Page 44 of Christmas with Three Firemen

The fire smells wrong before we even get inside.

I know it the moment I step off the engine. There’s a certain feel to the air around a structure fire, the way smoke layers itself, how it moves relative to wind and heat and what’s burning.

This one has the same off-note I caught at the apartment building two weeks ago. Too clean in some places. Too concentrated in others. A directionality that doesn’t match the building’s layout.

I don’t say anything. It isn’t my job to say anything. Noelle is the one who reads fire scenes. I read everything else.

Cap is already directing from the street.

The building is a four-story prewar residential brick building, the kind that burns slow on the outside and fast on the inside because the walls are full of wood framing that nobody has touched since 1938. Smoke is pushing hard from the second-floor windows.

The crew moves in standard formation.

I go in with Callum on ventilation, and we work the second floor, moving through smoke that thickens as we go, and by the time we get to the stairwell I’m already clocking the origin points, the way the char patterns on the walls track back toward a single location that doesn’t correspond to any electrical panel or heat source I can account for.

Noelle would want to see this.

I push the thought aside and keep working.

We ventilate the second floor in twenty minutes.

By then, the fire is contained at ground level, the crew is working with extinguishers through the smoke, and Cap calls for a secondary sweep before he’ll let anyone else into the building. Standard procedure. The building isn’t clear yet.

I come back down to the street and pull off my helmet and take a breath of cold air that tastes like snow and char.

Cap is on the radio. Tara is running equipment checks. Rico is talking to a neighbor who came out to watch despite the blizzard, the way neighbors always do, because people are drawn to fires the same way they’re drawn to anything that could destroy them.

I scan the perimeter.

Noelle is supposed to be behind the barrier.

She isn’t.

I do one full visual sweep of the street to be sure. She’s not at the barrier. Not at the engine. Not anywhere on the visible perimeter.

I go back inside.

I find her on the ground floor.

She’s in the room at the back of the building, the one closest to where the fire started, crouched low with her camera out and one hand braced against the scorched floor. The ventilation isn’t complete back here.

The smoke is thin enough to see through but thick enough to matter, and she doesn’t have a mask, and she’s been in here long enough that her eyes are watering. Surprisingly, she doesn’t appear to have noticed.

She looks up when she hears me.

“I found the origin point,” she says, her voice hoarse. “The accelerant pattern matches the apartment building exactly. It’s the same person.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I need two more minutes.”

“No.”

“Wes.”

“No,” I say again, the same way, and I reach down and take her arm, and she doesn’t fight me, which tells me she already knows she pushed it too far. She lets me help her up to a standing position. She takes one step, and her knees go uncertain, and I put my arm around her, and we walk out.

She doesn’t say anything on the way through the building.