Burn All Alike

by Nene Adams

  Mackenzie rolled her eyes, but Veronica was more patient. “What was the Asian woman wearing? You said ‘covered up.’ Not a swimsuit?”

  “No, some robe thing.” Fanette made a vague gesture that could have meant anything. “Big, long sleeves. Flowery.” She made a face. “I thought the woman was smoking so I told her to put it out ’cause the beach is nonsmoking. She acted like she didn’t hear me. That’s why I figured maybe she torched my tower, you know?”

  “Okay.” Veronica patted her swimsuit, frowned and went on, “I don’t have any business cards on me. If you remember anything else, Ms. Bloodworth, give me a call. I’m Deputy Birdwell and I work at the Antioch police station with your father.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever.” Fanette’s hips rolled as she walked away over the sand.

  A noise made Mackenzie glance at the tower. The structure had collapsed in on itself to create a merrily burning bonfire. By the time fire department volunteers reached the lake, there’d be very little left, just ashes and embers.

  In her peripheral vision, she saw a man standing at the end of the wide trail stretching from the public parking lot to the lake. Dark robes hung loosely around his body. For some reason, his eyes were cast in deep shadow, giving him an unsettling appearance.

  The brief glimpse reminded her of the eastern martial arts movies she used to watch as a kid every Saturday afternoon on Channel 10’s local show, Funky Fists with Freddie Fong. Mama had never understood her childhood fascination with pretend kung fu moves like Iron Monkey Captures Peaches, but she’d tolerated the yells, kicks, mock punches and frequent ambushes from the top of the refrigerator.

  Mackenzie didn’t want to be caught staring. She nudged Veronica. “Do you see that guy?” She nodded at the man.

  Veronica followed her line of sight. “What guy?”

  Mackenzie looked again, but the man had disappeared. She described him to Veronica, who nodded.

  “Probably one of the monks.”

  “Monks?”

  “At Kyoko-ji Buddhist Sangha.”

  For a moment, Mackenzie was nonplused. Enlightenment finally dawned. “Oh! You mean the Buddhist place over to Copper Ridge.”

  “It’s a monastery and a temple, Mac,” Veronica explained. “The resident monks have a dormitory out there. Four Buddhist sects share the premises: Pure Land, Tibetan, Zen and Theravada. Haven’t you ever been there for a meditation class?”

  Mackenzie almost choked on her surprise. “Have you?”

  “Once or twice. It’s nice. Peaceful.”

  “So’s the Oak Grove Cemetery.”

  “Mac!”

  “Well, it’s true. Why do you think the monk was here?” When she didn’t receive an answer, Mackenzie glanced at Veronica, who seemed engrossed in watching something down by the water. “You awake, Ronnie? Or sleeping with your eyes open?”

  Veronica replied without taking her attention off the lake, “Do you see that?”

  Growing alarmed, Mackenzie scanned the lake and the beach. The emergency over, people had begun drifting back to the sand again, searching for dropped belongings or joining the semicircle around the fitfully smoldering remains of the lifeguard tower. She saw nothing and no one who might give Veronica a reason to stare.

  A sharp light blinked at the edge of her vision.

  She flinched, expecting the disquieting burning ghost, but as she adjusted the tilt of her head, the monk resolved into view. Another spirit. She gazed at him sidelong, trying to be discreet and not openly betray her interest in case he vanished.

  The monk seemed older than Belle Pontefract, the nonagenarian owner of the boarding house on St. Mary Street. His wrinkled parchment skin resembled a relief map of China. He stood at the lake’s edge, his featureless black robes seeming to suck the light from the air and give back a solid block of man-shaped shadow. And his eyes! She shivered. His eyes were hollow pits sunk deep in withered sockets.

  As if sensing her interest, the monk disappeared.

  Oh, hell, no, not again. Sure enough, when she used a more oblique angle to view him, the monk reappeared. Were he and the burning spirit connected? “Ronnie. I see a Buddhist monk. What do you see?”

  “The same,” Veronica confirmed.

