The Arsonist (7 page)

F
RANKIE SAT IN THE BACKSEAT
as they drove to the Fourth of July Tea in the old station wagon. Perched there, looking at her parents’ heads from behind, she was suddenly remembering exactly how this had felt when she was young. Alfie and Sylvia were talking about which of the summer people had arrived, and as she listened to the familiar names, the quickly sketched updates, she could have been ten, or fourteen.

Though she was feeling fully her age, thinking about her father. She and he had walked together down to Liz and Clark’s house this morning. It had been her mother’s suggestion—that Alfie show Frankie the project, the house Clark and Liz would move into eventually—Clark had been building it himself piecemeal over the last two years.

She had the sense that her mother was
getting rid
of Alfie, and maybe of her, too, though she felt less sure of that. But either way, Sylvia seemed to want to be alone. She had clearly been upset about something from the time Frankie came downstairs.

She and Alfie had hiked down through the meadow instead of using the road, because Frankie wanted to look at the pond along the way.

The dock was still pulled up on the rocks. Several slats were missing. As they walked around the pond’s edge, the frogs jumped from the bank into the water, a steady
plop, plop, plop
that preceded them. There were sweeps of algal growth visible under the water. Frankie saw a turtle’s head break the pond’s surface. A snapper? she wondered. Time would tell.

They mounted the hillock beyond the pond, stepping carefully through the low-growing wild blueberries and the thorny, arching blackberry canes. As they reached the top, the vista below opened up.

“There ’tis,” Alfie said. In the meadow below was the small, simple
house—a cottage, really—shingled in wood that still looked raw, a wide unscreened porch on the uphill side facing them.

They started down toward it. “It’s almost done, isn’t it?” Frankie asked.

“You’ll see,” Alfie said.

Frankie followed him through the overgrown meadow, holding her palms out on either side to brush her fingertips along the tops of the grasses and blossoms. Bees hung in some of them. The ground was uneven, and Frankie felt a jolt in her body with each step.

The area around the house was gravel and dirt. They crossed it and stepped together onto the porch. There was no door—a piece of plywood had been hammered into place where it would have been. Alfie stood back while Frankie peered in through a window, framing her face with her hands. Though it was dim inside, she could see that there were no finished interior walls, just the vertical studs announcing where they’d be. Foil-backed insulation lined the house’s outer walls like silvery wallpaper, and some of the windows were in place. The openings for others, like the doorway, were boarded over. There was a table in what seemed to be the kitchen area, chairs set around it.

Frankie said something pleasant, noncommittal:
It looks like it’ll be very nice
.

Alfie didn’t answer, so she turned to look at him. He’d taken a step back off the porch onto the packed dirt. He was looking at the house, his eyes squinted, a slightly puzzled frown on his face.

“Don’t you think, Dad?”

He turned to her. “This is … I believe this is Liz’s house,” he said, dubiously. And then, more certainly: “Yes. I think it is.”

She had said yes, stunned. She wasn’t sure what else to say to him. Was it a joke of some sort? Was she supposed to offer something witty in response? She had no idea.

But he turned then and started back up the rise. Frankie followed him, up the hill, down through the berry patch, and around the pond, then up again, across the meadow. She could see her mother on the porch, waiting.

They didn’t speak until they got back home. As they opened the screen
door, Alfie said to Sylvia, “We’ve had the house viewing. What’s our next assignment?” and they both laughed, to Frankie’s amazement.

Had she misunderstood his lapse at Liz’s house? She thought she must have.

Now her parents’ car was steadily mounting the hill behind the town, and at the last turn, the Mountain House Inn came into view, a looming white frame building that looked across the valley to the tallest of the local peaks, their tops rising bare and rocky above the tree line. This was where the tea was held every year.

They parked at the edge of the wide, semicircular driveway cut into the rising lawn, behind a long string of other parked cars. Frankie looked up at the hotel as they got out of the car. There was a deep porch across the entire front span of the ground floor. Above the porch roof, on the second floor, there was a row of evenly spaced windows with dark green shutters. Several of these had fallen off, and the ones that were left sagged at the sides of the windows. There was a third floor above that with a line of smaller dormer windows.

