Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (34 page)

Nick stood and walked to the edge of the lake, pooled wide and gray beyond the shore. Matt wondered what it was that was bothering him, if he and Sarah had a fight. And if so, why he'd brought all of them out here to tell them he'd seen Russ taken away only to say it didn't mean anything. Matt waited for him to speak, to elaborate on what he'd seen, but he said nothing, eyes on the water, the waves of the lake the only sound.

WHEN NICK DROPPED
them all off at Timber Creek's parking lot, Matt asked if he was okay but he only nodded and pulled away from school, said he had to get home to watch his brother. Zola headed toward the Local Beanery on her bike, Christina toward home in her car. Matt climbed into his hatchback and didn't want to go home. Russ Hendricks at the police station, where the officers had surely taken him from Timber Creek. Matt glanced at the radio clock. He felt restless. He felt angry. So much information and Nick cared about none of it. He knew where his father would be.

He'd gone into the station a million times before, knew his father's colleagues, had shadowed them at Take Your Child to Work Day at least a half-dozen times across his elementary school years. He waited in the parking lot. He couldn't saunter through the station's doors, just checking in on his father, the department managing FBI officials and arson investigators and more media attention than they'd ever known. He left his backpack in the passenger seat. Steeled himself. Made his way toward the sliding glass doors of the police station. The receptionist recognized him and led him past the secured doors, and he followed her through the buzzed-open entryway and past rooms where he could see officers and detectives bent over computers and scattered papers. His father's office door lay open. He looked up from his desk.

You shouldn't be here, he said. Today's been insane. Your mother will worry.

Matt said nothing and sat down in the chair across from his father's desk.

I have work to do. Work I'm trying desperately to finish so I can get home.

What kind of work?

You know I can't tell you that.

Fine. Then let me tell you what I know instead. I know Russ Hendricks was brought here. We saw him being taken away from school today for questioning.

His father got up and closed the door. No one knows that yet, he said. We're keeping it confidential for now. No reason to raise unnecessary suspicion.

Is he here? Did they give him a polygraph test just like Eric Greeley?

That's enough, Matt. Keep your voice down.

Matt sat back in the chair. I want you to tell me. Please. Tell me what's going on.

Matt's father looked past him toward the closed door, as if expecting another officer to push his way in. You remember what I told you yesterday, he said. About what we're looking for. Russ Hendricks fits the bill.

Matt wanted to believe him. He thought about what Zola and Nick had said at the lake. That Russ had violence in him but not enough to kill.

He's been in fights, he said. But that's it. Did you find out anything else?

He may not have an extensive criminal record, but he's got some telltale issues. A history of anger, social problems. A low academic record, evidence of past criminality in property damage. I shouldn't even be telling you that. Family problems. Looks like his father died when he was small. Single-parent household, possible lack of supervision.

Christina lives in a single-parent household. So does Zola.

It's only one factor among many. Lots of kids grow up in great homes with one parent. We're looking at the few who didn't, statistically speaking, who've displayed evidence of criminality and social problems.

But do you actually have any evidence? Anything concrete that places Russ anywhere near Alexis Thurber's apartment, or at any other house?

I can't tell you that. I'd be breaching confidentiality.

You said you'd tell me anything to keep me safe.

I would. Don't think for a second I wouldn't. But trust me when I say that I won't tell you anything unless I absolutely have to. Trust that I have your best interest at heart, and everyone else in that entire goddamn school.

Matt felt nothing but a quiet shame. To have challenged his father, so much work spread across his desk like the pages of a disheveled manuscript.

Fire's not my area, his father said. But suffice it to say that we've
found some evidence at the scene, evidence that links Russ through more than profiling.

He was probably there hundreds of times, Matt said. Alexis was his girlfriend.

We know that, which is why we're not making anything public just yet. He's really just a person of interest at this point. Not a suspect. They'll probably question him through the evening and then let him go home. They can't hold him longer than that.

