by Lee Martin
“Wayne, you’re probably right,” Roe Carl said. “Hello, Lois. I didn’t see you folks come in.”
Lois held up the last package of Brach’s and said, “I came to get candy.”
“You didn’t have WPLP on this morning?” Anna said. “The local news?”
“We don’t listen to the radio anymore.” Lois threw the package of Brach’s onto the conveyor belt. “Ring me up,” she said to the girl at the register, a skinny-minnie of a thing with lipstick the color of black cherries.
“The fire marshal’s come to a conclusion,” Anna said. “Oh, Lois, I’m just sick over all of this.”
Wayne said, “You mean it was set? The fire? They know that for sure?”
He’d been by the place in the days after, and he’d seen the deputies from the fire marshal’s office combing through the debris. They brought a dog with them, the kind trained to sniff for accelerants—gasoline, kerosene, turpentine, that sort of thing. The deputies got down on their knees and dug around in the ruins. They took samples to send to the lab in Springfield. “Multiple points of origin.” Anna said the words carefully, recalling them from the radio news. “That’s what they’re saying.”
Just minutes before, she’d heard the sheriff talking with the fire chief in the Real McCoy using the same words: multiple points of origin. She’d lingered, clearing the table behind theirs, catching as much of the story as she could. The dog had sniffed out gasoline. The fire had started in more than one place. There were trail marks, more than one burn-through in the flooring, spalled concrete. There was crazed glass, finely cracked; collapsed springs in the furniture and the bedding; alligator blisters on the charred wood—all signs that the fire burned fast and hot. “It was set all right,” Milt Timlin said, and Biggs said, “The question now is who did it.”
“So it’s for sure?” Wayne said to Anna. The store was spinning fast now, and he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Lois!” Anna called out in a frantic voice.
The skinny-minnie girl let out a squeak and said, “Oh, what should I do?”
Lois turned her head to look for Wayne, but he was on the floor, tumbled down so fast she couldn’t have caught him if she’d tried.
At that moment, Roe Carl saw the sheriff’s car drive past, heading south on Main Street, and she watched it go for the briefest instant before she picked up the phone and called 911.
Ronnie was on the porch of Brandi’s house when he saw the sheriff’s car coming at him down Locust Street. He’d spent the morning alone—Brandi at work and the kids at school—trying to figure out what he could and couldn’t tell Angel about that pocketknife and how it came to be behind the trailer. Yes, he’d gone back there the night of the fire, but he didn’t yet know how to tell that story in a way that would make any sense, because he still didn’t understand why he’d done what he had—didn’t like to think about it, truth be told. Didn’t like to think about Shooter either and what story he might be spinning.
Here toward noon, Ronnie had finally decided to give up all that thinking and to drive over to Brick Chapel about that job the way he was supposed to have done the day before, but Angel hadn’t come home, and he’d been too worried about her to do anything but get on the telephone and call anyone he could think of who might have seen her—even Missy Wade, as much as it galled him. He’d driven the streets looking for Angel. Then he gave up and went back to Brandi’s, and that’s when Shooter called.
Ronnie would have to find a way to explain all that to the man in Brick Chapel, and then hope he understood and still had that job. It was a good job at a garment factory, working in the warehouse running a forklift, moving bolts of material, loading and unloading trucks. A job with health benefits and profit sharing and a week’s paid vacation every year. A steady job worth driving sixty miles there and back every day. He could work at it for years and years to come and make a life for his girls. Now that he had them, even with Brandi’s check, things were going to be tight, especially with the new baby on the way. He’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to ask Missy for any of the money in the bank, not unless he absolutely had to. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of playing Good Samaritan to his need. He’d rather that money turned to dust in the bank and Missy would have to explain to all the good folks who made donations why she’d never let Ronnie use it for his girls.
That’s what was on his mind when he stepped out onto the porch and saw the sheriff’s car. He watched it come, hoping it might turn left onto Jones Street and move on out of his day, but he could already see that the car was slowing. It came to a stop along the curb just to the left of Brandi’s drive, and Ronnie didn’t wait. He went out to see what Biggs might want, fearing that he knew exactly why the sheriff was there.
“I told you I wasn’t filing charges against Wayne,” he said to Biggs, who had put his window down. Ronnie laid both hands on top of the car and leaned down. The two-way radio crackled, the heater fan blew out warm air. Biggs had an aroma made up of leather and fried foods and some sort of pine-scented aftershave.
“I’m not here about that.” He reached over and squelched the two-way. “I need to talk to you about the fire.”
“Now? I’m on my way to see about a job.”
“I don’t think we should wait. Haven’t you heard?”
“It’s over at Brick Chapel. A good job at the garment factory.”
“Ronnie, the fire marshal’s report came in. We need to talk.”
Biggs wanted him to get in the car and ride over to the courthouse in Phillipsport with him.
“Like I’m some damned criminal?” Ronnie said. “Let people see me like that? Bad enough I got to stand out here talking to you and all the neighbors peeking out windows.”
