The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

  They talked about Clark’s ponytail—Frankie agreed with her, voted a resounding no, which gratified Sylvia. The pink of the sky had become a fading lilac by now. As they talked on, the scattered low clouds slowly grayed, until all the heat was out of them and you suddenly noticed the sky behind them, a clean blue again, almost turquoise at the horizon, rising to a darker overhead vastness, pierced and made familiar by the stars.

  Sylvia thought she was looking at the Big Dipper, but she didn’t mention it. None of them but Alfie was good at identifying the constellations, and her primary weakness in this regard was her capacity to see the Big Dipper everywhere. They had fallen silent, surrounded by the night noises and the creaking of one chair or the other, the lazy clinking of ice cubes in Sylvia’s glass as she lifted it or set it down. She had the impulse to apologize to Frankie, but she wasn’t sure she could have named the thing she was sorry for.

  But then Frankie got up to go to bed anyway. She was exhausted, she said. “Maybe by tomorrow I’ll finally be in your time zone.”

  Sylvia sat on alone in the dark. Finally she got up. She went down the hallway into the unfresh warmth of her bedroom. As she was undressing, she had a sudden memory of an evening like this with her grandmother, during that period of real trouble with Alfie, the time when she had thought divorce might be the answer.

  She had come up to New Hampshire without him. It must have been near the end of the summer, because the evening was chilly. She and her grandmother had both put jackets on to sit outside. Sylvia had had a drink then, too, one of several she’d put away over the evening. Her grandmother had noted that and had asked about it, about why she was drinking so much.

  “Is it so much?” Sylvia had asked. “It feels like not quite enough.”

  “Sylvie.” A gentle reproach. It was dark out by then. There was a lamp on in the far corner of the living room, but its light barely reached them on the porch.

  “Oh, I just … can’t stand myself, Gram. I’m so mean. I’m so unpleasant.”

  “To whom? Not to me.”

  “No. Not to you.”

  “To whom, then?”

  “I suppose to the children, mostly.”

  “Not to Alfie?”

  “No, there’s no point in being unpleasant to Alfie. He’s impervious.” She laughed quickly, bitterly. “His gift.”

  They had sat in silence for a while, the easy silence she had with her grandmother. Maybe she’d come up just for this, Sylvia thought. To be at ease, finally.

  “That’s not a gift,” her grandmother said at last in the dark. “It’s a great failing.”

  “Yes,” Sylvia had answered, and this suddenly seemed the truth to her. The explanation for everything.

  “Do you still love him?” her grandmother asked.

  Sylvia felt a wide gulf open under her. A blackness. “Yes,” she said, as if she could save herself with a lie.

  After a while her grandmother said, “Well, it’ll be all right, then.”

  And Sylvia had chosen to believe her.

  7

  Two house fires in Pomeroy within the span of a week have raised the fears of local residents. Both occurred in the unoccupied summer residences of families who hadn’t yet arrived for the season. They started in the early hours of the morning, when they were unlikely to be noticed until they’d almost totally destroyed the houses. In each case, by the time firefighters arrived, according to Pomeroy fire chief Davey Swann, there was nothing to be done but try to prevent sparks from starting fires in nearby brush or trees.

  The first fire, which destroyed the summer residence of the Kershaw and Olsen families, was called in by Emily Gilroy early in the morning on July 3. The Gilroy home is a quarter mile up Carson Road from the Olsen house, in the direction of Green Pond. At about four o’clock, Emily Gilroy said, she was wakened by the smell of smoke. She got up and looked out her window. Down the hill from her house, she could see what she described as “a flickering glow” in the area where she knew the Olsen house to be. The men on duty were summoned, to no avail.

  The second fire occurred in the early morning hours of July 5. This time Alice Dyer, awake in the night to tend to her newborn daughter, happened to look out a window that had a distant view of Mt. Epworth. She saw a large fire partway up the road where the Ludlow house is. Again the call went in, and again firemen arrived with little to do but try to prevent the fire’s spread beyond the already engulfed house.

