All the Things You Are

by Declan Hughes

  As she does so, Dave lights a fire cracker and sets the lawn ablaze, the flames in spider and skull and snake patterns, just like long ago.

  Detective Nora Fox has discussed the case with her sergeant, Don Burns, and he has referred it to Les Christopher, the West District Captain, who hums and haws about getting Cambridge PD involved. Nora says what they need is the Emergency Response Team and the captain says deployment of a SWAT team is going to need more than what they’ve got, which, all due respect, is hunches and guesswork, and Nora says in the time it’s taking they could be there and Christopher says, well then, go. Go. Nora Fox and Ken Fowler ride together, and they cover twenty miles in fifteen, just under twenty minutes, and when they get to Donna Brogan’s house overlooking Lake Ripley, the Halloween lights are on and there’s nobody home.

  ‘Colby,’ Fowler says quickly, neither of them wanting to confess their blunder to Don Burns or Les Christopher, and as they turn the car around and head back toward Madison, Nora calls Officer Colby, who is in State Street on Freakfest duty, and she authorizes clearance from his sergeant to release him so he can go check out the Brogan house on Arboretum Avenue.

  Oh, it is a spectacular now. The backyard is ablaze, and Dave with his werewolf head moves between skull and spider and snake, light on his feet; you would be forgiven for thinking he was dancing. Danny has come to, his face a mess, his nose swollen, maybe broken, matted blood on the back of his head. At first, when he sees the flames in front of him, he thinks he is having a nightmare. And this feeling does not change when he understands that it’s all too real, when he looks up to the tower window and sees his daughters framed within it, their faces contorted with panic and fear. He rocks the bench, straining against the ropes that bind him tight, and his movements bring his wife to her senses. When Claire sees where they are, and where the girls are, she begins to scream.

  Officer Colby can tell before he gets out of his cruiser that there’s a fire. The big wrought-iron gates are barricaded and he can’t get in, but there’s nothing stopping him dialing 911, which he does, and specifying that he’s a police officer (because the number of crank and panic and otherwise unnecessary calls on Halloween always puts the switchboard operators on their guard) and requesting an immediate call out, with danger of a forest fire in the Arboretum.

  Then Colby goes to the trunk of his vehicle and gets an axe and lays into the centre of the gates, working to remove whatever obstructions are blocking entry. When brute force doesn’t work, he finds footholds in the brickwork to the side of the gates and scales up and on to the wall, and it is there that a masked Charlie T, who has heard the policeman trying to breach the gates, shoots him dead. Colby’s body drops on the inside of the wall, and Charlie nods his El Diablo head.

  Dave takes Claire’s screams as his second cue, and produces two fire bottles from his SUV and lights one and offers it to Dee, but she shakes her head, her latex witch’s head. Dave, in his werewolf mask, shrugs and flings the lighted bottle at the house and the flames shoot up the ground-floor wall and catch on the patio doors and the house is on fire.

  Claire has stopped screaming, is sobbing, unable to let her head fall because she is trying to maintain eye contact with her children in the tower. Danny is shouting something at Dee, it’s hard to make out what, hard to hear above the roar of flames.

  Dave, with his werewolf head, stands amid the flames like the conductor of an orchestra, like an ancient fire starter, swaying in the haze of heat and light and smoke. Danny is still shouting, and Dee, with her witch’s head, comes closer. Danny is gesturing with his head, shaking it in the negative and then pointing it toward Dave, and Dee turns to Dave, and then back to Danny and shakes her head, and Danny goes through the same routine again, his head bobbing faster and more vigorously, and we can almost hear what he’s saying but not quite, something about Dave throwing the fire bottle and not him, and this time Dee stays with Danny for longer, a witch staring at a man with a bloodied, battered face, and all the while Claire is breathing fast and deep, trying not to cry so Danny can be heard.

  Barbara and Irene, at the window, as the smoke raises and the flames approach the sill. Their little faces.

