Jenny called me at five-fifteen in the morning. I was awake.
‘What the heck …’ Her voice disappeared into the sirens blaring in her background. ‘I can’t believe this!’ she yelled. Her voice vanished into sirens again.
‘Shout loud, Jenny,’ I said in a normal voice.
‘Dek?’ she screamed. ‘The woods across from Timothy Wade’s house are on fire!’
I expressed appropriate amazement.
‘Can you believe it, but then …?’ she asked, and then oddly, she laughed. ‘Luckily, it’s contained to a small patch. Someone phoned in an anonymous tip before it could spread.’
Her voice faded away. She was talking to someone there with her.
I picked up my travel mug and took another sip of Bohler’s excellent coffee. I was pleased to wait.
‘Anyway,’ she said, coming back to me, ‘Jimbo was listening to his police scanner. He was tuned to the North Shore, hoping for something new about the fuss yesterday, when the fire department radioed the Winnetka police, saying there was a fire across from Wade’s.’
‘I’ll meet you up there,’ I said.
‘Oh, and Dek? I called the cell number you’d given me for Sergeant Bohler, figuring at least she’d be interested in the fire. She wasn’t, not at all. She sounded afraid, just as you said a few hours ago. Gotta go. Bye.’
I already had my pea coat on. I took a last sip of coffee, put a Peep in my mouth to keep from whistling and walked out to the Jeep.
The flames were out by the time I got there, of course. I doubted they’d ever been big.
The road was blocked off. I parked behind the police tape and walked up. The gate to Wade’s driveway was closed. Strangely, I saw no guards. Jenny and Jimbo stood beside a fire truck a hundred yards ahead, talking to a young fire department lieutenant. Two Winnetka police cars were parked a little farther on.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Who might you be?’ the lieutenant asked.
‘Insurance investigator and a friend of these folks,’ I said, smiling at Jenny and Jimbo. ‘I was supposed to meet with Miss Gale on another matter this morning but she called to cancel because of this. I thought I’d swing by.’
‘Nothing to see here,’ the lieutenant said.
‘Ah, but there is, isn’t there?’ Jenny asked him. She turned to me. ‘They say there’s a scorched shovel next to an odd patch of soft ground that might have been freshly dug, right at the point where the fire was set.’
‘Set? It was arson, perhaps to cover up strange digging?’
‘They think gasoline was carried in plastic jugs, though they’re all melted. They think the fire was reported by the arsonist almost immediately after it was set.’
‘He used thick twine, probably soaked in gasoline, as a fuse to buy him enough time to get away and phone in the fire,’ Jimbo added.
Jenny was watching my eyes. ‘To make sure the fire didn’t spread to the houses,’ she said.
‘Unusual for an arsonist,’ the young fire department lieutenant said. ‘Usually they want a big blaze.’
‘Any idea where he called from?’ I asked, because it was expected.
‘The pay phone outside the library. It’s only a half a mile down the road, easily visible to anyone driving here.’
‘Surveillance camera?’ I asked, because I really didn’t know.
He nodded. ‘A police officer just checked it. All we got was a blurry image of a man in a short dark coat with a wool hat pulled down over his eyes.’ He took a long look at my pea coat, one of what I was sure were many thousands in Illinois, and shrugged it off.
Jenny was studying my coat, too, but only for an instant. She looked up. The smallest of smiles had started on her lovely mouth.
‘How about Wade?’ I asked her. ‘I didn’t see him when I walked up.’
‘It’s election day, remember?’ she said. ‘A car came for him right after I called you. He got in and was whisked away without so much as a wave. Maybe it was too small a fire to elicit his attention. Jimbo shot video of him anyway, looking studiously uninterested.’
‘Election day for sure,’ I said.
‘I told the lieutenant here that we’d been in the woods behind Wade’s house, just yesterday,’ Jenny said.
‘Everyone in Illinois seemed to be in the woods behind Wade’s house yesterday,’ the lieutenant said. ‘What a waste of time.’
A police officer wearing plastic gloves came out of the trees carrying my shovel by the point of its blade, upside down. It was scorched almost beyond recognition, as though it had been drenched with accelerant.
‘Have your guys move your truck,’ he called to the fire department lieutenant. ‘The fire’s been out for a long time and we’ve got a crime scene in those woods.’
‘You mean worse than arson?’ Jenny asked the cop.
The cop didn’t answer. He opened the rear door of his car and set the shovel on the seat.
‘I’d better leave,’ I said.
‘Not me,’ Jenny said. ‘We’ve got news happening here.’
I started back to the Jeep, but passing the guardhouse I noticed it was still empty. Someone should have been inside, defending the fortress against firemen, cops and the two or three neighbors milling about on the road.
I pushed at the gate. It slid open easily. It had not been left locked.
I walked up the drive and rang the bell. Though Timothy Wade had left, someone else was surely at home. Someone who was not paralyzed. Someone who could walk.
I peeked through the sidelight. The house was dark inside. I rang the bell again. More minutes passed.
The knob turned easily. Wade might have accidentally left the door unlocked or perhaps he figured it was unnecessary to lock it since a guard was expected to be in the shack.
Jenny was just across the road but I thought it better to call.
‘I thought you’d left,’ she said.
‘About Wade being driven away this morning …?’
She laughed, happy on the cusp of a developing major story. ‘I remember like it was just this morning.’
‘The car that came to get him – did it have to wait for the gate to be opened?’
She thought for a moment, then said, ‘No. It waited on the road. Wade walked out through the gate.’
‘He opened it?’
‘Slid it back just enough to get out. As I told you, I figured he would say a few words before he got in the car, about the fire, about election day, about anything. He didn’t. He just got in and was driven away.’
‘And the gate stayed closed behind him?’
‘He’d only opened it a little. These are strange questions, Dek.’
‘Do you remember seeing a guard in the shack?’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I haven’t seen a night-shift guard.’
‘I don’t remember what the gate did,’ she said. ‘And speaking of pea coats …’
‘There are thousands of them in Illinois,’ I said, and clicked off. I opened Wade’s front door all the way.
‘Hello?’ I called in, inventively.
After a minute of silence, I called in again. No one responded.
I stepped inside. ‘Miss Wade?’ I shouted, and then strained to listen, but no one called back.
I walked to the base of the stairs and knelt to the chairlift screw that had worked its way out from the track mounted to the wall. That loose screw had bothered me the first time I saw it, and it bothered me even more once I’d found a long-unneeded wheelchair left in the back seat of the Cadillac parked in the sunken garage. A spider had spun a small web around the loose screw. Dust, maybe several years’ worth, had been caught in the web.
I turned the screw. It turned too easily. I pushed it with my thumb. It slipped easily into the wall. It had worked its way out of the wall, from long use. But now it was useless. A thicker, longer screw was needed to safely snug the chairlift track to the wall.
No one had used the lift in a long time and that made no sense. For surely it had been needed once, starting with Theresa Wade’s trampoline accident, when she was ten years old.
‘So what if she can walk?’ Sergeant Bohler had asked as she watched the video of the figure moving behind an upstairs window. There was no crime in pretending to be paralyzed, she’d said.
That made no sense either.
‘Miss Wade?’ I shouted up the stairs.
Again, there was no response.
I started up the stairs.