Opposite him in the diner booth sat a friend of a friend of Vrieger’s whom he’d been put in touch with about getting new identity documents. The guy was in his mid-fifties, dressed in a khaki fisherman’s vest, bifocals dangling on a chain around his neck. After he’d finished his milk shake and scrambled eggs and nattered on about the Patriots for too long, he handed Doug a thick, white envelope. “I hope your memory’s good,” he said, signaling for the check. “If you can’t remember who you’re supposed to be, you’re finished.”
On his return to Finden that morning, as he made the turn onto Winthrop, Doug was passed by a column of fire trucks. As he crossed the river, he saw flames coursing from the downstairs windows of Charlotte’s house on the hill; they had caught on the overgrown bushes and on the dry shingle, setting the whole side of the house on fire. He pulled into his driveway and jogged up the slope, watching smoke billow from her front door. As the firemen unwound their hoses, a fuel tank or gas line exploded in the kitchen, sending a ball of orange flame shooting across the back entryway and into the barn. The panes of the upstairs windows began to pop. The fire was consuming the ancient wooden structure like kindling, the whole edifice starting to crackle and sag. By the time the water had been tapped from the hydrant it was too late to do much more than contain the blaze.
“Was she in there?” Doug asked the fire marshal, who stood beside one of the engines in full protective gear, issuing the occasional order from his walkie-talkie.
“Her dogs seem to think so,” he said, at which point Doug realized the sound he’d been hearing all along was their howling. “Curtis,” the marshal called to a police officer, “get those animals in a squad car, would you? They’re driving me crazy.”
“Do you know what caused it?”
The man shrugged. “These old places burn fast, but not this fast. My guess is we’ll find some kind of accelerant.”
Up on the road, traffic had clogged as passersby stopped to marvel at the sight.
“Did you know the woman?”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “A bit.”
“Anything unusual lately? Anything we should know about?”
Before Doug could answer, a voice from the dispatch squawked an indecipherable bit of news over the marshal’s radio and he moved off toward a group of firefighters standing closer to the blaze.
Doug remained there for some time, standing beside the truck, watching as the flames crested and then slowly diminished, the house turning to ash and scattering into the dry air.
This, then, was her moment. Less public than the monk immolating himself on the street in Saigon, but a protest nonetheless. He didn’t feel pity. His neighbor had never sought that. A lone soldier against an army. That’s how she’d described herself to him. And a professional one, it turned out, choosing a battleground grave over the dishonor of retreat.
He stayed until after most of the trucks had left, leaving behind them only a few charred posts and the crooked, blackened tower of the chimney.
OF ALL THE NEWS he watched in the weeks that followed, of UN weapons inspectors and the sniper menacing the suburbs of the capital and the rise in housing prices and criminals being released onto the streets of Baghdad, the story Doug couldn’t get out of his mind was the one about the pilotless drones flying over the Empty Quarter, a vast swath of western Yemen, off whose shores the Vincennes had once sailed. Intelligence services wanted to know if the operatives of various radical networks had secreted themselves among the nomadic tribes, who were the only people to traverse that portion of the Arabian desert. Cable news made only a few mentions of it but on the Web he found more and lying in bed or on the couch downstairs he watched over and over the various clips of aerial footage that people had posted.
In that nowhere place, so appealing in its way, mountains of sand razor-backed by the wind enclosed barren valley floors covered with hundreds of identical hillocks each swept to a point. Shots from higher elevations revealed a broader pattern: lunar white pockmarks spread over the flats between the sand ridges which stretched across the landscape like the wrinkled hide of some beast too large for the human eye to see, its skin slowly ulcerating in the sun.
Finally, the time for him to leave town arrived. The night before he left he took a drive, setting out along the golf course and then down a bit past the Hollands’ and beyond them the Gammonds’ old place, continuing on through the village past the green and the Congregational Church and the shops with their painted signs, turning at the intersection onto Elm and heading out to the state route.
There, uninterrupted woods ran either side of the highway for the first three or four miles until he reached the liquor store that still stood on the far side of the traffic light across from the muffler shop. It had begun to rain and the red of the traffic signal slid down his windshield in rivulets quickly cleared by the wipers, only to blur again as the signal turned green and he crossed the line back into Alden.
He glided through one light after the next, by the glowing signs for discount meals in the parking lots of the fast-food chains and passed the cinder-block furniture warehouses and the box-store plazas that they had knocked down the old malls to build, until eventually he reached Foley Avenue and turned off the strip. Half a mile down at the intersection with Main darkened storefronts stretched from one end of the block to the next: an insurance office, an empty showroom with a for rent sign in the door, a beauty salon whose faded posters advertised hair styles of the eighties. Across the street a convenience-store awning was illuminated by the bright yellow sign above the check-cashing office next door, its metal grate locked to the sidewalk.
Christmas decorations already littered the front yards of the ranch houses along Howard, the glowing Santas and plastic reindeer arranged like inflated toys on outsize playroom floors. As he reached Eames Street, the rain softened to a drizzle and then stopped. Up ahead he could see low traveling clouds, their yellow underbellies lit by the strip that lay just on the other side of the creek and the fences. Single-family homes petered out toward the end of the block where he noticed Phil’s Pizza had been replaced by a Brazilian restaurant still serving at this late hour.
The triple-deckers began on the other side of Miller, big clapboard rectangles with three front porches, stacked one atop the other, the angles on most of them no longer right, their posts sagging into the worn corners of the decking. Trash cans were lined up along the chain-link fences that fronted most lots beside the gated parking spaces. There were Christmas decorations here as well, string lights flashing slowly on and off in windows with the shades pulled and farther up Mrs. Cronin’s old wooden crèche, its figures two feet high and illuminated in front by a row of bulbs sheltered under a weathered strip of plywood.
He pulled to the curb and cut the engine. Up on the third floor of number 38 the lights in his mother’s apartment were still on. He pictured her as he had a thousand times: she would be into her second bottle by now, watching the evening dramas while whatever she’d managed to make herself for dinner lay half eaten on the table in front of her.