Five Fires

by Laura Lippman

  When my photo appeared in the Wilmington paper, it wasn’t a big deal. I mean, it was on page 1, and a lot of kids said, “Go, you,” and not at all sarcastic. A week later it was online, in a newspaper all the way in London, England, and it said: the face of belleville. Well, I’m not, but I would be proud to be that. And the part underneath, “A Town Unites in Hate Against Rape Victim,” wasn’t true. Because Tara wasn’t raped. No charges were filed; her lawsuit was dropped because her parents got cold feet, and they went back to Philadelphia. What about Daniel? What about Charley? I imagine them this fall, off at school, saying their names, saying where they’re from. She ruined their lives, or tried. And Charley’s not much, but Daniel Stone is the nicest boy you’ll ever meet. He lay down at her feet and let her walk across his back, and she says these things against him? “Slut” is kind, if you ask me. Girl gets caught having sex, says it wasn’t her idea, puts it on the boy.

  Sure, Tara, sure.

  And now she’s back. If she wanted to apologize, things would be different. But she’s never going to admit she was wrong. Never.

  The playhouse. The vacant lot where we held bonfires. The dumpster behind Langley’s. The snack bar at the pool. And now the Greene house, which no one wanted to buy. I bet it’s insured. I bet it’s insured for a lot of money. “Jewish lightning,” my mother says the next day. I had forgotten the Greene family was Jewish. People made a big deal out of that, too, but it never mattered to us. And Tara got lots of extra holidays. I think she made half of them up. She was a liar, and that’s what liars do: make things up.

  I know what I have to do, but I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go to the cops, tell them about Tara. The mud on her sandals the night after the rain, the fire at the pool. How I saw her standing outside her own house when it went up in flames. If I go to them, I’m a snitch. I’ll be like her, only I’ll be telling the truth.

  Tara must know what’s going through my mind, because she doesn’t follow me home on Monday or Tuesday. Or maybe I start leaving just a few minutes earlier, now that Wendi’s on time, since the pool closed down. But Wednesday, after I stop by the high school to make sure I’m not missing any major requirements, she’s waiting for me at the edge of the lacrosse field, under the John and Adelaide Stone scoreboard, the one with the ad for Langley Seafood along the bottom.

  Then she sees the state trooper’s car, parked across the street, and she runs.

  Two men get out. “Beth Ennis? Can we talk to you? Just a few questions. Can we talk to you?”

  I look around. No one’s there, no one will know if I talk to them. Tara might, but that’s her problem, right? She was tagging after me, they saw her, she ran. They think I know something. But I don’t. I can’t know anything. I make up my mind that I’ll talk to them, but I won’t volunteer anything. They teach you in kindergarten not to be a tattletale.

  They take me to the state police barracks. In the car, on the way over, they ask me my age and I say eighteen. I guess they don’t believe me, because I see them exchange a look and they ask for my actual birth date, like I can’t do math. I turned eighteen just two weeks ago. My mom had the option to hold me back, so she did, so I wouldn’t be the smallest in the class. The thing is, I’m kinda the biggest. I hit six feet at age fourteen.

  “My mom held me back,” I tell them. “So I wouldn’t be the smallest. I mean, the youngest. I was never the smallest. But it wasn’t like it was with Charley Boyd’s parents. They wanted him to have an advantage when he tried out for football. They call that redshirting—which is different from Redshirts, which is a Star Trek thing.”

  I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. “Speculative fiction” is the better term, I think. Because fantasies are that Fifty Shades stuff, about love and stuff. And science fiction sounds as if it’s about science. When it’s still about the people, you know? It’s all what if. What if?

  They ask me again for the year I was born and I tell them.

  At the barracks in Georgetown, they offer me anything I want from the vending machines—anything. I don’t want to appear greedy, so I ask for a Diet 7UP and a bag of Utz crab chips. They’re both really nice. Good cop, good cop. After all, I’m not a suspect. I’m just someone who knows things I wish I didn’t know. The mud on Tara’s sandals. Seeing her watching her own house burn. The thing she said about knowing how to make a fire from sticks. When I feel like I’m about to tell them something I shouldn’t, I eat a big handful of chips, sip my soda. The policeman is your friend. The policeman is your friend. That old song comes back to me from kindergarten, back when I was normal size, right in the middle of the class when we lined up by height.

  “You know the house that burned, right?” one asks me.

  “Know of it, sir. I was never inside.”

  “And the playhouse? The snack bar?”

  “Again, I know about those places, but they’re not places I ever went.”

  “The vacant lot, the dumpster at Langley’s?”

  They’re not from Belleville. They need my help.

  “Well, the vacant lot is where we have the bonfires in the fall. For pep rallies. And, and, for other things. Langley’s is a seafood restaurant. It’s owned by the Stone family. Daniel worked as a waiter there, modest as you please. He didn’t need to work. But his family has what my mom calls good values. They believe in work. Daniel waited tables there in the summer. They have a really good fried oyster sandwich. My mom and I went there for her birthday once. But it was March, so Daniel wasn’t working.”