She and her parents started up the sloping lawn toward the porch, where, Frankie knew, there would be tables with punch and cookies and tea sandwiches set out. But within the first ten paces or so, they were ensnared in a conversation with Gregory Hinton and his wife. Dr. Hinton, as Frankie still thought of him, was some big mucky-muck at the National Institutes of Health, a hearty, white-haired man. His wife, Louise, was a good friend of Frankie’s mother.

In Frankie’s parents’ generation up here there were many distinguished, important people. Poets, bishops, explorers of the human genome, presidents of this college or that. When Frankie was young, she had assumed that her father belonged in this company. She had realized only very slowly that he didn’t, that his tenured position at what she finally understood was a third-rate college was not even in the same category of success. And in her own generation, almost no one had the kind of prominence some of the parents had. Hardly anyone even seemed to want it. They were all more self-invented, less allied with all those important institutions. Like her, she supposed.

Dr. Hinton and his wife were asking her about her life, her doings.
How amazing!
they said.
Still in Africa all by yourself! How fascinating that must be!
Frankie was aware of the pleasure she was taking in being thought of as a girl, a pretty young girl, again. They asked about Liz, and she got the treatment, too, in absentia—they couldn’t believe she could have children as old as five and four and two.

After a few minutes, when the Hintons had turned their enthusiasm onto Alfie and Sylvia, Frankie extricated herself and went directly to the porch for a glass of punch, remembering on her way that Liz had often brought a little flask of rum in her purse to spike it with when they were in high school, when, for a while, Frankie had had the pleasure of thinking of herself as one of the wild Rowley girls.

The punch was pink, as ever, with circles of sliced oranges and lemons floating on its surface. Frankie served herself with the long, curved ladle and then went to the railing and drank. Standing there with her cup, she surveyed the scene. If you blurred your eyes, she thought, it could have been her childhood, an impressionistic Sunday-best gathering of parents and children on the grass—smears and dabs of color for the women, the men more drab. In her clear view, she couldn’t immediately recognize anyone in the sixty or seventy people clustered on the lawn or standing on the porch near her.

She moved over to one of the tables covered with platters of cookies and little sandwiches. There was an old woman there, loading up a plate with at least one of each of the many kinds of cookies laid out—and there were at least a dozen. “An amazing spread,” Frankie said.

“You know what I miss?” the woman said. She was short and plump, with an enormous drooping bosom that took up the entire space between her shoulders and her waist.

Frankie took a cookie herself. “What?” she said.

“Meringues. Ellen Babcock used to make meringues for the tea every year. Oh, how I loved them! Even if they did get gooey by the end of the day.” She popped one of the smaller cookies into her mouth and ate it rapidly, her jaw swiveling. She made a little noise, swallowing, and then she said abruptly, “Now, who are you?”

Frankie told her.

“Oh, yes,” the old woman said. She nodded and nodded. “I knew Sylvia
quite well. She used to babysit for us when she was … well, I suppose, in high school. Is she here?”

Frankie pointed out Alfie and Sylvia, still on the lawn, standing in a circle with several others.

“Aha!” the woman said. “With that Rowley fella. Not quite as charming as he thinks he is, that one.”

Frankie was startled speechless, this seemed so indiscreet. She picked up another cookie, just to give herself a few seconds, and then she excused herself, moving away from the old woman and down off the porch. She went to stand near a small group of people who seemed to be close to her in age. When they opened to let her into their circle, she said who she was, and, of course, she did know a couple of them, she recognized them as they said their names and introduced their spouses.

They talked for a while about which of them was staying up and for how long—
they must get together!
—about their parents, some of whom had died. When several of them broke away to greet other summer friends, Frankie moved on, too. She had a conversation with someone she used to like dancing with, Jay McMahon, a conversation about the music of that time, about her life in Africa, then about his work as an economist in London. He had that slightly
off
accent of someone who’s lived abroad too long, faintly but definitively British. Frankie knew she, too, had a version of this, and that hers was undoubtedly British also, but the postcolonial version of British. Maybe posttribal, too—a little bit of that clipped, singsong African thing, sometimes she heard it herself.

