by Richard Cox
“Well, for one thing, there have been three fires in the past three days, not two.”
“You mean that construction project in Tanglewood?”
“So you know about that?” Jonathan asked.
“It’s two blocks from my parents’ house. But why does it have anything to do with this?”
“Because the builder is Adam Altman.”
“Adam Altman? Why does that name sound familiar?”
“He was one of my friends back in junior high. He was in that club we had.”
Alicia’s eyes slowly widened and Jonathan could see her working it out.
“So wait,” she said. “Bobby burned down the restaurant, he killed David’s dad in the process, and someone also burned down a house Adam was building. Which means three of your friends were in some way involved.”
“That’s right.”
“Does that mean all this has to do with you?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “I suppose it could. But there was a police officer at the restaurant, and he heard what Bobby said right before the building went up in flames.”
“What was it?”
“That according to Todd, that was how his life had to end.”
“Who’s Todd?”
Jonathan was surprised she didn’t instantly remember this.
“You know that kid who went into a coma after the tornado? Todd Willis? The one who—”
“Of course! That’s the guy who . . . holy shit, Jonathan. He burned down the same restaurant when we were little. I remember because David—”
Alicia’s hand went to her mouth and she stopped herself. Jonathan felt a little stab of jealousy at how she remembered enough about that summer to protect his feelings.
“I wonder how much the police know about this,” she finally said. “Something premeditated is going on, and I’m caught in the middle of it. I was friends with you guys, too. Could it be Todd? Whatever happened to him, anyway?”
Jonathan took a long sip of his drink and decided to plow forward. Why even bother with all this if he couldn’t be honest with her?
“Alicia, Todd didn’t burn down the restaurant by himself. We all did it. All five of us in the club.”
“What?”
“Yes, we—”
“I knew it. I knew David was lying to me. He was so weird after that happened.”
“Yeah, well the reason I know all this is because a couple of detectives stopped by my house tonight. They interrogated me like they thought I was involved. And then, at the end, they told me about an anonymous email someone sent them.”
“Detectives came to see you?”
“The subject of this email was ‘The City Will Burn’ and the text was some kind of clue.”
“Clue? What clue?”
“Lyrics from a Don Henley song. Which said, ‘I’m gonna get you back. I’m gonna show you what I’m made of.’”
Alicia’s blank look made it clear the lyrics meant nothing to her.
“So David never told you the name of our club?”
“No. Should he have?”
“The name of our club was the name of that song. ‘The Boys of Summer.’”
“And someone is making reference to it now, all these years later? Sending cryptic emails to the police? This is like something out of a movie.”
Jonathan nodded, and Alicia drew circles on the table with her beer bottle.
“What did you say happened to Todd again?” she asked.
“All I know is he moved away after the restaurant burned down.”
“I imagine he was pretty pissed,” Alicia suggested, “if you guys all set fire to the restaurant but only he got busted for it. Why did you do that?”
“Why did we burn it down or why did we let him take the blame for it?”
“Both.”
“It’s a long story. Todd was very strange. He wasn’t like the rest of us. And that wasn’t the first fire we set.”
“No?”
“We also burned down the house on Driftwood. Like the week before.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember that. But I thought the kid who disappeared set that fire.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“Then what happened to him? Everyone said he ran away so he wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“I don’t know what happened to Joe,” Jonathan said, which was technically true. Any other details, no matter how guilty they might make him feel, were only speculation.
Alicia reclined in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She was farther away from him now, Jonathan noticed, than at any time since she’d arrived at the restaurant.
“So everyone thought Joe burned down the house, and then he disappeared—like forever—and none of you said anything.”
“We were thirteen, Alicia. It was obviously stupid and selfish.”
“But you could have helped the police. If they knew he didn’t burn down the house, that might have changed their investigation.”
This was true. Nothing Jonathan said now could change the decisions they had made then.
“Why the hell did you burn the house down in the first place?” Alicia said. “You’re talking about someone’s life, for God’s sake.”
“This particular house was empty. No one had ever lived in it. We hung out there a few times, and one day we snuck some alcohol in with us and got really drunk. Things got way out of hand and we messed up the place pretty badly.”
“Messed it up like how?”
“Just a lot of physical damage. Stuff we couldn’t repair. Todd explained about forensics, how we’d never be able to erase the traces of our presence there. He told us fire was the only way to cover our tracks. We were desperate. It was a really stupid thing to do.”
“This isn’t easy to hear,” Alicia said. “But I appreciate your honesty. It makes more sense now why David acted the way he did back then.”
“What do you mean?”
“After his dad’s restaurant burned down, David was withdrawn. Unhappy. Based on what you’re telling me now, maybe he felt guilty for what happened. But he pretended like the fire was great, that his father somehow deserved it. And he kept telling me he knew a secret. He said he knew something no one else did and it was going to make him rich.”
“I guess he was right,” Jonathan said. “Since he’s like a billionaire and all.”
