Larry was not much for religion, but he tried a prayer anyway: Lord, keep them. I know you have been. And please let this work. But the prayer sounded pitiful in his head, so he stopped it.
He flicked the lighter under a clump of newspaper and, once that had bloomed, touched it to the base of the door.
The fire took the door right away and flickered in a curling line across the carpet to the book and the papers. He could see them burning through the doorway, before thick gray smoke obscured his view. After a few minutes the flames began to gutter. He wasn’t much of an arsonist — it was wet in there. He retrieved the other gas can from the trunk and shoved a rolled-up cone of newspaper into the nozzle. He made sure he had a clear throw and then lit the paper and heaved the can inside the house. It exploded right away, with a thump, and orange light bloomed up one of the inside walls. Outside, the flames from the door flared, steadied, then began to climb upward to the siding.
Larry went back to the cruiser and pulled the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He drank from it and thought about Jenny, and then about camping in the meadow as a boy, with Wayne.
Larry had seen this house being built; he’d seen it lived in and died in. He had guessed he might feel a certain joy watching it destroyed, but instead his throat caught. Somewhere down the line, this had gotten to be his house. He’d thought that for a while now: The township owned the Sullivan house, but really, Wayne had passed it on to him.
An image of himself drifted into his head — it had come a few times tonight. He saw himself walking into the burning house, climbing up the stairs. In his head he did this without pain, even while fire found his clothing, the bullets in his gun. He would sit upstairs in Jenny’s sewing room and close his eyes, and it wouldn’t take long.
He sniffled and pinched his nose. That was horseshit. He’d seen people who’d been burned to death. He’d die, all right, but he’d go screaming and flailing. At the thought of it, his arms and legs grew heavy; his skin prickled.
Larry put the cruiser in reverse and backed it slowly away from the house, out of the drive, and onto the track. He watched for ten minutes as the fire grew and tried not to think about anything, to see only the flames. Then he got the call from dispatch.
Sheriff?
Copy, he said.
Ned called in. He says it looks like there’s a fire out at the Sullivan place.
A fire?
That’s what he said. He sees a fire in the woods.
My my my, Larry said. I’m on old 52 just past Mackey. I’ll get out there quick as I can and take a look.
He waited another ten minutes. Flames shot out around the boards on the windows. The downstairs ceiling caught. Long shadows shifted through the trees; the woods came alive, swaying and dancing. Something alive and aflame shot out the front door — a rabbit? It zigged and zagged across the turnaround and then headed toward him. For a moment Larry thought it had shot under his car, and he put his hand on the door handle — but whatever it was cut away for the woods to his right. He saw it come to rest in a patch of scrub; smoke rose from the bush in wisps.
Dispatch? Larry said.
Copy.
I’m at the Sullivan house. It’s on fire, all right. Better get the trucks out here.
Twenty minutes later two fire trucks arrived, advancing carefully down the track. The men got out and stood beside Larry, looking over the house, now brightly ablaze from top to bottom. They rolled the trucks past Larry’s cruiser and sprayed the grass around the house and the trees nearby. Then all of them watched the house burn and crumble into its foundation, and no one said much of anything.
Larry left them to the rubble just before dawn. He went home and tried to wash the smell of smoke out of his hair and then lay down next to Emily, who didn’t stir. He lay awake for a while, trying to convince himself he’d actually done it, and then trying to convince himself he hadn’t.
When he finally slept he saw the house on fire, except that in his dream there were people still in it: Jenny Sullivan in the upstairs window, holding her youngest boy to her and shouting Larry’s name, screaming it, while Larry sat in his car, tugging at the handle, unable even to shout back to her, to tell her it was locked.
1985
Patricia Pike had known from the start that Sheriff Thompkins was reluctant to work with her. Now, riding in his cruiser with him down empty back roads to the Sullivan house, she wondered if what she’d thought was reticence was actual anger. Thompkins had been civil enough when she spoke with him on the phone a month before, but since meeting him this morning in his small, cluttered office — she’d seen janitors with better quarters — he’d been scowling, sullen, rarely bothering to look her in the eye.
She was used to this treatment from policemen. A lot of them had read her books, two of which had uncovered information the police hadn’t found themselves. Her second book — On a Darkling Plain — had overturned a conviction. Policemen hated being shown up, even the best of them, and she suspected from the look of Thompkins’s office that he didn’t operate on the cutting edge of law enforcement.
Thompkins was tall and hunched, perhaps muscular once but going now to fat, with a gray cop’s mustache and a single thick fold under his chin. He was only forty — two years younger than she was — but he looked much older. He kept a wedding photo on his desk; in it he had the broad-shouldered, thick-necked look of an offensive lineman. Unsurprising, this; a lot of country cops she spoke to had played football. His wife was a little ghost of a woman, dark-eyed, smiling what Patricia suspected was one of her last big smiles.
Patricia had asked Thompkins a few questions in his office, chatty ones designed to put him at ease. She’d also flirted a little; she was good-looking, and sometimes that worked. But even then Thompkins answered in clipped sentences, in the sort of language police fell back on in their reports. He looked often at his watch, but she wasn’t fooled. Kinslow, Indiana, had only six hundred residents, and Thompkins wasn’t about to convince her he was a busy man.
Thompkins drove along the interminable gravel roads to the Sullivan woods with one hand on the wheel and the other brushing the corners of his mustache. Finally she couldn’t stand it.
Do I make you uncomfortable, Sheriff?
He widened his eyes, and he shifted his shoulders then coughed. He said, Well, I’ll be honest. I guess I’d rather not do this.
I can’t imagine you would, she said. Best to give him the sympathy he so desperately wanted.
If the mayor wasn’t such a fan of yours, I wouldn’t be out here.
She smiled at him, just a little. She said, I’ve talked to Wayne’s parents; I know you were close to Wayne and Jenny. It can’t be easy to do this.
No, ma’am. That it is not.
Thompkins turned the cruiser onto a smaller paved road. On either side of them was nothing but fields, empty and stubbled with old broken cornstalks and blocky stands of woods so monochrome they could be pencil drawings.
Patricia asked, You all went to high school together, didn’t you?
Abington, Class of ’64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.
Did you become friends in high school?
That’s when I got to know Jenny. Wayne and I knew each other since we were little. Our mothers taught together at the middle school.
Thompkins glanced at Patricia. You know all this already. You drawing out the witness?
She smiled, genuinely grateful. So he had a brain in there after all. It seems I have to, she said.
He sighed — a big man’s sigh, long and weary — and said, I have nothing against you personally, Ms. Pike. But I don’t like the kind of books you write, and I don’t like coming out here.