Once Burned

by Gerry Boyle

  “Honey,” Roxanne said, and she went and scooped her up and held her.

  “I woke up,” Sophie said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry we were so loud,” Roxanne said, kissing her on the cheek.

  I watched Beth watching the two of them. She was smiling, her mouth slightly open, the predatory look again. The teeth. She got up and came around the table and stood, pushed the hood off. Held out her hand and Sophie, hesitating, took it. Beth held on.

  “Hello, honey,” she said, her voice soft and gentle. “I’m Beth. What’s your name?”

  “Sophie. And this is Mittens.”

  Beth let Sophie’s hand go but the stare was fixed.

  “Sophie is a real pretty name for a pretty little girl,” she said.

  “I have a pony,” Sophie said. “His name is Pokey. But he doesn’t live here.”

  “Oh,” Beth said. “Where does Pokey live?”

  “He lives in Clair’s barn. There’s a path that goes there. Clair gave him to me. He’s my friend.”

  “Well, aren’t you lucky, Sophie. To have such a nice friend, and a nice mommy and daddy, and a pony. I’m sorry we woke you.”

  “We were just talking,” Roxanne said.

  “You were talking loud,” Sophie said, leaning her head against Roxanne’s shoulder. Her bare feet dangled. “And somebody was crying.”

  Beth said, “You know, I never had a little girl, but I used to have a little boy.”

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  “His name was Ratchet,” she said.

  “That’s a funny name,” Sophie said. “Rhymes with ‘catch it.’ ”

  “Yes,” Beth said, taking a step toward her. “Aren’t you smart.”

  “You could say, ‘Catch it, Ratchet,’ ” Sophie said.

  Beth smiled at Sophie and Sophie said, “You have writing on you.”

  “Yeah,” Beth said. “I write things there that I have to remember. Like Ratchet.” She held up the other hand and said, “And Alphonse.”

  “Who’s that?” Sophie said.

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  “Why do you have to put his name there?”

  “He went away.”

  Beth turned to me.

  “But he’s coming home.”

  She turned back to Sophie and Roxanne.

  “Well, sweetie,” Beth said, “it was wicked nice to meet you.”

  “I have a jacket that has a hood,” Sophie said.

  “You have a lot of nice things,” Beth said. “But now you have to go to bed.”

  “Are you staying at our house tonight?” Sophie said.

  “No, I’ve got to go. But you know what?” Beth smiled at Sophie, then looked at Roxanne, then at me, where her gaze rested. “I’m gonna come back,” Beth said.

  She blew Sophie a kiss and walked across the kitchen and out the door.

  I glanced at Roxanne, then followed outside to the drive. Beth was standing by the car, an old Ford Taurus, blue and primer black. She was lighting a cigarette, flicking again and again at a pink lighter. I came up beside her and could see her hands shaking, the flame wavering. The cigarette glowed and she took a long drag. Exhaled. Another drag, this time the smoke billowing out of her nostrils.

  I said, “I really am very sorry for what happened to your son.”

  Another drag, smoke forming a cloud above her head like she was smoldering.

  “Yeah, well,” Beth said, turning to me, her black eyes glowing with anger. “All the fucking sorry in the world don’t change nothin’. Everybody else is living the dream and I’m stuck in this fucking goddamn nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You and a lot of other people. And if they’re not, they will be.”

  She put the cigarette in the side of her mouth and held it there. Opened the car door. It creaked and she got in the car. I glimpsed beer cans and a cigarette carton on the passenger seat. She slammed the door, started the motor with a rough snarl. Looked at me and flashed a carnivorous smile and put the car in gear. She pulled away and the car, with a taillight out, disappeared over the rise. After a minute, the sound of the motor faded, too.

  I looked back at the house, the lights glowing in the deepening darkness, like lanterns hung to guide someone right to our door.

  Starting up the drive, I was alongside my truck when a voice came from my left, in the cedars.

  “Who was that?”

