The Burning

by Jonas Saul

  Jared screamed and ran for the door like one of those guys at a Tony Robbins motivational seminar walking on hot coals.

  The door wouldn’t budge. He yanked and pulled on it with renewed fervor, but to no avail, the whole time bouncing from foot to foot.

  Finally, before he completely collapsed onto the floor, Jared turned from the door in a panic and ran for the kitchen, his feet barely touching the floor in his haste.

  The oven still glowed red with its prize, but now the door was open, the remains of an animal inside. He moved closer for a better look.

  Then he threw up. All the nerves and all the fear gave way to a clenching of the stomach, dislodging his lunch and tossing the half-dissolved contents onto the floor of the kitchen, where it sizzled and fried. He considered his sanity. Yeah, I’m losing it.

  The heat overwhelmed him. Jared lost his balance and fell. He rolled on the floor as the intense heat rushed through his jacket. His hair caught on fire, lighting the dark kitchen with the flames.

  Jared screamed and rolled until he hit the wall, batting at his head.

  Something lifted him. The pain decreased for a passing second. His mind surrendered to the chaos of uncertainty as he levitated.

  One rational thought seeped through. Who’s carrying me?

  Chapter 2

  Friday, May 18, 2012…

  Tessa saw the police car approaching before she heard it.

  “Eric,” she shouted down the stairs. “Looks like we have company.”

  She set the paintbrush down on the plastic floor cover and took the turpentine with her to the bathroom to wash the paint off her hands. She hated using oil-based paint because of the lingering smell, but until they got the chalet aired out after a long winter closed up tight, she would rather smell paint fumes than the charred smells from last season’s woodstove fires.

  She dried her hands on her painter’s apron and headed downstairs as the doorbell rang.

  Eric stood close to the door, anticipating the cop’s approach. Before opening the door, he looked at Tessa as she walked down the huge staircase. He frowned, and she shrugged in a don’t ask me gesture.

  Eric opened the door.

  “Good afternoon, officer. Can we help you?”

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer came dressed in full uniform. He wore the Stetson hat, the pressed shirt and even the red stripes down the leg of his pants. But he had no horse.

  Is there a parade in town today or has this guy gone off the reserve?

  As Tessa approached the door, he lifted off his hat, and nodded ever so slightly.

  “Afternoon, folks. Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to do a routine drive-by to see how things were going.”

  Eric shot a look at Tessa, his eyebrows creased. “Everything’s fine here, officer. It’s Banff. It’s beautiful, warm, and we’re in our brand new house in the mountains. Nothing could be more right.”

  The cop looked from Eric to Tessa and back to Eric. The expression on his face made Tessa wonder if there was more to the visit he wasn’t telling them.

  “Good to hear. I’ll be on my way, but first, here’s my card.” He handed a white business card to Eric. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “If there was an emergency, wouldn’t 9-1-1 work just as well?”

  Tessa could tell that Eric wanted to know what precipitated the unannounced visit but he was too shy to ask the cop directly.

  “Nine-one-one would work well, but I live two kilometers away,” the cop gestured behind him, “and I could respond faster than any officer on duty in Banff. Oh, and I can see you’re wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet. I’ll let the local paramedics know.” The cop stepped back and examined the front of the house. “See, around here we all stick together and get to know each other.”

  Eric glanced back at Tessa again. She could see he was working up the courage to be more forthright.

  “Thanks again, folks, and sorry to bother you,” the cop said as he turned and walked to his car.

  “Wait,” Eric said. “Is there something we should know about?”

  The cop looked up and down the length of the porch then studied his boots like they were on the wrong feet. He lifted his left foot and inspected the underside.

  Weird.

  “There’s nothing to know about,” the cop said. “Consider this a personal housewarming gift from a neighbor who happens to be a cop.”

  “I need to be honest. As kind as this seems on the surface, it feels like there’s more purpose than a neighborly gesture. Did something happen here? In our house? Is that why we got it so cheap?”

  “Nothing happened that we know of.”

  “What does that mean? Did something happen that you don’t know of?”

  “Look, just call me if you need me. Really, everything’s fine. I only wanted to welcome you to the area.”

  The RCMP officer adjusted his Stetson and turned toward his car. Tessa’s stomach felt unsettled at how the cop acted. Could there have been a crime committed on their property or something worse? She’d never been welcomed in any home by a local cop offering his personal number.

  She stared at the officer’s back as he got to his car. When she looked at Eric, he stared at her. She knew he’d seen her expression of concern.

  Eric turned back to the cop. “Sir, please …” He jogged up to the front of the cruiser.

