The Arsonist (13 page)

Wasn’t that it?

When they came in, Liz and Frankie were sitting together in the living
room. They hadn’t yet turned the lights on, and the room was bled of color. There was some odd tension in the air. Liz looked up brightly at them, and said, as if warning Frankie of something, “
Here
are Daddy and Mother.” There was a pause, all of them looking at one another.

“And not a moment too soon, apparently,” Alfie said. Sylvia turned to stare at him.
Back
, it would seem. Back from wherever he’d been only moments before.

“I’m off to bed now, my girls,” Alfie said. A faint smile played over his face. A mischievous smile. “So you can talk about me all you wish.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Liz said. But she was smiling.

“It’s true. Feel free.” He turned into the kitchen, passing Sylvia without looking at her.

She heard him say, “Why is it so goddamn
dark
?” and the light behind her came on.

Sylvia turned and went into the kitchen, too. Alfie was gone, down the hallway to his study, or maybe, as he said, to bed. She was aware of not caring which, of relief just to have him away, somewhere else, beyond her purview.

She got a glass from the cupboard. In the pantry she poured it half full of gin and took a long swallow. She went back into the kitchen and got a tray of ice from the refrigerator. As she noisily popped three or four cubes out of it, she called out to the living room, “Do you girls want wine? Anything?”

“No, nothing for me,” Liz said.

“I’d have a beer,” Frankie called back. “If there are any left.”

Sylvia poured herself a little more gin, enough to cover the ice cubes, and got a beer out of the refrigerator for Frankie.

When she came back into the living room, Liz stood up, as if she’d been waiting for Sylvia’s return. “I’m going to head down,” she said. “Clark has his hands full. Plus I’m tired. Too much excitement around here for me.” She came over to Sylvia, embraced her quickly, a kiss on the cheek. She turned to Frankie. “See you in the a.m.,” she said.

When Liz was gone, Frankie asked Sylvia if she wanted to sit on the porch. “The sunset looks to be one of those cinematic jobs,” she said.

“Yes, lovely,” Sylvia said, distractedly.

And it was cinematic. The very word. Almost garish. It went on and on, the moving cumulus clouds first golden, then a flaring orange, then slowly more pink. She and Frankie were talking through all this, but peacefully, lazily. They discussed the children. Frankie thought they were beautiful, and part of that, for her, was how
fat
they were—that was the word she used. How healthy, “in that lovely American way.” Her voice sounded sad, and Sylvia thought of the children Frankie worked with then, how the images of them must come to her here from time to time.

They talked about Clark’s ponytail—Frankie agreed with her, voted a resounding no, which gratified Sylvia. The pink of the sky had become a fading lilac by now. As they talked on, the scattered low clouds slowly grayed, until all the heat was out of them and you suddenly noticed the sky behind them, a clean blue again, almost turquoise at the horizon, rising to a darker overhead vastness, pierced and made familiar by the stars.

Sylvia thought she was looking at the Big Dipper, but she didn’t mention it. None of them but Alfie was good at identifying the constellations, and her primary weakness in this regard was her capacity to see the Big Dipper everywhere. They had fallen silent, surrounded by the night noises and the creaking of one chair or the other, the lazy clinking of ice cubes in Sylvia’s glass as she lifted it or set it down. She had the impulse to apologize to Frankie, but she wasn’t sure she could have named the thing she was sorry for.

But then Frankie got up to go to bed anyway. She was exhausted, she said. “Maybe by tomorrow I’ll finally be in your time zone.”

Sylvia sat on alone in the dark. Finally she got up. She went down the hallway into the unfresh warmth of her bedroom. As she was undressing, she had a sudden memory of an evening like this with her grandmother, during that period of real trouble with Alfie, the time when she had thought divorce might be the answer.

