Everything Burns

by Vincent Zandri

  That night, after many drinks, I drove back to the big house and parked the Jeep along the curb. I killed the engine and the headlights and I watched them through the plate-glass window. They were seated on the couch in the living room. The same couch where Lisa and I made love many times before. The couch where I was convinced we’d conceived Anna.

  When finally they both stood up, I made out a tall, thin man with glasses and black hair. He was wearing jeans and a button-down with the tails hanging out. I tried to recall him from previous visits and I simply could not. Lisa was still wearing the same dress she’d been wearing when we had our drink at the Mexican restaurant earlier. Even from out in the Jeep, I could see how much fun they were having with one another. Laughing, dancing to music.

  When she leaned into him and kissed him, I felt like my heart would melt and spill out onto my feet. I began to cry. I wanted to get out of the Jeep, run up to the front door, kick it open, toss in a Molotov cocktail. But what good would it do?

  Starting the Jeep back up, I pulled away from the curb and drove on.

  I wasn’t halfway down the block before I decided to burn the house down.

  The details are still a little fuzzy, but I remember driving to the Lowe’s and buying a red, plastic five-gallon gasoline can. I also bought a new Bic lighter, or it’s possible I already had one on me. On my drive back to the house, I stopped at a gas station, where I filled up the can and bought a newspaper. Five minutes later, I was back in my old neighborhood. Parking far enough down the road so that no one would notice my presence, I grabbed the gasoline can, the newspaper, and the lighter, and I exited the Jeep.

  I made my way around to the back of the house where it was dark. There was a wood deck attached to the back of the house, which was accessed by a door off the kitchen. The deck supported a Weber grill we’d gotten as a wedding present from one of Lisa’s friends. Crumpling up some of the newspaper into fist-sized wads, I gathered them into a small pyramid on the deck floor and then soaked them in gasoline.

  Then I thumbed the business end of the lighter and produced a high flame.

  I brought the flame within inches of the gas-soaked paper. I touched the top most piece of paper with the flame, watched it ignite. But the breeze blew the flame out as soon as it started.

  I might not recall everything that occurred that night or, for that matter, during the days and weeks leading up to it. But I do remember this: something stopped me from bringing the flame to the paper a second time, not the least of which was knowing our infant daughter was inside, asleep in her crib. I just stood there staring at the crumpled-up heap of newspaper, the flame from the lighter burning so hot in my hand a big water blister began to form. Once again, I began to cry. I knew Lisa was inside the house and I knew what she was doing on the couch in the living room. I knew that he was inside her and that she was loving it, needing it, wanting it. Dropping the lighter onto the deck away from the newspaper, I turned and made my way back to the Jeep.

  The next morning I was awakened by the telephone. It was Lisa. She was screaming at me, angrily asking me if I had been at the house the night before. Was that my lighter? My can of gasoline? Had I made the little mound of newspaper balls and soaked them in the gasoline? Had I intended to burn the house down with our daughter inside it? You just don’t forget a telephone conversation like that. A conversation filled with so much anger, accusations, and hatred.

  “No,” I said. “I intended to burn the house down with your new boyfriend inside you.”

  “I’m calling the fucking police,” she said before hanging up.

  I can tell you this: she never did press formal charges, but true to her word, she did call the police. Later that next day I was served a restraining order stating I could not come within five hundred feet of Lisa or our daughter without express permission or else face immediate arrest by the APD.

  They tell me that exactly one week later my father let himself into my studio, pulled me out of bed, and dragged me to the Four Winds Psychiatric Center in Saratoga Springs, where I was diagnosed with a nervous breakdown.

  Chapter 31

  I stuff the lighter back into my pocket, feel its flame-baked metal head through the thin fabric against the skin on my thigh. The door to the cabinet over the coffeemaker is open, the entirety of its contents spilled out onto the counter and floor. I gaze down at the counter, search for my pills. But I don’t find them. My heart begins to pound. I feel the heart muscle beating against my ribs. Suddenly, my head needs my pills like my lungs need air. Like fire needs oxygen.

