The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  This was outside the post office. Loren was sitting in his car, parked close to the side of the building, hidden enough so he could catch people who didn’t come to a complete stop at the intersection, the only one in town.

  Bud was leaning over Loren’s open window, looking down at him. There were food wrappers scattered over the floor and seat of the passenger side of the car. “Could you share this good idea?” he had asked.

  “I could not,” Loren had replied, with deep satisfaction, grinning up at Bud.

  Now he and Frankie turned off the road at the redbrick building a few doors down from Snell’s.

  “But isn’t this your office?” Frankie asked.

  “Yeah. Loren’s meeting us here because he doesn’t have an office. Or his office is his car, mostly. You’re dealing with small-town stuff here, Frankie.” He pulled into the three-car parking area and turned the engine off. He got out and started around to open her door, but she had opened it already and stepped out on her own, so that he was just in time to awkwardly more or less help her close it.

  She smiled at him, charmingly, noticing his ridiculousness, he was sure. “Thanks,” she said. She followed him up the walk to the door and then in through the cluttered real-estate office on the ground floor. “It’s up here,” he said, gesturing to the stairs that led to the rooms above, the rooms that housed the paper. She went ahead of him. He followed her, watching the sway of the red skirt moving up the stairs, the white of her legs.

  Upstairs, she turned slowly around in the big open space. There wasn’t much here. Bud’s desk, a couple of chairs, a long table, shelves, and file cabinets. “But where’s the printing press?” she asked. “Where are your cub reporters?”

  “Ah. Well, the press is in Whitehall, a guy who runs it off every week, along with the Winslow paper and a couple of others. As well as a lot of other stuff—the brochure for your next concert, let’s say, should you be planning one. And the cub reporters …” He shrugged. “Well, they’re not cubs anymore. Three out of four are actually a bit geriatric. And they’re all part-timers, anyway—four or five people who regularly write the odd article. For free, I might add.”

  “So what you’re saying is you basically do the whole thing more or less alone.”

  “Yep.”

  “Isn’t it lonely?”

  “No. Not at all. Half the time I’m out and about, talking to people, going to things. And when I’m here, I’m on the phone most of the time. So, no. Now: would you like some coffee?”

  She would. Bud had a cheap coffee machine on the long table against the wall. There was a half refrigerator under this table for milk, among other things. While he fixed the coffee, he explained the decor, how he’d inherited the setup from Pete when he bought the paper. “The only thing I changed was to throw away a couch so sprung you could feel the floor when you sat on it.”

  She remembered Pete, vaguely. “I think he had a nice wife, too. Sort of … plump?”

  “She died a while back,” Bud said. “But that’s what I hear, that she was nice.” The machine made its gurgling noises as the coffee dropped into the glass pot, and Bud told her the story of buying the paper. Just as they sat and were drinking their first sips, Bud at his desk chair, Frankie in the one worn armchair, they heard the door downstairs bang shut. A woman’s voice called out, “Hellooooo!”

  “Hi, Barb,” Bud called back, getting up. “It’s the real-estate broker,” he said to Frankie. “Barbara Simms. Do you know her?”

  Frankie shook her head.

  “I’m just here for a bit!” Barb called up. “I have an appointment at four.”

  Bud went out to the top of the stairs. Barb was standing at the bottom, her face lifted to look at him. She was fiftyish and attractive in her carefully made up and constructed way. He had once told her that she was the last person he knew who still teased her hair. “And I was the first, honey,” she had said, grinning. “You don’t mess with a good thing.”

  “We’re not here long, either,” he said to her now. “But we’re expecting the chief of police any minute.”

  “Oh, God!” She stuck her tongue out. “That windbag. What for?”

  “Oh, I just wanted to go over some stuff about the fires.”

  “Okay. Well, forewarned is forearmed. I’ll send him up.” She moved away from the foot of the stairs, out of sight. After a second, just as he was turning back in, she called up, “You know, it’s like I’m your goddamned receptionist.”