When Jay moved off—to get some food, he said—Frankie talked for a while to a group of people her parents’ age and found out more about their children than she would have from the children themselves,
Because their currency
is
their children
, she thought. How accomplished, how far flung. She wondered how her parents were explaining her, the spin they were putting on her own life.
Oh, Frankie’s still in Africa, yes. She practically runs the East Africa office now
. Or maybe not. She could imagine another version, Sylvia, rolling her eyes, saying something like
God knows what she’s up to over there
.

She was called upon to explain herself to this group of parents, and
she did, not mentioning that she was on leave. That she wasn’t sure when, or even whether, she was going back.

While they were standing there on the sloped lawn, she was suddenly aware that she’d been hearing the thumping of a bass, of drums, of rhythmic music, getting slowly louder. Hip-hop. And now much too loud. She turned. A long, low car was approaching in the circular drive, windows down, music thudding. There were four boys inside—young men, really—their faces turned to the lawn, to the milling summer people in their fancy clothes. Someone in the car must have said something, because they all laughed at once, throwing their heads back, one of them in the rear pounding the back of the driver’s seat.

The music was deafening. Frankie saw that most of the people on the lawn had turned, too, turned to follow the slow cruise of the car along the driveway. It came to the end of the driveway and pulled out onto the dirt road, headed back the way it had come, and the music slowly faded, became mere thudding again, and was gone.

“Ah, youth!” one of the parents in her group said loudly, and several people within earshot laughed.

Just as Frankie was turning away from this group to move up to the porch, thinking that she’d get some more punch, she noticed a man standing a few feet away from her, with a camera. A camera trained on her.

Without thinking, she put her hand up to shield her face. In response, he instantly lowered the camera. He was about her age, with dark, curly hair, a blue work shirt, and jeans. She thought of her mother, of her being offended by those who wore jeans to the tea.

“Sorry,” he said. Then, stepping closer, his voice lowered: “Are you a fugitive from justice?” He had an odd voice—hoarse, scratchy.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Frankie said. “I’m not. A fugitive from justice. Are you … a representative of justice?”

“Nope. I’m a loyal member of the fourth estate,” he said.

“The fourth estate is not the clergy, I’m thinking.”

He shook his head. “Press. Vile, scandalmongering, left wing, elitist, et cetera.” He stepped even closer, his eyes steady on Frankie. “Bud,” he said, holding his hand out.

“Bud is your name?”

“Yeah.” Frankie shook hands with him. His grip was a little too firm. He was taller than she was. Quite a tall man, then. She was actually looking up at him, something she wasn’t used to. His face, too, was big, almost doughy, with a pugilist’s chin. His brown eyes were creased at the corners, amused-looking, and his hair, she saw now, was flecked with gray.

“Bud what?”

“Bud Jacobs.”

“I’m Frankie.”

“Frankie?”

“Short for Francesca. My father’s mother was Italian. I’m named after her. Frankie Rowley,” she said. “But I don’t remember you. Are you new in town?”

No, actually, he explained, he’d been here for a couple of years. He’d bought the
Pomeroy Union
, the local weekly paper. “I’m embedded, as it were. Reporting back on the action”—he smiled—“as it
explodes
all around me.”

Frankie looked around at the clusters of milling people, some already leaving, but other cars only now pulling up. There was a group of children running back and forth on the porch, screaming. “How would you write up this particular explosion?” she asked.

“Who came, of course. They all like to see their name in the paper. That’s my bread and butter.” He shrugged. “Who was visiting. And I always keep my eye out for the unforeseen event.” He arched his eyebrows. “The spiked punch,” he said dramatically in his whispery voice. “The marijuana-laced brownie. The lovers’ quarrel.” He paused. Then, dramatically: “The knife fight.”