by Lia Matera
I stood in the thick drizzle for a minute, listening to distant sirens, inhaling the pungent spice of wood fires. At nine o’clock, only a few porch lights were on. It was freezing, wet. People weren’t expecting drop-ins. I could feel goose flesh rise on my legs under wet hose. My suit would need pressing, and I’d be sniffling with damp hair all evening (the wall heater kept the hall and entry toasty without adding the least warmth to any room). But I liked the way it felt, the chill on my face, the way it coated my lashes, softening the lamplight.
I climbed the steps to the porch, digging the key out of my handbag.
When I let myself in, a voice called from the parlor. “Laura? That you?”
I felt a small rush, like a first sip of liqueur. It was nice to have someone waiting. “Yes. Hi.”
My uncle came out to greet me, unlike his former self in sweat clothes and a shawl-collared robe. He carried a drink, almost certainly Johnnie Walker Red. Some things never change.
As usual, I was surprised to see white where my mind’s eye stubbornly recalled dark brown hair. His olive cheeks, firm in the way of prosperous Italian men, were desiccating like crepe.
I embraced him. He smelled of drink and shampoo. His hair was damp. “To whose blood do I owe the pleasure?” he demanded.
The last time I’d arrived suddenly, it was because the police had just analyzed the contents of the trailside bucket.
He held me at arm’s length, almost splashing me with whiskey. “Or are you hiding out?” I knew he meant from the person who’d shot Kinsley.
“Partly.” I could hopscotch topics with him in a way that often left Sandy behind.
That hadn’t been true of Hal, Uncle Henry’s son, with whom I’d lived for almost four years. But during those years, family tensions made visits “home” rare. My uncle and Sandy and I had been by far the more frequent—and congenial—threesome.
“I didn’t have enough to do in the city to bother staying till the weekend. And I’ve been fretting about Brad Rommel.”
Uncle Henry shook his head. He wasn’t convinced Rommel was innocent. He wasn’t convinced his pal, the sheriff, could be wrong. But justice be damned, he wanted me to win.
“I’ve got news you’ll like.” He beamed, eyes gleaming. “Come and look.”
I followed him into a parlor furnished with a few showy antiques and some comfortable recliners, one of them scattered with newspapers. He bent creakily to retrieve a section. He flapped it, bowing slightly as he handed it to me.
When I saw the headline, I smiled. LOCAL D.A. MOVIE SUBJECT OF BAR PROBE.
I took the paper, skimming the article. Like others preceding it, it laid out my argument that Connie Gold had shaped her TV-movie case for salability. The newspaper’s tone was skeptical and loyal to Gold. But people would remember she’d been accused of something sleazy; she was Hillsdale’s resident celebrity. With luck—and agitation by me—she wouldn’t live it down before the Rommel trial.
“Bet she’s on the war path.” A lifetime of city politics made him smile at the thought.
The door buzzer sounded, interrupting our shared glee.
In answer to my querying look, Uncle Henry shrugged. Of course he wasn’t expecting anyone, not dressed like this. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have worn a bathrobe even in private.
I backtracked to the front door, allowing him to retreat toward the kitchen. The metallic grating of buzzer filled the entryway. I flung the door open, anxious to stop the damn noise.
I was surprised to see Jay Bartoli, a high school friend who was now a plainclothes sheriff’s investigator. I’d run into him last year, during my hermitage with Hal. More recently, I’d talked to him about the Rommel investigation, though it wasn’t his case. But on the whole, I tried to avoid him. He was forever asking me to dinner to talk about old times. I didn’t care about old times. It was hard enough to deal with the present.
He was a dapper man, a former jock who’d stayed in shape, trading youthful bulk for streamlined muscles that looked better in a suit. His hair, wavy and long in high school, was clipped short and mostly gray over a healthy, craggy face. He looked easy in his body and comfortable in his clothes. But I didn’t find him attractive. And though he was married, I kept feeling he needed that from me.
I tried to put some warmth into our social embrace. A sheriff’s investigator was a good friend to have, and cops as a rule didn’t like me. More accurately, they didn’t like the lawyer who defended Wallace Bean, assassin of two U.S. Senators.
