I must be crazy to stay here. The same thought had run through Andy’s mind most of the day. Learning more about Vardon Chaffee and Dayfield wasn’t enough justification to stay in a town where the atmosphere made him feel as if he’d been punched in the gut. Even if Dayfield’s historical society records weren’t online, there were other resources. He could continue his search from the safety of his studio apartment outside Boston while helping his father rid the house of Mom’s things.
But he’d chosen to stay the moment he’d walked into his motel room the night before. In school, he’d been the weird kid who preferred the library over the gym or being outside. The historical society room in the Dayfield library was his kind of place. Looking for records and books with mentions of Vardon and the factory would be like a treasure hunt.
Plus he would have Weston’s company. Something about him appealed to Andy. He was intelligent, for one thing. Andy had been with too many guys who were incapable of holding a conversation about anything besides sports and sex. Being around someone he could actually talk to was something he would rather not pass up.
Andy had other reasons for wanting to spend more time with Weston too, but he preferred not to think about them.
Weston had seemed happy when he found out Andy would be staying in town. The two of them had chatted and joked while going through the files and books until Weston suddenly noticed they’d been there an hour past the scheduled closing time.
Other than Mrs. Malley, no one had come into the library at all. Andy suspected that wasn’t typical for a Sunday. He had to wonder if Mrs. Malley had spread the word about him being there and who he was.
On the way back to the motel, he tried to put that out of his mind, along with the way some of the locals in the diner had glared at him through his entire meal. None of them had spoken to him. Even the server had barely said a word. If the food hadn’t been so good, Andy would have walked out without eating, but he’d stayed. Whatever the Chaffee family had done to piss off the town, he wasn’t part of it. If they held it against him, they were the ones with the problem.
That was why on Monday morning, he returned to the diner, waiting until midmorning in the hope of avoiding rush hour. Not that the timing made much difference. The diner was more crowded than it had been on Sunday.
The same server walked over to him when he sat down. Leaning away from the counter, the server narrowed his eyes and wrinkled his nose as if a disgusting odor had struck him. “What do you want?” he snapped.
“Polite service, for one thing.” Andy looked the guy in the eye. He was damned if anyone in Dayfield would treat him like shit merely because of his appearance. “My name is Andy Forrest. I’ve been informed of who I look like, and I don’t care what you think of me because of it. I’m from Boston, not Dayfield, and whatever crap has happened here, I don’t have anything to do with it. So maybe you could stop treating me less like I came off the bottom of your shoe, and more like a paying customer.”
The server cleared his throat and focused his gaze on the counter. Andy folded his hands in his lap. He hadn’t intended to spew all that out. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to spend another meal being glared and grumbled at.
For a moment, the server didn’t say anything. Then his features relaxed into a slightly more pleasant expression. “Sorry. You’re right. You’re taking some of us off guard, but that isn’t your fault. I’m Rich Murray.”
“Nice to meet you,” Andy said. He didn’t mean it, but he refused to hold a grudge the way most of the Dayfield residents did. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please. Sweetener, no cream or milk.”
“Sure. No problem.” Rich walked over to the coffee brewers at the far end of the back counter.
One of the men sitting near Andy, a guy with a greasy, graying mullet under his beat-up baseball cap, turned on his stool and folded his arms. “Your name’s Forrest?”
“Andy Forrest. Yes.”
The guy looked skeptical. “Why are you in Dayfield?”
“Searching for my roots.” Andy kept his expression perfectly blank and his body relaxed, but he was ready for a fight if one came. He’d run into guys like this from elementary school on up, and even now, in his thirties, he sometimes encountered belligerent morons when he was doing nothing more than walking through downtown Boston. As long as Baseball Cap stayed cool, he would too. But he would damn well be prepared if Baseball Cap tried to start something.
“Roots?” A man on the other side of Baseball Cap, skinny with wire-rim glasses, leaned forward and blinked at Andy. “So you have family here?”
“My family is in Boston,” Andy said. “But I’ve recently learned I have biological ties to a family from Dayfield, so I’m checking into it.”
Rich returned and set a cup of steaming coffee and a few packets of artificial sweetener in front of Andy. “Are you ready to order yet?”
