The Arsonist (44 page)

The conductor shook his head. “Out of the question,” he said cheerfully.

“What about the one forty-five?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you, okay?” He started to move off. He raised his voice. “I’m hiding nothing, folks! I swear to God!”

The girl behind Frankie leaned forward, her head appeared just over the seat next to Frankie. “He doesn’t know about the one forty-five?” she said.

“That’s right,” Frankie said.

“Okay. Thanks.”

Frankie heard her make her call again. Calmer this time. Defeated. But still pleading. She didn’t know when she’d be there, but she could stay. She’d stay overnight if she had to. They could meet tomorrow. He should call, or just … she’d call again. As soon as anything was clear, she’d call again.

When she hung up, Frankie could hear her start to weep—long, jagged intakes of breath—a sound, she thought, that made you feel your
heart was breaking, too. Her own throat cottoned, and she turned to the window so no one could see the tears rising to her eyes.

They pulled into New Haven a little after 1:30 with plenty of time to make the 1:45, although you couldn’t have told that from the anxious line of Frankie’s fellow passengers forming in the aisle. Or from the way they scrambled off the train when it stopped, some of them actually running toward the station to find out what tracks their trains were on. From her vantage at the end of the line, Frankie saw the handsome would-be mutineer outside pushing his way through the crowd on the platform. Ahead of her the sad ballerina hurried, too, but not as rudely.

Frankie was glad for the fresh air as she stepped from the train, as she walked slowly along the platform. Inside the station, she went to the window for the
Vermonter
and bought a return ticket for the next train back to the town near her parents’ new apartment, the town where she’d caught the train to New Haven early this morning.

Then she looked for a pay phone to call Diann, to tell her she wasn’t going to make it, that she wasn’t coming at all.

22

I
S IT OVER
?
This was the first sentence in Bud’s article about the possibility of an ending to the fires, an article he started to write a week and a half after Frankie Rowley had left town.

He stopped and looked at what he’d typed, and then he laughed out loud, a quick bark. “Yes, my friend,” he said to himself. “It is.”

But he went on typing.
This is what residents of the town of Pomeroy are asking themselves two weeks after the arrest of Tink Snell
.

Though in fact, that question had begun to be answered. Since the police had taken Tink in, day after day had gone by without another fire. People had gradually begun to relax, begun to assume that it was over—the long nightmare—though there was still disagreement about what this meant. There were those who were willing to accede to the obvious:
They arrested Tink, the fires stopped. Good enough for me
. But there were others who argued that the guilty man was still out there. That he had just decided that this would be a good time to stop, when someone else would take the fall.
Well, if you want to have people think someone else was guilty
, the argument went,
wouldn’t you stop setting them now? Let everyone make the easy assumption, and there you are, off scot-free, and Tink to take all the blame
.

As far as Bud could tell from his unscientific polling, the split was about fifty-fifty—though even among those who thought Tink must have done it there seemed a surprising sympathy for him. Undefined, a bit inchoate, but still, sympathy that you wouldn’t expect anyone in town would feel for the person who’d terrorized everyone for a season.
He must have had help
, some of these people said.
Someone must have put him up to it
.

There was, of course, the undeniable matter of the confession, but again, there was a divide between those who believed, simply, that if you weren’t guilty of something, you wouldn’t confess to it, and those who felt that Tink had been coerced into signing it, that he’d been chosen because everyone in charge knew he would be vulnerable to that coercion.

Adrian told Bud in the store one rainy afternoon that they’d promised Tink special treatment if he confessed, that they’d held him for hours after Alfred Rowley’s rescue, questioning him, that they’d told him—or implied anyway—that he could go home once he signed. Adrian said Tink had told him that he was so tired and confused by the beginning of the second day that he’d agreed, that he would have signed anything they asked him to.

That was crap, the state trooper in Winslow told Bud. They didn’t even need the confession, they had so much else. “That confession was just the icing on the fucking cake.” He said that Loren had found what he called “ignition materials” in Tink’s car, which Tink had left unlocked outside Liz Swenson’s house when he joined the search teams looking for her father. These were the same materials found on the ground outside the senior Rowleys’ barn the night of the fire there.

Oh, come
on
, Adrian said when Bud asked him about it. It was cotton balls and Vaseline. All the search guys carried cotton balls with Vaseline when they were going out looking for someone, in case they needed to start a fire in tough conditions. Half the volunteers probably had such materials.

“Sure. In their packs,” Loren said. “Not fifteen or twenty laying around on the floor of their car.”

And so it went. It was interesting, in some ways more interesting than the fires had been. But there was less, actually, to write about, so Bud was back for the most part to his standard material for the fall, the daily small events that constituted the pulse of the town—the recording of which, he reminded himself, was the reason he’d come here in the first place.

This was something he needed to remind himself of, over and over. That he’d chosen this place, that he’d wanted to be here. Even so, he was restless, which he knew was part of his response to Frankie’s departure. Since she’d gone, he’d been second-guessing himself, wondering again,
as he had in the first days after he landed in Pomeroy, whether he’d made a mistake, whether there might be something retrievable for him in the world
out there
, in the world of greater consequence, as it seemed to him now in these long empty days.

He told himself that the reason for these feelings was just that he was mourning Frankie, that this was temporary. That it would end.

Though it didn’t feel as if it ever would, right now.

