“Is there any chance we can get the deck up early?” William asked.
Wallace smiled like he was dealing with a sharp customer. Yes, of course, it could go up fairly early in the process, he said; like the command center, they could use it for things like storage and so forth. Wind was picking up. “I’m cold,” Wallace said. “Should have worn a jacket. Or pants, for that matter.” He threw back his head again. Wallace hadn’t said that he loved the land or that he thought anything built on the spot would be a palace, which suited William fine. Wallace opened the door of his truck and the music he liked poured out.
William’s week was a series of holes he could not fill, and he had to be careful not to fall into them. He devoted the morning to minor repairs around the house, and he drove through the afternoon, skittering from station to station. The news that week was about another fire, this one in a used-car lot, where a large cardboard display in the parking lot had gone up in flames at the same time a small blaze broke out in a corner of the roof. The phrase “intentionally set” had now been replaced by the word “arson.” “We use the term because it has legal ramifications,” a fire department official said. “It has to do with whether or not we can prove the intent of the fire setter.” The language was moving them all toward a new awareness.
That night the doorbell rang. Tom stood there with a bag of chips and a six-pack. “There was another fire.”
“I know,” William said. “So we’re celebrating?”
“Yes,” Tom said, “I would like to come in. We don’t have much time.” At eight, he explained, the local news was running a special report. They were reviewing the full set of fires, repurposing old footage, even clips of the anchors reporting the story on the nightly news. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “Would popcorn be inappropriate?”
The fire commissioner came on first to introduce the hour. He had eyes like pinpricks and a habit of turning to the side to point at his whiteboard, which exposed the collop at the back of his neck. “We are looking at a distribution that radiates out from the northeast side of town,” he said. Yellow diamonds appeared on the map.
At first, it was just William and Tom watching the show, which meant it was mostly Tom holding forth. “It’s strange to see the news report of the arsons long after the fact,” he said. “Fire’s supposed to be something primal, but this puts it on a delay, which is also a remove. It’s like Mark Twain said: ‘Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.’ In a way, you wish the cameras would just get there and shoot the fire as it burns. Or that someone would put a camera in the fire even before it starts.” He had raced through a pair of beers. “There should be a whole channel devoted just to that. I’d watch it all the time.” William thought of mentioning the fire graphs he’d found in Tom’s studio, but he caught himself before he did.
When the special broke for a commercial, Louisa joined them. She perched on the edge of the armchair and watched silently as happy children clambered into the new family car. “Hey,” she said. “Does anyone want pizza? I’ll order.”
“Sausage,” Tom said, and she went to call in the order. After she left, Tom said, “She doesn’t seem to hate you as much these days.”
Tom was wrong: she didn’t seem to hate him at all. The floor plan in the pin-up room had restored him to her good graces. “You know what else?” Tom said. “I was reading around in Latin and I found the original for ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire.’ De calcaria in carbonarium. It’s Tertullian. He was also the first one to explicitly formulate the idea of the Trinity. Oh, and he praised the unmarried state as the highest state of man. I don’t like his reasoning, celibacy and all, but you can’t argue with the conclusion.”
“News is back,” Louisa said, resurfacing to rescue William. The female anchor, cool in considered blue, reviewed the timeline, gave tips for reporting leads, warned against taking suspicious figures lightly. The camera panned to the commissioner, parked massively behind a tiny desk. “Pay attention, as well, to the crowd,” he said. “People gather to watch a fire, and sometimes the arsonist himself is among them. I use the masculine pronoun because that is, more often than not, the case.” A short feature on Karim followed: though most of the investigators did not think Birch Mutual was the work of the same man, Karim’s was still the only death, and so, however imprecisely, he was the face of the problem. Tom stood up and showed the way he’d run, legs almost straight like stilts, and Louisa put a hand over her mouth and asked him to stop.
Tom’s clowning, Louisa’s horror: between them, William took the role of analyst. There was one car that caught his eye, a black Pontiac with a decal on the back; he’d spotted it in the reports about two different fire sites, the marina and the nursing home. “Maybe that’s something,” he said. “You heard the fire commissioner. People gather to watch a fire, sometimes the arsonist among them.”
“That seems unlikely,” Louisa said. “A guy sets a fire and then comes back to rubberneck?”
“That would be like me going to my own art opening,” Tom said.
“You do go to your own art opening,” William said. “I should call this in.”
Louisa lifted a slice of pizza emphatically. “It probably belongs to one of the reporters or a tech.”
“Oh,” William said. “Yeah. I didn’t think of that.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “To be the smart one.”
Two nights later, the commissioner was a guest on another local station, on a panel show hosted by a severely handsome black man who seemed like he was already auditioning for the national networks. Tom dropped by for that show, too, and Louisa protested lightly that the rubbernecking made her uneasy. “Come on, Mom, can we watch, please?” Tom said, and she relented and brought a Chinese takeout menu in from the kitchen. They switched on all the lamps and overhead lights in the den and sat in the center of the warm glow. “I hate to say it,” Louisa said, “but Tom was right. This is fun.”
“Tom is always right,” Tom said. “This is the life: food, friends, and things burning down to the ground.”
“Friends?” Louisa said. “How about family?”
“It’s not a word I like,” Tom said. “But have it your way.”
They weren’t the only ones who were captivated. The fires, nine in all now, were bringing everyone together. Fitch called to say he’d been at a local service station when the police had questioned and then released a young man buying a can of gasoline. Stevie, outside one morning watering the lawn, joked that he was going to wet the house down to protect it. Even Karla was hooked; she and Christopher were watching the coverage together, and she was using it to teach him about the difference between crimes against persons and crimes against property. “Did you hear the commissioner’s press conference today?” she asked William on the phone. “He said they’ve pretty much decided they’re not looking for a juvenile, based on the sites of the blazes. We’ve had a marina fire and a hardware store fire and a train station fire, and juvenile fire setters tend to target institutions — schools, churches, that kind of thing.”
“Why?” William said.
“They seek control,” she said.
“Who does?” Christopher said from the background.