by Tom Bouman
“It’s a quick fix. The kids like it because it’s high up. Like a big city. I won’t be around longer than a few months. Maybe you shouldn’t be either.”
“I’m good where I am,” I said.
“Henry. The divorce didn’t go well. You can see that. I’d usually get something to live on. In a no-fault, that’s just the way it always goes. I’m the kids’ mother. But I get them every other weekend while that sociopath raises them. I get no money. Why am I here in this funeral home and not him, do you think?”
The old worry came back. “He knows.”
“It’s worse.” She looked away. “The house was rigged with cameras. If I’d fought for custody, for anything, things would’ve gotten personal. Real quick. For both of us, you and me both. He made sure I knew that.”
“It’s a bluff,” I said, knowing it wasn’t.
“I’ve seen video. I came down to his den, in the basement there? And he was watching us, ugh.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “What tipped him off, I don’t know.”
I felt sick. “Where does he keep the tapes?”
“You can’t smash and grab, not with him. They’re digital, on his computer anyway, uploaded to a server somewhere too. There’s no way to make them disappear. So that’s him, that’s who he is. I tried to tell you.” She swept away an angry tear. “I swear, I almost called you, I was going to kill him then and there.”
I sat there facing the idea of being on somebody’s video, having that hang over me and my life going forward. If I’m honest I wanted to kill him too. “What do you want to do?”
“There’s nothing to do. He’s got us. We could bring it out into the open. We could say we don’t care.”
“I’m with somebody now.” As I said it, I knew it wasn’t entirely true.
“Just like always,” she said. “Is she what you want, then?” Shelly stood, brushed past me, bent down, and put her mouth on my neck, her hands to my belt.
“I can’t do it, Shel. I’m fond of you as can be. I can’t.” I left guilty and lonely from my secrets.
The drive to the West Side was hairy and out of my way, but so few people were out that I could cruise ten miles an hour right down the middle of the streets. Nobody had shoveled the sidewalk in front of Joe Blaine’s little blue house on Schubert Street, the driveway was empty, and the lights were off.
THERE WAS an ice storm, and a thaw, and a freeze down to minus two, and so on until one night, up on that wooded ridge overlooking Maiden’s Grove, Kevin and Penny’s trailer caught fire. By the time I arrived, there was a line of engines down the driveway to the road. I could smell the plastic fusing together and escaping as gas, along with the cheap wood, almost like a campfire smell fighting with the plastic. I walked up the hill, passing squad trucks and idle firefighters from neighboring companies, narrow, wide, old, teenage, ready for action with not much to do. The closer I got to the house, the more I heard, around me everywhere, a great hissing separate and apart from the rumble of the fire. Whirls of flame rose out of the trailer’s windows and merged into one as the roof lifted and disappeared into air. The hissing, I understood, was from trees overhanging the mobile home losing their water to the heat.
With no chance of saving anything, the Wild Thyme crew still had hoses on the trailer and the surrounding scrub. The fire would be knocked down before long.
I got on the phone to Sheriff Dally, who said he’d heard about it but wouldn’t bother to see the show now that I was there. He offered to call PSP Forensic Services and ask them to send a fire investigator as soon as they could. I told him I’d get ahold of Binghamton and see if they’d oblige. Sleight would have to be told about this, anyway. There was no doubt in my mind the place had been torched intentionally. The ultimate scrub-down. Whoever had done it probably should have done so months ago.
The Wild Thyme assistant fire chief, Matty Lehl, stood back from the fire beside a red super-duty pickup with chrome decals on the doors. He wore no SCBA and neither did any of his guys; they just turned away from the fumes. Seeing me, he excused himself and sidled up.
“A fire like this is over soon as it begins,” he said, shaking his head. “At least we know nobody’s home.”
“What are we looking at?”
“Oh, I don’t know, some little rat-bastard chewing through a wire, my guess.”
“Has the owner shown at all? Swales?”
