Best Place to Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

roof’s edge. Impossible to make out, and she pressed the telephoto button as far as it could go. In the screen the lump took on form . . . human form. As the resolution sharpened she saw it was a woman –
oh God, no
– with thin gray hair, her scalp visible through the fine strands. She wasn’t moving and, ignoring tears that spilled down her cheek, Lil sidled to the left, not wanting to impede the firefighters and medics ferrying Nillewaug residents to a string of ambulances that had coalesced into a kind of taxi line on the access road. Staring at the camera’s LED screen, she kept the focus grid on the woman’s head, all the while praying that some movement would show she was alive, that they’d get up to the roof, bring her down and all would be well. Nearly banging her knee on a small bench, she moved a few steps forward, and had a clear shot of the woman’s face, as she lay with her eyes closed, her head resting on the brick edging. ‘Betty . . .’ Lil’s breath caught as she recognized Mrs Grasso, a retired first-grade teacher at Pond Elementary. She stared at the screen –
please be alive
– willing her to breathe. Tears spilled as she tried to steady the camera. A ladder with a firefighter in a cherry picker telescoped up the side of the building, and while Lil knew that recording this was ghoulish, she shifted the camera to video mode and followed him.
    The rescuer anchored to the roof’s edge and ran toward Betty. Lil watched him check for a pulse at her throat. He shook his head, then he scooped her up as though she weighed little more than a child. Lil’s hands shook as she held the camera in both, trying to steady it.
She’s dead, and what was she doing on the roof?
The answer that came to mind too awful:
she was trying to escape.
As the firefighter ran Betty in his arms to the ambulance at the front of the queue, she shut off the video. Sobbing, she turned slowly, aware of dawn creeping up the eastern sky, the flames through the second-floor windows still visible but no longer so high, as focused jets of water bombarded their target. Smoke billowed thick and black; windows shattered, and, barely audible over the sirens, cries for help.
    Ada, where are you?
Putting down the camera she started to jog around the building’s periphery, trying to gauge where Rose’s first-floor apartment was. Her closest exit was toward the back, and, shouldering her bag, Lil broke into a run. As she fled from the heart of the fire, she saw smoke billowing from broken upper-floor windows. Unbidden and unwanted thoughts hounded her, like having recently survived a fire she knew that death from smoke inhalation is not the worst way to go. The smoke was too thick, anyone still inside . . . It could take someone in their sleep. Not slowing her pace, she realized it probably had tonight.
People are dying here . . . people are dead.
    Lil coughed as she rounded the back of the building. ‘Ada!’ Spotting her silhouette in the bright blue sweats standing by a bench with the much taller Aaron on the other side and two women seated between them.
    Now winded, but so relieved. ‘Thank God you’re OK.’ Lil took in Ada’s worried expression, and then that of her mother Rose, and a second woman with dyed red hair in a white nightdress with sprays of purple petunias, both of them drenched, the redhead with Aaron’s jacket draped on her shoulders. They were strangely silent and focused on something in front of them that Lil couldn’t yet see. And then she could.
    â€˜It’s her,’ Ada said, as Lil caught her first glimpse of the blonde woman, in her late thirties – maybe early forties – on the ground not more than forty or fifty feet in front of them. ‘Delia Preston.’
    â€˜She jumped,’ Rose spat out. ‘She jumped to her death!’
    The redhead looked across at Lil. ‘I want to go home. Can you take