Burn All Alike

by Nene Adams

  While she settled gingerly on a rickety wooden stool in front of the bulky microform reader, Marilyn fetched the correct box.

  “The machine’s connected to a printer upstairs,” Marilyn said when she returned, pulling out the reader’s microfiche tray with brisk efficiency. The glass cover rose. She inserted a microfiche from the box she’d retrieved. “I’m taking a ballpark guess as to which date the story ran, but you should find what you’re looking for here. If not, don’t go looking on your own. Come get me or call me.”

  “I know the drill.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to remind you. And you can print out an article, but you’ll have to pick it up from the bullpen. Let me know and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks.” Mackenzie began adjusting the zoom and focus knobs.

  “You can use the phone if you need to call.” Marilyn pointed at an old black plastic rotary dial telephone mounted on the wall. “Dial zero, then two. All set? Great.” She hurried away, muttering under her breath something about deadlines and deliveries.

  Mackenzie scrolled through the issues until she found the story, dated almost five weeks prior. Reading the article left her little wiser, apart from the information that the warehouse in question was owned by Rosalyn Parker, granddaughter of the soup factory’s founder and the business’s current owner. Rosalyn’s corporate spokesperson had declined to comment on her behalf. According to the rest of the story, the fire chief planned to request an arson investigator from Macon look into the suspicious circumstances.

  She sat back, nearly fell off the wobbly stool and grabbed the edge of the desk to keep her balance. Questions crowded the forefront of her brain, but two questions in particular rose above the rest, demanding to be answered.

  Was the fire caused by an arsonist? And how the hell had Turner Erskine’s cheap, crappy desk gotten into Rosalyn Parker’s warehouse in the first place?

  Chapter Five

  Dissatisfied, Mackenzie hit Print, removed the microfiche from the reader, returned it to the box and turned off the machine before trudging upstairs. She found no sign of Marilyn. Attempts to subtly catch someone’s eye failed miserably.

  “Hey, I’m looking for, uh, Truman Female,” she called to the newsroom in general.

  “It’s pronounced Fee-mah-lee,” said a young man hovering around Larkin’s desk. He walked to her. “That’s me. What can I do for you?”

  Mackenzie looked him over. About Marilyn’s age, dark haired, cherubic, with guileless blue eyes she’d bet had gotten him out of trouble countless times. “Your byline’s on an article about a warehouse fire five weeks ago. A warehouse owned by Rosalyn Parker.”

  Truman regarded her with a little more interest. “That’s right.”

  “Any follow-up?”

  “You mean did the arson investigator from Macon find anything? The expert hasn’t filed an official report yet. I’d have heard about that. Why do you want to know?”

  She ignored his question. “Was there really a question of arson? Or did the chief send to Macon to cover his ass for some reason?” When Truman didn’t answer, she added, “I’m sure Little Jack will tell me what I want to know anyway. We’re old friends. He looks kind of busy right now, so if you can help me out, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

  Truman pursed his lips. “You’re Larkin’s friend?”

  “Known him since high school. How about it? I’m not trying to steal your thunder, Mr. Fee-mah-lee. I’m not a reporter. I own a business here in town: Finders & Keepers, Inc. Look me up in the phone book. Better yet, ask Little Jack.” Truman didn’t walk away, so she went on, “There’s a man suing me over a piece of furniture he claims was destroyed in this warehouse fire, so I’m trying to get as much information as I can.”

  “Furniture?” Truman appeared intrigued. “This piece allegedly happened to be in the same warehouse owned by Rosalyn—”

  “Parker, I know. Ma Parker’s Pot O’ Soup. No alleged about it.” Mackenzie drew him closer by lowering her voice. “To tell the truth, I find it odd this guy who’s suing me kept a reproduction desk in someone else’s warehouse. As far as I know, he and Ms. Parker aren’t related or associated in any way. Can you tell me anything that wasn’t in the printed article? You know, the stuff the legal department won’t let you publish for lack of corroboration or because Mr. Wyatt doesn’t like lawsuits any more than I do.”

