“I c’n help you guys,” Hayley offered.
“Oh shit no. I’d love it but if Nancy showed up while me and Aidan are supposed to be working and she found you there working with us . . . ? She’d go nuclear. And Aidan’s got to talk to the sheriff about the fire in that fishing shack before the sheriff talks to him, Hayley. But he won’t, and no one is listening to me no matter how I go at it.”
She took a final hit before she dropped her cigarette and carefully smashed it with her foot. She looked over at the kids gathered in dissolving ranks as the wait for the all clear extended. She said, “There better not be a fire,” more to herself than to Hayley, and then she swung around and announced, “I got to tell you something, Hayley, but you have to swear that you won’t say anything. If you can’t do that, then I won’t say but I need to say so please, Hayley.”
Hayley had never heard Isis sound so desperate. “What?”
“You swear?”
“Okay. Yeah. What’s wrong?”
“Aidan likes to start fires.”
“What?”
Isis looked around furtively. “He was in a special school. A boarding school for, you know, kids with problems? He was there for two years because he set fires. They were real small at first, just a kid having fun with matches, but they got bigger till a whole apartment building burnt down . . . God, you can’t tell anyone. But it’s why he has to talk to the sheriff before the sheriff finds out about the special school on his own. See, everybody knew he was disturbed. And I keep saying that he has to tell the sheriff about it or my mom needs to call the sheriff or something because if someone doesn’t tell him, he’s going to think that Aidan’s hiding something. And Aidan’s not hiding anything, I swear it. Only now with this shack and the guy dying inside? Hayley, Aidan didn’t set that fire. It was an accident.”
Isis was tearing at her fingernails with her teeth. She flung her hand down and said, “How disgusting,” and she lit another cigarette. She said to Hayley, “Is he around? Do you see him?” and Hayley knew she was talking about Aidan.
Hayley looked among the students, but it was an impossible task. Kids were milling around as the wait for the all clear went on and on, and the fire fighters scurried around the school checking to see if there was indeed a fire. She didn’t see Aidan anywhere. But she also didn’t smell any smoke, other than from Isis’s cigarette.
She said no, that she couldn’t see him.
Isis said, “He’s cured. Completely or they wouldn’t’ve let him out. That’s what they said. But if he isn’t, I’m in so much more trouble because I was s’posed to watch him only how am I s’posed to watch him one hundred percent of the time. See, I saw him with that stick at the party: how it was on fire and he was playing with it and acting loony but there I was with Parker and all I was thinking was how if him and me hooked up, that’d really fix Brady and he needs to be fixed and so does that bitchy Madison Ridgeway because . . . God, my life is so screwed up right now. If I didn’t have you, I’d blow my brains out.”
Hayley decided then and there that this wasn’t the moment to do what a close girlfriend would do and let Isis know about Parker Natalia’s visit to the farm and his declaration about wanting a chance with her. She realized she needed to clear this with Isis because she was her friend and because, after all, Isis might truly be interested in Parker. But to lay that on her when Isis was already in such a state about her brother . . . ? She couldn’t do it.
THIRTY
When Hayley was sent for a second time that day, during the last ten minutes of the final class period, she assumed that Tatiana Primavera was calling her to the office to have the meeting aborted earlier. But when her Spanish teacher gave her the call slip, she discovered that she was being called not to the administrative offices but to the band room.
Since she was in the jazz band, Hayley figured that something had come up, like a new rehearsal time. When she entered the band room, however, it wasn’t to see the jazz band director or the members of the band either. This didn’t have a thing to do with jazz, for the gathered kids had all been at the Maxwelton Beach party, and calling them together like this didn’t bode well for the next few minutes, especially considering who’d called for them.
Hayley recognized the fire chief from his uniform. He’d taken off his hat, but it was tucked under his arm, and he was talking soberly to Mr. Vansandt. Hayley heard her name called, and she looked around to see Isis waving her over just as she’d done earlier in the day.
When the door closed upon the last student, Mr. Vansandt went to a music stand that stood in the conductor’s position in front of the chairs where the students were sitting. He said gravely, “This won’t take long, for those of you worried about missing the bus home. Chief Levitt has asked me to gather you together.”
A murmur rose among the kids. Karl Levitt set his hat on the music stand and observed them all. He said, “Here’s what you need to know. We’ll get to the bottom of this sooner or later, but it’s going to be a helluva lot easier on everyone if you guys make it sooner.”
The murmur among the kids grew in strength. Across from her, Hayley saw Becca King and Derric Mathieson lean their heads together and begin to talk. Becca, she noted, took her hearing device from her ear, as if she couldn’t stand to know the worst.
The worst was what Chief Levitt next said. “This happens sometimes when a fire occurs at night. Till you can get a decent look at the location in the light of day, you just don’t know. That’s how it was with the fishing shack that burnt down. We didn’t know, but now we do.”
