The Arsonist (23 page)

Adrian murmured something, and they both laughed. Then she heard Loren calling good-bye to Harlan Early, who was shelving things close to where she was standing. Harlan called back. The bell on the door jangled again as it shut behind Loren.

Sylvia collected coffee, milk, bananas, oatmeal, and went to the register. Adrian bowed his head once to her. “Sylvia,” he said, and started to reach for her groceries as she set them down.

His hands moved quickly, smoothly, touching the items, punching in numbers. Without looking at her, he said, “Alfie got himself a gun yet?” There was something mocking in his tone, making fun of the notion of Alfie, the city boy, being able to use a weapon.

It annoyed Sylvia on Alfie’s behalf. “Why would he get a gun?” she said. “He’s not going to shoot anyone.”

“
I’m
planning to.” There was a satisfied smirk on his face. “I’ve got one right by my bed. The guy gets
near
my house, the sensor lights go on, and
boom!
he’s dead.”

“Hmm. Remind me not to come calling on you at night.”

His hand stilled. There was a long pause. Adrian was looking at Sylvia, looking at her as he hadn’t in perhaps fifty years—directly, honestly. His
eyes were the same, the pretty, gentle bluish gray, and she remembered her feelings for him then, all of them.

When he spoke again, his voice was lowered, soft. “I don’t need to remind you of that, Sylvie,” he said.

And then he turned back to the cash register, his hands moved again, he pushed her groceries past him, and rang up what she owed him.

11

T
HE SEVENTH FIRE BEGAN
on the front porch of the Froelichs’ house. It consumed the rug that sat just outside the door for people to wipe their feet on, and then a rag rug that sat just inside, redundantly—both of them soaked with the lighter fluid that had been squirted around on the porch and through the gap underneath the door. Inside, the fire hesitated a bit, licking the drops that had sprayed out beyond the doormat, and then it leaped over to the larger straw rug that sat under the living room furniture. It ate this slowly and then began hesitantly on the couch, producing mostly just a slowly thickening, dark, roiling smoke.

There was a second fire at work in the dining room, started soon after the first. It flared up at the windows, where the fluid had been splashed in through the screens—the Froelichs had forgotten to close those windows in their rush to get to a dinner party they were late for. She had been angry at him because he’d come home messy and well past the hour he’d promised to return, wanting to show her the fish he’d caught; so the windows were, as she explained later, the last thing on her mind. She’d done well to remember to shut the dog into the little study under the stairs where he stayed when they were out—though she came to regret that deeply, since that was where he suffocated.

The fire rode the sheer dining room curtains to the ceiling, where it turned, flattened against the plaster surface, and made its way sideways, searching out the oxygen at the open stairwell, beckoning the living room fire to follow it. It rushed up the stairs, lighting the curtains at the staggered windows in the stairwell that looked out over the Froelichs’ driveway to the dirt road in front of the house.

Where Franklin Goodyear, known to the teenagers in town as the
Goodyear Blimp, was driving by on his rounds as a volunteer patrolman and saw it. He stopped his car, got out, and walked up toward the house and the flames flickering in the stairwell windows. He stood there stupidly for some seconds—he’d never seen a house burning before, and it had, he thought, a certain beauty—and then turned and ran back, drove fast to the next house down the road, the Edmondses’. He drove directly across their lawn to the back door and banged on it. Margaret Edmonds heard him, though Shelley did not, something that confirmed for her again that he was going deaf. She stopped briefly at the hall mirror to pat her hair in place and went to the door. When she opened it, Franklin Goodyear gestured wildly. “Your phone, your phone, your phone. Where is it? There’s another fire!”

The first firemen arrived within fifteen minutes, and though the damage was considerable, the house wasn’t destroyed. It lived to tell the tale, as Davey Swann said. The state arson squad was able to say with assurance that yes, this one had been set.

But Bud had barely written that story when the eighth fire occurred, this one in Marjorie Griffith’s tiny writing studio, up a long driveway in the woods, its slow burning invisible until it was nothing but a charred pit in the ground. “I think he decided the seventh one was too close to the road, too easy to spot,” Davey said. This, too, was in the July 18 issue of the
Pomeroy Union
.

“All eight of these fires are now presumed to be arson by local police and state arson officials, as are the earlier brushfires of the spring,” Bud had written. “According to Fire Chief Davey Swann there’s a distinct pattern that’s emerged over time. Most of the fires seem to be carefully planned for maximum property damage and minimal loss of life, the fire at the Coolidge house being the major exception. ‘In almost every one of these fires there was no one home at the time and we’re grateful for that,’ Swann says. ‘But that also means there’s no one there to report it and so we’ve got us less of a chance to put it out.’

“Last, all these fires have occurred in summer homes, the homes of people who don’t live in Pomeroy year-round. Whether this is because there’s a greater chance of no one’s being home in one of the houses of a part-time resident or because the summer residents are being singled
out is something Swann doesn’t care to speculate on. ‘Someone lots smarter than me’s going to have to figure that one out,’ he says modestly. ‘All I know is, I’d get up here fast if I lived somewhere else, and I’d stay put for the rest of the summer.’ ”

What he’d actually said was “I’d get my goddamn summer ass up here fast,” but Bud didn’t feel obliged to quote him entirely.

“The state police are more willing to speculate,” Bud had written. “A source there who wishes to remain anonymous told your reporter that the divide between year-round and summer residents could offer a possible motivation for what otherwise seems a series of motiveless crimes. ‘It could be that there’s some kind of resentment at the heart of this. Class resentment.’ ”

Bud had gone on to write up the officer’s other theories, too. Insurance was one, “though we’re getting kind of beyond the pale for that with the numbers of fires you got here.” Some sort of land grab was another possibility. The trooper also mentioned his personal theory about the widespread pyromania of volunteer firefighters. “Half of them are nuts. It’s a well-known fact.”