She had come up to New Hampshire without him. It must have been near the end of the summer, because the evening was chilly. She and her grandmother had both put jackets on to sit outside. Sylvia had had a drink then, too, one of several she’d put away over the evening. Her grandmother had noted that and had asked about it, about why she was drinking so much.

“Is it so much?” Sylvia had asked. “It feels like not
quite
enough.”

“Sylvie.” A gentle reproach. It was dark out by then. There was a lamp on in the far corner of the living room, but its light barely reached them on the porch.

“Oh, I just … can’t stand myself, Gram. I’m so mean. I’m so unpleasant.”

“To whom? Not to me.”

“No. Not to you.”

“To whom, then?”

“I suppose to the children, mostly.”

“Not to Alfie?”

“No, there’s no point in being unpleasant to Alfie. He’s impervious.” She laughed quickly, bitterly. “His
gift
.”

They had sat in silence for a while, the easy silence she had with her grandmother. Maybe she’d come up just for this, Sylvia thought. To be at ease, finally.

“That’s not a gift,” her grandmother said at last in the dark. “It’s a great failing.”

“Yes,” Sylvia had answered, and this suddenly seemed the truth to her. The explanation for everything.

“Do you still love him?” her grandmother asked.

Sylvia felt a wide gulf open under her. A blackness. “Yes,” she said, as if she could save herself with a lie.

After a while her grandmother said, “Well, it’ll be all right, then.”

And Sylvia had chosen to believe her.

7

Two house fires in Pomeroy within the span of a week have raised the fears of local residents. Both occurred in the unoccupied summer residences of families who hadn’t yet arrived for the season. They started in the early hours of the morning, when they were unlikely to be noticed until they’d almost totally destroyed the houses. In each case, by the time firefighters arrived, according to Pomeroy fire chief Davey Swann, there was nothing to be done but try to prevent sparks from starting fires in nearby brush or trees
.

The first fire, which destroyed the summer residence of the Kershaw and Olsen families, was called in by Emily Gilroy early in the morning on July 3. The Gilroy home is a quarter mile up Carson Road from the Olsen house, in the direction of Green Pond. At about four o’clock, Emily Gilroy said, she was wakened by the smell of smoke. She got up and looked out her window. Down the hill from her house, she could see what she described as “a flickering glow” in the area where she knew the Olsen house to be. The men on duty were summoned, to no avail
.

The second fire occurred in the early morning hours of July 5. This time Alice Dyer, awake in the night to tend to her newborn daughter, happened to look out a window that had a distant view of Mt. Epworth. She saw a large fire partway up the road where the Ludlow house is. Again the call went in, and again firemen arrived with little to do but try to prevent the fire’s spread beyond the already engulfed house
.

Fire Chief Davey Swann has called a meeting at the Town Hall for Thursday night at 7 p.m. to discuss these fires and what residents can do to prevent others. All are encouraged to attend
.

——

There was none of that desultory, trickling-in stuff. When Bud drove past the town hall about ten minutes before seven, he could see that the place was already full. The double doors were flung open, and there were people still standing on the steps, moving forward slowly into the dimly lighted interior. He had to drive a long way past the low building to park—he was almost to Snell’s when he found a spot in the row of cars. He walked back slowly, relishing the feel of the warm night air and the pinkish light on the hills that banked the town.

On the steps, he waited behind Ed Carter to file in. Ed was a summer resident. He had met Bud often, but he still nodded in a purely obligatory way each time he saw him, as though there could be no reason for him to want to talk to Bud, or even to remember him. He was a geezer—white haired, skinny. But an expensive geezer, with a deep tan, wearing what Bud thought of as the high-WASP uniform: green pants, loafers with no socks, a yellow Izod shirt that exposed his skinny brown arms.

