Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  Poppy seed.

  “Not to mention you’ve been a little hard up for cash lately. Because they’ll look at your bank records, too. Been carrying much of a balance in your checking account, these past few months? Oh, that’s right… you’re basically flatlined, except for the money you had to borrow from your father to make last month’s rent.”

  I rattled my fingernails along the side of my beer glass in four-four time. Sounded like a very tiny horse, galloping away.

  “Yup, I gotta hand it to you,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “That’s a genius plan—start to finish. You might as well wear a Hamburgler costume and a fuchsia T-shirt that reads, I YEARN TO BE ASS-RAPED IN THE STATE PEN FOR THE REST OF MY NATURAL-BORN DAYS across the back, in sparkly six-inch-high letters.”

  “ ‘Made it, Ma. Top o’ the world,’ ” said Cary, utterly deflated.

  “Hey, at least you know enough not to misquote Cagney.”

  “Fat lot of good that’s doing me.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So let’s come up with a different plan, shall we?”

  “Like what?”

  “Damned if I know. I’m the empress of stupid ideas, remember?”

  “I am so fucked, Madeline,” said Cary, looking ready to weep. “So so so fucked.”

  Mimi came sauntering back, juggling three pints of Fat Tire. “What the hell happened? I leave you alone for five minutes, and the pair of you look like you just got out of chemo.”

  “Madeline,” said Cary, grim about the mouth, “has just explained to me the multitude of ways in which I am utterly fucking irredeemably fucked, right now.”

  “Join the club,” she said, slopping two fat paisleys of beer across the table as she brought our glasses to rest.

  33

  Figuring I’d successfully yanked Cary away from jail time, at least for the rest of the evening, I primed Mimi for a distracting treatise on my own current obsession.

  “Who was that heckler guy talking about, earlier?” I asked. “When he was trying to paint all firefighters as crazed arsonists?”

  Mimi looked up at me. “Hm?”

  “Some chief from California? Rainer sure didn’t seem like he wanted to elaborate.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “That would be John Orr: arson investigator, fire captain, shithead.”

  “Somebody you guys worked with?” asked Cary.

  “No, thank God. He was strictly West Coast. Got started in Glendale, outside LA.”

  I reached for my new beer. “What’d he do?”

  “Serial arsonist,” she said. “They called him ‘the Pillow Pyro.’ ”

  She took a sip of Fat Tire. “He had a habit of starting fires in stores that had a lot of pillows. Furniture places, et cetera. That kind of foam burns fast and hot—off-gases some nasty toxic stuff, too. Lethal.”

  “And he must have known how to cover it up,” I said.

  “You bet. He’d have places mapped out—easy access off highway exit ramps. Start seven or eight fires in quick succession, then show up at one of the scenes and act like a hero, knowing perfectly well that there were too many simultaneous fires for his department to handle.”

  “That’s horrible,” said Cary.

  “Worst one was a hardware store,” Mimi continued. “One of those big places, like a Home Depot. Four people died. A toddler…”

  My stomach flipped.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Evil, evil man. And then he even wrote a ‘novel’ about it. Only it turned out he’d actually done most of the stuff in the book.”

  “Is that how they got him?” asked Cary.

  “No. He left one fingerprint on a piece of paper he’d wrapped around a homemade delay fuse—a cigarette and a bunch of matches.”

  “Like Mapleton,” I said.

  She nodded. “Somehow, that shred of paper didn’t burn. Goddamn miracle. Still took them eight years to nail him, though.”

  “His fingerprints weren’t on file?” I asked.

  “Nope. But he did something really, really stupid… set serial fires around two cities in California during arson-investigator conventions. Bakersfield and Pacific Grove. Bakersfield is where they got the print. Someone started setting fires all over LA with the same MO a few years later. Only ten people had been at both conferences. Word got around, someone knew about Bakersfield, then they connected it to Pacific Grove, then they got Orr’s prints.”

