Valley of Ashes (9 page)

“So what do you look for next?” I yelled.

“Traces of accelerant. I’ll need samples from this front room, to start with. Carpet, flooring, anything left of the sofa cushions…”

She walked back to grab her tackle box from the porch floor, snapping its latches shut and hoisting it up to her hip. It looked damn heavy.

I reached for it. “Why don’t I carry that?”

“Great.” She let me take it. “Okay?”

The thing must have weighed fifty pounds, but I nodded assent.

“Ready?”

Another nod from me.

She stepped over the front room’s threshold, and I was all set to follow when she looked back over her shoulder at me. “Let me go in alone first. I’m worried about the floor.”

“No problem,” I yelled, stopping at the doorway.

Jesus, my throat was already sore. How did these guys do this all the time?

Her giant tackle box was digging into the side of my thigh and I thought my right hand was about to fall off, so I wrestled with the damn thing until I had it in both arms instead.

Mimi walked toward the center of the room, slowly and carefully.

“Okay,” she said, waving me in.

I humped the tackle box forward and lowered it beside her, with a bit of an unbecoming groan near the end of that effort.

“What’s in this,” I asked, “anvils and bowling balls?”

She chuckled, the flash on her Pentax charging up with an ascending whine.

I kept quiet while she took photographs.

Only when she’d documented every aspect of what the room looked like untouched did she start taking actual samples.

The tackle box had those stacking trays inside that accordioned up and out until it was the size of a small desk. Mimi knew the contents blind—X-Acto knives, chisels, needle-nose pliers, a box cutter, tweezers… zippered plastic bags in a bazillion sizes, with an equivalent number of manila envelopes. Glass slides that looked like they were for a microscope. Little tiny jars. Wide transparent tape and squares of card stock to stick it to.

“
A Thousand Clowns
,” I said, thinking of the miniature circus car
filled with same that Jason Robards referred to, during the course of my favorite early-1960s anti-establishment flick.

“Great movie,” yelled Mimi, scissoring a chunk of singed foam rubber from the arm of the ruined sofa. “ ‘Good morning, campers, I’m disappointed in the
very
sorry turnout for last night’s volleyball game—’ ”

I understood every word of that, and laughed.

She turned around and looked across the floor of the room again. “The problem with flashover… wipes out evidence. You lose the ‘pour pattern.’ ”

“Yeah?”

“Splash accelerant around and light it, burn pattern’s uneven. Flooring, carpeting…”

“Okay,” I yelled back.

“Usually fire burns
up
, pattern’s intact. Not with flashover.”

I nodded for her to continue.

“Extreme temperatures down low in a room? Pour pattern’s obliterated. No differentiation.”

“Bummer,” I yelled, looking at the evenly scorched flooring. “So how do you check?”

“Gimme that hammer,” said Mimi, pointing to an upper tray of her tackle box.

I picked it up and held it out toward her.

“Chisel,” she yelled, so I gave her that, too.

She walked over to the corner of the room closest to the sofa. “See? Floor dips down?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Liquid accelerant runs downhill and pools. So if it’s near a
wall
…”

She knelt. I watched her angle the chisel’s tip to rest against what looked like a join in the baseboard, about eight inches away from the corner of the room.

Mimi gave the handle a good whack and the chisel bit into this seam. She pulled the tool free, then brought the narrow tip to rest at the topmost juncture of baseboard and wall.

One more hard tap popped the entire piece of wood free. She picked this up, twisting at the waist so I could see it.

“Accelerant pools next to a wall,” she yelled, “the baseboard gets charred up the
back
.”

She turned the wood over.

Goddamn if that side wasn’t charred to shit.

I gave her a thumbs-up and watched her eyes crinkle into a smile, above the respirator.

I checked my watch. We’d been here over an hour.

“Babysitter?” she asked.

“Half an hour left.”

“I’ll show you the big room at the back.”

“You are a total goddess,” I yelled.

“What?”

I gave up. “
Thank
you.”

“Need to check one more thing,” said Mimi.

“Sure.”

She moved back over to the sofa, shining her flashlight down into the oddly white springs, angling it toward the arm of the thing.

“Ha!” yelled Mimi, plunging her gloved hand down into the furniture guts.

“What?”

She raised her hand so I could see the little yellowy tube of fluff pincered between her thumb and index finger.

“Cigarette filter,” she said. “Simplest fuse going—Marlboro stuck in a matchbook. Light it, stick it between the cushions, leave…”

She bagged it up for evidence, then got to her feet, waving a thumb toward the back of the house.

I nodded and followed her out of the room.

We moved down the hallway, slowly.

When she passed an open door on the left, Mimi stopped and played her flashlight slowly over the small room beyond its threshold.

“See that?” she asked, as the beam of light came to rest on a scorched metal cup resting on a waist-high countertop.

Downward-pointing spikes of multicolored plastic were hanging from all around the cup’s lip. It looked like a houseplant from Mars, but I nodded anyway.

“Toothbrushes,” she yelled.

I watched the light swing to the left, down a blackened rod a little higher than my head, draped with more plastic stalactites at regular intervals. “Shower-curtain rings?”

She nodded at me.

The curtain itself had joined the choir eternal, leaving not so much as a grommet in the wake of its cindery demise.

Mimi dropped the tip of the flashlight lower, playing its beam across the tub surround. “Flame-retardant eats into marble, see that?”

“Okay.”

She turned away from the door frame, walking carefully toward the rear of the house.

Stopping between some half-opened pocket doors at the end of the hall, Mimi whistled softly, a descending note of dismay. “I feel sorry for the claims adjustor…”

She stepped into the room and I followed.