“I’m not out to make things hard for you. Lord knows you’ve had trouble enough.” Biggs rubbed his hand over his mouth, considering. “Get in your car, then, and drive on over to the courthouse. I’ll be behind you.”
Next door, Willie Wheeler had come out to spread some salt on his walk, even though that walk was clear and there was no new snow in the forecast. Ronnie knew he just wanted to see if he could eavesdrop. A car came down Locust, Alvin Higgins in his old green Ford pickup with a tool case across the bed. He slowed down and took a good long look.
“All right,” Ronnie finally said. “But I can tell you I haven’t done a thing wrong.”
By the time the ambulance got to the IGA, Wayne was sitting on a folding chair that Roe Carl had found for him. The medics checked him over, took all his vitals, asked him whether he thought he should go to the hospital.
He told them, no, he just got dizzy sometimes. “It’s the vertigo,” he said. “That’s all. Tell them, Lois.”
“He gets the spins,” said Lois. “Been happening for a while now.” She was stroking Wayne’s head. “You feel better?”
“I feel all right.” He met the eyes of the two medics. He cursed the vertigo and how it turned him into a fall-down dizzy old man. “I’m sorry for all the upset,” he said, and that was that, so he thought. Just a little scare on a Thursday morning, that, thank goodness, came to nothing.
Ronnie eased his Firebird into a parking spot on the south side of the courthouse and watched Biggs pull his patrol car up the inclined drive reserved for the sheriff. Biggs got out and waited for Ronnie to come up the courthouse steps. It was twelve o’clock and the fire whistle was blowing to mark the noon hour the same way it’d done every weekday as long as Ronnie could remember. He knew Brandi would be leaving the Savings and Loan to slip out for lunch and maybe a little window shopping if she had time. She was starting to look at things for the baby. It would be a few weeks before the ultrasound would tell them whether they were having a boy or a girl. “It’ll be a surprise no matter when we find out,” Brandi told him when they were debating whether to have the ultrasound done, “so isn’t it better to find out in advance so we can be prepared?” But she was starting to look at things for both genders. One night
, she’d come home from work all excited about a Willie Nelson Born for Trouble onesie. The next night, she’d be laughing about a pink Baby Boop and then get all teary-eyed over a Mommy’s Little Girl. Since it was her first, she was excited about everything, and because of that, Ronnie was thrilled too, even if he couldn’t always bring himself to show it. “Aren’t you excited?” Brandi asked him one night, and he said, sure, without a doubt, but she had to keep in mind that he’d just lost three of his children, and surely she didn’t expect him to ever get over that. It was no good to even try.
So he found himself moving through his days like he was in a dream, which is how he felt now as he came up the steps to where Biggs waited, and he knew there were people passing by watching him—the office girls from the Reasoner Insurance Agency on the east side of the square, the opticians from LensCrafters, some mechanics from Albright Chevrolet, even a few high school kids who’d walked uptown to grab lunch at the new Mi Casita Mexican place. Lord, what if Angel was one of them? What if she saw him there with Biggs, about to enter the courthouse? After that ugly run-in with her last night, he didn’t need something else to try to explain.
“I know I don’t have to talk to you,” he said to Biggs. “Not unless I’ve got a lawyer with me. I know that much.”
Biggs opened the heavy glass door to the courthouse and motioned for Ronnie to step inside. “This is just a friendly talk. There are things I need to tell you.”
“You couldn’t have told me back in Goldengate? You had to drag me over here?”
“It’s better done here,” Biggs said. “Just in case our little talk goes somewhere interesting.”
Ronnie hesitated. He had things he wouldn’t tell Biggs, not if he could help it. He had things he’d rather keep to himself forever.
“You’ve got no call to throw me in jail,” he said, “if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
Someone in a car going by called his name. He thought it came from a red GMC Sierra pickup crammed full of high school boys going by on Fifteenth Street.
“Ronnie,” one of the boys said out the open window. He had red hair and freckles, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Hey, Ronnie. You got a light?”
The truck went on by, the boys’ hoots and whoops fading.
“Some people,” Biggs said. “If I could only arrest someone for being stupid or mean in the heart, I surely would enjoy it.”
“Let’s do this,” Ronnie said, impatient.
He stepped into the courthouse and then followed Biggs into the sheriff’s office, where a deputy, a man with neatly combed white hair and sad eyes, was sitting behind a desk. Biggs nodded to him, and then he took Ronnie into his office and closed the door.
“So what’s the fire marshal say?” Ronnie wasn’t going to wait for Biggs to work his way up to giving him the news—not give him a chance to hem and haw and see if Ronnie would squirm. He’d just ask him straight out. “Must have found something out of the ordinary?”
He hadn’t even sat down yet, didn’t know that he felt like it, didn’t want to give Biggs the notion that he meant to stay long.
Biggs unzipped his trooper jacket. He took it off and hung it on a coat rack in the corner. An American flag stood in the other corner, and Ronnie saw the plaques on the wall and the framed picture of the president, a man Ronnie hadn’t voted for but no one he wished any particular bad fortune. One wall held a large map of Phillips County, and Ronnie knew if he were to trace his finger along the right roads, he’d eventually end up down the blacktop out of Goldengate to where he once had a home with Della and their kids.
