Smoke (6 page)

“Your house in the line of fire, ma’am?” Deputy Clark asks as he steps on the gas. He speaks deliberately, almost as if there’s punctuation between his words. Commas mostly and an occasional period. He’s twenty-five, and his campaign hat is tipped back far enough to reveal a rash of acne across his forehead.

“Yes, unfortunately.”

And don’t call me ma’am
, I want to say.
Jesus.

Instead, I tell him where our house is. How the smoke woke me in the night. I leave out the rest of it, though a small part of me wishes I could confide in him. They way you do sometimes with complete strangers on a long plane ride, the thorough knowledge that you’ll never see each other again an erasure of reticence.

“This must be weird for you, then,” he says. “Investigating this.”

“All part of the job, right?”

“Yes, ma’am, I guess it is.”

Another version of Write Club is where Ben and I met in our last year of college.

As a science major headed—I thought—to med school, it had been strongly suggested to me as a way to round out my CV. Not Write Club, necessarily, but something, anything, other than the excessive lab time I’d been putting in alone with my assays. I’m not sure what drew me to that particular club. I wasn’t a writer, never felt the desire to put what was going on in my head down on the page. I read a lot, still do, but I never thought up my own stories. But I had a friend who’d joined the year before, and I was 100 percent certain that my ex, Jason, wouldn’t be there, which would be a welcome change from the 24/7 interaction we were still forced to endure as a result of being in the same program.

This guy named Morris, who was a teaching assistant in the MFA program, ran it. He had this terrible, affected air about him. Now I’d say he was a hipster before there were hipsters—he wore oversize glasses and sweaters with strategic holes, and seemed to feel that bathing was optional—but back then, my friend Cecily and I just thought he needed to invest in some good deodorant.

It was the second meeting I’d attended, and I was still on the fence about whether I was going to keep going. Cecily was late, and before I could get my “I’m saving this seat for a friend” out, Ben sat down next to me.

“Has he pulled out The Story yet?” Ben asked, nodding to Morris.

Most clubs I knew were more democratic, but Morris ran it like it was just another class he was TA-ing. Morris was talking about the importance of his
process
while fairly obviously focusing his attention on three freshman girls who were looking at him with wide-eyed adoration.

Yuck.

“Um, what?”

“You haven’t heard about it?” Ben smiled. He had a natural white smile, straight black hair, and sage-green eyes. Five eleven. Broad shoulders. Pretty much the opposite of Jason, in a good way.

“No. Should I have?”

“Uh-uh. But you probably will.”

“Dude, what the hell? Who are you?”

“I’m Ben Jansen. And you’re Elizabeth Martin.”

Before I could ask how he knew my name, he leaned forward conspiratorially. He smelled like sleep even though the class was at four in the afternoon. I’d learn later that Ben was a big fan of the restorative afternoon nap.

“It’s this piece he wrote—the
only
thing he’s written as far as I can tell—some semiconfessional thing about his sister’s death that he uses to get whoever catches his fancy each semester into bed.”

“And women fall for this?”

“They do.”

I looked closely at Morris. His hair was wiry and about to turn into natural dreadlocks. His glasses were round and too small for his face. He seemed incapable of talking in anything but a lecture voice.

How good would a short story have to be to make me remotely interested in sleeping with him? I admit I was slightly tempted to find out.

“Idiots,” I said to Ben.

“How so?”

I motioned to the girls watching Morris, taking notes,
eager.

“Women. Like falling for ugly rock stars because they write about feelings in sappy ballads.”

“Is
that
why that happens?”

“Yup. We pretty much go in for whatever makes us think men understand us.”

“Ha! That’s what you should write about.”

“No way.”

He smiled again and shook his head. “You’d be doing a service to mankind.”

“I bet I would. Say, why are you telling me about this anyway?”

“Oh . . . I . . . just have a feeling you might be this semester’s pick.”

He looked down at the notepad in front of him. He’d written my name in block letters, tracing it over as we spoke.

“You’d be mine, anyway,” he said quietly.