I stepped back quickly, talking myself out of believing what I’d felt below Bartoli’s belt.
“How’d you know I was in town?” I tried to sound happy that he did. “I just walked in the door.” Should I say I was tired or should I allow a few minutes before blunt hints?
Bartoli wore his smile like he’d pinned it on in front of a mirror. He looked miserable behind it. I wondered if something was up.
“We haff our ways,” he said with a Hogan’s Heroes accent. “Actually, I watched you pull up. I was across the street.”
I hadn’t noticed anyone in the few parked cars on Clarke. I took a backward step.
“Why were you there?” I’d had sex with him once while my marriage was breaking up, just before my twentieth birthday. He always let me know he remembered it. I could live with that. I couldn’t live with him lying in wait for me.
“I was listening to my radio, getting updates. I came to bring your uncle the news, if he hasn’t heard it already.” He ran a hand over his Ted Turner hair. “We couldn’t raise him on the phone.”
“I know.” I’d tried to call him from the airport to warn him I was coming. But he had the message tape on, probably the ringer off. He did that when he drank. I sometimes did that, too. It’s either too hard or too easy to talk on the phone with a third glassful in your hand.
“But he’s home tonight?”
“Yes. I’ll go get him.” It was clearly important. And god knew, Uncle Henry had learned to rise above intoxication.
“So he doesn’t know.”
“He hasn’t said anything. Know what?”
“I’m off duty—that’s why I came. Keep them from having to send someone they need.” Again he ran his hand over his hair. “Someone blew up the Southshore Mall.”
My uncle’s baby, Hillsdale’s only real mall. The only place within three hundred miles to buy serviceable underwear, sheets and towels, sets of dishes. What was left of downtown had gone specialty—futons and candle art and souvenirs. Old Town was just galleries and empty pubs. And Hillsdale’s one premall theater had closed years ago.
“Blew up?” No wonder Jay looked ashen. “The whole thing?”
“I hope not. It’s on fire, chemical fire. Or possibly gas-fed—the lines might be broken. Right now it’s way out of control. Fire fighters can’t get in to determine the cause.”
“How did it happen?” I checked my watch: 9:10. There were probably people still at the movie theater. But the stores would be closed. And I knew from frustrating experience that the mall restaurants locked tight at 7:00.
“We have reports of a small plane flying over. We think right now it might have dropped some kind of contact oil explosive, maybe something like napalm. We don’t know if it dropped bombs or sprayed. We don’t know the mechanics of doing something like this. We’ve got experts coming up from San Francisco.”
“The mall.” Everyone in Hillsdale—with the notable exception of downtown businesses— loved their “ticket to modern times,” as tacky and cookie-cutter as it may be. And who could blame them? Department stores and first-run movies were a recent luxury here. Without them, Hillsdale was a consumer wasteland, a sleepover on the highway to real cities.
“Jesus, Uncle Henry’ll die.” He’d endured five years of meetings and hearings and collapsing deals to get the mall built. He’d steamrollered over the objec
tions of environmentalists and the Coastal Commission, sweetening the pot for builder friends and investment corporations. He’d roused the unemployed—thousands of them cast off by lumber mills now sawing boards in Mexico—promising them jobs. He’d rammed the project through years of tight money and soaring interest rates. And it had paid off: the mall got him reelected in spite of debacles like the abandoned housing project across the bridge.
I glanced toward the kitchen.
“Who did it? Whose plane was it?” I felt a stab of fear, surely unwarranted. Brad Rommel had expressed bitterness toward the mall. Brad Rommel owned a plane.
“Nothing from out at the airport—the small craft airport. Too foggy up there tonight. Everything’s grounded.”
The town’s commercial airport, where I’d flown in, was little more than a few acres of tarmac and a building resembling a large campground bathroom with a ticket counter and a car rental company. Ironically, the noncommercial airport was at least as big, atop a fogged-socked hill with a tiny weather station. It had hangers for a couple of dozen planes and a truck-stop style restaurant open 5 to 5. We used to breakfast up there when I was in high school, our other choices being on-the-highway franchises with tea-weak coffee.
