“I’m Janet Seahorn, I live here. I’ll do anything I can for them, they’re such nice people.”
Okay, while the opportunity had presented itself . . . “Nice to meet you, Janet. Tell me, how are you heating your house?”
Janet grimaced. “We aren’t. We have friends down the street who told us we could go over there when winter really hits. They have a gas stove, and a fireplace, but they also have family staying with them already so it’ll be a crush. So far we’ve made do with wearing lots of clothes and staying covered up, when we’re inside. I don’t want to put them out before we have to.”
“That’s a plan.” It was also only one household. There were a lot of houses in the valley that didn’t have fireplaces. Maybe . . . braziers? She’d seen them mentioned in books. Grills were basically braziers, but they burned charcoal and that wasn’t safe inside. But as long as there was a fireproof container and a rack, wood could be burned, too. That was something the whole community needed to work on.
In the meantime, she had an upset elderly couple and a dead man to deal with. She returned to Jim and Mary Alice, sitting beside them and writing down everything they said, asking a few questions but mostly just letting them talk. She wasn’t a law officer, she didn’t know the questions to ask, and they needed to get this talked through to help them process it and deal with the emotional upheaval. “I never in my lifetime thought I’d kill anyone,” Jim said, staring into space. “Never. Our boy Danny was in the army—he’s passed—and when he went in I worried about him maybe having to pull a trigger on someone. I talked to him once about it and he just said, Pop, you do what you gotta do.”
“That’s what you did,” Sela said, putting her hand over his and feeling the frailty of it. Once that hand had been big and strong but now it was thin, each bone clearly felt. “What you had to do. You protected Mary Alice.”
Mary Alice laid her head against his shoulder. “He did.”
When she thought she’d done all she could do there, Sela crossed back over to the Livingstons’ house. The sun had come up now, and frost glittered on the browning grass. Mike reported that Trey had handled the fingerprinting, though he didn’t know how good of a job they’d done, and the dead man had been taken away. A small crew of women were at work in the kitchen, cleaning with bleach, setting things to rights. Neither of the Livingstons would feel easy about being there for a while, they could stay with friends or neighbors for as long as they needed to, but this was their home.
They didn’t have a fireplace, either.
“We’ve done what we can,” she said. “The neighbors will help them through today.”
The crisis had brought something else to the top of her mental list of things that needed to be done, and that was dispensing the gasoline. Maybe there was a potter here in the valley, and the gasoline could be used to fire a kiln to make clay braziers. If not, they’d make do somehow, but people needed to have heat. But first and foremost, the gas needed to be used before it went bad, in vehicles for stepped-up patrolling given that outsiders were now making their way to the valley. They couldn’t afford to assume the dead man was the only one, and that no one else would come looking to loot, maybe kill.
Some of the community patrol members were there, because that was their shift, but others were just now starting their day and likely hadn’t yet heard what had happened to the Livingstons; otherwise they’d have already arrived. “There’s not a lot of time, I know, but spread the word that everyone who works patrol needs to be at the meeting today,” she said. “We’ll hold a special session after we finish with normal business. It’s important.”
Mike nodded, then asked, “What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t want word to get out too soon, so I’ll wait until we have everyone together.” He nodded again, accepting her statement, and once again she marveled that no one seemed to be questioning her as leader. She started to tell Mike to have everyone drive, so their tanks could be topped off, but she didn’t have a suction pump in place for getting the gasoline out