  He studied her a moment. “If I help you, you’ll owe me,” he said finally.

  “Agreed,” Mackenzie said, wondering why she had the feeling she’d made a pact with the Devil. Probably Truman’s grin, which seemed too wicked for his angelic face.

  Truman told her Chief Irvine, the retired firefighter from Atlanta who ran Antioch’s volunteer department, had sent to Macon for an experienced arson investigator because he suspected the warehouse fire had been set deliberately. The investigator’s preliminary report mentioned no immediate evidence of arson, but also hadn’t determined the cause of the fire.

  “Ms. Parker stored antiques in there, things she inherited after her grandmother died,” Truman confided. “Furniture and stuff. No oily rags, no faulty electrics, no leaky combustibles, no obvious reason for a fire to start. I thought maybe it was a case of insurance fraud, but the expert hasn’t found evidence of arson so far, kind of the same as those other fires. How this relates to the guy who’s suing you, I have no idea.” He shrugged. “You can request a copy of Chief Irvine’s report at the Public Records office, if that’ll help your case.”

  Mackenzie thanked him and started to go. She stopped as the import of his words struck. “What other fires?” she asked, turning around.

  Truman straightened, his expression smooth and bland. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, his blue eyes more guileless than ever.

  “You mentioned ‘those other fires.’ What other fires?” Mackenzie persisted. “Have there been other fires in Antioch? What’s going on?”

  “I misspoke.”

  “The hell you did.”

  As if sensing trouble, James Larkin appeared, clapping a big, broad hand on Truman’s shoulder. Standing over six feet tall and dark-skinned, he made the younger man look like a pale shrimp in comparison. “Didn’t I warn you about riling Kenzie Cross?” he asked Truman. “She’s as persistent as a snapping turtle. Once she gets her jaws locked around a notion, she won’t let it go for love or money.”

  “Seriously? A snapping turtle? That’s the best you can do?” Mackenzie huffed, pretending to be offended.

  “Would you rather I likened you to Balaam’s ass?” Larkin smiled and spun Truman around to face the newsroom. “Let me handle Kenzie. You go finish that story you were working on and this time, use spell check before handing it over to the copy editor, okay?”

  Looking like he’d received a reprieve from a firing squad, Truman hurried off.

  “As for you,” Larkin went on to Mackenzie, “why are you hanging around here intimidating my cub reporter?”

  The lightness of his tone didn’t match the serious expression in his eyes. Mackenzie swallowed the clever quip she’d been about to make and said instead, “The warehouse fire. I read the story Truman wrote.”

  “Pretty good for a couple of inches of copy on page eight.”

  “And he says there have been other fires.”

  Larkin frowned. “Kenzie, don’t go there.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “I’m a member of the public. Doesn’t the public have a right to know?” A bit much to throw in his face, perhaps, but she hoped they’d been friends long enough that he wouldn’t hold the cheesy line against her.

  “Not when the newspaper’s still working on the damned story.” He grimaced. “Kenzie, it’s not that I don’t trust you—”

  “But you don’t trust me not to bust your scoop.” She folded her arms across her chest and stared steadily at him. “Really, Little Jack. You wound me.”

  “C’mon, Kenzie, don’t be that way.” He sighed. “Fine. But not here, okay? If Tru
man found out I told somebody about his investigative piece, he’d kill me.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Let me call Esme first, let her know I’m out of the office.”

  Mackenzie waited while he returned to his desk to make the call to his wife, who’d recently given birth to their son, James Larkin III—nicknamed “Peanut.” Larkin had practically floated around town until Esme’s mother came to help with the baby. She grinned to herself. The arrival of his mother-in-law had brought him back to earth with a bump.

  Larkin came around the counter. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Mackenzie asked, following him outside.

  He paused. “You okay with the Golden Buddha?”

  She made a face. “You know I’m not wild about the new cook.”

  “You mean that guy with the weird eye?” Larkin gestured at his face. “He quit a while back. They have a new new cook, Delmar Li. He’s pretty good. The Mongolian beef’s never been better.” He feigned a poke at her flat chest. “You could use a good feeding, girl.”

