Smoke (11 page)

“If there’s anything that isn’t in the reports,” I can hear Rich’s skeptical voice.

I shut Rich out as I walk along Sullivan Street and turn right on Main. A haze fills the streets, making my eyes water. The sound my feet make as they hit the slatted sidewalk boards feels crushed, like it’s weighted down and can’t rise to announce my presence like it normally would. It’s an eerie feeling; it makes the town seem derelict, though it’s the thick of the workday.

The sheriff’s office is in the old post office, a nondescript stone building from the sixties. There’s another sheriff’s office on the west side of the town square, a tourist version with a covered wagon over the entrance, where little kids get gold stars to wear on their lapels, and a mock shootout occurs every day at two o’clock—the apocryphal time the only shooting that ever happened in town occurred, a hundred and twenty years ago.

Detective Donaldson has one of the two enclosed offices in the Main Street building; Sheriff Thompson has the other. Everybody else shares desks in the bullpen, which is full right now at the shift change. Deputy Clark is talking to another officer by the coffee machine. He tips his hat at me when I catch his eye.

Donaldson’s office is in the back corner. He’s on the phone. He waves me in, holding his thumb and index finger a half inch apart to indicate he won’t be long.

He hangs up a moment later, and we go through the usual pleasantries, or what passes for them these days. No new news about the fire. Yes, I think it might get bad. No, I wasn’t so sure the case was that open-and-shut.

“Clark tells me the fire pit at the back of Phillips’s house was the point of origin. So I’m thinking it’s time to bring him in for a talk,” he says. About forty, he has the confidence I’ve come to associate with detectives through the reality of television, because everyone knows they’re the smart ones. Of course, that includes me too, so I should shut the hell up.

“But what about the kids he mentioned?” I say. “The reports checked out, right?”

He runs his hand over his receding hairline. His head is almost shaved, but the just-visible W pattern on his forehead gives him away.

“Those kids weren’t starting fires, they were harassing him. Throwing crap at his house. Stringing toilet paper between the trees.”

“But if they were in his yard that night . . . they
had
been back there before, yes?”

“Sure enough. Drinking beer. Smoking pot and God knows what else.”

“You ever figure out who they were?”

“My best guess was one of the gangs from Spanish Town, but I could never get anyone to talk to me. They don’t talk to gringos.”

“Didn’t Phillips say the kids were white?”

“It was dark out. He saw kids running away. What does he know?”

I grit my teeth. Donaldson doesn’t want to think it could be “ordinary” kids, as he calls them, white kids with rich parents who don’t live in the one poor area in town. Kids with parents who’ll hire lawyers and make his life difficult. I’ve seen this kind of thinking from him before, the few times we’ve worked together. His first port of call is always Spanish Town; I heard he’d even gone looking for the bank robber there, though the bank’s video footage clearly showed a head of blond hair under the bandanna the robber wore across his face. It’s also probably why he—and Rich—are fixated on Phillips. No one will come to his defense.

“So,” I say, “what’s your theory? John Phillips burned his house down on purpose by lighting a few pieces of paper in the fire pit two hundred yards from the building?”

“Maybe he laid a trail of fire-starter from there to the house, knowing the evidence would be burned away?”

“But it wouldn’t be. And nothing’s been found in the wreckage. Where’d he put the can, for instance?”

Donaldson shrugs. Details. Details.

“And why’d he do it?” I can’t help but add. “Everything he owned was in that house.”

“All right, all right, calm down, calm down.” He leaves out the
little lady
, though it’s clearly implied. “I wasn’t saying he did it on purpose. Accidents happen, you know.”

Four and a half years ago, I worked an out-of-state fire that turned out to have been started by a child who’d gotten hold of his father’s barbecue starter and wanted to imitate the way his dad lit the fire for marshmallows on their camping trips. It was the end of a very dry spring, and fires were blazing up everywhere. Though I was supposed to be investigating the fire, we were shorthanded, and I ended up working on the site, which I was more than happy to do because I was having trouble shaking off the devastation this striking little boy had caused. I couldn’t wait for the beautiful oblivion of sleep that would come after twelve hours of grueling work.

