On Fire

by Dianne Linden

  “Where?” I asked her. “And how are we going to get there?”

  “On the bus,” she said. “And don’t pretend you don’t have a bus pass. I know better.”

  They say the world is small and it must be because Mrs. Stoa’s nephew, who owned the house she was staying in, also owned King Koffee. I guess that made him the king. It also made Chuck, the barista who’d been making my coffee, the prince, because he’s the king’s son. Also the person Mrs. Stoa wanted me to talk to.

  “Chuck,” she said, “this is the young woman I told you about. Get her whatever she wants and then come and sit with us, please.”

  “Will it be decaf this morning?” he asked me.

  “Yes, please,” I said. Mrs. Stoa rolled her eyes.

  We sat outside at my usual table and in a minute Chuck came out with my decaf and two glasses of lemonade. “I can only take a minute,” he said. “We’re getting busy.”

  “Tell Matti what you heard,” Mrs. Stoa said.

  “I don’t know if it’s true,” Chuck said.

  “Tell her anyway.”

  Chuck was wearing a pair of mirror sunglasses. They gave him kind of an alien look, but at the same time made it easier for me to listen to him. I could look at his face without being able to see him looking at me.

  “I have a friend whose dad is a helicopter pilot,” he said. “He’s doing a lot of search and rescue this summer because of the fires.”

  Mrs. Stoa nodded her head at him while he talked like she was one of those birds you set above a glass of water to make its head move up and down.

  “He and his co-pilot picked somebody up from that old ghost town across . . . ” He stopped for a minute. “Across from where you used to live.”

  “Cato City, you mean,” Mrs. Stoa said.

  “He just said a ghost town.”

  “Probably an old mountain man,” I said. “We had a few at the Evac. Centre to start with.”

  “No. He was young.” Chuck started to get up like he was through talking, but Mrs. Stoa snagged him by the shirtsleeve.

  “And what else?” she asked him.

  He sat back down again. “The guy yelled at them and tried to kick my friend’s dad. They were going to leave him there because he was dangerous.

  Then he fell and knocked himself out so they tied him up and got him in the helicopter and flew him into town.”

  “What did this guy look like?” I asked.

  “He was tall and he acted crazy. That’s all I heard.”

  “Are you’re sure they didn’t help him fall?”

  I must have looked at Chuck very hard when I asked that because he said, “Hey. Don’t get mad at me. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “Matti can be very intense,” Mrs. Stoa said. She looked over her glasses at me and shook her head.

  “Did the guy know his name?” I asked.

  “I don’t think they had much of a conversation.” Chuck stood up. “I have to get back to work. Customer comes first.”

  I was sure he’d be king himself some day if he kept that attitude. “I am a customer,” I said. “And my bank balance is dropping fast because of it.”

  Chuck didn’t sit back down, but he stayed put.

  “Where did they take this guy?” I asked him.

  “The police station, I guess.” He looked at Mrs. Stoa. “Who’s paying for the drinks?”

  Mrs. Stoa looked at me.

  “Now what will you do?” Mrs. Stoa asked me after I’d given Chuck my bank card and he’d gone to put the charge through.

  “Try to get a loan from Frank or Marsh,” I said.

  “Don’t avoid the question. I mean what will you do about Dan?”

  “If it is Dan, which I’m positive it isn’t . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s no use phoning the police station. I’d have to ask in person and then they probably wouldn’t tell me anything. I’m just a kid.”

  “Police stations,” Mrs. Stoa said. “There are two here. And I did find out something when I called the one downtown.” She got little satisfied crinkles around her mouth. “If Dan was hurt, as Chuck says, or disoriented, the police wouldn’t keep him.

  “They’d send him to the community hospital here. But if he was violent, which means a danger to other people or even himself, they’d take him to the hospital out in Metal Springs.”

  “Where they take crazy people,” I said.

  “Mental health patients,” Mrs. Stoa corrected me.

  “Dan wasn’t crazy.” I stood up. “And anyway he’s dead. So it has to be somebody else.”

  “I’ve told you your evidence for that is all circumstantial.”

  “And yours is all gossip, so neither one of us knows squat.”

  I was suddenly thirsty. I got up and poured myself a glass of ice water and gulped it down. Then I belched. That was the T. S. speaking. Manners didn’t have anything to do with it.

  “Even if Dan’s alive,” I said, “which I doubt, he couldn’t be the one they found. He isn’t violent.”

  Then I thought about how I ran Billy Butler up that tree in the sixth grade. The reason he stayed up there so long was that I was patrolling back and forth underneath with murder in my eye.

  Anybody can be violent I guess, if you push the right buttons.

  6

  DEAD THINGS IN JARS

  MRS. STOAWENT BACK TO HER nephew’s to take a nap just after the meeting with Prince Chuck, and I went back to the high school. I needed to find a place where I could be alone and think about what to do. That sounded like the library, but when I got there a sign on the door said, “Closed. We’re getting our collection ready for school.”

  I could see people in there moving furniture and pushing carts of books around so I knocked anyway. They didn’t come to the door.

