Like all houses in which people have died violently, the Marrin residence was preternaturally silent, as if it were holding its breath at the horror of what had happened here.
But it was the stench of burned carpet that struck Bonnie the most. As she and Dudley Freeberg stepped into the hallway, their nostrils were filled with the fumy smell of gasoline, mixed with badly scorched wool. There was another smell, too, like those sour, charred fragments of hamburger that stick to the barbecue.
Dudley Freeberg peered around the back of the door, and then very cautiously closed it. On the inside, the white paint was bubbled and brown, and there was a sooty smoke trail all the way up to the ceiling. Ribbons of shriveled fabric hung from the upper part of the door, and the center panel had been scratched by a fan-shaped array of blunt, rectangular marks, as if somebody had been trying to scrape the paint off.
“Skin,” said Bonnie, pointing to the fabric.
Dudley Freeberg took off his glasses and stared at it.
“Skin?” he said, and his Adam’s apple went up and down.
“That’s right. And those scrape marks are where the fire department had to detach his remains from the door. I can clean the organic remains okay and remove the smoke stains, but you’ll have to bring in a professional painter to do the woodwork.”
“I see,” said Dudley Freeberg, in a hollow voice. “A professional painter.”
They looked around the rest of the hallway in utter silence. It was large, high-ceilinged, decorated in lilacs and golds. A large pottery vase of long-dead gladioli stood on a mock-rococo side table, and there was a gilt-framed reproduction of a painting of two Mexicans in large sombreros sleeping in the sun. Through a half-open door Bonnie could see a spacious, limed-oak kitchen. She would have loved a house like this, even though it was shabby—a house with space and tasteful furnishings and a sweeping staircase.
It was the staircase that gave them the most vivid narrative of the last seconds of Mrs. Marrin’s fifteen-year-old lover. Rushing down the stairs in flames, he had burned a pattern of footprints in the lilac stair carpet—all the way down from the second-story landing to the front door, and the varnished banister rails were blistered where he had run his blazing hands down them.
“Holy Christ,” said Dudley Freeberg. “He must have gone through some kind of hell.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Bonnie. She didn’t want to think about any kind of hell, not today.
They went upstairs to the main bedroom and stared at the soaked, blackened, four-poster bed, with its burned velvet drapes. Behind the headboard hung a mirror that was cracked from one corner to the other and stained brown with smoke. Bonnie could see herself and Dudley Freeberg standing side by side like characters from an old sepia photograph.
Bonnie made notes. “The bed’ll have to go, obviously, and the carpets, and I can erase the smoke damage. Like I said, you’ll need the place repainted, but I can leave it like you wouldn’t know that anything got burned here.”
“Well, that sounds fine.” Dudley Freeberg nodded. His face was waxy, and he was perspiring, and she could tell that he was close to suffering a panic attack. “Let’s, uh, wrap this up outside, shall we?” He hurried downstairs, his feet zigzagging to avoid the burned patches on the carpet.
She sat in her car and wrote him an estimate while he stood with his coat over his arm and his necktie loosened, occasionally dabbing at his forehead with a crumpled-up Kleenex.
When she handed him the estimate, he almost snatched it from her. “Great. That looks good to me. I’ll check with the family and then I’ll call you.”
“Any time,” said Bonnie.
“Thanks for—” he said, nodding toward the house.
“Listen, this is something that nobody ever gets used to. You learn to deal with it, but you never get used to it. It’s not something that a person should get used to.”
“Well, thanks again.”
He walked stiff-legged back to his car and drove off with a skittering squeal of tires. Bonnie watched him go, and then she walked back to her own car. As she did so, Kyle Lennox appeared, dressed in khaki chinos and a black polo shirt, and called out, “Hi, Bonnie! Before you go, Bonnie!”
She shaded her eyes with her hand. He came bounding across the street and said, “Hey, how was it?”
“Fine. Why?”
“Pretty grim in there, huh?”
“You wouldn’t want to go in there unless you had to.”
“Somebody told me the kid was—you know—actually”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“stuck to the door.”
Bonnie shrugged. “I’m not really at liberty to discuss anything like that. I just clean up.”
“He was stuck to the door, though, right?”
“Okay, yes. He was alight. He was trying to get out. He got stuck to the door.”
Kyle Lennox shook his head slowly and admiringly and said, “That’s such a gross-out. I don’t know how you can do that stuff. I really don’t.”
“You act on TV. I don’t know how you can do that, either. That would terrify me, acting on TV. I don’t even like being in home videos.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’m having kind of a get-together tomorrow afternoon. You know, round-the-pool kind of thing. Just some friends from the studio and a couple of writers and one or two producers. Why don’t you come along?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m having a party, Bonnie, and I want you to come. I’d just love you to meet Gene Ballard. He’s our director. He’ll go crazy for you, I know it.”
“I don’t think I understand. What are you inviting me to a party for? You don’t even know me.”
“Hey! How well do you have to know anybody to like the way they look? How well do you have to know anybody to sincerely admire what they do? I really want you to come along, Bonnie. It’s not going to be formal. You’ll love it. All your favorite soap stars. And who knows? Gene may take a shine to you. He may even give you a walk-on part.”
“When is it? This party?”
“Tomorrow evening, six o’clock, right here. Tell me you’ll come.”
Bonnie felt as if she were dreaming. This was really Kyle Lennox and he was really standing there and really inviting her to come to his show-business party round the pool.
“Yes,” she said, and then she nodded. “Yes, okay. Why not?”