Smoke (7 page)

“That doctor in the ambulance said I was okay after the . . . fire.”

His eyes go vacant, then snap back to attention.

“You’re fine, John. Safe,” I say to him, placing my hand on his shoulder gently.

“I’ve lost everything.”

“I’m so very sorry. You can stay here for now, and I’m sure that . . .”

I stop myself, because what am I sure about? That it will all be okay? That there will be people and money to help him? That when they shut this shelter down, he’ll have somewhere to go? How can I say anything like that to him, when I don’t even know it for myself?

If he notices my trailing thoughts, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He simply blinks slowly as he looks around him.

“This is Nelson Elementary, ain’t it?”

I confirm it is, and he goes off on another tangent. This isn’t the elementary school he went to. Well, it has the same name, of course, but this building was built twenty years ago. The one
he’d
attended was torn down when it was found to be full of asbestos and the school district was sued for two cases of lung cancer. He liked that building, which was new when he attended it. Back then, everyone in town was pretty much like him; cattle ranchers’ sons and dairy farmers’ daughters. School cleared out at harvest and calving times. Reading, writing, and arithmetic made up most of the curriculum—it was all anyone who grew up in Nelson needed.

Things are different now, of course, he says. He knows that. But it doesn’t mean he has to like it.

He stops, his eyes going blank again.

I can tell that Deputy Clark is growing impatient, but when he makes a move to say something, I signal him to let John talk. The talking is also part of the shock. I’ve found over the years that I get more out of someone if I just let them flow. People abhor the vacuum of silence in a crowd. It’s a natural instinct to fill it with whatever is foremost in your thoughts. If I were in his place, I’m sure I’d be babbling about Ben and what was going on between us and how it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t his fault, these things just happen sometimes. As it is, I know John will work his way back around to the fire, and if I’m lucky, put this case to bed before Ben even has to know I was working on it.

So I let the silence rest until John continues. “We never had any kids, me and Kristy. Kristy, that’s my wife. You sounded like her for a second. Anyway, Kristy couldn’t or I couldn’t or we both couldn’t. We never really bothered to find out. No money for the doctor, and besides, we both knew that if it was one or the other’s fault, we’d start to blaming, and resentment would grow until there was nothing else between us.”

He looks surprised at what he just said. I’m holding my breath, my heart thumping in my chest.

Out of the mouths of scared old men.

“You have any kids?” he asks me.

“No.”

“I bet you’d be good at it. You talk to people like they’re real, not like . . .” He nods over to where Honor is folding blankets. He lowers his voice. “She talks in that way people do to folks past a certain age. You know that way?”

I know what he means. Honor’s the kind of person who speaks to seniors like they’re hard of understanding. As if they already had one foot on the other side.

“I do,” I say. “So you’ve lived in Nelson your whole life?”

That’s right, he says, his whole life and his daddy’s life before that. And he worked construction, used to anyway, and he’s lonely now, without his wife. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and he feels like he might be to blame.

“To blame?” I say. “Do you mean for the fire?”

Deputy Clark leans forward, notebook in hand, looking as if he’s getting ready to take a statement.

“I was asleep,” John says. “Why I’d be to blame for the fire?”

“You might’ve noticed it sooner,” Deputy Clark says. I shake my head, but he presses on. “Or maybe . . . Were you using your fire pit last night, sir?”

“The . . . Is that where the fire started?”

“Likely.”

“It’s too soon to say that for sure,” I correct the deputy, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. He’s given up a piece of information he shouldn’t have, and we can’t get it back. John Phillips was a blank slate before, but now he’s marred. If he knew where the fire started, it could have been proof of something. Now it’s only proof of Deputy Clark’s lack of training.

John stares off into space again, and I can’t tell whether he’s trying to be careful about his answer or whether his brain’s simply on a skip-track. I let my own eyes travel around the room as a way to distract myself from pressing too hard, and that’s when I see her: Mindy Mitchell is standing at the gym’s entrance, talking to Honor.

