Son of Destruction (3 page)

It was awful, watching her try.

He nodded as if words had come out and they made perfect sense. He said, ‘Yes, Mom, uh-huh,’ smiling, smiling, but he didn’t fool her. She pulled him closer so he could hear what she was trying so desperately to say.

Finally he did. This is what Lucy Carteret had saved all her strength to tell her son. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

It was awful seeing her like this. ‘Me too.’

They said they loved each other.

You love her and you say so, even though you can never forgive your mother for certain things. The way she put him off that night on the porch, when he asked the biggest question in his life. All she said, in a voice that floated away was,
Just a boy I thought I loved
.

All these years later, it was still a puzzle and a mystery; she was afraid to tell him. She made him promise not to ask. It was too late to ask her why.

She tried to lift her hand, but she couldn’t; she was so sick, so thin, she was almost transparent. He begged her not to go.

She said what they say in the movies, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Then she died.

Like that! Part of Dan Carteret was gone.
Oh, Mom!

And, next? Words exploded in his head – the response he’d cobbled when she made him promise never to ask about his father:
As long as we both shall live.

She thought he’d promised, he knew he’d lied. She was gone.
OK then.

He is free to search.

Lucy didn’t leave him much to go on. The few things she’d said that night, when she first told him the truth. She loved the guy, she admitted it! Still did. Love like that doesn’t vanish without a trace.

It will be in that jewel box she was so anxious to protect.

The little wooden chest surfaces when he goes through her empty apartment, padding thoughtfully through the silent, abandoned rooms. He finds it in her bedroom closet, stashed behind books on a shelf he used to be too small to reach. It’s tough, going through the things she kept: bangles and mismatched earrings, his high school class ring, important papers and at the bottom items from the deep past, souvenirs of the life Lucy had before Dan was imagined and they ended up living here.

He runs his fingers over raised initials on the little gold football, a cheap high school trinket that his mother cherished or she wouldn’t have kept it for so long: FJHS. OK. Tonight, he’ll type FJHS into the Google search box along with her maiden name, the first step in a global search for Lucy Carteret’s lost life in the years before she married Burt Mixon, who made her so anxious and sad.

Here’s the picture she kept: five jocks snapped on a beach, waving and grinning like fools – a fading Polaroid that he turns over in his hands like an old friend. Wait! Here’s a second one: a black-and-white of Lucy in her teens, smiling for the camera in spite of the glare. At her back, a Spanish stucco house sprawls under a row of tall Australian pines – some builder’s idea of castle, with a grand stairway and two fat turrets. She’s wearing a little white T-shirt that breaks his heart and – what? That corny gold football hanging between her breasts. Did his father take this? Why did she hide it for so long?

Instinct tells him this isn’t all she was hiding. Troubled, he runs his fingers around the box, feeling only a little guilty because the silk lining shreds at his touch. Here. A scrap of newsprint from the paper he thought she’d destroyed before he learned to read. Well, now he can read:
Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Holy crap! He jumps, as if she’d just set her hand between his shoulders:
It’s all right, love. I’m here.

The initialed football, the snapshot. This. He feeds FJHS into the search engines, triangulates with spontaneous human combustion. Fort Jude at the top of every first page, the Florida city where – bingo: there have been three grisly, unexplained deaths by fire in the last fifty years. And, my God, the image search produces the stills that so terrified him as a kid. The crime scene photo of that bedroom slipper with a foot still in it, standing like a solitary bookend on the floor underneath the recliner where she died. He broadens the search, surfing obsessively because on the Web, everything leads to something else and in its own way, it insulates him from the ache in his belly, just below the heart.

He kept clicking; he struck gold at
howstuffworks.com
, where Stephanie Watson wrote about spontaneous human combustion at length.

Although Lucy was sad more often than she was happy, she didn’t live the kind of inner life that needs bizarre crimes and freaks of nature to explain itself
. Unless. What?
Dan is tortured by unanswered questions.
What does this have to do with us?
He browsed obsessively, lingering at this unsigned entry on
unexplainedstuff.com
and picked up later by a half-dozen other sites:

He should be packaging, storing, doing last things before he locks the door on his mother’s life. Instead, he trolls the Internet, gleaning details. At
theness.com,
a Dr Steven Novella pushes him into murk and confusion – hey, this is an MD putting his reputation on the line – when he says:

Except for the ends of the arms and legs . . .
The foot and the chair. The clipping. Another of those things she kept hidden but preserved: her secret, in code. As his mother tore the paper out of his hands that day, she smacked him hard. He reads on and on, chapter, verse, feeding on details, until he comes to himself with a shudder.
OK, lady, what does this have to do with us?

Did she really leave Fort Jude because old women go up in flames for no known reason? He doesn’t think so. Once, when she let herself talk about her life before New London, Lucy told him she’d rather die than go back there, ever.

Which she did.