“Oh, yeah. He was so helpful we had to send him out for sandwiches. He shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“When he gets back, I’m going to search his house, just quick. Keep an eye on him if he’s outside?”
“All right.” Matty spit black juice on the ground.
“Any way you could avoid pulling the site totally apart, so much the better. We got an investigator coming. Should have.”
“All right. We’ll just do what we’re doing, leave the rest to you. Hope you don’t find anything you don’t want to.”
“And keep it to yourself, please, Matt.”
“Who am I going to tell?”
Just the whole county, I thought. As we stood there, a pair of headlights threaded the needle between the trucks lining the driveway and the trees on the other side. I figured it would be Swales returning, but I was wrong. Out of an elderly Dodge Ram eased a large man who gripped the truck’s bed a good while before hobbling to where Lehl and I stood. Ron Chase.
“Ronny, hi,” said Lehl. The two men shook hands.
“Buddy of mine in Endicott let me know, structure fire up on Dunleary, I thought, I don’t know. Just, I’d see her place one more time.”
“I hear you.”
The old man turned to the trailer as the front exterior wall, what was left, toppled forward into the yard. “And that’s that,” he said. He turned to me. “What are you going to do about it?”
I shrugged.
“Too bad my boy’s still locked up, you could blame this on him too,” he said, quiet, and shambled off to find somebody else to talk to.
“He ain’t been the same,” said Lehl.
“Excuse me, Matt,” I said, and stepped into the woods.
Leaves covered earth and rock in a stiff layer almost like plastic. It was disturbed here and there around the trailer’s curtilage, but deer tracks only, nothing as purposeful as a human’s. The driveway in front would be totally useless from the firefighters. By the time I’d circled around again, Swales had returned. His back was to me; he was glad-handing some of the firemen as they clustered around his muscle car. He turned and saw me and cursed.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “You got a minute? You can leave the car where it is.”
In his garage, Swales and I stood in the space where his car usually went. I took note of the state of his clothes: jeans wet to the shins and splattered with soot and mud from the driveway. Ski gloves that he pulled off and tossed aside, dirty. He opened his work coat and released a smell of sweat. Black smoke residue had collected at his nostrils. I opened my mouth; he raised a hand.
“What do you want?”
“When did you first see the fire? It was you who called?”
“Yeah, me. Ten-thirty, I smelled it, looked out, turned on my outside water, and started filling buckets. There’s a spigot.”
“Was the fire on the left or right, let’s say, east or west side? The middle, front, back?”
“On the west side. The east side, toward my house, there’s a fuel tank. I was keeping my distance. Turns out it was empty. It never blew.”
“And it was a small fire at first? I mean, small enough that the buckets made sense.”
“Yeah, just climbing up the side of the trailer. I was pulling as much water as I could with a wagon on the ATV, going back, filling up, going back. I knew there was no saving it before the company even got here.”
“Any visitors today, tonight?”
“No.”
“Trailer insured?”
“I let it go. Nobody stays there, obviously.”
“I’m going
to take a look at the garage. House too.”
“If you must.” He left.
I took off my coat and shoes and rolled up my pant legs.
There was fresh mud and plant matter in the tires and on the undercarriage of Swales’s four-wheeler. Nearby stood a small plastic gas can, half full, dusty, no spills in the cement around it. I opened the inside door between the garage and the house and stepped into a small carpeted hallway leading to the kitchen. A bottle of expensive gin stood on the counter, along with a lowball glass, half a lime in it. I opened his garbage can; the remains of a salad, ranch dressing, gristle from a steak, paper towels, no chemical smell. Under the kitchen sink: what you’d expect. I stood, told myself just a quick sweep and if it needed to happen again, it would. Upstairs, the rooms were dark. I left them that way. The place was carpeted and everywhere I looked there were lines from a vacuum. The home was clean, impersonal, with nothing of life, nothing to embarrass. A white canvas. A man who sets a fire and then calls the fire department about it would have been careful. He might not even use fuel at all. Something told me Swales hadn’t torched the trailer, at least not personally. I headed upstairs.
