Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  Night glittered, glared, ran black and orange, as the water on leaves, grass, and street mimicked flames. Steam rose as it dried in sudden heat. A brighter flash, a green diamond in the shadow of the lilac hedge, penetrated the shattered structures of Clare's mind. Like a child or a monkey she reached for it. The blast had thrown it twenty yards, then, with the peculiar idiosyncrasy of explosions, left it resting on a leaf as neatly as the dew might leave a single drop of water.

  It was an eyeball. Clare let it roll into the palm of her hand. The white shone orange; the green was flecked with fire. The glass orb was no bigger than the tip of her little finger, the eye of a doll. Jalila made dolls, beautiful things of porcelain and paint. Vee and Dana had each been given one. Clare only let them play with them on special occasions. They were too precious for everyday.

  "Every day is precious," she whispered. The glass bauble felt heavy and hot in her hand. It hurt her heart. Still she couldn't bring herself to throw it away.

  Behind her car doors were slamming. Authoritative voices warning people back. If art truly mirrored life--or vice versa--the police would be putting up yellow tape to cordon off the scene.

  From the deep shade of the lilacs and an enormous elm, Clare watched the fire devour her home. Windows were blown out in the living room and, on the opposite side of the front door, the parlor David used as a study. The second story was only just beginning to burn: shingles smoking or steaming, fire in the window of the girls' bathroom at the head of the stairs.

  Like the tail plumes of a great bird, arcs of water from the fire trucks appeared. The noise of firefighters, police, and gawkers began overtaking that of the fire itself. An ambulance arrived. To her right, behind the house, Clare could see the white of a sheeted gurney and the black plastic body bag being strapped to it. Officer Shopert. The nice cop. She had not survived. Clare's mind skidded off that hard surface.

  A whine crept from the darkness of the shadows behind her. Her heart flopped like a fish trying to breathe air. Vee, Dana, hurt, alive.

  "Here," she said. Then louder, "Here!" as she turned from the glare and felt her way into the nearly liquid darkness beneath the elm to the wall of lilac bushes separating her yard from that of her neighbor's.

  "Here. I'm here." She was on her hands and knees reaching, pushing under the leafy spread of branches. Bizarre inchoate visions of the children, like the doll's eye, blown safely into the cushiony arms of the hedge were followed by the broken knowledge that the children were not in the house. Then she saw them running from the explosion, frightened, cowering under the elm, waiting for her to come to them. "Talk to me. Please. It's Mommy."

  Something wet and warm touched her fingers.

  Blood. She thought first of blood.

  Then fur. Then the entire dog was in her arms, shivering in her lap, whining, licking her face. His fur stank of smoke. His usual black-and-white coat was nearly all black with soot. Clare held him tight because she loved him and cried because he wasn't a little girl.

  "Where are they, Mackie?" she asked over and over as she rocked the Lhasa apso.

  The conflagration died down. The police relaxed their vigilance. People crept closer, standing on the edges of Clare's darkness as if they feared the shadow beneath the tree or sensed the bleaker shadows in her mind. Because her eyes had burned out with the fire and she had nowhere else to look for her daughters, the force of half a lifetime's habit took over. Clare studied the bystanders, noting nuance of voice, peculiarity of stance, language of movement--the tools of an actor's trade. Nearest her was a man in hiking boots wearing a sport coat over his pajamas. Clare recognized him from around the neighborhood. Two teenagers, African American, fully dressed in the rodeo-clown pants that had a stranglehold on boys' fashion, were clearly not from the neighborhood. Probably they'd been out looking for fun and found fire. A man a bit taller than Clare, broad of shoulder, arms looking muscular under a thin khaki jacket, held the hand of a little girl. Even as Clare's heart demanded it her eyes knew it wasn't one of her daughters. This child was younger, maybe three, and darker, her black hair straight and shining to the middle of her tiny bird-boned back.

  With the exception of the birdy girl, all were on cell phones. The overloud one-sided conversations fell with the same meaningless urgency as the final cracks and pops of the ebbing fire.

  "Yo, dude, you should check it out."

