The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

  “So we, we packed up all our fancy stuff, our radios, our computers, our medical equipment, and left. Trucks, you know, took us to the airstrip so we could get out. And we could see the villagers leaving, too, carrying their stuff, possessions bundled in cloths on their heads or their backs. Carrying their babies—some of them the babies we were supposed to be treating. Heading off into the bush to hide, to wait it out.”

  She sat still. She was playing with her napkin, tearing it into strips. “We left. We left, and they stayed.” She made a funny noise, an exhalation. “That was always our option,” she said. “To go. Our great privilege.” She was sarcastic, angry.

  “But if you’d stayed, you would have been killed, I assume.”

  “Killed, or raped.” She shrugged. “Or maybe not. Not all of them were. We heard it wasn’t too bad.” She laughed, once. “But you see my point.”

  “I don’t, really.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just … I had a way out. I always had a way out. And it marked a terrible … divide, I guess you’d say. I wasn’t African. I couldn’t be African.”

  “And that’s what you wanted?”

  After a pause, she said, “I wish I could explain it. I just … I felt so … allied with them, but when we were up against it—when they were up against it—I couldn’t be their ally.” Her hair swayed as she shook her head. “And this, this bombing … why should they be chosen to suffer again, when the bombers wanted to punish America, clearly?”

  “Because the bombers were very, very stupid.”

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “Or very, very callous,” he said. “Or both.”

  They sat without speaking for a long moment. They were finished eating, though she’d left part of her sandwich.

  “Do you want anything else?” he asked.

  “Food?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She gestured at her plate. “No.”

  “Shall I take you home then?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that. I can call my mother, if it’s not convenient.”

  “No, I want to do it. I just meant, are you finished with everything you need to get done on the phone.”

  “I am. For now.” She pushed back from the table. “I’ve got a healthcare place I’ll want to go look at in Whitehall, and one in Black Mountain. They’ve got an Alzheimer’s day-care program and a visiting-nurse association in the Whitehall center, and a hospice attached to an Alzheimer’s program in Black Mountain. I think something might work out for my mother—for my father, really. But I want to check it out first.”

  “You’ve been busy,” he said.

  “I got a lot of calling done, yes.”

  “Will you need a car when you go?”

  “Bud.” She made a stern face. “I’m not going to ask you to drive me to Whitehall.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Just … you could use my car.”

  “I’m not going to borrow your car, either.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because you need it. You’re like Loren. It’s your office.”

  He laughed. “Now there’s a nightmare vision.”

  “What?”

  “Becoming like Loren.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen. Never fear.”

  “If only you could guarantee that to me.”

  “Mmm,” she said. Her face shifted somehow. “I guess there are no guarantees.”

  Her voice was cooler, and he realized that it had come around again, that he had pushed it—there was something in what he had said that seemed to be asking for something from her.

  Now she got up with their plates and went back to the kitchen. And then to the living room, to get her purse, her book. He was silent. He rinsed the plates in the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher.

  In the car, more than halfway to her house—her sister’s house—she spoke first. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For?”

  “For letting me use your home. For listening to me. For coming to tell me about the bombings. That was … kind.”

  “Shucks,” he said. She looked over at him and, after a moment, grinned. He was happy, suddenly.

  “For showing me the aurora borealis,” she said, still smiling.

  “Come on: for arranging for the aurora borealis.”

  “Well, that too. That was kind.”

  “That was work.”

  After a minute, she said quietly, “It was wonderful.”

  When they parked in front of her sister’s house, Bud wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t sure even if he should turn the engine off.

  “I think you’d better come in,” she said. She was facing forward, as if they were still driving, as if there were something to look at in the road ahead.

  Something happened in his body, and he felt himself getting hard. “Because …?” he said.

  “Because I have so much …” She turned to him, not smiling now. “So much to thank you for.”

  15

  A Letter from the Editor

  Here’s what an arsonist on the loose does to a small town. First, of course, everyone is afraid. That could happen anywhere, but in a small town, the person you’re afraid of is bound to be someone you know, someone you probably see regularly in the store, at church, at the post office. The sense of community that is the bedrock of small-town life is broken, suddenly. People look at one another with suspicion and fear, friend to friend, father to son, wife to husband.

  Everyone is on edge. In our town, the fires have almost always been set at night, so people don’t sleep well, listening for the footstep outside on the porch, the splash of kerosene or gasoline or charcoal starter at the doors or windows. Families take turns. Tonight I get to sleep and you stay awake to watch; tomorrow night you’ll sleep and I’ll stay up. Everyone is exhausted. The men in the volunteer fire department are exhausted, too. They’ve risen again and again from their beds and driven across town to try to put out fires that were set with the confounding intention of causing maximum damage.

