The Arsonist (36 page)

Frankie stood up. “I’ll make another pot of coffee,” she said.

——

The deal was, Davey said, that they could keep it local for maybe three or four hours. Then they’d need to call the state officers in charge of search and rescue and make it official, which would enlarge it quite a bit. Frankie had the sense he’d risked something to get permission to do this, but perhaps not—he was deferential, shy almost, and therefore hard to read. And apologetic to Sylvia, as car after car pulled up outside and parked at the edge of the long driveway. They could see the men and a few women standing around out there, perhaps twenty or twenty-five of them, and Frankie saw how foolish she’d been to make the extra pot of coffee. Though she was having another cup herself while Davey and Sylvia sat at the kitchen table and she went over for him again what she thought Alfie was wearing.

Davey was writing all this down in a notebook he’d brought in with him. He’d turned down the offer of coffee. There was something self-contained about him, so orderly, it made Frankie feel better. Confident.

Yesterday’s clothes, Sylvia said. His brown slacks. A striped shirt over a navy T-shirt. And all this, she suspected, over his pajamas, as she hadn’t found them anywhere.

And Frankie could imagine it, his getting up and putting on the clothes he’d laid across the bedroom chair without noticing he was still wearing the old print pajamas.

He’d taken his parka, Sylvia said, which didn’t yet have the winter zip-out lining in it, and the heavy hiking sneakers he wore most days now. And his old hat, a misshapen beige canvas thing that had once looked a bit like a fedora.

Frankie stood at the back door, sipping her coffee, listening to her mother and watching the group in the yard. They moved around, leaning against one person’s car and then another’s, some of them sitting inside, turned sideways with their doors hanging open. A few were smoking.

And then Bud arrived. She didn’t see his car until after she spotted him walking up the drive. Then she saw that he’d parked it halfway down, behind a pickup that blocked most of it from her view. She moved to the window and stood where he could have seen her if he looked her way, seen her standing there, drinking coffee, hoping to talk to him, to touch him.

But he didn’t look her way. Tall, grizzled, wearing a navy-blue jacket she hadn’t seen on him before, he moved around among the others, talking, laughing, writing things down.

Well, of course, it made sense not to signal some special relationship. Hadn’t they been trying to avoid making that public knowledge?

Davey was asking about the barn now. Did it have electricity? Could they set up tables there? They’d need to make a kind of headquarters, a place to organize things.

Her mother began the apologetic description of the mess out there, and Frankie turned to face them both. “Why don’t you use my sister’s house?” she said to Davey.

He looked up. “Ah,” he said. “Down below, in the meadow.”

“Yes. It’s got electricity. And a working phone and a big table. A stove. Heat, even—a woodstove, anyhow.”

“Well. That’d be helpful. Thank you.”

“When you’re ready, I can go down with you and show you around. And pick up any of my stuff that’d be in the way.”

He stood up. “We may as well go right now. Get that disreputable bunch out of your mother’s yard sooner rather than later.”

Frankie got her jacket from the living room and came back to the kitchen to follow Davey out. At the door, she turned to Sylvia. “I’ll come right back, as soon as they’re settled in.”

Davey was outside calling out directions, and the assembled few dozen were returning to their cars, starting them up.

Bud came over to her. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, and Frankie felt suddenly tearful. “You want a ride down, or do you have your car?”

“A ride down, please.” As they walked back down the driveway, she told him what she knew. In the car, they waited for the line of others to make its way down the driveway and out onto the road to Liz and Clark’s. “I’ve been thinking about you so much through these last couple of hours,” Frankie said. “Isn’t that strange?”

“I don’t know.” He looked over at her. “Is it?”

“I feel guilty about it, actually. It’s almost as if I welcome this
drama
. Just so I can somehow be with you. Lean on you.”

“You don’t need a drama to be with me, do you?”

“No. That’s my point. Why should I feel so … hot for you. In the midst of this?”

They swung into the driveway now, the last in the line of cars. As they turned right down the hill, he said, “I’m glad for the heat anytime, it goes without saying. But maybe it’s a way not to think about what might be really”—his mouth tightened—“bad news, here.”