  “Jesus,” said Cary.

  “Yeah,” Mimi replied. “Tell me about it. Creepy, frustrating, and tremendously embarrassing to the profession as a whole.”

  “What’d he call the novel?” I asked.

  “Points of Origin. The main character was named Aaron. Orr said something like, ‘He was, after all, the only one who knew how the fire had started. To Aaron, the smoke was beautiful.’ ”

  I shivered. So did Cary.

  “But he was convicted?” I asked.

  Mimi nodded. “Life without parole, plus twenty years.”

  The three of us finished our pints in silence.

  Cary offered to drive me home.

  Which turned out to be a really, really stupid idea. On both our parts.

  34

  I was riding along in Cary’s truck, feeling mellow from the beers I’d had with him and Mimi, and just riffing in my head on what little knowledge anyone had about this arsonist guy, presuming it was a guy of course.

  “I should really map the locations,” I said, suddenly musing out loud.

  “Of the arsons?” asked Cary, as he slowed for a stop sign.

  All the houses around us were battened down for the night, a few upstairs windows cozily yellow as people prepared to turn in.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling warm and lazy. “I remember Mimi saying at one point that if they profiled the guy, it would probably turn out that he lived within two miles of where they’d been set. Hadn’t thought about that before. I mean, one of them was down on Arapahoe, which I was thinking meant way out on Arapahoe, but don’t you think her saying that has to mean they’ve kind of clustered?”

  “Madeline, as much as I think you’ve been a hero and everything, Dean did have a bit of a point—”

  “Like,” I went on, “the house that burned right up Mapleton? I mean, that’s really my neighborhood. I could totally keep an eye out for—”

  “Madeline,” said Cary, his tone sharper than I’d ever heard it—as though I were a little kid about to chase my errant kickball onto some busy street without looking both ways first.

  “What?” I said, as he turned off Nineteenth and onto my block.

  Cary pulled into a spot right in front of the house. Turned off the engine.

  He was quiet for a moment. Not looking at me, just staring straight ahead through his windshield.

  I glanced toward the house.

  Through our big living room windows, I could see blue light dancing across the ceiling’s white plaster.

  Setsuko’s probably watching some sappy Hallmark movie.

  “What, Cary?” I asked again.

  He took a deep breath, then said, “You’re scaring me.”

  “Scaring you?”

  Now he turned toward me. “Dean’s away—several thousand miles away—and you want to start nosing around these fires?”

  “Dude, I just want to look at a map. Dial in the geography a little.”

  “That’s not exactly all you said. You mentioned ‘keeping an eye out.’ For what?”

  “Just… stuff,” I replied. “You know.”

  “I don’t know. But even though I don’t want to see Dean harassing you about all this, I want you to be careful, okay?”

  I thought about that. And he was right.

  “Make you a deal,” I said.

  “What kind of deal?”

  “You stay away from that damn Ionix warehouse, I stick to plotting things out on a map. At least until Dean gets home.”

  We shook on it—each convinced we were saving the other from a flight of sheer, delusi
onal idiocy.

  “Can you give Setsuko a ride home?” I asked. “She took a bus here from the office.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Her car’s been in the shop for a week. If I’d known she was coming here tonight I’d’ve driven her over, too.”

  Cary and I opened our respective truck doors and climbed down from its cab, into the neighborly demi-darkness of Mapleton Street.

  My house smelled suspiciously of lemon Pledge when I preceded Cary over the living room’s threshold.

  I couldn’t exactly tell in the dim light of the television, but the place looked way crisper than it had when I’d left Setsuko in charge of the girls a few hours earlier.

  Jesus, this poor woman straightened up for me—after doing a full day’s work at the office. I should’ve known better, should’ve cleaned more before she got here.

  I felt a deep roiling pang of domestic guilt, what with Cary’s having told me how she always worked herself to the bone on everyone else’s behalf.