  I drop to my knees, run my hands over the utensils, spice bottles, chipped coffee cups, and too many drinking glasses to count, until finally I locate them. I pop the top on the small caramel-colored, translucent bottle, shake two pills into the palm of my hand, and dry swallow them while down on my knees. Returning the lid to the bottle, I stand and replace it on the cabinet shelf.

  It looks lonely sitting there by itself.

  I begin to smell something. It’s a familiar odor. It’s a smell that brings me back to when I was a kid and hanging around the crematorium. I see something reflecting against the dining room wall over my shoulder. The reflection is moving in waves or movement.

  I turn quick and, looking through the picture window that provides a view out onto the backyard, I see something I should not see.

  I see fire.

  Chapter 32

  Bolting through the dining room, I jump down both steps and throw open the sliding glass door. Something has been set aflame out on the back lawn. Something maybe five and half feet in length and two feet wide. It lights up the dark of the late fall afternoon. I jump down off the deck onto the lawn and try to get a look at it. But the heat is too intense and it prevents me from getting too close.

  I do my best to get close anyway.

  I’m not ten feet away from the burning object when I see that it’s human. That the smell of burning flesh wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

  “Oh my sweet Jesus,” I say aloud as my knees grow weak and my head spins out of control.

  Dad stands off to the side.

  For Christ’s sake, do something, Reece.

  Attached to the back of the house is a garden hose that’s attached to an exterior spigot. I sprint to the spigot and crank it all the way on, pick up the flowing hose, and, pressing my thumb against the hose opening, create a pressured spray which I use to douse the burning body.

  It takes me maybe two minutes of constant spraying to stop the fire entirely.

  Dropping the hose, I see the dead, now badly burned body lying on its back, face up, steaming in the waning orange/red sun of the late afternoon.

  “My God,” I say with a dry mouth, as if talking to my dad. “Is this what poor Mom looked like when she burned up in her bed?”

  All the clothing has been burned away. Everything but the shoes, which are short leather boots. Ladies’ boots. The body belongs to a woman. Some of the hair on her head has been spared. Golden brown, curly hair. Her face is too badly burned for me to make out any features, so it’s impossible for me to recognize her. But she’s wearing a silver necklace that supports a medallion. The medallion consists of a single word or, as it turns out, a name.

  Gingerly, I touch the medallion, bringing it closer so I can read it.

  It says, OLGA.

  Chapter 33

  Dropping the medallion back onto her burnt chest, I try to picture Olga.

  She is Lisa’s neighborhood friend. A recent divorcée and Russian expatriate, she lives—lived—up the road, alone, in an identical ranch. I’ve met the attractive, soft-spoken woman only once or twice in the two months Lisa and I have been back together.

  “What the hell’s happened here?” I say to my dad. “Who could have done this to Olga?”

  Maybe you should call the police, Son. Call them now.

  But I can’t
call the police. Miller not only suspects me of ransacking Lisa’s house, he knows that I went after Bourenhem. Knows I’ve been lighting fires on the deck and more than likely torched those garbage cans at Little’s Lake. He wants nothing more than to bust me for real.

  I think hard.

  Did the neighbors hear or spot anyone in the backyard either just before or immediately after I got home from the police station? If Olga were being burned alive, wouldn’t she have put up a struggle? Would the neighbors see the flames or smell the smoke? At least, that’s the way I wrote it in The Damned. When the paperboy shows up at Drew Brennen’s house, the pyromaniac lures the teenager inside, then out the back door into the yard, where he swiftly hits the boy over the head with a framing hammer. From there he douses the unconscious boy in gasoline and sets him on fire.

  While he watches the boy’s clothing and flesh burn away, Brennen feels something incredible happening inside his body. The feeling is euphoria, peace, calmness, serenity. It’s the feeling most people get from making love to someone they can’t live without.