We have no streetwalkers here in Wild Thyme. We have no trafficked girls locked away; it’s a small town. We have a woman or two you may know yourself or have seen at the supermarket going about her life. She could be raising kids without a partner, she could be out of work and it’s her own fault, or not, but she needs more than she can get the honest way. Maybe just for a time. Maybe it gets worse, as it did for Penny, one piece at a time scattered here in this bedroom and beyond. I crossed the bedroom and opened a set of glass doors leading to a private balcony. The night washed in with its smoke and flicker as I opened the doors and stepped out. Below me, the ridge sloped to where a solitary set of cottage lights marked a triangle of lake, naked beyond the trees. It was not a view you could see from the ground, but I recognized it.
I put in a call to Sleight, who answered on the third ring. I told him about the fire.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. There was silence on his end of the phone. Then, “Let me call in to the shop. What do you need?”
“Investigators.”
“I’ll send Mason and Riva down. They do good work, especially if there’s OT in it. They won’t talk either.”
I returned to the garage, pulled on my boots and coat, and stepped outside again. The line of emergency vehicles was starting to break up and disappear into the hills. Soon I was all that was left. Swales had long since gone to bed, and I shivered in my truck, waiting for ID Services. At some point I did fall asleep but did not dream that I can recall.
The trailer, what was left, reignited once in the early morning. It only took Matty Lehl, one squad truck, and one hose to put it out for good. It was six a.m. before Mason and Riva arrived with their van. I told them nothing of Swales’s account of the fire, where it had started and so on, to see if he’d be consistent. They talked to him separately in the house. I asked Mason if any alarm bells had rung: not particularly. She asked me what kind of smoke had I seen and smelled. Black, chemical, I said. Though the sky was clear, the detectives pulled on heavy-duty rain suits and galoshes before they strung a perimeter and grid over the charred remains of the trailer.
By the afternoon they had few answers. The fire had started on the west side of the structure, just as Swales had said. They’d found no burn trails, at least none visible to the naked eye, to indicate the presence of an accelerant. They had sealed samples from the charred remains, as well as the ground surrounding it, in metal canisters for hydrocarbon testing. There were, to their knowledge, no bones of any kind. They’d let me know if it looked like arson.
I watched as the two detectives gathered the grid they’d strung over the dead fire, now a black hungry patch on the hillside. Three of the massive oak trees that had once framed the trailer would survive. The fourth and most westerly of the oaks had been directly in the path of the blaze pulling itself skyward; the trunk of the tree and several of its lowest branches had been charred black and still glowed red in the wind.
LIEUTENANT SLEIGHT had paid weekly visits to the stranger’s cell in Schuyler County. Road salt from the highway coated his car, then the rain and sleet would wash it off, then the next week it’d collect again. The old cop sat across from the stranger, and the stranger sat shackled to an interview table, silent. Sometimes Sleight laid out a new fact they’d learned, or a theory, or sometimes it’d be stories from Deputy Poole’s short life. The stranger never asked for a lawyer, never even spoke, not once through his arraignment or his preliminary hearing. The Schuyler County judge had granted the DA several continuances so that the loose task force of state police, Binghamton cops, and local law enforcement could figure out who the hell they were talking to.
We had him cold for Poole’s murder; that wasn’t in question. Vicki Jelinski’s abduction raised questions. Kevin O’Keeffe’s truck raised questions. What was the connection to Charles Michael Heffernan? Was he, as an informant had told Sleight personally, responsible for at least two murders in Binghamton—a black man up from Brooklyn, as well as a local crack addict who had been sexually assaulted and had her throat slit three years ago? Was he Coleman Tod, a Lackawana County, Pennsylvania, native who had been raised by his grandpa until Grandpa died, after which Coleman had taken everything of value from the house, including Grandpa’s Roadtrek 190, and wandered over the hills and gone? A PSP detective had found a strong resemblance to early photographs from when Coleman Tod had gone missing, but the boy had been gone so long that if anybody had been interested in declaring him dead, he would have been.