  People have armed themselves. We’re a community of many hunters, so that wasn’t a difficult step, but it was a radical one, getting the guns out before hunting season, having them always loaded and close at hand. It’s resulted in at least one accident, fortunately not fatal. But more important, it’s brought the fear of one another to that extreme a possibility: If he comes here, I will shoot him. Or worse: Let him come here. I want to shoot him.

  There are plenty of business opportunities that present themselves, and there are those ready to step in and seize them. Would you like a handgun, or an alarm system, or someone standing guard at your door all night? Could you use extra locks, or motion-detector lights? These have all been made available for purchase, and many of us have bought at least one of them.

  This is to say nothing of the loss of housing stock in the community. Thirteen structures have so far been totally lost, and two more will require substantial rebuilding. Some of the losses are of houses that had survived from the town’s founding in 1785. Some were built by a local master builder of summer cottages in the twenties and thirties, Hall Moody. All were vested with memories, with history, both personal and civic, and all are mourned, not just by the families that owned them, but by the whole community.

  By now the wider world has begun to notice what’s going on here. It wasn’t surprising when the Winslow and Whitehall papers sent reporters to talk to townspeople about the fires. But after the fifth fire, the wire services began to reproduce parts of local articles, and that has happened more frequently with each additional fire. Your editor has been contacted by the Boston Globe and the New York Times, and we’ve had several visits from the Globe reporter. At this point, our town’s story is national news.

  There are other visitors, too. We’ve gotten used to the state police cruising the roads, parked at Snell’s or the café. Most of us drive or walk daily past the office the arson squad has opened behind the post office in Pomeroy
Center. And we welcome the work the state police and the arson squad are doing to try to help us. But their presence, too, marks a change in our lives here, and we’ll be glad when we no longer have need of them.

  The local and state police report that they have several persons of interest they are speaking to. For the sake of everything we hold dear in our town, we hope they can make an arrest soon and end the state of siege our citizens feel they’ve been living under these past weeks.

  Bud was still covering all the local news, all the usual stories. The weather, the deaths, weddings, illnesses, the meeting of the North Pomeroy Social Club—“All the Usual Refreshments Served”—the interminable repair of the bridge over Silsby Brook.

  All of these, though, were just the thrumming background music to what was really happening, the fires, and he’d written about them from every angle he could think of by now.

  He had covered each fire as it came along, of course. He had talked to the victims, including those who’d been in their houses when the fires started—there were three of these families by the end of August. He had written stories about how the fires had changed the owners’ lives. He had written about how they changed the lives of people in town. He did a story on the one person who’d been hospitalized as a result of the fires—Dan Stark, treated for smoke inhalation.

  He had done a piece on the first town meeting on the fires, and another later when the head of the arson squad spoke to the residents and tried to explain to them how difficult investigating arson usually was.

  As a result of that meeting, he had written an article on arson itself, full of statistics, statistics that amazed Bud as he uncovered them: That arson accounted for almost half of New Hampshire’s fires—probably more when you considered that the local fire chiefs didn’t report them all as they were supposed to. That suspects were rarely identified—named in only 17 percent of the reported fires. That a minuscule percentage of those suspects ended up in prison, because of lack of evidence or lack of witnesses. Because of not enough law enforcement in small towns or not enough trained arson experts in New Hampshire. Because of the difficult burden of proof. It made it seem more understandable to Bud, less perplexing, that the officials still seemed so much in the dark about the Pomeroy fires.

  When Harlan Early shot himself, Bud wrote about that. When, after the sixteenth fire, reporters from both the Boston Globe and the New York Times had come to town to do stories—the picturesque small town where no one used to lock their doors, turned into an armed camp—he wrote that up.

  He’d ridden along with the members of the fire watch one night and wrote about it. He did an article on the difficulties some of the victims were having collecting on their insurance policies because of the questions raised by the likelihood of arson.

  Fire had upended him.

  Fire, and Frankie Rowley.

  ——

  He felt as if these two things had arrived at almost the same time in his life to act as weight and counterweight. One or the other by itself might have thrown him off balance. Instead, they sat side by side in his thoughts

  Sometimes, actually, fire and Frankie merged, crazily, so that he could be writing something up about the latest fire, his mind full of images of all of the bright, noisy fires he’d seen, burning in the dark. He’d lift his head for a moment to think of what should come next, only to have a sudden vision of Frankie rise in his mind, Frankie, her endless white legs splayed out under him in the moonlight, calling out the way she did when they made love, a kind of breathless crooning sound he found sexy beyond words. And he’d bend to his writing again with a hard-on that would linger through the next sentence and feed also the next image that rose. And the next.

  That first afternoon, the day of the bombings in Kenya, she had seemed fragile to him, once or twice tearful as they were making love—some combination, as she explained it to him afterward, of being with him for the first time and thinking of the awful things that had just happened in her world.

  She’d corrected herself. In what had been her world, until a few weeks ago.