  "The Southerlands' place--Sullivan? The Mideastern guy."

  "Crusin' and blowie! Thought we'd . . ."

  "White wife."

  "Tell the Magician the problem has disappeared." This, in an American regional accent, stood out in Clare's ears.

  "Probably did it himself to make Americans . . ."

  "Yeah. The whole suit give or take ringers and salvage." Clare had studied accents for years, yet she could not place this one.

  "I know it's three A.M., jackass, I'm telling you . . ."

  "Okay, sure. Bourbon Street Nursery . . ."

  "Half these guys are terrorists . . ."

  The roof crashed through the second floor, driving the cellular addicts a few yards farther back. Soon lights from the streetlamps and emergency vehicles were brighter than that of the dying conflagration. Sated with flame and telephone calls, people began to wander off, no doubt hoping to find better entertainments. The first to go were the man and the little girl. The child turned back for some reason and looked into the shadows as if her keen young eyes could cut through darkness where adults' could not. The doll's porcelain face was smudged with the soot that drifted from the fire, its green glass eyes bright under black painted lashes.

  "Come on, brat," the man said and gave the child's arm a jerk.

  "Aisha," came a tiny whisper.

  "Aisha?" Clare echoed. The word reverberated familiarly against her tongue, but she had no idea why. Maybe a child's name that was in fashion at the moment. The two of them walked out of earshot, heading toward the darkness of the tree-shaded sidewalk along Laggert Street.

  "Holy shinola!"

  The shouted idiocy startled Clare. Still holding Mackie, she struggled to her feet. Her legs were numb from the damp and being still so long, and she teetered, trying to keep her balance. Officer Dunn stood at the front of the house. Clare was behind him, not far, maybe a dozen feet. She could see his wide rear end, the bulge of his waist where it oozed out over the butt of the gun on his hip. Two firemen walked into her line of sight. Clad in protective clothing and breathing apparatus, they looked as if they carried hazardous materials in a medical drama, but what they were carrying was charred bodies. Little charred bodies. The bodies of children burned to death.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Dunn murmured as he walked toward the burdened firemen. "Where were they?"

  "In the bedroom. Still in their beds. Smoke probably got them. They were gone before the fire ever reached them."

  "Small frigging blessings," Dunn growled.

  They were not in the house! Dana and Vee were nowhere in the house!

  Hot and blistering as molten lava, her voice made its way up her throat. "No," she screamed. And screamed. And screamed. Police, firemen with their monster masks and gaping empty eyes, the teenage boys in their clownish clothes, turned toward her. Nearly to the sidewalk, the man with the girl stopped. From his jacket pocket he removed a cell phone and held it up in front of his face. He was taking pictures of her, pictures of the burned bodies.

  Then Mackie was on the ground, and Clare was running toward the smoking remains of her heart, of her life, of her sanity. Maybe she was screaming, maybe she wasn't. Maybe her feet pounded the sod, maybe they struck only air. There was no way to tell.

  Hell was a place of eternal disconnect.

  SIX

  There was a time of nothing but a red-black spin of pain: smells that made a charnel house of her heart, sights that could not be expunged by the clawing out of her eyes, which, but for the strong arms of an EMT, Clare would have tried. Then came quiet, a place away. Bustle and beings, sound
and light, coiled in around the charred bits on the lawn.

  Clare was left alone on the tail end of an ambulance, a soft fleece blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Mackie, ever faithful, shivered on the ground near where her feet dangled. Across Laggert Street the dark man, the tiny girl towed behind, had vanished into the shadows of the elms lining the sidewalk. The boys in the baggy pants were gone as well. Much of the crowd, leaving before the bodies were carried out, had returned. Like flies on carrion, they'd lifted in a black cloud and now, new meat arriving, resettled.

  "They weren't there, the girls weren't there," Clare shrieked again and again, but only in her mind. Her mouth didn't open. Her lips wouldn't move. She tried to swallow but couldn't. Her throat was too dry.

