Clara folded the letter against her chest, over the place where the locket used to hang, and wept β not for a secret any longer, but for a girl of twenty-one, writing by candlelight in this same house, trying to be brave enough for both of them.
Chapter 13: The Fire
The official report on the death of Thomas Wren was eleven pages long, and Noah had been trying to obtain it, on and off, since he was twenty-three years old.
"Fire departments archive by incident, not by name," he told Clara, spreading photocopies across Priya Shah's kitchen table three nights after Sinclair House, while Priya β Clara's best friend, and an attorney who read footnotes β made tea nobody drank. "Once I was told the file was destroyed in a flood. The archive is on the third floor."
"So how did you get it now?"
"I stopped asking as a nephew. I asked as a journalist, with a records request under state law."
Clara read. She had dreaded this document for weeks the way you dread a hospital corridor, and now that it was under her hands it was worse than dread. It was banal. Incident 93-1187. Structure fire, single occupancy studio, rear of 14 Legare Street. Alarm raised 11:42 p.m., 9 December 1993, by a neighbour. Occupant: Wren, Thomas, male, 29, presumed within. One body recovered, badly burned, from the rear room. Cause of death: smoke inhalation and thermal injury. Manner: accidental.
"Keep reading," Noah said.
Page four. Origin of fire: undetermined, probable electrical fault in a space heater.
Page six. Clara's finger stopped.
Point of origin was given in the body of the report as the rear room, by the north wall. But the hand-drawn diagram β sketched by the first officer on the scene, before the investigators arrived from Columbia β showed the deepest charring in two places: the rear room, and the front room by the door, thirty feet apart, with a corridor of comparatively unburned floor between them.
"One fire doesn't start in two places," Priya said slowly, over her shoulder.
"No," Noah said. "Two fires do."
Page seven. A single line, typed: Traces of a petroleum-based accelerant were detected in samples from the front room. Below it, in different type β a later machine, Clara would learn, a correction nobody had initialled β the same sentence had been struck through and replaced: Laboratory results were inconclusive.
"A fire is lazy," Noah said. "It climbs, it spreads, it follows fuel and air. What it does not do is go out in a room, walk down thirty feet of corridor without burning it, and start again, fresh, by another door. When investigators find two separated seats of fire, they stop writing the word accident and they start writing the word person. I interviewed a retired captain in Columbia last spring β not for this, for a warehouse piece β and he said the sentence I have never been able to unhear: two fires in one building is a signature, not a coincidence."
Clara found that she was picturing it whether she wanted to or not: not flames, which the cinema had made almost beautiful, but the ordinariness of the setting of them. A man in a good coat, perhaps. A can, carried like a tool. A match struck by hands that had signed things in offices. She thought of Rose, eight months pregnant in a house across the city, asleep perhaps, believing the man she loved would come for her before Christmas; and she thought that the cruellest part was not the fire itself but the paperwork afterwards, the calm correction of a sentence, a heater quietly invented so that a whole city could agree to call a locked door and a can of petrol an accident.
"Everybody signed," she said. "That's what I can't β the neighbour called it in. The officer drew it. The laboratory found it. The investigator was paid to lose it. It's a whole staircase of people, and every one of them only had to take one small step down."
"That's how it's done," Priya said. "Nobody is asked to carry the whole lie. They're only ever asked to carry it one flight."
Page eight was the door. The rear door, the studio's only other exit, was found locked. Not latched. Locked, with the key in the lock on the inside, and β the first officer's notebook, photocopied as an appendix and plainly never read by whoever wrote the summary β a length of new chain coiled on the mat outside it.
"Someone locked him in," Clara whispered. "They locked the back door and set a second fire by the front, so whichever way he ranβ" She could not finish.
"Or someone wanted it to look that way," Noah said, but his jaw was tight. "Clara, there's more, and it's the identification. Brace yourself."
She nodded like a woman stepping into cold water.
The body had been identified, the report said, by personal effects recovered nearby: a signet ring engraved T.W., a wristwatch stopped at 11:19, and a wallet, charred at the edges, containing a driving licence. That was all. No dental comparison was recorded, although Thomas Wren had had a full set of Charleston dental records since childhood β Noah's grandmother had kept every receipt. No fingerprints survived, the report said. No one, so far as the file recorded, had ever asked the family to identify anything at all.
"My grandmother identified him by grief," Noah said. "She was shown the ring in a plastic bag, two days before Christmas, and she fainted, and that was apparently enough for Charleston. She buried that ring at Magnolia in 1994, with an empty coffin."
Noah took from his bag a folder Clara had not seen before, soft with age, tied with string, and laid it on the table between the teacups like a fourth guest. "My grandmother kept his dental receipts in this. Every visit since he was nine. Crowns at fourteen, two molars out at twenty. She gave it to the undertaker in January 1994, in person, and was told it would not be necessary, and was given back the ring in the plastic bag. She kept the folder for the rest of her life in her handbag drawer. Not in a box. In her handbag drawer, where you keep the things you may need to produce at any moment, for thirty years, in case somebody finally asked."
"Did anybody ever ask?" Clara said.
"You just did," Noah said. "You're the first."
"But the report says a body was recovered," Priya said.
"Yes." Noah turned to the last page. "And here is the name that paid for the report you are not reading."
It was an invoice, misfiled or defiantly filed by some clerk with a conscience: professional services in connection with Incident 93-1187, independent fire investigation, submitted by one E. R. Hollis, certified investigator, Columbia. Fees: four thousand two hundred dollars. And in the box marked Authorised by, in the hand Clara had now seen on thirty years of birthday cheques and legal letters, was a signature.
Silas Crane. For the Sinclair family. Dated 13 December 1993 β four days after the fire, and two days before the official report was signed.
"He paid the investigator," Clara said. "My grandfather's lawyer paid the fire investigator before the report even existed. And then the accelerant disappeared out of the findings, and the second point of origin disappeared, and a heater did it. A heater."
Priya had gone very quiet, in the way that meant she was already building a case in her head. "The signature alone is not proof of arson. It is proof of interference. Of an interest. Of a cover, certainly, of something."
"Rose knew." Clara's hand had found, of its own accord, the place at her throat where the locket no longer hung β it lay now in an evidence sleeve in Priya's safe, by mutual, miserable agreement. "Look at the date of her last diary entry. November the ninth. A month before. 'Men came asking for him, respectable men, a lawyer's men.' She knew they were closing in. She just didn't know how far they would go."
"Clara." Noah hesitated, and she saw the journalist in him fighting the nephew, and both of them losing to the friend. "There is one more inconsistency, and I have been sitting on it for two days because I did not know how to say it."
"Say it badly. Say it now."
"If the identification was that thin β a ring, a watch, a wallet, all of them things that can be taken off a man, or put beside another man β then the file does not actually prove that the body in that studio was my uncle."
"You're saying the fire was staged," Clara said. "The whole death was staged and covered. You're saying it is possible β not kind, not hopeful, possible β that Thomas Wren did not die in that room."
"I am saying," Noah said, "that for thirty years, everyone who told us he did had something in their hands except proof."