  From where she stood, Tessa could barely hear what the cop was saying. She stepped down front the steps to get within earshot.

  “… a man, Jared Tavallo, went missing last October after hunting in this area. We had detected his footprints in the snow, but they were quite faded by the time we found them. At this point, he’s still missing, and now that most of the snow is gone, his family has been roaming the area looking for his body.”

  “What’s that got to do with us?” Eric asked.

  “His tracks were found around here.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with the house, right? I mean, we did get it pretty cheap.”

  “Jared’s hunting rifle was found on your porch. Everyone knows that, but when we searched the house, we found nothing.”

  Tessa could tell the cop was lying. The whole conversation, he’d looked at either one of them directly when he talked. He seemed sure of himself as a veteran of the RCMP. But when he said they’d found nothing in the house, he looked away and fiddled with his car keys as if lost in thought.

  Eric would’ve caught it too. He was a writer and claimed to be a people watcher. He studied them to grab nuances and character traits that he could offer his characters.

  “Okay, well, thanks officer. We’ll keep our eyes open, and at least now we’ll know what they’re doing if we see people wandering around the property.”

  The cop nodded and slid into his cruiser. He backed the car up, spun the wheel and drove down their narrow driveway too fast for the curves.

  “What was that all about?” Tessa asked. “I’m seriously creeped out now.”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

  Chapter 3

  Tessa stayed on the porch as Eric walked into the house, no doubt on his way to the computer to see what he could research on the house and area.

  I know him too well.

  She took in a deep breath and detected the faint smell of something burning. It had been permanently stuck in her nose since they’d moved in.

  Eric shouted, and she jumped on the spot.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  “Get in here.”

  Tessa ran through the front door. Their furniture lay piled in the center of the living room covered in a white sheet until the room could be painted. The cathedral ceiling was sixteen feet high with a wooden railing along the top that led from one bedroom to the other. He wasn’t upstairs by the railing where she’d last seen his computer.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “In the kitchen,” he said.

  At the archway to the kitchen, Tessa stopp
ed and gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “Why did you do that?” Eric asked.

  She had nothing to do with what sat in the oven, and since it was only the two of them at the house, it had to be him.

  “You know I didn’t do that,” she said, pointing at the oven. “I’m not capable of doing that.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  Eric looked away from her. “You don’t have to be sarcastic. There’s only the two of us and since I didn’t do it, it had to be you.”

  The smell intensified as the oven’s door lay open. Tessa wanted to cover her nose but instead crossed her arms and stared at Eric.

  “That’s funny. I was just thinking the same thing. Is this some kind of prank?”

  “You’re kidding, right? You set this up and now you’re pretending it was me.”

  “Okay, Eric, I trust you,” she said, unfolding her arms. “But if I didn’t do this and you didn’t, then who did?”

  He looked at the stove and then back at her. “I have no idea. Could someone have come in while we were talking to the cop?”

  “How? The back door is covered up with furniture. They would’ve had to walk right by us at the front door.” The smell became overwhelming. “Can you grab that thing and toss it in the bush, and then we’ll talk about this outside?”

  Eric opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out the barbecue tongs. Carefully, he leaned into the stove and applied the tongs to either side of the rat’s burnt carcass. With the blackened rodent’s body held firm in his grip, Eric walked across the kitchen toward the door. Once outside, he continued away from the house and tossed the body into the trees.

  “There, it’s gone,” he shouted back at her as she stepped outside.

  Tessa shuddered the length of her body. “We’ve been here since yesterday. Do you think that charred smell was the rat all this time, and we just found it?”

  Eric shook his head. “No, the oven light was on when I went back into the house after the cop left. This is new.” Eric touched his chin and looked sideways, lost in thought. “Funny how it coincides with the cop showing up.”

  “Yeah, funny,” Tessa said, with sarcasm.

  Dark clouds formed overhead. Blue sky still surrounded the area and the sun shone in the late afternoon position. “It looks like we might get a sun shower.”

  “Tessa, I’m going to run into town to see if I can find our real estate agent. After that, I’m going to see if the library is open. Maybe they have newspapers or records on the Jared Tavallo missing person report. I’d like to know more about that. Will you be okay here?”

  “Yeah, but maybe you could walk through the whole house to make sure whoever stuck the rat in our oven isn’t still here?”

  “Of course,” Eric said and stepped past her.

  He entered the front door and skipped up the steps. Tessa stood alone, staring up at the gorgeous chalet they had just bought for a steal. They paid less than half the going rate without wondering why. Full disclosure didn’t reveal that any murders or suicides had taken place in the home. As far as they could tell, the mysteriously anonymous previous owners just wanted to unload the property as fast as they could.