Bud had mentioned this notion to Davey Swann to get his response. Davey said he was certain that his firefighters would be willing, “to a man,” he said, to take lie-detector tests. Bud quoted this in the article, too.

“I’m here to drop off the paper,” he said. He’d been parked in his car outside her house—her sister’s house—for about twenty minutes, passing the time by reading the
New York Times
. He’d told himself he could stay for half an hour, and here she was, with time to spare. He got out when he saw her coming down the hill, walking slowly through the long grass. The sun was in her face, so he wasn’t sure she saw him until she stopped partway down the hill, as if startled, and then, apparently recognizing him, started down again, a smile altering her face.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said now. Her hair was wet, in ringlets. She was wearing jeans and a big shirt, unbuttoned. It flapped open to reveal a black bathing suit. She carried a towel draped over one shoulder. “But I thought the deal was I was going to find the paper waiting on the porch.”

“Well, I tossed it, but I missed the porch.”

She grinned. “But I’d never have known that if you just got out and
put
it on the porch.”

“Then I thought I’d say hello,” he said. “You’ve been swimming?”

“My parents’ pond.” She gestured behind her. “I’m the only one who uses it, now that my sister and her kids are gone.”

They stood a moment. There was a pleasant, slightly algal smell coming from her. He said, “I wanted to ask if you’d seen Loren again, among other things.”

“I have. I should have told you.” She said he’d stopped by only two days before with a series of photographs, clearly taken by Loren himself with a not-very-good camera—shots of cars parked in a variety of situations. One, she said, was in a yard full of discarded junk and startled-looking dogs. One was in a driveway. One, slightly blurry, was taken on a road, the top of Loren’s dashboard visible in the foreground.

“I was not helpful, I’m afraid. Any one of them could have been the car I saw. I mean, they all had a
version
of the slant I sort of remember. I couldn’t really distinguish between them. Among them. There was only one I knew for sure
wasn’t
the right car.”

“Well, maybe it gave him something to start on.”

A little silence fell between them, and he was suddenly aware of the noises in the air—the faint stirring of the trees, distant birds calling. Abruptly she asked him if he wanted to come in.

“Sure. I confess I’ve been curious about this house, watching it go up.”

She led the way onto the open porch. She opened the door and indicated that he should precede her. He stepped directly into a large, open room, partially finished, the walls striped and dotted with dried white joint compound. The furniture was clearly secondhand, but somehow charming to him in its improvisational quality. A floppy bouquet sat in the middle of the table in a glass jar, small blue and white flowers. “This is pretty much it,” she said. “Two bedrooms there.” She pointed to a little hallway, an opening off the big room. There was a bathroom straight ahead, the door open to reveal an old sink suspended from the wall. He could also see partway into one of the bedrooms, just the Sheetrock wall lit by sunlight.

“I like it,” he said. “I can’t imagine living here with kids, but I like it.”

“I like it, too. It’s been a retreat for me. And a project, as you see.”

“
You’re
putting the walls up?”

“Oh, no, my brother-in-law did that. I just did the goop, as my sister calls it. I’ve actually enjoyed it. I’m tediously perfectionistic, so it’s the ideal job for me.”

“You are. Perfectionistic.” He was asking.

“I am.” She draped the towel on the back of one of the chairs set around the table, and went over to the old refrigerator and opened the door.

“Aid work must have been tough, then.”

She looked back at him. “It was. I had to let go of a lot of perfectionism. But what was left served me well. It’s always served me well.” She smiled. “I like being perfectionistic most of the time.”

“And here it’s serving your brother-in-law well. Lucky fellow.”

She shrugged. “I’m the one who gets to live here right now. So it’s serving me well, I’d say. Would you like a beer? Some wine? I have no hard stuff.”

“I’d love a beer. I can celebrate paper day being over.”

“Paper day?”

“Yeah, yesterday and this morning. Kind of the most useless day of the week.” He sat down at the table while she moved around getting glasses and an opener. “I drop off the pasteup, then I go back late in the day and pick up the papers, bring them back here, and spend some hours in the evening putting advertising inserts in with the help of my part-timers, and then we divide them up for delivery. And today, we deliver. It’s work any idiot could do, and I always feel I’m wasting my time doing it. But I sort of like it, on the other hand.” Frankie set a glass down in front of him and sat down at the table, too. “A sign of stupidity on my part, I suppose.”

“That’s exactly how I feel about this.” She gestured around herself. “Stupid work is sometimes good. Work that leaves your mind free to meander.”

“Ah. And what has your mind been meandering to while you did your stupid work?”

“Oh, free-floating stuff,” she said. “Africa. My parents.” She looked up at him. “Of course, the fires from time to time. That can occasionally stop me in my tracks, imagining I’ve heard the arsonist rustling around on the porch or something. I just hate it.”

“Don’t we all,” he said. Sitting this close to her, he could see she had no makeup on at all. She looked about twelve years old.

She poured some beer from her bottle into her glass. “So, what’s in the news? Same old, same old?”

“You heard about Harlan Early.”

“I did not.”

“Ah. He shot himself.”

Frankie looked stunned. “He
killed
himself?”

“No. No, no, no, no.” He smiled. “But he shot his
toe
off. He’s on crutches now.”

She said, “This wasn’t intentional?”

“No. An accident. He thought he heard a noise in the night, and he had a gun by the bed, a hunting rifle. I can’t quite imagine how it happened, but apparently he was more or less picking it up and swinging himself out of bed at the same time, and
ka-boom!
That was it.”