  Now Dave, with his werewolf head, lights a second fire bottle and walks toward the picnic table and offers it to Dee. Claire screams at the sight of it. Dee takes the flaming bottle and turns to Dave and says something to him. He raises his hands in the air, as if to dismiss her. She catches his arm, and there is an exchange between them, her voice harsh with passion, his hoarse with jubilant disdain, the yard aflame behind them, the witch and the werewolf center stage in a Halloween inferno. He shakes her hand away and puts some steps between them, and gestures toward the window in the tower, and then at Danny and Claire, and then opens his arms wide to span the entire scene, as if this should be answer enough for her. Dee’s head is bowed and she turns away, as if conceding the point, and then she swings right around and hits Dave full in his werewolf face with the bottle, and the glass smashes and the flaming gasoline envelops his mask and his head so quickly you can barely hear him scream. Dee wheels off, one of her own hands on fire, and runs toward the garage, flapping her arm to try and extinguish the flames.

  Charlie T, still in his horned devil’s head, is standing, gaping. The burning gas spreads in an instant, until Dave’s body blazes. He staggers around the yard, a wolf on fire, crazed with pain, limbs flailing. Charlie T lifts his gun and shoots him twice.

  Dee is nowhere to be seen. The sound of sirens can be heard in the distance. Charlie T takes a knife from his coat and cuts the cords binding Claire and Danny. Claire runs immediately toward the blazing house. As soon as Danny has his hands free, he lurches at El Diablo, who counters with the Steyr, swinging it in front of Danny’s face and then holding it on him. Danny stands a moment longer, then turns and follows Claire into the flames. Charlie looks around the yard, then in the direction of the back gate through to the Arboretum, and moves briskly out that way, and so, away.

  The fire has not really caught at the front of the house. Claire shoots up the spiral stairway and pops the trapdoor, and the children come tumbling, and Claire lifts them down and passes them to Danny, trying to make them stop hugging her and clinging to her so she can let them down, trying to stop herself hugging them and clinging to them so she can stop feeling so very, very afraid.

  They come out on to the lawn, the Brogan family, kissing and crying and coughing and not wanting to let each other go. There’s a fire truck at the gates, and the cops are there too, and no one can get in; they’re honking their horns and shouting out the Brogans’ names. Danny loosens his hold on the others and walks across to the gates, and starts to unwind the chains and remove the rocks, and then he hears Claire cry out, telling him to stop. He turns back and goes to her. She’s holding the girls close, her cheeks blackened and tear-stained.

  ‘Let it burn, Danny,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Let it burn.’

  ‘Your stuff,’ Danny says. ‘All your memories. And the letter from your folks. To tell you who you really are.’

  ‘Who I was,’ Claire says. ‘I know who I am. Let it all burn.’

  I’ll Never Be the Same

  Mr Wilson is standing in his apartment looking out at the city. Things have not worked out the way he planned. Their client is dead, and all over the papers, and was evidently insane, and while negotiations between them were conducted on disposable cell phones, Mr Wilson is not such a technical expert that he can be entirely sure his security was not breached. And there was a lot of money to come, although the advance he demanded was substantial, certainly in excess of any sum Charlie T might have imagined. Not that Charlie T’s imagination is a problem he will have to deal with for much longer. Charlie Toland’s career of violence is coming to an end today. He is due at the apartment in – Mr Wilson checks the clock – twenty minutes, by arrangement, to collect the balance owed to him, and to discuss their future relationship.

  Mr Wilson pats the left side
pocket of his navy gabardine blazer, feels the reassuring lightweight heft of the Ruger Compact .38 revolver Carl Brenner acquired for him. He has never shot anyone before, but doesn’t feel it’s going to be too arduous a task. Carl kindly provided a former Navy Seal to give him some elementary training in the use of firearms. All he has to do is present Charlie with the money, which the Irishman always insists on counting, and that will give Mr Wilson enough time to draw his weapon. And that will be that.