  Tessa wasn’t religious in the organized religion sense, or into believing about the Other Side, but it did scare her a little when they first visited the house and she saw the weird trim on all the windows. The gargoyles lining the roof had a certain beauty to them, but the exterior could be renovated. It was the interior that had won them over. They’d always wanted a quiet year-round home in the mountains where Eric could write his historical thrillers and she could dabble in gardening and cook extravagant meals. The oven would need a serious cleaning before she’d put any food in it.

  Eric ran out the front door, cars keys dangling in his hand. “The house is clean. No one’s in there.” He slowed as he reached her. “I’m starting to believe the rat was in the oven since yesterday, and that’s what we’ve been smelling.”

  “Yeah, that has to be it,” Tessa agreed.

  He kissed her and ran for the car. “Gotta hurry. It’s getting late and the library may close. See you in an hour or so. Call my cell if you need me.”

  Tessa waved to him as a light rain began to fall. A soft sheet of rain dropped from the gray cloud above. The sun still warmed her as water collected on her face.

  Eric’s car fired up and he was off, driving almost as fast as the cop did fifteen minutes before.

  Time to get back to painting the bedroom.

  Tessa turned toward the house and started for the porch, but stopped in her tracks.

  Steam rose off the roof as the rain water hit it. She stepped closer and examined the porch railing. It was happening there too.

  Weird.

  It reminded her of what water did when it hit the burner on the stove after overflowing from a pot of potatoes, sizzling and bubbling up, and finally disappearing. She touched the railing to see if it was hot, her fingers coming away cool, but not wet.

  As fast as the rain started, it slowed and then stopped with only the occasional drip here and there.

  Tessa walked into her house and discounted what she’d just witnessed. It had an explanation, she just didn’t know what. Probably the house had heated up with the direct sun all day and the warm rain only dissipated faster than expected.

  Who knows, she thought. I’m going to paint and not worry about dead rats and sizzling rain.

  Chapter 4

  Friday, June, 1, 2012…

  Officer Clayton stared up at the facade of the house. The house that the area was now calling The Burning Chalet. It looked like any other summer home in the Banff area, but he’d been on the police force long enough to know that strange things happened around it.

  “Strange things indeed,” he mumbled under his breath as cars pulled up behind him. He took off his sunglasses and watched the line of seven vehicles crawl up the drive, with Arthur McKay bringing up the rear. Good old Arthur — the longest standing resident still alive in the National Park. Clayton was pretty sure Arthur would hit ninety-five this year but people had stopped asking his age a dozen years ago. He was still spry, still eating bacon and eggs and driving his car, but Clayton suspected this would be the last year Arthur did any more driving.

  The vehicles broke left and right and parked where they could find room.

  “Gather around,” he shouted as everyone filed out of their vehicles. “I want to talk to you all before we get started.”

  The search team assembled in a loose circle around Clayton. He counted ten people including himself.

  “Okay, here’s what we know. According to the real estate agent, a young couple bought this house and were supposed to arrive for the long weekend in May, a few weeks back, but as far as anyone knows, they never showed up. Here’s the problem … their family in Calgary said they did leave for Banff and came here on the seventeenth of May. I’ve asked you all here to search the area in grid formation. Once we’ve covered every square meter of the property and found nothing, we will all leave as a group and go home. I will report to the family personally with what we find, which I’m figuring won’t be anything. Got it?”

  Heads bobbed up and down.

  “Okay, we’ll start in that corner in a single line and walk the property. We’ve all done this before. Let’s go, let’s go.”

  Arthur stood at the back, leaning on his cane. As the searchers started for the corner of the property line, Clayton walked over to Arthur.

  “You sure you’re up to this?” Clayton asked.

  Lately, Arthur’s old eyes watered constantly. In a high-pitched grandfatherly voice, Arthur said, “You’re damned right I am. No house will spook me.” He turned and started after the group, leaning into his cane more today than on other days.

  The ensemble of volunteers started by ten in the morning and finished the left side of the property by the lunch hour. Everyone went back to their cars for food,
where they sat on hoods and trunks to eat.

  Mike Lewis gestured toward Clayton, the remnants of a tuna sandwich in his mouth. “You really think that couple came here?”

  Clayton shrugged. “I have no idea. Everything points to the negative.”

  “I heard everything that comes around here goes missing eventually,” Barbara added from a few feet over.

  “We don’t want to encourage fairy tales,” Clayton said.

  “What happened to that hunter last year?” Mike asked.