How to Start a Fire (41 page)

Mrs. Popovsky was duly impressed by the job candidate but had to admit that she thought the young woman overqualified, based on her knowledge of Melvil Dewey and several other topics that arose during the interview. Kate told her that her primary occupation for the last ten years had been barista. Her unambitious employment history worked in her favor. She was hired on the spot.

After Kate spent a night in the town’s official motel—the Prairie Basin Inn—Popovsky phoned and told Kate that she knew of a woman renting a room at her farmhouse, just a few miles out of the city. A single bed, a dresser, a writing table, and a twelve-inch television provided the entire décor. Mrs. Bennett, now in her late seventies, was slightly hard of hearing, so the entire interview sounded like a conversation held over the cheers of a ball game.

“Rent is two hundred a month. With a two-hundred-dollar security deposit!”

“Okay!”

“No male guests!”

“I don’t know any males in town!”

“If you meet them, don’t invite them over!”

“Okay!”

“How long do you think you’ll be staying?”

“I don’t know!” Kate honestly and loudly said.

“Me neither!” Mrs. Bennett said, punctuating the reply with a wink.

Kate paid cash on the spot and lugged in all her worldly possessions in two short jaunts from the car. Mrs. Bennett commended her on packing light.

Kate managed to shelve the books in a fraction of the time that Mrs. Popovsky expected. Sometimes Kate would hide the cart among the stacks and nestle herself in a corner, reading whatever struck her fancy. Occasionally Popovsky would come looking for her, but the brushing sound the heavy fabric of her clothes made gave Kate ample time to look busy. Although she wasn’t certain that Popovsky would even care. Three weeks after she started, Kate didn’t even bother looking over her shoulder when she heard Popovsky coming.

Kate knelt with her back against a warren of Nancy Drew mysteries and read a book on the history of wool, which included some surprising facts on the fabric that Mrs. Popovsky so favored.

For instance, wool was remarkably stain resistant due to the overlapping scales on the fiber’s surface. Unlike some fabrics, it protected against body odor.
Although it still stinks when it’s wet
, Kate thought. A coin toss. Wool could both absorb and release the sweat. Its resilient fibers could be bent close to 20,000 times without breaking; compare that to silk, the fibers of which had a lifespan of about 4,500 bends. More important, it was naturally flame resistant; it smoldered rather than flamed, and the burn products did not lodge in wounds, which was why it was used to clothe military personnel. And if you were concerned about the sheep that the wool came from, Australia had developed a revolutionary process that caused a sheep to shed its entire fleece at once so it did not have to endure what appeared to be the rather brutal shearing procedure.

She couldn’t determine how this revolutionary system worked. A pill? A shot? Were there side effects? She would look into the matter later.

Kate felt her phone buzz in her pocket as she was reading. She was so unaccustomed to phone calls, it startled her out of her reading coma, and she snapped the book shut as if caught in an illicit act. She looked at the phone in her pocket and noted that the call was from George. One of her routine check-ins, she assumed. She would return the call later. Kate unfurled her legs and got to her feet, shaking her body out, like a swimmer before a race. She shoved the cart along the precisely maintained Dewey system and shelved a few more books at warp speed. Before she left for the day, she checked out a book on the history of soap.

In winter, Mrs. Bennett fed her fire from morning until night. She kept her thermostat at fifty-two degrees. She wore a wool sweater that she’d knit herself and sometimes a scarf and hat. A cup of weak tea warmed her hands.

Kate’s bedroom was exposed on three sides, and the wood frame had little insulation. She kept a portable heater one foot from the bed and slipped under the covers the moment she returned home. She wore two sweaters and a skullcap at all times. In the evenings she read from whatever she had checked out of the library. She thought it was solitude that she needed, even though she had always felt alone. She sometimes saw flashes, like images from a slide show, of herself from the outside. Her ridiculous monastic existence. Thirty-one years old and she was sleeping in a twin bed on a foam mattress over metal coils. She spent her days studying anything that had nothing to do with her.

