The Arsonist (39 page)

It was all over in about three minutes, and Tink was hustled out again. Bud got a few clear shots of him on the way out as people began to move to follow him. By the time Bud also had followed the crowd onto the front steps of the building, Tink was bending to step into a state police car, an officer’s hand on his head as he lowered himself. His hands were still cuffed behind his back. Bud took a picture of this, too.

Suddenly Gavin Knox was standing next to Bud. “Where the fuck are they taking him?” Gavin asked. “Do you know?”

“I don’t,” Bud said.

A man in front of them turned around and said, “Over to the Pembroke jail. For fear of retribution.”

Bud recognized him as one of the state cops that had been hanging around Pomeroy for the last month or so.

Bud snorted. “What, you think someone from Pomeroy is going to sneak into jail here and kill him?”

“There’ve been a lot of threats floating around.”

“There are a lot of big mouths with not much better to do than talk to cops and reporters.”

“All I’m saying is, better safe than sorry.”

“Hey!” Bud said. “Let me write that down.”

“Fuck you,” the cop said genially.

Back in the car, it occurred to him to call the
Globe
guy and let him know about the arrest, and he did that. Then he drove slowly back to Pomeroy and straight to the town hall. He parked and went around to a small door at the back, the door to the administrative office. He knocked once and opened it just as Emily Gilroy called out, “Come in.”

She was turning from the filing cabinet, the light glinting on her glasses as she did. Her face shifted into a warm smile when she saw Bud—she was a person of whom you could say,
Her face lit up
, Bud had always thought.

“Buddy boy!” she said.

“Hey, Emily.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” She gestured for him to sit in the chair facing her desk, and she went behind it to her own old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. She was plump, and she grunted a little as she lowered herself. She was in her winter uniform already—a turtleneck, a sweater over it, stretchy, pilled beige slacks of some wool-wannabe synthetic fabric. She wore slippers at work; her heavy sneakers were in a basket by the door. She’d been beautiful—Bud had seen the old photographs of her here and there. Now she was jolly-looking, her hair in the usual permed white ridges apparently required of any woman over sixty-five in Pomeroy. She wore bifocals, she had fat rouged cheeks. Mrs. Claus.

“Have you heard about Tink?” he asked.

She nodded. “Loren stopped in, first thing, the bearer of bad tidings as he so loves to be.”

“I was just over there for the basic
you’re under arrest
ceremony. They said he’ll be arraigned in a day or two.”

“And they have a confession, Loren tells me?”

He nodded.

“So.” She lifted her hands. “That would be that, I guess.”

“We’ll see. But I’m here to be nosy about him. About his life. What can you tell me?”

Much, it turned out, a little of which Bud already knew. But Emily added detail. His mother was Adrian’s youngest sister, the family ne’er-do-well—Mary Anne. She dropped out of high school when she got pregnant, no one was sure by whom, probably least of all she. “She was known for that, I’m afraid,” Emily said.

She’d worked for Adrian for a while in the store, but after the baby came, she went on welfare. “She was just big trouble, always,” Emily said. “Not the kind of trouble that hurt anyone else but herself. Mostly just men and drinking. But I mean a lot of drinking. We always thought that might be part of why Tink is like he is—you know, a little slow.”

Her parents had kicked her out, finally, and she moved to Winslow. The man she was living with there went up to work on the Alaska Pipeline, and she went with him, taking Tink. “He was still little,” Emily said. “Maybe one or two. She was up there awhile. It was a wild place then,
from what you hear, and apparently that suited her just fine. A couple of other folks from around here went up there, too, for the money, don’t you know, and we heard things about her afterward. She was making her living pretty much as a whore, they said. And who knows who was taking care of that baby? Or how much of all that he saw.” She shook her head. “Imagine.”

She came back to the area when Tink was six or seven. She lived in different nearby towns for a while, with different men. She was married once, for a couple of years. She was busted for drugs a few times. “Then maybe six or seven years ago, Adrian gave her the use of that land and the trailer up by Silsby, and she moved there with whoever she was with then, and Tink. So Tink came back to Pomeroy then and went to the high school in Winslow with the other town kids.

“And then at some point, come to find out she’d left again, without Tink this time. That he was living there all by himself. Had been for a while. I think some teacher noticed the same dirty clothes every day and him getting thinner. It’s true he wasn’t a baby anymore—he must have been fifteen or sixteen—but still … That’s not right, you know.”

“No,” Bud said.

She leaned back in her chair. “Well, Adrian and Lucy took him in, but Lucy said it was hard. Like having a wild animal in the house. You know, he’d never sat down for a meal except maybe the lunch room at school, he’d never been taught even basic manners.” She shook her head. “And he’s such a beautiful boy. It’s just a shame, that’s what it is.”

He’d dropped out of school, finally, she said. That was when Adrian hired him. At first at the store, but that didn’t work out. Then to do some of the odd jobs Adrian used to do himself. People said he was a good worker, Emily said. A hard worker. Just not sociable. “Not socialized, I suppose is what they meant. Though Lucy said she tried. Then when he turned eighteen, he moved back to the trailer.

“He’s pretty much a loner. You know how it is with kids. If you’re not very bright, it’s hard, even if you’re as handsome a boy as he is. The girls say he never even had a girlfriend. They kind of made fun of him, he was so shy. I heard that from Carin Knox. That they weren’t mean, exactly, but still, teasing. She felt bad about it later, but you know how girls do at that age.”

Bud said he did, remembering certain misfits from his high school, the way they suffered.

“So that’s pretty much what I know. I guess he’s been up there awhile with no electricity and no telephone. That might explain the kerosene purchases that got everyone so worked up.”

“I missed that.”

