Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

“Does this mean we’re friends again?” she finally asked him. They were dancing to a slow Elvis Presley song. She was trying hard not to listen.

“This means we’re not fighting anymore,” he replied. They danced for a while, quietly.

Then, “I don’t think we were fighting,” she said. “I think things have changed so much between us that maybe we can’t go on the way we were before.” His shirt, against her neck, smelled like soap.

“You mean we can’t be in love anymore?” He lifted his head away, looked down into her whiskered face.

“Is that what we were?” She had not been this close to him for weeks, and she allowed herself a moment to linger over his strong, sweet face, the wonderful blue of his eyes.

“That’s what I was. That’s what I am. You know that.”

“Yes,” she said, sighing. “I know that. But lately I don’t know how I feel about anything. My head hurts from thinking so hard all the time. I get up in the morning and I don’t know where to begin. I feel as if I’ve been told I have a rare disease that’s been known to kill people, but it might not kill me. And even if it does, I won’t know when until I’m already dead.”

He thought of a thousand things to say. “So that means you can’t love me anymore?”

“I don’t know.”

They danced to another song—afterward neither of them could remember what it had been—and then they returned to Angela. She was talking to a sort of cowboy named Sam who wore a Stetson on his head and a bronze lasso for a belt buckle. She seemed interested in what he was saying, and after a moment Joe and Rachel said good night.

It had grown colder, so Joe put his arm around Rachel, much as any friend might do, and hurried her to the Schooner, which was nearer than her house. Inside, he gave her a big sweater and made her some hot chocolate while she washed the whiskers off her face and took the tiger ears out of her hair. They talked for a while, about books they’d been reading and how much they missed Ian. Joe made them thick sandwiches and dished out some of the fat, crisp pickles she herself had made for him. At midnight they listened to The War of the Worlds on Joe’s small radio.

“I’ll walk you home,” Joe said when it was over.

“No need,” she replied.

“I insist,” he said, one arm in his coat. “I want to.”

“You misunderstand,” Rachel said, walking close to put her hand on his cheek. “I’m staying.”

Once again the world tilted on its axis and things shifted to where they’d been before. But like a forest altered by the seasons, the place they returned to was different now. Less certain. As if it would not take much the next time to cast them adrift.

Chapter 40

        “It won’t do you any good, Rachel.”

Mr. Murdock was angry. At Rachel, mostly at himself. Once he had found out for himself how shortsighted and stingy the government had been in the matter of the fire, he had caught some of Rachel’s feverish determination to keep Belle Haven intact and had been plotting, planning, and keeping secrets with her for almost a year now. Armed with her money and a lot of hard-won knowledge, he had been prepared to throw a monkey wrench into whatever plan the government was concocting to obtain Belle Haven. He had come to feel like a cross between Robin Hood and Karl Marx, and for a while he had liked the feeling. But when Ross Caspar’s house went down, when Mendelson laid out the evidence of the fire’s new and dangerous behavior, Murdock had balked. He had come, suddenly, to his lawyerly senses. He had returned to the pragmatism that had served him so well in the past. And now he was trying to bring Rachel along toward a more realistic attitude.

“It won’t do you one little bit of good,” he said to her, the day after the government had begun making bids on Belle Haven land. “You can buy half a dozen houses and maybe, after a few years as some sort of landlady, after the fire’s out or gone, sell the land back to someone who wants to live there, restore Belle Haven to its former glory. Something like that.” He slapped the air impatiently. “But it’s a whole lot more likely that you’ll go broke buying people out and then, when the fire comes to town, have all your property condemned and demolished. You’ll still own the land, but no one will ever come back to claim it. It will be yours—not exactly worthless, maybe worth a whole lot if the government decides to try and salvage the coal down below—but for your purposes, it will be worthless.” He gave her a hard look. “Buying land won’t save Belle Haven as you know it. It will simply eat up your money and maybe even cause some ill will between your neighbors. You start paying top dollar for some houses and let the government buy the others for less, how do you think people are going to feel?”

It was unlike Rachel to sit still and listen to such things. But she sat in Mr. Murdock’s office and said nothing. It was clear to him that she was angry, perhaps a bit afraid. He had expected her to fire him out of hand and was surprised that he had been permitted to speak his mind, encouraged by her silence.

He didn’t know that from the moment in the auditorium when Mendelson had pronounced his sentence, Rachel had begun to change and that she often now, despite continuing resistance, imagined hot air swirling around her ankles, certain as a tide, bringing with it nameless things: black-eyed serpents, long-tailed devils, and flame. She hadn’t admitted this to Joe. She saw no reason now to admit