  Fire Chief Davey Swann has called a meeting at the Town Hall for Thursday night at 7 p.m. to discuss these fires and what residents can do to prevent others. All are encouraged to attend.

  ——

  There was none of that desultory, trickling-in stuff. When Bud drove past the town hall about ten minutes before seven, he could see that the place was already full. The double doors were flung open, and there were people still standing on the steps, moving forward slowly into the dimly lighted interior. He had to drive a long way past the low building to park—he was almost to Snell’s when he found a spot in the row of cars. He walked back slowly, relishing the feel of the warm night air and the pinkish light on the hills that banked the town.

  On the steps, he waited behind Ed Carter to file in. Ed was a summer resident. He had met Bud often, but he still nodded in a purely obligatory way each time he saw him, as though there could be no reason for him to want to talk to Bud, or even to remember him. He was a geezer—white haired, skinny. But an expensive geezer, with a deep tan, wearing what Bud thought of as the high-WASP uniform: green pants, loafers with no socks, a yellow Izod shirt that exposed his skinny brown arms.

  Once Bud got inside, he saw that it was pretty much standing room only, the rows of folding chairs already nearly full and so many people still milling at the back that there was a kind of wall of heat and amplified voices competing with one another that you had to push your way into. He moved forward slowly through the crowd. He greeted Annie Flowers, an elderly summer person who was friendly to everyone. She was tall and boney, with yellowish teeth—a smoker, though you rarely caught her at it. “Apparently it’s a form of homicide,” she’d told Bud once. “So it’s really not possible to practice it publicly anymore.”

  “Our town crier!” she said now, enthusiastically. “Look at what you’ve created,” gesturing as expansively as she could in the crowd.

  “It’d be nice to think I had that much power,” he said.

  “But you do! It’s the power of the press.”

  He smiled at her. He waved to several others who’d raised their hands here and there in greeting to him—Emily Gilroy, Charley March, Shelley Edmonds. As he did, he was conscious of thinking how at home he was here, aware of taking a certain pride in it—Look how many friends I have—and then quickly feeling a bit foolish on account of that. He stopped to talk for a moment to Harlan Early, who was on the fire crew and said he’d give a lot for a good night’s sleep. There had been another fire the night before, the third in six days. Bud had gone to watch it and had spent half the morning writing it up. Now he and Harlan speculated, as Bud had heard others doing throughout the day—at Snell’s, at the café, where he’d stopped midafternoon for coffee—about the possibility of more. Of a kind of reign of arsonous terror that might be upon them.

  “I don’t think we’re anywhere near equipped for that,” Harlan said. “I mean, we’re all just volunteers. We got day jobs we have to do.”

  Bud agreed and commiserated—he was tired, too—and then moved on to find a seat, making his way to the side of the hall where the windows were open onto the thick shrubs pressing against the building outside. He found a spot next to a couple of teenagers and half sat, half leaned, on the sill, surveying the noisy room. He spotted six or seven guys from the fire squad, including several of the younger ones who didn’t usually come to town meetings—Gavin Knox, Tink Snell, Peter Babcock.

  Many of the summer people seemed to be here. They were recognizable—the women, anyway—by a kind of gesture at stylishness
in their dress. But the crowd was about evenly divided, summer, year-round. He saw two of the three farmers left in town sitting down near the front, notable in part for what wasn’t stylish in their attire. One was actually wearing overalls.

  Adrian and Lucy Snell were in the front row—Adrian was turned around to talk to someone in the row behind them, and Bud could hear his assertive voice over the rumble of the crowd, something about the Enrights, about the fire last night at their house. Those who knew were eager to tell. Bud suspected that half the conversations in the room involved the Enrights’ fire and the implicit assertion of being in the know that was part of passing the news along.

  Ah! Now he saw Frankie Rowley sitting with her parents near the back. Her hair was redder than he remembered, and she had pinned it up. Good luck with that—loops of it had escaped and were draped against her neck. Draped prettily, he noted. He watched her, hoping she might look his way, hoping he could catch her eye and wave. Something. Anything. He’d thought of her several times in the last week but had done nothing about it. He wasn’t sure if he would. It hadn’t sounded as if she’d be around very long. Though that had its attractions, too.