“I know. It’s pretty creepy. And the weird thing is, I had completely forgotten he told me that until you called.”
“Did David say what the secret was?”
“No. But his eyes, Jonathan. He looked crazy. When he told me all this, he looked like he belonged at that mental hospital out by the lake.”
Jonathan remembered feeling the same way. But he could not recall what had happened at the restaurant, besides the fire, that had induced such feelings. For a moment he considered telling Alicia about Todd’s impossible music, but he wasn’t quite ready yet. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea himself.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said to her, “but my arson days are over. You don’t have to believe it, but I’m as baffled as you are about what’s happening.”
Alicia drank the rest of her beer and said, “Who else could it be, then, besides Todd?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he convinced Bobby to burn up the restaurant for some reason and Fred Clark got in the way.”
“I feel so bad for David,” Alicia said. “Are you going to talk to him about this?”
“I would if I had a phone number for him. But maybe he’ll come back here to take care of his dad. If he does we could sit down and talk to him about it. Ask what he thinks is going on.”
“People just don’t go around setting fires like this. I think it’s pretty obvious whatever is happening now is related to what happened before, back when you guys knew Todd. I think I’d be worried if I were you. You could be next.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jonathan said, and it was true. Was his house on fire right n
ow, while he was here with Alicia? “I guess I better keep my eyes open.”
“It really seems like some kind of revenge on Todd’s part.”
“Okay, but why come back now? Why wait so long?”
“Maybe it doesn’t seem like that long ago to him,” Alicia said. “Maybe it seems like it was just yesterday.”
25
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Gholson wandered over to say goodnight to his partner. Daniels, recently divorced, was prowling around Match.com again. Over the past few months he’d been fucking some twenty-five-year-old bartender who relocated from Olney, Eve or Eva or something like that. Lots of people had moved to Wichita after the super collider accident, but the economy around here couldn’t handle it. The physics machine had been hailed as a savior for the area, but after it shut down the downward spiral only intensified. Dying slowly before, the city was in real trouble now.
“What do you think?” Gholson said. “About Crane?”
“I think he’s a schoolteacher. I think regardless of what you believe happened twenty-five years ago, he didn’t send that second email.”
Gholson looked back at his own desk. The email Daniels was referring to had arrived while they were away interrogating Crane. In fact, based on the time stamp, the message had arrived while they were at Crane’s house. Talk about an alibi. There was no way Crane could have sent the message, not while they were standing there talking to him. A further complicating factor was the email had been sent directly to Gholson this time, which meant the author had somehow learned of his assignment to this case. There was a printout of the message on Daniels’ desk, which Gholson picked up and read for the seven hundredth time.
remember how I made you crazy? remember how I made you scream?
FUCK YOU Gholson. You’ll never catch ME.
“Look at this bitch,” Daniels said. He clicked a link, and a badly-lit digital photograph on his screen became larger. The girl in the picture was a brunette and had obviously spent too much of her young life simmering under UV lamps. Her cocktail dress was hiked up and you could see a black thong underneath. “Lives in Dallas. I gotta get over there more often.”
Daniels didn’t have his head in the game since the divorce.
“So this perp calls me out,” Gholson said. “Calls us out, basically, and you don’t see any course of action. Our only suspect has an alibi for this email and you’re content to find some ass online.”
“You’re going to put a car on Crane, right? If it turns out he’s part of this, you’ve got him, right?”
“I’ve got a patrol in his neighborhood, but I think maybe I’m going to watch him myself.”
Now Daniels looked up. “Look, Jerry, I’d be pissed, too. If someone called me out like that, of course I would. But you’ve got to keep some distance here.”
“Okay, but—”
“I don’t think Crane is telling us everything he knows. You’re right about that. But unless you can establish a connection between him and Todd Willis—until you can even prove Willis has come back to Wichita—this theory of yours has no legs. We can’t put Crane anywhere near the houses or the restaurant. The only evidence we have for Willis’ presence in town is a one-sentence accusation from a man with a gun pointed at him. That’s not enough. That’s nothing. No offense.”
“I just can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Fred Clark’s restaurant was torched back then, and these kids were involved somehow, and now Bob Steele burned down the same restaurant last night. We’ve got a murder victim, Frank. We’ve got three structures destroyed in three days. This is the biggest case we’ve worked in months and we have no leads other than the members of that club.”
“The rich guy in California is part of it, too, you’re saying.”
“Why not?”
“Fred Clark is David’s father. Why would he want his own father dead?”
“They haven’t been on speaking terms for years,” Gholson said. “Maybe there was a fresh disagreement we don’t know about.”
“Phone records don’t support that. And what would they argue over, Jerry?”
Gholson couldn’t answer that, so he didn’t.
“What’s the latest on the background check on Willis?” Daniels asked. “Anything come back from the Bureau?”
“No trace of the guy. Obviously, he doesn’t want to be found.”
“Or can’t be found. We know he likes dope. Maybe he OD’d or found some other trouble that got the better of him.”