  Next, I tried a few classrooms. Only one of them was open. I went in and saw something really disturbing in it — a huge black bookcase on the far wall with its shelves full of things in jars.

  I don’t mean pickles and vegetables. I mean frogs and worms and lizards and snakes. Even a baby pig with the umbilical cord still attached.

  “Can I help you?” someone said. I turned and saw a woman in a white coat beside a shiny metal sink.

  “Why would you kill all these things and put them in jars?” I said.

  “I didn’t kill them,” she said. “They’re from a scientific supply company.”

  “Then why would they kill them? And why would you want to collect them?”

  The woman turned on a curved faucet at the end of the sink and filled a glass jar with water. “So we can dissect them and understand them better.” The way she said it I could tell she thought I was an idiot. She drank some of the water.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to understand them while they’re still alive?” I asked. “I’m sure it would be easier for them.”

  The woman made a curve toward the door with her hand. “This part of the school isn’t open to students now,” she said.

  “I’m not a student,” I told her.

  “Lucky me,” she said. She drank the rest of her water.

  I ended up doing my thinking outside while I walked around and around the school yard. By the time I got to the front for the third time, Marsh was there, leaning up against a cedar tree.

  “Too much coffee makes you hyper,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid it will stunt your growth?”

  “Too late,” I said.

  About then a family came out of the school with their suitcases. The man was one of the snorers so I should have been glad to see him go. But it actually made me a little queasy. I was just getting used to the way things were and now there were going to be more changes.

  “Are you still sort of helping me out when Frank’s not here,” I asked him.

  The sun glinted through the branches behind Marsh’s head. I had to squint to look at him.

  “As long as it’s legal.” He took the keys to his truck out of his po
cket and jingled them. “Anywhere within reason you want to go?”

  “There’s someplace I need to go,” I said. “I wouldn’t say I want to go there.” Then I told Marsh what I’d found out from Chuck.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Marsh told me, which was the opposite of what Mrs. Stoa kept saying.

  The problem was, I didn’t really know what my hopes were. I wanted Dan to be the person they found in Cato City. I wanted him to be in the hospital getting better.

  But if he was there, I’d have to face up to the fact that he’d pretty much run away from me. And unless the ring I was still wearing around my neck was a message, he hadn’t even cared enough to say goodbye.

  We tried the community hospital first. They said they couldn’t give us any details because we weren’t family, but they could tell us he wasn’t there then. That sounded like he might have been there and was gone now, which was encouraging.

  But it was also discouraging because if he’d been released or whatever you call it when you leave the hospital, where would he go?

  We went back to the truck and sat. “I don’t know what to do next,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” Marsh said. “If the . . . if Dan is in the condition you heard he was in, the hospital wouldn’t just send him out into the street. Not that fast, anyway.”

  “So you think maybe they sent him to the mental hospital?”

  Marsh started the truck. “Believe me,” he said, “I’m not any more excited about going there than you are.”

  The road out east to Metal Springs was in horse country, all rolling hills and aspen already turning yellow for the fall. It would have been an excellent trip except for where we were going. Every time we passed a white horse I made a wish.

  An appaloosa raced along beside us for quite a while. His ears were back and his tail stretched out behind him. He kept looking over at the truck like he wanted to tell us something. In a perfect world he would have been able to.

  7

  PERJURY

  THERE USED TO BE SOMETHING CALLED a spa at Metal Springs. Hot water bubbled out of the ground and people came there to soak in it and get rid of their aches and pains. Sometimes they drank the water as well.

  This was all written on a sign just inside the gate to the hospital grounds. It went on to say that fifty years or so ago, they found out there was too much arsenic in the water so they shut the spa down, but left the old buildings standing.

  I had no idea which one of those buildings to go in to and ask about Dan. Marsh seemed to know, though. He’d been pretty quiet on the drive out and kind of moody, but he took me up to the registration building like he knew exactly where he was going.

  “We’re looking for a young, white male from the Blackstone Village area,” he said to the woman at the desk. “Amnesia. Possibly in a state of agitation.” He said the same thing when we asked at the community hospital. It’s amazing how you can put everything about a person in a few sentences like that.

  “Are you related to this person?” the woman asked. She didn’t look up.

  “Yes,” I said before Marsh could open his mouth. I wasn’t going to get caught being unrelated a second time.

  “You would be . . . ?”

  “His cousin,” I said, quick off the draw again. “Matti Iverly.”

  I didn’t look at Marsh’s face when I said that. I fastened my eyes just below his chin and watched his Adam’s apple move up and down when he swallowed.

  “And the person you’re looking for would be Iverly as well?”

  “I . . . yes,” I said. “But he might not know that because of his . . . ”

  “First name?”

  “We call him Dan.” That part was the absolute truth.

  “Dan Iverly,” the woman said under her breath. She clicked the keys on her desk top computer and moved her head up and down. Then she stopped, frowned and began moving it from side to side.

  “I have no one by that name, of course, but I may have something. A young man — a John Doe, was brought here by the police. He’d been originally picked up in your general area.”