A rotary-dial phone sat on the floor of Kate’s bedroom. It rarely rang, but when it did, the room vibrated. It rang now, and Kate’s heart skipped a beat. It rang a second time, and Mrs. Bennett picked up.

“Hello. Hello. Who? Oh, yes. One moment, please.”

Kate picked up the phone as she heard Mrs. Bennett’s footsteps shuffling toward her door.

“I got it!” Kate shouted. “Hello.”

“Kate, it’s George.”

“How’d you get this number?”

“I called the library.”

“She shouldn’t give my number out to strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“Mrs. Popovsky doesn’t know that.”

“I got a phone call from Colin.”

“What happened to attorney-client privilege?”

“He doesn’t think of himself as your attorney. He’s just the treasurer of Golden Retrieval Inc.”

“Still, he should use some discretion.”

“I thought you were on a road trip,” George said.

“I was,” said Kate. “Now I’m not anymore.”

“Colin said you were roaming the country impersonating a woman named Sarah Lake and then giving money to complete strangers under the corporate name Golden Retrieval Inc. It’s too crazy for him to make that shit up. He said if you were related to him, he would have toyed with the idea of having you committed.”

“I’m glad I’m not related to him.”

“I pressed him for details, but there was one question he couldn’t answer. As far as I know, the last time anyone saw Sarah Lake was ten years ago. Why are you using her identity?”

“I’m just using her name because I can’t use my own.”

“Next question: Why are you giving your money away?”

“It makes me feel better.”

“It made you feel better to give close to fifty thousand dollars to a woman named Evelyn Baker?”

“It did.”

“Who is she, Kate?”

“She’s the daughter of the man I killed.”

Until that moment, Kate hadn’t admitted to anyone what she was doing. But now that her business was done, she could say it.

For years George had tried to banish her memories of that night, eventually relenting and accepting that they would never go away. It was with her forever, and now she realized she could live with that. But she’d always thought of that night as hers alone. It happened to her; his hands were around her neck. But Kate’s hands were on the vodka bottle. George never thought of it as murder; she hadn’t realized that Kate had.

As soon as their call ended, George phoned the treasurer of Golden Retrieval Inc. and told him precisely what that business entailed. While Colin tried to get Kate on the line, George called Anna and explained the purpose of Kate’s nine-month road trip. George’s call was akin to Kate’s seemingly redacted letters; words dropped randomly from the conversation because of the dodgy reception at the campsite Anna currently called home. But Anna got the gist of it, eventually. She got into her car and drove to civilization, or at least to a location where cell towers reached, and phoned her brother.

“Do you know what Kate’s been doing?” Anna asked.

“I only just found out,” Colin said, still stunned by the role he’d played in this enterprise.

“I don’t understand,” said Anna. “She was protecting George.”

“Someone died at her hand. Not everyone knows what that feels like.”

I do
, Anna thought.

“She was also protecting you,” Colin said.

“What are you talking about?” Anna said.

“She knew you’d left the door open, but she told George to keep it a secret. All of those years, she was keeping a secret that you already knew.”

“When did she find out?”

“Right after you went into rehab. I told her what you said to me afterward.”

“You told her that?” Anna asked.

“Isn’t it true?”

“Yes. But it should have come from me,” Anna said. “Why did you tell her?”

“Because I wanted her to leave you,” Colin said.

Anna immediately phoned Kate, but the call went to voice mail. Anna drove straight to an Internet café and spent an hour composing and recomposing an e-mail.

Dear Kate,

I just found out what you’ve been up to. I wish I had known. There are so many things I would have done differently, if I had. I’ve only just started admitting to things and I suppose there are some gaping holes in my confessions. Honestly, I thought if I brought it up, it would just be to ease my conscience. It never occurred to me that you’ve been revisiting the past on a regular basis. So this is what you should know: I went to that bar, Pete’s Emerald. I remember talking to an old man and ordering a few drinks and then being woken by sirens and ambulance lights. I went to the police station a day or two later and I looked at a mug shot of Roger Hicks. He seemed familiar. Our back door was open. I’m piecing together the night the same way anyone else would. I don’t remember talking to Hicks, but I might have. I don’t know if he followed me home, or if I invited him. I don’t remember leaving the door open, but I’m sure I did. It wouldn’t have been the first time. It’s hard to apologize for something you don’t remember. I should have told you at least what I thought I knew. I understand now that the worst thing I could have done was lie about it, but I never knew exactly what the lie was.

