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

cold. It just got hotter, she says. So instead of just turning it off she got all in a tizzy, and I guess she got the handles mixed up and shut off the cold, left the hot on by mistake. I don’t know. She ended up doing the standing long jump outta the tub. Anyway, I was already in bed, sound asleep. First thing she says this morning when we wake up is, ‘Doug, there’s no cold water.’ ‘Whatdya mean, no water. The well can’t be dry.’ ‘No cold water,’ she says. ‘Whatdya mean, no cold water?’ I says. ‘How could you run outta cold water?’ She gets outta bed, drags me into the bathroom, turns on the cold tap, and whatdya think comes out?”

“Cold water?”

“Cold water,” Doug said. “Cold as you please. But don’t tell her I told you. She made me promise to keep my mouth shut.”

But it was Rebecca herself who spread the news. She knew how it sounded. She knew people might think she’d made a silly, stupid mistake by nearly scalding herself, by talking about it afterward. But she knew—she knew—that she had made no mistake. The water that had come boiling down on her back had come straight up from the well, and it should have been cold. Somehow, the water in the well had become hot and then, by morning, cold again.

But as soon as she began to talk about the fire coming up under the well, people stopped listening. Sophia Browning’s house had stood three country blocks from the tunnels. Bill Hutter’s ice-locked lawn was just a block farther away than that. But Rebecca and Doug Sader lived a half mile from the nearest tunnel. Lots of people lived closer, and none of them had ever had hot wells. Unless you counted the people right over the tunnels, who had to be careful whenever they ran a bath. But that was different.

“Why is that different?” Joe had asked Rachel when he’d brought her the news about the Saders’ well.

“All kinds of things go on out over the tunnels. Their gardens aren’t much good anymore. Their basements are hot sometimes. That’s to be expected. They’re used to that sort of thing. But you can’t go around assuming that every odd thing that happens in Belle Haven has something to do with the fire. Especially not as far from the tunnels as the Saders live.”

Which is when Joe suddenly rose up from the hammock and asked Rachel why she was digging up her garden and putting it, piecemeal, into pots.

Chapter 28

        By July Rachel had decked her room out in its summer things again and Belle Haven was ready to celebrate Independence Day in its own, inimitable way. The country was turning 206 years old, the fire 12, and the people of Belle Haven made the most of both events.

There was, of course, the parade down Maple Street. There were picnics and baseball games, fireworks and painted faces. But there were other things, too: things that did not take place in other American towns. There was, every Fourth of July in Belle Haven, a gathering over an obliging hot spot. When night came on, enough wood was pitched into the glowing hole to make a magnificent bonfire. Everyone sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” marched around to “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” while the volunteer fire department tossed small fireworks into the hot spot and let the fire set them off. No rockets, though. Nothing meant to fly. Just color, and light, and enough bang and sizzle to make the babies cry.

It was at these outlandish fireworks that Joe finally met Mendelson, the firefighter.

They had, of course, heard of each other. Belle Haven was too small for anonymity. They had seen each other, too, from time to time. But they had never before met.

Joe had gone out to the hot spot—which had come up in the middle of a big tomato field—to please Rusty, but after a while he said good night.

“You’re not leaving yet?” Ian was sitting in an old lawn chair with his pipe and a supply of sparklers. Rusty stood behind him, chewing on a stem of grass, his face bathed with firelight. Angela and Rachel were over with the firemen, begging them to throw something more dramatic into the flames: what, they did not know. All around the hot spot, the tomatoes had baked black. At a safe distance, the spectators, all of whom understood the value of farm goods, had carefully taken up posts in between the rows of plants, like an eccentric battalion.

“I guess I am,” Joe replied. “If I could just look at the fire from the ground up, like you all do … but I can’t. It’s too spooky, to me.”

“You think that’s how we look at it? From the ground up?”

Joe stuck his hands in his pockets, looked back toward the fire. Rachel and Angela made precise, black figures against its glow. “Look at them, Ian,” he said. “You think they’re afraid?”

“Things aren’t always how they appear,” Ian said. Rusty watched the fire, waited patiently for the firemen to throw something into the flames.

“Well,” Joe said, “Pal’s a little nervous, too, so I think I’ll take her home.”

“Where is she?” Rusty asked.

Joe whistled, and Pal came trotting into the light. But when an emerald plume came whistling up out of the hot spot, she stopped short, wheeled on her hind legs, and plunged away. “Come here, you big chicken,” Joe called, but Pal stayed where she was. “So long,” he said, stepping carefully between the crowded tomato plants. “You going after trout tomorrow, Rusty?”

“You bet.”

“Can I come along?”

“You bet.”

“Good night,” Ian called after him, lighting his pipe. “See you back at the ranch? For a nightcap?”

“In the words of Belle Haven’s finest trout fisherman,” Joe called, without turning around, “you bet.”

He found Pal cowering among the infant pines at the edge of the woods. A single touch of his hand