On Fire

by Dianne Linden

  “Frank didn’t take the glass.” That was Marsh’s voice. “I did.”

  Mrs. Stoa clucked her tongue. “Just like the two of you in school. Frank egging you on and you covering for him.”

  I loved it when Mrs. Stoa talked about the two of them like they were still kids in her class at high school. And this time I definitely agreed with her.

  I sat there swinging back and forth and eavesdropping. I was actually enjoying myself for a change when another voice, Frank’s this time, snagged my attention.

  “I thought at first my contact in Kingman had sent me the results from the wrong fingerprints. I called and gave him an earful. ‘We’re not rubes up here,’ I said. ‘We can tell when you’ve sent us the wrong Intel.’

  “He insisted he’d sent me the right results. I apparently sent him the wrong fingerprints.”

  “My fault, Frank,” Marsh said. I got up and moved close to the screen door.

  “I suppose you involved Dan in this,” Mrs. Stoa said. She clucked her tongue again.

  I opened the door quietly and went through the hallway into the living room. All three of them were sitting there drinking tea. Mrs. Stoa was frowning. Frank’s face was red and Marsh looked completely sheepish. “What’s going on?” I said.

  Then the truth came out about the whole ridiculous fingerprint-swiping episode. Dan finally remembering his name. And Frank insisting he was someone else.

  “Dan could sue you for what you did,” I said.

  “No, he couldn’t.” Frank stuck out his chin. “It wasn’t his fingerprints we took.”

  “I took them,” Marsh said.

  “Too bad we don’t know who this Willis guy is,” I said. “Then he could sue you both. And I’d make sure he did.”

  I went upstairs to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. At first it was because I was so irritated at Frank and Marsh, but after a while I began getting curious about who the fingerprints actually belonged to. It turned in to a kind of puzzle for me.

  There weren’t that many people sitting at the table with us the day Frank and Marsh and I were at the Metal Spring hospital together. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly how it was.

  It was just after three am when I opened my eyes again. I switched on the radio in time to hear the tail end of the news. All of it was depressing. Murders. People getting blown up. Stock market information I couldn’t imagine anybody being interested in.

  At the end, the announcer did what they call a recap, where he reviewed everything you didn’t want to hear in the first place. That’s when I found out a tornado had touched down in a large city on the opposite side of the country.

  No one was killed, but people were still in shock. “It came out of nowhere,” a woman’s voice said. “It sounded like a freight train was bearing down on us and then . . . ” She was crying so she had to take a minute. “The whole world fell down on top of us.”

  It was the jog my memory needed. I sat up and looked at the clock. Only ten minutes since I looked the last time. Too early to go and wake Dan. I had to talk to him though. I was pretty sure by then I knew whose fingerprints Marsh had pinched.

  Still, I was mature about it. I turned off the radio. I scrunched up the pillow behind my head. And I waited.

  Just before five, I got up. I couldn’t wear the earmuffs, because I wouldn’t be able to hear what Dan had to say. Instead, I pulled a black toque as far down on my head as it would go, put on my jeans and a black turtleneck sweater with the collar turned up, and went outside and across to the egg.

  I banged on the door, just like I used to when he was staying in the jail. Maybe a little louder. “Get up,” I yelled. I banged a few more times before he called out, ”What?” in a bleary voice.

  “I have to talk to you ASAP,” I said. I heard him fumbling around inside. Finally he stuck his head out the door.

  “Matti,” he said. “Wha . . . what do you want?” He was obviously only half awake. His face was puffy and he had a thermal-blanket print running up and down one side of his face.

  “I know who this Willis guy is.” I waited to let Dan take that in. He didn’t seem to. “The guy whose fingerprints Marsh took,” I said. “The one Frank thought was you.” He was still acting very groggy.

  “Meet me at the Hot Spot in five minutes. Arlen probably has some breakfast started. I’ll get something for you.”

  “May I get dressed first?” Dan asked. “Or do you want me to come the way I am?”

  I ignored that. “And hurry up. I don’t want to be out too long after daylight.”

  By the time Dan got to Arlen’s, I had coffee in take-out cups and some sausage rolls and cinnamon buns bagged up. We carried it all away from the Hot Spot and down toward the lake, close to the place Dan and I used to go when he first got here and I still called him the on-fire guy.

  The sand was the same. The water, and the rocks. We were the ones who’d changed.

  “You’re a vampire now,” Dan said. He bit into a sausage roll. “Is that why we need to do this so early? You have to get into your coffin as soon as the sun comes up?”

  “I know all about the fingerprint mix-up,” I said. “And I think I know who Willis Asche is.” He kept on eating. “Do you want to know?”

  “It doesn’t really have much to do with me. He’s some patient at the hospital I never met. Or maybe a visitor.”

  “Think about the people at our table,” I told him. “The prints had to belong to one of them. I heard Marsh admit last night that he must have taken the wrong glass.”

  “Matti.” Dan had been blowing on his coffee but now he took two or three swigs. “I was still out of it then, remember? And besides, I couldn’t see very well.”

