The Arsonist (37 page)

“I’m so sorry your dad’s wandered off like this,” Helen said from where she stood at the stove, stirring the kettle, “but I’ve no doubt Davey’s crew are going to find him and get him right back home. And thank goodness it’s so mild out. That’s a blessing.”

“Yes,” Frankie said, but she was thinking of the smoke of her breath earlier this morning.

“Now, you’re the one who lives in Africa, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s so good you’ve come home to help Sylvia with all this.”

Frankie was about to explain herself—she hadn’t come home, she wasn’t helping—when Helen turned to Davey, who was just coming in, carrying a commercial-sized coffeemaker. “Oh, there. What a he-man. Just put it over there, by the sink.”

Davey set it down, and then made a questioning gesture back toward the open door.

“No, no,” Helen said. “We’ll get the rest. You do what you need to do.”

“Can I help?” Frankie asked, and Helen said no, no thanks. They had a routine down, and it was easiest for them just to do it themselves.

“Okay,” Frankie said. “Well, enjoy the cookies.”

“We sure will. And so will the crew. You just go along. Sylvia will be counting on you for company. We’re just fine here.”

Davey had gone back outside, where he was standing talking to a couple of the searchers on the porch. As Frankie came out, he stepped over to her. He said that it was seeming more likely that they’d have to call Fish and Game and get more crews on the search. One other team had radioed back with nothing, but they were waiting for the fifth team, which was supposed to meet up with them. This last group was still walking. They had the steepest terrain, Davey said, and he held up one of his contour maps to show her where they were—above Hurd’s Pond, heading down to it.

There had been a few things recovered, he said—an old baseball cap, some trash, some tin cans. Nothing that seemed connected to Alfie. He said Byron Morrell would be in touch with them regularly to let them know how things were going.

“My mother would like to come and help down here,” Frankie said. She knew Davey would understand this as a question.

“Well, I think it’s better she stays right there,” he said in his gentle voice. “There’s still a chance he’ll come back on his own from someplace we didn’t anticipate. Or if someone else finds him and calls, she’ll be right there, don’t you know.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought, too,” Frankie said.

——

Back up the hill, Frankie told Sylvia about the changing nature of the search.

“Fish and Game? That seems strange.”

“Well, I guess they know the terrain and how to move around in it. And they coordinate with other groups. Other rescue groups. Davey says they’ll need more searchers. So they’ll be in charge of these others. That’s mainly it.”

“So, we just keep waiting.” There was something spiky—irritation, Frankie supposed—in Sylvia’s voice.

“Yes. That’s our job. Mr. Morrell—Byron—will let us know if they find him. Or if they find, I guess, any signs of him.”

“Signs of him?”

“Yes. Pieces of clothing or, you know, something like a campfire.” Frankie shrugged. “I suppose he might think of that to keep warm.”

Sylvia looked away, as though imagining Alfie cold, needing warmth. “I suppose,” she said doubtfully. And then: “He was an Eagle Scout, you know.”

“Yes. I remember.” In her mind’s eye, Frankie saw the photograph of him in his uniform, towering over the smiling little mustachioed man who was his foster father.

They sat in silence for a few more minutes. Then Sylvia said, “I’m going to do some wash. Do you have anything?” Frankie said no. But it was another minute or two before her mother sighed and stood up and went down the hallway off the kitchen.

What to do?

She went to Alfie’s chair and picked up a book from the top of his pile. It wasn’t one of the books for his precious prize, this one. It was an old book of his about a fire in the mountains of Montana—he’d been reading it, he told her, in connection with the fires here, in Pomeroy. She sat down and opened it. In another life, her father had made notes in the margins in what was then his neat but still almost illegible script, all the vertical strokes so small and so closely identical as to be nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Sylvia came into the room, and Frankie looked up. Her mother was carrying a full laundry basket. “Should we call Liz, do you think?” she asked Frankie. “Shouldn’t she know?”

Frankie was flummoxed. She sat silent for a long moment.

“You don’t think so,” Sylvia said.

“I don’t
know
.” She set the book down. “If they find him an hour from now, what will have been the point?”