I thought it would be easier if we all just forgot. I’m sorry. I know that will never be enough.

Love,

Anna

Kate sent Anna a postcard after she got that letter. Anna was able to decipher every word.

Anna,

I think I’m ready to forget.

Kate

Kate swiveled back and forth in the plush leather chair designated for clients. She had returned to Boston three days earlier after being gone almost a year. When Colin asked her why she was back, she said that her business was done.

“You were kind of like a traveling vacuum salesman,” Colin said. “Only you gave all of the vacuums away.”

Kate noted and ignored the impatience in his voice. “And now all sorts of people have vacuums who wouldn’t have had them otherwise.”

“Do you know how much money is left in your account?” Colin asked.

“You do know that I’m really good with numbers.”

“In my book, good with numbers means you hold on to the numbers.”

“I have seven thousand, four hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixty-four cents in my account.”

Colin looked at his spreadsheet. “Close enough. You had seven thousand, four hundred and forty-three dollars and eighty-five cents this morning.”

“I had to gas up the car,” Kate said. “I thought I should return it with a full tank.”

“It’s your car,” said Colin. “Maybe you should sell it. You won’t need one in Boston.”

“I borrowed it. That’s all. Now I’m returning it.”

“You should have talked to me. You should have told me what you were doing.”

“How’s Anna?”

“She’s good. She’s a country girl now. Hasn’t had a haircut in a year. She drives a truck. She’s always covered in mud. My mother is terrified that she’ll meet a farmer and raise a brood of children who’ll be educated in the public-school system.”

“Congratulations,” Kate said. The mention of children reminded her that Colin had recently had a daughter.

“For what?”

“You’re a father now, no?”

Colin spun a picture around on his desk. It was a close-up of a baby in a woman’s arms—presumably the mother, but she was not the subject of the photo.

“She looks like a healthy baby,” Kate said. She’d never found infants attractive and never bothered gushing in the socially acceptable fashion.

“She’s got a set of lungs on her,” Colin said.

Kate got to her feet. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”

Colin circled his desk and gave Kate a warm embrace. She returned it with a businessman’s pat on the back.

“Don’t give away any more of your money, Kate.”

“I’ve settled the debts as best I could.”

“That’s good, because you’re just about broke.”

“I have over seven thousand dollars and not a single debt. That’s not broke in my world.”

“What will you do now?”

“What everybody else does. Wake up in the morning, drink coffee, read the paper, go to a job, come home, live my life for as long as I can.”

Santa Cruz, California

When Anna was a child, every morning her father sat in complete silence reading the business section of the newspaper. Her brother tackled the sports section, and her mother gazed at the style section, occasionally trying to draw Anna into some discussion of the latest fashion trend. Anna read the backs of cereal boxes and milk cartons, and when the milk was gone and the kitchen empty, she’d steal the discarded container and slice out the data on the missing person. She kept an album in her room and tried to memorize their faces. She noticed how her family poured their milk and didn’t give the lost boy or girl a second glance. This was why people stayed missing, Anna thought. And when she was out in public, she clocked the faces of strangers and consulted the memory of the file she kept in her room. Lena was searching Anna’s bedroom for a peach cashmere sweater that Anna claimed to have lost when she discovered the missing-person photo album in the back of her closet. She promptly tossed it in the trash and did her best to ignore the nauseated feeling it summoned in her.

Anna always knew when her mother had been in her room, because she left sharp heel dents in the rug and Chanel No. 5 in the air, which offended Anna’s senses more than rank body odor. Anna promptly checked the garbage, salvaged her scrapbook, and secreted it away with more stealth. Eventually Anna stashed the album in her hideaway.