Matt looked at his father. Is Russ the accomplice?

We still don't know if Caleb had one. But it's a possibility.

Matt sat back in the chair and imagined returning to school in the morning.

He'll be let go if he wasn't arrested, Matt said. He'll be back at school tomorrow.

I'm telling you, don't worry about it until you need to worry. I promise I'll tell you if you do. What I can tell you is that we're still working on the scene at the school.

What do you mean, working on?

Matt's father sighed. A situation like that calls for more cleanup and investigation than you can imagine. We're working with the FBI on that. It will take time. But we're still tracing the kid's path through the school. Because it's necessary. Because even though it seems so obvious what that boy did, it still needs to be retraced. Not just for investigation and evidence but for future prevention, so this never happens again.

Matt thought of police sweeping through the darkened classrooms, a mess of overturned desks and discarded backpacks. A trail of chalk markings indicating where his classmates had been found. The echoing halls of Lewis and Clark. Long corridors lined with ghosts. A place he knew he'd never want to see again.

How could anything have prevented this? What could we have done differently?

Nothing, Matt's father said. No one could have done anything
differently to change what happened. This isn't anyone's fault. But the more we know about his path, the more we know how we could have stopped him sooner.

Matt looked at his father. He wanted to believe him.

We're close, his father said. The force has dispatched a new team to keep an eye on the other homes. Just know that we're getting there. That we're on our way.

ZOLA SAT BEHIND
the counter of the Local Beanery, where she'd biked after Nick dropped them off back at Timber Creek's parking lot, a notebook of graph paper resting on her lap. Trigonometry functions;
x, y
. Variables that swam across the gridded page. Her homework, a thin pretense: near the far window, Kelly Washington's mother and two other women sat talking quietly. Zola recognized Kelly's mother from homeroom activities at Des Peres Elementary. Handing out glue sticks. Collecting unused pipe cleaners. A woman who sat hunched now, a mug of coffee enfolded in her hands. Zola didn't recognize the other two women though she knew they were mothers of her lost peers. Parents for Home Protection. Zola knew this. Knew without a doubt that this was their meeting. She thought of Alexis Thurber's father, a parent she couldn't imagine joining in, and recalled that Matt had seen him at the movie theater alone. How parents navigated the complications of grief, each in their own way. Zola looked to the women at the table, their faces hard but without the strain of tears, and for a moment she couldn't believe that they were in the world without breaking something, without shattering the glass of the coffee shop windows, without burning down the entire city.

Can I get a refill? a voice asked from the edge of the counter. A middle-aged man motioned his mug toward Zola and she held it beneath the coffee dispenser.

Fifty cents, she said. The man pushed two quarters across the
counter and returned to his armchair when she gave him his refilled mug. The sun slanted down the horizon beyond the Beanery windows, nearly sunk behind the trees. Zola thought of Nick, surely at home, sitting at the computer in his bedroom. Looking up juvenile arson. Culprit profiling. Or else combustion and gas excitation, what he'd clearly absorbed in chemistry class, seeking some explanation for how nothing remained. Zola wondered if the women in the coffee shop knew that no bodies were left, what still hadn't been printed in the newspaper. She knew they had no idea Russ Hendricks was at the police station at this very moment while they met, that they could have celebrated the catching of a suspect though Zola still didn't believe it. She imagined Jacob's mother's funeral, another lowering away she couldn't believe had happened that afternoon. Russ had a temper. A given. Zola knew he couldn't have possibly burned down so many homes. She also knew the fever for an answer. She thought of the pictures she'd taken of Alisha's house, evidence no different than police photography, how they'd told her absolutely nothing.

The same as what Russ could tell police.

She set down her notebook and looked at the women. She felt her stomach roll in a wave of nausea. She realized she hadn't eaten lunch. She wasn't hungry, muffins and scones waiting in the display case and even still she couldn't imagine eating, these women only yards away planning how to keep their homes from burning. Their children gone. Zola felt her stomach lurch, the strange workings of her own body. That it could alert her to something wrong, a flood of queasiness. That it could turn on her, a system of pathways and networks she barely understood.