  As for the neighbors, sure, they saw the flames, and they might have even heard the sounds of a brief struggle. But the neighbors didn’t want trouble. They knew enough to close their blinds, turn a blind eye to the strange sights and sounds coming from Brennen’s house.

  I recall the screen-saver note on my computer and the casket inside Bourenhem’s apartment. Both were lifted right out of The Damned.

  “Bourenhem,” I whisper through clenched teeth. “You did this, you son of a bitch. You sick son of a bitch. I will get you for this.”

  Staring down at the charred body, I try to figure out my next move. I steal another glance at Dad, see him standing beside me—stocky, gray-haired—peering down with me at the mutilated body.

  Reece, whoever did this is an animal . . .

  Dad knows what he’s talking about. As a father who’s already lost two sons to fire, he must be thinking of his last remaining son, and the threat these smoking remains pose to him.

  This is a horrible, terrible thing, Reece. But you also have to look at it for what it is: someone is after you, and they are willing to do anything to see that you are buried alive. Your only choice is to get rid of the evidence, and get rid of it fast . . .

  With my dad’s advice ringing in my ear, I consider the cell phone stored inside my right-hand pocket. If I call Miller, he will answer right away. But I don’t call him. And I don’t call Blood, because why get him involved in this nightmare? And I sure as hell don’t call Lisa, because she will be horrified and sick.

  Instead I choose to listen to my dad.

  I must bury her, and I must do it alone.

  Chapter 34

  Frankie is standing under the dining room table when I come back in through the sliding glass doors. She stares at me with those dark marble eyes, her body shivering, like she knows someone has just been murdered out on the back lawn. Turning, she issues a growl and trots off through the kitchen, back into the master bedroom.

  It’s not my fault, Frankie.

  From the linen closet in the hall, I grab an old blanket Lisa keeps around for Anna’s occasional sleepover guests. I know it’s inevitable that she will miss it, but I have no other choice. Right now, I just want to get rid of the body as soon as I can.

  In the garage I find the pair of Carhartt overalls I wear on frigid fall and winter days for ice fishing or bird hunting. Lisa has allowed me to store them here, but she doesn’t want the old, badly stained overalls in the house, so they’re hanging by a sixpenny nail that’s been pounded into the wall. Unzipping the legs, I slip into them, zip the legs back up, then zip up the front all the way to my chin. Turning to the metal shelf pushed up against the wall opposite the car, I locate a pair of leather gardening gloves and a flashlight. There’s also a shovel leaning up against the shelf. I grab hold of that too. With the blanket tucked under my arm, I carry everything out with me to the backyard.

  Standing over the charred body, I try to figure out the best place to perform a burial. It’s possible I could bury the body on the opposite side of the wooden security fence, but then maybe the better place to bury her is inside the fence. The fewer eyes there are to see the freshly dug-up dirt, the better. But what if the police make a surprise visit to the house? What if they inspect the backyard? What if the neighbors decide to get nosy?

  “Where would you bury her, Dad?” I say out loud.

  As if answering my question, it suddenly dawns on me that burying the body anywhere near the house just might be one of the most terrible ideas I’ve come up with in a while. But there is always the river. If I dump Olga in the river, chances are she will never be discovered.

  Dropping the shovel, I go back into the house, retrieve the keys to the Escape, then shut off all the lights. Back outside, I roll the body up in the blanket and heft it over my shoulder, praying that the body remains intact while I carry it to the vehicle.

  It does.

  Cursing the dome light’s glow, I store the body in the cargo bay of the SUV as quickly as I can and close the hatch. Back inside the garage, I locate two cinder blocks that were left behind when Lisa bought the house. I find some rope and some duct tape too. Storing everything in the Escape beside the body, I start the SUV and drive in the direction of the Hudson River.

  I’m on my way to destroy the body of evidence for a crime I did not commit.

