Chapter 9

There had been more discussion. But both women found themselves in uncharted territory, and that made making decisions much more difficult than it would have otherwise been.

For Jennifer, the unfamiliar part of all this was that she had finally met a man who would talk to her. That might sound odd to a lot of us, but that’s only because we’re grown and talk to people all the time. We have friends, both male and female, and we have an entire array of people to choose from if we want to talk about something, or get advice or whatever.

But Jennifer wasn’t popular at school. She had some girlfriends, mostly teammates, but boys, for the most part, just didn’t approach her for conversation. She didn’t spend time talking to boys. It was “normal” for her to go days without exchanging more than a sentence or two with a male. Now, suddenly, there was a man in her life, a man she had talked to at length, and who treated her, more or less, as an equal. She had saved his life. He had saved hers. They had seen each other naked.

It was a whole new world, and she had only nibbled at the edges. Life was suddenly very exciting.

When it came to Mindy, the difference was almost as stark. She had been in love, and knew what that felt like. It’s a glorious, addictive feeling. But she had also fallen out of love, and like kicking a drug addiction involves awful agony, she had been required to endure the pain of working through lost love. She had been without a man in her life long enough that she’d just gotten used to it. And life had gone on. It wasn’t very exciting any more ... but it had gone on. She had watched her little girl growing up and that had become the center of her existence.

Now, the little girl at the center of her existence was blossoming into a woman, and watching that was enormously exciting.

Except for the fact that the man her little girl was enamored with, was the first man she’d met in a decade who was also extremely attractive to her! Just touching him had awakened things in her that had lain dormant for years. The vague, insubstantial fantasies she’d allowed herself to have about him had brought her bone wrenching orgasms as she stroked her sex.

And he showed interest in her too. It was like walking in the jungle and coming face to face with a Bengal tiger. He was gorgeous. You wanted to hug him, and feed him and love him. But he was also a wild and dangerous animal. And so, like most people who stumbled upon a tiger, she was a bit frozen with the shock of it all.

Then there was the possibility that this tiger might be licking his chops at the sight of her daughter too.

This particular coin, however, had three sides instead of two.

Well ... that wouldn’t make any sense, now would it? Perhaps it should have been said this coin had three layers. And the middle layer was that tiger.

Bobby had much in common with the tiger. He was a loner. He was most at home in the inhospitable places where most others went only if they were seeking adventure. He had the capacity to be dangerous ... even deadly. He was happy simply padding through the forest, exploring his territory.

But Bobby wasn’t a tiger, of course. He was a man who also had memories of what it felt like as the ecstasy of human sexual interaction overwhelmed his senses. He’d held a warm, willing girl in his arms as she expressed pleasure. True, his memories of that were few, and so old now that they had begun to fray. In one sense, he was like the moth who is drawn to flame. Except this moth knew the danger that flame represented. His condition made it difficult to open up. His primary frustration was that his normal psyche - he had always felt fearless - had come under assault, and now he had withdrawn from the world.

Their touch on his back ... on his scars ... had been something he’d never experienced in his entire life. It went far beyond mundane concepts like “nice” or “good” or even “wonderful.” That touch had electrified him. It had been as if they had little tendrils of delight they could sink into his body, and stir his soul with. He had wanted to writhe with the ecstasy of it. He hadn’t ejaculated, but it had been a close thing. In the end he had exhausted himself emotionally, and only that had rendered him limp. He had sobbed because he hadn’t known life could be so delicious.

For Bobby, the girl was a reminder of stolen kisses, and illicit touches, of slow dancing in the dark while you tried to rub against your dance partner. She took him back to the few experiences he’d ever had before he joined the Marines and was changed forever. Except that now he was suddenly allowed to look ... to lust. She represented hope ... that he might be able to live another way than he had felt restricted to.

And the woman, who was lush, and soft, and deep, like a pool of pure water, was the flame that drew the moth in him. Mindy was the epitome of the concept of potential, where anything could happen. She acknowledged his maleness ... his desire ... and she did not castigate him for it. She was not offended by his reaction to her. She had let him come into her home, and even when he had lusted after her ... all she had done was stroke his chest and tell him to be at ease, and go back to sleep.