  “What does he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fine. How about you tell me what you saw when you looked at the other spirit, the one who’s been flambéed a little too long?”

  Ignoring the question, Veronica went to the place they’d left their towels, now trampled and covered with sand. In the rush to escape the fire, someone had knocked over their cooler. She inspected the soggy sandwiches with a sigh.

  “The other spirit, Ronnie,” Mackenzie persisted. “The flaming ghost you could use to roast a pig if you had a hankering for barbeque.”

  “I know.” Veronica’s unhappy frown also created lines bracketing her mouth, aging her ten years in an instant. “He’s gone. The monk.”

  In the past, Mackenzie had broken her toe karate kicking her mother’s china cabinet in a fit of Funky Fists enthusiasm. At the moment, Veronica seemed as unmovable as that Victorian mahogany behemoth. She folded her arms across her chest and watched while Veronica shook out the towels and folded them in silence. At last, deciding she’d rather risk an argument than deal with the silent treatment, she said, “Tell me what’s going on in that gorgeous head of yours.”

  Veronica turned troubled eyes on her. “What I saw wasn’t a wait-about,” she said quietly, ducking her head close. “Not one I recognized.”

  “Flat like a picture cut out of a book,” Mackenzie murmured. “Weird.”

  “More than you know.” Veronica dropped her voice to a bare whisper, difficult to hear over the sounds of swimmers returning to the water. “The Asian woman Fanette saw? I saw her too. Not a silhouette, but a woman. She was covered in yellow flames. That’s what your spirit really is, Mac—a woman on fire. I’m pretty sure she wants to burn everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “The whole world. She’s…she’s angry. Really angry.”

  The word sounded inadequate. Mackenzie shuddered and pressed against Veronica’s side. “Who is she, Ronnie? What is she? Has she been setting the fires?”

  Veronica’s silence was an answer, just not the one she wanted.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day, by mutual consent, their mini-vacation ended. Mackenzie wasn’t thrilled to return to Antioch so soon, but Veronica needed to consult police records, preferably without alerting Maynard or Irvine since she wasn’t actually assigned to the arson case.

  Stuck in her office until she heard from Veronica and at a dead end in her research on Asian ghosts, she considered calling her mother to ask about the Big Burn. She checked the clock. Bad idea. Sarah Grace would have turned off her phone for an uninterrupted viewing of her daily soap opera and addiction of choice, Passion’s Pastime.

  “Old lady crack,” Mackenzie muttered, reaching for the phone to call Aunt Ida Love, who was married to Mama’s oldest brother, Anderson. Ida Love had survived the Big Burn. Furthermore, she never watched soap operas, much preferring game shows.

  Ida Love answered on the seventh ring, sounding a little breathless. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Aunt Ida Love, were you out in the garden?” Mackenzie raised her voice a little to be heard over the sound of her aunt’s wheezing.

  “Oh, no, dear, no gardening until the new hip settles,” Ida Love replied, her accent a product of the north Georgia hills. “Like I done told your mama, my Chrysler Imperial roses don’t stand a snowball’s chance against Euphoria’s Alabama ones this year. She’ll be a-crowin’ till Christmas, that’s a fact, but pride goeth before a fall, says the Good Book. Mark my words, girl. Pride goeth before a fall.” A satisfied pause. “What you been up to?”

  While Mackenzie made the requisite family small talk, she envisioned Ida Love—a small woman, gaunt, bony, her face creased with laugh lines, her iron-gray hair immaculately tea
sed and sprayed into a beehive ’do popularized in the sixties.

  “I wanted to ask you about the Big Burn,” Mackenzie said when Ida Love finished telling her a complicated story about a neighbor’s lumbago.

  “Why in the world do you want to know about that?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Please, Aunt Ida Love. You must remember something.”

  “I remember everything, girl.” Ida Love sounded uncharacteristically stern. “I remember every last minute of that awful day and I ain’t likely to forget it this side of the grave. Etta Lee Crawford—my mama, bless her soul—she done miscarried and lost her baby in that fire, the baby that should ought to have been my littlest brother, Charles.”

