He learned how to use the computer, learned how to copy the disks, use the modem. He took a large folder to a Xerox machine and copied everything in it, then reboxed the originals. He sent the company the information and was finally done with them. He could not have said why he wanted copies; there was no real reason other than it was something to do. Without pondering further, he gradually learned the business through John Loesser’s accumulation of records and notes and his modem connections.
He had been startled one day when, following John Loesser’s directions, written in the man’s precise, minute handwriting, he had found himself accessing a mainframe computer that apparently held data from the entire insurance industry. Fascinated by the information available, he had scrolled through categories. Liability claims: flood damage in Florida, starved cattle in Montana, wind damage in Texas… . Accidents in supermarkets, on city buses, in neighbors’ yards and houses… . Medical claims for hernias, broken bones, hysterectomies, bypasses… . He was appalled by the automobile claims, then bored by them. He learned how to ask for specific groupings: shark attacks, bee stings, food poisonings… .
His fingers were shaking when he keyed in the request for hotel fires. There it was, his River House, followed by Arson—
unsolved
. He was shaking too hard to continue. What if they had a way of tracing who looked up information like that? What if they came back to him? The next day he registered as a public insurance adjuster, making his use of the computer data appear more legitimate. Why? he asked himself, but he did not pursue it. He looked for a list of closed hotels and marveled at the number. Carson Danvers would have liked seeing what all was available, he thought.
Some days later it occurred to him to look up instances of sudden madness and homicides, and again he was appalled. He scrolled the list and went on to something else, then stopped. Camden, he thought. He had seen something about Camden, Ohio, in the papers recently, and there was one of the abandoned hotels in Camden. He went back to that list and found it. Dwyer House, built 1897, closed 1936. Forty-two rooms. Used as an office building from 1938 to 1944. In litigation from 1944 to 1954. Owned by Gerstein and Winters Realty Company. Insured for forty thousand. It sounded almost exactly like the inn that Carson Danvers had been looking for. Wrong place, but right building.
In his mind’s eye he saw the wide back porch, Elly’s body sprawled, the bloody prints that led up the handsome, curved staircase. And he felt again the unseen presence that had swarmed all around him. Saw again the vacant, mad look on Gary’s face, the look of homicidal insanity. … He turned off the computer and went out for a long walk in the city.
The next day he looked up Camden in the library newspaper files. He was no longer shaking, but instead felt as cold and hard and brittle as an icicle. He found the story that had caught his eye, the match his mind had made. Mildred Hewlitt had gone mad and slaughtered several patients in a nursing home on Hanover Street, where she worked. She had vanished, and so had one of the victims. The hotel, Dwyer House, was also on Hanover Street. That was what had stopped him. He walked home and looked up the computer listing for the claim that had first sent the hairs rising on his arms and neck. Two weeks earlier, a college boy had gone mad and run his car through a pedestrian mall; he had fled on foot and vanished. One of the victims had filed a claim; the mainframe had recorded it. That day Carson Danvers packed a suitcase and left for Camden.
He stole an Ohio license plate from a parked car in a shopping mall, and put it on his car the morning he reached Camden. He checked into a motel outside town, read the local paper from the past two days, walked downtown. He chatted with a waiter, the motel desk clerk, several others. He did not go to the real estate office. He went to the shopping mall where the clerks were all ready to talk about the terrible accident.
“He came in over there,” a woman said, standing outside a Hallmark shop, pointing to a stretch of pavement that was barricaded now. A row of wooden planters had been smashed, store windows were boarded up. “He revved up and came in doing maybe fifty, sixty miles an hour, screaming like a banshee. My God, people were flying this way and that! Everyone screaming! Blood everywhere! And he got out and ran. No one tried to stop him. No one had time to do anything, what with all the screaming and the blood. He got clean away.”
Carson shook his head in disbelief and walked on to a Sears store, where he bought a crowbar and heard the same story, embellished a little because this time the salesman relating it had not actually seen what happened. He put the crowbar in his car and went to a Kmart, where he bought a gas can and flashlight. Then he found his way to Hanover Street. It started in town, went straight through a subdivision, and then became a country road very quickly. The nursing home where Mildred Hewlitt had worked was a few blocks from the subdivision; after that there was a small store and gas station combined, and then farmland and sparse woods. A four lane highway had been built three miles to the south; business had followed, and Hanover Street was left to the truck farmers. The same as River House.