  A guy her age was next to her, a long-haired guy in a T-shirt. A boyfriend? Somehow this didn’t seem likely—a vibe he’d gotten from her—though now they leaned together talking, smiling at each other. Maybe that vibe had been imaginary, Buddie boy. Projection.

  At five past the hour, Davey Swann got up from the first row and went to the lectern at the front of the low stage. Bud felt a pang for him. He knew Davey wasn’t comfortable with public speaking. Even with a small group, like one of the monthly meetings of the firefighters that Bud had attended a few times, he always seemed embarrassed, no matter how routine the agenda was. Tonight he had apparently made notes: he set a little sheaf of paper down on the lectern in front of him. He’d dressed up a bit, too—a white shirt, a tie—and it gave him an undertaker’s air. He had a long, thin face, a wispy mustache. He looked small and overwhelmed. He introduced himself and then announced quickly in his gentle, high-pitched voice what Bud and probably two-thirds of the others sitting there already knew—that there’d been another fire beyond the two reported in the town paper.

  There was a collective gasp among the few who hadn’t heard this news yet, and then a low buzz of conversation here and there as they took it in, as they, too, speculated on what it meant. It quieted as Davey went on to explain it: the Enrights’ place. Pretty much totaled, like the others. He said that in any case three fires were three too many. Someone in back yelled, “Louder!”

  Davey cleared his throat, raised his voice. “We’re … concerned, I guess you could say, about this. We’ve asked for the state arson investigators to come in and have a good look around.”

  There was another stir in the room—at someone’s saying the word arson in an official capacity, Bud assumed—and Davey looked up. His eyes moved around the room quickly. “Don’t anybody get worked up about this though. This is … precautionary, just to be sure.”

  He drew a deep breath. “Meantime—” he started, but someone in the crowd called out, “Why’s the state coming in? Why don’t you guys have a look around?”

  Davey was stopped, momentarily. He nodded a few times, as if to say, Okay, that’s fair. Then he said, “Well, the thing is, we don’t one of us volunteers know a thing about arson. Our job is just to fight fires, to put them out. These state guys, they know what signs to look for. How to say where it started, for instance. If there were accelerants used, that type of thing. That’s something you need training for, and our training is just to be firefighters, EMTs, that kind of thing.” He made an apologetic gesture, a lifting of his hands. Then he cleared his throat again. “But what I want to suggest in the meantime is that you think about alarm systems, all of you, the kind that get tied into your smoke detectors. That way, the way it works, as soon as anything starts up, the smoke detectors trigger the alarm, and the alarm would go in to the alarm company, and then they’d call us. Just precautionary, but, for instance, in these three fires, if we coulda had that kind of heads-up, we coulda put them out before they did all the damage they did.”

  Someone’s hand was up.

  “Samuel,” Davey said.

  Samuel Weed stood up, tall, tweedy, a great mop of white hair. Distinguished. A fine poet, or so they said. “Speaking of this alarm system,” he rumbled now. “How much would such a thing cost?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Meaning, you don’t have one,” Samuel said. He seemed amused by this as he sat down.

  Davey sighed. “I live in town, Samuel. It’s different when you’re out a way like you are. If I was you, I’d get one. I’m just saying that if these three houses had had such a system, they might still be standing. Or partially standing.” His mouth tightened. “More of them than is now, anyway.”

  Annie Flowers rose slowly, more or less unfolding herself to her full height. In her gentle, cultivated voice, she asked, “But why would anyone be deliberately burning houses? It makes no sense.” She looked around for an answer.

  After a few seconds, when no one else had responded, Davey said, “Well, I guess you could say arson makes no sense. Unless there’s some motive like insurance?”

  “Well,” Annie said.

  “Are you suggesting the Olsens or the Ludlows set their own houses on fire?” This was Ed Carter.