“From the insurance company?” I asked.

She nodded. “What I used to do. Horrible—you have to count up
everything
for depreciation. Down to the number of Q-tips and tampons.”

I shook my head.

We were in a west-facing large room at the back of the house, and Mimi turned off her flashlight. The place was filled with golden late-afternoon sunlight, and the sour chemical smell was much stronger.

There were scummy puddles of water on the Saltillo-tile floor.

The fire hadn’t been as intense in this part of the house—even I could tell that.

There were more shards of glass everywhere. I wondered whether the windows had been bashed manually by firefighters, or just blown inward by the intense pressure of hose-water.

Mimi had knelt down to take a sample of the oily water. “The worst part, you’ve gotta quantify personal things. Like those…”

I turned toward where she was pointing, at a row of five antique quilts hanging along the wall behind us.

Two were scorched, but even the ones still somewhat intact were sooty, waterlogged, and ruined.

A sixth quilt had slid to the floor in a sorry heap after the pole that’d held it up pulled free of the wall.

“Can I walk closer?” I yelled, pointing.

Mimi nodded.

I moved in, then crouched down next to the wet lump of fallen quilt.

My pal Sophia had taken me to a domestic-textile exhibition back east the year before, so I knew what it was: a log-cabin pattern pieced from hundreds of “cigar silks”—narrow embroidered ribbons that various tobacco companies included with their premium brands as a come-on collectible, back in the teens.

Someone must’ve hit this one with an arc of chemical foam, melting the fabric away in ragged splotches, revealing batting that was filthy and wet.

I wondered how many hours of work had gone into the quilt, how many years invested in collecting the silks themselves. A quiet testament to some long-ago women’s communal work, ruined in one angry flash.

I smoothed out a bunched flap of fabric tenderly with my gloved hands. The stitches were so tiny, so regular. All made by hand.

When my thighs started to prickle, I got to my feet.

“Oh, God, the books…, ” I said, looking at a floor-to-ceiling shelf of old volumes to my right, their leather spines swollen and bent.

Mimi stepped up beside me.

She squatted down, pointing toward a lower shelf. “See those?”

The shelf housed a row of matching albums, bound in different colors of leather with names and dates embossed in gold on the spines.

Rivulets of sooty water dripped to the floor when Mimi pulled two of these volumes out. The empty shelf had been painted white, the row
of books’ scalloped footprint now outlined in greasy black from the smoke.

“Scrapbooks,” she said, peeling each one open in turn. “Good…”

I looked over her shoulder. The pages were gummed together, the handwritten captions illegible.

“Good?” I yelled. “Sad!”

“Both. If the owners had set the fire, they’d probably have tried to sneak these out first.”

“Oh! Good, then.”

Mimi glanced at her own watch. “Babysitter?”

We both stood up, and I followed her back down the hallway to the front door.

“Want me to get you a ride?” she asked, when we were back out on the street and respirator-free.

“I’m okay, thanks. My house is right down the hill and the child care place is on the way.”

“You’re sure?”

“We could throw the wagon in the back of a truck, but I don’t have car seats.”

“Right,” she said, nodding. “It’s been a long time since I had to deal with all that. Forgot about the car seats.”

“Thank you so much for letting me follow you around today,” I said, when we’d reached her truck. “What you do is really fascinating, and it’s a rare pleasure for me these days to hang out with grown-ups.”

I meant that sincerely, wishing I had time to keep talking.

I took off her gloves, then the suit, hood, and booties.

“You can just throw everything in the bed, there,” she said. “I’ll deal with it later.”

Mimi took her own gloves off and grabbed a business card and pen out of her glove compartment. She jotted her home number on the card’s back, then handed it to me. “If you have any other questions, feel free to call.”

I decided to do what my mother does whenever she meets someone
interesting: ask her to come by for a glass of wine when she’d finished up.

“That’d be great,” she said. “Long day, ‘and miles to go before I sleep.’ ”

“Nineteen thirteen Mapleton.” I wrote that out with my phone number on the end of her card, then ripped it off and gave it to her. “It’s the house with totally lame Christmas lights still wrapped around the porch columns.”

I
picked up Parrish and India at the community center, handing over my last forty bucks to the child care boss-lady, who then got all snippy with me about not having left them with enough diapers, just as I’d finished loading the girls into our little wagon.

She was tall and stern with a prissy little mouth. “It isn’t our responsibility to provide supplies for
your
children.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I got asked at the last minute to work for another two hours.”

She stepped closer to me and wrinkled her nose.

I took a step backward. “Sorry. I was following an arson investigator around the scene of a recent fire. The smoke is kind of cloying.”

“And
that’s
why you were late?” she asked, pinching her tiny mouth even more tightly around the words.

“I’m not late. I’m actually five minutes early,” I said, pointing at the wall clock above her head. “I mean, early for the readjusted pickup time.”

“So you just presumed we could fill in for you, at the last minute?”

“I beg your pardon, but where exactly does presumption come into this? I reserved a block of time through your office yesterday, and called to request more time today when it became apparent I needed it. I don’t drive, I just got hired at the
Boulder New Times
, my husband is away on business, and I was given a last-minute extra assignment
by my editor. Which will almost but not quite cover the money I just
paid
you.”

So lighten the fuck up and show me a little feminist solidarity here, bitch.

She crossed her arms, nostrils wrinkling again.

“I mean, look,” I continued, “taking my one-year-old twins to a crime scene didn’t seem like a really splendid parenting move. And this place is called a
drop
-in child care center—not to mention one that claims to be ‘dedicated to supporting the families of Boulder,’ right on the front door.”