by Terry Shames
“You have Jenny to thank,” Elvin says. “If she hadn’t seen it, the whole house would have gone up.”
I look at Jenny full on and see that her hair has gotten loose and is wild around her head. There are smudges of soot on her face and on her Houston Astros T-shirt.
“You shouldn’t have risked your life,” I say.
“It wasn’t like that,” she says. “It had barely started when I got to it. By pure luck I was down watering my horses and I saw some light through the trees. I thought it was coming from the back of your house, but then I realized it was flickering, and it didn’t look right. So I cut up through your back yard and I saw right away you had a fire at your place.”
I tense up again with the thought of what could have happened. “And you got the art out of there.”
“I didn’t see your truck out front, so I ran back to my house and called the fire department. I knew you had all those paintings in there, so I went in and started bringing them out. These volunteer boys got here in nothing flat. They chased me out, put some water on the fire in the back and got the rest of the art out.”
Elvin is standing there nodding as she talks. “If she hadn’t called us when she did, the whole place would have gone up,” he repeats. “As it is, the walls at the back are blistered and you’ve got some water damage and some smoke inside.”
“I’m afraid I broke down your front door,” Jenny says.
Loretta has come back and is hovering nearby. “Oh, my Lord,” she moans.
I guess the relief of knowing everything is all right makes me giddy because I start laughing right out loud.
“What’s so funny?” Elvin says.
I finally wind down and wipe my eyes. “I don’t lock my door. Jenny, you could have just walked in.”
The look on her face gets me laughing again until everybody catches on, and we’re all snickering like fools.
“I don’t know how I can thank you enough. Those paintings mean everything to me.”
And I don’t mean only their monetary value. They represent a tie to Jeanne and a world that we made together. I may not be able to thank Jenny properly, but I know one thing: Jenny won’t ever have to go down there to water those horses again.
I awake in a strange bed, disoriented for a minute and feeling anxious, my heart doing a little overtime jittering. Several times in the night I half-woke, and don’t feel that I’ve really been all the way asleep. The smell of coffee brings one or two synapses back into play and I swing my legs off the bed. My whole body feels sore, as if I’ve run too far, the aftermath of an adrenaline rush from last night. I take a deep breath and remind myself that my paintings are safe and that according to Elvin the house is intact. What I want to know is how the fire got started. Figuring that out is just one of the things I need to get busy with.
The bedroom I’m in has the same quiet but comfortable feel as the rest of Jenny Sandstone’s house. Last night she took charge of me, brushing past my protest that I could just as well stay in my house. “It’s going to smell of smoke. Tomorrow you can air it out, but tonight you don’t need to sleep with that smell.” I went into the house long enough to get my shaving apparatus and a change of clothes.
Jenny’s spare bedroom has its own bathroom, so I feel like I’m in my own cocoon. I go in and take a shower, which takes some of the edge off my itchy mood.
“I figured you’d be up early,” Jenny says. She’s already dressed for the day, moving around briskly and making me feel ancient.
“Never was one for lying in bed.”
She sets a cup of coffee on the counter in front of me. “This is as far as my breakfast hospitality goes. I’ve got a meeting in Bobtail this morning, so I’m on my way. Make yourself at home. I don’t know what kind of breakfast you eat, but you might find an egg or two and some cereal.”
Then she’s gone in a whirl of briefcase and purse and perfume.
In spite of my abundant dinner last night, I’m hollow this morning, so I scramble Jenny’s last two eggs and toast the last two pieces of bread, and make a mental note to restock her larder. While I eat, I look through the pictures Jenny retrieved from my place. She has them stacked neatly in her living room in a corner near the bookcase. Seen altogether this way, I realize how many I have. My hands shake as I touch the first one, unable to hold back thoughts of what could have been if Jenny hadn’t been down there watering her horses.
I get the Wolf Kahn out and hold it in my hands for several minutes. There’s not a one of these pictures that I don’t know exactly where Jeanne and I were when we bought it. I notice the glass is sooty, so I pull out my handkerchief and wipe it off. I’m going to have to call an expert in to see if any of them have been damaged, or need to be professionally cleaned.
The phone ringing breaks my reverie. Thinking it may be presumptuous to answer Jenny’s phone, I almost leave it, but then think it might be her calling about something. It’s Loretta, checking in to make sure I survived the night. She offered for me to stay at her place, but her notions of propriety are strong, and I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Jenny seemed to sense the same thing, and she insisted I’d want to be where I could check out my paintings first thing in the morning.
I tell Loretta I slept fine and she says I can count on her to help with anything I need.
I could spend the whole day looking at those paintings and celebrating the fact that they are intact, but I need to go over to take a look at my place and figure out what to do about the damage. And I’ve got something else to do first.
Leaving Jenny’s, I walk around back of my house and down to the pasture where the tank is. The cows come crowding around, as if they know something unusual happened last night. “Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to welcome some strangers.”
I walk over to the fence between Jenny’s place and mine, to the gate that hasn’t been opened since she moved in. The gate has settled and is hard to open, but finally it gives enough so I can slide the handle sideways. The gate swings open and I pull it all the way back to the fence.