Frankie felt stung. She turned and looked out the window at the familiar trees, the last wild asters flowering below them.

At Liz’s, the cars were pulling over onto the meadow, some oddly angled, others falling into rows where they could.

As they got out, Bud looked over the top of the car at her. “Where will you be?” he asked.

“I’m heading back up to Sylvia’s, once I settle things here,” she said. “Are you going to join the search?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be waiting, then.”

Davey was standing on the back porch, gathering the volunteers around him as they got out of their cars. He had maps he was passing out, areas he wanted different “teams,” he called them, to cover. Five-man teams, he said, the usual captains.

There was calling back and forth, laughter, as the teams sorted themselves out. Frankie stood on the porch, too, watching. Someone said, “Hey, Gavin. We still got room,” and the lanky boy went over and stood with the small group clustered together nearest her. Some of the volunteers had rucksacks. All wore hiking boots, parkas, hats. Many carried walking sticks. Most of the faces were familiar to Frankie, and she knew the names of about half of them. Kevin O’Hara was there, and Peter Babcock. Dan Stark, Seward Mitchell, John Chick, and Gavin Knox, all of them sorted out into their groups.

Frankie was at first startled to see that Tink Snell was there, too, and then also to see that the others were behaving perfectly normally around him in spite of all the speculation about his possibly being the arsonist. But perhaps they were used to his appearance at events such as these.
Bud had said that he’d continued to fight the fires, too, and that no one commented on that.

In the end there were five groups. Two would start out from here, Davey said, one toward the beaver dam, the other toward the pond. The other groups were to drive to the trails that came at those sites from other directions. When they met, if Alfie hadn’t turned up, they’d come back here and see what the next step was.

“We think the professor is probably just lost, probably not too far from here, so we’re hoping this’ll do the trick. He’s got dementia, you should know that, so he may be confused about who you are and where you’re taking him. You need to be gentle and careful with him. A lotta explaining, when you find him. If you need help bringing him out, ask for help. He answers to Alfie.”

Davey talked about what Alfie looked like, what he was wearing, how long it was thought he’d been out there. He said within a couple of hours, if it lasted that long, there would be food here, at Liz and Clark Swenson’s place. Food and extra equipment. That everyone should come back here.

His voice, always, was shy, almost apologetic, but he was clearly in charge. Two men came up to him with their maps, asking for clarification on their exact routes. When he was done, the groups split up. The people in the groups that were driving were starting to negotiate which car or truck would be best to take. Frankie went inside.

She moved quickly around the main room, picking up her books and papers from the table, from the trunk by the woodstove. She started a fire. Once that was going, she went into the bathroom and cleared away her makeup, her toothbrush and hairbrush and used towels. She put everything she’d need for the day into her overnight bag to take up to Sylvia’s, along with a change of clothes. She got out a stack of clean towels and set them on the hamper by the bathroom sink.

She could hear that Davey had come in and was talking to someone. When she stepped into the big room, closing the door behind her, there were two men with Davey. They were pushing the table back against the wall. They had set their radios down on it, and stacks of papers—Frankie could see terrain maps and charts, with lists of names.

“We’re all set here,” Davey said.

“So I guess I’ll go back up to my mother’s,” Frankie answered.

“Yeah, that’s best,” Davey said. “She can use your company, of that I’m sure. And we’ll call, soon’s we have anything to report.”

Outside the air still seemed cool to Frankie. She could hear the calls starting in the field above, multiple voices: Aalfie. Aaalfie. She was thinking of her father, imagining him. Imagining him and imagining Bud now, too, walking in the woods, calling Alfie’s name. She tossed her overnight bag onto the passenger seat of the rental car and threaded her way out through the maze created by the cars of the searchers, back onto the road. As she reached Sylvia and Alfie’s driveway, she saw a car in her rearview mirror, just turning off the road below her into Liz’s driveway: Loren’s car, with its big star. There would be no keeping him away from the action, she supposed.

It seemed very quiet at Sylvia’s after the bustle below. Her mother was sitting in the living room, staring off at the view. She looked up at Frankie as she came in. “Everyone is all set down there?” She sounded determinedly matter-of-fact.

