1
Gail stepped out of the cab, her eyes looking slowly over the mess. The policeman at the tape line hadn't been kidding. It was awful.
On a sudden urge, he checked her cell phone, the time stamps on the texts she'd just gotten from Julie Westlake. The coroner looked at her pityingly, and pressed a hand to the back door of his van. Even if he would have let her, she wouldn't have dared to look at the body.
The fire had been brought down under control, the explosion had happened only twenty minutes before. The pile of burning debris, the ash, was still burning is some places. She could see though the end of the building to the other side where a new sign was going up for rental boats.
It would happen just as she came back home.
She turned to the officer who had walked up beside her. "You didn't find another body?"
He shook his head, and seemed uncertain how much more to indicate. Gail just walked away from him and into the mess of a bottom floor, her shoes hissing as she stepped on a hot board. She combed through some of the papers that hadn't been touched, kicked over a pile of charred wood, half hoping she would find something to make sense of. A fireman had followed her in, and cleared his throat.
"Far as we can see, a lighter got too close to some of the chemicals."
"But, they didn't smoke."
"It's a lab; maybe they needed it for an experiment."
She knew he meant well, but she wanted desperately to hit someone until they bled. Instead, she reached down and pulled out a picture that had mostly survived the fire. The frame had protected all except the edges. Drawing in a ragged breath, she broke away the melted back and dropped the glass.
Someone called to the fireman, and he left her to wander the open area. She found a stack of disks, marked with crazy names and numbers. The backup for the research.
Tucking them into a plastic bag that had been in her coat for a year, she dropped them and the photo inside and rummaged, hoping for a few more keepsakes. She found a file that had been seared, but the main body remained intact. A few more papers, discs, and another photo. It was Peyton and Julie's wedding picture. They were grinning hugely from behind an iron railing strung with ribbon and flowers. Julie still had that horrible perm, but it worked under the veil.
Turning around to look at the embers of the building, Gail measured up the remains of her parents' lives.
She began chanting to herself her mantra for the year: "I'm seventeen, I can handle it. I'm Seventeen, I can handle it."