Dead in a Flash

by Brynn Bonner

  There, I’d given her every opportunity to walk this back, but she didn’t take it.

  “No, I don’t remember anything like that,” Chelsea said. “But if it comes to me I’ll let you know.”

  And with that she stood and swiped at the seat of her pants. “I’d better go see if Dinah Leigh needs anything,” she said.

  I studied her as she walked away without a backward glance. I dusted off the back of my khakis, the second brush-off I’d experienced in the last thirty seconds. So there had been a blue envelope. And it had contained something important enough to lie about.

  * * *

  Esme had stayed at home because elderly people who have the tendency to tell meandering tales are not well matched to her patience reservoir. I, on the other hand, love old stories and am generally quite fond of old people—Aunt Yvonne being a notable exception.

  Luther was just getting back from his tour of the facilities. “We took a golf cart,” he said with a laugh. “From that little wayside inn to this.” He swung his arm in an arc to take in his surroundings. “In that first little motel we could see all the grounds from the office window, all twenty-five feet of ’em. Now we need a golf cart. We’ve come a long way, son.”

  The man was not what I’d expected. He was more slender and shorter than I’d imagined he’d be, given Cyrus’s height and bulk. His back was still straight and he was groomed and dressed fastidiously. His hair was clipped close and he wore horn-rimmed glasses that were so retro they were in again. He had on faded blue jeans, a white Oxford button-down shirt, open at the neck to reveal a blue T-shirt underneath, and brown boat shoes without socks. It threw me that he wasn’t the wizened old man I’d been expecting.

  After Cyrus introduced us, he excused himself to go take care of hotel business and I became acutely aware of my less-than-tailored appearance. But Mr. Hamilton put me immediately at ease.

  “Cyrus tells me Stanton and Lenora have hired you and your partner to write a report on the fire that took the baby,” Luther said. “I doubt I can tell you anything you don’t already know, but he said you wanted to talk with me and I rather like the sound of my own voice, so what is it you’d like to ask me?”

  The stopper now out of the bottle, I plowed right in. “I know Cyrus says you don’t like to talk about it, but you might know something helpful that you don’t even know you know.”

  “Ah, well,” Luther said, “Cyrus knows I don’t like to talk about that time in my life. He thinks it’s because of the tragedy of the baby dying like that and the parents going just crazy with grief. And that’s all true enough. But what he doesn’t know because it’s still hard for me to talk about, even all these years later, is that for a time they thought the fire was arson and I was considered the prime suspect. Big Jim Ogdon put me square in his sights and accused me of setting that fire. That was a hard thing for me to take.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “The two of us had a history. He’d arrested one of my farmhands after a bar fight. There was a roomful of witnesses, all of them saying the other guy started it, the other guy being the son of a major contributor to Big Jim’s campaign, don’t ’cha know. Anyhow, my guy, a kid without two nickels to rub together, was the one who finished it, giving the guy the whooping he deserved. I stood up for the kid and it got ugly, with accusations being thrown in both directions. So the sheriff and I weren’t exactly on howdying terms when that fire happened. I spent an uncomfortable couple of weeks getting ground under Big Jim’s boot before they finally ruled the fire was caused by an electrical defect. Then they issued the death certificate for the baby and that was that. Except it wasn’t, of course. Rumors just kept flying.”

  “That must’ve been hard,” I said.

  “Everything about my life was hard right along in that little stretch,” he said. “But it got better and here I am near the end of a long and mostly happy life. Still, no man likes to tell his son he was a suspect in an arson, or a kidnapping, or whatever it was Big Jim imagined had happened in the early stages of that investigation.”

  “Would you mind telling me the story of how that day unfolded for you? Just tell it how you remember it.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “But let me think on it a minute. That was all so long ago.” I waited as he studied the ceiling, gathering his thoughts. “It was hot that morning, even before the sun rose. We were pulling corn on the back forty of the farm, which was at a lower elevation than the house and the outbuildings. There was a rise and a thicket of trees between us and the house. Corn was still pulled by hand back then, so workers walked alongside the tractor, twisting off the ears and tossing them into the trailer. We generally had two tractors operating and staggered them so that one could make the run to the barn and unload while the other was still in the field.”

  “So they would have been coming to the barn every so often through the day?”

  “That was the idea,” Luther said, “but that day we had flat tires, one on a tractor, the other on a trailer. We ended up with just one hauler. Half the crew worked pulling corn and the other half getting the tires on the tractor and trailer. I thought about that a lot after what happened. If we hadn’t had that streak of bad luck, somebody might’ve been at the barn and sounded the alert sooner, in time to put the fire out. Maybe baby Johnny could have been saved.”

  “So what was going on when you arrived at the house?”

  “It was blazing, big flames shooting out of the windows and the doorways. There were neighbor men doing their best with garden hoses and buckets of water, but it was too far gone. You couldn’t see anything, the smoke was so thick. And despite what got into Miss Margaret’s head later on, there was no way the baby could have survived that inferno.”

  “Did you personally know all the men trying to fight the fire that day?” I asked.

