The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  Her mother was on the porch, waiting for her; Frankie could see her from halfway up the meadow, her arms tightly crossed, her shoulders hunched against the cold. As Frankie came up the porch steps, her mother stepped forward and held the screen door open for her. Her face was set, haggard. “So,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Frankie answered. Together they went into the house. The heat was on—Frankie could hear the new furnace in the basement, and the air inside smelled of it, and felt dry.

  “Do you want coffee?” Sylvia asked. “I was going to make some. I hadn’t got around to it yet.” Sylvia was bundled up in an oversize sweater. She had large, puffy slippers on her feet that made a sliding noise as she walked around.

  “Yes, let’s have coffee. And then we should figure out what we ought to be doing.” Frankie followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. As Sylvia moved from the sink to the stove to the cupboard, setting things up, Frankie had her go over again, in closer detail, the events of the night.

  Nothing had been unusual. He got up about midnight, which was typical. He moved around the bedroom for a bit—dressing, Sylvia thought, or gathering his clothes to dress out in the kitchen.

  A light had gone on somewhere down the hall. It was very faint at the bedroom door, just a slight lifting of the blackness there, so she assumed he was in the living room, reading, and she relaxed. “Usually when he reads, that’s a good thing,” she said. “He’s up for a few hours and then he comes back to bed. It’s when he’s agitated, when he keeps moving around, that I worry. Sometimes then I get up. Or just lie there, more or less monitoring him.” She was at the stove, pouring the water into the glass carafe.

  “But you went back to sleep this time,” Frankie said.

  “Yes, I thought everything was okay.” She poured more water in, waited, poured again. They were both quiet, and the only sound for a minute or two was the dribble of the coffee into the lower part of the carafe. When it slowed, then stopped, Sylvia poured the coffee into their cups and brought them over to the table, then went back for the little china milk pitcher. They sat opposite each other.

  The sunlight had climbed over the hill behind the house and reached into the room by now, lying in warming squares over the table, the refinished floor. Frankie put her hand into the light on the tabletop, feeling the slow warmth on her skin. She was thinking of Bud, she realized. She was thinking of calling him, telling him about her father, and there was part of her that was aware of the pleasure this thought brought her, the thought of his being in this with her—in the midst of all this worry!—a thought that contained momentarily all of her sexual feelings for him, her yearning. How strange.

  She must have made a little noise, because Sylvia set her cup down and said, “What?”

  “Oh,” Frankie said. “Just, I think we should give him, maybe, an hour.”

  “You think we should wait that long?” Sylvia’s face was lit harshly by the horizontal sunlight.

  “Well, if he went to the beaver dam, or around Hurd’s Pond, for instance, it would take him that long to get back.”

  “But I’m not sure he’s capable of getting back.”

  “But those are all paths he hikes a couple of times a week.”

  She shook her head. “Not this summer,” she said firmly. “He hasn’t wanted to go anywhere this summer. We went to the beaver dam with the children once or twice, and down to Liz and Clark’s two or three times. And there was that one time he came down alone to see you. But that’s it.”

  They sat for a long moment. Then Frankie said, “Okay, I’ll go out and look.”

  “But where will you go?”

  “I’ll go to those places. Hurd’s Pond and the beaver dam. That’ll put me on the road for a bit of it, too.”

  Sylvia was silent.

  Frankie said, “And why don’t you call around to the neighbors up and down the road and see if anyone’s seen him?”

  “But it’s so early,” Sylvia said.

  “It’s an emergency,” Frankie said firmly. “Call.”

  While her mother was looking for the phone book, Frankie finished her coffee. Then she headed out, about a half mile up the road first, to where the path to the beaver dam turned off. She moved back and forth from sun to shade along the road, grateful always for the warmth when it was the sun’s turn. She was calling intermittently, her voice a lonely sound amid the cheerful morning noises of the birds.