  “And you could use a little less time at the trough,” Mackenzie retorted, sinking a finger into his soft belly. “I thought Esme put you on a diet.”

  Larkin shrugged. “What my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

  The Golden Buddha stood on Stiles Avenue between Four Points Pharmacy and a discount shoe store. A ten-minute walk after leaving the Antioch Bee, she and Larkin stepped through the restaurant doors. She was immediately assaulted by the smells of hot peanut oil, garlic, frying onions, five spice powder and…smoke?

  While she and Larkin stood in the front of the restaurant waiting for someone to appear, the kitchen doors at the back of the dining room swung open. An Asian man dressed in chef’s whites stumbled out. His terrified gaze locked onto her.

  “Hungry ghosts!” he screamed.

  Behind him crawled a sinuous billow of smoke from the kitchen.

  Chapter Six

  “Mr. Li—Delmar—is the kitchen on fire?” Larkin asked, cell phone in hand, his thumb poised to hit speed dial. “Do you need the fire department?”

  Delmar muttered something indistinct. He made a weak gesture at the swinging kitchen doors and shook his head.

  An older Asian man in chef’s whites came out of the kitchen to join Delmar and began talking to him in Chinese. Mackenzie didn’t understand a word, but the man’s aggrieved, almost frightened tone came through loud and clear.

  At last, Delmar shook his head a second time and addressed Larkin. “No, sir, just a grease fire in the kitchen. It’s out now. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine.” A sickly sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He swallowed. “Please, let me show you to a table. My uncle says to bring you spring rolls on the house. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  The smoke had dissipated by the time he finished speaking. Mackenzie noted a discolored, oily sheen on the ceiling above the swinging doors, as well as a lingering trace of the burnt meat smell she’d detected earlier in Stubbs Park. Larkin glanced at her. She shrugged. No obvious fire. As Delmar insisted, everything seemed under control.

  A yellow flash in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Slowly, ever so slowly, she turned her head to view the spirit sidelong, squinting at the brilliant halo of flames surrounding the flat, black silhouette with its eerie golden eyes. The apparition was so close, she could have reached out and touched it, yet she felt no heat. Nevertheless, the skin of her arms—exposed by her short-sleeved shirt—became irritated like the beginning of a sunburn. Her insides went cold. Was this what Delmar had meant by “hungry ghosts?”

  She couldn’t keep the question from popping into her head: hungry for what?

  The spirit winked out of existence.

  Larkin allowed himself to be ushered to a table and drew Mackenzie along in his wake. “Spring rolls sound good, thank you,” he said to Delmar as a waiter in a black suit and tie emerged from the kitchen at a trot. “Please thank your uncle on our behalf.”

  A shaky Delmar took his uncle by the elbow and guided him to the swinging kitchen doors. The older man berated him the entire way in sharp bursts of Chinese. Delmar opened the doors gingerly, flinching as if expecting an attack. When nothing appeared to happen, he and his uncle disappeared inside. The doors flapped shut behind them.

  The waiter brought menus and glasses of ice water to the table. He, too, seemed nervous when he took their appetizer orders and ventured back to the kitchen much less quickly than he’d come out.

  The spring rolls and delicate steamed dumplings Larkin recommended were delicious, Mackenzie discovered, as was the spicy General Tso’s chicken and pork fried rice she ordered to go with an ice-cold bottle of Tsingtao beer.

  Larkin, bless his curious reporter’s heart, ate his portion of Dragon and Phoenix—stir-fried shrimp and chicken with vegetables—in a distracted state, most of his attention on the closed kitchen doors. Speculation gleamed in his eyes.

  “Hey, Jack,” Mackenzie said after the third time he raised an empty fork to his mouth, “what’s going on? You promised to tell me about the fires.”

  “Shh,” Larkin hissed. He glanced around the empty restaurant and hitched his chair a little closer to hers. “Look, it’s not my story. It’s Truman’s.”

  “And he’ll never hear from me that you spilled the beans.”