And like the girl that I was, my heart started to fall.

No one I recognize is manning the fire’s perimeter when we get to John Phillips’s house. The guys I know, those with the most experience, like Andy, are likely on the backside of Nelson Peak, fighting the upper edge of the fire, trying to get fuel out of the way so they can contain the blaze and keep it from spreading over the ridge, where it will slide down the hill like a ski racer into town.

It used to be that all forest fires received this treatment. If it burned, it needed to be put out, regardless of the cost. But public policy has changed over the years. A century of suppression taught us that fire makes forests healthy, and that one in every ten years is less devastating than one in a hundred. Now, if the fire’s naturally occurring and it isn’t threatening a populated area, we let it burn, because smaller fires prevent bigger ones in the end. “Fire Use Fire,” the policy’s called.

The most ridiculous term ever invented.

Of course, regardless of my findings, this fire will need to be suppressed, because although it might be good for the forests that surround Nelson to have it consume the downed trees and underbrush that have accumulated over the past fifty years, it clearly wouldn’t be in the town’s interest.

Or in mine.

Deputy Clark escorts me past the trucks, equipment caches, and people milling about till we get a couple hundred yards from the scorched shell of John Phillips’s house.

We take a lap around the property, keeping our distance. It’s still too dangerous to go inside the blackened structure, but I have a pretty good idea from the burn patterns in the grass that the fire didn’t start inside, anyway.

When we’ve done the perimeter sweep, we climb into a full kit of firefighters’ gear: boots, gaiters, jacket, gloves, a helmet with a mask and a breathing apparatus. The fire is a thousand yards away, but better safe than sorry. It takes a moment to adjust to the unfamiliar weight of the equipment—a wildland firefighting kit is much lighter—and the brief moment of claustrophobia having a mask over my face always produces.

My nostrils fill with the chemical smell of the suit as I walk slowly, notebook in hand, eyes on the ground, searching for the fire’s source.

“So,” I hear Deputy Clark say through the radio that connects our helmets. There’s a quality to the sound that always reminds me of astronauts doing a spacewalk. “How does this work? Is it like processing a regular crime scene?”

“You could look at it that way. Officially, there are four potential causes of a fire: natural, accidental, incendiary, and undetermined. We need to figure out which box this fire fits into.”

“Undetermined doesn’t sound like a cause.”

“You’re right. We don’t usually check that box.”

It was a point of pride among arson investigators. Undetermined was like a failing grade, one you gave yourself.

“How do you figure out which to check?”

I pull up my visor and push aside my breathing apparatus. I take a deep breath. My nose is flooded with the scent of charred wood and burned grass. I search for undertones of something that shouldn’t be there. Gasoline. Kerosene. Some other accelerant. But there’s nothing. So far, the only chemical I can smell is the all-too-familiar one found in the standard retardant that’s been dumped liberally in the area. What I really need is a hydrocarbon sniffer—a handheld device that can detect the presence of ignitable liquid residues in the air—but the department isn’t equipped with one.

“There are lots of ways to figure out what causes a fire,” I say, pulling my visor back down and readjusting my mask. “They have signals, fingerprints they leave behind, like any criminal.”

When I started my arson training, I realized I’d been learning these signals for years. That as I fought fires, I was also absorbing their grammar. So when I took the specialized courses in fire chemistry, dynamics, and how to read a scene, it all seemed obvious and natural. As if the fire wanted me to know what started it, if I was patient enough to listen.

If only I were as good at reading the hints left by those around me.

I continue. “The first step is to establish where it began, which is called the area of origin. Here, that’s pretty simple.”

I make a sweeping motion that encompasses the smoking house and the path of singed grass leading to the back of the property and into the woods.

“Even if the neighbor hadn’t called it in before it left the lot, it would be clear that this is where the fire started.”

“Does that mean it’s a human cause, then? There wasn’t any lightning in the area last night. I checked.”

“We’ll see. Once you’ve established your area of origin, you need to look for the point of origin, the source of the fire. Again, the fire helps us do that.”

