The Arsonist's Handbook

by L. A. Detwiler

  “I did it, Anna. I made him pay. I got revenge for our son. I made him suffer. I made him burn, too. An eye for an eye.” The words raced out of his mouth. He hated that he wasn’t in control. He’d wanted this to be more collected. He wanted to be stoic and strong. He’d imagined Anna falling into his powerful arms, sobbing on his muscular shoulder, and thanking him for being the man she needed.

  Instead, she wordlessly stared at the license, then back at him, mouth agape. She emitted a whimpering noise like an injured bird.

  “You did what?” she asked, her voice scratchy and barely a whisper.

  He stepped forward, so they were nose to nose. “I did what had to be done. I got revenge for what the bastard did. I took him in a field and I fucking burned him alive. Is that what you want to hear? I burned him until his screams melted away, until he became ash like our son. I burned him so he could feel the pain we feel.” His words were erratic. Even he could hear the craziness in his phrases. As he raved, Anna stepped back. He could taste her fear floating in the air. That made him feel wilder, hungrier to tell his story.

  “I stalked him for a while to make sure. He’s the one responsible for the Watson’s. The bastard’s the arsonist. He’s the one, Anna.”

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?” she asked.

  His fists clenched at the words. She wasn’t getting it. This wasn’t what he wanted.

  “Because, Anna. It was my job. It was my fault, and I had to set it right. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand what I did for us? I did it for us. I did it for him. I did what I had to do.”

  Anna stepped backward, and the distance between them grew in more ways than just physically. Staring at her shaking hands clutching the boy’s wallet, he realized what a mistake this had been. She wasn’t his anymore. She wasn’t his to win back. She probably wasn’t anyone’s, the damage too strong. She was a shell of a woman and would be forever.

  She wasn’t strong like him. She didn’t take action like he did. She wasn’t made of the stuff he was made of. And perhaps, he realized, she was never meant to be his. She wasn’t capable of being his.

  Pete exhaled. He thought about begging her not to say anything. But that was pointless. She would do what she would do. There was no stopping her. And maybe a part of him hoped she turned him in so it could be over, so he wouldn’t have to traverse life without her, without a plan, without a purpose.

  Once, he thought he wanted freedom. He thought the prospect of chasing something new would be exciting. Standing on the doorstep looking at the woman who was all but gone, though, Pete realized that life was so much more complicated than what one wanted. It stemmed from a sense of duty, magnified by a sense of pride.

  One’s pride, one’s honor—that was the only fate you could control.

  “Goodbye, Anna. I loved you. I did it for you. I did it for him.” They were the final words that came to mind, the only phrases he could utter.

  She didn’t answer, and that was all he needed to hear. He backed away, only turning once he got to the bottom of the steps. He nodded at her, taking in the sight of the broken woman he’d tried to rebuild. The broken one, in fairness, he’d ripped to shreds. But some things were beyond repair. Some things couldn’t be made up for. He knew that.

  His brokenness knew that, recognized it all too well.

  He headed to his car, both at peace and war, a paradox that burned into his skin, into his breath, into his being.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Darla

  The knock on the door was an articulate announcement of impending doom. She’d been fortunate to never hear that knock—she’s always taken matters into her own hands. Plus, she’d always been good at what she does. Still, deep down, she always knew this day would come.

  She opened the door slowly, reverently, like it was the door to a sacred sarcophagus. A piece of her surrendered at the sight of the uniformed men, the thing of her nightmares. Nonetheless, she was wise enough to keep her mouth shut. You never offered up words first. That should’ve been a rule somewhere.

  “Ms. Wills? Can we come in?” the one officer asked. A chill ran through her now. But she was always good at reading people. You had to be in her line of work. And he wasn’t looking at her with suspicion or knowing. He looked at her with pity and dread.

  Jameson.

  Shit.