MATT WATCHED FROM
the bay window of the living room as the last of the sun slid down the glass in ghosted light. It was impossible to imagine such a sun bringing only devastation as it slipped away, that
dusk meant only bracing. For darkness and a flame. For the inevitability of the newspaper. That he'd come to assume this, even with Russ Hendricks detained at the station.

His mother came in from the kitchen and stood beside him, dinner near ready.

Did you know her? The Thurber girl.

Not well. I knew of her.

With any hope, this will be the end of this.

He knew his mother meant Russ, a name his father had mentioned when he'd walked through the front door a half hour ago. Police still working at the station. Russ still being questioned, Matt knew. His father had vowed he'd be home for dinner but had retreated down the hallway and closed his office door despite his mother's meat loaf warming in the kitchen's oven, the aroma of roasted beef and browned ketchup filling the house until his father finished working.

Have you been writing? his mother asked. I'm not trying to snoop, but I vacuumed your room today. I saw the profile of Jacob Jensen on your desk.

It isn't worth reading, Matt said. Christina's been trying to write them, too.

They'll be valuable. You can't know it now. But your classmates will be grateful for them, for the memories you captured. When they go back and read those books.

When they go back
. Matt couldn't imagine his classmates as fully fledged adults, Nick or Christina at thirty, Zola at forty. If anything from here could be imagined, a future as impossible as so many blistering fires. Maybe that was why Nick had been so subdued. That he'd hit a wall. That the only thing left for them to do was look back. To put together a book. As if anything of this could be kept.

I don't even know what I'm trying to capture, Matt said. There are barely words.

But the words you find will be the right ones. I'm sure of it.

She touched his shoulder and they watched the roof of their neighbor's house absorb the last light of the sun and though he wanted to believe her, as readily as he wanted to believe that his father and the police team had control of an investigation at last, he knew there were no words, his task an illusion. The illusion of statement, of setting this down. Of creating a comfortable history. Of stabilizing the past. Of saying this was, in words that fixed meaning for anyone who would ever read them.

Will you write a profile of the Thurber girl?

Christina and I haven't talked about it. But I can try. Chris has done enough for now. She's seen enough in the past few days.

Your father told me she saw the Jensen house. On top of seeing Benji's mother.

This isn't easy for anyone, Matt said. Just waiting around for news to come.

I finished my book. The one on President Bush and the War on Terror.

What did you think?

His mother looked at him. He's an interesting man.

And?

She hesitated. It's easy to be certain. It's harder to admit what we don't know.

Matt followed her back to the couch, where she turned on the television, his father still behind the closed door. Matt sat on the armchair near the window, leaving the couch to his mother and soon his father once he emerged from the office. He thought to work on his history homework but gave up quickly, a notepad in his hand, the television whirring. A game show instead of news. He glanced out the window at the dark treetops, the sky heavy with new clouds that blocked out the moon. A storm was moving in. He could see it in the bend of every tree branch. He glanced at his mother, her attention divided between the television and a new book she'd started, a brief history of the world from the dawn of
the Big Bang to the modern age. His blood oscillated beneath his skin, the same restlessness he'd felt in his car. There was nothing he could do. Nothing but continuing to write profiles, the best he could do, a notepad in his hands.

Alexis Thurber. His pen stayed poised above the notebook.

There was so little to write. So little he knew of her and her life. But he knew his task, the simplest of actions, something to draw his focus: a profile to set down. He pushed down his pen.
Alexis Thurber was loved.
He didn't know if it was true. He didn't know what else to write, what information he could conjure up about a girl he'd barely known. The telephone rang and his mother set down her book, reached for the side table where the receiver sat but only tolled once. She withdrew her hand but Matt could hear his father talking to someone in the office, his voice audible above the television.