  9

  Clair stepped out. He was holding a shotgun in the crook of his arm like it was a baby.

  “Name’s Beth,” I said. “The mom. The boy who died.”

  “I figured. Got a little heated.”

  “Yeah. She started to vent.”

  “Can’t blame her,” Clair said. “Horrible thing, losing a child.”

  “No. If that was the end of it.”

  I told him what Beth had said to Sophie, about the dad, Alphonse, getting sprung for the funeral.

  “What is he in for?”

  “Aggravated assault. Meth head with a serious mean streak, Roxanne says.”

  “He’ll be shackled,” Clair said.

  “Yeah, he’s nasty, but I think she’s the one we have to worry about. Her moods swing all over the place. She’s drinking, angry.”

  “To be expected. You going to report her? That she came here?”

  “Roxanne will, I’m sure.”

  “You know,” Clair said, “it’s her only chance to do right for her son.”

  “Screwed things up so bad when he was alive,” I said.

  “Now she has to prove to the world and to herself that she really loved him. One last shot.”

  We stood there in the dark. A nighthawk swooped low over the house, zigging and zagging like a giant bat. It was cutting through the light from the windows, feeding on the moths and bugs swarming there.

  “Hungry babies back at the nest,” Clair said.

  “All that parental instinct,” I said. “Why do you think it doesn’t work right for humans?”

  “Modeling,” Clair said. “We turn into what we see.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “And then there’s old-fashioned evil. Plenty of that to go around, too.”

  The bird swooped. The bugs swarmed.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I feel better now.”

  “Anytime,” Clair said. He shifted the shotgun from one arm to the other. “This girl carrying, you think?”

  “I doubt it. I see her more as the box-knife type.”

  “But brazen, come right out here, plunk herself down.”

  “She and Roxanne, they did talk a lot. Back then,” I said. “But still. There’s something nutty about her. From sorrow to rage, just like that. And the way she looked at Sophie.”

  “I’ll make sure I’m here,” Clair said. “She won’t walk in again.”

  “Counting on it,” I said.

  Roxanne was upstairs when I came in. I stopped at the closet by the side door, pressed the hanging coats and jackets to the side. There was a shelf in the back and I reached up, moved a stack of blankets, and took out a gun case. I brought it out to the shed and laid it on the workbench and worked the combination lock. It clicked open and I flipped the lid.

  There were two long guns inside: a Remington 700 deer rifle and a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. I went to the cupboard on the end of the bench and unlocked the lock, took out a carton of double-aught shells, and then went to the gun case and lifted the shotgun out. I slid five shells into the tube, put the gun back in the case, put the lock through the hasp. I didn’t clasp it.

  I walked back in the house, put the case on the shelf above the jackets, then closed the door. When I turned Roxanne was standing there.

  “She got to you, too,” Roxanne said.

  We spoke softly.

  “I’m sorry for her, I really am. But she’s cracking,” I said. “Losing her son, and all the drugs and alcohol.”

  “I thought she’d be angry,” Roxanne said. “Maybe v
iolent, even. But this—this was creepy. It scared me.”

  She opened her arms and we embraced. We held each other tightly and when I started to let go, Roxanne didn’t.

  “It’s like part of her is reaching out, wants me to forgive her,” she said.

  “And the other part is ready to lash out,” I said.

  “I never saw the anger before,” Roxanne said. “She was high, mostly. I never really saw her in touch with reality.”

  “And this reality would set anybody off. The guilt—the grief.”

  “Now that she’s straight. Sort of.”

  “So what we need,” I said, “is to get her some heroin.”

  We fell away from each other.

  “You think she’ll really come back?” I said.

  “I don’t know. She knows where we are now.”

  “Did you call and report it?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “It took a while to get Sophie back to sleep.”

  “Was she frightened?”

  “A little. I think she just wanted me to explain it all.”

  “And could you?”

  “To a five-year-old? Yes. To myself? Not really.”