  Chapter 35

  The river just north of the city is flanked on both sides by deep woods. There’s a bicycle path that traverses a major portion of Albany riverbank, but on a dark, late afternoon in October, the path is abandoned. Driving the Escape up over the curb, I maneuver a two-tracked maintenance road that runs perpendicular to the bicycle path. Crossing over the path, I drive into the tall grass until I come to the edge of the steep bank, then kill the engine.

  Opening the back hatch, I grab hold of the body and drag it with me down to the edge of a section of riverbank wall that’s constructed of huge black boulders rising up vertically some four or five feet above the surface of the fast-moving, deep water—a mile-or-so-long section of river that’s been dredged in order to accommodate the big cargo ships that dock at the Port of Albany only a few hundred yards downriver. Jogging back up to the truck, I grab the two cinder blocks and set them down beside the body. Making one last trip to the Escape, I snatch up the rope and the duct tape.

  Unwrapping the body, I tie one section of rope around the wrists and another around the ankles. Running and tying off the opposite length around both cinder blocks, I cut away the excess rope with my pocketknife and then proceed to wrap as much of the body as possible with duct tape in order that the limbs and head don’t show up on either bank as they decompose and separate from the body. By the time I’m done, Olga looks like a gray mummy.

  Dad steps up beside me.

  Be careful you don’t fall in with her when you push her over the side . . .

  Dad’s got a point.

  Taking hold of her duct-taped feet, I shift her body so that it rests parallel with the very edge of the riverbank wall. Then, setting both blocks flat onto her stomach and making sure none of the excess rope is wrapped around my feet or ankles, I brace myself and heave her body unceremoniously into the river. The body and blocks make a splash, but then disappear entirely from sight.

  “How’d I do, Dad?” I whisper, feeling a cold sadness wash over me.

  But my dead father has nothing to offer.

  Chapter 36

  On the way home I pull into a Mobil gas station, drive around the back of the main gray block building. Parking beside an overfilled blue Dumpster, I pull off the soiled Carhartts and stuff them, along with the gloves, as far down into the trash as I can. Closing the black Dumpster lid, I get back into the Escape and drive on.

  Parked once more in Lisa’s driveway, I try to make sense of this whole thing. How did B
ourenhem manage to sneak into the yard and burn Olga? He must have come back to Lisa’s while Miller was interrogating me. That’s when he must have spotted Olga. Maybe she forgot that Lisa was having her eyes operated on and came by to see if she wanted to take a walk. I have no idea. All I know is she must have come here and Bourenhem must have used her sudden presence as an opportunity.

  Or maybe something else happened.

  Maybe she caught him doing something. Something bad, like once again breaking into the house. She might have threatened to call the police. Whatever happened, he killed her. Burned her alive, mimicking almost perfectly one of the pivotal murder scenes from The Damned.

  Olga died on Lisa’s property from a fire that quite possibly was fueled by gasoline stored inside her garage. I know in my bones that there will be no evidence of forced entry into Lisa’s house and that it will be my prints plastered all over everything. That evidence will only point toward me as the culprit.

  But simply getting rid of Olga’s body isn’t enough.

  Now there’s the matter of cleaning up the lawn. Eventually she’s going to be missed, and one of the people the police will interview is Lisa. I get out of the Escape and make my way into the backyard. I pick up the shovel, scrape away as much of the charred lawn as I can, examining the area with the flashlight. Collecting the burnt grass and dirt in the shovel, I toss it over the fence. Then, covering up the exposed area with fallen oak leaves, I spread them out to look as if they haven’t been touched by human hands. By the time I’m done, you would never know that a grown woman was burned to death there.

  Back in the kitchen, I open another beer and drink half of it down, setting the can on the counter near the sink. I pull out the lighter and go to trigger a flame, but the lighter falls to the floor. Sinking slowly and carefully onto my right knee on the glass-strewn floor, I feel a sharp pain and shoot upright again.