Jenny’s three horses are standing together near the fence, watching me as if they’ve never seen a man before. I walk toward them gingerly, but they hold their ground. If they had spooked, I would have, too. “You’re welcome to come through any time,” I say. But then I realize that my cows are going to come in here and eat up all Jenny’s grass, so I go back and close the gate. Jenny and I will work out the details later. But at least the gate has been opened once and it will get easier.
Coming back up to my house from the pasture, I’m greeted by a sad sight. The back of the house is blackened and peeling. Again, I wonder how the fire started, and I don’t like the way my thoughts tend.
Nothing at the back of the house would make a fire spark spontaneously. If it had started in the kitchen, it would have taken a while for it to blister the back walls the way it has. I have a bad feeling that this wasn’t an accident. Somebody set it, starting it around back so it would have a good chance to consume the place before anyone would notice it. The plan just failed to take Jenny into account.
I’m trying to settle my mind around the idea that somebody would do something so destructive when I hear a grumpy meow. I turn around to see Zelda stomping toward the back door, where her food dish usually sits. The fire has charred the dish and the steps it sat on. People who don’t know cats may not think they can stomp, but Zelda can. She’s mad as hell about the disruption in her life.
“Let me go inside and I’ll get you a new dish,” I tell her. She honors that idea by finding a place on her side that needs some heavy grooming.
The floor is gritty and my boots crunch as I walk through the house to the kitchen, at the back. The paint is peeling off the cabinets from the heat of the fire, and the whole room is gray with soot. I open the cabinet and take out a cereal bowl, fill it with cat food, and start to open the back door, but the handle is seared, and won’t budge. I take the bowl back through the front door and around the side a
nd set it down in the grass near the blackened steps. Zelda walks over to it, stiff-legged and suspicious, but decides to go along with my new plan.
When I get back around front, Elvin is just pulling up. He’s a barber in town as well as being head of the volunteer fire department, and he’s here early so he can get on to work. He stands with his hands on his hips, his baseball hat tipped back on his head, and looks at the untouched front of the house. “You got yourself some luck,” he says. “Jesus was on your side last night.”
“Jesus and Jenny.”
He chuckles, but sobers right back up. “I need to talk to you about something,” he says.
“I know what you’re going to say. Somebody set this fire.”
He looks me full on. “I’m afraid so. I’ve put in a call to the fire chief over at Bobtail. He wasn’t in yet, but I left him a message to call me at the shop. I expect he’ll want to come over and see what he can make of it.”
“I guess I can’t have anybody clean up until then.”
“If I was you, I’d call my insurance company. You know, they’ve got these fellows who come out and investigate a suspicious fire. Might be to your advantage.”
“I’m going to take that advice. But I want you to know, I’m going to tell everybody what a first-rate job you and your crew did.”
He takes off his hat and dips his head in acknowledgment of the compliment.
When he’s gone, I head back inside. Before, when I came in, I had a mission to take care of Zelda, but now I get the full effect of the fire. The smoke smell is strong, so I turn off the air-conditioning and open up the windows. The house seems strange to me without the pictures. I pass by the dining room and see that no one thought to take the Neri sculpture. That would have been a loss. But I remind myself that it isn’t a loss; it will need careful cleaning to get the soot off it, but it’s still here. I’m suddenly sorry that Loretta had to go off with Ida Ruth today. I would have liked hearing her yoo-hooing me about now.
By now it’s close on to eight o’clock, still too early to call the insurance company. But I phone my nephew Tom and tell him what happened.
“I’m coming down there myself right now,” he says.
“No, you just go on with your day. I’m fine. It wasn’t much damage.”
“I can cancel my appointments. I don’t like the idea of you having to face that alone.”
I calm him down and tell him how I appreciate his concern, but that I’m not really alone; I’ve got all kinds of people on my side. He makes me promise that I’ll call him tonight. If he was my own son, I couldn’t feel any more pleased with that boy.
With a little time on my hands, I’m itchy to get back to Jenny’s to take a closer look through my pictures to see if there’s any damage that needs to be seen to right away. I couldn’t quite take it all in first thing, my mind being on getting over here to assess the property. I’ll feel better if I satisfy myself.
At Jenny’s I pour the last cup of coffee and turn off the pot, then go through the pictures. I have nineteen of them, many of them not particularly noteworthy, a few decent prints and some line drawings. But five of them have turned out to be the kind of investment that art collectors dream about. And one of them, probably the most valuable one, is missing. It’s a Wayne Thiebaud cake picture that Jeanne and I bought early on, in San Francisco, a pink and cream confection on a light green background—not one of my favorite paintings, being more Jeanne’s taste. But it turns out she was right about the painting’s potential; it’s worth an indecent amount of money. Before Jeanne died, we put in our will to leave it to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The firemen couldn’t have missed it, because it was right over the fireplace.
Before I panic, I call Jenny to ask if she might have stuck the painting somewhere else. Maybe she even recognized that it might be valuable.
“Thiebaud? I don’t know anything about him. But I put all the pictures in the same place. You’ve had a shock. Maybe you just missed it. I’d go back through them if I were you.”
