Smoke Page 8

  “Oh, right, of course,” I say. “I’ve been a bit distracted by . . . the fire. It’s Saturday, yes?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Still being held at the base of the Peak?”

  “I’d imagine.”

  “They might have to cancel it. If the fire worsens.”

  “Oh?” he says, not bothering to lower the paper this time. “That would be a blow to the whole town, I’m sure.”

  I suppress a laugh. “Either way, it might turn out to be a front-row seat to watching half the town being burned to a crisp.”

  “Surely not,” he says, and the subject is closed.

  “So Deputy Clark should do some interviews at the high school and at Voyages too,” I tell Rich when he gets into work and I’ve filled him in on what we’ve learned so far from a forensic perspective. Likely source: fire pit. Likely cause: human.

  “Based on what?” Rich asks.

  “Our interview with John Phillips.”

  I hand him a copy of the report I typed up in the still morning. I’ve had a productive couple of hours. I feel strangely proud that Judy will have nothing to complain about with respect to my arrival time today. I was in the office, ensconced in my closet, long before she came in.

  As Rich scans my pages, I look out his window. Like so much of the town, it has a view of Nelson Peak. The smoke behind it is thicker today, and a haze has enveloped the mountain, so from where I’m standing, it looks out of focus. It’s hard to imagine anything marring it, worse still our house.

  Rich puts the report down and leans his chair back, resting his boots on the desk.

  “Seems pretty obvious what happened here, even if Phillips won’t admit it. Why not just bring him in for formal questioning? Then we can decide if we’ll lay charges.”

  “But he says there have been kids hanging out on his property. Teenagers. Drinking, using his fire pit, that sort of stuff. He says they were there that night.”

  “At one in the morning? On a Monday night?”

  I feel a prickle of unease.

  “He has made complaints about them before. I found these in the system.”

  I pass a second set of papers to him—the police reports of the complaints Phillips made to the sheriff’s department. A pack of rowdy teenagers had been using his backyard as their personal playground all summer, drinking, setting off firecrackers, leaving things on his porch for him to trip over when he came roaring out into the night to drive them away. A sort of Chinese water torture of harassment, for God only knows what reason.

  “If these check out, I think it’s our most likely avenue of investigation,” I say. “Guys like Phillips know better than to burn anything in these conditions. Besides, same logic applies, right? Why would he be out there at one in the morning?”

  “I’ve found,” Rich says, his chair precariously close to tipping over, “that logic rarely applies in these kinds of situations.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Root Causes

  Mindy

  Angus’s birth had been so easy that Mindy thought her friends had been lying to her about the trauma of childbirth. Rationally, she knew this wasn’t true, that she was simply lucky the mind-blowing pain they’d described to her, in detail, hadn’t been part of her equation, that she’d barely had to push because Angus seemed so eager to get out in the world he left without a moment’s hesitation.

  He’d been an easy baby too. Sleeping through the night at six weeks, happy to amuse himself with his blocks, and simple to leave at the half-day day care she’d enrolled him in so she could finish writing her PhD thesis and apply for postdoc positions without any sense of guilt. After all, she’d been in day care from an early age, as had Peter, and they’d turned out fine. Fine. Angus leaped so easily into the arms of strangers, he’d surely be fine too.

  So there wasn’t any reason to think things would be different with Carrie, and in the beginning, they hadn’t been. Her birth had been a bit more of a labor, but Mindy felt like this was her due. And despite their worry that he’d be jealous of his new sister, Angus simply seemed fascinated, hanging over her crib for hours making faces and babbling to her in his particular brand of baby talk.

  Eight weeks, they’d had. Eight weeks as a normal family of four, adjusting, laughing, trying to catch naps when they could. Eight weeks of thinking that her life was on one track when it was really on another.

  Then Mindy found Carrie blue and gasping in her crib when she went to wake her for a feed on a beautiful afternoon. Mindy’s scream reached out through the open window and brought her neighbor, the EMT, running. He’d performed the CPR that saved Carrie’s life while Mindy frantically found the phone, dialed 911 and then Peter, convinced that Carrie was already lost. On the blurred ride to the hospital with Angus clinging to her, crying uncharacteristically, Mindy couldn’t help but feel that she should have known something like this would happen. That it was happening because she hadn’t been 100 percent caught up in the well-being of her children. That in keeping some space for herself, she’d been selfish, and this was her punishment.

  What was wrong with Carrie turned out to probably be genetic, one of those anomalies that takes two flawed genes, one from each parent, to produce. If that was the case, then both she and Peter created the problem at the moment of conception, and in total ignorance. It was called ventricular septal defect, which meant there was a hole in her baby’s heart. Though most cases were diagnosed soon after birth and treated easily, somehow the large hole in Carrie’s heart had been missed. That happened sometimes, the doctors reassured her. Peter was convinced that they were just worried they’d be sued.

