Pippa said, her voice not steady at all, “We came to find him, Mr. Pell. The chief told us only that a young man from the department had carried Doralee out, and he asked us not to push. He said the young man wanted no credit.”
She said, “Mother was in the hospital, then in a care home for two years, and we did not want to press a stranger who had asked for quiet. We thought maybe he had moved away. Then Doralee said she remembered letters. She spelled them on the drive down.”
I turned around.
Dallas Benning stood in the door of the apparatus bay with a cup of my coffee in his hand. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who has been waiting four years for an ax to fall.
I said, “Dallas.”
He set the cup down on the nearest table. He said, in a low voice, “Walk-in, Rex.”
The walk-in cooler smells of cold cardboard and cabbage. Dallas pulled the door shut behind us. The compressor kicked on. I could see my breath.
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He did not make me ask. He stood with his back against a rack of egg flats and told it straight, in the voice of a man giving a report to the state.
“When Octavia started screaming about Doyle, she said something else. She said, and Doralee, where is Doralee, she’s not in her bed. Pippa’s girl was staying that weekend. I heard it. Colt heard it. I turned to the radio, and by the time I turned back he was gone around the west side of the barn.”
He said, “I ran after him, Brantley behind me. By the time we got around the corner Colt had the west door open, the one door the fire hadn’t taken yet, and he was inside. Then he came out of the smoke with that child under his coat.”
He had to stop. He pressed the back of his wrist hard against his jaw. I had never seen Dallas Benning do that.
“She’d got herself into the cow’s stall behind the feed bin. She followed her granddad out in her nightgown, and when the fire went she hid, the way a little thing will. He found her by her crying.”
He said, “He carried her around the far side of the barn, away from the hoses, away from you, to where the ambulance was. He set her in Octavia’s arms. And then he turned to go back in for Doyle.”
I said, “You stopped him.”
He said, “Brantley and I stopped him. I gave him a direct order and he did not hear it. He went for that door like a man going after his own heart. We got him at the corner, and he fought us, Rex. Brantley has still got a scar through his eyebrow.”
He said, “We took him down in the dirt. I sat on his legs and Brantley held his arms, and he was crying and telling us Doyle was right there, he had seen the boots. When he finally quit, we walked him around into the front yard, out of the collapse zone.”
He said, “And the second we let go, he just stopped. He stood there looking at that door. I told Brantley to let him be. A minute, maybe. Then the ridge let go.”