“I’ll do that. And Jenny, I’d just as soon you not mention that anything is missing.”
Now I know what the fire was about. Somebody came in and took that picture and was willing to destroy all the others to cover up the theft. I’m breathless with fury, so I sit still until I can think properly about who would have done such a thing. And whether it is connected to my investigation of Dora Lee’s death.
Elvin said he was going to get the fire investigator from Bobtail involved, and insurance investigators will come out eventually, but I’m too impatient to wait for them to get to it. I want to find out now if any of my neighbors saw somebody hanging around before the fire started.
The obvious place to start is with old Mrs. Summerville next door. In her nineties, Mrs. Summerville is not as spry as she was, so her daughter, Letitia, who lives with her, parks her in the front window of the house everyday so she can see everybody who comes and goes.
Letitia shows me in to talk to her mother, fussing over me as if I were an honored visitor, instead of just the man next door. I guess they don’t get a lot of action, and last night my house provided them with enough to talk about for some time to come, so I’m something of a celebrity.
After I’m settled knee to knee with Mrs. Summerville, and she has told me how she and her daughter liked to have had heart attacks when they heard the fire engine stop next door, I tell her that Elvin thinks somebody set the fire.
Her hand goes to her chest and her mouth starts to work as if she’s chewing on the information. “Well, I swan,” she says, in the old way of saying “I swear.” “I never thought of such a thing happening right next door. Did you ever hear of such a thing, Letitia?”
Letitia agrees that she never did.
“What I’m wondering is if either of you saw anybody outside my house yesterday evening after I left.”
“You was taking Loretta Singletary somewhere, all dressed up,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am, we went over to Frenchy’s, that restaurant in Bobtail.”
“The French food with all them snails. I don’t believe I could eat that.”
“Mamma, you told me you saw somebody go to Samuel’s door and then walk around back,” Letitia says. I’m grateful to her for pulling the conversation back around.
“It was a boy. He was in a reddish kind of a car,” she says. “Wine-colored.”
“You said it was a Ford.” Letitia sounds impatient.
“I don’t know anything about cars, but it had that thing on it that Fords have. You know what I’m talking about?”
“The medallion on the front grill?” I say.
“That’s it. Medallion. Fancy name for it. I couldn’t read it from here, but I know what it looks like.”
“Could you describe the boy for me?” I say, although I know she’s talking about Dora Lee’s car, and there’s only one boy who would be driving it. Sure enough, she describes Greg, and my thoughts take a bad turn.
I ask her if she saw anyone else around, but she says after that she and Letitia ate their dinner and watched TV, so they wouldn’t have seen anybody.
I make a quick tour of the other neighbors, but get nothing to show for it. Most of them were busy eating dinner or at the TV by early evening.
When I get back to my place, a big red SUV is sitting out front, Fire Marshal—Bobtail, Texas printed on the side in yellow letters. My front door is open, so I call out and let the fire marshal know I’m here.
Woodrow Callum is a tall man with skin the color of molasses and the erect posture and close-cropped white hair that suggests a military background. He shakes my hand with a firm grip.
“Mr. Craddock, you’ve got yourself a situation here,” he says in a deep baritone. I like him right off for being direct. “I found it hard to credit when Elvin called and told me he thought this fire was arson, but he was right on. Come on around back and I’ll show you.”
He has a long stick with him, and when we get around
back near the porch, he crouches down and pokes it under the porch to point out a couple of half-melted bottles with charred rags next to them. With my bum leg, I can’t squat the way he does, so I have to get on my hands and knees to look at it.
“Unless you find it handy to keep some kerosene and rags under your porch, I think we can assume whoever did this put them there.”
“Sounds about right.”
Callum pokes at the charred rags. “Well, look at this,” he says. With the stick he brings out one of the rags, and it’s only party burned, one corner seared, but intact. He brings it closer and points to it. “There’s some kind of stamp here. When I get it to my lab, I may be able to make out what it says.”
“It looks like whoever did it wasn’t particularly sophisticated in their methods. Am I right about that?”
He stands up and gives me a hand up. “I was just going back to my truck to get some bags to put this stuff in. Walk with me and I’ll explain a few things.”
On the way to his truck, he tells me he took the job as fire marshal in Bobtail to get a little salary to supplement his retirement and to keep busy. “I retired from the army after twenty-five years and then was a fire inspector for an insurance company for another fifteen before my wife and I moved to Bobtail to be near our family.”
“So you’ve seen a few fires,” I say.
“Yes, sir. What you said about the person who did this not being sophisticated, is right on. Most people who set fires aren’t sophisticated, and this one is about standard. It’s been my assessment that people who set fires like this are desperate one way or another. They’ve got financial problems or a score to settle or they’re covering up something, like a theft or even murder. They’re not people who’ve thought out the business of starting the fire. They just use whatever they can pick up. They assume the fire will burn up the evidence. More often than not, that’s just plain wrong.”
He opens the back of the truck and takes out some serious-looking heavy duty plastic bags with thick plastic closures.