For Robert Higginbotham, whose normal development had been arrested by the United States Marine Corps, and an IED on a roadside in Afghanistan, that development was being invited to resume. He had been offered the chance to have another relationship with a woman.

His only problem was that he wanted it to involve both of them. In truth, though he was completely unaware of Jennifer’s comment to her mother, the idea of fighting either of them off would have seemed absurd to him.

What helped keep things from spiraling into uncontrolled emotional chaos, was the simple fact that Bobby had too much to do to wallow in the luscious and lusty presence of the two women. He naturally assumed that he needed to get back on his own two feet as soon as possible. And that meant rebuilding his uncle’s house. And that meant getting into his safe, where the insurance policy was.

That was the first thing they did. He made it easy for them by saying: “Why don’t you two just ride with me. Bring gloves if you have them. And a shovel too. Do you have one?”

Both women wanted to help, so they gathered the things they thought would be helpful and threw them in the back of his truck. Mindy noticed that Jennifer got in first, so she could slide over and sit next to Bobby. That meant she had to put one foot on one side of the old fashioned floor shifter, and the other foot on the other side. The older woman grinned as she imagined what would be going through her own mind if she was sitting there ... his hand resting on the knob between her knees ... moving back and forth ... forward and back. She felt an uncharacteristic pulse of lust in her loins ... and welcomed it like an old friend she hadn’t seen in years.

As they took off, she watched his hand, and wondered what her daughter was thinking about.

It only took them twenty minutes to get there. The road was still blocked off with yellow tape, but Bobby got out and tore it loose from one tree. They drove up to the pile of twisted metal and ashes that was all that was left of his home, and got out to survey it.

He was pointing out where they would have to dig when another car arrived. It was white, with decals on it that said it was part of a fire department. The man who got out came over and introduced himself as the arson investigator who had been assigned to the case. His name was Tom Harkins. He seemed to know who Bobby was.

“The evidence for arson is pretty strong already,” he said. “I assume you’re going to go through the ashes and try to recover anything of value?”

“There’s a buried safe that’s fire proof,” said Bobby.

“Nothing is fire proof,” said Tom, smiling gently. “But I hope yours was good enough. I need to collect some evidence, though, and what I’m after is better collected from an undisturbed scene. I’m glad I got here before you started pulling things apart.”

“Are you saying we have to wait?” Bobby looked unhappy.

“Nope. I’m saying I’d like to get the samples I need as we take it apart.”

The metal roof sheathing had to be removed first. Tom described things as they did that, pointing out how the colors and the shape of the bends told one how hot the fire had been. Once they had dragged all the steel aside, what remained consisted of lumps of blackened objects that sat amid piles of ash. The refrigerator looked odd, standing by itself, with no wall at its back. The bed frame lay canted where it had fallen from above. A ceramic lamp looked perfectly normal, lying on its side, except that it had no shade or cord.

Tom walked around, using a hoe to dig here and there. He scooped up piles of ash and put them in shiny, new paint cans, sealing them tightly. He said they would be examined for traces of accelerant, and that they expected to find gasoline fumes in them. He pointed out how the fire appeared to have started in the back of the house, and then moved forward.

The safe wasn’t hard to find. The floorboards that had hidden it from view were now ash. The wood stove that had covered the entrance had fallen into the basement, which was full of ash and objects. When they had cleared enough away to see the top, Tom whistled.

“It’s a freaking bank vault! How the hell did they ever get that thing in here?”

“My uncle told me it came from a bank they tore down,” said Bobby. “He didn’t say how they got it out here, but he said they dug the pit for it first, and then built the house around it. He wanted something big enough and strong enough to protect his valuables when he wasn’t here. They only used it part of the year back in those days.”

“Well maybe it is fire proof!” said Tom. “But can you still get it open? That’s the question.”

The staircase to the basement had burned, of course, and the area in front of the big door was full of debris. But they shoveled enough out that Bobby could get to the combination dial, which was about the size of the saucer that would hold a coffee cup.

The dial spun effortlessly.