  “Yes,” she said, offering her hand like Vanna White from the television show her parents used to watch every single night. They paraded to the kitchen, where they tell her to sit down.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Ms. Wills. But your son is dead.”

  She heard the news, processed it. It whirled through her body like a tornado hellbent on destruction. But when the words dissipated in the air between them, when they rotated through every fiber of her body, she didn’t feel sadness or grief. She felt like a heap of rubble, incapable of feeling at all. Numbness overtook her.

  Jameson was dead.

  “What?” she asked, sounding like an idiot and scolding herself for it. She should be more elegant in her grief, shouldn’t she? More convincing? The last thing she needed was to get wrapped up in the suspicions. “How? When?” More questions spewed from her as she bowed her head. Tears blurred her eyes. They were genuine, she noted. Her heart caved in a little bit.

  “It was a homicide. We’ve already caught the guy. We’re questioning him now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know this is a lot to take in. We’re going to go over the details. You should know he already confessed. We cornered him with so much evidence, he had to confess. And we think he might be tied to some of the other fires.”

  Her ears perked up at this. Was this a trap? Was this some sort of sick, twisted entrapment?

  “Start explaining,” she ordered icily, knowing if it was a trap, she had nothing to lose.

  “Your son was burned to death, Ms. Wills. He was set on fire in a field at the edge of Elmwood. The accused confessed to his ex-wife.”

  “Who?” she asked, her heart thumping.

  And then she heard the name, and it all made perfect sense.

  It all made perfect sense—she was a terrible fucking mother.

  She would burn, too. They all would.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Pete

  The sting of betrayal still sat heavily in Pete’s mind as the guards led him to the visitation room. His eyes still hurt from the burning fluorescent lights. He felt like he was in some sort of nightmarish hell, and Anna was the ringmaster. She’d turned on him. After all they’d been through, all he’d done for her, she turned on him.

  He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. They’d drifted apart long before the fire, before Tanner, and before Pete’s actions. She was a stranger to him, as he was to her. He should’ve got in his car and drove away after killing the kid. He should’ve left town and never looked back.

  The world certainly did eat you up if you let it. A moment of weakness—a need to win Anna’s approval—had led him here.

  The cuffs cut into his skin. He saw a string of tomorrows all the same. He was guilty. He’d confessed. There was nothing to do now but bide his time.

  As he waited in the visitation room for her, he wondered what she’d come for. A final goodbye? An apology? None of it fucking mattered anyway. Tanner was still dead. He’d avenged him. There was nothing to do now but let the dust settle. His life had been over long before he set that kid ablaze in the field.

  Still, crimes couldn’t go unpunished. He did what he had to do. Regrets were for fragile men. At least he wasn’t that, not anymore.

  Mama would be proud.

  The thought struck him then that perhaps it wasn’t Anna coming to see him. Maybe it was his mother. He wondered what words of wisdom she would spew. She’d made him who he was, though. She couldn’t be too hard on him.

  The door finally creaked open. The room looked nothing like on those crime shows he and Anna used to watch, he realized. It was cold bu
t somehow normal, like he’d been chained up in someone’s depressing back corner office.

  His attention snapped to the door though at the sight of her. Confusion roiled through him and sweat started to form on his forehead. He wrinkled his eyebrows. What the fuck was she doing here? Why? How?

  He shook his head. He gripped the table. He told himself not to faint.

  “You killed my son you bastard,” she said.

  And for a moment, the world simply stood still in the serendipitous truth.

  ***

  He stood over her lifeless body, the bruises on her face. It was like he was staring at a porcelain doll a child had dragged on the cement, had clinked against every hard surface. She was still beautiful, her blonde hair cascading around her. She emitted a groan, and he came to.

  He had snapped. That was all there was to it. He couldn’t even blame alcohol this time. Maybe it was in the way she called him “boy,” or in the defiant look in her eye. Peggy Sue, as she not-so-charmingly called herself, was a prostitute who was unmistakably strong. She had a piece of his mother in her, he realized. A quiet yet taunting power.

