Free Angel Food and Devil Dogs by Liz Bradbury Page A

disaster scene. The reception area was a shambles. The police had sealed the conference room with a piece of yellow tape across the door. I didn't really think the thin piece of plastic would keep anyone out, but I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to go in. It stank. Would I ruin another of my clothing ensembles just by absorbing the smell, the way one's clothes do in a smoky bar?
    Looking in the conference room, I had a flashback. When I'd been in graduate school, a small house I'd rented with friends caught on fire during a rainstorm from an electrical short in the attic. Luckily, we were all out for the evening. One of my roommates, Adrienne, had a girlfriend who was quite a bit older than the rest of us. Come to think of it, she was the age I am now. I digressed for a moment wondering why a 35-year-old woman would want a 19-year-old girlfriend, but that wasn't the point of the flashback.
    This "older woman" had given Adrienne a gift of a spice rack, complete with two dozen bottles of assorted spices. The rack hung on a wall in the kitchen but the girlfriend was over protective of it and constantly insisted Adrienne and the rest of us not waste the spices by using them. It became an in-house joke, but we did painstakingly conserve them, thus making all the food we cooked consistently bland.
    After the fire, the fire department let us back in to salvage what we could. When I went into the kitchen, I called to Adrienne that we didn't have to worry about saving the spices any more. She asked why. I pointed. Not only was the spice rack gone, so was the entire wall it had been hanging on. The wiring in the kitchen wall must have ignited too. When we looked up, the ceiling and roof were gone as well. There was a moral in there somewhere about the spice rack, but the real lesson was: Fire Is Scary.
    In a way, the Irwin Administration Building conference room now looked more horrifying than when it was actually on fire. Maybe because I had more time to think about it. A large section of the ceiling was gone. Tarps covered the torn open roof. The fire department must have cut it away to be sure the fire was out. Part of the back wall behind the table where the drinks had been was now just a large hole with twisted metal behind it. Everything in the room was black and sooty. Splintered furniture parts stuck out at odd angles like greenstick fractures. File cabinets lay on their sides. Shards of glass crunched under my feet. Another tarpaulin hung over the broken window area, but a sharp December breeze buckled it into the room. The wind was stirring up rank odors and wet grit.
    It was easy to see how the fire had spread. The pattern of blackened scorch marks resembled a childlike charcoal drawing of the sun. The irregular rays generated from a round blackened area at the back table.
    The chair Bart Edgar had knelt on was lying on its side. The back was charred, its plastic arms melted. But the area directly above the chair was fairly untouched, as was the area where Bart had fallen to the floor. The phrase, "gods protect little children, drunks and fools," seemed particularly apt.
    Nighttime temperatures were forecast to drop below freezing. Puddled water on the rug would be ice before dawn. I marveled that I hadn't seen more water damage to the ceilings of the floor below, but then Bart's office wasn't under this part of the building.
    In a heap on the floor next to the coat rack, was my once beloved parka, filthy and stinking of burnt rubber. I left it there. Good thing my good gloves hadn't been in the pockets.
    The reception area window was smashed where Connie had tossed out the marble stand. I pulled the tarp to one side, interested to see if the stand was still on the ground below the window, but it was gone. Good thing it didn't hit anybody. My mind segued for a moment to Carl Rasmus's dead body on the sidewalk.
    I had hoped looking at the fire scene would give me some profound insight. It didn't, except the fire