Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  Two were scorched, but even the ones still somewhat intact were sooty, waterlogged, and ruined.

  A sixth quilt had slid to the floor in a sorry heap after the pole that’d held it up pulled free of the wall.

  “Can I walk closer?” I yelled, pointing.

  Mimi nodded.

  I moved in, then crouched down next to the wet lump of fallen quilt.

  My pal Sophia had taken me to a domestic-textile exhibition back east the year before, so I knew what it was: a log-cabin pattern pieced from hundreds of “cigar silks”—narrow embroidered ribbons that various tobacco companies included with their premium brands as a come-on collectible, back in the teens.

  Someone must’ve hit this one with an arc of chemical foam, melting the fabric away in ragged splotches, revealing batting that was filthy and wet.

  I wondered how many hours of work had gone into the quilt, how many years invested in collecting the silks themselves. A quiet testament to some long-ago women’s communal work, ruined in one angry flash.

  I smoothed out a bunched flap of fabric tenderly with my gloved hands. The stitches were so tiny, so regular. All made by hand.

  When my thighs started to prickle, I got to my feet.

  “Oh, God, the books…, ” I said, looking at a floor-to-ceiling shelf of old volumes to my right, their leather spines swollen and bent.

  Mimi stepped up beside me.

  She squatted down, pointing toward a lower shelf. “See those?”

  The shelf housed a row of matching albums, bound in different colors of leather with names and dates embossed in gold on the spines.

  Rivulets of sooty water dripped to the floor when Mimi pulled two of these volumes out. The empty shelf had been painted white, the row of books’ scalloped footprint now outlined in greasy black from the smoke.

  “Scrapbooks,” she said, peeling each one open in turn. “Good…”

  I looked over her shoulder. The pages were gummed together, the handwritten captions illegible.

  “Good?” I yelled. “Sad!”

  “Both. If the owners had set the fire, they’d probably have tried to sneak these out first.”

  “Oh! Good, then.”

  Mimi glanced at her own watch. “Babysitter?”

  We both stood up, and I followed her back down the hallway to the front door.

  “Want me to get you a ride?” she asked, when we were back out on the street and respirator-free.

  “I’m okay, thanks. My house is right down the hill and the child care place is on the way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “We could throw the wagon in the back of a truck, but I don’t have car seats.”

  “Right,” she said, nodding. “It’s been a long time since I had to deal with all that. Forgot about the car seats.”

  “Thank you so much for letting me follow you around today,” I said, when we’d reached her truck. “What you do is really fascinating, and it’s a rare pleasure for me these days to hang out with grown-ups.”

  I meant that sincerely, wishing I had time to keep talking.

  I took off her gloves, then the suit, hood, and booties.

  “You can just throw everything in the bed, there,” she said. “I’ll deal with it later.”

  Mimi took her own gloves off and grabbed a business card and pen out of her glove compartment. She jotted her home number on the card’s back, then handed it to me. “If you have any other questions, feel free to call.”

  I decided to do what my mother does whenever she meets someone interesting: ask her to come by for a glass of wine when she’d finished up.

  “That’d be great,” she said. “Long day, ‘and miles to go before I sleep.’ ”

  “Nineteen thirteen Mapleton.” I wrote that out with my phone number on the end of her card, then ripped it off and gave it to her. “It’s the house with totally lame Christmas lights still wrapped around the porch columns.”

  12

  I picked up Parrish and India at the community center, handing over my last forty bucks to the child care boss-lady, who then got all snippy with me about not having left them with enough diapers, just as I’d finished loading the girls into our little wagon.

  She was tall and stern with a prissy little mouth. “It isn’t our responsibility to provide supplies for your children.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I got asked at the last minute to work for another two hours.”

  She stepped closer to me and wrinkled her nose.

  I took a step backward. “Sorry. I was following an arson investigator around the scene of a recent fire. The smoke is kind of cloying.”

  “And that’s why you were late?” she asked, pinching her tiny mouth even more tightly around the words.