He drove slowly until he reached the driveway to Dwyer House. There was a chain across it. The hotel was not visible from the road. The woods had invaded the grounds, deciduous trees with new April leaves not yet fully developed—ash trees, maples, oaks, all scrawny and untended. High grasses and weeds and hedge gone wild filled in the understory. There was a path through it, well trod, evidently in daily use. He drove another hundred yards and came to a turn on the side of the road of the hotel and drove onto it. It was dirt, rutted and unkempt, but passable. A service entrance? Why no chain, if so? And why would Mildred Hewlitt have come back here, and the boy, and the four or five others he had read about? Mystified, he kept driving slowly until he came to a clearing, an old parking lot maybe. He could see the hotel from here: three stories, a frame building ornately decorated with cupolas, balconies, porches with handsome rails and fancy posts. It was boarded up, but he could imagine the stained glass windows it must have boasted. Inside there would be the paneling, the carefully dovetailed joints, the elaborate patterns in the walnut floors. He felt as if he knew this building intimately; it was so like the ones he had investigated a long time ago, looking for a place to create a fine restaurant. So like them. He stopped and turned off his engine, and he felt it again, and that too was the same. A pressure, a presence, like cobwebs with an electrical charge. This time the headache was slight, a distant throbbing. He got out and stood by his car door, looking around, and now he understood why people came here. Lovers’ lane, a place to park out of sight of the road, beyond the sound of passing cars or the inquisitive eyes of anyone. That explained the ages, he thought, not moving away from the cobwebs, brushing at his face now and then. One girl of eighteen, a suicide. The college boy, twenty-one. Mildred Hewlitt, twenty-five. Another young man of twenty who had been apprehended smashing windows at the elementary school. When seized, he had collapsed in a catatonic state from which he had not recovered. Others, mentioned in whispers, with puzzlement, just weird things, the desk
clerk had said in a low voice. Weird, you know?
Carson Danvers stood brushing away electric cobwebs that were not webs at all, and he nodded. He knew. He got in the car again and turned on the ignition, and was alone again. He drove out.
A fine rain had started to fall, soft, promising spring growth, smelling of newly sprouted seedlings and fragrant earth. Spring, Carson thought, warmer nights, couples in cars with engines turned off, mayhem. Back in his motel, he set his clock for three thirty and lay down, but did not sleep. When it was time, he drove to the hotel parking lot and turned around, so that his car faced out. He ignored the webs that found him instantly, and unloaded his equipment methodically. He pried open a door in the rear of the building, dropped the crowbar on the porch, and entered cautiously, flashlight in one hand, gas can in the other. This time there was no need to make a trail, to obliterate the past with fire. He made his way through the blackness, following his narrow beam of light, moving with great care, not wanting to fall through a rotten floorboard, or trip over an abandoned two-by-four. He found the stairs and climbed them, testing each step. The building was solid, filled with real cobwebs and dust and mold. He was disoriented momentarily at the landing on the second floor, but closed his eyes and drew a mental map, then continued down a hallway to where he judged the center of the hotel was. Many of the doors were open; none was locked. He opened more of them and then began to splash the gasoline around the walls, through the hall. He brushed away webs and shone his light around to make certain he had soaked the place thoroughly, and then went back downstairs, dribbling out gas as he moved. He tried to find a spot roughly under the gas soaked area, and emptied the can, spilling the last drops on a handkerchief he had knotted around a rock. He looked about with the flashlight one more time, then went to the back door he had forced open. There he lighted a match, touched it to the handkerchief, which blazed instantly, and heaved the handkerchief to the bottom of the stairs to ignite a trail of fire. He could feel the webs all around him, pressing as he picked up the crowbar and returned to his car. He put the empty gas can in the trunk, brushed away webs, got in his car, and turned the key. It fled. He drove out carefully. No sign of fire was visible when he drove past the main entrance. The rain was falling, more like a mist now, settling gently with great persistence, as if a mammoth cloud were being lowered to earth. He got back to his motel, back to his room, and fell into bed—and sleep—without undressing.
It was one of the very few nights of the past nine months that he was untroubled by dreams, that he awakened feeling refreshed and vital.