“Pancake stack, please.” Determined to be so polite it would make their teeth ache, Andy picked up one of the sweetener packets. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” Rich looked at Baseball Cap and Wire Rims. “Ease off, guys. He’s only having a meal.”
“Sure.” Baseball Cap huffed and picked up his coffee cup. “Forrest. You probably don’t want to stick around here too long.”
Andy couldn’t resist. “You don’t take kindly to outsiders?” he said in a pseudo-cowboy accent.
Baseball Cap glared at him. “Don’t mouth off. You’re not a popular person around here as it is.”
“I gathered that, but thanks for the confirmation.” Andy picked up his own cup and took a sip of the too-hot coffee, wincing as it burned his tongue. He saw no point in continuing his conversation with the locals. They’d made up their minds about him, and he doubted anything he said would change it.
He’d been stupid enough to assume people in Dayfield would be open-minded, but he’d clearly gone through a time warp into some kind of judgmental land that time forgot. These men would probably be more tolerant of his sexuality than his ancestry.
To his relief, the men didn’t speak to him again. He could only hold his temper so long, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep his mouth shut if the other customers kept at him. He sipped his coffee until Rich brought his food and then ate while staring at the counter, which was covered with old newspaper clippings under a clear coating.
Most of the stories were about the Chaffee Furniture Factory and the “charitable efforts” of the Chaffee family. None of the clippings had dates on them, but going by the photos accompanying the stories, Andy guessed they dated from the pre-Depression era. He considered asking Rich but decided not to waste his breath. The server was being civil, but that didn’t mean he would be happy to answer questions.
When he finished eating, Andy left a ten-dollar bill under his plate and walked out of the diner without a word. It wouldn’t be the last time he went in there. The only other options he knew of for meals were the fast-food place beyond his motel and the grocery items Walmart sold. Andy wasn’t a fan of fast food, and since his room didn’t even contain a fridge, let alone a microwave or even a hot plate, he would have been very limited in what he could buy at Walmart. Despite the suspicion and rudeness of the people in the diner, the food was worth going back for.
The library wasn’t open yet. According to the sign on the door, it didn’t open until noon on Mondays. Andy groaned. He should have checked the hours, but he’d assumed the library would be open all day, and Weston hadn’t told him any differently.
Since he still had a couple of hours to kill, he decided to take a walk around what passed for Dayfield’s downtown. It wouldn’t take much time, given how small the place was, but it would be better than awkwardly standing on the library steps. And since Dayfield was part of Andy’s heritage, it made sense to see more of the town.
He headed in the opposite direction from the diner, not wanting to encounter Baseball Cap or Wire Rims again. The men had been chatting with other guys about the Boston sports teams, but Andy hadn’t missed the glares they shot him from time to time. The longer he avoided them, the better.
A few doors down from the library, a small photography shop took up half of the first floor of one of the brick buildings. A hand-painted wooden sign above the door identified it as McKenzie Photography. The other half of the building was empty, with one side of the front window boarded up.
With nothing better to do, Andy went into the photo shop. Despite the door being unlocked, no one else appeared to be in the place.
Matted pictures of local landmarks hung on the walls, and bins of prints of the same pictures stood atop dinged wooden tables. He walked over to one of the bins and flipped through the prints, most of which were of a vacant factory. The furniture factory, he assumed, though there was no indication on the pictures of where they’d been taken.
“May I help you?” an irritated male voice called from the back room.
Andy jumped and glanced toward the curtain. “Just looking, thanks.”
“Of course you are.” A tall, red-haired man walked through the curtain. “Anything strike your interest?”
“This, I guess.” Andy held up one of the factory photos. “This is Chaffee Furniture, right?”
“Yeah. Well past its prime.” The man leaned on the counter. “And you’re one of them.”
“Not exactly.” I’m going to have to get used to people recognizing me. “I’m Andy Forrest. I was adopted. My birth father was a Chaffee, but I didn’t know anything about him beyond his name until I came to town.”
The man nodded. “Matt McKenzie. And you couldn’t look more like the Chaffees. Which one was your father?”