  Mindy couldn’t think about that. Who cared about lawyers and money and pointing fingers when there was a chunk of her daughter’s heart missing? Two open-heart surgeries later, Mindy still felt like she was in shock—shivering, cold, unable to focus. Although Carrie’s prognosis was good—there shouldn’t be any lifelong problems so long as she had good dental hygiene, of all things, because there was still a risk of bacteria getting into her blood and hiding in the rough areas that remained in her heart—Mindy felt permanently changed by the experience. Gone was the nonchalance, the ease of motherhood she’d experienced before. In came the Mindy she was now, the one with no confidence, the hypochondriac who made constant vigilance her motto.

  That Mindy agreed to move to Nelson without a passing thought. She would never run a lab now—how could she leave her kids in the hands of strangers? It didn’t matter where she lived, so long as it was safe for Carrie, safe for Angus. And Nelson was beautiful, the air was clean, everyone looked so healthy, perhaps they could recover there. Perhaps she could recover there.

  In a sense, she did. Years passed, and nothing happened. Carrie grew and fell in love with ballet and found a focus Mindy felt was almost frightening sometimes. Angus turned into a funny little boy who lived to make his mother laugh. Days would go by when Mindy wouldn’t think the worst, then weeks. She started working part-time, not at anything complicated, just the chemistry lab at the high school while the kids were in school, which left her available when they needed her.

  She realized now, though, that when she thought she was manning the fort, what she’d really been doing was letting her guard down. She’d been lulled back into happiness, and that had made her lax. Left her in some halfway house between the old Mindy and the new.

  But today she woke with the fear firmly back.

  And the name on her lips was Angus.

  “Angus! Get over here and eat your breakfast.”

  An hour after the terrifying beginning to her day, Mindy sighed. She hated how often she had to raise her voice these days. No, more than that. Actually yell at her children to get them to do anything she asked. She’d always flinched around people bellowing at their children before she had kids, as if those parents’ words were a whip that might catch her by accident. But it seemed to be the only way to get her kids’ attention now, as if they knew the hollering was so a
gainst her nature that it was like a slap she’d never administer.

  But still, Angus didn’t move. She walked over to the computer where he was zoned in to his Ask.fm feed—though not too zoned in to minimize it before she could focus on the words.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? No computer before school unless it’s—”

  “For school. I know, Mom.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “It’s just . . . these guys are being mean to Willow, and I wanted to check if she was okay.”

  He ducked his head as he’d done his whole life when he was saying something that was leaving out an essential detail. Willow Koning was, well, in Mindy’s day, Willow would’ve been Angus’s girlfriend. These days, Mindy didn’t know what they were, only that Angus’s usual brashness and confidence slipped when it came to her.

  “I’m sure she’s fine. Plus, you’ll see her in half an hour. Come eat.”

  He closed the browser without opening his page again. She knew from experience that he’d changed the computer’s settings so that if she reopened it later, his password would be deleted automatically. She kept meaning to ask Peter to change the settings so she could . . . not snoop exactly, but be a parent like you needed to be these days in the world of cyberbullying and Ask.fm and “No one’s on Facebook anymore, Mom. That’s for parents.”

  “Listen to your mother,” Peter said from the table when Angus was already halfway there.

  Something in Peter’s tone made Mindy look at him carefully for the first time that day. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his lips dragged downward like they did when he hadn’t been sleeping properly. She chastised herself for not noticing. She wasn’t one of those women who’d replaced their husband with their children. Peter was usually front and center on her radar, right there along with them.

  As she watched him slice a banana, she wondered whether his sleeplessness might also have something to do with Angus. Not that slightly off feeling they’d both had the last year, but the twang of panic that was still lodged in her chest. She should mention it to Peter, she knew, but she didn’t want him to dismiss it.

  “Everything okay?” she asked instead.

  He looked up, dazed, unfocused. “Just a potential situation at work. I can’t really talk about it.”

  Another worry joined Mindy’s list. There’d been a lot of layoffs at the bank. Well, a lot by Nelson standards. Two, to be exact. Peter losing his job would be a real crisis, though they were conservative savers by nature. With college coming up and health insurance and . . . Mindy shuddered. What was wrong with her today?

  “Should I be concerned? I can try looking for work. It’s been a while since I—”

  “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I might have to get the police involved in something, that’s all.”

  Mindy felt a measure of relief, which was immediately replaced by guilt. Ever since the economy tanked, Peter had to repossess more houses than he could count. Sometimes, people did things—ripped out fixtures, took appliances, or worse—as an act of revenge against what they saw as unfairness. Peter didn’t condone that kind of behavior, but that didn’t make it easier to get those people in more trouble than they were in already.

  “Repossession gone wrong?”

  “Something like that.”

  She reached over and rubbed his knuckles. His skin was rough, dried out.

  “I know you hate those kinds of cases.”

  “I’ll survive. What’s on your plate today?”

  Mindy turned to watch Angus as he slowly ate a piece of pancake toast that had gotten cold waiting for him (it was French toast, really, but the name they’d given it when the kids were little had stuck). She felt too nervous to eat. Whether it was because of the way she woke up that morning or what was coming up later in the day, she wasn’t sure.