  “I’m not late. I’m actually five minutes early,” I said, pointing at the wall clock above her head. “I mean, early for the readjusted pickup time.”

  “So you just presumed we could fill in for you, at the last minute?”

  “I beg your pardon, but where exactly does presumption come into this? I reserved a block of time through your office yesterday, and called to request more time today when it became apparent I needed it. I don’t drive, I just got hired at the Boulder New Times, my husband is away on business, and I was given a last-minute extra assignment by my editor. Which will almost but not quite cover the money I just paid you.”

  So lighten the fuck up and show me a little feminist solidarity here, bitch.

  She crossed her arms, nostrils wrinkling again.

  “I mean, look,” I continued, “taking my one-year-old twins to a crime scene didn’t seem like a really splendid parenting move. And this place is called a drop-in child care center—not to mention one that claims to be ‘dedicated to supporting the families of Boulder,’ right on the front door.”

  “One of your children ate a great deal of sand on our playground,” she sniffed, turning on her heel to dismiss me. “It’s developmentally inappropriate.”

  “As is your attitude,” I muttered, watching her goose-step primly away down the hall, “and I feel sorry as hell for that poor two-by-four you’ve got shoved up your fascist butt, you haggity sphincter-mouth cow.”

  “Moo!” chortled one of the girls, from beneath the wagon’s canvas roof.

  At home, I changed the girls’ diapers and then plopped them into the playpen so I could wash my hands before attempting to scrape together some reasonable facsimile of dinner.

  “Oh, crap,” I said, catching sight of myself in the medicine-cabinet mirror.

  Where the respirator had been was still relatively flesh-toned, but the rest of my face and neck were so soot-encrusted I didn’t know whether to belt out “Chim Chim Cher-ee” or clutch a plaid shawl around my head and go sell matches on Pearl Street.

  I lathered up my hands with a bar of Dean’s Ivory soap instead, watching the blue-black runoff swirl drainward. Once I’d scrubbed my face clean with the moistened corner of a towel, I used it to scrape grime off the now-filthy bar of soap.

  I’d just dumped my clothes on the kitchen floor, grabbing a quasi-clean high school football jersey of Dean’s out of the laundry pile, when Parrish got weepy in the dining room. I pulled on the shirt, hoisted her up onto my hip, and threw a frozen pizza into the toaster oven before slicing up two bananas and a crown of broccoli one-handed.

  “Your mother,” I observed, as I nuke-steamed the broccoli bits soft in the microwave, “is a goddamn genius.”

  She rested her head against my shoulder, popping a thumb in her mouth.

  I kissed her fuzzy scalp and rocked her gently. Out beyond the kitchen window, the sky above Boulder’s steeply pitched rooftops deepened to purple.

  The toaster oven dinged at the exact second the phone rang, of course. I strapped Parrish in her booster seat and yanked out the pizza before grabbing the receiver.

  “Hello?” I tucked the phone between my shoulder and cheek, stretching the cord as far as it would go into the dining room so
I could scoop India up out of the playpen.

  “Hi, Bunny,” said my husband. “They overbooked my flight out of New Orleans.”

  “That sucks, I’m so sorry. Any chance of catching another one?”

  “One more U.S. Scare plane through Pittsburgh, but it’s full. I have to stay here another night.”

  “That really sucks.” I fastened India’s booster belt and started slicing the pizza, hissing when I singed my fingers. “Ow. Shit.”

  “You okay?”

  “Hot cheese,” I said. “I’m getting the girls’ dinner ready.”

  “How are they?” His voice got all soft and I could hear echoey background noises.

  “They’re gorgeous. They’re hungry.”

  I filled their yellow plastic trays with foodstuffs and snapped them into the booster armrests.

  “I miss them so much,” said Dean. “It just kills me when I’m on the road.”

  “I know.”

  “Kiss them good night for me, okay?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I always do.”

  It was too dark to see out past our kitchen window anymore.

