Disguised Blessing Read online

“You don’t owe me an explanation. I almost didn’t come, but then I thought maybe you’d want a little forewarning so you could keep Lynda out of it.”

  “Thank you.” She put her hand on the doorknob. “Did this captain happen to say if Tom was with anyone?”

  “He was alone.”

  She frowned. “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “A green Lincoln Navigator.”

  She exploded. “That son of a bitch! He waited until I was inside the hospital and then took my car.”

  “I’ll call the police when I get back to the station and see if I can find out where it was towed.”

  Without her car, she had to arrange for a ride home. If she asked her mother to come and get her, she’d want to know why Tom wasn’t available. Damn. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone else about Tom that night.

  Catherine jumped when she heard a knock on the door.

  “Mrs. Miller?” The night nurse looked inside. “There’s a phone call for you. It’s Mr. Adams. He said he’s at Sutter Hospital and needs to talk to you right away.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be right there.” To Rick, she said, “And thank you. Again. For the hundredth time. I don’t know what I would have done if Tom had blindsided me with this.”

  “You would have rolled with it the way you have everything else.” He waited to follow her out of the room, but she showed no sign of leaving. Finally, he said, “I’m out of my district so I can’t hang around, but if you need me for something, you can reach me at the station.”

  She nodded. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  He’d planned to stop by for a few minutes on his way home and then spend the rest of the day taping and texturing wallboard. “I’m free all day if you need something.”

  “I hate to ask, but I don’t want to involve the rest of my family in this until I absolutely have to and I’m going to need to get my car tomorrow. Do you know if it’s still drivable?”

  “No, but I’ll ask when I call to see where it was towed.”

  “Shit—something I didn’t think about. I don’t know any body shops. Where do I go to get it fixed?”

  “Check with your insurance agent. They may want you to take the car to one of their approved shops.” Sentence by sentence, he became more involved in her life. If he had any sense, he’d run like hell. Lyn had given him the option that morning. A female firefighter had become available to take Lynda’s case. He’d declined the offer.

  But he could still change his mind. He’d earned a free summer. His house needed him. Hell, Blue needed him. The dog was as neglected as the garden he’d started the week before he met Catherine and Lynda. If he didn’t spend a little more time with Blue, he was going to move next door permanently.

  Then he looked into Catherine’s large brown eyes and saw the fear and confusion and pain. She’d lost the protective veneer of the belief that bad things happened to other people’s children. She triggered a protective streak he had no business feeling, one he’d be crazy to act on. She had family to take care of her. She didn’t need him.

  She covered her face with her hands as if trying to close out the overwhelming onslaught of problems. Seconds later she dropped her hands back to her sides. “I’d better take that call—I need to ask Tom who he’s insured with if I’m going to get started on this thing tomorrow.”

  “Do you have a way home tonight?”

  “It’s out of his way, but I’m sure Brian would be willing to take me.”

  He nodded. “Let me know what time you need to be picked up in the morning.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Thank you.” She offered him an accompanying smile. “Yet again.”

  “It’s nothing I wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me you’re only doing your job. What you’re doing goes way beyond what you signed on to do. I know it and you know it. I promise I won’t put you in this position again.”

  He wasn’t sure if he felt relieved or disappointed.

  On his way back to the engine, Rick decided Tom was an ass, pure and simple. Someone who couldn’t see what he had in Catherine and Lynda sure as hell didn’t deserve them.

  12

  JANET STEPPED OFF THE RUNNING BOARD ON THE engine when she saw Rick come out of the hospital. “Everything okay?” She climbed into the back with the rookie, Paul.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine.” As soon as he was inside the cab, Steve pointed to the computer.

  “Dispatch called a couple of minutes ago. They wanted to know if we could take an animal rescue call.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cat in a wall.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That we’d be there as soon as you put us in service again.” He grinned. “Figured we should make sure Paul has a full range of experience before he leaves us.”

  Rookies spent six months at each of four different stations their first two years in the department. Paul was a week shy of two months on his first rotation. He was the only one of his graduating class of twenty to have actually fought a fire and the only one to go overboard on a white-water practice drill.

  Rick put on his headset and pressed the microphone button on the dash. “Engine seventy-six responding.” He hit the Enroute button on the computer and the button on his headset that cut him off from his crew. He’d already sustained a significant hearing loss in one ear from the sirens and air horn, and he fanatically protected what was left.

  Usually he enjoyed the enforced silence. It gave him time to think about whatever project he had going at the moment, especially if it was something that needed finessing. He tried concentrating on the half-finished texturing, but his mind kept drifting back to Catherine. He’d dated off and on in the ten years since his divorce, but never seriously. He kept waiting for the stars to spin, to hear a symphony in the wind, to know in his gut that he’d found someone who, when they were both eighty-five, would still tell jokes and take showers with him and lay on the grass to watch meteor showers in August. He refused to settle for the moment, or for someone who wouldn’t stick through the hard times. He wanted a relationship, a lover, a friend to last forever.

  He’d been through the death of love once; he didn’t have the heart or the courage to go through it again.

