A Fireproof Home for the Bride (37 page)

“Take notes,” Jim said, and Emmy fished a pencil and notebook out of her satchel. She pressed the lead against the open page, wrote “ramshackle” and “denuded.” He turned one corner and then the next, the quiet car practically gliding over the empty re-paved streets until at last, turning the corner on Twenty-ninth Street, Jim slowed and pulled to the curb at the sight of a fire truck, ambulance, and assorted cars blocking off the end of the street. Killing the engine, Jim righted his hat and sighed.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said, shrugging more deeply into his camel hair coat.

“More than usual?” Emmy asked, disquietude scaling up her arms and neck. She shook herself to get warm as Jim threw open his door and approached a man in a police uniform.

“Morning, Jim,” the man said as Emmy quickly caught up.

“Hey, Harry, this is Emmy Nelson. She’s with me,” Jim said, shaking the man’s hand. “Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Harry said, looking her over. He was quite young, she thought, possibly even her age.

“What you got?” Jim asked him, and Emmy turned her notebook to a fresh page.

“Some kid,” Harry said. “Only dead a day or so, from what I hear tell.”

Jim rubbed his chin. “Cause?”

“I’m just crowd control.” Harry tapped a cigarette out of a pack of Viceroys. “Got a light?”

Jim struck a match and offered the flame. “How old?” he asked.

Harry blew smoke mixed with cold breath high into the still-dark sky. “Nine, maybe ten? Ask the boss.”

“Okay, then.” Jim looked at Emmy. She wrote down “9–10,” and glanced at Jim, the hair on her arms goosed. They walked past Harry and down the street, Emmy falling a step behind and soaking in as many details as she could scratch down. Along the edge of the sidewalk was an empty lot, and she began to see the forms of familiar things in the tall dried grass—a few tree stumps, a child’s wagon missing a wheel, a paper bag quavering in the breeze against an object that was pinning it in place.

“There’s still so much debris,” she said, and Jim nodded without turning until they reached the phalanx of emergency vehicles. “Why the fire truck, do you suppose?” she asked him.

“Search and recovery.” He grimaced. “They have the axes and ladders.”

The light grew dimmer between the truck and the ambulance and Emmy braced against them as she stepped more carefully toward a brighter light that drew her forward until she emerged to see a floodlit, half-demolished house with people milling about like termites in the process of stealthily removing every shred of human invention. Details began to come into focus as the sky lightened in advance of the dawn. One outer wall had been ripped clean away from the structure, leaving the half-lit rooms exposed, the cheap wallpaper of the living room and battered cabinetry of the kitchen looking like a haunted dollhouse. Most of the men were milling about an area in the yard, and from there a man wearing a long trench coat approached them. In one hand he held a boxy camera, the spent flashbulb of which he unscrewed and stuffed in a pocket as he walked.

“Hello, Ted,” Jim said, extending a hand. “What you got here?”

Ted raised a hoary eyebrow at Emmy, drew a new bulb out of the other pocket, and talked around a wad of chewing tobacco as he pressed the tiny light into the camera’s socket. “Runaway, I suspect. We haven’t ID’d the body yet. Just finished up with the photos. Don says an inquest is unlikely.”

“Who’s Don?” Emmy asked. She wanted to ask what an inquest was, too, but held back, hoping to look less at sea than she felt.

“Dr. Lawrence, the coroner,” Jim said, studying the house. “When’ll they bring the boy up?” he asked Ted.

Ted stopped his fiddling and spit a long line of dark liquid from one side of his mouth. “Didn’t say it was a boy.”

Jim put a hand on Ted’s shoulder and began to walk past as he said, “You didn’t need to.”

Emmy quickly caught up to Jim’s side and gauged his expression. “Who is it?” she asked just as two men carrying a slight, sheet-covered body on a stretcher emerged from the slanted cellar door on the side of the house that still stood mostly unscathed.

Jim folded his arms and shook his head slowly. “I can’t say for certain. But that’s the Acevedo house.”

Emmy’s heart crimped. “Jesse?”

“I was here that night, saw them bring out his siblings. One by one.” Jim’s face was ashen in the first rays of daylight. “His mother.”

“Well, I know what he looks like,” Emmy said, and started toward the stretcher. Jim caught her arm and pulled her back as the two men carrying it made their way past Emmy and to the open doors of the ambulance. A pungency not entirely unlike the smell of a two-day dead and bloated cow hit her and she stopped, a quick hand over her nose and mouth.