Isis hissed in a breath. Hayley looked at her. Her blue eyes were stricken.
“It was logical to think at first that the fire was an accident: some doped-up fool not watching out when he was cooking his food or trying to stay warm. But now we know it was something different. The way I see things, someone sitting right here in this room knows that, too. And it’s going to go a hell of a lot easier on him if he comes forward.”
One of the boys—Hayley couldn’t see who it was—called out, “You saying someone set that shack on fire?”
“An astute observation,” Karl Levitt acknowledged dryly.
“So does that mean . . . What’s that mean?” It was another voice.
“What it means is that we’re going to begin with the fire starter and work from there,” Karl Levitt told them. “He comes forward, it’s one thing. Someone turns him in, it’s another. We have to dig him out of you all, it’s a third.”
“He wants someone to rat,” a boy murmured close by. It was one of the jocks, Hayley saw. The kid looked around, probably for a likely suspect he could point out to the fire chief.
The rest of the kids said nothing. And the only other thing the fire chief said was, “You guys think about that, okay? Mr. Vansandt here knows how to get in touch with me. Anything that anyone tells us will remain confidential. For now.”
• • •
IT WAS THE for now that got everyone talking. They broke off into tight little groups once the principal and the fire chief allowed them to leave the band room. Hayley gravitated to her lunch table friends who were near the athletic trophy case. Isis went to talk to her brother. They ducked out of the building together.
Jenn McDaniels was talking when Hayley joined the others. She was, it seemed, trying to pump Derric for information. If there was something to be known about the fire and the demise of the druggie and what it meant, surely Sheriff Mathieson would know it and, through him, Derric would know it, too.
“What’re we talking?” Jenn was demanding. “If someone set that fire and there was someone inside that house, is this, like, murder? Or what?”
Becca said, “No one could’ve known that guy was hiding out there. And if someone started a fire and didn’t know there was someone in the house . . . That’s not murder, is it?”
“Your ass it is,” Jenn told her.
“Isn’t it?” she asked Derric.
“Not first degree, I don’t think,” he said.
“But if you’re committing a crime—like robbing a bank—and someone dies, that makes it murder. First degree.”
“If you rob a bank,” Squat put in, “you c’n see all the other people there. You know they’re there and you rob the bank anyway and you end up shooting someone. This is different.”
“No way. You don’t get some special . . . special . . . excuse or something,” Jenn pointed out.
“Don’t know,” Derric said. “And my dad’s not saying. I only know what you guys know: Someone set the fire, and it wasn’t an accident.”
“But you can find out more, can’t you?” Hayley asked him. “If the sheriff thinks it’s murder, your dad’ll tell you.” If Derric did find out, he’d tell the rest of them and she could let Isis know. And if what Isis had said about Aidan starting fires in California was true . . . that a whole apartment building burned down . . . God, she was going to have to tell someone, wasn’t she? Now that they knew the fire had been set and a guy had died as a result. If she didn’t tell . . . if she didn’t talk Isis into telling . . . if Isis couldn’t convince Aidan to talk to the sheriff . . .
Hayley saw that Becca had fixed her gaze directly on her. It was a grave gaze, as if the other girl was actually reading her thoughts from her expression. Hayley tried to make her face a perfect blank. She needed to think everything through.
“S’pose,” Derric said in answer to her question. It was a question that, at this point, Hayley had entirely forgotten. But he was looking at her, and she realized that she’d been the person to ask it: Could Derric find out from his dad what the real situation was?
Jenn said, “Well, you ask me, we need to know. ’Cause there were people at that party who weren’t even from this school and if someone started that fire, then it could have been one of them.” She used her fingers to count off the suspects. “There were those guys that showed up with the booze. They looked like Navy guys from up at the base, didn’t they? There were three of them. And then there was Parker, that fiddler from Canada. And two kids who already graduated from here and at least three others from the alternative school.”
“If Chief Levitt came here, he probably’s talked to those guys too,” Squat Cooper said. “He’s not gonna just point the finger at us.”
“There’s those other fires, though,” Becca said quietly. She was frowning, as if looking inward. But then her gaze shifted to Hayley and her eyes seemed to bore right into Hayley’s soul. “They’ve been getting bigger and worse since the first one, haven’t they?” she asked everyone in general. But Hayley knew Becca was asking her, although she couldn’t figure out why.
“Cops need to figure out who was at each fire.”
Squat looked from one of them to the other and he was the one to put it into words. “We all were, weren’t we?” he said to Jenn.
THIRTY-ONE
Seth heard about the change in the Maxwelton fire investigation from a fellow carpenter on the job site north of Freeland. The guy was one of the island’s volunteer fire fighters and also a neighbor and friend of Karl Levitt. He’d been there to help douse the fishing shack fire, so the fire chief had passed the word to him. It wasn’t a secret anyway. The last issue of the South Whidbey Record had been all over the developing story.