  “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” He came back and sat at his desk again. They started to talk about the fire the night before. He told Frankie it had gutted the house so thoroughly that it left no evidence.

  “No evidence except for the complete impossibility of six fires … six?” she asked. He nodded. “Six fires in the same tiny town in the span of a couple of weeks.”

  “The unlikelihood, in any case.”

  “Yes.” After a moment, she said, “That’s why I’m at my sister’s house, actually. The idea being that as long as someone’s living there, the arsonist will be less likely to strike.”

  “That would have seemed reasonable until the last three, I guess.”

  “Which were in houses where people were living.”

  “Exactly. It’s as if there’s been a kind of gradual upping of the ante. Davey Swann and the arson guys now think that the brushfires earlier in the summer—there were three of those, I think—were probably set, too. So you had those first. And then you had some unoccupied places. And now, some occupied ones.”

  “Which is pretty scary.”

  “And people are pretty scared.”

  “Are they? Do you hear a lot about it?”

  “First- and secondhand.” He nodded, and suddenly, somehow, they were looking at each other in a way that felt charged to him.

  She looked away. “Thus your friends, I guess.”

  “What friends?”

  “Renting themselves out.”

  “Oh, those guys. Yeah, they’re playing on that. Or counting on it, anyway.”

  They each had some coffee. Bud was watching her. “Are you?”

  “Scared?”

  “Yes.”

  She shrugged. “It comes and goes,” she said. “If I hear something, some animal or something, or even if I let myself think about it too hard, I can get scared.” She looked into her cup. “I lock the door when I leave now, for all the good it would do. And at night, ditto.” Her face lifted to him. “Do you?” she asked.

  “I haven’t yet taken to locking things. But a couple of times I’ve gotten up in the night, thinking I heard someone. And then slept downstairs. So, yeah. I suppose I’m scared, too, in some sense or other.”

  She started to say something else when they both heard Loren downstairs—his voice, speaking to Barb.

  “Voilà,” Bud said. They both fell silent and turned to the opened doorway, listening as Loren slowly and noisily ascended the stairs. He stepped in, breathing hard, wearing his uniform, holding his hat pressed against his chest.

  Frankie had got up, and now she crossed to him, extending her hand. She was taller than he was by several inches. “I’m Frankie Rowley,” she said. “We’ve probably met before, but, anyway, I’m glad to meet you again, if that’s what it is.” She laughed, a single, quick exhalation. She was shy, Bud thought.

  “Loren Spader.” He was nodding slowly, steadily. “Good to meet you.”

  Bud gestured to Loren to sit in the desk chair, and he moved over to perch on the long table next to the coffee machine. Frankie sat down in her chair. Bud asked Loren if he wanted coffee.

  “Nope,” he said. “Thanks. It just makes trouble when you spend your day driving around in a car.”

  “I can see that would be true,” Bud said.

  “It is true,” Loren said. They talked for a minute or two about the fire at the Coolidges’, agreeing about their good luck. Then Loren turned to Frankie. “So, Bud here tells me you saw something.”

&nb
sp; “Maybe. I think so. It’s just, I was out walking in the dead of the night—I’d flown in from Africa—I live in Africa and I’d flown in that day. And I had jet lag, so I was up.”

  Loren nodded, several times. “This was what night?”

  “The night of the first fire. The one up beyond my parents’ house on Carson Road? The Kershaws’.” She sounded nervous.

  “Okay.”

  “So I’d gotten up, got dressed, left the house”—she took a deep breath—“and I was walking toward town, away from the Kershaws’.” She went on, telling him the same story she’d told Bud. The car, stepping off the road out of its path, noticing the slightly slanted horizontal taillights go down the hill.

  “Okay,” he said again, and this time his hand made a circle: And?

  “Well, that’s it,” she said nervously, apologetically. “It’s not much, I know. But Bud thought …” She looked at him, then quickly back at Loren. “I thought it was possible, not until later actually, but I thought it might be the arsonist. Maybe not, but maybe. And that the taillights might be a kind of …” She sighed. “Identifier, I guess.”