  “I’m not in the business of suggesting anything,” Davey said. “I’m saying it’s a common motivation.” He gestured. “Bob,” he said.

  Bob Bigelow stood in the third row and turned sideways so that the largest possible number of people could hear him. “Not to say I’m an expert or anything, but I believe there are pathologies that result in arsonous behavior. Theoretically anyway. That it’s not necessarily something that does make sense to other people. My understanding is that it’s a compulsion, the expression of deep-seated psychological disturbances.”

  Adrian Snell had turned to see Bob behind him. Now, without standing, he said, “Okay, there’s that explanation.” His voice boomed. “But there’s insurance, too. I bet half of arson fires are insurance fires.”

  Davey said that it hadn’t been established that any of the fires were arson.

  There was a silence. No one else stood up.

  “So that’s what we’re doing,” Davey said. You could hear the relief in his voice, Bud thought—it was almost over, his stint. “We’re calling in the state arson squad. Plus, we’re going to have us a kind of skeleton crew at the fire station twenty-four-seven until we’re clear what this is. And Bob, Bob Bigelow”—he gestured—“is organizing a rotating night watch, with a group of men who’ve volunteered. Three men a night, just driving around in a couple of shifts. Since he’s putting this together, we’ll let him talk.”

  Talk he did, for more than ten minutes, ignoring the various hands that had gone up almost immediately. There are people who love a meeting, Bud thought, and Bob was one. Though he was a kind man, Bud knew. And he sometimes wrote a thoroughly researched piece for the paper, usually a discussion of local flora or fauna—bird sightings, the location of certain rare mushrooms. Now he explained in detail how he and several others had come up with this proposal, and asked for volunteers to sign up after the meeting.

  Others followed him. Louise Hinton was starting a list of rental possibilities for those whose homes had burned, so they wouldn’t miss the summer up here. Jay McMahon needed volunteers to clear the burn sites once the arson squad was done—haul away the debris and charred timber. The town was making the garbage truck available for free, and there was a call for more volunteers.

  There was an overelaborated discussion of timing and logistics for these efforts. Someone objected to the private use of the garbage truck, and there was a prolonged discussion of that and how it might affect the town budget.

  Bud had been taking notes throughout all this—he was planning to use them for an article that would appear in next w
eek’s paper—but at some point, he stopped. He looked around slowly. What was going on here? He was struck by the imbalance: the people talking, the people taking over the meeting, were summer people. It was true that a couple of the year-round residents had called out a question or two, but the others who’d stood, who’d asked questions or volunteered opinions or had their own agendas, were all summer folk or people who’d been summer folk and then retired here.

  Sitting there, he thought that it was likely he hadn’t seen this dynamic before because he hadn’t seen this mix of the town’s population before. At the town meetings, especially the big ones in March, it was only the year-round people who came, who voted. And in the summer, the events were always organized by the summer residents, for the summer residents.

  This was interesting to him, this meeting, because of the kind of deference, he supposed you’d have to say, that the year-round people were showing to the summer people and their projects.

  As he was thinking about this, he realized that his gaze had settled on Frankie. Her head was tilted to the side, she was apparently listening to Bob, who was speaking again. But then, as if she felt Bud’s eyes on her, her head swung slowly in his direction and she met his gaze, still frowning in concentration, her mouth slightly open.

  He raised his hand as inconspicuously as possible in greeting. Her mouth closed, she nodded and turned away. He watched as a deep redhead’s blush rose from her neck and flooded her cheeks.

  Davey Swann was standing up again. “No one else?” he asked, looking around. “Okay, then,” he said. “I’m going to turn things over now to the police chief, Loren Spader.”

  Spader got up from the third or fourth row, a large man, his belly slung like a bulging sack over his low belt. He came slowly up the center aisle, giving everyone ample time to view his backside. His uniform pants were wide and low, bagging off his butt. His bald spot was clearly visible. He came to the front and looked around thoroughly, nodding at a few people, palpably more comfortable than Davey. He had no notes. He stood to the side of the lectern, resting one hand on it.