  From his right side pocket, he takes the letter he received this morning. It’s from a woman who claims she’s his sister, Claire Bradberry, the only child to have survived the fire in his family home in Madison all those years ago. She alludes to having known Mr Wilson’s most recent client, and is insistent that they should meet. She seems to believe that the coincidence of their common blood has some importance, and merits further elaboration.

  Mr Wilson shakes his head, and screws the paper into a ball and clenches it in his fist. What kind of country does she think she’s living in? A country where the accident of one’s birth has any significance? It has taken him all the momentum and will he was capable of summoning to become the man he is now. Why would he want to jeopardize that now with even a backward glance?

  Mr Wilson has nothing to do with who he was. He is all about who he is about to become. He knows that’s the only person worth being. It’s what the country was founded upon, for God’s sake.

  He puts the ‘Prelude’ to Wagner’s Parsifal on the Bose CD player, turns up the volume, sits back, and waits for Charlie T to arrive.

  The Way of the World

  Millamant: And d’ye hear, I won’t be called names after I’m married; positively I won’t be called names.

  Mirabell: Names?

  Millamant: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweet-heart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar – I shall never bear that. Good Mirabell, don’t let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis; nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and whispers, and then never be seen there together again, as if we were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us be very strange and well-bred. Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

  William Congreve – The Way of the World

  All the Things You Are

  Christmas Eve

  The cold days and weeks trudged by until they were deep into the bleak Madison midwinter. The Brogan children were shaken by their ordeal, and each dealt with it differently: Irene explicitly, with a lot of crying and talking and clinging; Barbara internally, her already-evident mood swings swelling and darkening. Some days, she’d still seem her ingenuous, sweet-natured, bubbly self; others, it was as if she’d become possessed by a nineteen-year-old runaway who’d seen too much too soon, and had lost her faith in human nature, in the future, in life itself. They were both attending counselors and psychologists, and were thought to be progressing as well as could be expected. And of course, everyone spoiled them within an inch of their lives, until Danny and Claire worried alternately that they would emerge permanently scarred by their ordeal, and that they’d morph into some unholy simulacrum of the Kardashian sisters.

  There were the funerals to get through: Ralph Cowley’s, and Jeff Torrance’s, and Officer Colby’s, and of course, Donna Brogan’s, the only one the girls attended. Apart, that is, from Mr Smith’s. Mr Smith was buried in the backyard of the burnt ruin on Arboretum Avenue that was no longer theirs, the afternoon before the first heavy snowfall, and there was a week or two afterward when no one in the Brogan family could be guaranteed to get through the day without breaking down in tears, as if the trauma of everything that had been done to them rested in one small dog’s carcass. They would get a new dog in the spring, and at least that was something everyone could look forward to.

  The insurance company came to a settlement over the house on Arboretum Avenue. This just about enabled Danny to pay off the mortgage he had taken out when he thought he deserved to be rich. For now, they’re all living above the store, in the few cramped rooms over Brogan’s Bar and Grill. They’re starting again. It’s not easy, but it’s never dull.

  The police investigations were complicated. Nora Fox worked patiently with Barbara and Irene to create a photofit picture of the man who murdered Donna Brogan, while Danny and Claire were able to identify his accent as Irish. It was only a matter of time before the FBI got involved, and they soon had a new addition to their Top Ten Most Wanted: Charles Toland, an undocumented alien from Belfast in Ireland, understood to be a former member of the Provisional IRA. DNA smears on the girls’ wrists, swabbed the night of the fire, matched with skin particles found on the Sabatier knife used to kill Ralph Cowley, and with a hair coiled around the Miraculous Medal Nora Fox found at the scene. When this DNA profile was added to the Bureau’s CODIS database, it matched material discovered at a crime scene in a riverside apartment in Chicago. The body of a man in his fifties by the name of Wilson had been found after an anonymous tip-off, having apparently shot himself in the head with a Ruger .38. CPD forensic investigators quickly became suspicious of the quantity and nature of liquid discharge on the corpse’s face. It soon emerged that a third party’s saliva was present. This saliva was Charles Toland’s, and was consistent with his having murdered Mr Wilson and spat in his face.