I point to the streaks in the house’s backyard. The entire half acre of lawn is black and sodden with a mixture of water and retardant, and there’s a distinct pattern that makes it obvious—to me, at least—that the fire moved
toward
the house, not away from it.

“You see that pattern? That’s telling us where the fire came from. So now we just need to follow its path.”

We step across the seared ground. The protective suit and boots stop the heat from burning our feet, but I’ve already started sweating.

The burn pattern leads me back to the edge of the property, where the grass goes from short to long to woods.

And there’s my likely culprit: a fire pit.

“Once you have your point of origin,” I say, “then you need to find out what sparked it. Out in the woods, it might be something as innocent as a piece of glass, or as dramatic as a lightning strike. Near people, it’s generally going to be a human source. A campfire left lit. Garbage burned carelessly in a barrel.”

Deputy Clark points to the stone pit. “That’s where it started, isn’t it?”

I bend down and hold my gloved hand above the white ash. It’s still radiating heat. It contains a few pieces of charred wood, the remnants of some paper, and two burned-out beer cans.

“Get me a paint bucket,” I say. “And a shovel.”

CHAPTER 7

The Blame Game

Elizabeth

As we drive back to the elementary school,
I’m starting to feel like a yo-yo. Our house to Ben’s parents’ house. Their house to the fire. The fire to the elementary school. The school to work. Work to the fire. The fire to the school.

Each time I settle on a direction,
snap!
I’m pulled in another.

We’re driving back to Nelson Elementary because that’s where John Phillips was taken after the EMTs treated him for minor smoke inhalation. I actually need to interview him
and
his neighbors, but the latter have scattered like the four winds. He’s the only one we have a fixed location on.

At the school I check in briefly with a harried Kara, then follow the signs for the gym. It’s already been set up to shelter as many as possible, with rows and rows of empty camp cots and piles of army-surplus blankets and lumpy off-white pillows. I wonder where all the kids are, then remember they’ve been given a “fire day,” much to their delight, I’m sure. What will be done with them if the fire isn’t contained and this place starts to teem with refugees is something that hasn’t been worked out yet.

I ask the lead volunteer where Mr. Phillips is as the gym doors clang shut behind us.

“He’s over there,” a woman I know slightly named Honor Wells says, pointing to a lump of blankets in the far left corner in a condescending voice. “Sleeping, I think.”

He might have been earlier, despite the penetrating fluorescent lights, but he isn’t when we get to him. He’s just lying on his back, staring at the ceiling tiles, his arms folded behind his head, which is resting on his palms.

“Mr. Phillips?”

“Kristy?”

“No, Mr. Phillips. I’m Elizabeth Martin. And this is Deputy Clark. We’re from the police department, and we have a few questions for you.”

“You can call me John.”

He sits up slowly, blinking his brown eyes like we’ve just turned on the lights. His hair is snow white and close-cropped, and his face has the deep tan of someone who works outdoors. He’s snagged three blankets and two pillows. The bed he’s on is in the corner farthest away from the doors.

A man with a plan, it seems. Or good instincts, at least.

John places his bare feet squarely on the shiny wood floor. He’s wearing a pair of blue hospital scrubs and smells like industrial soap, presumably from the school showers.

I begin by asking him some basic questions about his background. He answers me in a rambling way, his mind flitting back and forth between the present and the past like they hold equal weight.

For instance, he tells me that he picked this bed because he was in the army over forty years ago, and he still remembers how hard it was to sleep in a room full of snoring men. And that was when he was in basic training and so tired that he should’ve been able to sleep through a bombardment, let alone the little kind of noises that shook him awake now.

“It’s the days I have trouble staying awake through,” he says, his gaze fixed on a far-off place. “Like earlier. I just put my head on the pillow, thinking I’d rest for a moment, and who knows how long I slept for.”

“You’ve had a shock,” I say. “It’s the way the body copes.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Going through something like you have, you can feel very tired afterward. For days even. It’s a normal reaction, but if you keep feeling poorly, you should see a doctor.”