  And so, after they had rough sex, the kind he liked, she called him boy. It was probably just a phrase she thought was charming. But it had set him off.

  His fists had found her face, over and over. He had pummeled his fists into her skin, hearing cracks and watching her fade in and out of consciousness. And then, somehow, he had stopped. The businessman Pete Andrews returned, taking over the warrior in training at his mother’s feet. He crawled back from her naked, lifeless body. He sat and stared, horrified at what he’d done.

  He’d fallen so far from the grace he’d tried to build his life around. Gone was the steady, reliable accountant major Anna had fallen for. He was slipping into old habits and vices. And now, a violent ferocity merged with his hunger. He morphed into someone new, someone unrecognizable.

  He had rested his head against the headboard, considering it all. Perhaps it wasn’t that he was becoming someone new. No, deep down, he admitted a harsh truth—he was simply reverting to the true version of who he was. The unloved boy who was raised to be a fierce competitor, a monument of all things strength. The boy who learned love wasn’t real and that you had to look out for yourself.

  He stared at her for a long time until he fell asleep, a niggling piece of his brain wondering if he should seek medical attention—but the stronger part of him saying fuck it.

  When he awoke to her body, he thrust out a hand to feel for a pulse. Still alive. He’d stared at the bruises forming on her face and marveled at the beauty of it. An art teacher told him once that he had the artist’s eye. He didn’t know if that were true, but there was something painstakingly intriguing about the bruises mixing with the fine lines of her weathered face.

  She groaned again, and he thought about straddling her, choking her out, watching her flail around again. But the urge subsided. He had work to attend to. He was a busy man. A needed man. Unlike her, he had people to miss him.

  He flung a fist of twenties on top of her, sprinkling her body with the paper she was worth. He smiled to himself, took one last look at the woman who had made him feel alive again, and then he was gone.

  ***

  She was beautiful, Pete realized as she steadily and defiantly took a seat across from him. She folded her fingers on the tiny metal table and stared directly into him. Where the bruises once had been all those months ago, there now were no signs of his power. She looked like the stronger one.

  She did not act like a mother in grief. She did not weep or show any signs of puffy eyes or sleepless nights. Her back was ramrod straight. He shuddered under her eyes.

  The guard stood nearby, and she seemed fully aware of this. She glanced at him and then back to Pete.

  “You murdered my son,” she whispered to him. Confusion and terror mingled in his chest. What were the chances? What the fuck were the chances? He was not a superstitious man, but it certainly seemed like karma was real. The prostitute he’d abused all those months ago—her son had killed his? Was this her sick, twisted way of getting revenge? Panic settled into him as he realized he’d played a bigger role in Tanner’s death than he’d ever thought. Vomit rose in his throat.

  “He murdered mine,” he managed to choke out, wanting to read her face. To see if she had schemed it all, if that had been how this all had gone down.

  Her eyes narrowed. “He didn’t.”

  “I fucking saw him wandering the town. I watched him for a while to be sure. He was the fucking arsonist.”

  “He was not,” she said adamantly. Her eyes didn’t waver. Her index finger tapped out a beat on her folded hands. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap.

  He observed her, the two in a mental duel that had started months and months ago and had led them here. Two parents who had lost their sons. The connection between them was forever entangled.

  “I saw him.”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “Did you put him up to it? Did you want revenge?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she murmured, and at this, she cracked a subtle smile that may as well have been a huge, toothy beacon of the truth.

  She fucking knew exactly what he meant.

  His head whirled. How had she known? Had she tracked him down? Women like that probably talked. He never used his real name. But his license was always with him. Had one of them searched for it? Had she followed him? Had she tracked him down and then waited for the right moment to send her son?

  He clenched his jaw. The bitch. The stupid bitch.

  “This is all your fault. You killed my son.”