  The pathetic little bodies in front of the house had been covered by dun-colored sheeting from somewhere. Maybe the fire trucks. It didn't matter. Clare could still see them. She would always see them.

  Another body was carried from the burning house over a fireman's back. This one wasn't so badly burned; David, or somebody wearing David's silk pajama bottoms, striped in silver and gray. Being in the clothing business, Clare's husband dressed well for pennies on the dollar. She had liked that at first, back when she'd liked him.

  Riding lightly on the back of her silent and unending scream, it came to her that the pajamas were as wrong as the house had been wrong. David had gone out. Now he was in. Now he was wearing pajamas. Now he was dead.

  I've gone mad, Clare thought and experienced the briefest breath of relief. If she were mad surely she'd forget soon.

  "The dad was in the master bedroom," a fireman said before Officer Dunn asked.

  "Jesus." Dunn thumbed the button on his shoulder mike, and for a bizarre instant Clare thought he was radioing Christ.

  "Yeah, Sergeant Pate? I think we got the doer." He described Clare down to the wet sneakers without socks. "You can make book on it," he finished. "When the blast hit she looks at the flames and says, 'Hallelujah.' Yeah. I kid you not. A Susan Smith is my guess.

  "Nobody touches anything," he said to the firemen, then jogged toward the Donovans'.

  For a minute Clare continued to sit, legs dangling, mind dangling. The policeman thought she had killed Vee and Dana. The incomprehensible insanity of such an act rendered his opinion void. There were those who believed the world was flat, that aliens walked among us, that God made the world in seven days. These people didn't matter to Clare. She worked in fictional realms but lived in the real world. Actors had a better grasp of reality than other people. Perhaps because they spent so much of their time trying to re-create it onstage.

  The little bodies were removed. The big body was covered up. Clare didn't need to be here anymore. She didn't need to be anywhere anymore. Like all children, Vee and Dana had secret passages. Like all mothers, Clare knew about them. Picking up Mackie, she drifted into the darkness of the trees behind the ambulance and moved along the dense hedge running between her house and that of the neighbor to the north. A few yards down she and the dog pushed into the leaves and were gone.

  An intruder light, hooked to a motion sensor on the side of the garage next door, flared on, and the ivory of David's coat lit up. Not wishing to be in a world where people killed their own children, Clare let the coat drop from her shoulders. Beneath it she wore only a pink satin nightgown that fell to midthigh. Not subtle. Not invisible. Feeling schizophrenic, a ghost and a corpus, she watched her hands turn the coat inside out, hiding the light color and replacing it with brown-and-burgundy plaid.

  As she pulled the coat back on she had a respite so short it felt like a spark in a windstorm: For half an instant she was a spy, a lunatic, a character in a matinee of Drood.

  Anything, anything, was better than being Clare Sullivan.

  "Someone will find you," she whispered apologetically as she tied Mackie to the neighbor's glider with the cloth belt from the raincoat. "Stay." In the heartbreakingly trustful way of his kind, Mack stayed and did not bark as she walked away.

  Because of the vagaries of sound, suddenly Clare heard a single sentence loud and clear from the other side of the hedge, "I'm glad Washington has the death penalty."

  Too bad they seldom used it. There would probably be no help there; no kind needle to take her from this place before the true and crushing weight of what had happened hit. Before she went crazy: memories cutting when recalled, cutting sharper when forgotten, sleeping in nightmare, waking to worse. For the length of an indrawn breath she saw herself in a straitjacket crouched in front of an old-style radiator covered in layers of paint. Above it was a window, opaque with years of grime and further darkened by heavy black wire mesh. Nothing sharp, nothing pointed, nothing edged. No way out of life. Clare staggered and nearly fell as she moved out of the yard. Where her children had once been was a terrible hole, a black hole in inner space. Should she fall into it she would be taken to that room with the radiator, and, once there, she'd be kept alive.

  For years.

  And years.

  Turning from the streetlight into the greater dark of the alleyway, she forced her thoughts to her husband, David. Daoud. He was dead; she was a widow. The thought left her strangely unmoved. She stopped. A stream of water trickling down the alley dammed up behind her heels to run over the back of her shoes. The cold and the wet went unnoticed.

