Chapter 18 - The Divergent Flame
The storm that hit Boston on Thursday night brought fifty-mile-an-hour winds and blinding sheets of rain.
At 11:30 PM, the emergency alarm at Noah’s Harbor Shelter in Worcester went off.
My phone rang instantly—it was the shelter manager, her voice frantic over the shrieking sirens. "Grace! The west wing is on fire! We’re evacuating sixty mothers and their babies into the courtyard! The security cameras went dead right before the blaze started!"
"I’m coming! Call the fire department and initiate emergency protocol B!" I shouted, adrenaline flooding my veins.
I turned to Margaret, who had just stepped into the foyer wearing her dressing gown. "Margaret, stay here with Marcus and the perimeter team. Do not open the doors for anyone. Noah is asleep in the nursery upstairs."
"Go, darling," Margaret urged, her hand clutching my arm. "The shelter mothers need you. We have four armed guards on the grounds. Noah is safe here."
I kissed Noah's sleeping forehead in his crib, lingering for a heartbeat on the warm scent of his skin, before rushing out into the torrential darkness with Marcus’s secondary driver.
It took forty-five minutes of white-knuckle driving through flooded streets to reach Worcester. But when I arrived, the local fire chief met me at the perimeter tape, his helmet drenched.
"Fire's out, Mrs. Vance. Minor smoke damage to the exterior storage shed. Someone threw a couple of road flares against the siding and cut the security wire to trigger the central evacuation alarm."
I froze in the middle of the rain-slicked parking lot.
May you like
A storage shed. Cut security wires.
*It was a diversion.*