  “Oh, me? I’m going into the lion’s den.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Threads

  Elizabeth

  I decide to walk the six blocks to the sheriff’s office for my meeting with Detective Donaldson, who filled out the police reports lodged by John Phillips. To the extent the sheriff’s department looked into his complaints, which seems to be not really, Donaldson would know what isn’t in the reports.

  “If there’s anything that isn’t in the reports,” I can hear Rich’s skeptical voice.

  I shut Rich out as I walk along Sullivan Street and turn right on Main. A haze fills the streets, making my eyes water. The sound my feet make as they hit the slatted sidewalk boards feels crushed, like it’s weighted down and can’t rise to announce my presence like it normally would. It’s an eerie feeling; it makes the town seem derelict, though it’s the thick of the workday.

  The sheriff’s office is in the old post office, a nondescript stone building from the sixties. There’s another sheriff’s office on the west side of the town square, a tourist version with a covered wagon over the entrance, where little kids get gold stars to wear on their lapels, and a mock shootout occurs every day at two o’clock—the apocryphal time the only shooting that ever happened in town occurred, a hundred and twenty years ago.

  Detective Donaldson has one of the two enclosed offices in the Main Street building; Sheriff Thompson has the other. Everybody else shares desks in the bullpen, which is full right now at the shift change. Deputy Clark is talking to another officer by the coffee machine. He tips his hat at me when I catch his eye.

  Donaldson’s office is in the back corner. He’s on the phone. He waves me in, holding his thumb and index finger a half inch apart to indicate he won’t be long.

  He hangs up a moment later, and we go through the usual pleasantries, or what passes for them these days. No new news about the fire. Yes, I think it might get bad. No, I wasn’t so sure the case was that open-and-shut.

  “Clark tells me the fire pit at the back of Phillips’s house was the point of origin. So I’m thinking it’s time to bring him in for a talk,” he says. About forty, he has the confidence I’ve come to associate with detectives through the reality of television, because everyone knows they’re the smart ones. Of course, that includes me too, so I should shut the hell up.

  “But what about the kids he mentioned?” I say. “The reports checked out, right?”

  He runs his hand over his receding hairline. His head is almost shaved, but the just-visible W pattern on his forehead gives him away.

  “Those kids weren’t starting fires, they were harassing him. Throwing crap at his house. Stringing toilet paper between the trees.”

  “But if they were in his yard that night . . . they had been back there before, yes?”

  “Sure enough. Drinking beer. Smoking pot and God knows what else.”

  “You ever figure out who they were?”

  “My best guess was one of the gangs from Spanish Town, but I could never get anyone to talk to me. They don’t talk to gringos.”

  “Didn’t Phillips say the kids were white?”

  “It was dark out. He saw kids running away. What does he know?”

  I grit my teeth. Donaldson doesn’t want to think it could be “ordinary” kids, as he calls them, white kids with rich parents who don’t live in the one poor area in town. Kids with parents who’ll hire lawyers and make his life difficult. I’ve seen this kind of thinking from him before, the few times we’ve worked together. His first port of call is always Spanish Town; I heard he’d even gone looking for the bank robber there, though the bank’s video footage clearly showed a head of blond hair under the bandanna the robber wore across his face. It’s also probably why he—and Rich—are fixated on Phillips. No one will come to his defense.

  “So,” I say, “what’s your theory? John Phillips burned his house down on purpose by lighting a few pieces of paper in the fire pit two hundred yards from the building?”

  “Maybe he laid a trail of fire-starter from there to the house, knowing the evidence would be burned away?”

  “But it wouldn’t be
. And nothing’s been found in the wreckage. Where’d he put the can, for instance?”

  Donaldson shrugs. Details. Details.

  “And why’d he do it?” I can’t help but add. “Everything he owned was in that house.”

  “All right, all right, calm down, calm down.” He leaves out the little lady, though it’s clearly implied. “I wasn’t saying he did it on purpose. Accidents happen, you know.”

  Four and a half years ago, I worked an out-of-state fire that turned out to have been started by a child who’d gotten hold of his father’s barbecue starter and wanted to imitate the way his dad lit the fire for marshmallows on their camping trips. It was the end of a very dry spring, and fires were blazing up everywhere. Though I was supposed to be investigating the fire, we were shorthanded, and I ended up working on the site, which I was more than happy to do because I was having trouble shaking off the devastation this striking little boy had caused. I couldn’t wait for the beautiful oblivion of sleep that would come after twelve hours of grueling work.

  But exhausting myself physically and mentally wasn’t enough to drive away the last conversation I’d had with his mother. The fire had killed two people at that point—the grandchildren of an older couple who hadn’t checked the batteries in their smoke detectors—and emotions were running high. When I went to see her in their tiny apartment, Karen—or Carol, how awful that I can’t remember—had been up all night soothing her son’s nightmares. Their phone was ringing off the hook. I asked her why she didn’t unplug it.

  “I don’t want to miss their call,” she said. She was young, not even twenty-five, but she looked at once childlike and older than I was. Her clothes didn’t fit properly, and the house had an ingrained messiness to it, something much more permanent than could have occurred over the past few days.