He tried to give himself permission to do whatever he needed to do to get over her. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what that was. He drank himself to sleep every night for the first four or five days after she’d gone, but he felt so crappy the next day that he decided the temporary oblivion wasn’t worth the pain. He wept several times—once extravagantly, driving home after bundling the papers the second Monday in October. Louise Hinton was helping that night, and she’d talked to Frankie’s mother recently. Frankie was such a help, Sylvia had told Louise, though she’d also said that she felt guilty for keeping her away from her work. “By which she appears to mean New York,” Louise had said as she handed one of her newspapers to Conor.

Yes, Bud had said. That was his understanding, that there was work in New York she was eager to do.

Even after he got home that night, he had sat outside his house for maybe fifteen minutes and let himself make the strange grunting, gasping noises that were coming out of him, let his nose and eyes run freely. Until finally it all seemed self-indulgent, and he stopped.

He stopped, he came inside and washed his face, and he went to Pete’s house.

He saw Pete more often than he usually did in these weeks. Most times he called ahead, and always he brought two six-packs of beer with him, some to drink, some to leave with Pete. It wasn’t good beer, because Pete didn’t care whether it was good beer or not, and because Bud was pretty certain Pete would think him a fool for caring about such a thing—though he did. But he also cared, too much probably, what Pete thought of him.

They didn’t speak of what was bothering Bud, of why he was suddenly
coming by so much. Mostly they talked about the paper. The paper and the news.

Bud had gone to interview Tink in jail, finding him as inscrutable as ever, and he told Pete about that. “I asked him why he’d confessed,” Bud said.

“Ya-ah?”

“Yes. He said, ‘To get them off my back.’ ”

Pete nodded several times, judiciously. “
That
worked well,” he said.

Bud laughed, aware of feeling a wash of gratitude just for that—to be laughing, to be thoughtless for a moment.

He told Pete about the new regular column he was adding to the paper, a summary each week of the events of the same seven days twenty-five years earlier. Louise Hinton was scanning in all the old files and had the idea. She’d offered to write this piece up each week. Easy enough, she had said.

They talked about what Pete was reading now. He’d finished all of Conrad and was starting on Robert Louis Stevenson, whom Bud confessed he’d never read.

“Lucky man. Some good stuff waiting for you.”

“I’m glad to know that. I could use some good stuff.”

After a long moment, Pete said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

And that was as close as they came to talking about Frankie.

They talked often about the fires—who was rebuilding, who wasn’t. They talked about the developments in the court case. Tink’s lawyer was still trying to get him out on bail.

Pete thought this was unlikely to happen, even though there were townspeople who believed in his innocence and were trying to raise the money, to be ready if the judge should rule in Tink’s favor.

“Though he’s going to get off, in the end,” Pete said.

“You think so?”

“I do. They don’t have much of anything without the confession, and that’s dirty. Take that away and add in all the people lining up with alibis for him.” Pete shook his head. “There’s nothing there. Like you said in your piece, it’s a hard crime to prove, and they haven’t.” He had some beer. There was a fire going in his fireplace, and Pete had been up often,
poking at it, turning the half-burned logs to keep it going. It seemed an activity he enjoyed. “I suspect we’re never going to know for sure, one way or the other,” he said.

“That’ll be really hard for people to take, after all this. They want to know. They need to.”

“Too bad. They won’t, if he’s acquitted on some technicality.”

Bud had been watching the fire. Now he looked back over at Pete. “But maybe if that happens, they’ll reopen the investigation.”

“There’s nothing to reopen. They bet the farm on Tink. They’ve got nothing left.”

“Unless there’s another fire.”

Pete made a dismissive noise. “There won’t be any more fires. Whether Tink’s acquitted or not, there won’t be any more fires.”

“What makes you say that?”

“What would be the point? If Tink did them, it
worked
, it worked out for him. There are all these folks willing to stand up for him. There’s even some raising money. Sure, it might be mostly because they’re so mad at the way the police handled it, but there it is. Why would he put all that goodwill, all that
love
, in jeopardy by starting up again?

“And if someone else did it … well, now is the perfect time to stop and get away with it.”

It would turn out that Pete was right. That the confession would be ruled tainted and inadmissible after the state police admitted they’d alternately befriended and threatened Tink, after they acknowledged that they told him things would go easy for him if he signed. After they conceded that they had rejected the suggestion by his friend Gavin Knox in their presence that he get a lawyer. After it was discovered that Tink was unable to read aloud or understand a number of the words that had been used in his statement.

But long before all that—and it wasn’t until spring that the judge made that ruling, and summer when the quick trial was held and Tink was acquitted—Bud had come around to Pete’s way of seeing things: that it was unknowable, though that wasn’t exactly what Pete had said. But that was the point, Bud thought. The point of Tink, and of Frankie, too, he’d come to feel. Of the way they arrived together in his life, brought to
him by the fires. The lesson was there were things you had to let go of, losses and mysteries you had to learn to live with.

And sometimes, even years later, when he’d see Tink around town—a less and less pretty boy, and then a thickened, balding, middle-aged man—Bud would be aware of feeling a strange sense of connection with him. Of a kind of gratitude welling in him at the sight of Tink—gratitude for his unwitting lesson, for the letting go he had helped to teach to Bud.

It was cold in the mornings now, and Bud decided to change what had been his routines since he came to Pomeroy. Now before he had his breakfast, he built a fire in the living room stove at his house, and he stayed at home for the first half of the day, working at the desk facing one of the big picture windows on the first floor. The window looked down the hill to the northern edge of the village, and from his vantage, he could watch the slow, distant stages of the morning’s start down there.