“Oh, yeah. Loren and some of the state guys. Adrian had to set them straight. That Tink had let the electric lapse, so he and Lucy gave him a couple of old kerosene lamps. They were all excited when they saw him buying the kerosene. ‘Nope,’ Adrian told them. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there.’ ” She shook her head. “I imagine he’s devastated,” she said. “He really loves that boy, I think. It’s hard.”

They sat for a minute. “Do you think he set the fires?” Bud asked.

“Well, he confessed, didn’t he?”

“Does it make a difference that they held him for almost twenty-four hours?”

“But why would you say you did something if you didn’t?”

Bud had read of various complicated reasons you might, but he didn’t feel like talking them through with Emily. Instead he said, “Let’s say he hadn’t confessed. What would you think then?”

She sat silent for a long moment, her lips pressed together. It made her look mean. “You know, I just don’t know, Bud. It seems like such a crazy, kinda pointless thing to do, setting a bunch of fires like that. But just think how
mad
he has a right to be. And how few ways he’s got to let that out.” She shook her head. Not a hair moved independently. “It’s just hard to imagine, how you’d respond to such a raw deal in life, isn’t it?”

“It’s unimaginable for me.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“This is what I come here for, Emily,” Bud said, getting up.

“Oh. Gossip.” She lifted her shoulders and looked embarrassed. “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t help it, I’m afraid.”

“No. Not gossip. Your
take
on the gossip. That’s what makes it worth listening to.”

She sat a moment, and then she smiled and stood up, too. “You’re a nice man, Bud.”

“
Finally
. Someone noticed.”

And as she swatted her hand in the air to dismiss him, he left.

He sat in the car outside the town hall for a few minutes. It was still raining, but he decided he’d drive over by Silsby Pond and have a look at Tink’s trailer, now that he wasn’t there.

As he was driving across the valley, the rain slowed. By the time he got to Silsby Pond Road, it had stopped. He drove to the point where he’d stopped before, where the road opened onto the meadow, but this time he continued up the worn double path made by Tink’s tires. Grass grew tall between the dirt lines. He saw that the meadow was really an old orchard that was slowly being swallowed by brush and saplings, though you could still see the dark, twisted apple branches through the younger growth. Bud drove up to the high point, where the trailer sat, and got out of his car.

The grass immediately around the trailer was trampled and flattened. He knew there’d been a search warrant after the fire at Frankie’s parents’ house, but clearly someone had been here again recently, looking for evidence. He turned slowly around. There were sweeping views in all directions, gorgeous even on a day as dark as this.

He turned to face the trailer. It was old, a humped, old-fashioned shape. There was cardboard taped over one of its windows. It sat up on cinder blocks. Scattered around it were tin cans and trash. Tink’s firefighting boots were leaned against what constituted the steps up to the door, steps that were also made of cinder blocks. Bud mounted them. The door was metal, with a metal lever rather than a knob.

He stood there, trying to figure out what to do.

If the door wasn’t locked, he’d look, he decided, but only from the doorway—he wouldn’t go in. Mr. Morally Fastidious. He pulled down on the lever, and the door swung open.

He leaned slightly forward, to see what there was to see.

It was a mess, but there was no way of knowing how much of that was Tink’s doing and how much was the police’s. Dark rucked-up carpeting covered the floor. Clothing was strewn around on it, and a couple of girlie magazines. Along the wall facing him, a smudgy picture window looked south to the Presidential Range. Under that was a banquette and a built-in table with a Formica surface. There was a small television set on the shelf opposite this.

Dishes were stacked in a kitchenette sink to Bud’s left. A little hallway went past that area, and Bud assumed it led to a bedroom—or a bed in a room, anyway—as well as a bathroom. There must be a bathroom. An unfinished picture puzzle was on the Formica table in front of him, and pieces of it were scattered on the floor. An old kerosene lamp with a net filament sat on the table, too, along with a couple of glasses still half full of something, and some more dishes.

The banquette was pulling apart at the top seam. Worn, almost granular foam was spilling out, was pilled over the no-color fabric of the cushioning.

Bud tried to imagine driving from here, from this squalor, down to town, past the well-kept summer homes—empty, unused for most of the year. He couldn’t. He tried to imagine coming home to this in the dark every night, and couldn’t. It seemed wrong to him, cruel. Maybe it was illegal, actually—there must be zoning laws to prevent someone’s living like this in a town like Pomeroy. In the United States of America.

And yet Tink had chosen it. The solitude.

No, the privacy, Bud thought. Over what must have been comfortable and warm, what according to Emily was loving and caring at Adrian and Lucy Snell’s.

But you wanted your privacy. You wanted your own home. You wanted to live by your own rules, in your own place. You wanted to fix your own dinner, even if it meant just opening a can. You wanted to sit down and look at the beaver shots in your
Penthouse
and jerk off. Or lean under the light of your kerosene lamp and add six or seven pieces to the puzzle you were working on.

Bud shut the door, pulling it to with the awkwardly small metal lever. He turned around.

The sun was glinting through under the clouds to his left, lighting them a brilliant golden color from below, casting a dramatic, threaded horizontal light across the landscape. Ahead of him, the hill fell away greenly. The ancient apple trees still held the wizened brown fruit the deer hadn’t reached, so many homely ornaments. The mountains to the north beyond all this were a distant gray-blue. He looked to the east. Yes, against the brooding dark sky in that direction, a rainbow.

So this was part of what held Tink here. Beauty. After all.

19

S
YLVIA HAD WAKED
with the idea clear in her head, she told Frankie. It would be better—for her, and for Alfie, too—to be back in Bowman. This was three days before Alfie was to come home from the hospital. She and Frankie were sitting in Liz’s house at the table, talking about her plans. He had been in the hospital for four days.