“So the plane came from somewhere else?” I tried not to sound relieved. After all, Brad wouldn’t firebomb a mall.
“Too early to tell. Although”—he shook his head wonderingly—“you know what? No one picked it up on radar. Wherever it came from, it stayed very damn low. Too low to show up.”
“Have you checked the air traffic around here? Maybe someone dipped under the radar on his way overhead, someone who landed north or south at about the right time.”
“We’ll be doing a lot more checking, obviously.” He straightened, inhaled, seemed suddenly larger and more confidant. “I just thought we better tell Henry.”
“You don’t know how bad the damage—”
Uncle Henry entered the hall, dressed now in slacks, a double-knit polo shirt, and a cardigan. He’d gone upstairs and changed.
He skipped the usual hearty greeting. He must have checked his phone messages. “One of you give me a lift out there?” Emotion deepened the timbre of his voice, reddened his olive skin.
“Glad to.” Bartoli seemed relieved not to have to explain. “Are you ready?”
My uncle nodded, patting his pants pockets and pulling a 49ers jacket off a rack by the door.
I grabbed my purse and walked out with them. The stink of fire was stronger now, too strong to ascribe to a neighbors’ chimneys. Sirens swelled like distant screams.
Bartoli’s car was across the street and a quarter block down from mine—rather far considering there were spaces in front of my uncle’s door. I climbed into the back seat, knowing it would never occur to my uncle to offer a woman the front. The car, big and American with panels of Dad-control buttons, smelled of fast food. I wondered where Bartoli would buy his burgers now. The places along the highway looked worse than ever.
Jay turned in his seat after starting the engine. He stared at me for a few seconds. His face, never expressive and now trained to a sheriff’s deadpan, didn’t reveal why.
He pulled away from the curb before clicking on his lights. He sped past neighboring Victorians, fiddling his seat belt into its clasp. He shifted, tugging wrinkles from his jacket and trousers. Even speeding to a disaster, he showed clothes sense. My Aunt Diana would have given him points.
Without asking, my uncle clicked on the car radio, a multi-button citizen-band affair. It seemed to be on a police frequency. We heard a female voice say, “Two more fire trucks en route, one from Dungeness, one from state college. What we really need is some manpower out here to help us keep bystanders back. We’ve had five more explosions in there—we think the fire’s hitting combustibles, fuel in the restaurants, chemicals in the gardening and hardware stores. Seems like we got a hundred onlookers at least—we could sure use more help keeping them back. For one thing, the smoke’s real nasty.”
By the time we rounded the next corner, we could see the glow from the fire, still nearly a mile away. I heard my uncle gasp. The whole horizon was a muted orange, as if the bay fog had sponged up the glare, graying and diffusing it.
A man’s voice crackled from Jay’s radio. “We’ve got a call in to off-duty uniforms, should have a few more bodies out there pretty quick. What’s the status of the fire?”
“They say they’ve got it contained, but it looks like hell-all—stuff exploding all over the place.” There were lots of background voices, shouted commands, a shriek. “I hope we get those off-duties out here soon.” Her voice quavered. “You wouldn’t believe this, Phil.”
“Hang in, Molly.”
Jay fiddled with the knob, muttering, “Get on the fire band.”
For the next five minutes, racing along the highway through downtown and past a strip of feed stores and cowboy bars, we listened to the fire captain’s urgent conversations with out-of-town rigs racing to help. There seemed to be a shortage of a chemical the captain needed in huge quantity. He was nearly in tears about it.
As we approached a road block, Jay clicked back to the police band. He pulled a cherry light out of his glove compartment and popped it out the window onto the roof. Seeing its swirls of red, two blocks of stopped cars inched over to let him zipper between the lanes. We stopped near two police cars straddling Broadway nose to nose. On the radio a man with a backwoods accent barked: “Get all them cars out of here. Turn ‘em around starting at the back. Just get them the hell out. I want Broadway empty by the time the engines get here, you understand me?”
