Twilight

  War? I thought. Famine? Plague?

  At the end, many onlookers burst into applause, which I could only hope was specific to the sympathy they felt for her on this night. I was heartened to overhear a woman whisper to another, “That phony bitch! If she’s so sad for her family, why isn’t she over there helping her poor mother and father?”

  Good question, I thought, but I knew the answer as well as they and Ardyth did: Opportunist to the end, she had political fish to fry in this fire.

  And whom wasn’t I surprised to glimpse in the background of the interview? None other than Ardie’s de facto prime minister, Peter Falwell himself. He was looking gimlet-eyed and evilly Machiavellian, I thought, but maybe it was the flickering light playing tricks with my eyes.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said, as Lewis Riss appeared beside me.

  “Hey, Cain, got any marshmallows?”

  He reached under my hair and tugged on my left earlobe. Lew always had taken personal liberties that the degree of our friendship had never supported. He was dressed macho again, this time in a snug black body-builder T-shirt over equally snug black jeans that displayed every bulge of his, uh, thighs. Most of the rest of us in the crowd were snuggled into warm jackets and sweaters, but not Lew—he had his new muscles to keep him warm. Man, I thought, catching the catty drift of my own thoughts, this supposed old pal was pissing me off even more than Ardie Kennedy did. The very small part of my brain that was managing to remain emotionally detached, wondered: Why?

  I ignored his tasteless joke.

  “Almost makes me pine to be a reporter again,” he said, grinning at the fire and then at me. “I’m a sensation junkie.”

  “Where were you,” I demanded of him, beating around no bushes, “around five-thirty to six o’clock yesterday afternoon?”

  His maddening grin reappeared. “You mean the highway blockade? Kinda looks like our work, doesn’t it?”

  “And what about throwing logs at motorcycle riders, Lew?” I was infuriated by his bad-boy attitude. “Is that kinda like your work, too? The kid who got hurt, Lew? He’s like a son to us.”

  He is? I thought, startled by my own dramatic license. If it hadn’t been such a serious matter, I might have laughed at myself.

  “Hey,” Lew protested, raising his arms in mock defense against me. “Lighten up, Cain. Would I hurt you or yours?” He pointed a forefinger at me like a pistol and lifted one eyebrow in an expression of outraged innocence. “Think it over!”

  Maybe I owed him an apology, but since he hadn’t even answered my original question, I wasn’t feeling any remorse about it.

  “Okay then, where were you when it happened?”

  “With my friends.” Emphasis on the last word.

  “Where were they?”

  “With me.”

  “And where was that?”

  “What is this, Cain? Do I need to call my lawyer? You gonna read me my rights? Aren’t you a little confused? Isn’t your husband the one who’s the cop?”

  A crashing sound behind us caused me to turn away from him—just in time to see part of the roof on the adjoining building to the south go crashing in. A collective gasp surged through the crowd as new flames and sparks flew high into the smokey sky.

  When I turned back around, Lew was gone.

  To a mysterious eleven-o’clock meeting by the bridge, I wondered?

  And what would they do there, celebrate a successful fire?

  No. I couldn’t believe it of Lew. I couldn’t. And besides, why would I even think they would do this, when there wasn’t any reason to connect First Things First either to the Kennedys or to their Dime Store?

  I shook off the odd, irrational, unwelcome notion.

  The crowd remained for hours, long into the night, and some of us even into the first minutes or hours of the next morning. I saw Nellie and Bill Kennedy leave, and who could blame them, as there was nothing they could do, and this was heartbreaking for them to watch.

  By midnight, we all had speckles of soot on us and our cars, gritty souvenirs of an unforgettable night in our town. I stood for a long time with the mayor and her husband, who was a minister. They were magnets, drawing citizens over to them to share reminiscences, to criticize, to opine. I came in for some of that myself, mostly to do with the festival. It was fascinating—the whole thing—like watching a huge living organism, which happened to be our community, move and shift and feel its collective emotions and think its collective thoughts. The only people who seemed out of it were the strangers and the newcomers. I saw the Post Haste delivery woman wandering in and out among the parked cars, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself, compared to the focus of longtime residents. They—we—knew why we were there—to witness the passing of an era, and to be able to say years later, “I was there the night the Dime Store burned.”

  The only others whose appearance jarred with the natives that night were the Halloween protestors. I looked for the El Greco man, but didn’t see him among them. By now, I could recognize several of the others, however. They stood in a tight little huddle in the crowd, forming their own private island in the sea of spectators. The expressions on their faces as they stared at the conflagration were so smug, so self-righteously “I told you so,” that I couldn’t stand to look at them for very long. What were they thinking, I wondered? That this fire paid the wages of sin? That this is what you got for selling Halloween costumes? At that moment, they looked about as attractive to me as the Frankenstein monster mask that was probably a melted puddle of latex by then.

  The buildings on either side of the store were total losses, too. The fire department heroically limited the devastation to those three structures, however, although businesses for blocks around would be dusting ashy residue off their premises for months to come.

  Geof found me a little after midnight and said, “They can get along without me. Let’s go home.” On the way back, he called the police dispatcher.

