Once again, he could smell the fire as soon as he turned onto Agony Hill. Alice Bellows had said to go past the Webers’ farm and keep going until he saw a tree shaped like a fork. The Weber house was dark, everything quiet as he passed, long moon shadows falling on the side of the house closest to the road. He imagined Sylvie Weber and the boys sleeping inside. He couldn’t envision the inside of the house beyond the small glimpse he’d had through the windows, couldn’t imagine what it contained. Were the furnishings simple or elaborate? Was the house tidy or messy?
The road became narrower and more desolate as he drove, the headlights of the Ford making bouncing pools of light on the dark road. There was one small house past the Weber farm and past that was only forest, crowding in on either side as the dirt road narrowed to a track. At what felt like must be close to the end of the road, the smell became stronger and he saw the tree, exactly like a fork, along with ten or so cars parked alongside it, including Pinky’s battered cruiser and Roy Longwell’s shiny Bethany Police one. He left the Galaxie on the side of the road, grabbed an old flashlight from the glove compartment, and ran down the short driveway. There was a truck with a tanker on the back and the men were spraying water at the blaze, but Warren could see that it was futile. It wasn’t much of a house, more like a cabin, built from logs like the ones in Western films, and it was almost completely engulfed in flames. At this point, they were mostly trying to prevent the fire from spreading to the trees, he thought.
“Detective.” Chief Longwell, standing by the trucks, acknowledged Warren with a raised hand. He was wearing civilian clothes but he stood there with an air of authority you couldn’t miss.
“What do we know? Who called it in?”
Longwell sighed. “Kids. They’d come up here to drink and saw the flames. They drove back down to one of the farms on the flat and used the phone there.”
Warren surveyed the chaotic scene. He recognized David Williamson, in fire gear, sitting on the rear bumper of a pickup truck and drinking steaming liquid from a thermos top. A few other men stood around, looking grim. “Any idea about how it started?”
“Not yet. It’ll be hard to find anything in that. But it’s a hunting cabin,” Longwell said. “Owners are from Boston. Name of Fredericks. Only built it last year. David Williamson said there wasn’t any car here when he arrived but we won’t know if anyone was inside until they put that out.”
Warren stood around for a bit, watching as the flames died down under the stream of water and the men began to go in and check what was left. Pinky had thought to bring the camera and Warren asked him to coordinate with the firefighters and to get some photos of the scene.
“More than I think we’ll need, right?” Pinky asked, winking at Warren.
“That’s right. You got it.”
Someone had brought coffee and they drank it while they watched some of the firefighters pack up their equipment, leaving a few men behind to keep hosing water on the smoking timbers. David Williamson waved to Warren. The sun was beginning to rise and suddenly the woods around the cabin were glowing with a strange, moony light. It took Warren a moment to realize they were birch trees, bright white, a huge stand of them, and in the early sunlight, the trees looked like ghostly figures, standing on the hill.
Warren was looking up at the blur of pearly white when he saw movement in the trees. A person, not an animal. Slowly, he turned away so the lurker wouldn’t know he’d been spotted. Warren pretended to tie his shoe, looking up at the hillside out of the corner of his eye. Sure enough, someone was standing behind a tree toward the top of the hill, watching the scene unfolding below. Warren walked slowly over to Pinky and whispered, “There’s someone up in the trees. I’m going to circle around and see if I can get him there. Can you keep an eye on us, but without letting him know he’s been seen?”
Pinky raised his eyebrows. “Sure thing. I’m gonna sit down on that stump over there and pretend I’m just taking a load off.”
Warren pretended to wave goodbye to him and walked down the driveway before cutting back along the road and into the woods, then circling up and around behind the property. It was slow going, stepping carefully so he wouldn’t make a sound, and it took him twenty minutes to reach the top of the hill. The guy was still there, a couple hundred yards below him now, the rising sun revealing the outline of his body against the white trees and the hat pulled low over his face, and he was still hiding behind the tree and watching the men fighting the fire below. Warren counted to twenty and then he shouted, “Freeze. Police. Put your hands on the tree and stand still!”
The guy ran. He didn’t seem to think about it, just took off toward the crest of the hill and disappeared in the other direction. He was fast.
Warren had been fast once too. He’d been St. Paul’s track-and-field champion three years in a row and he used to keep in shape by sprinting at the Tufts track, running laps and then short distances. Once he’d graduated, he would drive to Medford; he’d used running as a valve for the stress from his job. But it had been ruined for him and it had been a long time since he’d visited a track.