“You think there’d be a reason for the fire marshal to find something worth us talking about?” Biggs walked around behind his desk and peered at a computer screen for a moment. He put his closed fists on the desk and braced himself with his knuckles. The office smelled of the limestone walls, damp and moldy—that and the cherry-scented air freshener that Biggs was using to try to make things more pleasant. He had a row of photographs lined up on a wide ledge that ran beneath the wall of windows behind his desk. Ronnie could see the pictures were of him and his family: a blond-haired woman with her arm around Biggs, a boy in Marine dress blues, Biggs with what must have been a grandson riding on his shoulders. “Ronnie, is there anything I ought to know?”
The pictures of Biggs’s family had Ronnie all out of sorts. Here was a man who had everything right where he wanted it. A man with a wife and kids and grandkids, and here was Ronnie, a man fighting to keep his family together.
“I thought you already knew everything.” He sat down then, sat right down on the chair across from Biggs’s desk and let the sheriff look down on him. He sat down because he felt a trembling in his legs, and he feared if he didn’t sit he’d fall over. “Didn’t you say you had things to tell me?”
Biggs eased himself down onto his own chair. He rested his forearms on his desk and put his hands together, his thick fingers laced. “All I know is what the fire marshal’s office told me.” He looked at Ronnie for a long time, and Ronnie made sure to hold his gaze steady and not to glance away. “That fire didn’t start all by itself,” Biggs finally said. “It had help.”
“Someone set it?” Ronnie said. “Someone put that trailer to burn with my kids inside?”
“With your kids and your wife.”
“Who’d do that?” Ronnie jumped up from his chair. “Find out who it was and I’ll kill the bastard.”
“No one’s going to be doing any killing,” Biggs said. “Not if I can help it.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Ronnie,” he said, “where were you the night of the fire?”
“I was home,” Ronnie said. “At Brandi’s. I was with Brandi.” He pointed his finger at Biggs. “Surely you don’t think I’d do something like that. Try to kill my whole family?”
Biggs got up and walked around the desk. He stood with his face just inches from Ronnie’s own. “I truly hope that’s not the case, but someone set that fire, and now it’s my job to find out who. I’m going to have to start talking to folks.”
“You do that,” Ronnie said. “You talk to everyone you can find who can tell you something.”
“I may be back to talk to you.”
“What can I tell you that I haven’t already?” Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, I was with Brandi.”
“I just want you to know that I’m going to be pushing this hard,” Biggs said. “I’ve got a family of my own, and what someone did to yours makes my blood boil. It’s the saddest damn thing that’s ever happened around here. You get me?”
“You think it doesn’t do the same thing to me?” Ronnie’s voice shook and tears came to his eyes. “I may have left Della, but I had fourteen years with her, and we had all those kids. And now three of them are dead. I was their father. You remember that.”
Outside the courthouse, a cold wind had come up out of the north and the temperature had dropped. By the time Ronnie got to his Firebird he was wishing for his gloves. He fumbled with his keys and they dropped to the street. He stooped to pick them up. Finally, he got the car unlocked and he slid in behind the wheel.
Anyone driving by just then would have seen a man pounding his fist on the dashboard, and if they didn’t know he was Ronnie Black—and if they didn’t know about what had happened at that trailer—they might have thought him a crazy man. Still others, just moments later, might have seen the Firebird backing out of its parking place and not thought anything about Ronnie and what he might be up to until they got home that evening and read about the fire marshal’s report in the Phillipsport Messenger. Then they might recall seeing the Firebird on the courthouse square, and they might think about how slowly he drove, taking a left onto Fifteenth to the stoplight at State. Maybe they sat behind him there in their own cars. Maybe they saw him start to turn left when the light went to green—left to Goldengate—and then change his mind and turn right instead with a squeal of tires and a roar of engine like he d
idn’t care who might be in his way.
_________
Brandi came home from work and found the girls alone. “Where’s your dad?” she asked Hannah.
“Don’t know,” Hannah said.
She was playing a game of Operation with Sarah. The two of them were on their knees on the living room rug, the large oval braided rug Brandi bought last fall to celebrate Ronnie’s moving in. “This has just been a house,” she told him. “Now it’s going to be a home.” When she found out she was pregnant, she counted back and thought that night must have been the night they made the baby. First part of October, the nights starting to cool and soon the leaves would turn and there’d be the lovely part of autumn that she’d always treasured. The leaves, and pumpkins on people’s porches, and scarecrows on straw bales in front yards, and corn shocks woven around the gaslights. Indian summer days—a last time of warm sun and golden light before the turn toward winter.
“Don’t know?” Brandi tossed her car keys onto the marble top of the old washstand that she kept just inside the front door. The house was full of things she’d inherited from her grandmother—a pie safe with punched tin panels, a Hoosier cabinet, a library table, a Morris chair, an apothecary dresser, a sleigh bed, a cedar chest. “I like old things,” she’d told Ronnie. “They’ve got character.” And he said, “Must be why you like me.”