  “Nobody made Lew’s meeting,” he told me.

  A few minutes later, he slammed the palm of his right hand against the steering wheel. “Damn! I made a mistake about that, Jenny. After this fire … I should have done the surveillance on that meeting, myself.”

  “Geof, there’s no reason to think FTF set it. Is there?”

  He shook his head, looking thoughtful. “No. But they’re in town. You saw Lew at the fire. And you know how it is with groups like that, Jenny, sometimes they have reasons that don’t necessarily make any sense to the rest of us. Damn! I should have been there.”

  We were only able to sleep for a couple of hours, before the phone rang on his side of the bed.

  “Bushfield,” he snapped into the receiver, the cop in him coming awake first.

  I heard the babble of an excited, high voice.

  “Mrs. Kennedy,” he said, in a calm, firm, steadying tone, and I immediately sat up in bed, alert, listening. “Mrs. Kennedy, have you called 911? That’s good. How are you, right now? How is your husband?”

  He listened and again I heard high threads of hysteria from the phone. Nellie? I thought. What more? What now?

  “Mrs. Kennedy.” He kept saying her name, focusing her on the fact of her identity. “Do you feel safe now? Have you relocked all the doors? Do you think you’ll be all right until officers and the paramedics arrive?”

  “What?” I whispered, not expecting an answer.

  “You could call neighbors to come over to be with you,” he said next. “Yes, all right, we can do that. Yes, Jenny, too. We’ll leave for your house as soon as you and I get off the phone. Mrs. Kennedy? It’s over. Hang on to that thought, will you? And remember that the cavalry’s on its way.” He smiled a little, and I felt the reassurance emanating out from him over the telephone wires to her. “Hang in there.”

  I was already out of bed and pulling on jeans and sweatshirt.

  “What happened, Geof?”

  He tossed the covers off and stepped naked out of bed. “’Some thugs were w
aiting at Nellie and Bill Kennedy’s house when they got home from the fire. Beat Nellie up—”

  I gasped, but there was more.

  “Beat up on Bill, tore up their house.”

  I was too shocked for speech, but my thoughts were clear enough: How could anyone do such a thing? And why? And were they the same people who hurt David?

  We finished dressing and left a note for the kid.

  The first time I found speech, it was to ask, “Why’d she call us?”

  “You.”

  “Okay, me. She had to know we’re a package deal, though. Order one foundation director—”

  “And get one cop thrown in, for free.”

  I laughed a little as I pulled a brush through my hair. “We’re doing each other’s punch lines now.”

  “That’s probably just as well, sweetheart.” He was standing in the bedroom doorway, waiting for me to put away the brush and hurry down the stairs with him. “Since you can never remember the punch lines to jokes.”

  I had to laugh again, in agreement

  And it was thus that we happened to distract ourselves from my original question, which was: Why did Nellie call us—me—when she surely had a town-full of other, older, better friends to call? If she wanted the presence, the comfort, of a friend … why me?

  We made it out to the Kennedys’ in just under twenty minutes.

  On the way out, Geof called in to headquarters to ask who had been sent out ahead of us and to let them know he was coming, too. That’s when we found out what the rest of Port Frederick wouldn’t know until morning …

  Fireman had found a body under the stockroom rubble of the Dime Store. So far, unidentified and unidentifiable.

  “The fire was so hot,” Geof told me, “that it charred a silver cross the victim was wearing.”

  And that’s how I came to be the first person to know the identity of the single human casualty of the fire.

  “It’s the El Greco man,” I said.

  Of course, I didn’t know his name.

  I remembered that handsome, dramatic face, and I felt very disturbed. He, not I, had walked into the fires of hell.

  But had he also set them?

  16

  THERE WAS STILL A LOT OF SMOKE IN THE AIR.

  We couldn’t see it, but we could smell it—a pungent woodiness—especially in low places in the road where it gathered in aromatic pools, like invisible, fragrant fog. I began to feel that we were coated in it, our clothes, skin, hair, even the car. It was odd to think that our entire hometown was now similarly perfumed, as if we had all bathed the previous evening in a scent called Nostalgia. Or, been hung in a woodshed, to soak the smoky flavor of the fire into our pores.

  We paused at the large red stop sign that was becoming very familiar to me, before turning into the Kennedys’ driveway. Two police cars. An emergency medical van. A dark Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan parked behind the cop cars, arrogantly angled in behind them, blocking their way out. That was obviously somebody who’d arrived after the cops had, I thought, and I could guess who it was, just from the way the car was parked. At least she hadn’t blocked the med van.

  Geof pulled the Jeep onto the grass, out of the way.

  It looked like every light in the house was on.

  Nellie and Bill had raised Ardyth in this modest house. In the daylight, what you saw when you looked at it was white siding, shake shingle roof, a sort of farmhouse-looking structure, with spare parts added on—an upstairs dormer bedroom that stuck out in an architecturally ungainly fashion above the original first floor, an enlarged kitchen in back, and a clump of a room stuck onto the west side, where one of the original bedrooms had been expanded to provide a television den.

  It was clunky, ugly, and oddly inviting, from the outside.

