Chapter 18: The Fire
The fire was set on Thursday night, while Boone was at the diner eating meatloaf he did not want, in the seat he did not need, watching a road where nothing was happening. His phone lit at 9:40 with his neighbor Dale's name, and Dale's voice came through shouting over other shouting: "Your porch, Boone. It's your porch. We got the hoses on it."
He does not remember the ride. He remembers arriving to a street of his neighbors in nightclothes holding garden hoses like a bucket line out of another century, and a county cruiser angled across his drive, lightbar turning, and the smell — that smell of hot paint and scorched pine — coming off the house he had painted.
It was out by the time he got there. That was the thing. It had never had a chance to be a fire. The porch boards were blackened in a fan shape from the steps, the screen door had blistered, one rocker had given up its finish, and the front of the house wore a wash of smoke like a handprint. But the sills had not caught. The walls had not caught. A trooper with a fire extinguisher from the cruiser's trunk and forty years of neighbors had seen to that between them.
"He used the woodpile," the fire chief said, walking Boone around with a flashlight like a man showing him a boat he'd decided not to buy. "Built it small, against the steps. Kerosene, I'd say, from the smell. It was meant to grow slow and be seen late. Professional? No. But it wasn't meant to burn your house down before you got home. It was meant to be burning when you got home."
Dale, in a bathrobe and work boots, had seen the glow from his kitchen window and come across the yard at a run, hose in hand, a story he would tell for years. "Thought it was your grill tipped, at first," Dale said. "Then I smelled it. Boone, a man doesn't smell that and think *accident*." "I've watched that porch forty years. June shelled peas out here and threw the pods at me over the rail."
"Don't you dare apologize for that," Boone said, and put a hand on the man's wet sleeve.
The trooper with the cruiser's extinguisher was nineteen if he was a day, standing in the smoke with the empty canister still in his hand, unsure where it went now. Boone thanked him by name, having made a point of learning it, and the boy said, "Sir, I just—" and then couldn't find the rest, and Boone said, "You just did. That's the whole of it," and the boy stood a little straighter in the ruined yard.
The yellow raincoat was not on the porch. That was luck wearing the shape of a whim: that morning, for no reason he could name or examine, Boone had taken the coat off the rack by his front door and hung it in the truck's cab instead, because the truck was going to the shop Friday and he had thought — some clerk in his mind had thought — that a man should keep the good coat with the good truck. It sat now on the truck's passenger seat in Dale's driveway, glossy and unburned, and Boone stood looking at it through the glass without saying anything.
Grant arrived at two in the morning and stood in his yard in the white light of the work lamps and wasted none of it.
"He's read your week," she said. "He knows you eat at the diner. He knows you're gone from the house by dark." She turned a slow circle, reading the street as he'd seen her do before. "He wanted you out of the house or into the open. Preferably both. A man rides home fast to a burning porch, he's not checking the treeline. He's not checking anything."
"He's setting a table," Boone said.
"He is. He wants you somewhere undefended, on a schedule he chooses. The quarry was a test. This—" she nodded at the blackened steps "—this is him getting impatient with the test results."
Boone looked at his house, at the smoke print, at the neighbors' hoses coiled in the street like something alive put down to rest. Four years ago a man had taken his whole life at sixty miles an hour and never stopped. Now that man was close enough to smell kerosene on, arranging Boone's evenings for him, and the worst part — the part Boone admitted to the kitchen at three, standing in the smell of it — was not fear. It was the pull of the arrangement. The wish to accept the invitation. To stop being arranged *around* and go and be the weather for once.
He made coffee he didn't drink. He sat where June used to sit. And by dawn he had decided something, and it was not the thing Ketch was hoping for.