  Luther frowned. “No. There was noise and confusion and eventually the fire department with its half-functioning rust bucket of a pumper truck showed up. Those men came from miles around, so I didn’t know all of them. You need to understand what it was like back then. Coventry is a proper little town now with pizza parlors, coffee shops, bagel places, and fake Irish pubs. But back then it was a scruffy little crossroads with scarcely any resources, and out in the country there were even less. Neighbors depended on one another in times of emergency, but your closest neighbor might be a mile away and not everybody had a telephone. And no family I knew back then had more than one automobile. They were lucky to have one.”

  “Eventually the fire marshal ruled the fire was caused by faulty wiring. You were familiar with the house—would you have any reason to question that?”

  “No,” Luther said, sitting back in his chair and lacing his fingers over his chest. “No particular reason other than the fire marshal was a horse’s ass, pardon my language, with a brain the size of a hummingbird’s.”

  The gentle delivery of such blunt words startled a laugh from me and he looked up and smiled.

  “I’m old, Sophreena,” he said. “I don’t have the energy to parse my words anymore. Truly the man was incompetent. But as I say, it was a volunteer fire department and I doubt he had much training. In his defense, there were a lot of house fires caused by faulty electrical wiring in those days, so it was a good guess. Rural electrification came late to those parts and most of the old houses, like the Sawyers’, were retrofitted, sometimes in ways that weren’t the safest. Codes, such as they were, got wink-and-a-nod compliance. Now, if you’re asking if I saw anything specific that I regarded as dangerous, the answer is no. I’d have done something about it if I had. And Miss Margaret would’ve been more likely to notice than me. She kept a close eye on every aspect of that household. That didn’t make her popular with some of the help. She wanted things done the way she wanted. I liked that about her, but not everyone was as enlightened as me.” He looked at me over his glasses and again came the slow smile.

  “Others have mentioned that Mrs. Sawyer was a particular
woman,” I said. “And we’ve learned that after she’d gotten over the initial shock, she brought up several things she thought were out of place in the house when the fire started.”

  “I heard that, but not until long after it happened. The Sawyers moved into town after the fire and Alton decided to rent out the land. I finished out the fall harvest but I didn’t see much of Miss Margaret during that time. Then I went out to my brother’s place to learn to be an innkeeper. The next time I went back to visit my folks, nearly a year after the fire, was when I learned the Sawyers were saying they thought little Johnny had been kidnapped and was still out there somewhere. God bless ’em. I thought it was just their passage through it all and they’d come to accept it after a while, but they never did.”

  “May I tell you the things she thought were amiss?” I asked.

  “I’d like to know.” Luther nodded.

  I ran through the list—the noises, the closed door, the unlatched screen, the open window, the chair out of place, and, finally, the sound of the lighter.

  At the last one his head came up. “Alton didn’t smoke but he did carry a lighter.”

  “But he wasn’t home,” I reminded him.

  He nodded. “And from that you’re thinking, the fire might have really been arson?”

  “I’m definitely out of my depth here, but I can see where the theory got traction,” I said. “It doesn’t seem the fire could have gotten going so quickly without a boost, but according to the fire marshal’s report, they didn’t find any accelerants.”

  Luther huffed. “The sniff test, that’s what they had back then. I imagine he rubbed some char between his fingers and smelled it and if he didn’t smell anything he concluded it wasn’t there. And I doubt his nose was any smarter than the rest of his head. There were lots of things to hand that could serve that purpose back then that wouldn’t have left much odor. Even moonshine worked, and that was easy enough to get.”

  “Can you think of anyone else connected with the Sawyers who might have owned a Zippo lighter?” I asked.

  This drew an outright chuckle. “Yes, the answer is everyone. I had one my wife gave me for a wedding present. Cyrus carries it around now for a good-luck charm. Most every farmhand would have had one. Every neighbor, the preacher, the storekeepers, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker,” he said, making his voice a singsong. “As I say, even Alton carried a lighter. He didn’t smoke, but he used it when we were burning brush or for lighting the wash kettle. Lots of us smoked in those days. Disgusting, unhealthy habit. I had a devil of a time quitting.”

  He turned to stare out the window for a moment, then put a hand up to rest his fingertips against his temple, a frown creasing his forehead. “All the other things you listed—the doors, the baby’s window, and the chair—well, those seem like things you could dismiss. There were other people living in that house and maybe Stanton or Lenora moved the chair or opened the windows without Miss Margaret noticing. But she wasn’t a woman to let her imagination run away with her, and what you’re saying about her thinking she heard the sound of the lighter disturbs me.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Esme and I were hired to validate the findings that the baby died in the fire, and everything we’re learning just seems to open up more doubt.”

  “And I surely haven’t helped your cause by spouting off about the ineptitude of the fire marshal. My apologies for that.”

  “I appreciate your honesty,” I said. “In the end we’ll have to submit an honest report that may leave things muddier than we found them. But so be it. Is there anything else about that day? Anything you remember that was out of the ordinary?”

