The Arsonist (27 page)

After a moment, she said, “And women?”

“What about women?”

“Don’t be coy. I told
you
.”

“In a general way you told me.”

“I ask no more from you. Just, generally, you’ve had girlfriends here before.”

“Girlfriends here, yes. Though I’ve slowed way down. And wives before.”

“Wives? Multiple wives?” This startled Frankie. Though why should it?

“Two. One that doesn’t count. The starter marriage. Isn’t that what Margaret Mead called it? We’re allowed that, right?”

“I guess.”

“And then one serious mistake.”

After a long moment, she said, “But I thought the point of the starter marriage was that you didn’t need to make the big mistake.”

“Ah, I think I wanted the big mistake, somehow. The drama. But in the end it wore me out. And then it was over.”

Frankie wanted to ask more about it, but she wasn’t sure she should. And the lights were leaving the sky anyway. They might have been lying in the field for an hour by this time. The sky was turning black and starlit again. Bud was shivering, and she’d curled against him to try to help him stay warm. “You’re cold now,” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“This was … so astonishing.”

“All of it.”

“We should go,” she said.

“Should we?”

“You’re cold.”

“It’s okay.”

“
I’m
cold.”

“Ah.”

He rolled against her; he kissed her. For a moment her whole body moved, rejoiced, in response to the length of him, the size of him against her. Her mouth answered the warmth of his.

And then she checked herself, she pulled just slightly back and smiled at where his face was. “I should go.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“But the show is over.”

“Is it? It is. I guess.”

“I should go. I’m actually worried about Liz’s place.”

“Okay.”

She sat up, and he did, too, and then they stood. He put his arm around her again, and she leaned against him as they walked slowly, bumping oddly over the rough ground, back to the car.

They drove up the dark hills without talking. He pulled in at Liz and Clark’s, where the porch light was on. He turned to her. “Thank you for this evening. For being my date.”

“I liked being your date. Thanks for being
my
date.”

“I think the date is the one who got asked. Not the asker, I don’t think.”

“Well, what are you then, to me?”

He grinned in the half-light of the porch light, a slow, widening grin. “We shall see, shan’t we?”

Frankie didn’t have an answer. After a moment, though, she leaned over and kissed him. Just their faces touching. His flesh was cool, but his mouth, opening, was warm, and tasted sweet. He made a noise, a sigh.

She sat back and turned to open her door. She got out of the car. The night was cold. At the door to Liz’s house, she turned under the light to wave, but he was already in gear, just starting to drive away.

Some part of her was disappointed, ridiculously.

13

T
HE RIDING MOWER
had been sitting in the middle of the overgrown lawn for three hours now. The pickup truck with its ramps set out was smack in the middle of the driveway. If she’d wanted to go somewhere, Sylvia would have had to drive over the unmown grass to get out. Not that she wanted to go anywhere, but it was the idea. The principle.

The boy—the young man—Tink, had driven up at about eleven, and with what seemed to Sylvia his usual deliberated, elaborate slowness, set the planks out, backed the mower down, donned ear protectors and goggles and started the engine up.

Alfie had been having a bad day anyway today, and this clearly tipped the balance. He’d come almost immediately into the kitchen, where Sylvia stood at the door watching Tink.

“Tell that …” He pointed out the window. “Tell him to go away.”

Sylvia turned to him. His face was working, agitated, his jaw moving up and down, his head almost palsied.

“It’s just the mower, Alfie. He’s doing the lawn.”

“No! That machine.”

“Yes, the machine that mows the lawn. The mower. He comes every week, to cut the grass.”

“It’s too loud.”

“Well, I agree with you.” She stepped over to him, touched his elbow. “But come, let’s shut the windows in your study. Come on. That will help.” And perhaps it would. They were new windows, double-glazed, tight. She took Alfie down the hall, matching her gait to his unsteady one. As she shut and locked the last of the windows, the noise was suddenly domesticated. It was as though someone were mowing off in the
distance—an almost pleasant sound. She shut the curtains, too, so Alfie wouldn’t see the machine as it passed around the house again and again, and she turned the desk lamp on over Alfie’s work. Her eye fell on the papers scattered around, filled with Alfie’s vertical handwriting, almost completely illegible now.

“There!” she said. “Cozy and quiet. Perfect for working.” She hated herself—this tone, this condescension. Next she’d be using the nurse’s first person plural:
Now we’re going to sit down and we’ll just get at it
.

May I die first
.

“But I don’t know where my books are,” Alfie protested. He sounded like a child.

“They’re right here.” Sylvia gestured at the stacks he’d placed on his desk, four or five of them, sloppy towers of different heights lurching this way and that.

“No, I mean the other books.”

“These?” She pointed to the bookcases lining the three walls of the room where there were no windows. They held the several hundred books Alfie had culled from his libraries at the college and the house in Connecticut.

“No, no.” He was angry at her now. “The
others
.” You idiot.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, willing herself to patience, to cheerfulness. “You sit down and do your work, and I’ll go get the other books.”

He looked dubious.

“Okay?” she said. “Okay,” she answered herself. And she was grateful to see, as she walked to the doorway, that he was complying, that he had sat down and was pulling in, to do his “work.”

She shut his door behind her. She was thinking that this would give her a chance to get all the piles of books that were now messily stashed around the house into his study, at least for a little while. She started to gather them onto the kitchen table, beginning with the two piles from the porch, thickened with damp. She had just bent to pick up the pile on the floor by his living room chair when a motion outside flickered at the edge of her vision. She stood up and went to the window.

It was the police car, the big green star taking up the whole driver’s-side door. It had driven right across the lawn to Tink’s mower and
stopped in front of him. Now the mower stopped, too, and Tink dismounted, though he didn’t turn the motor off.