  Steve stopped in front of a two-story brick house and remained with the engine while Rick and the two firefighters went up to the front door. A woman Rick guessed to be in her eighties opened the door seconds after he knocked.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re finally here. I’m so sorry about calling this late, but I didn’t know what else to do.” She glanced up and saw the engine. “Oh dear, I didn’t know you would be coming in that. I told them it was only a little emergency. You could have come in a car. Now the neighbors are going to think I left something on the stove again.”

  “Sorry—this is all the city gives us. We come in the fire engine or not at all. Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve got going on in here?”

  She held open the door and stepped out of the way. “Come in, come in.” When the three of them were inside, she closed the door and led them to a back bedroom. “My son is out of town. He’s the one who usually takes care of things like this for me—or my neighbor does. But he works at night, so he’s not home, either. So you see I really didn’t have any choice but to call you.”

  “What makes you think you have a cat in the wall?” Rick asked.

  She gave him a chastising look reminiscent of his mother’s response to dumb questions. “Listen for yourself.” She tapped the wall by the closet door and put her finger to her lips motioning for quiet. Sure enough, several plaintive wails followed. “Well?”

  “You’re right,” Rick admitted. “It sounds like a cat.” He went to the wall and tapped again to try to pinpoint its location.

  “Would you like me to do that, Captain?” Janet said.

  He chuckled to himself at her veiled a
ttempt to cover for him. She’d picked up the results of his city-required hearing test a month ago and was convinced he was going deaf. “I think I can handle it. You can get the saw and a couple of tarps out of the rig.”

  “What are you going to do?” the woman asked.

  “Cut a hole in the wall. The cat is too far down to try to reach it from above.”

  “Oh dear, what am I going to do with a hole in my wall?” She put her hand to her ample bosom. “Or were you going to fix it for me, too?”

  “No, I’m afraid we don’t do that.”

  “Are you sure there’s no other way?”

  “Not any that I know of.”

  “What would happen if we just left it there? Isn’t it possible it could climb out by itself?”

  “If there were any way that cat could get out of there on its own, it would be out by now.” He could sympathize with her reluctance to see her wall damaged, but he wasn’t about to walk away knowing an animal would starve to death because it was inconvenient to rescue it. “Now, I can’t force you to let us cut a hole in your wall, but I can promise you it’s going to happen one way or another. If that cat dies in there, the smell is going to drive you out of the house. You won’t be back until you find someone to tear down the wall and clean it up.”

  “Oh dear. I had no idea.”

  “I take it the cat isn’t yours?”

  She shook her head. “I always wanted one, but my husband was allergic. Then when he died, I started going here and there—places he’d never go with me—and I was hardly ever home.”

  Janet and Paul came back. Rick had them cover the bed and floor with the tarps. He found the studs by tapping and listening to the sounds change from hollow to solid. After marking the position with a pencil, he cut a straight line down the wall. Moving the saw to the second stud, he caught the look on Paul’s face. His eyes were enormous, his mouth open, his expression one between horror and fascination. Clearly he expected blood to come spurting from the cut.

  Rick made the second slice down the wall sixteen inches from the first, and then one across the top. Wedging the tip of the pry bar into the third cut, he levered and pushed. The wall broke at the seam, two feet above the cat. He shined his flashlight into the hole. Two terrified eyes shined back. The cat was wedged upside down, its feet pointing toward the ceiling, its black fur covered in white dust. It started purring, the rumble loud enough for Paul and Janet to hear on the other side of the bed.

  “Is it okay?” Janet asked.

  “Far as I can tell,” Rick told her.

  “May I see?” the woman asked.

  Rick moved out of the way. “Don’t touch it,” he warned.

  “Oh my, it’s a pretty little thing, isn’t it?” she said, the hole in the wall temporarily forgotten.

  “Would you like me to get it out for you, Captain?” Paul asked. “Cats like me.”

  Rick had seen too many animals in crisis to trust one, no matter how loud it purred. But he was willing to give the rookie a chance. “All right, but put your gloves on.”

  “No disrespect, Capt’n, but if I go sticking a glove in there I’m only going to scare the poor thing. I do know what I’m talkin’ about when it comes to cats. I tell you, they like me.”

  There were some things you just couldn’t teach; they had to be learned by experience. Rick shook his head and backed away. “All right—have at it.”

  “Hey, kitty,” Paul crooned softly. “That’s a good boy.” He slowly reached inside, talking the entire time. Everything went fine for about a second and a half. Then, as if on cue, the cat let out a high pitched snarl, spit, growled, and latched onto Paul’s arm. Paul jerked his hand back and hit the dresser with his elbow. For a second, Rick wasn’t sure whether the howling was coming from Paul or the cat.

  “Jesus, get him off of me.”

  Rick figured the cat no more wanted to be on Paul’s arm than Paul wanted him there, so he stood back and waited. Sure enough, the cat used Paul for a launchpad, hitting the bed and then the floor.

  “Ungrateful little—”

  “Watch it,” Rick warned.

  Janet couldn’t hold back any longer and doubled over laughing.