“Vardon.”
Matt’s expression didn’t change a bit. “Really? Wouldn’t have thought the guy had it in him. I went to school with him. People made assumptions, if you know what I mean.”
“Um, sure.” Andy wasn’t completely certain of Matt’s meaning but chose not to ask. “At least you aren’t cursing him or me like some of the people I’ve run into.”
Matt shrugged. “Vardon was supposed to take over the factory. His father fucked it all to hell, if you’ll excuse my French. People lost a lot, and some of these folks don’t forgive or forget easily.”
“So I’ve noticed. It would be nice if they wouldn’t hold something against me that happened right after I was born.”
“As I said, they don’t forgive or forget.” Matt straightened and walked over to Andy. “How long have you been in town?”
“Since Saturday.”
“The historical society might have some information you can use, if you’re trying to find out more about your family.”
“I’ve been there,” Andy said. “Yesterday and the day before. That’s why I came to town.”
“Ah. Then I’m sure Weston will take care of you.” Matt took the picture out of Andy’s hands. “You can have this. It sure isn’t anything the locals are likely to buy, and we won’t have many tourists this way for another month or two.”
“Um, thanks.” Andy wasn’t sure what he would do with the photo, but since Matt was the first person other than Weston to treat Andy with anything resembling respect, he didn’t want to turn down the gift.
“No problem. I’ll bag it for you.” Matt returned to the counter. “We were pretty sure Vardon was gay.”
The comment came out of the blue, and it took Andy a moment to process. “That’s what you meant by people making assumptions?”
“Yep. Right through school, and believe me, he got a lot of shit for it. Worse in high school, of course. We had to go to the regional instead of staying here in town.” Matt pulled a sheet of tissue paper out from under the counter. “Wouldn’t have figured he would get close enough to a girl to have a child. I guess we were wrong about him.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Hearing that people had suspected his father of being gay surprised Andy. He didn’t know anything about his birth parents’ relationship, but maybe it hadn’t been a relationship at all. That might have been one of the reasons for Andy’s adoption. Maybe his mother and Vardon hadn’t been willing to raise him together because they weren’t actually together.
He could wrap his head around the idea of Vardon fathering a child more easily. Vardon certainly wouldn’t have been the first gay guy to have sex with a woman in an attempt to be straight.
“People suck.” Matt wrapped the print in the tissue and slid it into an unmarked plastic bag. “There you go. Part of your heritage.”
“Thanks.” Andy went over and picked up the bag. “And yes, people do suck.”
“Be careful around here if you’re staying long. Anyone who sees you will know who you are and might not be too pleased about it.”
“I’ve already had a few experiences with that.” Andy glanced over his shoulder in time to see Weston walk past the shop. “There’s Weston. I’ll try to persuade him to let me into the library early.”
“Good luck. Have a good day.” Without waiting for a response, Matt turned and went back through the curtain.
Bemused, Andy hurried out of the shop and caught up with Weston a few yards up the sidewalk. “Good morning.”
Weston gave him a distinctly unimpressed look. “Morning. I’m not so sure about good. I have more information for you, along with a warning.”
“Warning?”
“I’ll tell you inside.”
Weston didn’t say another word until they were inside the historical society room. He took off his denim jacket and draped it over a chair, then cracked his knuckles. “My dad has a lot of friends in town, and they keep him informed of what’s going on. Including the fact that a Chaffee is poking around. Why are you going into the diner? Didn’t you learn anything yesterday?”
“I learned they have good food.” Andy shook his head. “Why do I feel like I’m in a horror novel or something? Stay away from the town, or they’ll possess you and eat you alive.”
“That’s how some small towns are,” Weston muttered. “You had a run-in this morning.”
“A couple of guys in the diner weren’t thrilled with me being there, but Rich shut them up.” Andy paused. “After I told him to get over himself.”
Weston’s frown deepened. “I heard about that too. Maybe you should take the books back to Boston and mail them to me when you’re finished.”
Andy stared at him. “Kicking me out of town? I wouldn’t have figured you’d agree with the general public.”
“I don’t, but Dad said Ernie implied you’d better get out of here sooner than later.”