Chapter 3
October 1985. Constance
Leidl drove home happily that
October afternoon. The two year old
Volvo still smelled of apples; a stack of books from the university library added its own peculiar, comforting odor, but the dominant fragrance was of fall, of wood stoves, frosts to come, and burning leaves. “The world is draped in the glory of autumn,” one of the patients in the hospital had murmured to her. A hopeless schizophrenic, wandering in a world of poetry and surrealism. Constance shook her head, then smiled, remembering Charlie’s complaint as they had picked apples over the past three days. “Honey, I don’t get it. Why do we tend all these damn trees and then just give away the apples?”
“Do you want strangers in here picking them?”
“Come on!”
“Well then “
“It’s not one or the other,” he had said indignantly.
“We could sell off the hillside.”
He garumphed at her grin. “Okay. But tell me why we are doing this.” A cold breeze had colored his cheeks as red as the apples they were picking. He had stopped working and was regarding her with a mutinous expression.
“Well,” she had said with what she considered great practicality, “because.”
“Ah,” he had said, illuminated, and they had returned to the chore of picking apples.
Today she had delivered three bushels of them to the hospital. There were twenty bushels on the back porch, some to be called for, some to be delivered. She hummed under her breath. Just because. She loved this section of the drive home from the hospital she had visited. On one side of the blacktop county road stretched a pasture graced by three sorrel horses that struck poses whenever traffic was present. A white fence completed that picture. On the other side, the side she lived on, a two-hundred year old farmhouse marked what she thought of here as her stretch. The old house was of stone and wood and bricks, with a slate roof; the Dorsetts lived there. They said Dorsetts had always lived there, would always live there. She believed that. Next was a tall, cedar sided house with a southern face constructed mostly of glass. The Mitchums lived there. They had four sons, all husky football types. Two of the boys had come over to complete the apple picking, and had taken away two bushels of apples for their labors. Sometimes Constance fried the special Swedish cookies that Charlie loved more than any other sweet, and gave most of them to the Mitchum boys. She had explained that, also. If she kept them in the house, Charlie ate them, and at his age—fifty plus—he did not need all those calories. The boys did. When he asked if she couldn’t simply make fewer, she had said no.
Everywhere maple trees blazed and cast red light on the world. Autumn had been benign so far. Its progress had been gentle, with a few early hard frosts, then a mellow Indian summer, and now more frosts. There had not been a tree stripping windstorm, or slashing rain. A long expanse of pasture—the Mitchums kept goats—and finally her own house appeared. The lowering sun turned the maples in her front yard into welcoming torches. It fired the chrysanthemums that edged the driveway with a carpet runner of red, rust, glowing yellow, and white. There was a silver Mercedes parked in the center of the driveway in front of the garage door.
Constance scowled at the other car. The drive was wide enough for two cars, but not if one that size took the center. And, she thought with irritation, she’d be damned if she would run over the chrysanthemums. She stopped behind the Mercedes and got out. As she walked toward the house she saw that Charlie and an unknown man were in the garage. From the roof of the garage the gray tiger cat Brutus glared at her with slitted yellow eyes.
Charlie came out to meet her. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt that emphasized his huskiness. His hair was crinkly black with enough gray to look distinguished, and, since moving out in the country, he had turned a rich mahogany color. She thought he was extraordinarily handsome and often told him so. He liked that. Now he kissed her and murmured, “The mountain has come to Mohamet.”
Where he was dark, she was fair, her hair pale to nearly white, her eyes light blue—some thought gray—her skin a creamy ivory, touched so lightly with color it was as if she seldom spent time outdoors. Yet she was out even more than he was. She was tall and lean; she would be a stick of an old woman, she sometimes said, almost regretfully. They walked together to the garage where the visitor waited, looking ill at ease. A gray man with a tight mouth, she thought coolly, a city man who should stay there alone where he belonged.
“Honey, Mr. Thoreson,” Charlie said. “My wife, Constance Leidl.”
“Oh, ah, Mrs. Meiklejohn, or is it Ms. Leidl? How do you do?”