  Mackenzie hadn’t known about the miscarriage and Etta Lee Crawford had died long before her birth. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Ida Love. So sorry for your loss.”

  “It may be ancient history to some, but I remember.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Not that Daddy wanted to bury baby Charles like a Christian,” Ida Love went on, clearly caught up in her memories. “There lay Mama in the bed of the pickup truck, us parked on the roadside between here and Laxahatchee City with her trying not to cry too much on account of us kids, and Daddy with the little body wrapped in his spare Sunday shirt, saying he might could go back to town and leave Charles to the fire to spare the funeral costs.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine—” Mackenzie began.

  “No, my girl, you can’t,” Ida Love said sharply. “But you’re young,” she added, her tone softening, “and times is different. The world has changed.”

  Mackenzie let a moment of respectful silence pass. “Was there anything, uh, unusual happening in Antioch about that time?”

  “Like the fires?”

  “Anything at all.”

  Ida Love considered the question for several moments. “You might ought to talk to the old sheriff, Pharaoh DuPeret.” She pronounced the name “Fay-row” with the accent on the first syllable. “Last I heard, his son put him in one of them assisted living condos on Copper Ridge.” Her scorn made it clear she considered the son’s actions one step above patricide.

  “I could do that.” Mackenzie scribbled the name on a notepad. “Should I ask him about something in particular?”

  “My daddy always reckoned Sheriff DuPeret knew more about the Big Burn than he let on,” Ida Love said, “and it had to do with that camp over to War Woman Springs.”

  Mackenzie stopped writing. “What camp?”

  “Good grief, don’t y’all lazy children learn anything in school these days?” Without waiting for a reply, Ida Love continued, “An internment camp. Enemy aliens, the government called ’em. From out west somewhere.”

  “Christ Almighty.”

  “Yes, well, war is war and we had to protect ourselves. The president said so. You ought to go and ask Sheriff DuPeret about it, dear. Maybe those people out at the camp done tried to burn us up. I don’t know. Daddy never wanted that place so close to our town. He tried to quit paying taxes in protest till the revenue men came callin’. Pert near scared his liver white. To the day he died, he swore he saw a Japanese lady in the field where the Big Burn started. Some of his friends said the same, but the sheriff didn’t pay no never mind.”

  Mackenzie tried asking a few more questions, but Aunt Ida Love seemed tired. She ended the call in a thoughtful mood.

  Turning to her computer, she did an Internet search for an internment camp in War Woman Springs. She knew about the detention and incarceration of Japanese-Americans and other citizens following Pearl Harbor and considered the episode a national disgrace, but in a town so close to home? The situation seemed unreal and left a bad taste in her mouth.

  As it turned out, Ida Love was partly right. The high security detainment camp at War Woman Springs hadn’t housed ordinary citizens, but Japanese, German and Italian prisoners of war and detainees who had committed crimes in other facilities.

  The camp had been constructed and run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons rather than the Wartime Relocation Authority. Not within the city limits of War Woman Springs, but about four miles west near the place where Rusty Knife Creek met the Oglethorpe River. Mackenzie checked an online map. The location was marked as an historic site.

  Her telephone rang.

  “Mac, it’s me,” Veronica said. “Listen, I’ve got a copy of the list of places that burned in the original attacks. Like we thought, the fires happening now aren’t quite as identical.”

  Mackenzie sat up straight. “Tell me.”

  “The times are a bit off. The gas station on Murphy Road, a bait shop about a half mile south of Wahusi Creek, the Lady Chapel of the Episcopal church, a barbershop on Tenth Street, an abandoned factory, a loading dock behind Straightaway Shopping Center, the police station—that’s all on the list, but the fires skip to the lifeguard tower at Lake Minnesauga.”

  “What’s missing besides Rosalyn Parker’s warehouse?”

  “In 1945, there was a fire of unexplained origin in a bakery downtown.”

  “Bakery Sam’s?”

  “No. This property was sold in the fifties and became a French restaurant, changed hands a few more times over the years and now it’s the site of the Golden Buddha restaurant. But there was no call out to the fire department from that address. I checked.”