Andy had no clue which of the men in the diner was Ernie. Nor did he care. He wasn’t about to leave because of a dickwad blustering over the phone. “I’ll get out of here when I’ve finished what I came here for. Matt over in the photo shop doesn’t seem to hate me, at least.”
“Matt’s a little different. He’s a townie, but he tries to keep an open mind most of the time.” Weston nodded toward the bag Andy was still holding. “You bought a photo?”
“He gave it to me. It’s the factory.” Andy hesitated. “I haven’t seen the factory yet.”
“Do you want to?” Weston sounded surprised.
“It’s part of the family history, right?” Andy wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to visit the place, but since he was in town, it wouldn’t hurt.
“In a way, I guess. Not a pleasant part.” Weston walked over to one of the bookcases and ran his finger over the spines on one shelf. “I have a book about the factory here somewhere. When it started, when the Chaffees took over, all of that. Maybe you should read it first.”
“Sure.” Andy didn’t see why he needed to read a book before visiting the factory, but he appreciated Weston’s willingness to help.
“So are you planning to hang out here again today?” Weston asked. “You took all those books yesterday. I figured you’d spend the day reading at the motel.”
Andy hesitated. They were barely at the friendly acquaintance stage, and he wasn’t the kind to admit an attraction to someone after knowing them such a short time. He’d learned to be cautious.
But Weston was worth taking the chance. Worst case, Andy would avoid the library for the rest of his time in the area, except to return the books he’d borrowed.
He smiled. “I wanted the company.”
Weston glanced over his shoulder. “You did, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. I don’t mind the company either.” Weston turned back to the books. “Here it is.”
“Okay.” That’s it? We say we like being around each other and then go back to talking about books?
Then again, he didn’t know what else he’d expected.
Weston turned around and held out a book with a sepia-toned cover photo of several people in nineteenth-century clothes standing in front of a building Andy recognized from the picture Matt had given him. “Take a look. I need to get some things put away. Apparently someone’s questioning whether I’m actually doing anything around here, so a couple of the town selectmen are coming to inspect.”
“Ugh.” Andy took the book and sat at the table. “I guess you have to prove you’re earning your keep.”
“Pretty much. Read the book. If you have any questions, ask, but I can’t help you find anything else until I get this stuff sorted out.” He picked up a small pile of books from the floor and looked at the bookcases. “Assuming I can find places to sort it.”
“I can give you a hand.”
“That wouldn’t exactly prove I’m doing my job, right?”
“I guess.” Andy studied the picture on the book cover. One of the men looked vaguely familiar. After a moment, he realized the man resembled Vardon.
Weston started moving books, and Andy began reading the one he was holding. The book had been published before the factory closed, so the introduction was fairly complimentary about the job opportunities and other contributions the Chaffee family had made to Dayfield over the years. They weren’t the ones who had started the factory, but they’d owned it the longest, and their name was the one that had become nationally recognized.
The first chapter was about the factory’s construction and opening in 1850, followed by a description of a flood that had inundated part of the town thirty-seven years later. Part of the factory had been underwater, machinery and supplies had been destroyed, and the repairs and replacements had taken more money than the owner had. He’d managed to cover most of the expenses, but the toll those had taken on his bank account, along with the similar effects the stress had on his health, had left him unable to keep the factory open. Three months after the flood, having paid most of his employees to help in the cleanup effort, he’d shut down and put the business up for sale.
The chapter included pictures of the flooded town, mostly illustrations along with a couple of photographs. The flood had done nearly as much damage as the recent tornado, and had had a similar impact on the town’s businesses since most of them had been located near the riverbank.
Andy leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. His parents weren’t wealthy, but they’d always had more than enough, and they’d given Andy everything he needed. Even now, he couldn’t visit Dad without being handed cash. He didn’t know what it was like to barely manage from paycheck to paycheck, let alone the impact of losing the paycheck altogether.
People in Dayfield had found out more than once exactly what it was like. Thinking about it turned Andy’s stomach.
“Shit,” Weston said.
Startled, Andy looked up. “What’s wrong?”
