Page 13 of Lance

The rest of the evening and well after midnight, the two of them worked in their separate offices. There was plenty to go over for the foundation, and Lance found himself glad that he could simply go into the other office and get a second opinion on what he’d been doing.

“This person wants to see about getting funding for putting a water wheel on his property so that his water is flowing all the time. It gets nasty in the summer months when the water is low.” Georgie said that she had the same paperwork. After shuffling through her files, she handed him four files with the same man’s name on them. “It looks like he’s turning in requests weekly. Do you suppose he’s thinking we’ll get tired of reading it and give the money to him anyway?”

“Stranger things have happened.” They put the files together and decided it was too late to start on anything else. “I’m exhausted. I think we should hit the bed and get up early enough to get another start on this stuff. I had no idea that there were so many people out there that had ideas—not necessarily good ones, but ideas on how to make their lives easier.”

“I do have a couple of good ones. This lady said that she wants to go to college but has no way to get her children to daycare. They’re twins and too young to be put in nursery school. I don’t know a great deal about this area, but I want to know if there is good daycare around she could use.” He said he’d hand that one off to his sister. “That’s right. I forgot she was a teacher. She’d have a good idea about schools, too, I’d think.”

After digging through her pile, she made a note on the sticky paper on top of the several files to ask Ivy about. After explaining to Lance what she was doing, he went to his office and brought in his files for the same questions. She finally looked up at him after stretching her back.

“We need more jobs.” He said that he couldn’t agree more. Then, he told her about what Bailee said about getting companies to come around. “Even if they can hire as many as fifty people, that’ll hopefully be enough income coming into most of these families that they can get what they need. I was thinking, too, that we need to get with the grocer and see what they think about enlarging and updating the store that is around here. I know that they only carry name branded stuff, which is good but more expensive. But I think we need to start looking at the larger picture around here. Nothing is going to happen overnight, but it would be good if we can get a few dozen people working for income.”

As they made their way up to the bedroom, he sat on the side of the bed and just stretched his muscles, too. Her mouth nearly watered when he did that, but she was just too exhausted to jump his bones right now. Instead, she rolled over to her side and closed her eyes. Not long after she was falling into sleep, she heard Lance talking and decided that it wasn’t worth getting up for if he didn’t need her.

She was shaken awake by Lance too early for her to see much beyond someone standing over her. Slapping out, she told him how sorry she was when he told her it was him. Sitting up, Lance looked like he’d had the shit beaten out of him, and it wasn’t from her. Asking him what was going on, he sat down on the floor and let her know what he’d been up to all night.

“One of the buildings that were set for demolition fell inside of itself earlier this morning. It wasn’t until we started going through the mess that we discovered that people had been living in the building, and one of them had started a fire to cook her family dinner.” He looked at her. “Honey, she actually set the fire right on the wooden floor like it wasn’t going to catch fire that way. Anyway, she got out with one of her four children. Two of them were sent to the burn unit at the hospital, but the husband never got out. By the time she remembered him, the building had collapsed on him, and there wasn’t anything that we could do to save him. I was still trying to find out about the fourth child when Denver sent me home to get some rest.”

She got up and dressed herself. “You rest. I’m going to whip up some sandwiches and see if someone can get water to the site.” He said he’d help. “No, you rest. When you’re all right enough to come back, then I’ll see you there. Right now, we have to get those that are fighting the fire—” She stopped talking when he raised his hand.

“They found the other child. He’s all right, but he knew that his mother was going to burn them out by how she was cooking dinner. He waited until he could see the smoke, thinking that they’d get out in time before he called the fire trucks. Denver asked him why he didn’t try and convince his mother that she was going to kill them all, and he told him that he knew better than to give his mom lip. They’re taking him to the hospital now.” She asked him if he thought that it was set on purpose. “That is just what Denver said. He’s the one who thinks outside the box better than anyone that I know. Even Bailee has it in her head that it was done to get rid of her family.”

“I guess one of you guys has looked into her sick noodle to find out.” When she didn’t get an answer, she noticed that Lance was sleeping right on the floor where he’d been resting.

Covering him up and laying a pillow on his chest, she left to get things organized. As she was trying to figure out how to make sandwiches for a bunch of hungry people with three slices of cheese and half a loaf of bread.

“Just wave your hand over the counter.” She asked who this might be but did it anyway. “I’m Parker Foster. The grand witchy. I gave you the powers that you’ll need to do a lot of things, but for now, just pack up what you have there and water will be already on site. Good thinking on that. You’ll make Brook jealous, in a good way, because you thought of it before she did.”

