The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  “What an accomplishment for Alfie.” She smiled quickly.

  At about seven someone knocked on the back door again. Frankie went to open it. It was Bud. He was back from Whitehall with his papers and about to spend the evening with his helpers inserting the circulars and ads into them. He said he’d stopped below, but they had nothing to report to him.

  Sylvia offered him coffee or a drink, but he said he had to get going. They stood awkwardly for a moment, all three of them, and then Bud looked directly at Frankie and said, “Will you walk me out to the car?”

  “Oh. Sure,” she said.

  “Oh, yes!” said Sylvia, as though she’d been stupid not to suggest it herself. “Go on.”

  The rain had started, lightly. They’d taken only a few steps from the porch when they turned to each other. He held Frankie so tightly that she felt small, she felt engulfed. “I’ve missed you so much today,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “I wish I didn’t have this fucking civic obligation. I just …”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Will you call me?” He pulled his head back to look at her. His breath was warm on her face. “Anytime,” he said. “The office or the car or home. Just, if you hear anything, if anything happens, call.”

  “I will.” Frankie wanted to stop him, to tell him she needed him, he couldn’t go.

  They turned together to walk the few steps to his car, their arms around each other’s waists. “I told Davey that Alfie overheard what Sylvia said, about not loving him.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because it seemed to me all of a sudden that he must have heard her that night, and that he may not want to be found. That this may be, really, suicidal, this …”

  “Yes? You think so?”

  “I don’t know, but …”

  They were by his car. He held her again. She could feel his lips, his breath, on her hair, her ear. “Jesus, I’m sorry to leave you. For this ridiculous … chore.”

  “It’s all right. Sylvia and I can’t think of a thing to say to each other, and you and I would probably just sit there, too. It’s just impossible, waiting.” She lifted her shoulders and tried to smile. “And maybe he’s fine. He could be fine.”

  “But cold.”

  “But cold,” she agreed.

  “I could come back. This’ll be a few hours, and then …”

  “I’ll call,” she said.

  “Okay.” He stepped back, and she felt cold. She crossed her arms, hunched her shoulders. He reached out and touched her face. “Sweetheart,” he said.

  She turned her face and kissed his hand quickly, then stepped away and walked back to the house, hearing the car start up as she went inside.

  Byron Morrell stopped by again at nine or so, still with nothing to report, except that the helicopter had stopped for the night. After he’d left, Frankie lay down on the couch with another one of her father’s books. Sylvia said she would read, too. In the bedroom, if Frankie didn’t mind.

  “No,” Frankie said. “No, of course not.”

  And the next thing she was aware of was someone lightly shaking her shoulder. She opened her eyes. Sylvia was bending over her, her face oddly pouched by gravity, by fatigue, saying, “They found him. I’m going in.”

  “ ‘Going in’ …?”

  “To the hospital.” She had her coat on, she was holding her purse.

  Frankie sat up. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s alive, anyway. Byron thinks he may have had a heart attack or something. He’s unconscious. That’s really all he knew. They took him in right away.”

  Frankie was licking her lips, swinging her legs down. “I’ll come, too,” she said.

  Sylvia shook her head. “No. No, no. You stay here. Get some sleep. I’m sure … I’ll call you, either here or at Liz’s, if you want to go back down there. I’d rather … I’d like to be alone with him right now.”

  Frankie looked at her mother. Her face was firm, decided. After a moment, she asked, “Where was he?”

  “Not far,” Sylvia said. “By the beaver dam. Curled up, under some leaves, they said. Perhaps trying to stay warm.”

  “Yes,” Frankie said, though she was thinking that he was hiding, he must have been hiding.

  Sylvia leaned forward and kissed her quickly. “I will, I’ll call, first bit of news.” She started to move away, toward the kitchen.

  “Shall I … shall I call Liz?” Frankie asked.