  My reflection looked old and tired: Queen Victoria in an East Syracuse–Minoa varsity football schmatte.

  “I should get in tomorrow about noon,” said Dean, “but I have to go straight to the office. Bittler’s got some conference-call thing set up for one thirty.”

  I wove the phone cord through my fingers. “Okay.”

  And how’ve you been, Bunny?

  Just great, thanks for asking. Hey, guess what? I even got a job.

  “Listen,” he said, “the hotel shuttle’s pulling up to the curb. Gotta run.”

  “Call me back when you get—” I said.

  I heard the pay phone’s receiver click to rest, all the way from Louisiana.

  Perfect.

  I sat on the kitchen floor next to my girls, Indian-style.

  They were happily slathered in pizza sauce, head-to-toe and ear-to-ear.

  Parrish had cheese strung through her fuzzy hair like Christmas-tree tinsel, and India smiled, pressing a mushy sprig of broccoli to my lips.

  “Eat!” she said. “Yum!”

  Parrish patted my cheek with a well-sauced little hand. “Mummie!”

  Even though I was solo-parenting for yet another night, I had a great time doing it.

  Sure, I hadn’t slept more than six hours at a stretch all month, Dean had been away for three of the last four weeks, and I still wanted to bitch-slap that day care lady, but giving the girls a bubble bath in the old clawfoot tub upstairs just felt fun for a change.

  I gave India a kewpie-doll spike ’do once I’d lathered up their heads with baby shampoo, and Parrish kept looking at her and giggling.

  They pounded the water’s surface with their little fists and scootched around a lot, sloshing fresh-smelling sudsy breakers over the tub’s curled lip and onto the floor.

  The knees of my pants got soaking wet, as did the entire front of Dean’s jersey, but I figured I’d take a bath myself once I’d put them to bed so it was a head start, what the hell, and anyway it was terrific, hanging out with my kids and being ridiculous.

  Most nights when I was on my own, I was totally exhausted by this point—dragging ass through the last couple of hours until the girls were asleep and I could crash on the sofa to bond vicariously with Sipowicz on NYPD Blue.

  I knew exactly what had made tonight feel better than that. It was having gotten to go out and do something on my own during the course of the day, something I was good at, for a change.

  I also knew exactly how I was going to write up my afternoon with Mimi: the sour-thick smell of that house, the blackened walls and heat-alligatored paint, the drooping horsetail points of each melted toothbrush and shower-curtain ring, the soupy puddles of hose-water delineating Mercator-projection oceans and continents across the floors…

  I reached my arm into the lukewarm bathwater and popped out the old white rubber drain plug, then bundled up both my kids in fluffy clean towels.

  “Life is good,” I told them. “Your mom has her chops back. And also she put the laundry away for once so we actually have fluffy clean towels, all folded up in the linen closet.”

  I had a fleeting flashback to the ruined scrapbooks in that house. Baby pictures. Wedding. The travesty of the quilts…

  Not now.

  Right now it’s all good. Now is the best.

  Enjoy this. Be here. Revel in it.

  I blew a raspberry on India’s belly and made her laugh, then it was Parrish’s turn.

  Ten minutes later they were diapered and pajamaed and tucked into their cribs.

  “And tomorrow your dad will be home,” I whispered, standing at the threshold of their room.

  I eased the door almost closed, leaving a yellow band of hallway-light reassurance across the wooden floor between them.

  Colorado was the first place I’d ever lived where the grown-up shows came on at nine instead of ten, via that whole “Central Time” scheduling loophole. Kind of great, actually.

  When the phone rang, I was kicked back on the sofa with a towel around my head and Sipowicz had just explained that some perp was a rage-aholic, which means he’s often pissed off—unlike the vast majority of us gliding along devil-may-care.

  I jogged to the kitchen, picking up on the third ring. “You got back to the hotel okay?”

  Mimi Neff said, “Actually, I’m still down at the station.”

