It was a hot, hazy late-summer day. Warren kept the windows open so the breeze could stream across his face, and it was okay while he was driving, but as soon as they’d pulled in by the Webers’ farm and he’d shut off the ignition, he could feel the day’s heat come down on him like a blanket. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and used his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck. His shirt was soaked through. When Pinky got out of the cruiser he’d been following in, he flapped his uniform jacket a few times and then used his own handkerchief to mop his forehead. When he was done, he hoisted the camera over one shoulder.
Now they knocked at the front door and waited a few minutes before Pinky pushed the door in. The cool of the house seeped out at them. A clock ticked off the seconds somewhere beyond.
“Hello? Anybody there?” Pinky called out.
Silence but for the clock.
They let the screen door slam shut and went over to the outbuildings. The cows stared and then followed them along the fence line. A couple of white chickens pecked at the dirt.
“Hello?” Pinky called out again. “Anybody around?”
A metallic clank sounded inside a long building next to the barn where Hugh Weber had died and they followed it through a doorway and found themselves in a low-ceilinged space with a concrete floor, sloping down on both sides. It smelled strongly of cow manure. Indeed, a small boy was shoveling it off the floor and into a large cart. Another slightly bigger boy was replacing it with sawdust. They both looked up and froze.
“Is your mother here?” Warren asked them. The older one nodded and ran very fast out of the barn. The remaining boy stayed frozen, staring, as Warren and Pinky waited. After what seemed like too much time, Warren said, “We’ll just go find her,” and they went out again, trying not to step in the piles of manure all along the walkway. The sun was blinding outside and it took Warren’s eyes a few minutes to adjust and make out two figures coming toward them, a woman and the boy. She was pushing an empty wheelbarrow and the boy was dwarfed by the collection of gardening utensils he held over his shoulder.
Warren studied them for a few seconds. When the woman put the barrow down, he saw with a shock that she was pregnant. Her belly curved tellingly under a men’s work shirt, tucked into the swelling waistband of a gingham skirt. He had to ignore his urge to jump in and stop her when she took the shovels and pitchforks from the boy and hefted them into the wheelbarrow.
“Mrs. Weber?” Pinky called.
She came closer and Warren’s first impression was of a small girl playing at adulthood. She had pink cheeks and dark blue eyes that curved in a vaguely feline way, reminding Warren, improbably, of Elizabeth Taylor. Her black hair was bobbed and cut in ragged bangs that curved toward high cheekbones. She did not smile at them.
The boy stared, his eyes wary. His mother stared too. Warren’s second impression was of a feral cat and her kitten, both of them fearful and alert.
They walked toward the woman and the boy, hands up to shield their eyes from the sun. Pinky said, “Can we talk to you for a moment, Mrs. Weber? This is Detective Franklin Warren. He’s just arrived. He lives here in Bethany and will be investigating the fire.” She clearly knew Pinky. She gave him a little nod and stared at Warren.
Warren put a hand out and then took it back when she refused, showing him that her hand was smeared with dirt or manure.
“Is it okay to ask you some questions? We’re so sorry for your loss.”
She nodded, rubbed her hands on the gingham skirt, and said to the boy, “You go in for some water.” Her voice was deeper than he’d expected, with a slight accent he couldn’t place. There was something off about the way she looked at them, her gaze direct and curious, as though she didn’t know why they were there. But Warren knew all too well that grief was not uniformly expressed.
Once the boy was gone she waited, and Warren jumped in to fill the void. “Could we sit somewhere, Mrs. Weber?”
She led them to the rotting picnic table. As Warren folded himself onto the bench, he felt a splinter catch his good trousers. He watched her face as she lowered herself onto the end of the seat, one hand going to her belly, instinctively protecting it from the edge of the table. He dispensed with small talk and asked her directly, “When did you realize that the barn was on fire?”
She hooked a piece of dark hair behind her ear and looked over in the direction of the barn. “I smelled it,” she said, a bit stiffly. “Something woke me up. I heard the cows and then, when I went to the window, I smelled … smoke. I called to the boys and we went out. I called for Hugh, but I couldn’t get into the barn. It was already burning. He didn’t come out.”
It was a concise recitation, so concise he couldn’t glean anything from it. It offered very little for him to judge.
“And you called down to the fire department?”
“We don’t have a telephone,” she said.
They waited. Surely she would explain. But she just stared back at them.
“So, how was the fire department alerted?” Warren asked finally.
“Scott drove the truck down to the Uptons’ and they called up Chief Williamson.”
“Scott is your son?”
She nodded.
“How old is he?”
Her eyes widened and moved from Warren to Pinky and back again. “Fourteen. But … he had to drive. Even though he doesn’t have a license. He knows how.”
“Don’t worry about that, Mrs. Weber. It was an emergency,” Pinky said kindly.
Warren forced himself to make his voice quieter. “When did you realize your husband was … forgive me for having to ask … inside the barn?”