“That she will know what we know.”

“But she can do even less than we can.”

“Still, she might want to know.”

“I think we should wait.”

Sylvia’s silence was a question.

“See what the end of the day brings,” Frankie said. “Call her then if he hasn’t been found.”

Sylvia set the basket down on the arm of the chair she was standing next to. “What will they do if he hasn’t been found?” Her voice was quiet.

“Liz and Clark?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The searchers.”

“I don’t know,” Frankie said. “Perhaps they’ll wait until morning—it must be hard to find much of anything in the dark.”

“Not a
person
.” Her voice was full of alarm. “You can find a person in the dark.”

“Well, but if he doesn’t answer. Or if he’s lain down somewhere to go to sleep.”

“But he wouldn’t be able to sleep in the
cold
.”

“He might, if he was exhausted.”

Sylvia didn’t answer for a moment, and Frankie thought they must both be imagining that version of Alfie—exhausted, frightened, numb, lying down, giving up. Alfie, cold, asleep, dead.

“All right,” Sylvia said, turning away. “Let’s wait until the end of the afternoon.”

Sylvia was up and down the stairs to the basement, doing laundry; and then puttering around somehow in the kitchen, the bedroom. They were considerate to each other, polite, but neither wanted to talk about what she was thinking. Each kept busy trying to keep up the appearance of busyness.

“Would you like tea? A cookie?”

“No. Thanks so much.”

“Can I help you fold some of those?”

“No, I’m fine.”

After a while, Frankie went upstairs and lay down on her bed with several of Alfie’s books, simply because she could think of nothing else to do. She first tried to read
Young Men and Fire
and then a Harper Prize book on Ebola, but in both cases she found herself repeatedly frozen in the text, unthinking, gone, starting a sentence over and over.

At about three-thirty, she became aware of the murmur of conversation downstairs and got up.

Sylvia and Byron Morrell looked up at her as she came into the dining room. They were at the table. Sylvia’s hands were folded together as if she were praying. Byron stood.

“It’s Frankie, idn’t it?” he asked. He was a large man, with a big, round face. He held a kind of hunting hat in his hands.

“It is. And you’re Mr. Morrell.”

“Byron is fine.” He smiled quickly, revealing several missing teeth.

“What’s the news?” Frankie asked.

“Well, I was telling your mother here, there’s not much. But we’re planning on going all night, I guess that’s new.”

“Ah,” Frankie said.

“Yep. It’s supposed to maybe rain, and that’d be bad for your father, ’cause it’ll be down in the thirties, they say, maybe cooler if he’s uphill somewhere, so that rain, that’d be tough. It seemed like it’d be a good idea not to wait till morning. It could be a tough night for Professor Rowley if he had to stay out there all that time.” He pressed his lips together.

“That seems right, then.”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. So they’ve got some more teams, some of the mountain club fellas. And then, I think we’re hoping that there’ll be a helicopter we can use.”

“Oh, my God,” Sylvia said softly, and bowed her head.

Frankie came and stood behind her mother’s chair. “We feel utterly useless up here,” she said to Byron. “Isn’t there something we can do down at my sister’s?”

“I don’t think you want to go down there.” He shook his head. “There’s
close to a hundred people going in and out down there, and if anyone can find him, they will. Plus they got a news truck there now.”

“Oh,” Frankie said.

“Yeah. So you had best just stay up here and wait. You got the hard part, I’d say.”

“You know,” Sylvia said, after a moment. “I really don’t think you need to search very far for him. I mean, this notion of extending the search … Well, part of Alfie’s illness is a kind of awkwardness. Not immobility, exactly, but … Well, I just don’t think he’s gone beyond where you’ve been looking. I don’t think he could have.”

“But why wouldn’t he have answered us, then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s scared, somehow. He has, sometimes, sort of irrational fears.”

“Or he could have fallen. He could be unconscious,” Frankie said.

“We were pretty thorough. Line searches, you know.”

“But if he were unconscious? If he’d fallen?” Sylvia said.

“We should have spotted him. We would have, I think. We was going carefully, the way we do.”