The handle also moved easily when he twisted it, but that’s when their luck seemed to peter out. The door didn’t budge.

It took both men to get the door started. Tom surmised that the heat had expanded things a bit. Suddenly the door moved an inch, but it still took both men to pull it open on creaking hinges. Tom examined them and said that he thought a little oil would probably solve the problem, and that it was still usable.

The safe itself was an eight foot cube. The outside was scorched, and already showing signs of rust, but the inside looked unharmed. There was a gun rack against one wall that had four rifles in it. A tall, thin shelf next to it held pistols and boxes of ammunition. There was a work bench along another wall, covered with things related to reloading ammunition. One wall was occupied with stacks of boxes and a file cabinet. Bobby went to that and opened it, leaving through folders until he found one marked “Insurance.” He turned to find Tom examining one of the rifles.

“I’ve always wanted an AR-15,” said Tom, looking up. “Does it really shoot as well as an M-16?”

“Yes,” said Bobby. “I got the flat top version so I could put a scope on it, but really, in terms of what it’s best at, I don’t even need that. Open sights is good enough for three or four hundred yards. Fact is, I don’t even really need it around here. There aren’t any varmints to use it on.”

“Still, it must be fun to shoot,” said Tom.

“Fun.” Bobby said it as if he was tasting the word. “My rifle was a tool for so long that I stopped thinking of shooting as fun.”

“I understand you were in the Corps,” said Tom.

“Yeah,” said Bobby.

“So how does civilian life compare to that?”

Bobby seemed to think about that for a minute. “I guess I’m glad I did it ... but I don’t want to do it again. Unless they need me, of course.”

Tom smiled. “Well. I’ve got what I need in terms of evidence. I need to ask you a couple of questions. What kind of flammables did you store inside the house?”

“The powder in this safe, and a couple of cans of WD-40,” said Bobby.

“No gasoline?”

“No. That was in the garage.”

They climbed back up, helping the ladies get out of the hole the safe was in.

“The garage is the pile over that way?” Tom pointed to where the garage had been.

“Yeah.”

“How much propane was in the tank?”

“I don’t know. I don’t use a lot. Just for cooking, mostly. I only fill it once a year. It was about time to do that, but I don’t know how much it would have taken to fill it. Why?”

“The kid who set the fire said that while he was dangling from your noose, he heard an explosion. He tried to blame the fire on that, still trying to deny that he had started the fire. That explosion was probably the propane tank going up, and that’s probably what actually caused the forest fire to take off like it did. The house still would have gotten the trees going, but it would have been a slower fire, and wouldn’t have done as much damage without the propane creating a fireball.”

Bobby led them to the cement pad where the propane tank had been. The pad was broken into three major pieces, which had been kept together only by the rebar inside it. The line that had gone from it to the house was still there, but the tank was completely missing.

“I hadn’t even noticed the tank was gone,” said Bobby, shaking his head.

“You’ll find it out there somewhere,” said Tom, gesturing toward the forest vaguely. “Probably in a couple of pieces. Well, I have what I need. Give it a couple of weeks and there should be a preliminary report for your insurance company to request.”

“Thanks,” said Bobby.

Tom turned to the women and tipped an imaginary hat. “Ladies,” he said.

Then he left, leaving Bobby and the women to sift through ashes until it became clear there was nothing capable of being salvaged, except for what was in the safe. The only oil Bobby had was a quart of motor oil behind the seat of the pickup, but they dribbled that on the hinges, moving the door of the safe until it moved a little more easily. Then he closed the door, spun the lock, and they headed for town to find the office of the insurance company.

The insurance agency office was in Rapid City, but even so, it only took two hours to locate the office and get things started on the claim. The agent made a few calls, one of which was to verify there was a police investigation going on, and one to verify that the property was in fact privately owned. But after that things went pretty quickly, comparatively speaking. Bobby had thought to get his uncle’s power of attorney out of the safe, too, and when they left, Bobby had the promise that the initial funds would be deposited directly into his bank account. The final claim payment would be based on the adjuster’s report, once that report had been completed.

But Bobby was assured he would have funds to start rebuilding with.

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