But exhausting myself physically and mentally wasn’t enough to drive away the last conversation I’d had with his mother. The fire had killed two people at that point—the grandchildren of an older couple who hadn’t checked the batteries in their smoke detectors—and emotions were running high. When I went to see her in their tiny apartment, Karen—or Carol, how awful that I can’t remember—had been up all night soothing her son’s nightmares. Their phone was ringing off the hook. I asked her why she didn’t unplug it.

“I don’t want to miss their call,” she said. She was young, not even twenty-five, but she looked at once childlike and older than I was. Her clothes didn’t fit properly, and the house had an ingrained messiness to it, something much more permanent than could have occurred over the past few days.

“Whose call?”

“The parents. Of those kids. When they call . . . I want to be here.”

“I don’t think—”

“They’ll call. I would if I were them.”

The phone rang shrilly, and she leaped toward it. I could hear the deep rumble of an angry male voice spilling forth from the receiver. She listened for a moment, then hung up. It wasn’t them.

She sat back on her listing dining chair, folding herself into it like it was a capsule that might catapult her out of there and into outer space. She cracked the knuckles of her fingers rhythmically, a practice that’s always set my teeth on edge. She had an odd pattern of bruises on her arms. It took me a moment to figure out they were caused by fingers. A set of large hands had pressed into her forearms long and hard enough to tattoo the skin. The owner of those hands was nowhere to be seen. One of the guys on the crew said her husband had been down in the local pub since the news broke. I guess he had enough time to leave his mark before he went.

“Are they really going to arrest Timmy?” she asked. “Can you even arrest a seven-year-old?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. He’s too young.”

“When we went to the police station, he thought it was a field trip. He kept wondering where the rest of his class was.”

She broke down. I sat there, trying to keep myself from crying, wondering what the protocol was. I hadn’t received training for this. I’d already done what I was supposed to—determine the cause of the fire—and it was only a sense of guilt that had brought me to her apartment. I felt, somehow, that I had set this in motion and should find a way to stop it, though there wasn’t one.

I heard a door creak, and Timmy was in the room. He was small for his age, wearing stained footy pajamas, with a thatch of white-blond hair that stood straight up. He padded up to us and put a protective hand on his mom’s shoulder.

“You’re making my mommy cry,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was asking or telling.

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t like it when she cries.”

I had no hesitation about what I wanted to do in that instant. Take him in my arms and hold him close. Protect him from the outside world that was calling him a pyromaniac in the making, a sociopath. So I did. I scooped him into my lap and held his slack body against mine while he looked up at me with wide blue eyes. He smelled of milk and Johnson’s shampoo, baby smells even though he wasn’t a baby anymore. He sucked on two of his fingers, self-soothing. We sat like that until his mother gathered herself, and then I let myself out of their broken home. I left quickly, because if I hesitated I had this wild feeling I’d simply tuck Timmy onto my hip and never look back. I could save this kid. Not in the abstract way we all saved people every day, working out of sight, unacknowledged. In a concrete way, like taking in a stray cat and feeding it properly, gentling it, teaching it that not everything in life had to be as bad as it thought.

When I got back to camp an hour later, I waited in the long line for the outdoor showers and spent my allotted time scrubbing my body with rough soap as if I could erase the terrible day. I went through the food line mechanically and took my plate of spaghetti and garlic bread to a picnic table where there was a group of firefighters I didn’t know. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted that feeling of being alone-but-not-alone that you can get in a crowd all working toward the same thing.

But one of the men didn’t leave me alone.

“You’re the arson investigator, right? Elizabeth Martin?” a man who was about my age—middle thirties—asked. He had dirty-blond hair that curled close to his head and dark-brown eyes. His face was tanned and lined, but handsome.

“How did you know that?”