  “Setsuko?” I said.

  She looked up at me and Cary, smiling. “Did you have a good time?”

  “It was lovely,” I said. “And you’re so kind to have watched the girls for me. Thank you.”

  I reached my hand toward her, fifty bucks already folded up in my palm. “Here.”

  She looked confused but held her hand out. Then said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to do this,” when she realized I’d given her money.

  “Please,” I said.

  She shook her head, hand still extended toward me. “It was my pleasure, really. Your girls are so sweet.”

  I crossed my arms. “Setsuko, you absolutely saved me tonight. Please let me do this.”

  “Why don’t I drive you home?” said Cary.

  “Are you sure?”

  “You know it’s on my way, and I know your car isn’t back from the shop yet. And we should let Madeline get to sleep.”

  There’s that insistent tone again. Cary seems less wussy with every passing hour. Good for him.

  Setsuko dropped her eyes. “Yes. You are right. Thank you.”

  She gathered up her wool and stuff, packing it carefully into the tote bag at her feet.

  I said good-bye and offered profuse thanks to both of them until they were well out the door.

  I kept my hand on the switch for the porch light, turning it off once they’d reached Cary’s truck.

  Its dome light came on when he opened the driver’s-side door. His face looked strained.

  The pair of them hadn’t said a word to each other as they’d walked away from my house, but the minute the truck doors slammed shut behind them I could hear their voices rising inside the re-darkened cab: his a dull rumble, hers a little shrill.

  An argument? Maybe they were dating, after all.

  None of your business, Madeline.

  The engine rumbled to life and Cary pulled away from the curb, my whole sleeping block momentarily bathed in taillight red when he tapped the brakes turning onto Nineteenth.

  I told myself I’d call him in the morning, remind him of our mutual promises not to do anything stupid over the weekend.

  Then I went inside to find a map of Boulder. And some straight pins I could stick in the damn thing, once I’d tacked it up on the corkboard tiles some previous tenant had left glued to the laundry room wall.

  It took me until midnight to plot the fire locations. I’d been saving copies of the New Times for a while, tucking them away in a broom closet so Dean wouldn’t be tempted to start the barbecue with them. Or bitch me out for creating more mess.

  I suppose it was also a juju thing on my part: I’d secretly hoped that if I saved all the back issues, they might eventually hire me. Which I guess had worked.

  Prescience. Heh.

  I sat cross-legged on the laundry room floor and read through my pile of newsprint, trying to locate anything written about each of the arsons over the last nine months.

  I probably could’ve just saved time by calling Mimi, but it was more satisfying to do this on my own.

  And I suppose I figured I might find something else useful in the old articles, reading through them all in a row like that.

  At ten past the witching hour, I had eight pins in the map and a nasty crick in my neck.

  I’d been right—the fires had all taken place within fifteen blocks of my house. The first grass fires up near Mount Sanitas, the cars, the gas station—even the one on Arapahoe wasn’t really far away.

  And now, of course, the fire at the house actually on my street, albeit up where the money lived.

  Not like our place was the epicenter, or anything, but I was still on the edge of the exact neighborhood Rainer wanted rallied to attention.

  So I’ll only be doing my civic duty here, right? Paying a little extra notice to the local comings and goings. Who could possibly find fault with that?

  And hey, maybe I could swing by his station in the morning, tell him I figured it wouldn’t hurt to grab a couple of free padlocks for our garbage cans. See if I could catch him in a chatty mood.

  I pulled the length of chain-and-string dangling from the laundry room’s bare ceiling bulb, then padded upstairs in the dark.

  My daughters were tucked up all snug in their beds, while visions of crime-fighting danced in my head.

  35

  Parrish and India didn’t wake up until nine the following morning, God bless them.

  I strapped both girls into their booster seats for breakfast, feeling more rested than I had in weeks. Or months, probably. Sleep deprivation tended to blur my retrospective time lines. And everything else.