  “So,” says one of them. They look so much alike, they might be twins. Tan suits, short dark hair. “If you think about it, every one of these fires is tied to the Stone family or the Greene family.”

  “Well, not the vacant lot, sir. Everyone in the high school went there.”

  “Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  I don’t. I really don’t. But I’m out of chips and soda, and I don’t know what to do with my hands. I tent my fingers, then put my palms flat on the table. They’re really sweaty, and now my fingers have that crab dust on them from the chips.

  “Sirs? There’s something I probably should tell you. I don’t want to, and I would appreciate if you didn’t let it get out. That I told you. Because, while I plan to major in law enforcement at Del Tech, kids can be very cruel. They’ll say I’m a snitch. I’m not. I’m the opposite. But Tara Greene is back in town. I’ve seen her. I don’t know where she’s staying, but I see her every day, almost. She was at the school just now. Did you see her? She ran away when she saw you. She walks home with me from the deli. And the day after the fire at the pool, there was mud on her sandals, and I saw her, at the fire at her house. I don’t know why she would burn down the snack bar, although I think she and Daniel first started flirting there”—Wendi told me that—“and I don’t know why she would burn down her house, although her parents can’t sell it; maybe she thought they would get insurance money—”

  They interrupt and say: “You know, we probably should call your parents.”

  My mom is getting ready to go to work, and she’s pissed. But when she comes in, she says, “Let’s make this quick.”

  I say, “Mom, I had to tell them. Tara did it. Tara started all those fires. And she’s been following me around for weeks now. I didn’t let her in the house, although she kept asking to come in. I don’t owe her anything.”

  The cops do that thing where they exchange a look, then leave. My mom, so old, so used up, so not the pretty schoolteacher with the convertible that needs a new tire, does something that she hasn’t done since I was eight years old. She takes me in her arms, although she’s so tiny it feels odd. It’s like one of those birds who rides on the head of a hippo decided to give it a hug. Not that I’m that big, just that my mom is that small. By the time I was fourteen, when she had bad nights, I could pick her up and carry her, put her in the tub, put her to bed. I hated doing that, yet I miss it sometimes. She doesn’t need me as much as she us
ed to.

  “Oh, Beth, oh Bethie, what have you done?”

  “Nothing, Mom. I wasn’t even sure until now that it was Tara. I—”

  “Oh, baby,” my mom says. “You know that Tara Greene’s been dead since last May. Killed herself a week before graduation. She drove down here from Philadelphia and slit her wrists in that playhouse. You know that. Everyone in town knows that.”

  The cops come back in. I bet they were listening to us all along. It’s a one-way glass, usually, so they can see in, listen to what you say. Everyone knows that trick.

  “But she set those fires,” I say. “Sorry, but she did. I don’t want to tattle, but I saw her, I saw her—”

  “Beth,” the one cop asks me. “We need to go through where you were. Every night there was a fire, okay? Can you prove where you were?”

  “She was home with me,” Mom says.

  “Are you sure, ma’am? Are you sure?”

  I say, wanting to be truthful, wanting to keep Mama from looking like she’s covering up for me: “I did go out the night of the fire at the Greenes’ house. But only after I heard the sirens. That’s how I know Tara was there. I went out my bedroom window. But I wouldn’t go out to do anything bad. You know that, Mama. I would never do anything bad.”

  The two men in the tan suits look to my mom, who is crying now and rocking in her seat.

  “Been working four to eleven since August 1,” Mama says. “The night shift. The fucking night shift. I don’t even look in on her when I get home. She’s always in her room with the door shut. At least—I thought she was in her room.”

  My poor mom. I probably should call her sponsor tonight. It makes her so nervous when I’m at the center of things. She doesn’t think I can handle it. That’s why she had that bad night last fall. But I’m a hero, Mama. I’m proud. I’m righteous. I don’t mind telling these police officers what Tara’s been up to, if that’s what I have to do. I’ll help them catch her too. That will be exciting, almost as exciting as last fall, when I was the face of Belleville.

  An Excerpt from Sunburn by Laura Lippman

  Continue reading for an excerpt of New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman’s new novel, Sunburn, on sale now.

  Praise for Sunburn

  “I feel like it creates a whole new category, which I’m thinking of as ‘femme noir.’ . . . She’s taken this traditional noir structure of a man sweeping in to save a woman who then turns around and eats his heart out—she’s turned that notion on its head.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Another extraordinary novel from Laura Lippman—full of just-one-more chapter, stay-up-late suspense, but packed too with nuance, subtlety, observation, and humanity. Lippman is a natural storyteller at the height of her powers.”

  —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “This is Lippman at her observant, fiercest best, a force to be reckoned with in crime fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “You can tell how much fun the author had updating the classic noir tropes, and it’s contagious. Plotty, page-turning pleasure.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  1

  June 11, 1995

  Belleville, Delaware

  It’s the sunburned shoulders that get him. Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing, as she’s doing right now in an absentminded way. The skin has started sloughing off, soon those narrow shoulders won’t be so tender. Why would a redhead well into her thirties make such a rookie mistake?