“I’m Andy Thomas. I saw you being interviewed last night about that kid. Poor fucker. He’s screwed for life, isn’t he?”

“What about the people who died? They’re really screwed for life.” I colored at the force of my anger.

He ducked his head and took a long drink from his water bottle. “You’re right, of course. But I still feel for the kid.”

“Why?”

“How’s he going to live with that? Knowing he killed two people, maybe more? All because his dad left a barbecue starter where he could get at it. Like we all do every day.”

I ate a few bites of my food. “Most would disagree with you. There’s basically a lynch mob outside his apartment building.”

“Sick fucks. They should be raising money for the lifelong therapy he’s going to need. I just wish he didn’t have to know. You think his parents are smart enough not to tell him?”

I thought about the low-level poverty he was living in, his young mother, his drunk-since-the-incident father. Maybe I should have told her not to say anything. Maybe I should have walked that child right out of that house.

“He’d find out eventually, though, wouldn’t he? All he has to do is Google himself.”

“Yeah, I guess. Goddamn Internet.”

I turned toward him. His hair was wet and he smelled fresh from a shower, but he still had streaks of dirt and ash across the bridge of his nose and imbedded under his fingernails.

“Why are you telling me this, anyway?” I asked.

“That’s a long story. And maybe I’ll tell you someday if we become friends.”

“Sure, no problem, I get it.”

I bent my head toward my plate, certain my face was turning bright red.

He laughed. “Dude. Seriously. I’m not that mysterious. I became a firefighter because when I was on a camping trip when
I
was a kid, we had a campfire when we shouldn’t have and ended up burning down a thousand acres. No one died or anything, but I’ve always wondered what it’d be like if someone had. What
I
would be like.”

His face was so open and guileless that I felt instantly attracted to him. It wasn’t a sexual thing, though it could’ve been. It was more the ease with which he gave access to his emotions. The simplicity of his personality. He wasn’t a puzzle to be pieced together. There wasn’t any trick. I could tell right then I wouldn’t have to work to know what he liked, what he wanted, what made him tick. And if for some reason I couldn’t figure it out, he’d just tell me, if I asked.

“So you’ve clearly had a crappy day,” he said. “Want to tell me about it?”

And I found to my surprise that I did.

When I get out to the fire-site, the white trailers have multiplied overnight. There are more than two hundred people working the fire now, and there’s already a sense of permanence setting in, a mobile community. Large yellow tractors, backhoes, and earthmovers dot the hillside. The green- and yellow-suited firefighters move among them like so many worker bees.

Containment, containment, today’s watchword is containment.

I find Kara in one of the trailers. Her mobile command center has arrived, but she’ll keep the one at the elementary school, anyway, she tells me, “just in case.” I suspect she’s really keeping it to drive the tweedy principal batty. I think that, and then Kara smiles at me and says, “There’s that too.”

“So what are your visions telling you?” I ask as I watch the crews working on the hill with the precision and grace of years together.

“You’re aware that I do not actually have visions.”

“Tell that to Andy and the rest of them. Tell that to me, for that matter.”

It’s not that I believe Kara really has ESP or visions or whatever it was her grandmother was famous for. But she does have an intuition about people, events, and the things around her, like being tuned in to a different frequency that lets her hear what people are thinking, which way the wind is blowing.

Where the fire will go.

“Andy and the rest of them?” she says, smirking.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She turns back to her computer screen. “You found the point of origin?”

I fill her in on the details.

“Any reason why Phillips might want to burn his house down—or part of the town for that matter?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Just sloppiness, then?”

“Not sure about that either.”

She looks at me for a moment, then nods. “You like this man.”

“I feel sorry for him, sure, but . . . Assigning blame isn’t really my responsibility. I need to pinpoint what started it and leave the consequences to others.”

“I doubt you’ll be able to separate the origin and the consequences in this instance.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Kara turns back to the monitors. The one she’s looking at captures a hotshot crew returning from their shift. A familiar bunch of old friends, including Andy.

“He’s doing well,” she says. “Since you left.”