The Ice Cradle (9 page)

It wasn’t.

Fairly quivering with the effort required to resist my pleas, she shook her head angrily and disappeared. I had no choice but to close the shining door.

I don’t know what woke me up.

I had been having a crazy dream about popping popcorn in my old dorm room. I had poured in too many kernels, and I was watching with horror as the volume of popped corn grew and grew, lifting the lid right off my old Revere Ware pan. And
then there was all this noise in the hall; people were shouting, and people outside in the courtyard were yelling, and it was all because I’d been popping the corn on an illegal hot plate. I knew I was going to get busted.

There was the sound of shattering glass, and I opened my eyes.

The room was dark, but I could still hear the popping and crackling. I threw off the covers and stumbled over to the other bed, where Henry was sprawled out, sound asleep. I pulled back the heavy damask drapes and peered out in horror.

The crackling was real. The shouting was real. The sky was an eerie melon color, and I didn’t know whether to stay or flee.

The barn behind the inn was on fire.

I
DRESSED AS QUICKLY
as I could. I was torn about whether to wake Henry, who hadn’t been roused by the sounds and light in back of the house. I wanted to help Lauren and Mark if I could, and that would be hard with a five-year-old in the mix. On the other hand, I didn’t want Henry to be terrified if he woke up alone in the room and opened the curtains to discover the barn in flames. Factoring in how soundly he usually sleeps, I decided to take my chances. I slipped into my jeans and boots and pulled a sweater over my head, then closed the drapes tightly and tiptoed into the hall. There, I broke into a run.

Vivi
. It was all I could think. Furious at being banished from our room, I theorized, she had found a way to focus her anger on the decrepit old wiring in the barn, sending enough energy frizzing through a frayed antique tangle to cause sparking. That’s all it would have taken, really. I’d seen the barn’s interior a few hours earlier, when Henry and Mark had been scaling the fish, and it abounded with the usual clutter found in most people’s basements and garages: firewood, half-empty cans of paint, doors removed from their original locations, furniture awaiting refinishing or repair.

Plans for restoring the hundred-year-old barn had fallen by the wayside as the costs of renovating the inn had skyrocketed, Lauren and Mark had told me over dinner. They’d had to settle, temporarily, for installing a new set of doors and freshening the clapboards with a new coat of paint.

Now, the stained oak doors stood open on their hinges. Mark and a couple of men who had arrived on the scene were using garden hoses and buckets of water to try to keep the flames from spreading. It didn’t take a trained observer to perceive that the blaze was getting away from them.

“Where’s the fire department?” I asked Lauren, who was pacing in her bathrobe on the grass behind the house. For an instant, I wondered if there
was
a fire department.

“On their way,” she said, just as I heard the first sirens in the distance. “It’s all volunteers. They have to get to the station from their homes.”

I put my arm around her. She was shivering. I know that pregnancy doesn’t make a woman frail or ill, but I still didn’t feel that Lauren should be out here in her bare feet, breathing in all the smoke.

“You should go inside,” I said.

“No.”

“Really. Think of the baby. There’s nothing you can do out here.”

She shook her head firmly.

I broke away and moved toward the barn, and as I reached its doors, I could see flames beginning to lick up three of the four interior walls. The men seemed to have tapped all the water sources, so I ducked inside the barn, hoping I could save some objects by pulling them out onto the grass.

“No!” Mark shouted, seeing me. “Get out!”

“I’m fine.” I grabbed a chair by its arms and hurried it out to the side lawn. Over the next few minutes, I was able to pull or push out five more chairs, a snowblower, a lawn mower, three tables—one of which weighed a ton—two bicycles, and half a dozen huge, expensive-looking ceramic pots. These I had to roll.

When the firefighters arrived in two trucks, tapped a hydrant, and brought in the heavy hoses, we were all ordered to get back. Mark crossed the grass, stood behind Lauren, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. The other men drifted into the clusters of horrified neighbors who had gathered at the edges of the property.

I retreated to the back steps but had to move a short time later, when the firefighters decided to hose down the stairs and the exterior of the inn. This seemed overly cautious to me. I highly doubted that a stray spark, having jumped a distance of some three hundred feet, would have been hot enough to set the inn on fire, but what did I know? I scooted out of the way and joined an older couple lingering on the far lawn by a hedge of hydrangea bushes.

“Terrible,” I said.

“Awful,” said the woman, who was wearing a pink flowered nightgown under her trench coat. “I heard a whole string of explosions. Woke me right up. Course I don’t sleep much. Bing bing bing bing! That’s what it sounded like.”

“Spray cans,” mumbled the man.

“What?” the woman asked. She nodded at me and said, “I’m Mina Hansen. We live over there.” Mina pointed to a shingled cottage tucked back behind the barn. Unlike the back steps,
the cottage appeared to be well within reach of a stray spark, and I wondered why the firefighters weren’t turning their hoses in that direction.