Now, he crashed through the underbrush. There was no path and so he had to maneuver around small trees and scattered sticks as branches and brambles pulled at his clothes. The man had to dodge them too and Warren might have caught up to him, but for a sapling growing across the path; he tried to leap over it, but his right foot caught and he went down on his knees, his face hitting a protruding branch. He felt pain race through his body and when he put his hand up to his cheek, he felt blood.
Warren rolled over and lay back on the leaf-strewn ground. Above him, the trees reached toward the pale sky. He was beat. All that running had been a long time ago now. He felt drained of life, utterly spent and suddenly vulnerable, lying there on the ground like a wounded animal.
Longwell and Pinky came up the hill, stopping when they saw Warren.
“He get away?” Longwell called. “Should we keep chasing him?”
“Nah, he’s gone,” Warren said, carefully standing up and flexing his muscles to make sure everything was in place. “And I didn’t see enough of him for it to be useful. But you could get some of your men to search. What’s on the other side of the hill there? We probably ought to get someone down on the other side in case he comes out.”
“Yeah,” Longwell said. “We’ll do that. It’s fairly dense forest all over the hillside and then it comes down on River Road, down at the bottom of the hill, and borders Weber’s farm.”
Warren considered. “If he set this fire, maybe he set that fire too. Arsonists like to watch their handiwork, don’t they?”
Longwell shrugged. “It’s an idea. We’ll get out there and look for him.”
They walked back down to the staging area. The fire was under control now, a stream of dark smoke pouring from what was left. The camp would likely be a total loss.
“Anything inside?” Warren called out to the remaining firefighters. “Was our guy in the house before setting the fire?”
“Can’t tell yet,” someone called out. “It’ll be a few hours before we can get in safely.”
Warren did a quick search of the cleared land around the camp. There was a lovely view from up here, of the distant hills and fields, and in the near distance, a slope of the mountain. He found a couple of beer cans that looked new and had Pinky bag them to go back to the evidence room at the barracks. He was betting they had been dropped by teenagers like the ones who had reported the fire, but he could show Pinky how to lift fingerprints from them.
A cruiser pulled up and Tommy Johnson got out, joining Warren, who got him up to speed on the man in the woods. “Chief Longwell’s going to organize a search,” Warren said. “I’m going to go home and make something to eat and then head back to the barracks. You want to join me when you’re done here?”
Tommy grinned. “You cooking?”
“Sure am. I have some fresh eggs and good bread in.”
“The cooking detective,” Tommy said, grinning. “I knew I’d get my money’s worth out of you.”
Back in the house on the green, Warren, now with a bandage on his forehead where he’d scraped himself in the woods, carefully broke six eggs into the bubbling fat in his cast-iron pan, shaking salt across the glossy surface and watching as the white quickly clouded over in the heat. He cut two thick slices of bread and dropped them into the hot fat sizzling in the other skillet, turning them quickly and getting both sides golden brown before flipping them out onto plates and sliding the barely set eggs on top.
The coffee was done percolating and he poured two cups, pushing Tommy’s over with a little pitcher of milk.
“Ahhh, that’s good,” Tommy said. “Judith’s coffee is too damn weak, no matter how many times I tell her.”
“Benefit of marrying into an Italian family,” Warren said lightly. Tommy’s eyes snapped up and he nodded without smiling, then sliced the toast and eggs into squares and popped one of them into his mouth, sighing.
“What do you think about this new fire?” Tommy asked, changing the subject.
“Feels like arson,” Warren said. “That man watching? That’s what they do, arsonists. They get a charge out of it, don’t they?”
“You mean a lunatic?” Tommy asked.
Warren nodded. “There was a case like that in Charlestown couple years back, a man who went around setting fires in the middle of the night. He only did it when the occupants were asleep, so he’d kill as many people as possible. One family died when they couldn’t get out, but the others escaped. He was disturbed, couldn’t help himself.”
Tommy chewed thoughtfully. “So you think we’ve got one on the loose here in Bethany?”
Warren shrugged. “Otherwise, it was an accident. The man we saw running away was, what? A vagrant of some kind? Do you get much of that sort of thing around here?”
Tommy, a bright yellow speck of yolk on his chin, considered that for a moment. “Not down this way so much. But you know, times are changing, Frankie.”
Warren handed him a napkin. “Let me ask you something. Roy Longwell. What’s he like to work with? He resent us being here?”
Tommy looked up from his food. “Roy? Why? He say anything to you?”
“Not exactly. Just a feeling I get. A lot of these local guys, they don’t appreciate the detectives coming in and taking over when something’s really interesting.”
