Fire, The Read Free Page B

He had become a bootlegger straight out of high school and socked away thousands before being shot and killed in a dispute over a woman at the age of twenty-eight in 1933.
    Lloyd Johnson, the youngest son, had gone in a different direction. He had attended college, married, and sired three children before his thirtieth birthday. After serving in the Army in World War II, he had moved his family to his wife's hometown of Unionville, Oregon, and started an auto dealership that had thrived long after his death in 1985.
    Kevin had not known Asa, Randolph, and Lloyd personally. They had died long before he had arrived on the scene in 1991. They existed only in stories that had been passed down to him from Grandpa Roger, who had run the dealership store following Lloyd's retirement, and his great aunts, Beatrice and Janet, who had also settled in Unionville and jointly managed what had become known as the family vacation house in Wallace until their deaths in 2006 and 2008. So it was with great interest that he read a document he had mostly ignored at the reunion, when he was fourteen and obsessed more with girls, school, and sports than dead relatives.
    Kevin lowered the reunion book to his lap and reached for a glass of iced tea on the nightstand. He knew it wasn't wise to drink a caffeinated beverage at this hour. He didn't look forward to stumbling down a dark stairway at two o'clock to find the house's only bathroom. But iced tea was just what he needed on a night when the temperature clung stubbornly to the high seventies and the air conditioner didn't work.
    He returned the glass to a coaster on the nightstand and resumed reading about his late-and-sometimes-not-so-great relatives. He didn't even get to the bottom of the page, however, before he was interrupted by the sum of all his fears: a brown spider the size of a minivan that had crawled up the side of the bed to within six inches of his side.
    Before he could decide whether the arachnid was a venomous killer or merely a frightening nuisance, Kevin swatted the beast to the floor with the reunion book. In the process, he swatted the glass of iced tea to the floor as well.
    Kevin swore up a storm over the loss of his drink and the seemingly irrational reaction that had caused it. He was a big boy, a man of science, and an intelligent human being. He knew better than to freak out over an eight-legged creature he could destroy with a flick of his wrist. But he hated spiders. He really hated spiders.
    Kevin caught his breath, slid to the edge of the bed, and glanced over the side. He looked for the spider but found a mess instead. Ice cubes and tea soaked a spot on the hardwood floor about the size of a large serving tray. Fortunately, the glass itself remained intact.
    He turned away, shook his head, and laughed. No wonder he couldn't keep a girlfriend. He was a big chicken. What girl would want a guy who was afraid of spiders?
    Kevin sighed as he pondered the chore ahead. He would have to clean the spill before the tea stained the red-oak planks. The last thing he needed was another surface to scrub in the morning.
    He adjusted the nightstand lamp to its brightest setting and glanced again at the floor. This time he saw more than a spreading puddle. He saw iced tea drain through four long, straight cracks – cracks he had not seen before.
    Kevin got off the bed, walked to the far side of the bedroom, and picked up a clean rag that he had tossed on the floor earlier that day. He turned on the overhead light, returned to the side of the bed, dropped to his knees, and wiped up his mess. When he took a closer look at the cracks, he saw that they were more than imperfections in an otherwise smooth and seamless floor. They were the boundaries of something created by design.
    Kevin ran a finger along the slits, which formed a rectangle about two feet by three, but found nothing to suggest that they were anything more than grooves in wood. The dark brown strips within the