  The path through the woods to the beaver dam was shady, and the widening pond they’d made was in deep shade, the backed-up water black and still. There was no sign of Alfie, though Frankie couldn’t imagine what a sign would be. She stood by the pond turning around slowly, calling his name in every direction, and then she started back.

  As she drew near the house, she had a sense of the futility of what she was doing. He could be anywhere. He could be frightened of her voice, somehow. She could have passed him, if that were the case. Or if he were distracted somehow. Or if he’d fallen and hit his head.

  But she went on. She hiked down the meadow and on the wide path through the woods to Hurd’s Pond, where there was no sign of him, either.

  The sun was fully up, glorious on the fall leaves, by the time she got back to the house. She came in through the front porch again.

  Sylvia was in the living room, looking out. “Nothing?” she asked.

  Frankie shook her head.

  “And no one else has seen him, either,” Sylvia said.

  “We need some help, I think.” Frankie sat down opposite her.

  After a moment, Sylvia said, “Davey Swann, I suppose.”

  “Yes. He’ll have organized the odd search party before, I imagine.” You read about it every now and then in the paper—usually hikers lost off a trail in the mountains, injured or caught in sudden bad weather. Or a child wandering off. “Not Loren, certainly,” Frankie said.

  “Good Lord, no. I hope we can avoid him entirely.” Sylvia got up and went into the kitchen, where the wall phone hung by the back door.

  Frankie followed her and poured herself more coffee as she listened to her mother’s voice speaking to Davey. She sounded calmer than she had talking to Frankie—even slightly amused at what she called, to Davey, her “pickle.” “Well, I’m not sure how long,” she said. “He wasn’t around when I got up, and that was sixish.”

  After a moment, she seemed to be agreeing with him about possible places Alfie might have been going. And then she said, “Though it may be none of the above. He’s been diagnosed with a kind of Alzheimer’s disease, you know, sort of midstage, I guess, so he may not really remember where it is he’s headed.”

  This led to a long silence on her part, some noises of agreement, and finally the end of the conversation.

  “He’s coming up,” she said as she came back to the table. “They’ll start with a group of people searching, I guess the same men who respond to fires.”

  Frankie stood up. “I’ll make another pot of coffee,” she said.

  ——

  The deal was, Davey said, that they could keep it local for maybe three or four hours. Then they’d need to call the state officers in charge of search and rescue and make it official, which would enlarge it quite a bit. Frankie had the sense he’d risked something to get permission to do this, but perhaps not—he was deferential, shy almost, and therefore hard to read. And apologetic to Sylvia, as car after car pulled up outside and parked at the edge of the long driveway. They could see the men and a few women standing around out there, perhaps twenty or twenty-five of them, and Frankie saw how foolish she’d been to make the extra pot of coffee. Though she was having another cup herself while Davey and Sylvia sat at the kitchen table and she went over for him again what she thought Alfie was wearing.

  Davey was writing all this down in a notebook he’d brought in with him. He’d turned down the offer of coffee. There was something self-contained about him, so orderly, it made Frankie feel better. Confident.

  Yesterday’s clothes,
Sylvia said. His brown slacks. A striped shirt over a navy T-shirt. And all this, she suspected, over his pajamas, as she hadn’t found them anywhere.

  And Frankie could imagine it, his getting up and putting on the clothes he’d laid across the bedroom chair without noticing he was still wearing the old print pajamas.

  He’d taken his parka, Sylvia said, which didn’t yet have the winter zip-out lining in it, and the heavy hiking sneakers he wore most days now. And his old hat, a misshapen beige canvas thing that had once looked a bit like a fedora.

  Frankie stood at the back door, sipping her coffee, listening to her mother and watching the group in the yard. They moved around, leaning against one person’s car and then another’s, some of them sitting inside, turned sideways with their doors hanging open. A few were smoking.

  And then Bud arrived. She didn’t see his car until after she spotted him walking up the drive. Then she saw that he’d parked it halfway down, behind a pickup that blocked most of it from her view. She moved to the window and stood where he could have seen her if he looked her way, seen her standing there, drinking coffee, hoping to talk to him, to touch him.