“Well, I just thought you should know,” she said. She sounded defeated.

“I’ll pass it along. Anything else?”

“No, we’ll just … wait, then.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing up.

Frankie ran a bath. “Hydrotherapy,” she said to Sylvia when she excused herself.

“I hope it works,” Sylvia said. She was ironing now, in the kitchen.

The water held the palest possible tint of aqua in the old porcelain tub. The drain was set too low, so Frankie had to keep wetting a washcloth and covering her breasts with it to keep them warm. There was a window over the tub, and she looked out at the gathering clouds, the clouds that would deliver rain to Alfie. Only the tallest trees were visible from where her head rested—several pointed pines of a deep, almost black, green—and the unreasonably orange-purple flare of the maple just below them.

And then it came to her. The night when Sylvia told her she didn’t love Alfie, when Frankie was sitting with her at the kitchen table, the one light on over it, Sylvia’s face half in shadow saying the words.

And the slide of a foot in the hallway, Frankie’s quick glance that way, a glance that brought her the sight of Alfie standing outside the bathroom, just beginning to turn away from his wife’s voice explaining her distance from him, her resolve to do well by him because she didn’t love him, hadn’t loved him for a long time. His wife, saying she’d wished for a moment that he were dead so she could be free of him.

In that moment, what Frankie had hoped was that he hadn’t heard, what she had chosen to think was that it was unlikely he had. Or that if he had, he would have been incapable of taking it in, what Sylvia was saying. Incapable of understanding how deeply it connected to him and his life.

So she’d turned back to Sylvia, who needed her more right then.

But now, sitting up in the tub, she had the sudden conviction that he
had
heard. He’d heard, and he’d sought a way out, for himself, for Sylvia.
He would disappear
. He would walk away from the house and not be found.

She stood up in the tub and stepped over its edge. She grabbed one of the thin towels that had always been the specialty of the house. She dried herself quickly and dressed again and came down the hallway to her room, leaving damp footprints all the way on the old wood.

She pulled on her socks and shoes and went downstairs. As she passed Sylvia, still ironing in the kitchen, she said, “I’m just going to go down for a minute or two. See how things are going.”

“I don’t see the point,” Sylvia said, reasonably enough. “Didn’t Byron as much as tell us to stay away?”

“I guess I’m just having trouble doing that.”

Sylvia set the iron down. “Do you want me to come along?”

“No, I won’t be long.” As though that made any kind of sense.

She walked fast down the meadow under the cloudy gray sky, breaking into a jolting run a couple of times. Around the pond, over the hillock, down again, into the thicket of cars. There was a van with the local TV station’s call letters parked there and an ambulance. There were more
than a dozen people standing around. There were cigarette butts on the ground here and there.

Inside, the smell of coffee dominated now. All the lights were on. Davey was there, talking to two men in green uniforms. She caught his eye and raised her hand. He nodded to her and, in a few minutes, came across the room to where she’d sat down by the woodstove.

She explained it to him, what she thought. What she said was that Sylvia had been tired that night, talking to her, and said aloud she’d couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t take care of Alfie. This was not far from the truth, she told herself.

“And you’re sure he heard this,” Davey said, when they’d been over it twice.

“I am, pretty sure. I can’t be positive because we never discussed it, but I think I’m right.”

“Right that he’s trying
not
to be found.”

“I … yes, I think so.”

Davey pushed his chair back and sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to start all over here.”

“I’m sorry,” Frankie said.

“No, no. Nothing for you to be sorry about.”

“I wish I’d thought of it sooner.”

He smiled. “Now,
I’m
sorry about that.”

On Frankie’s way back across the yard, a woman in a puffy full-length down coat wearing too much makeup approached her with a mike in her hand, trailed by a guy holding a camera, but Frankie gestured her away, waving her hand in front of her, and cut quickly between the cars and into the tall grass that led up the hill, where she knew the woman wouldn’t follow her.

About an hour later they heard the helicopter and went to the window to watch it moving back and forth in long, slow sweeps across the hills, its noise steady as a lawnmower for a while, then moving off, growing quieter. Sylvia called Liz sometime after that.