Jim handed her his handkerchief. “You ever seen a dead body?”

She brushed off his hand, thought of her nearly dead grandmother, and then the last time she’d seen Jesse alive. “No.” As she watched the ambulance drive off, Emmy wondered about the ages of the other children and where Jesse fit in, whether he was a help to his mother with all those kids, where he had gone during the storm in order to escape one fate but be so cruelly delivered to another.

“You ready to ask some questions?” Jim asked her in his full voice, and Emmy jumped.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, flipping her mind away from the personal and toward the morning’s assumed goal. “What if it isn’t Jesse? And if it is, why did he come back here, and how did he die?” Emmy searched the faces in the crowd, determining which of the men still milling about she should approach first. Harry didn’t seem to know much; Ted didn’t know a whole lot more. “I need to find the coroner, right?”

“That’s a good start, but he’s already gone,” Jim said. “That was him with the stretcher.”

Emmy turned in a slow circle in the crisp morning light, the investigators, police, and firemen moving around the yard, in and out of the house, or to their vehicles. She stopped when she saw Pete emerge from the cellar in his fireman’s uniform, his face as ashen as the still-warming sky above them.

“It’s Jesse, after all,” she murmured to Jim. “That’s Bobby’s friend, Pete Chaklis.” Pete crossed the short distance between them, glanced at Emmy, and then continued to the fire truck, his eyes trained on the blank expanse in front of him.

“Looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Jim said, close to Emmy’s ear.

“I suppose he has,” she replied, the desolation of Jesse’s certain demise settling upon her like a fine mist.

Ted ambled back over to them, his camera replaced by a notepad much like Emmy’s.

“Look,” he said to Jim. “We should have the investigation wrapped up in a couple of hours. I’ll give you a call when I can get you down into the hole.”

“Much appreciated,” Jim said, and shook Ted’s hand before directing Emmy to the car. “Let’s go see what we can dig up?”

*   *   *

Around noon, Emmy looked at the clock in the archive room and sighed. She stretched her arms as high above her head as she could get them and pushed her chair away from the table. She’d been scribbling down her impressions of the morning, crafting small sentences loaded with import as best she could. Very little in school had prepared her for this, but the rhythm of copy felt oddly natural to her, even though her writing contained more crossed-out words than not. There was something captivating in watching the nib of the pen soak the thin paper of the spiral-bound pad when she held a thought for too long, and the thin scratch of the ink when she wrote too quickly. She chewed on the corner of her left thumbnail all the while, releasing long enough only to turn a page forward to press on or backward to find where she might already have used an uncommon word, crossing it out, inserting something fresh.

On the table in front of her were the carefully spread-out pages of
The Fargo Forum
from June 21, 1957, the day after the storm. She pulled the front page to her for perhaps the twentieth time, mesmerized by the photo beneath the top-fold breadth of the tornado cloud in deathly midswirl. This other image was half the size but carried twice the blow: a young man with a shock of blond bangs hanging to the middle of his face, looking down at the limp body of a tiny child in his arms. She read the caption again, still unable to fully absorb the meaning of the words: “Off-duty Fargo firefighter Peter Chaklis carries the body of Marcela Acevedo, 5. Three other Acevedo children and their mother died in the storm.”

Emmy held the newspaper, transfixed by the limpness of tiny Marcela. She couldn’t have weighed much more than a wet feather, and it was entirely clear that her form was already lifeless, every muscle having abandoned the urge to contract. Mrs. Acevedo and her four youngest children had taken shelter in the bathtub, of all places, possibly forgoing the basement due to her fear of the dark, or so went the story as reported to Jim at the time. Emmy thought back to her morning out in Golden Ridge, the broken dollhouse, and tried to restore the missing walls enough to envision those last moments as the windows blew out and the children were spun away from their mother. Emmy read on, fascinated to learn that Mrs. Acevedo was not from Mexico like her husband, but was a local woman whose family had come over from Europe after the war. That explained Mrs. Doyle’s assertion that Jesse’s maternal grandparents hadn’t wanted him. It must have been the hardest part for the boy—knowing that the person he loved most in the world had parents who hated him merely because of his father. Emmy read on, but when she came to the detail that Jesse’s given name was Jesus, she stopped reading, heartbroken that a child named after a man who gave so much to the world would have everything good ripped away. The sound of the windowpane rattling in the door behind Emmy startled her, and she turned to see Jim, silently reading from his notepad.