  But he didn’t look her way. Tall, grizzled, wearing a navy-blue jacket she hadn’t seen on him before, he moved around among the others, talking, laughing, writing things down.

  Well, of course, it made sense not to signal some special relationship. Hadn’t they been trying to avoid making that public knowledge?

  Davey was asking about the barn now. Did it have electricity? Could they set up tables there? They’d need to make a kind of headquarters, a place to organize things.

  Her mother began the apologetic description of the mess out there, and Frankie turned to face them both. “Why don’t you use my sister’s house?” she said to Davey.

  He looked up. “Ah,” he said. “Down below, in the meadow.”

  “Yes. It’s got electricity. And a working phone and a big table. A stove. Heat, even—a woodstove, anyhow.”

  “Well. That’d be helpful. Thank you.”

  “When you’re ready, I can go down with you and show you around. And pick up any of my stuff that’d be in the way.”

  He stood up. “We may as well go right now. Get that disreputable bunch out of your mother’s yard sooner rather than later.”

  Frankie got her jacket from the living room and came back to the kitchen to follow Davey out. At the door, she turned to Sylvia. “I’ll come right back, as soon as they’re settled in.”

  Davey was outside calling out directions, and the assembled few dozen were returning to their cars, starting them up.

  Bud came over to her. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, and Frankie felt suddenly tearful. “You want a ride down, or do you have your car?”

  “A ride down, please.” As they walked back down the driveway, she told him what she knew. In the car, they waited for the line of others to make its way down the driveway and out onto the road to Liz and Clark’s. “I’ve been thinking about you so much through these last couple of hours,” Frankie said. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked over at her. “Is it?”

  “I feel guilty about it, actually. It’s almost as if I welcome this drama. Just so I can somehow be with you. Lean on you.”

  “You don’t need a drama to be with me, do you?”

  “No. That’s my point. Why should I feel so … hot for you. In the midst of this?”

  They swung into the driveway now, the last in the line of cars. As they turned right down the hill, he said, “I’m glad for the heat anytime, it goes without saying. But maybe it’s a way not to think about what might be really”—his mouth tightened—“bad news, here.”

  Frankie felt stung. She turned and looked out the window at the familiar trees, the last wild asters flowering below them.

  At Liz’s, the cars were pulling over onto the meadow, some oddly angled, others falling into rows where they could.

  As they got out, Bud looked over the top of the car at her. “Where will you be?” he asked.

  “I’m heading back up to Sylvia’s, once I settle things here,” she said. “Are you going to join the search?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be waiting, then.”

  Davey was standing on the back porch, gathering the volunteers around him as they got out of their cars. He had maps he was passing out, areas he wanted different “teams,” he called them, to cover. Five-man teams, he said, the usual captains.

  There was calling back and forth, laughter, as the teams sorted themselves out. Frankie stood on the porch, too, watching. Someone said, “Hey, Gavin. We still got room,” and the lanky boy went over and stood with the small group clustered together nearest her. Some of the volunteers had rucksacks. All wore hiking boots, parkas, hats. Many carried walking sticks. Most of the faces were familiar to Frankie, and she knew the names of about half of them. Kevin O’Hara was there, and Peter Babcock. Dan Stark, Seward Mitchell, John Chick, and Gavin Knox, all of them sorted out into their groups.

  Frankie was at first startled to see that Tink Snell was there, too, and then also to see that the others were behaving perfectly normally around him in spite of all the speculation about his possibly being the arsonist. But perhaps they were used to his appearance at events such as these. Bud had said that he’d continued to fight the fires, too, and that no one commented on that.

  In the end there were five groups. Two would start out from here, Davey said, one toward the beaver dam, the other toward the pond. The other groups were to drive to the trails that came at those sites from other directions. When they met, if Alfie hadn’t turned up, they’d come back here and see what the next step was.