  “Oh. Yes.” She stopped. “Well, no. It’s almost four.” She sighed, heavily. “Well, but even if she’s trying to sleep, I suppose she’d sleep better knowing. So yes. Yes, call her.” And she left.

  Frankie called Liz immediately. As soon as she got off the phone with her, she telephoned Bud at home.

  “Frankie?” he said. His voice was whispery, sleepy.

  “He’s alive,” she said. “They took him to the hospital.”

  He cleared his throat. “Where are you?”

  “Here. At my mother’s.”

  “Can I come over?”

  “It’s four o’clock.”

  “How is that relevant?”

  18

  BUD COULD FEEL IT HAPPENING, the shift in Frankie, starting with her call to him after her father was found. He’d driven over to her mother’s house and stayed with her, but only for a few hours—he had to start delivering the papers at six. They’d gone upstairs to the guest bedroom and lain down on the coverlet, pulling the spare blanket over them. Frankie was wired, unable to sleep, alternately relieved, even excited, about Alfie’s having been found, and then worried about how he was doing, whether he would recover, and what this episode might mean for him, for his care, going forward.

  Bud let her talk, not saying much. He drifted off more than once, but then would wake, wake to Frankie’s pressured voice. “I mean, don’t you think this is it? That he’s just got to have more supervision. That Sylvia … that she can’t …”

  And Bud would stroke her arm, her hair, and make his noises of agreement, feeling a kind of sleepy joy. A joy that rode with him through the day—first delivering the papers, and then talking to Davey Swann to get the details of the rescue operation.

  Even as he sat in his office in the afternoon and finished the article he’d been working on before Alfie disappeared—even then he could feel it: that she had let go of something that had kept her pulling away from him, away from the possibility of commitment, of staying.

  In the evening, he drove over to her house—her sister’s house. She’d spent the day with her mother at the hospital, talking to doctors and sitting with her father. At Liz’s, he helped her push the furniture back in place and clean up. Then sex, gentle and conventional and sweet, they were both so tired. And in all of that, there was the same newly eased quality to their interactions that he’d felt the night before.

  He’d come home at almost midnight. He’d thought about just staying over, but he was reluctant to seem to push anything, to assert any claim. And he was more and more certain he didn’t need to. He wasn’t going to need to.

  So he was moving slowly this morning. He’d just made his first cup of coffee when the phone rang. He almost didn’t pick it up, he was so reluctant to start his day. But after three rings, he turned the radio off and lifted the receiver from its cradle.

  The voice on the phone was Loren’s. He said, “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

  Bud wasn’t happy to hear from him. Bad news of some sort, he assumed. “What exactly is it you’re doing for me?” he asked.

  “This call. What I’m doing right now.”

  “What’s the big deal?” he asked.

  “We’ve got Tink.” Loren’s voice was thick with self-satisfaction.

  “What do you mean, got him?”

  “We’re gonna arrest him.”

  Bud set his coffee down. “Who? Who’s going to arrest him?”

  “The state police. They’re taking him over to Greenwood.”

 
“When did they pick him up?”

  “Yesterday. They were waiting for him at the brother-in-law’s house there after Rowley was found. Took him down to Black Mountain for questioning. Had him there all day yesterday and into the night and he confessed.”

  “He confessed.”

  “Signed, sealed, delivered.”

  Bud could hear how much he was enjoying this. “Did he have a lawyer?” Bud asked.

  “He didn’t ask for no lawyer. He just confessed.”

  After a moment, Bud asked, “After how long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long were you questioning him?”

  There was a pause, and Loren said, “I guess maybe twenty, twenty-four hours or so.”

  “Jesus, Loren!”

  “What?”

  “This is fucked up. You know that.”

  “I don’t know any such thing.” He sounded offended.

  Bud told himself to hold it in. After a moment, he said, “So they took him in. Where?”

  “They’re just taking him now. Greenwood. You get over there fast enough, you can watch it.”

  “Okay,” Bud said. And then, not quite an afterthought, “Thanks.”