“You think keeping your mouth shut’s going to save you? You think they won’t hang whatever they can on you?” said Sleight. “But you could talk. You could give us something.”
Nothing was given.
“I’m going to play a game,” Sleight said. “I’m going to assume that you are Coleman Tod, born in Clarks Summit, 1978. I see you have a mother in First Hospital in Wilkes-Barre. We could test her, see if there’s a match. I see here a mother, a brother and his wife, and they have two daughters. Would they recognize you if I asked them?” Sleight fell into silence.
“I don’t know,” the stranger said. “Let me think about it.”
YOU GO along and things happen and you don’t know why. If you stop and think, you get pushed out of your own life. And when that happens, do you put up a tent in the yard, or do you go back in the house? There’s a song about it. What I mean is that your life can get to feel like a current all around you, floating you along, but if you go back and look at the way things happened, there’s fate, and then there’s you. That’s why I have to remind myself how Polly and I began. Not that chance meeting in the mountains in Wyoming, but what came after. Now that she’s gone, the story I tell myself about her is like a flag, colorful against the sky, commanding devotion. The pattern shifts in the wind, but never changes very much, and it’s been there so long I take it for granted. And all the while, the earthbound struggle of our life together fades until it’s almost gone from memory.
Certainly, if I allow myself, I remember the autumn trip to Jackson before Polly and I were anything. I had saved and gone hungry to pay for a drive across the country, gas tank by gas tank. The first night she took me to the ski hill and we rode a gondola to a fancy restaurant that specialized in wild game. Seams of aspen trees glowed gold in deep green pine trees, everywhere. I had pheasant medallions on a kind of green paste that looked like oil paint and tasted like the sun, never had the like before or since. It became clear that I had no plans out there that were independent of her, and the dinner had hit my wallet so hard I almost cried. Polly stayed quiet as she drove me back to my lodgings, and I had to remind myself even then that she hadn’t asked me to come, hadn’t asked me anything, and owed me nothing. The motel sat in the perpetual shadow of a steep valley outside of town. We got there and idled in the parking lot for a bit, then she came in wi
th me, claiming she was curious to see my room. I believe I was the only guest at that time.
“Oh, brother,” she said, her eyes flitting from the stained ceiling to the single bony armchair to the mattress swaybacked by decades of humanity. More than anything, the creek running behind the motel gave off a dampness that slicked the fabrics and the wallpaper, fogged the mirrors and glass surfaces, and mixed with the lack of light to choke the very happiness out of the air. “You can come sleep on my floor.”
She didn’t know what the journey had meant to me, or what she meant to me then, and that’s probably a good thing. We tiptoed around each other for years without honesty getting in the way. Whenever I liked someone it was always, whoa, nelly. Slow down. Lately I don’t know anymore.
AT FITZMORRIS’S tiny art supply store and coffee shop on Main, old hippies in funny sweaters sipped wine and sat and tapped their knees or ignored us. The Country Slippers rode again. The gig had come to us through a friend of Ralph Lilly’s, a local poet throwing herself a book party; she’d read a number of poems, some of which made me blush, and we did our thing after.
We finished a set and a potbellied old man with a long yellow beard cornered me, smiling. It took me a moment to recognize John Allen, my fiddle teacher from when I was a kid. Back then, I’d thought him old, biking slowly up the hill in the summer months. But now, in the store’s backyard some twenty-five years down the line, he was a true old-timer.
Last I’d seen him was the mid-1980s at a bluegrass festival in Bainbridge, New York. Somehow they’d gotten Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals to headline at the little fairground, and Father and Ma took us. I was eleven or twelve. Back then, hillbilly and bluegrass music was controlled by societies of men in fire halls and garages, and presented for the enjoyment of old folks in lawn chairs. Newgrass had arrived with competing flavors of jamminess and precision, but at that time it had not yet elbowed out the gospel and country blues of true bluegrass, which itself had elbowed out something before. That older thing is what I play to this day.