What’s she doing here?

Volunteering, probably. A sliver of an uncharitable thought forms, but then I dismiss it. I’m still furious with her, and I can feel it in me like a shot of adrenaline. But it would be completely irrational to be irritated by her altruistic instincts. Ben would say everything that happened between us was irrational, but it’s one thing to hear about a fight and another to be in it.

I turn my back to the door, hoping Mindy doesn’t notice me. I’ve spent a year successfully avoiding her in this small town. One more day seems possible.

“Is there anything else you can think of?” I ask John. “Even if it doesn’t seem like it might be connected, you never know.”

His hands travel to his shoulders and down his body to his knees, as if he’s trying to press out the wrinkles in his clothes.

“They tell you about those kids?” he says slowly.

“What kids?”

“The kids I’ve been complaining about all summer. I phoned it in a couple times to your office, Deputy. You check.” He turns his body and leans back against his pillows. “They come at night and sit around that fire pit and drink beer. Wait till I’m asleep. Think I don’t know they’re trespassing.”

“These kids ever started a fire in your pit, you know of?”

“Sure enough. That’s one of the reasons why I called the police. Kids foolish enough to start a fire in these conditions . . . Well, they could burn the whole town down.”

“Do you know their names?”

“No, ma’am. But I’d recognize them if I saw them.”

CHAPTER 8

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

Mindy

After dropping off food and clothing
donations at the elementary school, checking with the administration that Angus would be allowed back into Write Club, and taking Carrie to her intensive ballet class, Mindy spent several hours doing the kinds of chores that were slowly driving her insane. Picking up the dry cleaning, taking her car to the car wash because it had been six months and the inside was starting to get embarrassing, and, finally, driving to three grocery stores to get everything on her list because no one store had everything she needed. One-stop shopping was not a concept that had made its way to Nelson. And even if it did, what did it matter? Because what else would she be doing with her time, anyway?

That was an awful thought, wasn’t it, to think she had nothing better to do with her time. Not that taking care of her family wasn’t something worthwhile. But for years now, ever since the kids were old enough to feed and dress themselves, and even she had come to accept that Carrie was finally out of danger, she’d had this nagging feeling she should be doing
more
. For a while, her part-time work at the high school had kept the worst of it at bay. But then she’d been laid off and the days stretched before her. So she joined committees and volunteered at the school and her days were full—yet she still had time to go to three grocery stores in one day.

Maybe that’s why she was already obsessing over John Phillips. Why she was making a mental list of all the things the Coffee Boosters would need to do to change the focus of the Fall Fling from earning money for the hockey team to getting him a new home. The event was only five days away, and she could already imagine the disappointed expressions of the rest of the organizing committee when the new focus was announced (by Kate, she fervently hoped). But they were doing the right thing, they
were
, so for once she wasn’t going to worry about gaining acceptance or pissing people off or any of the things she normally worried about.

She just wasn’t.

Besides, if Kate didn’t care, why should she?

Mindy bought the chicken she was going to serve for dinner at her last stop, because she’d seen enough warnings about chicken and how you needed to make sure to get it right home and into the fridge. And she’d cook it properly this time, with no pink juices flowing out of it. She was ashamed to admit that despite years of effort, she still hadn’t perfected cooking a chicken. It was such a basic thing—she thought it should be, anyway—and the fact that she was often hurrying it back to the oven after Peter’s carving knife had revealed that, once again, it wasn’t cooked through, was an embarrassment.

But it was Peter’s favorite, roast chicken with spices on top and a lemon inside, served with garlic rosemary potatoes and a tossed salad, and she liked doing things to make Peter happy. Even after all these years, she made sure that Angus and Carrie didn’t completely divert her attention from the person, the reason, she was living this life in the first place.