  “Hey there, sorry. Thought you’d be my husband.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” she laughed, “but is that glass of wine still on offer, or am I too late?”

  “Your timing is exquisite. I gave you the address, right? I’ll turn on the porch light.”

  “Need anything from the outside world?”

  “All set, thanks. Just bring your most excellent self.”

  I said ciao to New York’s fictional finest and jammed several truckloads of living room detritus into a handy nearby closet.

  13

  I’ve got Zinfandel, Liebfraumilch, or Anchor Steam,” I said to Mimi as I stared into the icebox. “And the Liebfraumilch is my mom’s, so I’d recommend giving that a pass.”

  “Beer sounds perfect.”

  I grabbed one for each of us. “You want a glass?”

  “Bottle’s fine.”

  “A woman after my own butch heart,” I said, handing her one. “Pretty sure they’re twist-offs.”

  She trailed me back to the living room and we sank into the sofa with happy sighs.

  “Any recommendations on getting rid of the smoke smell?” I asked. “I did the lather-rinse-repeat thing three times and my hair still reeks.”

  She sniffed the air. “Not so bad. At the scene today, there weren’t any—” Mimi stopped mid-word, eyes to the floor as she took a sip of beer.

  “Any what?”

  “It’s just, you know, worse if there’s been a fatality. The, uh, composition of the smoke being different.”

  I grimaced, sucking a little air inward through my teeth. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay. I mean, I admire you guys for dealing, you know? I don’t think I could handle it.”

  “Well, that part’s rough,” she said. “Otherwise, I kind of dig it. I like how exacting I have to be, figuring out what happened, piece by piece.”

  “You must be incredibly organized.”

  “Yeah.” She looked around the still-rather-chaotic room and smiled, then patted the edge of the sofa: the front panel of fabric just under the floral-chintz seat cushions had lots of large holes in it, with cotton batting poking out.

  Mimi tried poking it back in. “Interesting, um, decor.”

  “Funny story about that,” I said, taking another swallow of beer.

  She took one herself. “Hmmm?”

  “Well, there was soy sauce and stuff spilled down the front of the sofa, and I thought it looked kind of crapp
y so I bought this foaming upholstery-cleaner spray, back in New York…”

  She nodded.

  “Unfortunately,” I continued, “the stuff turned out to be made for car upholstery. The sofa got really clean for about fifteen seconds. Before it melted.”

  Mimi started laughing.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” I said, “rub it in. Made me cry at the time. First piece of furniture I ever bought new, and I turned it to shit.”

  “Look at the bright side,” she said. “It wasn’t on fire.”

  “Excellent point,” I replied toasting her with my beer bottle. “Speaking of which, do you have a verdict yet on the place today?”

  “Definitely arson.”

  “You figure it was set by the same person?”

  “I’d say a ninety percent likelihood, but I’m still waiting on lab results.”

  “About the accelerant?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “What kind of analysis do you do?” I asked.

  “Mostly, we seal activated charcoal into a glass container with whatever sample we’ve got. Then you desorb the charcoal and—”

  “Run a little gas chromatography on the sample?”

  Mimi squinted at me. “I had you figured for an English major.”

  “We didn’t actually have majors, at my college. Or, you know, tests. Or grades.”

  She snickered. “Sarah Lawrence or Bennington?”

  “Sarah Lawrence,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “Dude!” I crowed. “No fucking way!”

  “Way,” said Mimi, pleased.

  “And here you are, all technologically savvy and shit… what was your concentration?”

  “The nineteenth-century French symbolist poets.”

  “Perfect. Bet that comes in really handy at crime scenes.”

  Another snicker. “You?”

  “Fiction writing. Useful for doing my taxes.”

  “And yet you’re conversant in gas chromatography?”

  I shrugged. “My husband sells scientific instruments. I pretend to know the lingo.”

  “Spousal business-dinner osmosis… I know it well.”

  “Exactement,” I said. “So if the accelerant matches up, you think this fits as part of the recent serial stuff?”