She had known his handshake would be limp, she thought, still very distant and cool, if proper. “Either, or both at times,” she said. “Shall we go inside?” She watched with clinical interest to see if he would unconsciously wipe his hand on his trouser leg. He did. A gray man, with a gray, fearful soul. Sixty, sixty-two. Gray hair, sallow complexion, gray suit, discreet maroon tie. She started for the front door.
“Honey,” Charlie said, “we can talk here.”
“I apologize for parking like that,” Thoreson said almost simultaneously. “Cats were running everywhere. I thought it best simply to stop.”
Just then Candy, the orange cat with butterscotch eyes, approached Constance with a melting legs walk, meowing. Constance started to pick her up, but she slunk away, looking nervously at Thoreson and Charlie, complaining.
“Charlie, what’s been going on?” Constance demanded.
“Nothing, not really. I opened the door and the cats all ran out just when Mr. Thoreson pulled in, and I came out to meet him, and then you got home.”
She watched him, wondering what he was hiding, and then turned to enter the house. The front door stood wide open.
“We’ll just wait here,” Charlie called after her.
When she glanced back, he grinned his most engaging smile, and Mr. Thoreson looked more uncomfortable than ever. Cautious now, she entered the house and immediately choked on the thick, sharp smell of burning chili peppers. Her eyes teared, and she groped for the door and backed out again, coughing.
“Charlie,” she cried, “why didn’t you warn me?” She continued to cough, fumbling in her purse for a tissue.
“You would have wanted to find out for yourself,” he said reasonably. “I was going to make Hunan chicken. It starts with frying ten chili peppers.”
Thoreson looked from him to Constance, back to Charlie. He examined the garage with disdain, then said, “Mr. Meiklejohn, is there some place we can talk? Phil Stern assured me that you would at least listen.”
“I suppose it gets worse on in the house?” Constance asked.
“Sure does,” Charlie agreed. “Kitchen’s uninhabitable. I turned on the exhaust fan and opened windows.”
“Mr. Meiklejohn! Damn it, I drove all the way out from New York to see you! I apologized for
not calling ahead of time. Stern promised he would call and explain the situation to you.”
“He didn’t call,” Charlie said. He looked at Constance. “Benny’s?” At her nod, he turned to Thoreson. “There’s a roadhouse down the road, four, five miles. Let’s go have a drink there. And you can talk. I’ll listen.”
Thoreson’s lips had drawn into a thin line.
“You’ll have to follow us,” Constance said and started back to the Volvo. She did not look to see if Thoreson was dismayed by the lack of hospitality she and Charlie were snowing. City man, go home, she thought, and take your problems with you.
“Who is he?” Constance asked, in the car with Charlie driving now.
“Hal Thoreson. He said he was supposed to come with Phil’s recommendation, but Phil never got around to it. Actually Thoreson called a week or so ago, wanted me to meet him in New York, but I knew you’d think I was trying to duck out of picking apples.” What Thoreson had done, although Charlie did not say this, was order him to a meeting.
“I don’t like him,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“He’s an
insurance
man!”
Charlie laughed. “So’s Phil.”
“That’s different, and you know it.”
“Not where business is concerned.” He had known Phil Stern in college, and they had remained friends over the many years since then. When Charlie took an early retirement from the New York City police force, Phil had turned to him for a private investigation, then another, then several more. What Phil had bought was not so much Charlie’s expertise as a detective, although that had been important, but rather his unmatched knowledge of arson. Charlie had been a fire department investigator for years before becoming a city detective. It was Thoreson’s fault, he thought aggrievedly, that he had burned the peppers. The damn cookbook said you could do the preliminaries early and in less than ten minutes turn out the dish. Hah! He had wanted to surprise Constance, had heard a car and had gone to look out the front window; the chili peppers burned, and he ended up with the sourpuss Thoreson. It had not been a good day, he brooded, parking at Benny’s. Thoreson’s silver Mercedes was right behind him. He caught up with them before they entered the roadhouse.
Benny’s was virtually empty that afternoon. It was not yet six. A man in a leather jacket sat at the bar talking to Ron, the spindly bartender
who would leave as soon as Benny arrived. Two
women were talking in low voices in a booth at the rear of the room. Charlie and Constance waved at Ron and took another booth; they sat side by side, Thoreson opposite them. Ron slouched over, took their order, and slouched
away again. No one spoke as they waited for the
drinks to arrive, but the moment the drinks came, Thoreson began, as if the service were his cue.