  For a while, it looked like the Madison captain of police wanted to re-open the Bradberry fire inquiry and press charges against Danny and Gene for conspiracy, but the district attorney’s office decided there wasn’t enough there to make a case – too much time had elapsed, for one thing. And given Dave’s evident psychosis, it would be fruitless attempting to link him with such blameless and productive citizens as Gene Peterson and Danny Brogan. Gene and Danny were voluble in their regret for having been involved in a Halloween prank that had gone so tragically wrong, but it was felt that any kind of prosecution would not only be impractical but unjust and would probably open more wounds than it would heal. And who wants to persecute someone for something they did when they were eleven? That might fly in Texas, but it’s not how it works in Madison.

  And of course, the press (and with its macabre Halloween theme, it was a story that went national, and international, went viral) very quickly settled on a narrative that dovetailed with the decisions of the police and DA’s departments: Dave Ricks, the artistic psycho; Ralph Cowley, the mild mannered failure whose unpublished novel revealed at least the partial truth; Danny Brogan and Gene Peterson, the blameless survivors of bullying and blackmail.

  There were retrospective photo spreads of the Bradberry funerals, and the briefest of accounts of the two brothers, amounting to a factual assertion that they had existed. There was much focus on Dee St Clair, formerly Claire Bradberry: one strand of opinion branded her a femme fatale and a woman scorned; another defended her as a victim-survivor. She has joined Charles Toland on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. Although no relationship existed between them, they are invariably discussed as a couple, a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde. The FBI receives multiple daily sightings of the pair together, from every state in the union. A rap song and three heavy metal tracks have been written about them. They are the most Googled people in the United States.

  The scores of paintings Dave Ricks had made over the years of the Bradberry children trapped in their burning house were subjected to endless analysis by forensic psychiatrists, university fine-art professors and that brand of pop psychologist known as the newspaper columnist.

  Yet Dave’s motives remain opaque. Danny worked it over and over in his mind, what he had done and what he had failed to do to be the object of Dave’s obsession. In the end he couldn’t get much further than Gene Peterson’s verdict, delivered in Gene’s blunt, square-jawed, Mid-Western man
ner: ‘You know what, Dan? There was just something wrong with that guy.’

  There’s a guilt that Danny should never have had to feel, but the truth remains: it had been his idea to prank the Bradberry house, his idea to set the fires. Even if the press and the justice system think otherwise, he knows he bears a share of the responsibility for those deaths. He still wakes up in the middle of the night with the vision of Barbara and Irene in the window, a vision that telescopes back through time to the Bradberry house. He knows the paintings Dave made speak to his guilt, but that wasn’t the whole story. Dave had caused the fire, but that didn’t absolve Danny of blame, and it never would: he will carry it to his grave.

  Danny and Claire remain haunted by Dee St Clair: Claire, by the friend who wasn’t really a friend, but who she misses as if she had been; Danny, because who knows how little Claire Bradberry might have turned out if it hadn’t been for him? They are exhausted with themselves and with each other; quick to tears and to anger and to recrimination; often unable to decide, or even to remember, what had happened for real and what was invented, concocted to lay them low. Claire sometimes feels as if she is Claire Bradberry, so insidious was the deception, and that Danny had betrayed her all along.

  And then gradually, as the saying goes, gradually, as the days wear on, and then suddenly, as hand brushes hand and eye catches eye, and at last, a kiss becomes something more than just a kiss, and Danny and Claire start to remember who they are, and what they saw in each other, and in the future, and in love.

  (It’s not perfect, of course. She still feels as if he is hiding something; he still thinks she is making do with him. Sometimes he just won’t look her in the eye, and she feels desolate; sometimes she can’t look him in the eye, and he fears the worst. It’s not perfect. It never is.)