  “The fire killed him. A fire set by an arsonist, Pete,” she said calmly. “But from what I hear, you know that already, don’t you? After you murdered my son in cold blood, the police did their digging. Any psycho who would set a teenage boy on fire is capable of crazy, crazy things. Like setting all those fires in Elmwood. Like even setting his own house on fire.”

  “I didn’t kill my son,” he choked. He’d known they were investigating him for all the fires. But he was certain the truth would come out. He’d told them it had to be Jameson Wills, the boy he’d followed. He told them all the reasons he knew the boy had started the fire.

  “Well, Pete Andrews, know this. Karma’s a bitch. Everyone pays eventually. And you’ll pay for what you did to Jameson. You will. Somehow, in some way. You’ve always paid before, haven’t you?”

  At that, she winked at him. He wanted to spew his accusations. He wanted to ask how and why. But he didn’t have time. She calmly stood from her chair and called for the guard. She turned back to him once more.

  “Be careful who you cross, Pete Andrews. Not all of us are as weak as you think.”

  With that, she was gone, and he was left with nothing but days and days of tomorrows to fill with questions she would never answer.

  And perhaps that was the worst kind of hell—never knowing if he had killed the right one, if he had avenged Tanner, and if his actions from those days in the motel had led to the death of everything that mattered.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Darla

  She didn’t need a reason to burn the night she set Pete Andrews's house ablaze. She never needed a reason to watch the satisfying flames, the billowing smoke, the beauty of the scene she created. She didn’t need a reason—but she sure fucking had one.

  She’d walked away from that life, all those years ago when Jameson’s father disappeared.

  Or burned to a crisp underneath the dense forest covering, she thought to herself. The bastard deserved it after she caught him with those racy online messages with that slut.

  Still, after she’d exacted her revenge and set him ablaze one night when he was drunk, she’d looked at her son, Jameson, in the living room. She told herself she’d be better for him. He needed someone to create a normal life for him. She wanted more for him. She didn’t want to risk getting caught and him sent to foster care where real monsters
preyed in disgusting ways.

  So she’d quit cold turkey. Did the pull of the flame call to her? All the time.

  Did she think about giving in? Absolutely.

  But through his sixteen years, she’d been too busy to pursue her passion, in many ways. The journal she’d kept was carefully stowed in the attic and some of her supplies were left forgotten in the shed and basement. She was done with that part of her life. She would find other passions, other ways to relieve her stress.

  Being a single mom was exhausting, though, and there was never enough money. So she took up the job at the diner with Joe, a guy she’d met at the bank when he made his deposits. But even then, money was tight. And, in truth, any free time she had led to temptation. The busier she was, the less likely she was to give in.

  She knew in many ways she was a shitty mother. Never home, never giving the boy what he needed. He was different, though. So much like his father—an outlier, happy to be on the edges looking in. She supposed there was an element of that to her as well. You can’t be an arsonist, after all, and be completely part of acceptable society. Still, her craving for flame was rooted in the need for power, the desire to control destinies—her own and others.

  Jameson was rooted in a deep-seated feeling he was different from everyone—including her. It drove a wedge between them. If that weren’t bad enough, there was also the fact he looked so much like his father. Looking at him was like looking at a fucking specter reminding her of what she’d done. She looked at her son and saw a fleshy version of his burned father. It was hard some days to look at him at all.

  So when a regular at Joe’s diner asked her if she did any work on the side with her sweet tits, she shrugged and thought why not. It had been so long since she’d been with a man, but her husband had always told her she was good in bed. And when the random, scruffy man offered her two hundred bucks for an hour, she knew she could use her prowess to better her position.

  She started taking fewer hours at the diner and more and more hours at the motel a town over. It wasn’t just about the money, though. It was so much more. It was about the luxurious power she craved found in a new way. Suddenly, her old thirst for the fire was quenched with a sexual fire with strangers. And they paid her for it. She was hooked.