Angus
. She had barely thought about him all day, she realized with a start. For once, the focus of her worry had been pulled away from her sixteen-year-old son. She’d spent so much time fretting about Angus this year, a constant slice of pain, like a deep paper cut, that his absence from her thoughts brought a kind of sting too. Because something was off about Angus, though she didn’t know what.

It hadn’t been any one thing, just a series of small incidents. He wasn’t off in the way Carrie had been, not in need of medical attention. And not in the building-bombs-in-the-basement kind of way (please, God, no). He’d simply moved out of her orbit and into a place she couldn’t quite understand. Was it depression like her brother suffered from? Was he struggling with his sexuality? Was he being bullied at school? No matter how many times she’d asked and poked and even snooped, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Only that there
was
something.

Take this morning. Mindy had a feeling he’d been sneaking out at night, going off to smoke pot or whatever kids were smoking these days, and the way his clothes were strewn on the floor, that lingering scent, his complete lethargy, all seemed to confirm it. But as hard as she and Peter tried, they could never catch him. Room searches came up empty. The alarm on the house was never disabled. And teenagers like to sleep a lot and experiment and . . .

So, so,
so
.

Peter always said she shouldn’t worry so much, though she knew he was concerned too. He kept trying to get Angus to do the things they used to do together: throwing a ball around, going for long bike rides, rock climbing. But Angus wasn’t interested in those pastimes anymore. Not in doing them with his dad, anyway. And Peter’s quickly hidden hurt broke Mindy’s heart each time she saw it.

At least Carrie seemed to be skimming on top of whatever was dragging her brother under. As if being born with a hole in her heart had given her extra buoyancy. That might be a problem later on, Mindy knew, but for now it seemed to keep her safe from the worst of what many of her friends’ teenage girls were going through.

But Angus. They really did have to do something about him. Soon.

Mindy’s mind skipped to how strange it had been to see Elizabeth at the elementary school, even if it was only a glimpse across the room. That’s all she’d had of her since The Falling Out. And what was she doing talking to John Phillips? Mindy guessed it was about the fire, but it felt odd to see two people who had dominated her thoughts for completely different reasons talking together.

Was it the emotional loss she felt when she and Elizabeth stopped speaking that made her suddenly attuned to Angus? She wondered about that, knowing that when she was down she tended to amplify other people’s feelings. As if she was a magnifier of other people’s anguish. And that probably explained her obsession with John Phillips too. At least this time, it was going to lead to something good.

As she pulled into her driveway, Mindy resolved to put these thoughts of her head. And it worked, after a fashion. Peter arrived home while she was checking the chicken for the eighth time, using the meat thermometer he got her, not for her birthday or their anniversary or anything crass like that, but just because he knew she stressed about it and he wanted to help in the small way he could.

“You should just set that and forget it,” he said. He was wearing one of the suits he’d bought when he got his promotion at the bank, a dark-blue one, with a white dress shirt and a striped tie the kids gave him for Christmas. His sandy hair was still thick, but it was starting to contain shots of gray, particularly where it met his neck.

“Oh, sure, Ron Popeil, that’s easy for you to say.”

He held up his hands in mock surrender. He had long, tapered fingers that went with his six-foot-four height. “I know you don’t think highly of sales,” he said. “But Ron Popeil? Sheesh. That’s low.”

Before Peter started at the bank, he worked in the sales department of the hospital. As Mindy had explained to him more than once, she didn’t have a problem with selling
per se
. It was the idea of selling medical services, that patients were treated as sales units, something to measured, counted,
budgeted
for
that disturbed her. Not that working at the bank put him in a better moral position. Certainly not when the houses of family after family were being repossessed. Problems Kate and the Coffee Boosters never had to face, or even really understood.

“Who says I don’t think highly of sales? Plus, Popeil made a shit-ton of money. I could get behind that,” Mindy said.

“Don’t let the kids hear you talk like that.”

“I’m sure they say a lot worse out of our hearing.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Hello, who do we have here?”