Die, and she left orders. He will throw her ashes into the Atlantic thousands of miles north of her home town. What came down there, he wonders, what was so bad that she had to go? Trouble in her family, or was it something worse? He won’t find the answers in his browser. He slams his laptop and turns to the pictures she kept.

If he stares at the house behind Lucy for long enough, will he see her parents grouped behind the leaded windows, snapped in black and white? Are they still in there? Would they come out and talk to him? He doesn’t know. In fact, there’s a lot he doesn’t know. When he was a kid he wanted to go live inside that picture, hang out on the beach with those five happy guys, laughing and not giving a fuck. The problem is, they don’t look carefree to him now; they look sinister and guarded.

Stupidly, he sits, half-waiting for a sign from his mother, but the dead don’t leave messages, right? Reason, Carteret. Think.
One these dudes has got to be my father
, he thinks,
why else would she keep this thing?

The hell of it is that he could stare into those faces and never know which one; he could feed the Polaroid into a scanner and enlarge it, he could analyze every facial detail down to the last pixel and still not know, but Dan does know one thing. He’ll hunt down the careless, grinning bastard. He will, and when he does, he will damn well shake him until the truth falls out.

Don’t ask me how it happened, don’t think you know what it’s like. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Did you quit gossiping or leave off gawking long enough to wonder how it felt to burn alive, with your heart splitting and a furnace in your fundament?

Or were you too busy surmising? Was it all about the phenomenon, and did you give me a second thought, or were you only scared because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you? Do not send your children to visit my grave, ladies, and leave me the hell out of your little lectures on playing with matches.

I know you despised me, and you know what I thought of you.

Poor Lorna. Nobody knows what happened, but everybody knows what she looked like at the end. It was in all the papers, on TV, those pictures! How humiliating for a proud woman like her.

In this town, extraordinary things come down – Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds – hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like
that
. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch, but these things happen to outsiders, not people you know, although our mayor did get struck by lighting on the eighteenth hole.

In towns like ours, where lizards come indoors and scorpions as big as lobsters can tumble off rafters in old garages, anything can happen.

Anything.

But – spontaneous human combustion?

We’ve had three, right here in Fort Jude!

Now, people may combust in broad daylight in London or Paris or even in downtown Dallas, but never in Fort Jude. Some poor soul may burst into flames in public where you live, but not here. The society is much too private. We will do anything to protect our own. Fort Jude’s crimes and love affairs, the betrayals – our great mysteries – unfold in secret, late at night.

In Fort Jude, there are close to half a million people.

Then there are people you know.

The whole world knows about Muriel Keesler, although she wasn’t from here. She’s famous, because she was the first. Old Muriel combusted and burned to a cinder sitting in her chair back in the Fifties, and to this day nobody knows why. Experts still study it. People from all over the world come to Fort Jude to reconstruct the scene and come up empty. Nobody in town knew her until it happened.

Then everybody did. It’s a very great mystery. No sign of arson; it wasn’t suicide. Nobody broke in and set her afire. She just burned up, and nobody knows why. The only things burned were the chair she sat in and Mrs Keesler, of course. Charred bits that fell on the rug. Police and fire marshals, the coroner, scientists, nobody could explain it. Forensics experts and scientists, psychologists, journalists from all over the world came to investigate. Movie people came, even mediums came, psychic pathologists. They studied it from every angle; they wrote books about it, but it’s all speculation. All that snooping, all these theories and all these years later, we still don’t know how it happened, or why.

In the Sixties, a Mrs Arbruzzi flared up in her trailer and burned to a crisp, front page news in the
Star
, but she didn’t gather a crowd. It was interesting, but she was a foreigner, came here from Sicily or someplace like that. Everybody ooohed and ahed, but for families that have always lived here, it was like it happened to some old lady on Mars.

Things like that don’t happen to people like us.

But the third was Lorna Archambault. Lorna Archambault! Past president of the Junior League and the museum board, her father founded the Fort Jude Club, but she lit up and flamed out all the same.

As if such fires are specific to the person.

When these things happen to somebody in a society as tight as this one, the mystery lingers. Thirty years later, people still talk about it in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What happened to Lorna Archambault, really?

How am I supposed to know?

Lorna was divorced: nobody to see, nobody to throw a blanket over her or pour water into the smoking cavity where her guts had been. Poor Lorna, how awful. And because she was prominent, it got in the papers and on TV. There were photographs of it in the
Star
– how embarrassing! Like the others, she just burned up from the inside out. As if a stealth missile homed in and exploded in her belly. Dead. The other two women had to lie in the charred ruins of their lives for hours before the landlady or some other stranger blundered in and found them dead.

When you’re prominent, like Lorna Archambault, they miss you. Somebody misses you and comes looking. They find you right away.

Poor Claudia Atkinson found Lorna, they were roommates in the Pi Phi house at FSU.
We were leaving for Europe today. I brought the tour labels to stick on her bags!
Her luggage was right there by the front door, all zipped up and ready to go. Imagine. How sad.