  “That’s a good point,” I said, “so just listen. We were sitting at a long table. Frank and Marsh were next to each other. We sat across from them. I was on your left.

  “Obviously it wasn’t any of our fingerprints.” I couldn’t tell if Dan was paying attention or not.

  “There were some women down at the end of the table to the left of me. They were very loud and they talked in a foreign language. It couldn’t have been one of them, unless they’d had a sex change before the age of eight.

  “That’s how old Willis was when his fingerprints were taken. Even then, the women would be too old.

  “The only other person I could think of for a long time was an even older man down across from them. It can’t be him for the same reason.”

  Dan finished his coffee so I gave him mine. “The fingerprints belong to someone invisible. Is that what you’re telling me?” He didn’t seem to care for the idea.

  “Now you’re being stupid,” I said. “There actually was another person on your right side. I didn’t remember at first because I felt shy around you and I didn’t look in your direction very often. But we had those huge pieces of white cake, remember?”

  Dan nodded. “They tasted like air.”

  “Egg cartons,” I thought. “Anyway, I was looking at your plate, noticing you hadn’t eaten anything when some guy slid an empty plate in front of you and slid your plate with the cake on it back toward him.

  “He had to lean far forward to do it and I saw the edge of something rainbow coloured running up and down his back. Like suspenders.”

  Dan turned and looked at me. “You’re talking about Howard?” I nodded. “He wasn’t there.”

  “Yes, he was. He was with you when I first saw you sitting outside. I think he tagged along with us when we went in to eat and got a free meal.”

  “That sounds like him,” Dan said. He threw the crumbs from the bag out to some ravens that were perched on a rock. “But what difference does it make if he really is this Asche guy?

  Maybe he just made up his first name like someone else we know.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s weird that his name came back to us here?”

  Dan got up and dusted the crumbs off his jeans. “What are you suggesting?” he said. “W
hat is it you want to do?”

  I could hear car doors slamming which meant people were coming to work. I stood up, too, and readjusted my toque so it came as far down as possible. “When work’s over and I can stand to come out again, I’m going to talk to Frank. Will you come with me?”

  “Why Frank?” Dan asked.

  “He started this mess,” I said. That wasn’t really true. I’m not sure even now who started what. But I definitely needed Frank’s help to clear it up.

  3

  LIGHTNING

  JUST AFTER FOURO’CLOCK, DAN AND I were in Frank’s office. He was on the phone when we came in but he got off when he saw us. “Dan,” he said. “Matti.” He cocked his head at me. “Nice to see you in the daylight. Any particular reason for the getup?”

  I didn’t let him distract me. “When you first told me down in Kingman that you knew who Dan was, even though you didn’t, you said his whole family was killed in a car accident. Right?”

  “I think so,” Frank said.

  “How did you find out about that?”

  “The . . . connection I have in Kingman sent me a copy of an old newspaper clipping about it.”

  “Do you have it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “May we see it?” I was trying to keep things businesslike.

  “I don’t know where I put it,” Frank mumbled. He hardly ever mumbled so it was a dead give-away that he was hiding something.

  “What about that red folder over on the TV tray by your desk?” Dan asked. “That’s where you had it when I was here before.”

  Frank made a show of noticing the folder and then picking it up and looking through it. “What do you plan to do with this information, Matti?” he said. “I really should burn it.”

  “I intend to read it to Dan.” I held out my hand. It was trembling a little, but it had been a long day. I was still keeping it together. “I’m positive that Willis . . . ”

  “Asche,” Frank said. He was reading it off something in the red file.

  “I’m positive he’s someone we knew when Dan was in the hospital. I just need to find out one more thing about him and then I’ll back off.”

  I held out my hand again and snapped my fingers. Only once, but I did snap them.

  “You’re not making sense,” Frank said. “If he’s someone you know, why didn’t you realize it right away when you heard his name?”

  That’s when I had the melt down. A very brief one. “Because it’s complicated,” I yelled. “It’s . . . just . . . I’m sorry.”

  Frank lets me get by with a lot, but he does not appreciate being yelled at.

  “Please,” I said in a soft Bambi’s mother’s voice. “May I see the newspaper article? I’ll give it back.”

  Frank handed me the folder, but he did not look happy.

  “Thank you,” I said. I opened it. The clipping was right on top. I decided I was too stressed out to handle reading it myself. I handed it to Dan. “Could you read this out loud?”

  Dan looked at the clipping for a minute and then began to read very quietly. “A lightning strike during yesterday’s freak electrical storm brought trees down on Highway 6A Sunday afternoon, causing a fatal accident. Killed was passing motorist Willis Asche, 37, and his wife, Selena, also 37.”

  Dan stopped reading then. “It goes on about the accident. How the car jumped the road and crashed into an embankment.”

  “But there’s more, isn’t there?”

  Dan studied the clipping, and then looked up at me. His face was suddenly different, pulled down in some way. “Also killed in the accident,” he read, “was the couple’s six-year-old son, Howard . . . ”

  He cleared his throat and not for the reason I do it. “Howard Asche. Willis Asche, Jr., nine years old, was the only survivor.”