  Mackenzie hated to be the bearer of grim news. “There was a fire yesterday in the kitchen of the Golden Buddha. Little Jack and I were there right after it happened. The cook said it was a grease fire, but I saw the burning ghost right there in the dining room.”

  Veronica took a minute to digest this tidbit. “If the pattern holds, the next fire will take place at the Get-R-Done roadhouse pretty soon. Oh, something else: I think Ground Zero for the Big Burn was a field by Copper Ridge, which is now where Renaissance Two stands.”

  “Is that the senior assisted living facility?” Mackenzie shuddered, thinking of Pharaoh DuPeret. A fire breaking out among the elderly residents late at night, with only a skeleton staff on hand to assist with an evacuation, and the fire department a good twenty minutes away—in her opinion, a major tragedy waiting to happen.

  “Mac, we’ll figure things out before it goes that far.” Veronica broke into Mackenzie’s private horror and apparently reading her mind. “Those people won’t burn. I promise.”

  Mackenzie took a deep breath and let it hiss out between her teeth before asking, “What if we can’t solve the problem? What if we’re too late?”

  She already knew the answer and it scared her to death.

  If they couldn’t stop the fires, a lot of people were going to die.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That evening, alone in her apartment, Mackenzie used the remote to turn on the television. “Ronnie doesn’t know what she’s missing,” she murmured, gazing at the large Supreme Ultra Grande pizza she’d had delivered from Colombo’s on 21st Street. Pepperoni, Italian sausage, prosciutto, honey baked ham, meatballs, bacon, pork roast, green peppers, onions, Portobello mushrooms, Kalamata olives, four cheeses, and an heirloom tomato sauce. Or as popularly known, the “Double Bypass.”

  Veronica was at her own house waiting for a friend of a friend to fix her water heater, so they’d agreed to meet for breakfast in the morning. Mackenzie wasn’t sure how she felt about their separation. She and Veronica were adults with individual responsibilities, past the age when a new relationship meant being joined at the hip until the shine wore off. However, she also felt a Veronica-shaped absence in the space next to her. The sensation was akin to getting stitches—once the wound was numb and she watched the sutures going in, her mind kept insisting that the tugging needle ought to hurt, kept anticipating pain where none existed.

  She decided to turn off her unnecessary angst generator for once and switched her attention to the pizza. Lifting a dripping slice to her mouth, she took a bite, closed her eyes and let out a soft moan. Colombo’s might be mo
re expensive than the other Italian delivery places, but their pizza was the best on the planet.

  The Channel 10 news had nothing startling to report until anchorwoman Charlotte Wyatt flashed a serious expression framed by masses of perfectly coiffed blond hair at the camera. “Tonight, the Antioch sheriff’s office has announced a suspect in the rash of local fires recently causing severe property damage, including the destruction of a warehouse belonging to Rosalyn Parker, owner and CEO of Ma Parker’s Pot O’ Soup. The suspect is Turner Erskine, an unemployed auto mechanic. Erskine was brought in for questioning this evening and a source close to the investigation has informed us an arrest is imminent.”

  The report went on to list the fires in order, but Mackenzie tuned out Charlotte in favor of eating pizza and thinking about the anomaly on the 1945 list. The warehouse belonging to Rosalyn Parker wasn’t on it. That bothered her. Comparing the complete list of past fires with those in the present left her with only one conclusion: the Parker warehouse fire didn’t fit the pattern. She doubted official investigators would agree. To be honest, the notion sounded crazy to her, too. Why should fires occur in the same places as in the forties? Unless something connected the events then and now, something beyond the fires themselves.

  She almost dropped her fourth slice of pizza when she glimpsed the monk standing in the living room next to a bookcase.

  The ghost appeared the same as on the beach at Lake Minnesauga: a wrinkled old man, hollow eyed, dark robes. This time, he was accompanied by a sound. A human voice chanting, Mackenzie realized, straining to make out the rhythmic words. What she heard didn’t make sense. She scrabbled for a magazine on the coffee table, turned to a page with white space at the top and picked up a pen.