Point of Origin

The first fire was in a dumpster behind a laundromat on Delaney Street. Nothing to it. Cardboard, a dead mattress, somebody's old love letters. Emmett stood in the alley with his coffee going cold and watched the last of it steam under the hose. That was March. The owner came out in his slippers and asked if anybody was going to be arrested. Emmett told him no. The owner asked if anybody was going to find out who did it. Emmett told him probably not. The owner looked at him like he had just been told his dog was going to die, then went back inside and locked the door. Emmett wrote it up as accidental. Somebody tossed a cigarette, maybe. Somebody always tosses a cigarette. There are a thousand ways a fire starts and only two or three of them mean anything. He went home. He ate a sandwich standing over the sink. He watched the news and fell asleep in the chair with his shoes on. That was his life then. Fifty two years old with a bad knee and a house with too many rooms and a phone that did not ring much anymore. The second fire was in April. A garage off Route 9. The man who owned it kept a boat in there and a lawnmower and a chest freezer full of fish he caught in the summer. The fire ate the boat and the lawnmower and left the freezer. You can always tell when a fire has opinions about what it wants to keep. The adjuster said it was probably faulty wiring. Emmett said the wiring was not that old. The adjuster shrugged and wrote his report and went home to his family. The third was in May. A boat shed at the marina. Small. Clean. Gone before anybody noticed. By June there were five. A vacant house on Pepper Mill Road where the owner was three months behind on his mortgage. A shed behind the elementary school. A car in the lot behind the VFW. Each one small. Each one clean. No accelerant the lab could find. No obvious point of origin. No reason for any of it except that somebody wanted something to burn and did not want to be caught. Nobody died. That was the thing. Five fires in four months and nobody so much as got a blister. A man who burns buildings without killing anyone is either careful or lucky. Emmett had known both kinds. He had never known the careful kind to stay careful for long. The fifth one was different. He knew it before he got out of the truck. The address was on the north end of Wexler, a street he had not driven down in twenty years. He sat at the stop sign at the corner a while. Long enough that the guy behind him laid on the horn and swung around with his middle finger out the window. Emmett did not blame him. He would have done the same. The house was a two story colonial with a bad roof and a maple in the front yard that had grown so wide it swallowed the porch. Somebody had painted the shutters green a long time ago. The paint was mostly gone now. The steps bowed under his weight. He remembered that. He remembered the third step had always had a soft spot in it, and he put his foot there on purpose, and it gave just the way he knew it would. The chief was already there, hands on his hips, talking to a deputy. He saw Emmett and waved him over. "Arson," he said. "Same as the others." Emmett did not answer. He was looking at the front door. The way the fire had come through it. The way it had eaten the frame from the inside out, low and patient, the way you would if you wanted a house to burn slow. A fire that starts high and moves down is a fire that wants out. A fire that starts low and eats up is a fire that wants to stay. He had done that. Once. A long time ago. Before the thing that ended his career and his marriage in the same week. He had done it exactly like that. "You hearing me, Emmett?" "I hear you." "Then say something." "Who called it in?" "Neighbor. Said she smelled smoke around two this morning. By the time the trucks got here the top floor was gone." "She live next door?" "Across the street. Name's Mrs. Halloran. She's sitting on her porch if you want to talk to her. I already did. Nothing there." He walked across the street anyway. Mrs. Halloran was seventy something, in a housecoat, with a mug of tea she had not touched. She told him she had lived on that street for forty one years and that the house across from her had been empty since the old man who owned it went into a home up in Bangor. She told him the maple tree had been there since before she moved in and that it had dropped so many leaves in her gutter one fall that she had to hire a man to come clean them out. She told him she had seen a light in the upstairs window on Tuesday night, just for a minute, and then it went away, and she assumed it was kids. "Did you see a car?" he asked. "I did not." "Anybody walking?" "Not that I noticed." "Did you know the old man? The one who went into the home?" She looked at him a long time. "Everybody knows everybody on this street," she said. "You used to live here, didn't you." He did not answer. "Third house down," she said. "The one with the blue door. I remember your wife. Pretty woman. Red hair." "She's in Florida now," he said. "I'm sorry to hear it." "So am I." He walked back across the street. The chief was talking to the fire marshal now, and neither of them was looking at him. He stood on the lawn and looked up at the house. Second floor, left window. The glass was gone and the frame was black and there was a curtain rod still hanging there, holding nothing, like a man who has forgotten what he was doing. Tuesday night. She saw a light Tuesday night. Somebody had been in there. Somebody had walked the same floors he walked when he was twenty eight years old and thought he was going to be somebody. They had stood in the same rooms, put their hand on the same banister, looked out the same windows. And then they had built a fire, low and patient, and walked out the front door, and left it to burn. He went around the side of the house. The grass was tall and wet. There was a chain link fence along the property line with a gate that had rusted open. He stepped through it and found what he was looking for almost immediately. A five gallon can. Red plastic, no cap. Tipped on its side. Clean. Nobody uses a gas can and leaves it. The ones who know what they are doing take it with them. The ones who do not know what they are doing get caught with it, and the ones who are stupid enough to leave it are stupid enough to leave prints on it too. This one was clean. Wiped down. Left in a place he would find it. That was not an accident. That was a message. He stood there a while with the wet grass soaking through his shoes and thought about what kind of person leaves a clean gas can at a fire and what kind of person wants him to find it. Behind him, one of the trucks started up and pulled away, and the hose dragged across the pavement with that sound it makes, like a snake going through dry leaves. The chief came around the corner and saw him standing there. "What'd you find?" "Gas can." The chief looked at it and then at him. "Think it's the same guy?" "No." He waited for Emmett to say more. Emmett did not. "Emmett," he said, "if you know something I don't, now's the time." Emmett looked at the house. The maple. The black window where a curtain rod still hung holding nothing. "I don't know anything," he said. "Yet." He walked back to his truck. On the way he passed the deputy and the fire marshal and a woman from the county who was taking pictures of everything, and none of them looked at him twice. He got in and sat in the cab with his hands on the wheel and did not start the engine. Twenty years ago he burned a house down. He was never caught. He was never charged. But he knew what he had done, and the man who owned that house knew, and the woman who used to live in the third house down with the blue door knew, and none of them ever said it out loud. He paid for it in other ways. His badge. His marriage. Twenty years of sleeping four hours a night and waking up in a chair with his shoes on. And now somebody was doing it again. Low and patient. The same way he had done it. In a house he used to live in. He turned the key. The engine caught. He pulled out onto Wexler and did not look back, because he knew if he looked back he would see the window and the curtain rod and the maple, and he did not want to see them. He had seen them enough. He drove home and ate a sandwich standing over the sink. He watched the news. He did not sleep.