“Too many papers, too little time.” Weston grimaced. “I’m going to have to bullshit some of this. I’ve been trying to keep clippings on the same topics together, but people keep dropping stuff off, and I haven’t had a chance to file some of the new papers. Hopefully they won’t go through all the folders and find out some of them aren’t even close to organized.”
“If you haven’t had time to organize the folders, whoever’s coming in probably won’t have time to check them all,” Andy pointed out.
“Yeah. I can hope, at least.” Weston stacked some folders on one of the few empty shelves. “We’ll see. If I can get the room neat and tidy, maybe they won’t check into things too closely. Finding anything interesting in the book?”
“I just got to the part about the flood.”
“Keep reading.”
Andy turned the page to the beginning of chapter two, which detailed how two brothers from Boston, Abner and Oliver Chaffee, had bought the factory a year and a half after the flood and begun the process of rebuilding. By 1890, the factory was up and running again, manufacturing the furniture it was best known for. Abner and Oliver were publicly hailed as the town’s salvation, but not everyone had been happy about the Bostonians taking over Dayfield. Some of the factory workers had questioned and outright protested the Chaffees’ authority over them.
And then a year after the factory reopened, a fire had struck, sparked in the sawdust that perpetually coated the building’s interior. Thanks to the fire doors the Chaffees had had installed, most of the factory was spared, but in the room in which the fire started, two men had died. Larry Thibeault and Oliver Chaffee.
Andy blinked and read the names again.
“Hey, Weston?” he said slowly.
“Yeah?” Weston didn’t turn around from the folders he was organizing on the windowsill.
“Did you by any chance have an ancestor named Larry?”
“Yep.” Now Weston faced him. “My great-something uncle. Great-great-grandfather’s brother. He was twenty-two when he died.”
“Along with Oliver Chaffee.” Andy looked down at the book. “Everyone else got out, but they were trapped in the room when the fire door closed. How would that have even worked?”
“They had steel-covered doors on a track, held open by a rope with a counterweight. If a fire hit it, the rope burned through, the weights fell, and the door lowered to seal off the entrance to the room where the fire was.”
“Thanks for the history lesson.” Andy should have known Weston would be able to explain the door. “That isn’t what I meant. How did everyone except those two get out?”
“That’s something I can’t answer. The door would have closed pretty fast once the rope burned through, but you would think more people would have been inside. Or Oliver and Larry would have moved faster, or at least been strong enough to slide the door back so they could get out.”
Andy turned the page of the book. On the next page, there was a picture of the fire damage, along with an illustration showing how the fire door was set up.
Leaning closer, Andy studied the drawing. “Was the door inside the room or outside?”
“Outside.”
“So if the fire started in the room where Larry and Oliver were trapped, how did the door close? The fire would have had to spread to the next room first, right?”
“Yeah, otherwise the rope wouldn’t have been able to burn through.” Weston turned around. “That’s probably how they got trapped. The fire spread in front of the door. They could have broken a window, but maybe the smoke was too much.”
“But if the fire spread in front of the door, how did everyone else get out?” Andy shook his head, trying to clear his brain. Something about the story detailed in the book didn’t ring true to him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Conspiracy theory, much?” Weston came over.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Frowning, Andy peered more closely at the photo, which had been taken through the doorway into the room that had burned. Judging from the wood and ashes scattered around, the picture had been taken not long after the fire.
Then he saw it. “There’s no soot or burn marks on this wall.”
Weston bent down. “Where?”
“Right here.” Andy put his finger on the picture. “The fire door was out here, right? So the rope had to burn through. For the rope to burn through, the fire would have had to spread to this room. But if the fire spread to this room and burned the rope, there would be some sign of fire on this wall, wouldn’t there?”
“Yeah.” Weston paused. “Yeah. The rope would have been over here.” He touched the photo to the left of the open doorway. “So the fire would have had to spread along this wall.”
“But it didn’t.”
Andy sat up, trying to figure out where his thoughts were going. Oliver and Larry had been trapped by a door that shouldn’t have closed. He didn’t know why it mattered. The men had perished well over a century earlier. But Andy wanted to understand why his instincts said it hadn’t been an accident.