  Dean still hadn’t called home from Japan, but even that couldn’t piss me off. It was Saturday, it was gorgeous out, and I had something concrete with which to occupy myself over the course of the day to come.

  Fucking awesome. All around.

  I dialed Cary while the girls chowed down on their whole wheat toaster waffles, leaning against the laundry room door frame so I could check out last night’s map work.

  The phone rang eight times before his machine picked up.

  “This is Cary. I’m not at home right now, so please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day!”

  I asked him if he maybe felt like going for a walk later, and hung up.

  Probably out biking or jogging or whatever already. Typical Boulderite.

  “Well, my darlings,” I said to my children, “how would you like to join your mother on a wagon tour of arson sites around our fair city?”

  I figured I could type up my notes on Rainer’s talk later on. The article wasn’t due until Monday, and I had the whole weekend to myself.

  The girls had finished breakfast. I cleaned them up and gave them each a fresh diaper, realizing I only had four more left in the Pampers package—which meant I’d have to buy more sometime today. Like, soon.

  I packed two into my kid-care travel kit along with the usual complement of sippy cups, butt-wipes, and Cheese Nips.

  The fifty bucks to Setsuko had put a serious dent into my cash liquidity, so I grabbed my Amex card before loading the girls into the wagon. Fuck it, Dean could hardly give me shit for buying diapers—even on credit.

  But then I figured I should check that month’s bill before we headed out. I remembered having put it in the pile of mail on Dean’s desk.

  I didn’t usually read through the monthly statement, but I wanted to make sure I could charge the Pampers—and a couple of gallons of milk—without leaving him stranded somewhere in the Western Pacific with no money for a bowl of ramen or whatever.

  The bill was addressed to me, since his card had started out as a subsidiary of mine once upon a time back in Syracuse.

  As far as I remembered we had a monthly limit of a thousand bucks or something—or maybe it was up to twelve hundred between the two of us?

  I tried not to be crazy with the plastic, but it wasn’t like Dean gave me a formal household allowance or anything
so sometimes I’d buy the girls a couple of dresses at Target. Or, hey, treat myself to a burrito—with tip for delivery—when he’d been on the road for a tiresome stretch and I was sick of toddler-food remnants for my own makeshift dinner.

  Remarkable how tempting the latter option became on the nights when he’d call home from wherever to regale me with details about some fabulous expense-account dinner with clients. He knew I loved hearing about the foodie shit, especially from Asia. In the old days he’d amuse me with scathing descriptions of Midwestern-airport-layover pizza (“catsup on a matzoh”) or Poulet Frit de Kentucky in the rural paper-mill hamlets of French Canada.

  When home was an apartment in Manhattan before the girls were born, I’d delighted in teasing him over the phone with lavish riffs about how I couldn’t decide between Korean barbecue or Shanghainese soup dumplings, West Indian curried-goat roti from our corner deli or chunks of Cuban roast pork basted with garlic-spiked lemon juice and browned to a crisp.

  Culinary foreplay was something at which we both excelled.

  He’d come up in the world since then, and relished getting to pay me back at long last with food-porn of his own from hotel rooms in Bangkok or Taipei, Bangalore or Seoul.

  Even his description, once, of getting taken out to this Beijing restaurant specializing in snake-meat cuisine had been exquisite torture, not least since I’d just eaten cold leathery mac-and-cheese scraps out of the pot with a wooden spoon.

  “Twelve courses,” he’d said, describing each one.

  “You are such an asshole,” I’d replied.

  “But wait, Bunny… I haven’t told you about the deer-penis liqueur they brought out with dessert.”

  “I hope it was hideous.”

  “Surprisingly smooth,” he said.

  “This sounds like a major case of Hey dudes, let’s fuck with the giant blond gweilo!”

  He laughed. “Obviously.”

  “Over which you of course totally prevailed, twisting circumstances to your own nefarious anthropology-major advantage.”