“Two weeks ago there was a conference of underwriters in Dallas. I attended, as did Phil Stern. I have known him for many years, of course. During one of the informal meetings a startling fact was unearthed. When I mentioned the matter to Stern, he suggested that I might discuss it with you. I have been trying to do so,” he said with some bitterness. “I know that I am not an engaging man, Mr. Meiklejohn, Mrs. Meiklejohn.”
He had rehearsed it in his silver Mercedes, Constance realized with interest. First the teaser, then his abject self-abasement, and now he would reveal the startling fact. She glanced at Charlie; he appeared engrossed in spearing an onion in his Gibson.
“I seldom have to deal with the public, and never have had to deal with a matter of this delicacy, and, frankly, the thought of hiring a private investigator for such a… a discreet matter is abhorrent to me.”
“You have your own investigators,” Charlie suggested.
“Of course. However, we feel that there may be a leak somewhere. Phil thought, and I agreed ultimately, a private investigation would be more to the point.”
Charlie got the onion and ate it with evident satisfaction. He smiled at Thoreson. “Why don’t you cut the bullshit and get to the point.”
“That is precisely why Phil was supposed to talk to you,” Thoreson said in a plaintive voice. “He knew I would bungle it alone.”
He actually sighed. Constance felt Charlie nudge her leg, and she looked away to keep from smiling.
“It came to our attention that there has been a series of hotel fires,” Thoreson said. “So far, three insurance companies have paid out a million dollars in claims. That’s one of the reasons we thought an independent investigation would be wise.”
“It just came to your attention,” Charlie murmured.
“Yes. They are widely separated geographically, and span a period of five years.”
“How widely spread?” Although he still sounded lazy and not very interested, Constance knew from his voice that Thoreson had finally said something that worked.
“Vermont, Ohio, North Carolina, California, Idaho, and Washington State.”
Charlie shook his head in disbelief. “A serial arsonist working from coast to coast? I don’t believe it.”
“Were there casualties?” Constance asked, almost in spite of herself.
“None. In fact, each hotel was closed down, out of use when it burned.”
Charlie looked blank, rather dull. “You need the ATF or a national organization to investigate something like that. Spread over five years? There won’t be anything to see anyway. It’s probably coincidence.”
“Phil said he would tell you the
modus operandi
—is that the phrase? It’s the same in each case. We know there have been at least six deliberate fires, probably three more that we aren’t so certain about. In each case, the fire started in an interior room and burned outward, and by the time the fire departments arrived, the buildings were practically gutted already. Always between two and five in the morning. Almost always when it was either raining or snowing, the exceptions being during a dense fog in one instance, and following a week of rain in the other. Every one was considered arson at the time.”
Charlie was shaking his head. “And you think someone in one of your companies must be in on it? Why?”
“Not in on it, not that way. But maybe feeding information to someone else. Information about where abandoned hotels are, what the coverage is for them.”
Very kindly Charlie said, “Mr. Thoreson, go home. If you suspect a conspiracy to commit a crime tell the FBI. If you suspect arson, notify the ATF. Let them take care of it.” He glanced at Constance, who nodded. ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had a national arson investigative team.
Thoreson’s lips had tightened again. He had not yet touched his scotch and water. Now he put it to his mouth, then set it down sharply. “That’s about the last thing we want to do. There certainly would be a leak then, maybe publicity. Do you know what it would mean to have this publicized?”
“Copycat fires,” Charlie said. “But the ATF can be very quiet about what they’re up to. Very discreet.”
“And they solve three percent of all arson cases they investigate!” Thoreson snapped. “We decided to keep it private. One person, you, asking questions, looking into this matter, would not attract undue attention. A flock of men asking questions? How long would that remain concealed? Mr. Meiklejohn, the insurance industry depends on discretion. Without discretion there would be no insurance industry.” He picked up his drink again, and this time he downed it all. “We are prepared to be very generous, sir. What we are most afraid of is the possibility that someone has started a new service, a syndicate, if you will, that has a task force composed of people knowledgeable in the business of arson. With inside information about where the old buildings are, if they’re insured, they could approach the owners, make a deal, and light the fires. Mr. Meiklejohn, this matter has already cost three of our companies over a million dollars!”