  Dan put the clipping in the folder, closed it and laid it back on the desk.

  “This sound like your friend?” Frank asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I saw him at the main bus terminal in Kingman one time when he said he was going to visit his family. He had flowers and a small teddy bear with him. The bus he got on went out to a cemetery.”

  “All the same . . . ” Frank said.

  “I couldn’t find him when I left the hospital,” Dan said. “I never told him goodbye.”

  “I know where he lives,” I said.

  The next words out of my mouth were for Frank’s benefit, because even though he sometimes went too far, I knew he could make things happen.

  I was sorry for the meltdown and I used the clearest, calmest voice I could come up with. “Frank,” I said, “we have to get back to Metal Springs right away. We have to find Howard.”

  “Right away,” Frank said, “as in tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If we can’t go today.”

  “I’ve got insurance people coming in the morning, Matti. I can’t leave here. And Marsh is expecting a big shipment. You won’t be able to pry him away, either.”

  “You’ll find a way though, Dad,” I said.

  I think it surprised him, me calling him that instead of Frank. But it probably sealed the deal.

  4

  FLYING

  FRANK CAME UP WITH A BRILLIANT solution to our travel problem. Early the next morning Dan and I were on a helicopter to Kingman. One of the X-Treme Ski pilots had to pick up the owner there anyway and we went along.

  A friend of Frank’s picked us up at the heli-pad south of town and drove us to the main bus terminal. I knew the trip from there to the hospital like the right side of my face.

  Except we weren’t going to the hospital. We were going to get off at the Metal Springs gas station. I hadn’t cleared that with Frank, but I thought it was the best place to look.

  We had to be back at the palace by 7:00 PM or he would never allow me to go out alone again until I was eighteen. We’d stay overnight and Frank would drive down to get us sometime the next day. He said he and Dan had some business to take care of before we went back home again, anyway.

  It was noisy in the helicopter so Dan and I didn’t talk much. I put on my ear muffs and spent my time looking at the way the lake below us cut a long exclamation mark down through the dead trees, and farther south, the living ones. And at the iron hard mountains all around it.

  We didn’t say much in the car we were picked up in either. Once we got on the bus though and we had a little more privacy, I asked Dan what he thought we should say to Howard.

  “If we find him,” Dan said. “There’s no guarantee we will.”

  “We’ll find him,” I said. “What are we going to say to him when we do?”

  Dan turned to look at something out the window.

  “That appaloosa, again,” I thought. “He won’t quit.” When I looked though, there was just a guy on a tractor driving down the edge of the road.

  “Dan?” I said. “About Howard?”

  Dan turned back toward me. “He told me when you lose your memory of something it can be very traumatic to get it back. I thought at the time he was saying it for my benefit. Now I think he was talking about himself.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “What makes you think he’ll want to know what his real name is? Or that his family’s dead?”

  “What makes you think he doesn’t know already? Maybe he’s just using his brother’s name to give him a second chance at being alive.”

  Dan was quiet for a minute. “All the time I was in the hospital, Howard looked after me. Now . . . ”

  “I think we’ll invite him to come home with us,” I said.

  Dan laughed. “Frank would have a bird.”

  “Probably. At first.”

  “Howard wouldn’t come, anyway.”

  “He told me family was the most important thing in the world. I think he needs one that’s above ground.” The bus stopped at the Metal Springs gas station.

  “What are you doing?” Dan said, when I stood up to get off the bus. “I thought we were going t
o the hospital.”

  I shook my head. “This is where Howard lives,” I said. “Frank and Marsh and I let him off here once.”

  Dan grumbled, but he got off after me. Then he stood looking around and shaking his head. “I can’t believe he lives here,” he said. “Is there even running water in these places? Or heat?”

  Metal Springs did look a lot worse than I remembered. Most of the houses had doors or windows missing now. A few had apparently been yanked off their foundations and moved away. There were just holes in the ground where they’d once been.

  Gulls picked through the garbage that was everywhere. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a rat.

  “Which one of these shacks is he in?” Dan asked finally.

  That was the one flaw in my plan. “I don’t know exactly,” I said. “We’re going into the gas station to find out.”

  5

  THAT APPALOOSA AGAIN

  THE CASHIER IN THE GAS STATION looked like he was about Dan’s age. He was wearing a red bow tie and a vest with a badge pinned on it that said, Norm. And under that, Employee of the Month.

  I pointed to the badge and said, “Congratulations.” Frank usually started out that way when he was trying to be friendly and get the other person on his side.

  Every now and then, I tried out one of his strategies.

  “It’s no biggy,” Norm said. He had so many freckles on his face and they were so close together in places that he made me think of the Appaloosa I used to see on the way to the hospital.

  “I’m the only one who works here now. We’re about to close. All these houses are coming down and they’re putting in a shopping centre.”

  “I wonder if you can help us?” I said. Frank’s influence coming out in me again. “We’re looking for a friend of ours.”

  “His name is Howard,” Dan told him. He gave the usual description. While he was talking it occurred to me that if Howard ever changed his suspenders, we’d have no way of finding him again.