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

peeking.” Joe watched the door swing behind her and thought about his great good fortune.

A moment later she stuck her head into the Schooner. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready.”

“Close your eyes.”

“Didn’t you even wrap it?”

“No, I didn’t wrap it. Shut your eyes.”

Joe closed his eyes. Rachel stepped into the Schooner and shut the door behind her, the puppy inside her coat. When she stepped close to him, Joe swung his arms out toward her, eyes still closed. “Let me guess,” he said. “You. In Saran Wrap.”

“Wrong, you oaf. You can open your eyes now.”

Joe opened his eyes. “Well?”

“Merry Christmas,” Rachel said, stepping closer, and opened her coat just enough to let the puppy poke its nose against Joe’s chest.

He gently lifted the puppy up against his neck and held it there for a moment, speechless. Even though he could not yet know what this dog would come to mean to him, he felt an immediate and escalating happiness that moved him nearly to tears.

“Thank you, my wonderful girl,” he said, kissing her, while the soup bubbled over and the teakettle screamed. “He?” he asked.

“She,” she said, smiling, tending to their lunch.

“What’ll we name her?”

“How about Noël. For Christmas.”

“Nah, that’s a real girl’s name. She’s got to have a dog’s name.”

“What, like Bowser?”

“Better than Noël,” he said, setting her down gently on the floor, where she immediately peed.

“Marking her territory,” Rachel said, stepping out of range.

Joe said, “That’s all right.” He cleaned up the mess, poured a bit of milk into a pan, and began to warm it. “Fortune,” he said. “How’s that sound?”

“She’s your dog,” Rachel said, pouring soup.

Joe watched the pup waddle around the Schooner. “I wonder what she’ll look like when she’s full grown.”

“Like a bigger mutt,” Rachel said.

“Perfect,” he said. “Friendliest dogs on earth.”

“You can’t leave her alone in the Schooner all day, you know. You’re going to have to take her with you places or find someone to look after her when you’re working.”

“No shit, Einstein. I’ll rig up a carrier on the back of the bike for when she’s tiny. When she’s big she can run. And I’ll drop her at your place on really nasty days.”

“I have an idea. Why don’t you drop her at my house on really nasty days?”

“Wish I’d thought of that. Thanks, Rachel. You’re a pal.”

“Now there’s a better name.”

“Pal?”

“Better than Fortune.”

“I suppose.” And he did call her Pal, for all her born days.

Chapter 27

        When spring arrived, Rachel took down the blue curtains, shook them clean, and stashed them up in her loft. She made long and narrow ceramic bowls, filled them with water, white pebbles, and flower bulbs, and put them to wait on the windowsills. She rolled the oriental rug and lugged it up into the loft, swept the fireplace clean. At a garage sale in Fainsville she found a lemon yellow throw for the bed, hung rounds of stained glass in the windows to enrich the thin April sun. She topped her bookshelves with more of Joe’s creations: a mermaid, a perfect acorn, a horse’s hoof, a polished bowl that she put odd pebbles in. Of these, the mermaid was and always would be her favorite.

When she planted seeds that spring, she put some into urns and jugs she’d made on her wheel and set them out in the sun. She didn’t give much thought to her reasons for doing this. She liked her pots and thought they looked lovely in her garden.

“Nobody just suddenly decides to plant a moveable garden,” Joe said as he lay in her hammock with Pal and watched her transplant a clump of pincushions into a big purple pot. “Not without a reason.”

“Why do I need a reason?”

“Forget it,” he said, closing his eyes. He was tired of talking. There were too many things that Rachel would not discuss, too many things he could not disregard. Like Otto Browning’s detached skull. Like the mine rats that were suddenly much more numerous—much more alarming with their slick pink tails and their white-thorn teeth—than they had been since their first exodus from the mines over a decade earlier. And, most recently, like what had happened at the Hutter place, and then soon after to Rebecca Sader.

On the day of the first good thaw that spring, when the last stubborn inches of snow had melted off the grass, a man named Bill Hutter, who lived four long blocks from the mine tunnels, had gone outside to find a sheet of ice across his lawn. It was a good inch thick and too hard to break with his boot. Nobody else had ice. Everybody else had good, wet grass, already greening under the snow. His, through the ice, looked gray.

Nobody could think of an explanation for the ice except that something had melted the snow that lay closest to the ground and that the slush had frozen solid soon after. Rachel was not interested in explanations. When Joe brought it up, she changed the subject. And before long it became old news, for the ice melted in the strengthening sun and the lawn beneath it survived.

The greater mystery, the one that Joe had brought to Rachel this very morning, having heard about it from Angela over breakfast, was stranger, more frightening.

Rebecca Sader was not an overly dramatic woman. She was not flighty. She was, in fact, sensible, practical, and calm. But according to her husband, Doug, she had gotten mixed up somehow, the night before.

“She nearly cooked herself in the shower.” He pronounced it shar, waited while Angela warmed his cup. “You know how you do something a million times without even thinking about it, but as soon as you give it any thought a’tall, you’re not quite sure you’re doing it right?”

Angela nodded, her ponytail bobbing. “Happens to me all the time.”

“Well, Becca was in the shower last night, and after a while it started to get too hot. So she turned back the hot a bit, but that didn’t help. So she turned up the