  Roxanne called Dave at home. While she talked I went around and closed the windows on the first floor and locked them. I made sure the front door was locked, and the shed doors, and the side door. When I came back to the kitchen, Roxanne was off the phone.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I should keep the lines of communication open.”

  “Like what? Invite her for coffee?”

  “No, just don’t shut her down.”

  “Let her go over to his house,” I said. “They can have their own heart-to-heart.”

  “Jack, we’re doing damage control. We’re better off if we’re not adversaries.”

  “Seems like an awful lot to expect when—”

  I caught myself. Again.

  “When I’m responsible for her child’s death?”

  She had picked up a cloth and was swirling it around the already-clean countertop like she wanted to rub through the rock maple. I reached out and took her arm and stopped her. She sagged and her head fell forward into her hands. I held her, felt her shoulders shake as she started to sob.

  “Jack,” she said. “It’s all my fault.”

  “But baby,” I said, “it isn’t. You did the right thing. No one could have known.”

  “They paid me to know,” Roxanne said, holding back sobs. “They paid me to protect children.”

  I held her until the shaking had subsided. She sniffled and I got her a tissue from the box on the counter. She blew her nose and said, “I’m very tired.”

  So we turned the lights off and went upstairs and I pulled the comforter down, shucked off my jeans and shirt. When I turned, Roxanne was coming into the room with Sophie, still sleeping, in her arms. Roxanne put Sophie in the middle and went to the closet and slipped her clothes off, dropped a nightshirt over her head. She came to the bed and climbed in. I turned off the light and went to the window and looked out. I stood there for a time, until they’d fallen asleep.

  The windows were on the gable end of the house, facing east, the direction Beth had taken when she’d left. The window was open, and for a long while I listened. A hum of insects. A bullfrog croaking out in the marsh. The hoot of a barred owl, Lasha’s screaming woman, like a deranged person calling out in the woods. Rustling in the leaves and grass.

  I looked over. Roxanne and Sophie were on their backs, their soft throats exposed. I listened a minute more and went to bed.

  It was 5:03 a.m., the first glow of morning light. A phoebe had just started calling behind the shed, repeated and insistent. I looked to my left, saw Sophie asleep with Mittens, Sophie’s mouth open, snoring softly. On the other side of her, Roxanne’s back was to me. She was asleep, too. I lay there, ran through the night in my head. Even in the dim light of dawn it seemed some of the threat had faded.

  Had Beth been that threatening, or just understandably upset? Had she come to reconnoiter or to find some closure? Would she ever come all the way out to Prosperity again, or had she done what she’d set out to do—to see Roxanne face-to-face?

  Was it just my imagination running wild?

  I eased into the bed, lay back, and stared at the ceiling. As I listened to Sophie’s small, soft breaths my cell phone rang in the study. I slipped from the room, down the stairs. Picked up the phone.

  “Yes.”

  “Jack. Jack McMorrow?”

  A woman’s voice. Husky.

  “Lasha?” I said.

  “Yeah. Listen, sorry to bother you.”

  “No, no bother. I was up.”

  “You said to call if there was anything.”

  “Did you think of something?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I thought you’d need to know.”

  “Know what?” I said.

  “The fires,” Lasha said. “There’s another one.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. It’s still burning.”

  Clair was in the barn. He had a book on the workbench, a biography of Mozart, and he was fiddling with his iPod. He held up one finger, clicked the iPod, and stuck it in the docking station in the stereo. Music filled the space, all the way to the rafters, a soft building of violins.

  “To understand the book you have to know the music,” he said.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Another arson fire in Sanctuary. Right now.”

  “I’ll take over here.”

  “Sorry. I’ll be three hours or so. Back by nine.”

  “Not a problem. Our little girl ought to be up pretty soon.”

  “I told Roxanne to bring her over.”

  “I’ll head over, sit on the deck.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then Roxanne and Sophie can come back here with me,” Clair said. “Mary’ll make coffee.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and started for the door. Stopped. The violins had given way to cellos, more ominous, foreboding. A soundtrack for our conversation.

