Chapter 36
Tessa sat bolt upright, sleep-baffled and supremely confused. The sound, the sound, the sound, and the flashing red light strobing on the white ceiling above her. Heart pounding, she leaped from her bed, smelled for smoke, tried to decide what to do.
Her bleary brain tried to clear itself, to reset, to comprehend it was not a dream. This was certainly a false alarm, but what if it wasn’t? Someone pounded on her door— “fire alarm!” —and a voice blared over the public address system, disconcertingly robotic.
“What do I take?” She said the words out loud.
Her laptop. Her schedule. Her handbag, yes yes yes, and her phone.
Her jewelry pouch with the engagement ring.
She stashed it all in her tote bag, threw her coat over her nightgown, shoved her feet into her boots.
The chocolates, the gold-wrapped chocolates, sat on the dresser.
Let’s go, Annabelle said.
The robot voice continued. Every word meant get out of here. She grabbed her hotel key card, said goodbye to her suitcase, and followed the line of people, all bathrobed and complaining and fearful, down the carpeted hall and through the metal door of the fire exit and onto the crowded stairway.
“These things are always false alarms,” a man in a white T-shirt complained. “If this happens again…”
“It’s happened before? Here?” Tessa couldn’t help but ask as she stepped down, down, down.
“Hotels in general, I mean.” The man in front of her wore a sweatshirt with a Dodgers logo on the back, jeans, bare feet. “I travel all the time. It’s never anything.”
“Sometimes it is,” someone else said.
At every floor, more people entered the stairway, the pace deliberate, constant, unstopping. At one point she heard laughter, which was quickly shushed.
“What time is it anyway?”
“Ten after four,” a woman said.
“Why do these things happen in the middle of the night?” The voice came from behind Tessa. “There’s never a fire alarm in the daytime.”
But through the complaining and the derision and the fretting, everyone moved relentlessly downward; all the random hotel guests, all away from home, maybe thinking of home, walking with focused determination.
Maybe tamping down panic, maybe praying or bargaining or simply hoping.
Maybe some of them weren’t supposed to be here, she speculated as she took the turn to floor eight.
Might that be a plot for her next book? A fire alarm forces clandestine lovers into the street, and someone sees them?
Keep walking, Annabelle said. Let’s get ourselves to safety.
Tessa clutched the bag with her laptop and phone and schedule to her chest, her thoughts racing.
Many flights of stairs to go. She didn’t smell smoke, but the public address system voice was insistent, repeating, punctuated with the whoop whoop whoop of the fire alarm.
Her priorities crystallized—even if all of her other possessions burned, she herself would be safe. Keep going . Get out.
It crossed her mind to call Henry, to dial as she continued walking.
But it would only upset him, and she had no news, simply that she was following the rules in a fire alarm where there did not seem to be smoke and there did not seem to be fire and there did not seem to be anyone in firefighting gear rushing up the stairs. Yet.
One gaunt-faced woman clutched a tawny fur coat, and had thrown it over a slinky undergarment. A husky man in a Lions Club jersey cradled a swaddled infant in his arms, sound asleep. Clomping behind him, a tow-headed boy wearing untied running shoes and a striped T-shirt.
A striped T-shirt , Tessa thought. Like the girl in that locket. Which was still in her room. She wanted to jam her fingers into her ears, but the insistent warnings were too piercing to be silenced.
She pictured Zack and Linny, home in their beds— Zack’s not in his own bed, she reminded herself. And her children, in blissful dreamland, she hoped, had no idea their mother was in this kind of danger. If she were killed in a fire, how much would they miss her? What would they remember?
A famous author who had died because she left her children behind. If she’d stayed home, she would not be in this potential jeopardy. If she died, on the road… Did Henry have life insurance for her? She had no idea.
The quality of the sound changed. As she turned the corner, the stairwell widened.
A bright red number one was stenciled on the wall.
Beyond, the sprawling lobby of the hotel, the gray relief of almost daylight coming through the broad front windows, punctuated by swirling red lights, painting hotel guests’ faces crimson as they came out of the stairway, refugees from a still-hypothetical danger.
Two hotel employees in navy-blue uniforms flanked the open stairwell doors, guiding the emerging guests.
“Let’s move outside, ladies and gentlemen,” one of them said, “until the firefighters give us the all clear.”
The other employee held a stack of folded blue fabric. “If anyone needs a blanket, please let me know, plenty of them right here,” she said.
“Is there a real fire?” Tessa couldn’t help asking.
“Yeah, can someone tell us what the hell is going on?” The voice of a man behind her, sharp with anger, rolled over Tessa’s question. “I have valuable documents in my room.”
“We are waiting for the firefighters to give the all clear, sir,” the clerk said again. “Please keep moving.”
Firefighters in tan canvas turnout gear and red back-billed helmets stood in the lobby, cigarette pack–sized radios clipped to their shoulders.
The doors on either side of the massive revolving front door were propped wide open and the inner partitions of the revolving door flattened so people could leave without delay.
Tessa marched obediently toward the front door, and into the not-quite-warm-enough Denver morning. The June sky had not yet turned pink, but the pulsating swath of emergency lights turned the buildings on both sides of the block into a red-and-blue light show.
“Keep moving, folks,” a stocky man in a blue suit repeated, gesturing people to go ahead. “Get away from the building.”
Some of the hotel guests, standing in the middle of the street now, panned their phone cameras across the clumps of people and the hotel and the fire engines, at the police who were cordoning off the street with yellow tape, at the hotel employees, some of them uniformed, others in overalls and black jumpsuits.
One gangly man wore a white chef’s hat and apron, and carried a spatula as if that were his prized possession.
This would be on social media in a heartbeat, an Instagram-worthy occasion, an evacuation, a danger, an adventure. But for her, it was an invitation to exhaustion. She would be miserable at the event tomorrow.
Today, Annabelle said.
“Have you heard anything?” The woman next to Tessa clutched her arm, her voice soft and Southern. Smudges of mascara streaked under her eyes, and her mass of dark hair was scrunched in a ponytail. “Do you smell smoke?”
“No,” Tessa said.
“Oh, y’all,” the woman whispered. Pointed. “Look who’s here.”