  Hyperaware of feelings, Clare was unaccustomed to having none. She hadn't hated David, nor had she loved him, not for a long time. David controlled, had to control: her, the girls, everything. He never hit her, never lifted a hand to the girls. There was nothing that would be called verbal abuse in modern courts. He'd not interfered with her work at Seattle Repertory so long as it did not interfere with his comfort.

  David controlled with money and ice.

  Leaving was not an option. David would never give her the girls. He'd told her that, and she'd believed him. If she'd ever dared look like she might try to take them he swore he would spirit them off to the Middle East to be raised by his mother and sisters. He could and would do it, Clare knew, no matter what legal pressures she might try to bring to bear.

  David manufactured clothing. Most of his workers were women from Pakistan, India, and Nepal. They appeared and disappeared from his factory near Puget Sound with unremarked rapidity. Many were illegal, Clare suspected, but she never would have reported David, even if her welfare hadn't been wedded to his by a justice of the peace. Though the wages his factory paid were low, the women were probably better off than they had been in their home countries. Why else come to the Promised Land?

  Clare knew she'd been complicit in her easy imprisonment. David made good money. It allowed her and the girls to live well, and since Jalila had come over from Saudi Arabia a year before, there hadn't even been the unpleasantness of sex. David and Jalila were lovers. Clare'd suspected from the first week the au pair had arrived--and she hadn't cared. Jalila was not David's first, just the first he'd brought home.

  Clare's strongest emotion concerning the affair was a vague sense of pity for the mistress. She would even have been glad Jalila's body was not among those carried from the house had she been capable of gladness.

  The water in her shoes finally penetrated the cloud of thought, and she woke to the alley, the stink of smoke, the remembering. She began to move. Suicide was not a new thought. At one point in her life--not a point so much as a plane, it had lasted seven years--death had been her fail-safe plan. Over time Death had become her comforter, the friend she turned to when life became untenable. Then Dana was born and Death lost a devotee. It was incomprehensible that she leave that child, and, if an absolute could be doubled, twice as incomprehensible once Vee came into the world.

  Now Death was the only place she could look without seeing corpses. The only place where even the smallest spark of hope resided. The gods, if gods there were, must love irony.

  Shock or post-traumatic stress or God or something very like took her mind for a while. Clare walked and did not run.
She stepped up curbs and turned corners without any sense of where she went. Occasionally she was peripherally aware of blue strobing lights, the faint wail of sirens, of rain or no rain.

  In time she came back into herself; eyes began to see, ears to hear. Whatever had driven her, ridden her, had brought her full circle. She was standing in front of the all-night pharmacy where she'd gone for Vee's cough medicine so many thousands of years before. For a brief and glorious moment she believed the clock had miraculously been turned back, that she'd left home only minutes ago, and, if she turned and ran, she would be able to find the girls, get them out of the house before it exploded.

  Except they hadn't been in the house.

  And then they had.

  Clare opened the door and went inside. In the old dark days when Death was her bodyguard, ready to snatch her from fates worse than He, she'd had the luxury of time to prepare for their meeting: to buy a gun, pills, a rope, a car with emissions problems.

  Tonight all she could think of was fire. From the starkly lit shelves she pulled out accelerants: rubbing alcohol, fingernail polish remover, and hair spray. Not for her the questionable dignity of a red gasoline can in the middle of Tiananmen Square. She'd go up like an American girl, reeking of perfume and paint.

  At the checkout counter a sleepy middle-aged woman, made as garish and bleak as the shelves by late-night fluorescent lights, rang up her purchases.

  "May I have some matches?" Clare asked and was stunned at how normal she sounded. At least to her own ears.

  The woman behind the counter wasn't as sluggish as the hour and the lighting suggested. Her pale blue eyes darkened as she glanced at the inflammables on the counter.

  "And a pack of cigarettes," Clare added. Vigilance relaxed.

  "What kind?"

  Clare hadn't smoked in twenty years. She pointed.

  "Camel nonfilters?"