“Aerosol cans going off,” said the man.

“I’m Anza O’Malley,” I offered. “I’m a guest here.”

“You think that’s what exploded?” Mina asked. For my benefit she added, “This is my husband, Frank.”

“I know damn well it is,” said Frank.

“Frank was a volunteer firefighter for thirty-one years,” explained Mina.

“Thirty-two,” he corrected.

“He just retired last year.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Frank went on. “There’s something fishy about this fire.”

Yeah, no kidding
, I thought. “You think it could have been—electrical? The wiring out there must be pretty old.”

“Electrical fires don’t usually start by themselves,” Frank explained.

It might have had a little help
, I thought.

“Not in the middle of the night, anyway,” he continued. “Not when everything’s turned off. Now, if you left your clothes dryer running, say you turned it on before you went to bed, and you had a big backup of lint in there …”

“I’m good about lint,” I answered reflexively and immediately wondered why in the world I had said it. And just as quickly I realized that Frank reminded me a lot of my dad, who’d always been a bear about dryer lint.

“You’ve got to clean the screen off
every
time,” Frank said, before a crash and some shouts drew our attention back to the barn. Something had happened inside. Something had fallen
or broken. Nevertheless, the men and two women handling the hoses seemed to be getting the fire under control.

“You smell anything?” asked Frank.

Mina shook her head. I mostly smelled smoke, but I took another deep breath.

“Gasoline?” I asked.

Frank nodded and set off along the line of bushes. He motioned for us to follow and we did, moving deeper into the lot until Frank paused under one of the pear trees. From our new position, we had a clear view into the barn.

“See how orange those flames are?” he asked. “See that black, black smoke?”

He was right. The flames were the color of tangerines, not the washed-out yellow of fireplace blazes. And the smoke was pluming up and out in big black clouds.

“What would cause that?” I asked.

“Accelerants,” he replied. “No question.”

“You think the fire was set?” Mina whispered.

“Not a doubt in my mind,” said Frank.

It was nearly three in the morning. Henry was still asleep, and since the trucks and the neighbors had all departed, and the lapping of the waves was the only sound in the air, it seemed likely that he would slumber on until daybreak.

I had finally gotten Lauren to come inside, and now she sat wrapped in an afghan at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of chamomile tea. Mark had cracked open a beer, not undeserved under the circumstances, I thought, but after taking one sip, he left it sitting untouched on the table. One of Mark’s closest
friends, the fisherman who’d caught the bass we’d had for dinner, had arrived in his pickup just as the hoses were being drained and the bystanders were dispersing. The wife of one of the volunteer firefighters had alerted him to the alarm, knowing that he was close to Lauren and Mark. Alberto Azevedo, who went by Bert, had now joined us in the kitchen for the gloomy postmortem.

Bert asked for tea rather than beer, which surprised me, given that he was all decked out in bulky sweaters and heavyweight canvas. He definitely struck me as a beer guy. With his curly black hair and sunburned good looks, he could have walked right out of one of those offensive high-fashion spreads in which a supermodel is posed in a far-flung location among exotic “natives” in their actual clothes, or lack of them.

How do they get away with those ads?
I wondered as I plopped a peppermint tea bag into a stoneware mug and poured in boiling water. What were we supposed to make of a woman dressed, or semi-undressed, for the red carpet, mugging for the camera before a council of Zulu warriors or from the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat?

“Thanks,” said Bert.

I nodded and sat back down. Why in the world was I thinking of Bert on the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat with a woman in a state of elegant undress? This was in such poor taste. Lauren and Mark’s barn had practically burned down.

“At least no one was hurt,” said Mark.

“That’s all that really matters,” said Lauren.

It was one of those bland, soothing things that people always say, and it was true, of course. But it wasn’t completely true. Other things did matter. They mattered a lot. Like how
much the repairs would cost and how much damage the old structure had sustained. Precious objects were now soaked and sooty, and no one had a clue as to where Frances had gone. They hadn’t found the remains of the portly old feline, thank goodness, but who knew what daylight would reveal?

Then there was that little matter of arson. For nauseatingly selfish reasons, I sort of hoped that Frank was right. It was awful to contemplate the possibility that my own self-centeredness had prompted Vivi to act out in childish fury and ignite the blaze. I wondered if anyone had mentioned to Mark the possibility that the fire had been set.

“I’ve never seen flames that color,” I said, hoping this comment might lead to the subject. “And all that black smoke.”

“That’s my fault,” said Mark. “I had a couple of cans of gas out there, for the lawn mower and the snowblower. It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the flames, how stupid I’d been to leave gasoline lying around.”

“Heck,” said Bert. “Everybody does it. Or worse.”