  “Only one small thing, and I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the fire. I had to go two towns over to get the tires for the farm equipment, and I came back along the road on the west side of the farm closest to where we were working. It had been a dry couple of weeks and it was a dirt road, so I was kicking up a storm of dust. As I came along a straight stretch near the field, I saw a girl I didn’t recognize walking along the roadside. At least I thought it was a girl. The dust was so thick I only got a glimpse but I had the idea she was wearing a headscarf. She stepped off the road and went into the thicket of trees. I felt bad because it was my dust that drove her off the road. I looked for her when I got to the spot where I thought she’d be, but she was gone. If she was even there in the first place, and I’m not a hundred percent sure of that.”

  “And you didn’t think that was worth reporting?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t unusual. As I said, most folks had only one vehicle, and seeing folks afoot was a common thing. We’d cut across fields and make trails through woods to get from one place to another by the quickest route. But I did report it. I told Big Jim, but he didn’t give it much credence, especially since it came from me. And I didn’t honestly believe it had anything to do with the fire. I still don’t believe that.”

  “Probably not,” I said with a sigh.

  “This was all so long ago,” Luther said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what difference any of it makes now. Alton and Miss Margaret are gone, Stanton and Lenora are on the downward slide of life, even baby Johnny would be getting on up in years himself if he’d lived. Whatever happened back then can’t be undone.”

  “Still, maybe knowing the truth would be a comfort.”

  “Maybe,” Luther said, “though sometimes I think the truth is highly overrated.”

  I spent the rest of my visit with Luther Hamilton hearing about his own career and listening to him brag about his son’s successes. “My wife and I weren’t blessed with more children, but Cyrus is everything I could hope for in a son.”

  “Then you’re both very lucky,” I said.

  * * *

  As I went down on the elevator, I felt more and more downcast. Though I’d enjoyed my chat with Luther, nothing he’d told me had added much to what we knew and we’d run out of avenues to investigate. The reports and the internal memos we’d gotten hold of reflected ineptitude and infighting among the investigators, but solid evidence of baby John David Sawyer’s death was nowhere to be found in any document we’d unearthed.

  When the door opened to the lobby, I pushed the button to go back up. Esme had left the call up to me and I’d decided it was time to have a talk with Senator Stan and Lenora. I knew they were back because I’d overheard Cyrus tell Luther they’d arrived.

  When Lenora came to the door she must have seen something in my face, because she immediately asked if there had been a development in Lincoln’s case.

  “No, not that I know of,” I said. “I just needed to speak to you and the senator.”

  “Surely,” she said, motioning me inside. “Let me call Stanton’s room and see if he’s available.”

  J.D. rose from the sofa, where he and Gabriela had been having a room service lunch. “Could we offer you something?” J.D. asked.

  I thanked him but declined, and my eyes roamed to the side table on which sat a plastic zipper bag filled with rice.

  “Cell phone mishap?” I asked.

  J.D. nodded. “It got soaked that night we got caught in the rainstorm. I’d just gotten the thing, too. My old one died on our trip back to the States. Tech guy said not to turn it on and to put it in a bag of rice for a week.”

  “So you wouldn’t have known if anyone tried to call you around midnight the night of the storm, would you?”

  “Well, you didn’t try to call me, did you? We hadn’t met at that time.”

  Lenora hung up the phone. “Stan’s waiting for us in his room. Shall we?”

  I quickly scrawled a number on the pad by the phone and ripped it off and handed it to J.D. “Give Detective Carlson a call and tell him about your phone,” I said. “He’ll explain.”

  A look, half puzzlement and half irritation, came over J.D.’s face, but it only lasted a moment. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll call him right now.”

  * * *

  When we got to the
senator’s room, it was clear he and Damon had been working. There were papers scattered over the tabletop and Damon was clicking away on his laptop. I wondered if Damon was going to step into Lincoln’s place to finish the book. The senator stood and herded us toward the sitting area. “If this is about your report, Sophreena, I’d like Damon to stay and hear what you have to say. Since he’ll be heading the foundation, he should be in the loop.”

  “It’s fine with me,” I said, “though I don’t think what I have to tell you will be very encouraging.” I proceeded to describe to him how everywhere we probed seemed to be opening up more ambiguity instead of nailing down the conclusions. I gave him a few examples and at first he tried arguing them down, point by point, but eventually he gave up.

  “This was not the news I was hoping to hear,” he said.

  “Nor the news I was hoping to deliver,” I said. “But I felt obligated to let you know where things stand in case you want to call in someone else who might be more qualified in law enforcement investigation to take over. I know time is a factor.”

  “I think not at this juncture,” the senator said. “Do you agree, Lenora? Damon?”

  “Oh, Stanton, I don’t know why we started down this road in the first place,” Lenora said. “It was unfair to Sophreena and Esme. We certainly knew how complicated this all was. We’ve lived with this since we were children.”

  “Indeed,” he said, wringing his hands. “I suppose it was wishful thinking on my part to believe that you and Esme could set things all to rights after all these years.”

  “We’re finding a lot of information,” I said. “It just doesn’t seem to be moving us in the direction you wanted.”

  “Still, one never knows, but that something you learn can be useful. I’m on the fence. What say you, Damon?”

  Damon shrugged. “I say they’re done for. Cut our losses and ax ’em. I’ll bat down any claimants that come and send ’em packing They’ll learn not to mess with me.”