  Inside, everytime I’d seen it, it was messy in the way houses can get when both the husband and wife work (as I ought to know), with papers strewn around, along with enough paraphernalia to make it look like an annex to their store: boxes of unsold this and that and marvelous, colorful, useless cast-off bric-a-brac.

  And yet, there was still living, walking, sitting space within, and there was something about the old, unfashionable slipcovered furniture that made a person want to take off his shoes and sit down and stay awhile.

  That’s how it had appeared to me, anyway, on the few occasions I was there when I was growing up. I recalled a birthday party, possibly two of them, for Ardyth, when her mother had probably forced her to invite all the girls in our class. And there’d been a couple of committee meetings in high school. And then there was my midnight visit in January, of course.

  It was a perfect house for a politician to come from, I thought—modest, unassuming, kind of populist-looking. And it looked a great place to live or to visit, for a child, because of all those things from their store. Can you imagine, having as your best girlfriend when you were, say, eight, a kid who had never-ending, free access to unlimited arts and crafts supplies, and toys and candy and doll clothes and doll furniture? I had always wished I liked Ardyth—or, failing that, that at least she liked me—so I could dive into that cornucopia of doodads! But, no such luck. Bad chemistry had kept us apart, all the way back to kindergarten.

  The lie she told about me then—by the way—the first one I remember, was that I didn’t wear any underpants. “Jenny, Jenny, doesn’t wear panties!” I’d had to show a few girls that I did, just to prove Ardie wrong. And, of course, she’d made hay with that, too. “Jenny, Jenny, shows her panties!”

  Mortifying, at five.

  A grown-up would have forgiven her, by now.

  Bitch, I thought, the minute I suspected that was her car blocking the police cars in her parents’ driveway. If only I’d had such a useful vocabulary back then, in kindergarten!

  “What are you doing here?”

  She wanted to know, when she answered our knock at her parents’ front door and then blocked our access to the inside of the house.

  “Your mother asked us to come,” I told her.

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. You’re always pushing in where you don’t belong, Jenny. You’re here to pick up any scandal you can use against me in the election, aren’t you? You’re here for Mary.”

  I nearly voiced the only rational response that came to my mind: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” But I didn’t.

  “I don’t know about my wife,” Geof said, in a voice so dry it could have passed for British. He had reached into one of his back pockets and pulled out his wallet, and now he flipped his police identification at Ardyth’s pugnacious face. “But I’m here on police business, Miss Kennedy.”

  Ardyth made a frequent public point of distancing herself from “Ms.” God forbid she should be linked in the voters’ minds with those dangerous feminists!

  Her face turned slightly red at his multilayered gibe.

  “Knock it off, Bushfield.”

  Looking as reluctant to let us in as if we were the people who’d assaulted her parents, Ardyth opened the front door a little wider. Wide enough, it turned out, to admit only one person at a time. Geof was closest, so he stepped through first.

  I moved one foot—and found the door closed in my face.

  “Ardyth!” I protested to the door.

  I knew what to expect next. Geof would use the opportunity to get Nellie’s permission to let me in, and Ardyth could scream and yell all she wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference, not if Nellie said, “I invited her.” I did, for a moment however, recall the way Nellie had seemed to cave in to her daughter the other morning in front of the Dime Store, the way, in fact, Nellie had always caved in, rather than stand up to her willful, spoiled offspring. Oh, dear, I thought, am I going to be left standing out here in the dark, on the front stoop?

  It took about a minute, while I grew nervous.

  But then the door opened to the sight of my husband, shaking his head at whatever had transpired within. He was alone.

  “Where’s the twit?”
I whispered to him, as he let me in.

  “Arguing with her mother.”

  “About?”

  “You.”

  “Now? She’s arguing with poor Nellie about me, now? Miss Sensitivity, isn’t she? If I had a daughter like that, I wouldn’t be satisfied with merely disowning her. I’d hire a hit man.”

  Geof hid his laughter by disguising it as a cough.

  I took my attention off the multiple character flaws of the daughter long enough to register what had happened to the home of the parents. What I saw made me reach for Geof and whisper an exclamation of surprise and dismay.

  It looked like a broken dollhouse.

  Lamps, knocked off tables, shattered on the carpet.

  Ashtrays, statuettes, much of the accumulated and displayed mementos of their lives, thrown about, most of them broken.

  It looked as if somebody had taken something like a pool cue or a cane and swept everything off every surface in the living room and—when I looked beyond—the dining room. In there, I saw about a dozen shipping boxes upended on the floor. When we walked past, I saw they looked as if somebody with big feet had stomped on them, probably smashing whatever they held.

  I began to feel more afraid for Nellie.

  “Geof?” I whispered. “Is she badly hurt?”

  “I don’t know, but I think maybe not.”

  There wasn’t time for us to sightsee any further, or to talk about the mess around us, because there was too much else going on to demand our—particularly his—attention.

  In the kitchen we found, not Ardyth arguing with her mother, but Nellie, Bill, three uniformed police officers, and two paramedics. It wasn’t a very large kitchen, and now it seemed as crowded as a utensil drawer, with brawny people and starched uniforms.