  “We think the professor is probably just lost, probably not too far from here, so we’re hoping this’ll do the trick. He’s got dementia, you should know that, so he may be confused about who you are and where you’re taking him. You need to be gentle and careful with him. A lotta explaining, when you find him. If you need help bringing him out, ask for help. He answers to Alfie.”

  Davey talked about what Alfie looked like, what he was wearing, how long it was thought he’d been out there. He said within a couple of hours, if it lasted that long, there would be food here, at Liz and Clark Swenson’s place. Food and extra equipment. That everyone should come back here.

  His voice, always, was shy, almost apologetic, but he was clearly in charge. Two men came up to him with their maps, asking for clarification on their exact routes. When he was done, the groups split up. The people in the groups that were driving were starting to negotiate which car or truck would be best to take. Frankie went inside.

  She moved quickly around the main room, picking up her books and papers from the table, from the trunk by the woodstove. She started a fire. Once that was going, she went into the bathroom and cleared away her makeup, her toothbrush and hairbrush and used towels. She put everything she’d need for the day into her overnight bag to take up to Sylvia’s, along with a change of clothes. She got out a stack of clean towels and set them on the hamper by the bathroom sink.

  She could hear that Davey had come in and was talking to someone. When she stepped into the big room, closing the door behind her, there were two men with Davey. They were pushing the table back against the wall. They had set their radios down on it, and stacks of papers—Frankie could see terrain maps and charts, with lists of names.

  “We’re all set here,” Davey said.

  “So I guess I’ll go back up to my mother’s,” Frankie answered.

  “Yeah, that’s best,” Davey said. “She can use your company, of that I’m sure. And we’ll call, soon’s we have anything to report.”

  Outside the air still seemed cool to Frankie. She could hear the calls starting in the field above, multiple voices: Aalfie. Aaalfie. She was thinking of her father, imagining him. Imagining him and
imagining Bud now, too, walking in the woods, calling Alfie’s name. She tossed her overnight bag onto the passenger seat of the rental car and threaded her way out through the maze created by the cars of the searchers, back onto the road. As she reached Sylvia and Alfie’s driveway, she saw a car in her rearview mirror, just turning off the road below her into Liz’s driveway: Loren’s car, with its big star. There would be no keeping him away from the action, she supposed.

  It seemed very quiet at Sylvia’s after the bustle below. Her mother was sitting in the living room, staring off at the view. She looked up at Frankie as she came in. “Everyone is all set down there?” She sounded determinedly matter-of-fact.

  “Yes. They’re getting things organized.”

  “What kinds of things, exactly?”

  “Oh, teams, I guess. Search groups. With different assignments. Davey Swann had maps to hand out.”

  Frankie sat down. She looked out to where Sylvia had been staring and saw a widely and evenly spaced row of figures just entering the woods at the bottom of the meadow.

  After a moment, Sylvia said, “Maybe we’d feel more useful down there?”

  “I don’t think they really want us down there, Mother. I think it’s … easier for them if we just let them do what they usually do. Tell their usual jokes, you know. Behave the way they always behave.”

  “I suppose there are jokes, aren’t there?” Sylvia smiled ruefully.

  “At this stage, anyway. Everyone seemed almost … cheerful.”

  “Well, it’s an adventure.”

  “For everyone but Alfie.”

  “Oh, it may be for him, too, at this point,” Sylvia said. “That’s how I’m trying to think of it. That he’s out for a walk and is enjoying himself. And he doesn’t have the least idea that there are dozens of people out hunting for him.”

  “If he’s not cold.”

  “Well, yes.”

  They sat for some minutes more, one or the other of them offering something occasionally. Then Sylvia abruptly decided to build a fire in the fireplace, and Frankie went upstairs to unpack her overnight bag. She stayed up there longer than she needed to, listening to her mother moving around below. She could hear that Sylvia was talking to herself a little, the odd word audible. It was hard to read her, Frankie thought. She seemed to swing back and forth between the deepest concern for Alfie and a kind of willed insouciance. It made Frankie uncertain what her own position should be.