“Maybe. But then what the hell is going on here?”
“Look,” Daniels said. “All I’m saying is maintain perspective. It’s what you’re always telling me. Don’t get personal with the case. It’s good advice. You should keep it in mind.”
26
An hour or so later Gholson was sitting in semi-darkness with his wife, wondering if maybe the only point of life was for it to turn out differently than you expected.
How else to describe his tenure with the WFPD? He’d hit the streets as a patrolman at age twenty-three, with no degree and no law enforcement experience, yet after only four years he had become one of the youngest officers on the force to ever make detective. Now, after beginning his career with such promise, the kid who had been called a “shooting star” by his lieutenant was still doing the same work at the same rank more than twenty-five years later. Only he was no longer a kid. Daniels was also no kid, though he was forever pretending otherwise, and recently he’d introduced Gholson to a Web site called LinkedIn. On LinkedIn you put up a description of your work history and accomplishments, sort of like an online resume, and then you waited for a private company to snatch you up and make you their head of security. If you believed Daniels, this sort of thing happened all the time. But when Gholson had considered what personal and career information he might put on such a site, he realized his job history would consume all of three lines of text, which was just one more depressing reality in a life full of them.
You might wonder if Gholson’s career had suffered because of his insistence upon a healthy work/life balance, that he had foregone rapid advancement to enjoy rich and fulfilling family living. And in fact he’d been married for over thirty years and was the father of a strong-headed young man named Lance, who had run off to Oklahoma and was studying to become a chiropractor. But Lance was angry at Gholson for a variety of reasons and rarely called or visited. In the past few years he’d come back to Wichita for only one occasion, his mother’s birthday, and the only way Gholson knew that was because of an elderly nurse named Phil who fashioned himself as a therapist of sorts for the families of his patients.
Gholson’s wife, Sally, was one of those patients, and had been going on five years now. Once a tall, lithe blonde who could nail baseline jumpers with her eyes closed, Sally had seemed unattainable to Gholson the first moment he saw her bouncing a worn leather basketball on a rectangle of blacktop in Archer City. She stood an inch taller than him, and passed insults around as easily as she passed the ball. But in a conversation afterward, over barbecue ribs and cans of Schlitz, it had been clear there was something between them, an electric sort of connection that still made Gholson smile when he thought about it.
“I thought you might be interested in this new case I’m working on,” Gholson said to her now as she lay motionless in bed. “It’s a new case related to an old case. Or maybe the same case. You would probably like to hear about it, in any case.”
His wife didn’t acknowledge the joke. She was awake, her eyes were open, but those things were irrelevant because three years ago she had finally stopped talking altogether. This period of silence had followed a gradual decline over the course of twenty-six years, after she had suffered a minor head injury during the tornado in 1979. Nowadays, Gholson paid weekly visits to her at the hospital—North Texas State Hospital—which over the years had borne other names, such as Wichita Falls State Hospital and the more ominous Northwest Texas Insane Asylum.
“For some reason I ne
ver made the connection, how that Willis kid stopped talking after the tornado. It was a long time ago, sure, but it’s just like what’s happened to you. In fact when I went back and looked at the case file, even the clinical diagnosis was the same. That’s pretty strange if you ask me.”
A sconce burned on the other side of the hospital room. It was the only light he’d turned on, and half of Sally’s face was darkened by shadows. Visitors’ hours were over, of course, but as a law enforcement officer he could come here anytime, and had long ago worked out an agreement with the nursing staff.
“For you it happened a lot slower, I guess, but in the end I can’t help but wonder if you both went to the same place. Wherever that is.”
Sally moved a little in the bed. It wasn’t unusual for her to stir at the sound of his voice, but tonight he was hoping for something different.
The doctor’s name here at the state hospital was Young. He claimed schizophrenic catatonia was still common in some parts of the world but almost unheard of in industrialized nations. Gholson wondered how that could be true when two unrelated people in a town like Wichita Falls had been diagnosed with it, but he hadn’t thought to ask this before because he’d forgotten about Todd’s illness. Young explained that certain drugs were usually able to bring catatonic patients back to reality, but since Sally’s mental health had deteriorated over such a long period of time, it was possible no type of therapy would reach her. And so far Young had been correct in that assessment.
“Sally,” Gholson said. “I know I didn’t believe a lot of the things you told me. I know you were angry at me for that. But the reason we fought so much is you could never understand my side of it. I’m a man who needs to see something to believe it, especially when it’s something so difficult to believe. When you tell someone you can see things that haven’t happened yet, it helps if you can prove it.”
Her sickness had begun with dreams a few weeks after the tornado, terrible bouts of nighttime terror that turned Sally into an insomniac. The first time it happened, Gholson woke up and thought his wife was dying, so painful and shrill were her screams. It took half an hour to calm her down, and when she was finally able to speak, Sally still couldn’t put into words what she had experienced. I’ve never seen a place so empty was all he could get her to say.