  “I’m always looking out for you.”

  “Yes, you are.” And he hung up.

  So much for a slow morning. He’d been planning on getting Alfie’s story written. He’d been thinking it would be on the front page. Now it would be pushed below the fold anyway, and maybe farther back. This week would be all Tink. All Tink all the time—for the foreseeable future, anyway.

  He rinsed his cup in the sink and got out some bread. While it was toasting, he called Sam Pitkin and Georgie Morrell to see if someone could cover the high school soccer game this afternoon.

  The toast had flung itself onto the counter and was cold by the time he reached it. An omen.

  And sure enough, it started to rain on the way over to Greenwood. Bud’s wipers were not all they should have been, and he had to slow down to see through the streaks they made on the windshield. He had the radio on, listening to the news, but mostly he was thinking of Tink Snell.

  He’d gone back and forth in his own mind about the kid’s possible guilt. For a long time, as he’d told Frankie and whoever else he was talking about it with, he had thought it wasn’t likely. He’d thought Tink was too slow to have eluded the police and the arson investigators as long as he would have had to. But the fire at Sylvia and Alfie’s had changed all that, and Bud had been suspicious of him ever since.

  And, it was clear, so had the various investigators, since it was after that that the serious surveillance had started. In spite of which there had been six more fires set. On the one hand this would argue against its being Tink who’d set them. How could he, with all that attention focused on him? Though it was also possible that he was pissed off enough at being so closely monitored that he’d been inspired to new heights. And maybe there was an added element to his rage because people didn’t seem to have bought his heroism at the Rowleys’ fire. After what I did to save the house, you’re watching me? Me? Fuck you. See if you can watch me set this one, or this one. Or this one.

  What Bud wondered was what might have happened if they had bought it, presuming Tink had been the arsonist all along. Might that have been gratifying enough to stop him? To heal whatever wound the fires were intended to serve as a poultice to?

  Now, monitoring his wipers, trying to keep the white line at the edge of the road in sight, Bud let his thoughts float freely, sometimes turning to Frankie’s long white body coiled in the quilt last night, to her legs opening to wrap around him, to his sense of her new ease with him; sometimes to Tink, lost now for sure if he hadn’t been before.

  The main room at the Greenwood police station was crowded—with other local newspapermen, with a dozen or so people Bud didn’t know, with folks from Pomeroy that Loren or someone else must have alerted. Bud saw Harlan and Gavin. Kevin O’Hara. A few others. Adrian was up near the front. Bud had come so late that he had to push his way over to the side of the room in hopes of a better angle. He’d brought his camera.

  There was a stir at the doorway, and the murmurs, “They’re here!” “Here he comes!” And then he watched as three heads moved through the crowd, the two state troopers wearing their hats, and Tink, looking tired and confused, stumbling in between them, visible only in quick glimpses through the crowd. He was wearing his usual outfit, a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, work boots. He’d lost his jacket somewhere along the way, the jacket he’d been wearing in the search for Alfie. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

  They marched him up to the counter at the front of the room. A man Bud took to be the arresting officer sat behind it, fat, tired-looking, his glasses swung up to the top of his head.

  Yes, now Bud could hear him speaking to Tink, telling him he was under arrest. He looked up sharply, then across the counter, and asked, “Do you understand this?”

  Bud couldn’t hear Tink’s reply. Or very much else the officer said after that. Enough to know Tink was told of his rights, and then several times asked the question again: “Do you understand this?”

  It was all over in about three minutes, and Tink was hustled out again. Bud got a few clear shots of him on the way out as people began to move to follow him. By the time Bud also had followed the crowd onto the front steps of the building, Tink was bending to step into a state police car, an officer’s hand on his head as he lowered himself. His hands were still cuffed behind his back. Bud took a picture of this, too.

  Suddenly Gavin Knox was standing next to Bud. “Where the fuck are they taking him?” Gavin asked. “Do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Bud said.