“Roy will be fine,” Tommy said vaguely. “He’s been around a long time, I guess. He knows everybody and everything that’s ever happened in this part of the state. He’ll be a good resource for you.” He pushed the eggy bread around on his plate.
“Tommy.” Warren leveled a skeptical look at him. “The least you can do is tell me what I’m walking into here.”
Tommy bowed his head “Okay, okay, yeah, Roy Longwell’s pretty protective of his turf. Guess he got used to doing his investigations the way he likes, but like I said, times are changing and we need to change with them, right? He’s old school. Doesn’t think we need all this fancy stuff. Those techniques I learned when I was down there at Harvard Medical School, when we met up to talk about this job? That’s the stuff we need here and Longwell’s skeptical.”
“You have any recommendations for how to handle him?” Warren asked.
“Just do your job well and stay out of his way.”
“You tell him why I left my job in Boston?”
“Nah. That’s your business. He doesn’t know a thing.”
Warren nodded, to indicate that all was forgiven, though he retained a small sliver of resentment, and he didn’t think Tommy was right about Longwell’s ignorance of why Warren was in Vermont. He might not have the whole story, but he knew something. Warren was sure of it.
Tommy took a deep breath and finished his eggs, then looked around the kitchen. “Nice place here. You settling in okay?”
Warren stood up and took their plates over to the sink. “Yeah, I like it. I’m getting a feel for it. There’s something about the landscape that kind of … calms you, you know?”
Tommy smiled. “I do. Did I ever tell you about when I took a job in Philadelphia? When Judith and I were first married? I couldn’t take it. I walked out of my house and I was already dialed up to ten, the traffic, the noise, and the concrete and so forth. Here, I walk outside and I’m at zero. The events of the day may take me up to ten, but I can handle it because I started at zero. That’s how I think of it anyway.”
Warren watched him for a second. It was a vulnerable, human side of Tommy he hadn’t seen much. “How long did you last?”
“Two years. It was Judith who decided for me. She said she wouldn’t raise her children in the city. Soon as a position opened up here, we came back. Good decision. I liked the investigative work best and eventually moved over to the bureau.”
“Well, I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me,” Warren told him. “It’s good to be here.” He nodded in what he hoped was a meaningful way that would let Tommy know that he intended the words to say that the peace of Bethany had allowed him not to think so much about Maria, which was true, though perhaps it was just the different scenery that had jogged his brain.
He wasn’t sure if Tommy took his meaning because the older man jumped up and said, “Is that the time? I’ve got to hit the road. What are you doing today?”
Warren slugged the rest of his cup of coffee. He told Tommy about his visit to the lawyer’s office and about Hugh Weber’s brother. “Williamson’s going to tell them about the will today. I want to get a sense of what she knew, Sylvie Weber. If she stands to inherit everything, well, we need to know that, right? And if the brother has a stake, then we ought to be looking into his movements the last couple of days.”
Tommy nodded. “Get Pinky to start asking at the hotels and so forth. He working out okay for you so far?”
“He’s a good kid,” Warren said. “Has he always had his … problem?”
Tommy laughed. “Poor bastard. Yeah, I guess he has. Someone told me he could never tell a lie when he was a kid, ’cause his face would give him away. Tough for a detective, but he seems to make up for it in other ways. Hope he works out for you.”
“I like him. Hey, I have a good excuse to go poking around some more at Webers’, don’t I?” Warren added, “With this fire. I can start out asking if they saw anything, see if there’s been any sign of our fire setter around.”
Tommy studied him. “What are you thinking about Hugh Weber? This change things for a hotshot detective like you?”
Warren laughed. “I don’t know about the hotshot part, but if there’s one arsonist loose on Agony Hill, I have to wonder if it’s the first time he’s done his thing.”
“Yeah, well, I gotta go,” Tommy said, draining his coffee cup and making an appreciative sound. “Seems like you’re on top of things, Frankie. I’ll leave you to it.”
It was only once he was gone that Warren remembered he’d wanted to ask about the burglary Fred Fielder had referenced. He’d have to call Tommy later. He rinsed their dishes and left them in the sink. Then he found the box containing his envelopes and writing paper and penned a quick note to his parents, letting them know he’d arrived and moved in and that he would call them once his phone was installed. Once he’d signed his name, he saw that he had only used half of the sheet of paper. The expanse of white mocked him—all the things left unsaid between Warren and his parents.
He stamped the envelope, addressed it, and dropped it in the mailbox at the end of the green. The duty completed, he felt a small wave of relief, tinged with something else, guilt maybe, about how quick he’d been to write rather than find a way to call. He shrugged it off and walked back to get the Galaxie for the drive up to Agony Hill.