Once Bud got inside, he saw that it was pretty much standing room only, the rows of folding chairs already nearly full and so many people still milling at the back that there was a kind of wall of heat and amplified voices competing with one another that you had to push your way into. He moved forward slowly through the crowd. He greeted Annie Flowers, an elderly summer person who was friendly to everyone. She was tall and boney, with yellowish teeth—a smoker, though you rarely caught her at it. “Apparently it’s a form of homicide,” she’d told Bud once. “So it’s really not possible to practice it publicly anymore.”

“Our town crier!” she said now, enthusiastically. “Look at what you’ve created,” gesturing as expansively as she could in the crowd.

“It’d be nice to think I had that much power,” he said.

“But you do! It’s the power of the press.”

He smiled at her. He waved to several others who’d raised their hands here and there in greeting to him—Emily Gilroy, Charley March, Shelley Edmonds. As he did, he was conscious of thinking how at home he was here, aware of taking a certain pride in it—
Look how many friends I have
—and then quickly feeling a bit foolish on account of that. He stopped to talk for a moment to Harlan Early, who was on the fire crew
and said he’d give a lot for a good night’s sleep. There had been another fire the night before, the third in six days. Bud had gone to watch it and had spent half the morning writing it up. Now he and Harlan speculated, as Bud had heard others doing throughout the day—at Snell’s, at the café, where he’d stopped midafternoon for coffee—about the possibility of more. Of a kind of reign of arsonous terror that might be upon them.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near equipped for
that
,” Harlan said. “I mean, we’re all just volunteers. We got day jobs we have to do.”

Bud agreed and commiserated—he was tired, too—and then moved on to find a seat, making his way to the side of the hall where the windows were open onto the thick shrubs pressing against the building outside. He found a spot next to a couple of teenagers and half sat, half leaned, on the sill, surveying the noisy room. He spotted six or seven guys from the fire squad, including several of the younger ones who didn’t usually come to town meetings—Gavin Knox, Tink Snell, Peter Babcock.

Many of the summer people seemed to be here. They were recognizable—the women, anyway—by a kind of gesture at stylishness in their dress. But the crowd was about evenly divided, summer, year-round. He saw two of the three farmers left in town sitting down near the front, notable in part for what wasn’t stylish in their attire. One was actually wearing overalls.

Adrian and Lucy Snell were in the front row—Adrian was turned around to talk to someone in the row behind them, and Bud could hear his assertive voice over the rumble of the crowd, something about the Enrights, about the fire last night at their house. Those who knew were eager to tell. Bud suspected that half the conversations in the room involved the Enrights’ fire and the implicit assertion of being
in the know
that was part of passing the news along.

Ah! Now he saw Frankie Rowley sitting with her parents near the back. Her hair was redder than he remembered, and she had pinned it up. Good luck with that—loops of it had escaped and were draped against her neck. Draped prettily, he noted. He watched her, hoping she might look his way, hoping he could catch her eye and wave. Something. Anything. He’d thought of her several times in the last week but had done nothing about it. He wasn’t sure if he would. It hadn’t sounded as if she’d be around very long. Though that had its attractions, too.

A guy her age was next to her, a long-haired guy in a T-shirt. A boyfriend?
Somehow this didn’t seem likely—a vibe he’d gotten from her—though now they leaned together talking, smiling at each other. Maybe that vibe had been imaginary, Buddie boy. Projection.

At five past the hour, Davey Swann got up from the first row and went to the lectern at the front of the low stage. Bud felt a pang for him. He knew Davey wasn’t comfortable with public speaking. Even with a small group, like one of the monthly meetings of the firefighters that Bud had attended a few times, he always seemed embarrassed, no matter how routine the agenda was. Tonight he had apparently made notes: he set a little sheaf of paper down on the lectern in front of him. He’d dressed up a bit, too—a white shirt, a tie—and it gave him an undertaker’s air. He had a long, thin face, a wispy mustache. He looked small and overwhelmed. He introduced himself and then announced quickly in his gentle, high-pitched voice what Bud and probably two-thirds of the others sitting there already knew—that there’d been another fire beyond the two reported in the town paper.