  “Okay, you asked me about the Parker warehouse fire, right? Well, that’s not the first. There’ve been a rash of fires in Antioch starting about two months ago. It looks like there’s maybe a serial arsonist in town—”

  Mackenzie stared at him. “Two months?” she asked an octave higher than normal. “Goddamn it, Jack, why haven’t you broken the story yet? People could be in danger!” Veronica could be in danger. She recalled the police station fire that afternoon. If anything happened to her…she smothered the unwelcome thought.

  “Keep your voice down!” Larkin ordered, looking nervous. “The fact is, we don’t have many facts to report except some suspicious fires around town. But there’s no actual evidence of arson so far according to the police and Chief Irvine. We’re looking deeper into things, trying to find a connection, a lead, something other than coincidence.”

  “And George Wyatt won’t let you run the story without rock solid proof.”

  “Wyatt’s been skittish ever since the paper was sued over that Bear-Man debacle a few years ago that turned out to be Abel Foley on a hunting trip.”

  Silence descended while Mackenzie—and Larkin, no doubt—recalled the highly controversial “Bear-Man” story. Someone had sent in pictures of Mitford County’s answer to Bigfoot, which turned out to be a naked and drunk Abel Foley, a very hirsute man who could have given a black bear a run for its money in the big and hairy department. After the furor died down, Foley’s wife sued the paper for libel and defamation of her husband’s character.

  “Truman told me Chief Irvine sent to Macon for help,” she said at last, putting Foley’s folly out of her mind.

  “Irvine has Bob McCarty, the investigator from Macon, looking into all the fires to date. McCarty will probably check into what happened today at the police station, too.”

  “Are you planning to interview McCarty?”

  “Not me. Like I said, it’s Truman’s baby. I’m just mentoring him.”

  “Were any other structures damaged by the warehouse fire? Like, I don’t know, nearby storage units or something like that? I’m just trying to understand how Turnip Erskine’s desk got damaged in a fire starting in Rosalyn Parker’s warehouse.”

  Larkin reached across the table, snagged her beer bottle and took the last swallow, ignoring her protest. He set down the empty bottle and burped the words, “No idea.”

  Mackenzie gazed at him narrowly, waving away ginger and garlic fumes. “Damn, that’s nasty, Jack. Didn’t marrying Esme civilize you any?”

  “Only when decent folks are around.” He signaled the waiter for more Tsingtao and hunkered even closer to her chair. “Lis
ten, Kenzie, I’ve been doing some digging into the archives on my own. If there is a serial arsonist, he’s older than you think.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Mackenzie stopped chasing the last few grains of pork fried rice around the plate with her fork. “Do tell.”

  “There was another rash of fires in Antioch some time ago.” He paused until she swatted his arm, then he continued in a whisper, “In 1945.”

  She met his gaze. He wasn’t joking. “How many fires are we talking about?”

  “Not sure. Maybe as many as eleven, culminating in the Big Burn.” He settled back in his chair, raising an eyebrow as though daring her to question his statement.

  The waiter delivered fresh beers to the table while Mackenzie absorbed what Larkin had told her. She’d heard about the Big Burn, of course—an event more destructive for the city of Antioch than Sherman’s March to the Sea was for Atlanta. Many families had been affected, even hers. Meemaw Cross certainly told a hair-raising account of the devastation.

  Larkin stabbed a chunk of red bell pepper with his fork and ate it. “What makes the coincidence even odder is that places set on fire in 1945 are similar to targets today, at least so far,” he said around the mouthful. “Golden Buddha’s on the list.”

  Paying little attention to his bad manners, Mackenzie asked, “Are you sure?”

  “As near as I can be. Bear in mind there was a war going on in the forties. Reading between the lines of the stories in the newspaper archive, I guess local authorities suspected a saboteur might be involved. Bet you anything the sheriff’s people let journalists know only the information they deemed safe for the public, what with national security and all.”

  “But why would the same person set the same fires again, more than seventy years apart? Besides, if it is the same person, he’s a very old man by now.”