Coming Home to Roost: Chapter 4

After the Enterprise dri­ver pulled away, I head­ed into the debris that had been my home for the past eight years to see if there was any­thing to be sal­vaged.  Being still in the clothes I had been wear­ing when I ran from the con­fla­gra­tion, I did­n’t care too much about try­ing to stay clean while look­ing around.

But there was lit­tle to be found.  Virtually all the fur­ni­ture had been so total­ly con­sumed or dam­aged as to be of no fur­ther use. And, of course, my beau­ti­ful new Eames chair was a dis­as­ter, the wood warped and scorched and the leather and padding most­ly gone.

The kitchen cab­i­nets were like­wise scorched and water-dam­aged, but the din­ner­ware and a good many oth­er items inside the cab­i­nets were large­ly untouched.  I would have to sal­vage those lat­er when I could get back with some box­es to put things in.

I worked my way into the bed­room to find the same destruc­tion there as was in the oth­er parts of the house.  What was­n’t just a pile of car­bon was so dam­aged from the attempts to con­trol the fire that it looked like noth­ing could be saved.

Fortunately, many of my cloth­ing items that were in the clos­et and in a dress­er had sur­vived some­what intact, some with some water dam­age and all smelling of smoke, but I felt that much of it could be tak­en to the clean­ers and returned to use.  Those, too, were items that I would have to col­lect lat­er in boxes.

Then it was off to the vault.

I was con­cerned that the key­pad lock might have been dam­aged beyond use but found it intact.  There being no com­bustibles near the entrance, there was noth­ing to sup­port the fire near the door, and the fire depart­ment had arrived in time to at least hold down the fire before it became too intense there.  It’s pos­si­ble that water from the fire hoses could have ren­dered the key­pad inop­er­a­ble, but it seemed to have sur­vived that as well.

I pressed in the five-dig­it num­ber and heard the bolt retract.  I pulled open the heavy met­al door, push­ing aside some of the debris on the floor as I did so.  The inside of the vault was, for all intents and pur­pos­es, still pris­tine, my col­lec­tion of weapons untouched.  The con­crete ceil­ing showed some signs of damp­ness, appar­ent­ly where water was left stand­ing on top of the vault, but there was no leak­age.  It was appar­ent, though, that I would have to get some dehu­mid­i­fi­ca­tion in the vault as soon as I could get pow­er restored.  Otherwise, I was going to even­tu­al­ly be deal­ing with rust and corrosion.

I decid­ed to take a cou­ple of the weapons with me.  I guess my pro­fes­sion­al years have aroused a cer­tain wari­ness in me about not hav­ing a famil­iar weapon nearby.

So I picked out the Sig P238, made sure it had a full mag­a­zine, placed it in its hol­ster, and laid it aside to select one of my edged weapons, the Marine K Bar.

Opening one of the many draw­ers in the vault, I extract­ed a DVD that I had made a cou­ple of years pre­vi­ous­ly.  It con­tained a visu­al of every room in the house, show­ing all the fur­ni­ture and acces­sories, includ­ing every opened draw­er of every bureau and every opened clos­et.  I had made the video in a rare fit of cau­tion one day after read­ing an arti­cle that sug­gest­ed such a video would prove high­ly valu­able if one had to make a claim for lost house­hold items.  I intend­ed to give the video to Glenda as a start on my dam­ages claim.

I exit­ed the vault, made sure it was secure, and made a men­tal note to call KU, the local util­i­ty, to work out some­thing to get pow­er back to the site so that I could place a dehu­mid­i­fi­er in the vault.

As I worked my way through the remains of the house to leave, I spot­ted the charred copy of the Cussler book I had been read­ing short­ly before the explo­sion.  It had been blown toward the front of the house, and though the cov­er was most­ly charred and the edges of all the pages were car­bonized and wrin­kled from water dam­age, a part of the title and Clive Cussler’s name were bare­ly visible.

Having a some­what devi­ous nature, I deter­mined that I would take the remains of the book with me and pull a trick on the library.

I tossed the book on the floor of the car, pas­sen­ger side, and placed the Sig and K Bar in the glove box and lis­tened to the purr of the engine as I turned the new key in the ignition.