riki's eyes. Pure, unadulterated terror.

"We can do this," I said to her. "We have to. Someone did this to us. Someone set a fire. Stay mad."

"Stay mad," she repeated.

I opened the window, and the storm rushed in again. The smoke billowed. I took my curtain and tried to swing it up over the point above the window, but this was not as easy as it had seemed. The wind kept whipping it around.

"I need something to stand on!" I yelled.

I heard a crash as she dumped all her books out of a wooden box she had been using as a bookcase and stuck it by my feet. I stepped up on this. It occurred to me that I would have to go through the top part of the window to get at the point.

"We need to break this!"

The smoke was burning my eyes. The top of the door was gone. Riki was coughing as she raced around the room. She pushed me aside and smashed the window with a chair, hitting several times to clear the shards that would have disemboweled me if I leaned over them.

This time, with the box and no window, I was able to hook the curtain over the point.

The fire had entered the room.

"Now," I said.

I grabbed both ends of the curtain and swung my leg out the window. Wind slammed me from all directions, throwing my hair in my eyes. The rain was filling the rest of the space. I reached my toe down, looking for that little lip. I couldn't find it. There was only air below me.

I was going to die. That much was obvious. I could not do this and live. And yet, I could not stay in the room and live either. There was a cheerful simplicity to it all.

I felt for the lip again. My toe landed on it this time. One leg in, one leg out. Time to commit. I gripped the windowsill as well as the curtain and lowered my second leg. This time, I found the lip more easily. I was standing four stories up in the storm. All I had to do now was shuffle along....

I went to move my foot and missed. I started to fall backward into eternity. Riki grabbed my arm and pulled me back. I inched along just enough so she could join me. She took the other end of the curtain. Now we were counterweights for each other.

"Move!" she yelled against the window. "Marlowe, go!"

I had zoned. It was time to shuffle. Maybe it was easier that I couldn't see anything, hear anything above the roar of the storm. Also, whoever had done this to me probably hadn't factored in that high Marlowe was apparently chill-in-the-face-of-danger Marlowe. Cat-burglar Marlowe.

I took my first step. Riki moved, leaning into the building, clawing at it for dear life. We moved again, and again. Five feet of this, working our way around the curve. We ran out of length of curtain quickly, so we had to hold on to whatever we could on the building facade, which was nothing really, so we stretched our arms into wide hugs and leaned in. Then the roof was below us, maybe three feet down. It was a hard slant, running with water. How we could get to it wasn't clear.

I did the only thing I could think to do. I dropped to it. Maybe I thought I would land and stick, but I did not land and stick. I was on the world's worst slide. There was nothing to grab, so I cascaded down wet roof tiles until I slammed into the peaked top of a dormer window. Riki was still hugging the turret, her black hair snapping around her face. She looked down fearfully at the roof I was on.

"Jump!"

"I'll slide off!"

"I'll grab you!"

"You're high!"

"Do it anyway!"

Down she came, landing hard, rolling, clawing at the roof. She slid right past me and almost kept going, but I managed to catch her ankle. She was splayed on the roof like a starfish, her head facing the ground. She was attached to me, and I was attached to the top of a window. The rain slickened her leg and my hands kept losing their grip, slipping down to her socks. I clung with all my might, the top of the window digging into my abdomen.

"What do we do now?" she screamed.

"Can you turn to get to the window?"

She used some bad but highly inventive language to let me know she could not, and that I should not have asked. Through the rain, I could see Tom and Liani down below on the ground, dragging cushions and pillows into a pile. There, in the mud and driving rain, were the elegant furnishings of the downstairs rooms, all those pillows and bits of the sofas.

That seemed a bad option. Four stories down, and maybe we would hit a bunch of wet sofa. I was starting to think that maybe we'd spend our forever on the roof, as long as I could keep hold of her. Then Van's curly head appeared from the window I was stuck on top of.

"What the fuck?" he screamed.

He had a point, of course, but there was no time to address it. A fire ladder tumbled from the window, landing a few feet from Riki. She clawed for it, but it was too far. He pulled it back and threw it again, this time landing it on her head. She pushed it off and turned herself around. I saw her hands slip off the rungs once or twice, but she managed to climb up. I saw her body disappear through the window. Now it was my turn.

Van and April craned up to look at me.

"We've got you!" April said. "Drop toward us!"

"I'm fine!" I said.

"What?" Van asked.

I played it all out in my head. I could spend the night jackknifed over this window. I'd probably make it. A helicopter would come for me. A claw would come down, pinch me, and carry me into the sky. All I had to do was wait. Being stuck on the top of the triangular dormer of a window during a storm isn't great, but falling four stories is worse. I'd gone this far. I didn't want to go any farther.

"The house is on fire," Van screamed. "You have to do this, now."

Oh yes. The fire. You can't stay on the roof if there is no roof to stay on. Everyone knows that. I could not stay here, but there was a 50 percent chance that someone below me was a murderer. Liani, April, Tom, Van. It was one of them. Not ideal conditions for a trust fall.

But Riki was in there too. She'd made it.

I wiggled myself so that my legs came up and my head slid down. The roof, while slick in the rain, was composed of many tiles, a dragon skin's worth of scales, nooks to dig my fingers into. Nothing gave me any purchase, though, and now only my feet were hooked over the crest of the window. Once I shifted, I was going down.

"Come on, Marlowe!" Riki called. "Come on..."

I straightened my ankles, and I began to slide, bumping down over the tiles, headed for the bottom of the roof and the edge, to the ground...

Something caught my foot. Someone. Then I was pulled up, up, up, my chin slamming against tile edges, my knees scraping. They pulled me by the shorts, my shirt, my hair, and then I was falling back into someone's grasp and collapsing on the floor of the upstairs hall, back in the house I had escaped minutes before. The smoke was snaking through, causing me to break into spasms of coughing and tearing my eyes.

"Go go go," Van said. "Gogogogogogo."

Riki hauled me to my feet and the four of us tore down the steps as smoke billowed from the upper floors into the main open hallway. A cloud of it drifted between us and the stained-glass dome, obscuring it. Down, down, down, through the main hall, under the sunrise transom, and out.

As the rain came down around us, we huddled on the lawn and watched the upper floors of Morning House light up. Left unchecked, the fire wandered like a ravenous guest, eating the furniture and carpets and drapes. It ate floors and stairs. It ate the desks and pianos, the cushions and the pictures. It drank the Thousand Island dressing in the gift shop.

Funny, with so much water outside—the countless gallons of the St. Lawrence and this storm—that nothing could stop it. The house was well insulated from the elements. It kept to itself, tight and snug, and burned. Then there was the strangest noise I've ever heard—a twisted music of whistles and screaming pops, followed by a tinkling like a thousand tiny, demented bells.

"There goes the dome," Riki said.

The women in the ceiling. They were leaving, their glass faces breaking from their lead prisons, dripping down, free at last.