Fire Engine Dead Read Online Free

trouble getting my head around it. Give me a moment.” He looked down at his lap, his eyes closed, for maybe thirty seconds, before facing me again with a much calmer expression. “I apologize—you have no idea what I’m talking about, of course. Did you hear about the warehouse fire yesterday?”
    “Yes, I read about it in the paper this morning.”
    Peter glanced around the office, as if to confirm that we were alone. “Please don’t spread this around, but…” He swallowed. “That warehouse was where we were storing the museum collections during renovations.”
    I felt as though someone had punched me in the gut. Questions tumbled through my head, and I waited to speak, trying to sort out which to ask first. “Are they all gone?”
    He shook his head. “We don’t know yet. Parts of the warehouse were spared from the fire, although there may be secondary damage to the stored items that survived—smoke, water. But we don’t know where our particular collections were. I’m still hoping for the best.”
    Some small hope, at least. Then the practical side of me took over. “What were you thinking? This was a public warehouse, right? No climate control? What about security? What kind of safety record does the warehouse management have? How could you have put the collections at risk like that?”
    If possible, Peter looked even more distraught than he had originally, and I immediately felt guilty. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself the same questions?” he said. “You’re absolutely right: those collections should have been in a safe and secure location. But it all came down to money. The better the storage, the more expensive it is. We just didn’t have the money, not with all the construction costs and the lost income while we were closed. Surely you can understand that?”
    Unfortunately I did understand, only too well. A limited budget could stretch only so far, and corners got cut. “I’m sorry—it’s rude of me to second-guess you now.” Especially since the worst had happened. “You thought the collections would be there for only a short time, right?”
    “Exactly,” he said, somewhat relieved. “We thought they’d be in and out just a few months at most, but then the whole process kept dragging on and on and our reopening kept being postponed. There’s nothing you can say that Ihaven’t already said to myself. I feel terrible about this. I feel I’ve let the museum down, and the fire department, not to mention the city.”
    We both fell silent for a moment, in mourning for the lost collections. Then I gathered myself up. “So, what brings you here, Peter?”
    Peter gave himself a shake and straightened his tie. “I’m hoping you have some records about the museum, its founding and its collections, here at the Society.”
    “Ah,” I said. “I see. But don’t you have those records?”
    “Some of them. The older, archived ones…”
    I completed his sentence. “Were sent to the warehouse along with all the other stuff.”
    Peter held up his hand. “I know, you don’t have to tell me how stupid that was. But I was overruled by my board. They were looking at the bottom line, period. They’re firemen and bureaucrats mostly—not collectors or museum people.”
    “May I ask why you want this, right now?”
    “Because we need to get a handle on what we’ve lost, and what we should look for, if anything in the warehouse survived. I have to report to the board.”
    A task I didn’t envy him. “What about insurance?”
    “You mean, did we insure the collections? Only minimally. I’ll admit a lot of items weren’t worth much on the open market—you know, antique fire axes and old helmets and the like. It was the collection as a whole that was valuable, at least to us. So much of it was donated by local firefighters—things they had collected or salvaged over the years. Again, the board balked at the premiums. If I recall, a few of the key pieces were covered, although I