  And why is she here, sitting on a barstool, forty-five miles inland, in a town where strangers seldom stop on a Sunday evening? Belleville is the kind of place where people are supposed to pass through and soon they won’t even do that. They’re building a big bypass so the beach traffic won’t have to slow for the speed trap on the old Main Street. He saw the construction vehicles, idle on Sunday, on his way in. Places like this bar-slash-restaurant, the High-Ho, are probably going to lose what little business they have.

  High-Ho. A misprint? Was it supposed to be Heigh-Ho? And if so, was it for the seven dwarfs, heading home from the mines at day’s end, or for the Lone Ranger, riding off into the sunset? Neither one makes much sense for this place.

  Nothing about this makes sense.

  Her shoulders are thin, pointy, hunched up so close to her ears that they make him think of wings. The front of her pink-and-yellow sundress is quite a contrast, full and round. She carries herself as if she doesn’t want to attract any male attention, at least not tonight. On the front, he can’t help noticing as he slides on a barstool, she’s not so pink. The little strip of skin showing above the relatively high-necked dress has only the faintest hint of color. Ditto, her cheeks. It is early June, with a breeze that makes it easy to forget how strong the sun is already. Clearly a modest type, she wears a one-piece, so there’s probably a deep U of red to go with those shoulders. Yesterday, fingerprints pressed there would have left white marks.

  He wonders if she’s meeting someone here, someone who will rub cream into the places she can’t reach. He would be surprised if she is. More surprised if she’s up for leaving with a stranger, not shocked by either scenario. Sure, she gives off a prim vibe, but those are the ones you have to watch out for.

  One thing’s for sure: she’s up to something. His instincts for this stuff can’t be denied.

  He doesn’t go in hard. He’s not that way. Doesn’t have to be, if that doesn’t sound too vain. It’s just a fact: he’s a Ken doll kind of guy, if Ken had a great year-round tan. Tall and muscular with even features, pale eyes, dark hair. Women always assume that Ken wants a Barbie, but he prefers his women thin and a little skittish. In his downtime, he likes to hunt deer. Bow and arrow. He goes to the woods of western Maryland, where he can spend an entire day sitting in a tree, waiting, and he loves it. Tom Petty was wrong about that. The waiting’s not the hardest part. Waiting can be beautiful, lush, full of possibility. When he was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, his ahead-of-the-curve beat parents put him in this study at Stanford where he was asked to sit in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. He would get two if he didn’t eat the one while he waited. He had asked, How long do I have to sit here for three? They laughed.

  He didn’t learn until he was in his twenties that he was part of some study that was trying to determine if there’s a correlation between success and a kid’s ability to manage the desire for instant gratification. He still thinks it was unfair that the experiment wasn’t organized in a way that allowed a kid to get three marshmallows for sitting twice as long as anyone else.

  He has left two stools between them, not wanting to crowd her, but he makes sure she hears when he orders a glass of wine. That catches her attention, asking for wine instead of beer in a place like this. That was the idea, catching her attention. She doesn’t speak, but glances sideways when he asks the blonde behind the bar what kind of wine they serve. He doesn’t break balls over the selection, which is red and white. Literally: “We have red and we have white.” He doesn’t bat an eyelash when they serve him the red cold. Not a sommelier-ordained-sixty-degree cold, but straight-from-the-fridge cold. He takes a sip, summons the barmaid back, and says, oh so politely, “You know what? I’m happy to pay for this, but it’s not to my taste. May I have a beer?” He glances at the taps. “Goose Island?”

  Another quick sideways flick of her eyes, then back to her own drink—amber, rocks. Wherever she’s going tonight, it’s not far from here. He looks into his own drink and says out loud, as if to himself: “What kind of an asshole orders red wine in a tavern in Belleville, Delaware?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, not looking at him. “What kind of an asshole are you?”

  “Garden variety.” Or so his exes—one wife for a span of five years, maybe seven, eight girlfriends, which strikes him as a
respectable number for a thirty-eight-year-old man—always told him. “You from around here?”

  “Define from.” She’s not playing, she’s retreating.

  “Do you live here?”

  “I do now.”

  “That sunburn—I just assumed you were someone who got a day or two of beach, was headed back to Baltimore or D.C.”

  “No. I’m living here.”

  He sees a flicker of surprise on the barmaid’s face.

  “As of when?”

  “Now.”

  A joke, he thinks. A person doesn’t just stop for a drink in a strange town and decide to live there. Not this town. It’s not like she’s rolled into Tuscany or Oaxaca, two places he knows well and can imagine a person saying, Yes, here, this is where I’m going to plant myself. She’s in Belleville, Delaware, with its saggy, sad Main Street, a town of not even two thousand people surrounded by cornfields and chicken farms. Does she have connections here? The barmaid sure doesn’t treat her like a local, even a potential one. To the barmaid, blond and busty with a carefully nurtured tan, the redhead is furniture. The barmaid is interested in him, however, trying to figure out whether he’s passing through tonight or hanging around.