  “Loaded the shotgun last night,” I said. “Probably overreacting.”

  “Handgun’s better at very close quarters,” Clair said.

  “Yeah, well, hard to tell Roxanne that’s for hunting.”

  “There’s guns for hunting and there’s guns for the hunted,” he said. He held up his hand again, started to conduct. The strings were joined by trumpets, a crescendo that rolled through the barn.

  “Allegro,” Clair said. “You go.”

  The Sanctuary firehouse was empty, bay doors open, trucks gone, a few pickups parked helter-skelter to one side. Lasha had said the fire was off South Sanctuary Road, beyond her house, a dirt road on the left, a couple of miles out. She couldn’t remember the name. She thought the place was owned by a guy named Don.

  I drove out beyond the school, took a right, and headed south. The road followed a ridge, the river a silver ribbon beyond the woods to my right. It was a little after 6:30, the morning mist clinging to the roadside brush. I drove slowly, not wanting to miss the turn, but then a pickup came up from behind, red light flashing on the dash. I pulled over, then followed my escort, a latecomer in an old rust-white pickup who didn’t want to miss the party.

  It was 1.8 miles from Lasha’s driveway, a single-lane dirt road that disappeared into the woods. I followed my man, bouncing the Toyota over ruts and bumps until he swerved into the brush. I did the same and a tanker truck came out of the trees and eased past us. We crashed out of the brush and continued on and I could smell smoke.

  Then the road broke out of the woods and into a clearing with a shingled farmhouse at the near edge of an overgrown field. At the far edge a barn was burning.

  I parked alongside the Ford and, while the driver wrestled his gear on, gathered up my notebook and phone and ran along the rutted path that the fire trucks had made through the grass. There were trucks parked around the barn and a stream of water cascaded onto the half-collapse
d frame. Smoke billowed into the sky, sending embers aloft like tiny flaming balloons.

  I saw Chief Frederick in a yellow jacket and helmet directing Ray-Ray and Paulie, manning a hose. Other firemen were walking the perimeter with shiny water tanks on their backs, extinguishing fires in the field. Harold from the store drove up at the wheel of a tanker truck.

  To my right was a small crowd, some holding paper coffee cups. I approached, saw Davida Reynolds in a dark blue jumpsuit, taking notes as she talked to a tall guy at the edge of the crowd.

  Ten feet away, I stopped and listened.

  The tall guy—lanky, tanned, blond curly hair—was saying something about gasoline. “Some kerosene, too. A bunch of old paint. Haven’t had a chance to go in and clean the place out. I mean, it was filled with the old man’s—”

  There was a whoosh from the barn, blue and yellow flames leaping skyward. The crowd flinched. Across the clearing the reflection of the flames danced on the side of the house.

  Reynolds turned and Chief Frederick started shouting, “Back up, back up.” The guys on the hose staggered backwards, like the feet of a dragon in a Chinatown parade. There was another explosion and Reynolds left the tall guy, started for the fire.

  I raised my phone and snapped a few pictures. Then I eased into her place. I told him my name, said I was from the paper. I didn’t say which one.

  “Don Barbier,” he said, shaking my hand. Big hands, strong arms, broad shoulders under his dungaree jacket.

  “You’re the owner of the barn,” I said.

  “Was,” he said. He mustered a smile.

  “What was in there?”

  “Not entirely sure. The old guy’s farming equipment, some antique tools. Just bought the place in February. Moved up six weeks ago.”

  “From where?”

  “Down south. Atlanta area.”

  “Your family here?” I looked toward the house.

  “Single. Divorced.”

  I scribbled in my notebook. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Glad it’s just the barn?”

  “Jesus, yes,” he said.

  “What brought you up here, Don?”

  “I flip houses,” he said. “Me and Tory and Rita, we’re kinda teaming up.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “They own the real estate place.”