Free The Ice Cradle by Mary Ann Winkowski, Maureen Foley

freshening the clapboards with a new coat of paint.
    Now, the stained oak doors stood open on their hinges. Mark and a couple of men who had arrived on the scene were using garden hoses and buckets of water to try to keep the flames from spreading. It didn’t take a trained observer to perceive that the blaze was getting away from them.
    “Where’s the fire department?” I asked Lauren, who was pacing in her bathrobe on the grass behind the house. For an instant, I wondered if there
was
a fire department.
    “On their way,” she said, just as I heard the first sirens in the distance. “It’s all volunteers. They have to get to the station from their homes.”
    I put my arm around her. She was shivering. I know that pregnancy doesn’t make a woman frail or ill, but I still didn’t feel that Lauren should be out here in her bare feet, breathing in all the smoke.
    “You should go inside,” I said.
    “No.”
    “Really. Think of the baby. There’s nothing you can do out here.”
    She shook her head firmly.
    I broke away and moved toward the barn, and as I reached its doors, I could see flames beginning to lick up three of the four interior walls. The men seemed to have tapped all the water sources, so I ducked inside the barn, hoping I could save some objects by pulling them out onto the grass.
    “No!” Mark shouted, seeing me. “Get out!”
    “I’m fine.” I grabbed a chair by its arms and hurried it out to the side lawn. Over the next few minutes, I was able to pull or push out five more chairs, a snowblower, a lawn mower, three tables—one of which weighed a ton—two bicycles, and half a dozen huge, expensive-looking ceramic pots. These I had to roll.
    When the firefighters arrived in two trucks, tapped a hydrant, and brought in the heavy hoses, we were all ordered to get back. Mark crossed the grass, stood behind Lauren, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. The other men drifted into the clusters of horrified neighbors who had gathered at the edges of the property.
    I retreated to the back steps but had to move a short time later, when the firefighters decided to hose down the stairs and the exterior of the inn. This seemed overly cautious to me. I highly doubted that a stray spark, having jumped a distance of some three hundred feet, would have been hot enough to set the inn on fire, but what did I know? I scooted out of the way and joined an older couple lingering on the far lawn by a hedge of hydrangea bushes.
    “Terrible,” I said.
    “Awful,” said the woman, who was wearing a pink flowered nightgown under her trench coat. “I heard a whole string of explosions. Woke me right up. Course I don’t sleep much. Bing bing bing bing! That’s what it sounded like.”
    “Spray cans,” mumbled the man.
    “What?” the woman asked. She nodded at me and said, “I’m Mina Hansen. We live over there.” Mina pointed to a shingled cottage tucked back behind the barn. Unlike the back steps,the cottage appeared to be well within reach of a stray spark, and I wondered why the firefighters weren’t turning their hoses in that direction.
    “Aerosol cans going off,” said the man.
    “I’m Anza O’Malley,” I offered. “I’m a guest here.”
    “You think that’s what exploded?” Mina asked. For my benefit she added, “This is my husband, Frank.”
    “I know damn well it is,” said Frank.
    “Frank was a volunteer firefighter for thirty-one years,” explained Mina.
    “Thirty-two,” he corrected.
    “He just retired last year.”
    “And I’ll tell you something else,” Frank went on. “There’s something fishy about this fire.”
    Yeah, no kidding
, I thought. “You think it could have been—electrical? The wiring out there must be pretty old.”
    “Electrical fires don’t usually start by themselves,” Frank explained.
    It might have had a little help
, I thought.
    “Not in the middle of the night, anyway,” he continued. “Not when everything’s turned off. Now, if you left