  A man in front of them turned around and said, “Over to the Pembroke jail. For fear of retribution.”

  Bud recognized him as one of the state cops that had been hanging around Pomeroy for the last month or so.

  Bud snorted. “What, you think someone from Pomeroy is going to sneak into jail here and kill him?”

  “There’ve been a lot of threats floating around.”

  “There are a lot of big mouths with not much better to do than talk to cops and reporters.”

  “All I’m saying is, better safe than sorry.”

  “Hey!” Bud said. “Let me write that down.”

  “Fuck you,” the cop said genially.

  Back in the car, it occurred to him to call the Globe guy and let him know about the arrest, and he did that. Then he drove slowly back to Pomeroy and straight to the town hall. He parked and went around to a small door at the back, the door to the administrative office. He knocked once and opened it just as Emily Gilroy called out, “Come in.”

  She was turning from the filing cabinet, the light glinting on her glasses as she did. Her face shifted into a warm smile when she saw Bud—she was a person of whom you could say, Her face lit up, Bud had always thought.

  “Buddy boy!” she said.

  “Hey, Emily.”

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” She gestured for him to sit in the chair facing her desk, and she went behind it to her own old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. She was plump, and she grunted a little as she lowered herself. She was in her winter uniform already—a turtleneck, a sweater over it, stretchy, pilled beige slacks of some wool-wannabe synthetic fabric. She wore slippers at work; her heavy sneakers were in a basket by the door. She’d been beautiful—Bud had seen the old photographs of her here and there. Now she was jolly-looking, her hair in the usual permed white ridges apparently required of any woman over sixty-five in Pomeroy. She wore bifocals, she had fat rouged cheeks. Mrs. Claus.

  “Have you heard about Tink?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Loren stopped in, first thing, the bearer of bad tidings as he so loves to be.”

  “I was just over there for the basic you’re under arrest ceremony. They said he’ll be arraigned in a day or two.”

  “And they have a confession, Loren tells me?�
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  He nodded.

  “So.” She lifted her hands. “That would be that, I guess.”

  “We’ll see. But I’m here to be nosy about him. About his life. What can you tell me?”

  Much, it turned out, a little of which Bud already knew. But Emily added detail. His mother was Adrian’s youngest sister, the family ne’er-do-well—Mary Anne. She dropped out of high school when she got pregnant, no one was sure by whom, probably least of all she. “She was known for that, I’m afraid,” Emily said.

  She’d worked for Adrian for a while in the store, but after the baby came, she went on welfare. “She was just big trouble, always,” Emily said. “Not the kind of trouble that hurt anyone else but herself. Mostly just men and drinking. But I mean a lot of drinking. We always thought that might be part of why Tink is like he is—you know, a little slow.”

  Her parents had kicked her out, finally, and she moved to Winslow. The man she was living with there went up to work on the Alaska Pipeline, and she went with him, taking Tink. “He was still little,” Emily said. “Maybe one or two. She was up there awhile. It was a wild place then, from what you hear, and apparently that suited her just fine. A couple of other folks from around here went up there, too, for the money, don’t you know, and we heard things about her afterward. She was making her living pretty much as a whore, they said. And who knows who was taking care of that baby? Or how much of all that he saw.” She shook her head. “Imagine.”

  She came back to the area when Tink was six or seven. She lived in different nearby towns for a while, with different men. She was married once, for a couple of years. She was busted for drugs a few times. “Then maybe six or seven years ago, Adrian gave her the use of that land and the trailer up by Silsby, and she moved there with whoever she was with then, and Tink. So Tink came back to Pomeroy then and went to the high school in Winslow with the other town kids.

  “And then at some point, come to find out she’d left again, without Tink this time. That he was living there all by himself. Had been for a while. I think some teacher noticed the same dirty clothes every day and him getting thinner. It’s true he wasn’t a baby anymore—he must have been fifteen or sixteen—but still … That’s not right, you know.”