  He asked about the make of the car, the color, and she came up as blank as she had earlier with Bud.

  “So that’s it, then?” He sounded disbelieving.

  “Yes. I’m sorry not to be more helpful.”

  He shook his head, as if correcting himself. “Oh, no, this is helpful, this is helpful.” He started to get up, making a little grunt of effort as he lifted himself out of the chair. “I can do something with this.” He picked up his hat, which he’d set on Bud’s desk. “I might ask you to look at some photographs in a few days,” he said.

  “Photographs of …?”

  “Taillights. Car taillights. I’ll just drive around and look. See what I spot and take some pictures.”

  “I was afraid of that. Because, uhm …” Her hand rose to her hair and pushed it back. “I’m not absolutely sure I’d be able to pick them out. Particularly if there were several varieties of the same lights.”

  He sighed. “Okay, fair enough.” They were all standing now. “I have to say, though, what is it with women and cars?”

  “What about women and cars?” she asked.

  “They never notice them!”

  “But, what is it with men and cars? Why are they always so interested in something so fundamentally uninteresting?”

  Loren looked at her, and then he grinned, suddenly. “There you have it,” he said, and then he turned to go.

  “I am sorry I can’t tell you more,” she said quickly.

  He stopped at the doorway to the stairs. “Well, I’m sorry, too, but this is something. Something to start with, anyway. Thanks for this, Bud.” He gestured at Bud with his hat. “Miz Rowley.”

  Bud said, “Anytime,” at the same moment Frankie said, “You’re welcome.”

  They could hear him descending the stairs, then speaking to Barbara. They were looking at each other. When they heard Loren let himself out, Frankie grinned suddenly. Big grin. Big, he would say, sexy grin. She blew out, noisily. “That’s over.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  “But the hard part.”

  “It didn’t seem hard. You did good.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll take you home? You done with the coffee?”

  She nodded. Bud carried the cups to the deep sink—an old laundry sink Pete must have installed himself. Frankie slung her purse on her shoulder, and they headed downstairs.

  Barb was at her desk, looking at some photographs laid out there. Frankie introduced herself, and they talked for a minute. Barbara asked about her parents: their retirement here and how that was going.

  “I think it’s a big adjustment for them,” Frankie said.

  “But it is such a gorgeous property,” Barb answered, as if relevantly.

  “I never think of it that way,” Frankie said. “As property, I mean.”

  “Well, if you ever do, think of me the next second,” Barb said, and laughed.

  “You’re a little like a vulture, Barb, you know that, don’t you?” Bud said. He opened the door and held it for Frankie.

  “I take pride in it.”

  They were quiet in the car. It went on too long. Bud said, “What else have you been up to today? Church?”

  “No. No, I don’t do that.”

  “Ah. Lapsed?”

  She nodded.

  “Lapsed … what?”

  “Protestant. My mother’s religion. Actually, my grandparents’ religion. My grandfather was a preacher. Presbyterian. And we used to go to church regularly, especially when we were up here. So I was a churchgoer. But not ever a believer, even in my memory. Were you?”

  “No. No, my parents are really secular Jews. More or less socialists. Religion was so over for them. If I’d even started talking belief around the house, that would have been cut off pretty quickly. So I was deliberately raised a nonbeliever—that was their intention for me.” He looked over at her. The wind was having its way with her hair—half her face was covered. “Sounds like not, for you.”

  “No, I think they would have had me believe. We did the whole thing early on. Sunday school. Confirmation class.” She swept her hair back with one hand. “But I was a gimlet-eyed kid. I saw hypocrisy everywhere around me among the grown-ups, who were always on about honesty and kindness, not hitting, et cetera, and yet were so much not up to the job themselves.” After a pause, she said, “And then there was God—such an unattractive character! Why be so jealous, so small, with the whole universe your own? And why call on us to be so good—so giving, so forgiving, so open and sweet, when you hardly model that for us.”

  “Yeah, a noticeably vengeful guy.”