  He had undressed her slowly that day, standing on the mattress on the floor in her bedroom. They knelt together then, and lay down with each other. Her flesh felt cool, her hair smelled of something spicy as he pressed his face into it where it lay, spread out in a tangle, on her pillow. He had been almost tremulous himself, moved by her tears, by her white body. They were tender with each other, and he was thrilled by the length of her, by the deep muscles around her spine, by her wide bottom in his hands, by the way her flesh warmed slowly. She had sighed, perhaps gasped, when he came into her, so easily, and he had held her close, moved slowly inside her. Afterward they lay side by side, facing each other, and he held her face, ran his thumbs gently over her cheeks, her lips.

  They had slept. When they woke, the sun had moved from the room, and it was cooler. She was turned away from him on the mattress. He could watch her slow breathing, watch the curve of her wide hip. He moved closer to her, angled his body against her back, a perfect match. He grew hard again against her buttocks. “Ah,” she had whispered, waking, and turned, smiling, to face him.

  That was three weeks ago. Five fires ago. Perhaps twenty times making love ago, Bud hadn’t kept count. They’d been wild for each other, crazy, the way you are when you’re coming to know the other, to know the other’s body, everything you can do to it, that it can do to you. He sometimes felt her going into what he came to call overdrive, something he associated with what she’d told him of her life in Africa, her sexual life there; he’d actually occasionally tried to slow her down, a first for him. Though even so, sometimes they ended up finishing in inventive positions on the mattress on the floor, or in a chair at the kitchen table, or standing up, pushed against the wall.

  They didn’t spend the night together, though; Frankie didn’t want to do that, and he agreed, aware of how visible her life—their lives—were. Better, then, to have his car parked outside his own house when people start getting up in the morning and looking out their windows or taking walks or driving to Snell’s or to work. Better for Frankie to have no car parked at her sister’s house. And better for both of them, they also agreed, not to leave their houses empty overnight, after all.

  And this was helpful to him, this enforced separation—along with how busy he was with work. He was trying not to grab at her. He knew this was his habit with women, he knew how much trouble it had gotten him into before. He was trying to curb it with Frankie, trying not to push her. He reminded himself that he’d met her only two months ago, but each time he thought of that, it made him remember the way she’d looked, standing alone on the lawn on the Fourth of July at the Mountain House Inn. Fragile, he’d thought at the time, though some of that could have been just her white, white skin. Or jet lag. And then the surprise of her gap-toothed smile. Of how much he’d liked talking to her.

  And the amazement of her tearfulness that day at the burned-out house. He still had that photo, in a drawer at the office. Frankie, her butt resting on his car, her hands behind her making a cushion for it, her red skirt, her white skin, her wild hair blowing, partially obscuring her anguished face.

  They learned about each other lying in bed, talking. He told her about coming here, about buying the paper from Pete, about what it meant to him, what he wanted it to mean. She talked about her sense of helplessness sometimes in her work in Africa—how no matter what she did, what systems she set up, mothers were still watching their children die from illness and malnutrition, most of the time because of things she couldn’t change or make better. Things like lack of infrastructure and resources. Like the effects of civil war. Like corruption and lousy governance.

  She told him about the difficulties in her parents’ marriage, about Alfie’s apparent decline. About all the different places she’d lived as a kid, about her sense of alienation from her family’s life. He talked about the feeling he’d had growing up that his parents loved him too much, that they thou
ght he was better, smarter, than he really was, and the sense of inadequacy this bred in him.

  She told him she loved his voice. He told her he talked the way he did, almost in a whisper, because of a high school football injury to his larynx. He told her how much he had loved football then because he’d loved to hit.

  “But isn’t that the same as being hit?” she asked. “I mean, smack! And you’re both in pain, no?”

  “That didn’t occur to me until much later.”

  When they were done talking or making love, his life went on much as usual, almost unbelievably to him. He’d take the pasteup to Whitehall, pick up the copies, deliver them. He’d go to his office and talk on the phone to someone, he’d go out in the town and poke around, he’d go to meetings or interviews or town events or to another fire, and another fire.

  And then he’d come back and bring her the news of all this. He intended it as a kind of gift, he supposed—his way of looking at Pomeroy, of understanding it. Though what he only slowly became aware of was how his way of looking at it was changing. Afterward he would think of this period—this period of the fires and his new love for Frankie—as the time when he came to feel a part of Pomeroy. When it truly became his home.

  He’d stopped in at Snell’s one night about two weeks or so after they started to make love. He still wasn’t sure they’d be together that evening—it wasn’t a given. Some nights she had dinner with someone she’d known in her youth and had remet. Some nights she went up to spend the evening with her parents. But he thought he’d get wine, just in case, and then maybe he’d drive by and see if she was home.

  Or not, he told himself. Maybe he’d wait to hear from her. One day she’d stopped in at the office to invite him over and, one other time, left a note in his door. Unexpected gifts that made him happier than they should have, probably.

  Either way, he thought now, wine would be nice, so he pulled in at Snell’s on his way home and parked alongside the other cars.