  The old woman went to the cat where it had settled in a corner. She spoke to it for several seconds, stroked its head, and lifted it into her arms. “Cats like me, too,” she said to Paul.

  It was too much for Rick. He roared.

  “Look at this,” Paul said indignantly, holding out his hand. “Look what that thing did to me.”

  “Oh dear,” the woman said. “You really should have a doctor look at that. I once heard that a man lost his thumb to a cat bite.”

  “Is that true, Captain?” Paul asked, his outrage turning to concern.

  “True enough,” Rick said. “Once we get this place cleaned up we’ll take you to the hospital and get you started on an antibiotic.”

  When they were back at the rig, Janet went up to Steve. “You missed a good one. The rookie got baptized.”

  Steve grinned. “And earned himself a new name in the process no doubt.”

  “Aw, come on, you guys. I was only trying to help out,” Paul groaned.

  Janet gave him a no-mercy grin. “The long of it is—Paul ‘Cats Like Me’ Murdoch,” she told Steve. “But I think plain old ‘Cats’ has a nice ring to it.”

  “You’re not going to tell anyone else about this, are you?” Had he been in the department longer, he would have known that the pleading tone in his voice would be his undoing. “I’ll never live it down.”

  “Sure you will.” Rick slapped him on the shoulder. “Ten or fifteen years after you retire, no one will remember anything about it.”

  On the way to the hospital, Rick thought about his first house fire: how he’d gone inside so excited he never felt his feet hit the ground; how his captain had taken the hose and given him the nozzle; and how his heart had pounded so loudly he was sure everyone could hear. He’d spotted the fire right away—a deep orange glow against the far wall. He’d hit it with a smothering fog, but it hadn’t been enough. He’d hit it again. And then again. Still it had burned as if fed by embers from hell.

  He’d heard the truck crew cut into the roof. Someone had yelled from the back of the house that they’d found the fire. Confused, Rick had closed the nozzle handle, cutting off the water. The smoke had been drawn through the ventilating hole in the roof and the room had cleared as they’d backed out. Rick had stared slack-jawed at his fire: the neon light in a built-in fish tank.

  His captain, a crusty man two years short of retirement, had told Rick that he’d just learned the most important lesson he would ever learn in the fire department. Never take anything for granted.

  Rick had not entered a burning building since that day without reminding himself of that lesson.

  13

  CATHERINE LEANED FORWARD IN BRIAN’S FORD Explorer and waved to the guard at the gate. He smiled and pressed the button that started the heavy metal bars sliding along their tracks, letting them enter the Estates at Granite Bay. She glanced at the dashboard clock. They’d stayed at the hospital later than usual, and when Brian found out she’d decided to call a cab to take her home, he’d insisted on taking her himself. It would be two in the morning before he finally made it home.

  “Did you call your mother and tell her you were going to be late?” She’d never asked Lynda’s friends that kind of question. Just one of the differences three weeks with a daughter in the hospital had made. It seemed she worried about everything now, no longer leading a life where accidents always happened to other people.

  He drove past the gate and started up the hill to Catherine’s house. “She’s at the lake this week.”

  “Don’t you miss being there?” she asked carefully. She didn’t know Brian well enough to understand his motives for being at the hospital every day, she only knew how grateful she was when she found him there. The last thing she wanted was to say or do something that might make him feel
unwelcome. Lynda still wouldn’t see any of her friends, including Wendy, her lifelong best friend. She even refused to talk to them on the phone. She said she wasn’t ready and Catherine didn’t push, confident that once Lynda was away from the hospital she’d start feeling more like herself again.

  “Sometimes,” Brian admitted. “But it wouldn’t be the same.”

  Her heart went out to him. “It will be. You just need a little time.”

  “You think that’s all Lynda needs, too?”

  She sighed. “I wish I knew what she needs. I’d move heaven and earth to get it for her.” The one thing she knew for sure Lynda hadn’t needed was Tom walking out on them.

  “She’s scared.”

  “I know…”

  “I keep telling her that no one is going to care how she looks, but she doesn’t believe me.”

  “She cares. When she looks in a mirror she doesn’t recognize the girl looking back and she’s afraid her friends won’t, either.” She hadn’t recognized what was happening until she’d gone to the meeting that night. She’d listened to other parents talk about their children and in bits and pieces heard them describe and explain Lynda’s feelings.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “To you and me maybe, but not to her. It’s her head that was shaved, her body that’s wrapped in bandages, her back that’s scarred for life. We can’t really know what she’s going through, any more than she can know what it feels like for us to watch her going through it.”

  “I thought about not coming so much.”

  They were the words she’d feared hearing. “But?”

  “I couldn’t stay away.” He pulled into the driveway but left the car running. “She keeps saying she doesn’t want anyone there, but if I’m late, she always asks why.”

  Brian comes because he feels sorry for Lynda. Catherine had hoped it was because they were friends. She felt a flash of protective, misplaced anger, but thankfully it was gone before she acted on it. Of all the men in Lynda’s life, Brian had proved the most loyal; his motivation didn’t matter. “She’ll be home soon.” The rest of her meaning—that he could move on with his life when that happened—was implied.