Seth decided to drive up to Coupeville after work to have a talk with the undersheriff. For in combination with the warnings he’d heard from the bass player in BC Django 21, Seth had realized that Parker Natalia had been on the island since before the very first fire. While Seth told himself he hated to be a snitch, he also told himself that the cops needed to know that along with his presence at the Maxwelton Beach party, Parker had been camping in his car at the fairgrounds when the fire occurred there. The sheriff would want to check him out.
Of course, Seth also knew there was another reason for his trekking up to Coupeville to talk to the sheriff, and that reason was Hayley. He had to protect her, he told himself.
So Seth went to Coupeville, ten miles north of the building site. The undersheriff was in, as it happened. Seth had been hoping that maybe Dave Mathieson wouldn’t be there, and he’d’ve been able just to leave a message along the lines of “Check out a dude called Parker Natalia from Nelson, B.C., because he’s been on the island since the fires started.” But when he stopped at the reception desk and asked for the undersheriff, he was told to “wait over there, please,” and he took himself to a bench and picked up a magazine on golfing, which he pretended to read.
Ten minutes after he got there, Dave Mathieson came out. He said Seth’s name and he extended his hand. There had been bad blood between them when Derric had been hurt in the woods the previous year, but that seemed to be forgotten now.
“Good to see you,” Dave said to him. “Come on back.”
He seemed to know that Seth was there on business, so that made things a little easier. He took Seth through to where the offices were, which was mercifully not where the interview rooms and the holding cells were. Seth had seen those already, up close and way too personal.
Inside his office, Dave indicated a chair for Seth and took the one behind the desk for himself. He leaned back, yawned, said, “Damn long day,” and then added, “What’s up?”
“I heard about the fire,” Seth told him. “The guy that died inside the shack? I work with one of the volunteers, and he told me about it.”
Dave said, “I heard you’re doing construction now. Good for you, Seth.”
Seth thanked him politely. He said that he’d been thinking things over and something had dawned on him once he sorted through the number of fires they’d had on the island since the first one in July.
Dave nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He looked interested, though, so Seth went on.
“There’s this guy.” He leaned forward, his hands between his knees. He tried to sound earnest but also reluctant because he was earnest and he was reluctant. He said, “I hate to be a snitch, Sheriff Mathieson, but now with that guy dying inside the shack . . . ? When someone eats it because of what someone else has done . . . ?”
“You mean when someone sets a fire and someone else dies,” Dave said.
“Yeah. I mean, before it didn’t seem . . . Well, aside from the property involved, it wasn’t harmful except the fire at the fairgrounds and the animals and all that, but now it’s a person and . . .”
Seth was sort of hoping Dave Mathieson would bail him out by saying something like, “Ah. You have a detail for us, don’t you?” and opening up his cop’s notebook or whatever they had. But the undersheriff didn’t do this. He just waited and pretty much forced Seth to rat out a friend.
So Seth gave him Parker’s name, which of course the sheriff already had since he had the names of every person who’d been at the Maxwelton party. But what he didn’t have was the “watch out for this guy” and the “he could be trouble” that Seth had heard from the BC Django 21 bass player. What he also didn’t have was the information about where Parker had been staying till he moved to the tree house in Ralph Darrow’s woods. When Dave Mathieson heard all this from Seth’s betraying lips, he made a note of the fact.
He said, “Staying at the fairgrounds? We didn’t know that. He was up front about when he’d arrived on the island, but as to where he was staying—”
“You mean you’ve talked to him already?”
“We’re in the process of talking to everyone, asking them to account for where they were every time there was a fire.” Dave smiled thinly. “Haven’t got to you yet but now that you’re here . . . What’ve you got to say about where you were, Seth?”
“Not at the fairgrounds, not the night of that fire,” Seth told him. “We had a gig in Monroe, me and the Triple Threat guys. And hey, I don’t start fires.”
“Nobody does,” Sheriff Mathieson s
aid. “That’s what they keep telling me.”
• • •
SETH LEFT, THINKING he hadn’t done much good despite dropping the word to the sheriff that Parker Natalia had been sleeping in his car at the fairgrounds. As for the rest of the fires and Parker’s whereabouts: He’d been at the high school for the fire that had occurred during Djangofest and he’d been at the party at Maxwelton Beach and who knew where else he’d been aside from definitely on the island from the very moment the first fire had started in that trash bin over at Bailey’s Corner.
Seth drove to his grandfather’s house. Sometimes only a gab session with Ralph Darrow would cheer Seth straight when he was feeling rotten. And he was definitely feeling rotten about Parker because he knew the main issue in his mind was really Hayley and not some druggie who’d died when a shack burnt down.
At Ralph Darrow’s house the porch lights were on in the fading evening, and through the windows he could see Becca at work in the kitchen. He went inside without knocking, as was his habit. He said, “Hey,” to Becca and he looked around. “Where’s Grand?” he asked.