“Yes. They’re getting things organized.”

“What kinds of things, exactly?”

“Oh, teams, I guess. Search groups. With different assignments. Davey Swann had maps to hand out.”

Frankie sat down. She looked out to where Sylvia had been staring and saw a widely and evenly spaced row of figures just entering the woods at the bottom of the meadow.

After a moment, Sylvia said, “Maybe we’d feel more useful down there?”

“I don’t think they really want us down there, Mother. I think it’s … easier for them if we just let them do what they usually do. Tell their usual jokes, you know. Behave the way they always behave.”

“I suppose there are jokes, aren’t there?” Sylvia smiled ruefully.

“At this stage, anyway. Everyone seemed almost … cheerful.”

“Well, it’s an adventure.”

“For everyone but Alfie.”

“Oh, it may be for him, too, at this point,” Sylvia said. “That’s how I’m
trying to think of it. That he’s out for a walk and is enjoying himself. And he doesn’t have the least idea that there are dozens of people out hunting for him.”

“If he’s not cold.”

“Well, yes.”

They sat for some minutes more, one or the other of them offering something occasionally. Then Sylvia abruptly decided to build a fire in the fireplace, and Frankie went upstairs to unpack her overnight bag. She stayed up there longer than she needed to, listening to her mother moving around below. She could hear that Sylvia was talking to herself a little, the odd word audible. It was hard to read her, Frankie thought. She seemed to swing back and forth between the deepest concern for Alfie and a kind of willed insouciance. It made Frankie uncertain what her own position should be.

They would find him, was what she told herself. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t. She thought again of the row of searchers moving slowly across the meadow. She imagined Alfie, surprised by the fuss, delighted by the attention. It would be all right. There was no point in worrying.

She went downstairs.

Through the long morning they moved around separately in the house. At one point Sylvia decided to make some cookies to send down to the searchers. Frankie drifted in and out of the kitchen. She ate a fair amount of the raw cookie dough when Sylvia wasn’t looking. She tried to read. She borrowed some darning thread from Sylvia and mended a couple of holes she’d noticed in her sweater. They had a mostly silent lunch of canned soup and fruit. They were just putting the dishes in the dishwasher when someone knocked at the back door. Sylvia emitted a little noise, half anticipation, half fear, and, wiping her hands, went over to it. “Oh, it’s Bud,” she said, her disappointment audible.

She opened the door, and Bud came in a few steps and stood by the table, looking at Frankie. All three of them were standing, Frankie still by the sink, Bud and Sylvia just inside the door. Sylvia had the dishcloth in her hands.

“I bring no news,” Bud said. His voice, hoarse as always, surprised
Frankie, stirred her. “My group didn’t see anything, and the others aren’t back yet.”

“Well,” Sylvia said. “Well, thank you.”

Frankie found herself unable to speak. She wanted to step into Bud’s arms, she wanted him to hold her, and she felt very far away from him.

He stayed where he was. “I’ve got to get a few things done for the paper—I’m late getting it to the printer—but I’ll have my car phone, if you need to call.”

When Frankie didn’t say anything, Sylvia spoke. “That’s very kind of you. We
will
. We’ll call if we hear anything.”

“When will you be back?” Frankie said. Her own voice sounded hoarse to her.

“Late. Late afternoon, early evening. I’ll come by.”

“Okay,” Frankie said. “Okay.”

He turned to Sylvia. “I’m … I’m just so sorry you have to go through this.”

“Thank you,” Sylvia said. Frankie said nothing.

“Okay, then. I’m off.” Frankie nodded at him. He nodded back. “I’m off.”

After another hour or so had passed, Frankie went down to Liz’s with the cookies. Two more of the teams besides Bud’s were back, standing and sitting around. Frankie went inside. There were two women from town, moving around the kitchen. They were cooking what smelled like chicken soup in big kettles on the stove. Frankie knew one of them by sight—Helen Ardery, fiftyish, stout and red-faced. The other introduced herself as Rachel Stark. She was probably Frankie’s age, small as a child, and pretty, in a delicate way. Frankie set the cookie tin down on the kitchen counter. Rachel offered Frankie some soup, but she said she’d eaten.