Osprey Island

Later, when the men from the volunteer fire department said that it had just been a matter of time, it took people a minute to realize they meant the laundry shack, not Lorna. “A fire trap,” Chief McIntire called it: a rotting wooden structure stuffed crevice to crevice with dry cotton sheets and towels, piles of old newspapers, bottles of highly flammable cleaning chemicals, and aerosol cans just ready to blow. No windows to open, no trapdoor through which to escape. All exits but one closed off and sealed. (They might have fined Bud for keeping a structure so far below the fire codes, but it never came to that. He’d suffered enough.) “Probably a cigarette,” said the chief. Bob McIntire also taught third grade at the school and was the track coach and the Boy Scout troop leader and sometimes refereed the varsity and junior varsity football games. “Looks like the origin of the fire was right there on the couch,” he said. The couch on which Lorna had fallen asleep. Drunk, they said. The smoke would have gotten her first, they said. She wouldn’t have felt anything. There was that, at least. She’d have felt no pain.

Gavin and Jeremy saw the fire first. Jeremy had awakened in the middle of the night to pee, smelled smoke, and thought Gavin must have fallen asleep and dropped his cigarette, probably smoldering in his sheets somewhere, ready to flare. “Gavin,” he called, then louder, “Gavin!” as he approached his roommate’s bed. Gavin jolted awake, and it was at almost the same moment that they both looked out the window beside Gavin’s bed and saw that across the path the laundry shack was quite clearly on fire.

Jeremy began banging on doors the length of the hall, shouting, “Fire! Fire! Everybody wake up! There’s a fire!” He moved downstairs, banging and hollering: “Everybody get out! There’s a fire!”

Gavin ran outside. The night was oddly still, and it was warm, no breeze at all rising from the shore below. Under the glare of the safety lights he looked at the laundry shack and then to the Squires’ cottage next door. It was the only other building nearby. Dashing up the steps, he reached the door in seconds and banged on the screen—the real door wasn’t even shut—then went inside, hollering, his voice high and panicky. He ran to an inner door, shouting, pounding. He tried the knob. It gave. “Fire!” he shouted. “There’s a fire!” In the room, clothing and crap were piled everywhere—dishes, cups, cracker boxes, Styrofoam to-go containers, lotions and nail polish and all sorts of women’s things, towels, packing bubbles, a double bed, empty. Gavin whirled around to the other door and took up pounding. “Fire!” He hammered the flimsy door. “Fire!” Gavin paused, listened, heard nothing, and tried the knob and found it locked. He shouted louder, kicking at the door now to rest his fists. He leveled his kick at the doorknob and let go. There was a splintering sound, but the latch held. Gavin glanced around him. Lying there on its side on the floor was, of all things, a fire extinguisher. He hefted the red cylinder, got his grip, and swung it at the knob, which folded into itself as if made of tinfoil. The door, light as cardboard, swung inward. In the twin bed, still fully dressed, Squee’s body was just beginning to twitch awake. His head was tucked under a pillow, which he held around his ears with a grip so insistent it seemed incongruous to sleep. Gavin grabbed the kid by the middle and hoisted Squee over his shoulder— the boy still clasping the pillow to his ears—and carried him through the cabin and down the steps outside to safety.

A few lights had gone on in the Lodge, and Suzy was dashing up the hill barefoot, in a tank top and underwear, clutching Mia as if rushing her to an emergency room in the middle of the night, the girl’s skinny legs dangling limply from beneath her oversize T-shirt.

One of the waiters had raced up the hill to get Bud, who came tearing down moments later in a pair of thin pajama trousers and a white V-neck. He held a broad-beam flashlight and was struggling into a bathrobe as he ran.

Bud’s wife, Nancy, called the fire department from their house up the hill, then came tripping down toward the motley crowd assembled by the staff barracks. The fire was hot, but contained—it looked as though it was going to take out the laundry shack and leave it at that. Still, the waiters and housekeepers stood before the barracks as if they might somehow shield their new home from danger. Squee was just like the rest of them, staring at the fire, glowing in the firelight.

Nancy clutched her robe about her, scanning the crowd. She saw Squee and stopped. “Where are Lance and Lorna?” she shouted. Then something in her tripped over to the hysterical. Her voice screeched and broke: “Where are Lance and Lorna?!”

Bud wheeled around, scolding his wife for her noise. “For god’s sake, no one’s in the laundry at two a.m.!”