  “Exactly.” The car was mounting a hill in the shadow of overhanging trees. They were silent for a minute. Then she said, abruptly, “Even so, I so much wanted to be good. The ideas in Christianity, I have to say, moved me. The notion that you’re called on to do something about human suffering.” She’d been turned away, looking out her window when she said this, but now she turned back to him and smiled. “Plus, I just plain wanted to please the grown-ups—I was a bit of a suck-up.”

  After a moment he said, “Do you think that has anything to do with the kind of work you do? That religious … training. If not belief. Did that get you to aid work?”

  “Maybe. I suppose humanitarianism is its own religion in a way.” She made an odd face. “Or maybe it’s just another kind of colonial power. Who knows?” She shrugged. “At the start, though, it was just a way to go to Africa. To justify going to Africa. I had to do something there. Something … useful. But the selfish impulse, the impulse just to be there—that came first of all. Then came the reasons. And all the training.” Both hands rose now and gathered her hair into a ponytail at her neck. Her breasts rose, too, under the sweater. She looked over at him. “And you?” she said. “How about you, with journalism?”

  “Oh, I pretty much backed into it. I wanted to be a photographer—wars, natural disasters, the great romance of that—and I was mostly thinking about that, though I took a couple of journalism classes in college. But I started just by sending pictures in everywhere I could think of, and got so I was a stringer for the Denver Post. And then they asked me to cover a couple of campaign visits out there, and I wrote some stuff to go along with the pictures, to explain them, really, and pretty soon that was mostly what I was doing—writing. First as a stringer, just sending stuff in. And then as a hire. And then I went to Washington, and then—a long, long then—I was tired of that and I came here.”

  “Are you ever sorry you left?”

  “I suppose. From time to time. But you choose, don’t you? And it was my choice.” He looked over at her. She was listening intently, her eyes steady on him. “I made my bed,” he said.

  “Still, it must sometimes feel so far away from the action.”

  “Yeah, but a lot of the action that makes the news in Washing
ton is pretty silly. Inconsequential, finally. Or so it seems to me.”

  “Oh, I agree. I’ve been listening to the radio on and off while I’ve been working on the house, a lot of news on NPR, and I’m struck that I don’t think I’ve heard Africa discussed even once since I’ve been here. It’s so strange for me. I mean, not that Africa has to be in the news, but …” She turned away, looking out her window. Then she said, “You know, it’s always hard, coming back. Bridging the worlds. But this time around, it’s so pointed, the sense of disconnection. It feels, completely this time, either/or.”

  “Whereas at other times?”

  “Well, it didn’t, not so much. Somehow—maybe it’s just being up here, not in a city—but America seems so insular now. More than before, yes. And the Clinton stuff, which is so ridiculous, really, is part of that for me. I mean, how can this be what Americans are talking about—Monica Lewinsky?—when there’s so much … horror in the world.”

  “And I suppose the fires add to that feeling for you. That everyone here is so taken up with them.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but I suppose it’s true. But I can forgive that more easily.”

  “Good. We need your forgiveness.” He had meant to make a joke, but as he looked over, he saw it hadn’t worked. She looked stricken. She turned her face away to look out the window.

  When she turned back to him, her eyes seemed immense. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You must think I’m so … holier than thou. And that’s not what I mean.”

  “I don’t think that.” She didn’t respond. “But on the other hand, maybe you should mean it. Compared to what you’ve done in your life, what I’ve done is … self-indulgent.”

  “Don’t, Bud. You’re embarrassing me.”

  “Why? I’m being serious.”

  “But you shouldn’t be. I told you, my motivations were, they are, really complicated. For everything I did, there were all kinds of … satisfactions.” They rode in silence for several minutes. They had turned onto the dirt road that led up to her parents’ house, her sister’s house. Bud was aware of the noise of the tires. “Here’s an example,” she said, turning to him. “When I met you at the tea and you asked me where I was from, and I said, ‘Africa,’ you were impressed: ‘Africa!’ ” Her voice was amazed, imitating his surprise. “I got to dazzle you with how cool I am, that sneaky pleasure.”