Jay Bartoli and Uncle Henry jumped out of the car, striding to the line of cops between the bystanders and the fire.
I emerged more slowly. Black smoke roiled under the orange-gray canopy of fog. My lungs contracted against the stink of chemicals exploding and plastics melting. Up ahead, men in silhouette struggled with hoses and trucks while the red and blue lights of police cars and fire trucks flashed and ricocheted off wet concrete. An area the size of a city block burned like a two story candle, flames so richly red and yellow they hid all but the barebones infrastructure of what they consumed. Even from a two thousand yards back, heat poured from it, carrying swarms of sparks.
Behind me, a slow row of cop cars wove through traffic, halting behind Jay’s. Men in police uniforms or jeans and football jackets spilled out and trotted past. Fearing hassle, I crouched back into Jay’s car with its still-circling cherry.
The new arrivals huddled with a man I took to be a fire chief. My uncle and Jay were there, too. But I didn’t want to join them. I’d never seen a fire so huge. I just wanted to watch it, not hear it discussed as an enemy, nor consider the hardship and grief it would cause. For now, I wanted to watch it as I’d watch Niagara Falls. I wanted to appreciate its grandeur.
When I next looked for my uncle, he was gone. The silhouettes had shifted three quarters of a block south, toward the ENTERING HILLSDALE sign. Probably my uncle was there now. He would be wherever field command had been established.
A low juggernaut of smoke made my eyes water, my sinuses burn. I backed away.
Finally, with the fire no smaller or larger than it seemed when we arrived, I walked away, cutting uphill into a neighborhood of ranch-style houses flanked by fields with occasional donkeys and ponies. I covered long stretches with gully on one side and tract housing on the other. People stood outside looking downhill at the tips of flames and the glow of fire. No one asked me what I’d seen, no one asked me what was burning. They stood in the foggy light of street lamps, watching mass culture’s local outlet vanish. Arms folded against the cold, huddled in their wool jackets, neighbors stood side by side saying absolutely nothing.
I called a cab from the first pay phone I encountered. All the driver could talk about was how much more he’d have to pay for his daughter’s insulin if the ch
eapest drugstore in town burned down. “But acourse to her, that’s nothing compared to what she’s supposed to do for fun. All the kids hang out over there at the mall.”
When we pulled onto Clarke Street, he said, “It’s like President Kennedy being shot. That’s exactly what it feels like.”
14
I stopped with my hand on the doorknob. I could see the taxi’s brake lights like red eyes in the distance. At the end of the block, bundled-up pedestrians stood talking, pointing south toward the fire. Flashlight beams lit widow’s walks and rooftops. People were finding high ground from which to view the fire.
I was sure it hadn’t been Brad Rommel’s plane. It was just coincidence he had one.
But he did resent the mall. He did blame it in part for Piatti’s decision to leave.
A hot filament of worry snaked through my confidence in him. I checked my purse for the rental car keys. I walked back down the porch steps and got into the cigarette-reeking two-door. It was just a drive, after all. I’d go for a little drive up to Brad’s house, reassure myself that he was there and his plane was tucked into its hangar miles away. I wouldn’t charge him for my time, and I had nothing better to do, so who could complain?
I sped north, away from the fire, toward both airports and toward Brad’s cabin. Nearly all the traffic was southbound, families braving the slick, wind-whipped highway to check out the excitement. About five miles north of town, two fire trucks flashed and howled past.
I took a sharp left onto a potholed road. I crossed dairy flats and started up an increasingly steep hill. I couldn’t identify the roadside vegetation in the dark, but I’d lived close by here last year. I knew there were ferns taller than me, cow parsnips with stalks thicker than my legs, skunk cabbages, cattails—wet weather plants, thirsty ancient greenery that couldn’t take the frost of colder, drier climates. Soon the road wound through firs and pines and redwoods. My headlights danced in sparkling particles of fog and painted their sheen on tangled vegetation. Ten minutes later, the road straightened to a messy, tamped mélange of dirt and gravel and broken clam shells.