Loren stayed in his car. She could hear their voices, yelling, though not what they said. She assumed he was asking about her—he’d come to her house, after all—but it didn’t make sense to her. Why hadn’t he just parked his car and come to the back door?

Ah. Perhaps because that would have been difficult with the truck taking up so much of the driveway. She felt a helpless irritability rise in her. She wanted to slam Alfie’s books down. She wanted the noise of the mower to stop.

She crossed to the porch door and stepped outside. She walked through the lanky grass to Loren’s car and greeted him and Tink. She had to shout to be heard, and she could barely hear Loren’s shouted greeting in return. She wasn’t sure whether Tink said anything at all. His face stayed impassive. Dull. It
was
dull, she thought. Dull and sullen and pretty. She stepped toward him and shouted, “Could you please turn
off
your mower.” She gestured at it.

It seemed to her he paused just a beat too long before he turned back to the mower. A beat meant to tell her he could goddamn well choose or not choose to do as she asked.

The silence that fell when the mower went off seemed shocking. Embarrassing, really. Loren was grinning up at her.

“Hope you’re well, Sylvia,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said, ignoring Tink, who was coming back to stand by the car. And then she saw that there was someone in the backseat. She lowered herself a little to look in. His head, too, was ducked, to see her. “Gavin!” she said.

“Hi, Miz Rowley.”

“Are you boys in trouble? What is this, Loren?” She had stood back up and was looking at Loren levelly.

“I was looking to borrow your yardman for a bit.”

“But he’s in the middle of things here, as you see.”

“Yes, I do. And I apologize for that. But we won’t be too long. Just a few things to talk over.”

“But what’s so important? Why can’t it wait?”

“If you insist, Sylvie, I’ll wait. We could wait, couldn’t we, Gavin?” His tone was jovial.

“I can wait, for sure,” Gavin said.

“It’s just, I’d rather not,” Loren said, looking directly at her.

“Well, I suppose it’s none of my business …”

“It’s town business, Sylvie. You don’t need to concern yourself with it.” His tone had cooled.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Loren,” she said in exasperation. “Go ahead.” She stepped back from the car. “It’s inconvenient, to say the least. But I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? The law speaks, and that’s that.” She turned to Tink. “Go ahead, then,” she said.

Without looking at her, the young man went around the car to the passenger side and got in.

Now Loren smiled up at her again. As he started to turn the car around, he raised his hand in a regal salute. The king, riding off in his carriage.

“Please don’t be too long,” she called. She thought his smile deepened, but she couldn’t tell for sure. She was sorry she’d fed his vanity, or whatever it was. She turned and went back into the house, where Alfie’s books waited for her.

At about two-thirty, she called Adrian. He wasn’t at home, so she tried the store. Tink had been called away, she said, and the mower and truck had been sitting all over her yard for hours now. Her voice, she thought, was conciliatory. She was always careful of her tone with Adrian.

“What do you mean ‘called away’?”

“Loren Spader stopped by and picked him up.”

There was a few seconds’ silence. “Loren,” he said.

“Yes.”

“On official business?”

“It seemed so. He was in the police car. He had Gavin Knox in the backseat.”

“Gavin?”

“Yes.”

Another pause. Then: “I wonder what those boys got up to.” His voice
had relaxed, it sounded slightly amused. Gavin’s involvement must have been reassuring to him, she thought.

“Well, whatever it was, it’s taking a while to resolve it. And meanwhile, I’d either like my lawn mowed or for this equipment to go away.”

“I s’pose I could get up there in, maybe, half an hour or so.”

“That would be perfect.”

It was less than half an hour, though, when she heard his car in the driveway. She stood up from her desk to watch him park behind the truck. He started across the yard toward the back door, and she quickly went to the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to knock, so he wouldn’t disturb Alfie, who was taking his afternoon nap.

He started when she opened the door—clearly he hadn’t expected it—and his face seemed unguarded, open, in a way she rarely saw it.

“I’m sorry about this, Sylvie,” he said, gesturing behind him at the truck.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she said. “Just, can you get them out of the way?”

“No, I’m going to finish up mowing now. I’m not sure when Tink’s coming back.”

“Are he and Gavin in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

“Sounds like maybe. Anyway, Loren took them over to Black Mountain, to the state police. Fran”—this was Loren’s wife—“wasn’t sure when they’d be back.”

“Is it about the fires, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Both of those boys’re on the fire squad, don’t you know.”

“No, I didn’t realize that.”

“Yep,” he said. “No, Fran said it was something about a car, maybe one of theirs. What I’m hoping is that it’s not some hit-and-run kinda thing.”

“Oh. Yes. That would be terrible.”

“But we don’t know.”

They stood for a moment. It was, Sylvia thought, the longest exchange they’d had in years.

“Well, I’d better get on it,” he said. “I won’t do the trimming today. Just the mowing. Then I can get that out of here anyhow.”

“Fine. I’m grateful for anything.”

He turned and went around the corner of the house. Sylvia went back inside. She’d make tea for Alfie. The mower would surely wake him.

So she was in the kitchen when the mower started up again, and between the noise outside and her own noise inside—the running water, the kettle clashing on the stove as she set it down—she didn’t hear Alfie. She didn’t hear the porch door slam shut after him, she didn’t hear him shouting at Adrian. She didn’t see him, either, trying to pull Adrian off the mower. Just suddenly the motor was off.

And then she did hear him, his terrified voice, shouting senselessly something about the house being his. “You’re
not
going to wreck it!” and she was across the living room, across the porch, the door was slamming behind her as she stepped outside.