“So you say,” William said. “About what?”
The afternoon sun had bleached out most colors. The car parked just beyond the overhang was slightly yellow, Fitch’s face slightly red. He shook his head, a displeased little tic, and tried to fit his hands together. “Things are bad at work,” he said. “Worse even than before. There’s a serious problem with TenPak. When O’Shea pulled out, and then Loomis, there was a run by smaller investors, and it turns out that Hollister doesn’t have the money to cover the customers. And all the while, the new guy’s been selling harder and harder, which means the process will only repeat. There are at least two lawsuits being threatened, and every day Baker makes it clearer that he’s not going to take the fall for this.”
“So who is?”
“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “All of us, I guess. When there’s a storm, it rains down.”
“Maybe I’ll turn out to be the luckiest one of all.” Fitch didn’t even smile; he just stared at his own hands, which were fidgeting faster now.
A horn honked. “That’ll be Gloria,” Fitch said, and rushed across the panhandle of the lot and vanished into a slightly green sedan, looking around as if spies were everywhere.
FOUR
William’s phone buzzed with a text from Karla. “Turn on news,” it said. “Ch 9 now.” The fire commissioner stood at a podium, a bouquet of microphones in front of him and a whiteboard behind him. “We are now prepared to release a comprehensive profile of the man we think is responsible for the fires.”
A woman in the front raised her hand. The gesture displeased the commissioner, but he pointed at her anyway. “You’re sure it’s a man?”
“Reasonably so.”
A man in the back blurted out. “Can you tell us anything else?”
“I can,” the commissioner said. “I was about to.” He turned toward the whiteboard, scribbled in a blank space, and then turned back. “Based on the way the crimes have unfolded, we have determined that our suspect is a white male, almost certainly in his early to mid-forties, likely well educated. There’s a high probability that he is either unmarried or childless.”
A man in the front row leaned forward, taking his time with his question. “And what’s the motive?”
The fire commissioner sighed. “That’s where I was going next. He appears to be motivated by economic resentment rather than a personal grudge. These are only educated guesses, though, or interpretations.”
The woman in the front raised her hand again. “But definitely a man?” she said.
“They usually are,” the fire commissioner said.
“And what are we counting as the arson set?” said a man in the back.
“Clearly, it’s not every fire in town,” the commissioner said. Laughter surged briefly. “It’s the ones we’ve been talking about all along: the depot, the marina, the hardware store, the dollar store. There are erroneous reports about this last one, the warehouse.” That was the building adjacent to Tom’s old studio; William leaned closer to the screen. “That fire seems to have been set by a copycat,” he said. “This isn’t uncommon: a case starts to get publicity, and someone wants in on it. The warehouse fire was significantly smaller and significantly more amateurish, a kind of experiment.”
An experiment? The word went icily through William.
After two days of rain, the sun and heat had returned. The afternoon cooked the inside of the car. William found Tom’s Charger parked right outside his studio, fender now double dented. He went inside and knocked on the door, once, then a break, then again, as if it was a secret code. He heard shifting and scraping and then Tom came to the door and opened it. “Who is it?” he said, though he saw William’s face. Tom’s hair was in an uproar.
“Hey there,” William said. “I was just driving by. Thought I’d stop in to say hello.”
“Busy,” Tom said.
“Yes, I would like to come in,” William said. Tom opened the door a little more, maybe a foot wide, and William pushed his way in. Chaos possessed the studio: pencils snapped in half and disarranged on the desk, books open upside down next to beer bottles. The only work visible was a large-scale oil painting of one of Tom’s charts — a gradually descending line titled “How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time.”
“Wow,” William said, sitting down on the narrow sofa. “The place looks good.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “I’ve been busy. But nice to see you. It’s been a while.”
“Not really,” William said. “Stevie’s thing was just last week.”
“It was?” Tom said.
“How did that go?” William said. “Last I saw, you were doing pretty okay with that girl by the bar.”
Tom bunched his brow and searched for the memory. “Katy? Karen? I don’t know. It was a twenty-four-hour flu. She was a nice girl, if you like that kind of thing, but I had to get back to work.”
“Right,” William said. “I see. What are you working on?”
“‘New pieces’ is what I’ve been telling people. But that’s not exactly true. I’ve been going through old work and reconnecting with it. Sometimes I’ve been pulling it into a different medium.” Tom pointed across the room. “Like that canvas over there. When I have to repaint the graphs, I remember them completely, in ways I thought weren’t possible anymore.”
William hunched forward and leaned his forearms on his knees, a technique he’d seen TV cops use to put suspects at ease. It was time to get what he’d come for. “Can I ask you something, Tom? You know that graph? The one about how much fire liked paper?”
Tom had started off toward the canvas. “Of course I know it. I made it. To me, it’s part of a larger comedy about the human arrogance that makes us think we control things — or rather, our refusal to believe what we’re shown repeatedly and conclusively, which is that we control nothing. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the universe. And I believe that when the universe looks down upon us, it doesn’t see a species with an acceptance of its fate. It sees a species raging against that fate, and maybe it admires that stubbornness just a little.”
“Right,” William said. The sense that he was not quite listening was strong enough in his tone that Tom turned around. “I was out by the warehouse where you had your old studio,” William said.
“Oh?” There was a light in Tom’s eyes that seemed to make it difficult for him to see what was around him. “Why?”
“I wanted something from the alleyway. When I was out there, I talked to someone who saw you.”
“Who saw me?” Tom repeated.
“Who saw you going into the building the day of the fire.”
Tom was, all at once, as still as a Buddha, head down. He spoke finally, in a hushed voice that William couldn’t hear at first. William moved closer. “Cranston.”
“What?”
Tom’s head snapped up. “That was the name of my psychology professor in college. He used to talk about how people project their own negative ideas onto others. He wrote a whole book about it. He said that suspicion was like a black butterfly, and that what darkened it was the shadow of the person looking.”
“Okay,” William said. “The next time I’m in a library or a bookstore, I’ll check it out.”
“You could use a copy right now,” Tom said. Now he was staring at William intently. “Unless I’m wrong, you’re accusing me of something.”
It sounded stupid when Tom said it. “No,” William said. “Not accusing. Just being overly curious.”
“I’ll say. Can I ask how you know about the fire graph?”