Chapter Seventeen
Dean and Belinda Goddard’s phone rang. Startled awake, Dean wasn’t sure where he was, what it was. He rolled over, rising out of deep sleep and the phone made another jangle. He reached over and picked it up.
“Yeah?”
“Dean?” Smith Garnes.
“Yeah,” he managed. Belinda’s bed creaked in the next room.
“Sorry to wake you. Thought you might like to know. There’s a fire in Defiance.”
“Yeah?”
“The Winthrop building is going up like a Roman Candle.”
Goddard’s eyes opened. “No shit?”
“Came into 911 about ten minutes ago. I was just making sure the volunteers were called up, but I doubt it’ll do any good. Happened after midnight and it’s an old wooden building.”
Dean remembered. “Who called it in?”
“Old lady Cummins. She lives down off Main Street, above the closed Ben Franklin store. She’d just finished the Tonight Show and was in bed having trouble sleeping when she saw a yellow flicker through her window. When she got up and looked, the place was already covered in flames.”
“I bet,” was all Goddard could think to say. “I better drive over and have a look. Grebs been called?”
“Yeah. He’s on the scene, or should be in a few minutes.”
He thanked Smith and hung up.
On the corner of Main and Second the volunteer fire truck was plugged into a nearby hydrant. Grebs’s patrol car stood parked across the street, at an angle that prevented traffic from getting through. But there wasn’t much traffic, given the early morning hour and the deep cold. The fire was burning like a blast furnace. There were almost a dozen volunteer firefighters, all dressed in heavy gear. The water that wasn’t affected by the heat had frozen solid. The adjacent buildings were covered with sparkling icicles, and clouds of smoke and steam rose into the frosty night air.
Grebs got out of his patrol car as Goddard parked and approached.
“We caught it in time,” he said. “They’ve got it under control. At least it’s contained. The building’s gutted, though. Not much left.” Grebs was excited, like an athlete after a big game.
“Anybody know what happened?”
“Martha Cummins saw it first. It was late. Fire Marshall’s been called. He’s on his way. But I don’t think there’s much to see. By the time Martha saw it, it was pretty much ablaze.”
“Anybody else see it?”
“Nobody.”
“Wasn’t Will Winthrop’s office in that building?”
Grebs nodded.
“Anybody get anything out?”
“I got here right after they did. There was no way you could go near it. They started spraying down the fire and the adjacent buildings, trying to keep them wet.”
“Or frozen.”
“Either way. They didn’t want ’em to burn. I think they contained it. But Williston’s office is ashes.”
As Goddard walked a little closer he could feel the heat on his face. The firefighters milled around the edges, spraying down the buildings, staying in that narrow zone between the blistering heat and the deep freeze. It was well below zero, terrible for fighting a fire, but it had to be contained. As they watched, the Fire Marshall’s car came up Main and parked behind the Sheriff’s cruiser. Walt Gibbons stepped out of his car, walked over to where Grebs and Goddard stood. Walt was a roly-poly man just past sixty, with a cherub face and a bushy gray mustache. Nothing put Walt Gibbons in a more jovial mood than a big fire.
“Gentleman,” he said.
“How ya‘ doin‘, Walt?” Sheriff Goddard said, extending his hand.
“Couldn’t be better,” he said, staring at the fiery ruin.
Grebs greeted him with a nod. “Walt.”
“Looks like a goddamn wood flambé with silver icing,” Walt observed.
The three men stared at the fire. The Fire Marshall paced to the left, considered the smoldering blaze from a different angle. He walked to the other side and then came back to center. Around and in front of him the volunteers were doing what they could to both contain the blaze and stay warm and dry.
“Looks like they have it under control. It’ll just be keeping it corralled from here on out. Anybody see anything?”
“Not until it was stoked up like a goddamn bonfire,” Grebs said.
The Sheriff was peering into what remained of the caved-in structure. The timbers were still firing, blackened and charred beneath the yellow flames. There was no way anything, particularly anything combustible, could have survived that blaze. He didn’t know if it was a good thing. Could be, if the only place Williston kept that video was on his office computer, where Dean had viewed it. If, on the other hand, he’d kept copies elsewhere, they’d still need to be found and destroyed. He glanced sideways at the two men, watching Grebs observe the smoldering hulk. If Grebs knew about the video he was damn quiet about it. And if Goddard knew Grebs, if he knew about it he would have already leveraged it. Either that, or he would have been a whole lot more circumspect about watching it go up in flames.
“I’ll have to wait until well past morning to get in there,” Walt said.
“What do you think?” the Sheriff asked.
“No way to tell. That building was inspected last summer. As I recall, it needed some serious wiring repair. A sprinkler install. Don’t know if Winthrop made those improvements, but probably not,” he said, looking at the Sheriff.
“Probably not,” the Sheriff agreed.
Grebs was silent, watching the last of the building burn.
“The wife believes bad luck comes in threes,” Walt observed, staring into the blaze. He turned and with a wry smile added, “I guess that means we haven’t seen the last of Williston Winthrop’s misfortune.”
Grebs considered it. “Good thing dead men don’t worry about luck.”