Laughing while she was putting things in bags, large capacity ones that didn’t look like they’d hold much that Parker suggested that she make. Telling her that having her around was going to be helpful in all kinds of things had her laughing.

“Also, the kid who called the police, he has been trying to get away from his mom for the last couple of years. I can read his mind better than most of the rest. There are two little girls, and thanks to a bit of magic, they are going to live. The baby, an infant that seems to be about six months old, is the only one that Mrs. Agilent got out with. She left the other two screaming for help from her when she left them there. The police will be taking care of her when they get her to the hospital. You might want to think about you and Lance taking on a couple of kids to be watched over. There are other members of the family out there that will be willing to take them, but for now, they just need baths, food, and a safe haven.”

She told her that she could do that. “I have some ideas that I’d like to run by the people who made the money decisions. Our little town needs help with jobs.” Parker told her that she could make that decision on her own. She was as much a part of the foundation as they all were. “I don’t know how to even start. We need businesses, but where do I begin to look for something like that?”

By the time she was pulling up as close as she could to the fire trucks, people were unloading the food. The water just simply appeared by one of the tables that she’d commandeered, and she found some bags of chips in her bag that she hadn’t put in there. She wondered if there would be pie, too, and shook her head. Sometimes, she was silly. How on earth would they eat pie?

The water was going fast but she need not have worried. There seemed to be an endless supply of that, as well as the sandwiches. The kids that had come out of some of the houses to look around began handing the sandwiches and water out to the homeless people in the buildings near the one that had caught fire when she asked them to.

By the time Lance had shown up, the brothers had taken turns going home to rest. Eating a couple of sandwiches, she was glad to see that Lance looked better than he had when she’d left him. They all watched as the firefighters worked to keep the fire contained while the woman and her baby were being treated for small burns. The other little girls had been taken to the hospital to be treated as well.

“What’s happened to Samuel?” Georgie asked the woman, she had forgotten her name already who that was. “Well, I have a son. I couldn’t find him anywhere as I was leaving, and my husband too. Both of them weren’t there when I started out of the building. My daughters, too. They were on another floor when the fire started. You know how kids can be. Never wanting to be hanging around with their parents.”

Before giving out any information, she asked what she should say. Denver told her that the mother was going to be detained. There was a smell of gasoline on her husband when they found his body, as well as the two little girls. She still didn’t know what to say to her.

“That her husband died under suspicious circumstances, and you don’t know anything about the other members of the family because you only just got here.” After telling her that, Denver asked her what she’d had to say about that. She told him that it was Samuel’s fault that she had warned him about starting a fire on the bare wood floor. “Sure she did. Samuel is with the police. His son is at the police precinct telling them what he knew about how they ended up in the building in the first place.”

“Was it bad?” He told her how he’d spoken to the fire Marshal. He told him that it looked as if she’d planned on even bringing out the infant not breathing. “She wasn’t going to save any of them, was she, Denver?”

“It doesn’t look like it, honey. But there is enough evidence that she’ll end up in prison. The man was dead before the building caught fire. The medical examiner said the body was at least three to five days old. He’ll be able to tell us more when he gets him to the morgue.” She asked about Samuel. “He’s being examined with his other siblings who were in the fire. The baby has been taken from her and put into a secure place as well.”

That was about all she could hope for, she guessed. Well into the next afternoon, they were just finishing up with the fires. A total of four buildings were demolished, the only way they could contain it, and three firefighters had been hurt. The stupid woman was going to be in such trouble when this hit the papers.

After getting a long bath, she had to stand up and shower, washing her hair three times before she felt like she’d gotten all the smell out of it. For some reason, it wasn’t just the smell of burning wood, but she could smell the oil that had been a part of the building for so long that it had embedded itself in the floor. Gasoline was there, too, as well as the coffee, hot cocoa, and the food that she handed out. Everything that she’d been a part of, it was now smelling up her hair.

Blowing dry her hair, something that she rarely did, Georgie felt better and smelled better, too, than she had in a while, she thought. Putting her clothing into a large paper bag to be incinerated. The firefighters told her of a place they used to burn things that would never get the smell out of it. She was going to take them up on that offer.

Going into the kitchen, the first person that she saw was Grannie. Everyone called her that, even people from the little town that they were living in. The kids started to come over to her and Grandpa’s home so that they could hang out with the elderly couple.

Two days ago, she found some of the teenagers who had come for a visit pulling dandelions out of the yard. She’d heard that they were going to make dandelion jelly. Not one to turn down a good jam or jelly, she was hesitant to taste the creation.

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