  She clicked and read again. “Search and Rescue were alerted by a Mrs. Laverdiere that she had found him in her house in Cato City and that he was in distress.”

  “That’s him.” I said. “That’s my cousin. Cato City is just across the lake from us. And I know who Mrs. Laverdiere is.”

  “It also says he was uncooperative.” The woman looked up at me then like she wanted an explanation.

  “If somebody tied you up and flew you away in a helicopter,” I said, “I imagine you’d be uncooperative too.”

  While she did some more checking, we waited in a little room about the size of a chicken coop. It was the opposite of fancy. The floor was bare grey linoleum. The chairs had hard, wooden seats and there were no magazines to read, although I wouldn’t have been able to settle into reading anyway. I was nervous and ticcing.

  The way Marsh was looking at me didn’t help. It wasn’t like he was angry. More like I’d hit him over the head with a board.

  “Matti,” he whispered. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? You’re not related to him.”

  “You have to be family to find out anything,” I said. “Isn’t that what they told us at the first hospital?” Marsh massaged his forehead the way I’ve seen him do before when he had a headache coming.

  “Besides, what’s a little thing like a lie when a friend’s in trouble?”

  “Perjury,” Marsh said.

  The woman from registration came back into the room then. “Dr. Charon will see you now,” she announced.

  8

  A DANGER TO HIMSELF AND OTHERS

  I DIDN’T EXPECT DR. CHARON’S OFFICE to be any fancier than the waiting room, and I wasn’t disappointed. He had a huge desk, empty except for his hands on top of a file folder. A bookcase behind him overflowed with books.

  That was it except for two wooden chairs like the ones in the waiting room, facing his desk. It didn’t seem like you were supposed to get too comfortable or stay too long.

  “I understand you think you’re related to one of our John Does?” the doctor said. He was small with an oddly shaped head. I thought his voice was way too high to be coming from a man.

  He didn’t ask us to sit down, but we did. I figured that’s what the chairs in front of his desk were for.

  “Yes,” I said. “His name is Dan Iverly and we’d like to take him home with us. Now, if possible.”

  Dr. Charon’s eyes popped out a little when he heard that. “He’s very ill,” he said. “He’s been committed.”

  “What does that mean?” I turned and looked at Marsh.

  “It means,” Marsh said and he narrowed his eyes, “that he can’t leave here. And it would be breaking the law and also very unpopular if you tried to take him.”

  “So he’s a prisoner?” I turned back toward the doctor with his unusual head. “This is a democracy. You can’t just lock someone up for no good reason.”

  He blinked in the slow way a cat does when you’ve asked it a dumb question. Then he pushed back in his chair and laced his fingers across his round stomach. “How are you related to this person again?” he asked.

  “He’s my cousin.”

  “Well,” the doctor said. “Your cousin attacked the men who brought him in. That makes him a danger to others.”

  “If it’s the helicopter pilots you’re talking about, I think they may have attacked him.”

  He went right on. “Then this same cousin assaulted a nurse while trying to fly out a third-story window shortly after he got here, making him a danger to himself, and others again. There are also signs of self-mutilation on his body. I believe that’s enough reasons to keep him here for the full thirty days the law allows.”

  When the doctor put it like that, there wasn’t a lot I could say. I was glad Marsh finally spoke up.

  “Matti’s just concerned about . . . ” he flicked his eyes over at me and then bac
k to the doctor. “ . . . her cousin. I think she’d feel better if she could see him.”

  “You’re her father?” the doctor asked.

  “A friend of the family,” Marsh said.

  The doctor scooted back up to his desk and looked through the folder of papers he had there. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “He was close to death when they brought him in. His blood tests showed something like wood alcohol in his system. Would he have drunk that, do you know?”

  “Unlikely,” Marsh said.

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I said. “Dan was just visiting us from . . . just visiting us. He went off to hike in the mountains and got lost.”

  “In the middle of a forest fire?”

  “Before that,” I said. “Anyway, there was no place to get any alcohol where he went.”

  “Toxins can build up,” the doctor said. “The test results could have been due to lack of food and water, I suppose.” He nodded like he’d experienced that first hand.

  “Can we see him?” I asked again.

  “I’d advise against it.” The doctor closed the folder and laid his hands on top of it again. “He’s heavily medicated. If you’ve never seen him like that before, it would be upsetting. I suggest you come back in . . . ” He ran the adding machine he had inside his head “ . . . a few days. They can tell you at registration which building he’s in.”

  I couldn’t believe we’d come this far and still didn’t know if Dan was the guy they had here or not.

  John Does, the doctor said, like the fire had flushed a lot of them out of the mountains and into the world.

  I sat there, staring.

  “Come on, Matti,” Marsh said. “We can’t do any more here today.”

  9

  SHOCK THERAPY

  FRANK CAME TO THE SCHOOL AGAIN that night, just before lights out. He squatted down on the floor in the empty space where a family had been sleeping before. There were lots of spaces like that by then. And more every day.