“I can’t seem to come up with anything out of the ordinary,” he said, flipping a page. “It’s just a damn shame his aunt didn’t call someone to follow up.” Jesse had been sent to his aunt’s family, Emmy knew, but hadn’t heard that he’d left them.

“Maybe she didn’t have a telephone,” Emmy said. “Or money enough to make the call.”

Jim shrugged. “Or maybe she didn’t have any reason to be concerned.” He looked over her shoulder and put his index finger on her copy, reading, “‘Acevedo must have been frightened to death alone in that dark space.’ Hmm.” He picked up her pen and drew a line through “frightened to death.” “This is what’s known as a cliché, or a turn of phrase that’s used too much. You need to beat them out of your writing, kid. You know, things like ‘baby with the bathwater’ and ‘green with envy.’”

Emmy swallowed and looked down at the offending sentence, wondering how many more were in her piece. “Thanks,” she said as a knock at the door broke into their conversation. Emmy stood, dusting her slacks of the tiny shards of newspaper that had collected from her research. A woman tentatively entered the room; a cloche was pulled down over her ears. It took Emmy a beat to recognize within the tightly huddled figure her old friend Svenja; her body had gained considerable girth, her ill-fitted skirt was frayed at the edges, and the thin cotton coat was slightly muddy and in need of a button in the middle of the row, where Svenja clutched at it, her glove gray.

“Emmaline,” Svenja said quietly, turning her eyes away from Jim as he passed through the doorway and went back down the hall. Svenja bit her lower lip. “I didn’t know where else to go. I’m sorry. I’d heard you worked here and told the girl out front that I was your sister.”

“It’s okay,” Emmy said as she led Svenja to a chair, noticing a light green, crescent-shaped bruise just above her collar. Svenja’s hand went there and pulled a scarf up out of the coat and around her neck. She sat carefully down on the hard wooden chair.

“I need money,” Svenja said, placing her shaking hands on the newspapers and pushing them slightly away. “To buy a bus ticket.”

“What’s happened?” Emmy sat next to Svenja, steadying her arm. The girl flinched. “Does John know where you are?”

Svenja darted her eyes to Emmy’s, then just as quickly refocused on the clock over the filing cabinets. “I can’t tell you. I just need the ticket. There’s a place in Saint Paul … I have an aunt. If anyone can understand, it’s you!” Her voice caught on the edge of broken hope.

“You can tell me,” Emmy said. “Has John done something?” It seemed an impossible idea. The John Hansen that Emmy knew would never do anything to incite such fear—he’d only ever been quiet and kind—but then she’d thought the same of Ambrose. If there was one thing Emmy had learned, it was not to base an opinion on a person’s public behavior.

Svenja jolted her head, a nod that looked like a dismissal. “I can’t go back, not now. Not while he’s…” She burst into quiet sobs, her mouth contorting into a downward smile that neither confirmed nor denied her husband’s role in her distress. Emmy wrapped an arm around her, rocking steadily as Svenja gave in to her tears, the flow of which eventually ebbed enough for Emmy to release the girl.

“The ticket’s only three dollars and fifty cents.” Svenja sniffed. “But whatever you can spare will be most appreciated.”

“Do you think a good night’s rest would help things? Why not stay with me and get a fresh look at it all tomorrow?” Emmy offered, only to see a wild hysteria wash over Svenja’s face, the kind of look she’d seen in the rolling eyes of the birthing cow in the barn.

“He’s—” Svenja said, slapped a hand over her mouth, pushed back the chair, and let it topple behind her in a noise so alarming that it brought Jim rushing into the room.

“We’re all right, Jim,” Emmy said calmly, and motioned for him to leave them alone. She reached into her satchel and unsnapped the interior pocket where she kept loose change and folding money.

“Here,” she said, pressing a ten-dollar bill into Svenja’s shaking hand and closing the fingers into a fist. “Get that bus. I won’t tell John where you’ve gone. I promise.”

“Promise me you won’t tell
anyone
where I’ve gone?” Svenja begged, shaking her head and backing toward the door. “There are people everywhere who would tell, if they knew.”

Emmy studied the paranoid fear contorting her friend’s still beautiful face and detected something else, a roundness that belied a deeper and more protective vigilance blossoming within her, something Emmy hadn’t seen since that cold day in Bev’s kitchen. She turned to the table quickly and tore a strip of paper off the bottom of her notepad, scrawled her address and the office’s phone number and handed it to her friend.