She thought for a moment, remembering. “I don’t know,” she said finally, not looking at him. “I…” She hesitated. “He went out there and then there was the fire, so like I said, I went to open the big door. But it was bolted on the inside. I couldn’t open it. And then there were flames coming out of the pig house. It was very hot.”
“There were no doors on the pig house?”
“No, we went through the main barn to get to it.”
“The barn door was bolted from the inside?” he asked.
She nodded.
“And there are no back doors to the barn? There wasn’t another way you could have gotten to him or that he could have escaped?”
She shook her head. “There is a door, but the hay is piled up in front of it. The hanging doors are the only way in. When the hay is in there, we can’t … There’s no other door.”
Warren thought of the towering stacks of hay and nodded to show he understood that they blocked the whole back wall, where there otherwise would have been an exit. “And is there any other way that could have happened? For example, could he have bolted it and then planned to go out the back way, but been prevented by the hay?”
Her eyebrows dropped in confusion. “Why would he do that? He knows, knew, about the hay being there.”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Weber. I’m just asking if you ever did that, if your husband ever did that.”
“No,” she said simply.
There it was. They would have to confirm that, but if so, and if the fire seemed deliberately set, then this was fairly clear-cut. Hugh Weber had committed suicide in that barn.
Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. “Mrs. Weber, how had your husband seemed earlier that evening? Was he upset about anything?”
“Not really, no more than he usually was.” She reached up to scratch her nose and looked at them. Her dark blue eyes were still curious, appraising suddenly.
Warren had to resist the urge to laugh. What was wrong with her? She seemed so childlike. It was hard to believe she had given birth to and raised all those boys they’d seen. It seemed more likely to him she was their tomboy sister.
“He didn’t say anything to you?”
She hesitated. “You mean, such as that he was going to burn himself up in the barn? No.”
Warren didn’t dare look over at Pinky. The situation suddenly seemed absurd. She was simple, that’s what it was. She wasn’t all there.
“Did your husband talk to you about this man who died last year, who was upset about the interstate?”
He could see it immediately, that there was something there. She sat up a bit straighter and tucked an escaped piece of hair behind one ear again, then met his gaze with her own direct one. “He hated it. He said it would ruin Vermont, bring evil things here. He wrote letters about it all the time. When he was … when he had gin he was especially upset about it all.”
“But did he ever talk about the man?” He looked to Pinky for the name and Pinky obliged by saying, “Forrest Germond, Mrs. Weber.”
“Oh yes, he talked about him a lot. He said he understood why he had done it, that the interstate was the government stealing people’s land. He said…” She swallowed nervously and looked away. “He said he would do the same thing.”
Warren watched her. Most grieving widows would be sobbing at this point but she barely seemed bothered by the fact that her husband had just incinerated himself. “I’d like to read some of the things he wrote,” Warren told her. “Could I take some of them from the house?”
She glanced back toward the barn. “He made an office in the barn, in the pig house,” she said. “He said he couldn’t concentrate on his writing with the sound of the boys in the house. So he had a typewriter and books and cabinets in there. All his writing was in there. In the winter he had a little electric heater he brought out there.” They all looked back toward the ruins of the office. Any paper that had been there was long gone.
Warren wanted to know about their financial arrangements but he wasn’t sure how to get around to it. “I assume he’s left the farm to you and your sons,” he said finally. “Would there be any other beneficiaries?”
The quizzical look she gave him was sincere, he thought.
“Did your husband have a will?” he tried again.
She shrugged and scratched her nose again, as though the fine spray of freckles across its bridge was irritating her. “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about those things. He got checks from New York sometimes.”
Warren wrote that down on his pad of paper. New York/checks? She watched him do it. “I’m sorry, do you know who they were from?”
“His family. I think.”
“Tell me about his family. They lived in New York?”
She nodded. “I never met them. His parents died when we were first married. He had a brother but they didn’t get along.”
“And his name is?”
“I think Victor,” she said. He waited for more but it didn’t come.
“Was there a lawyer whose name you might have heard?”
She shrugged and said, “He sometimes went to see Mr. Williamson in town. He’s a lawyer.” Warren didn’t know what else to ask her. He wanted to think a bit, figure out what to look for next. So he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Weber, we’ll leave you now. We’re going to go and do some more investigation of the crime scene. Please do look around for any papers you might have.”
She got up from the picnic table with some difficulty and headed back toward the garden without saying goodbye. Warren stood there stupidly for a moment and then he and Pinky went to the barn.
“Now that the body’s been removed, I want to document other aspects of the scene beyond what we got yesterday,” Warren said. “Have you photographed evidence in situ before?”
“A few times. Burglaries, I’ve taken snaps of broken windows. Once I responded to a car wreck and Lieutenant Johnson told me to get a picture of a whiskey bottle on the driver’s side floor. So I did that.”
Warren nodded. “Good. Assuming you’ve got enough film, the object is to get as many pictures as you can. In this case, I really want the doors and the position the hardware was in. I also want pictures of the place where Mr. Weber was found. And as much of the burned timbers and beams as we can get. Sometimes patterns of burns on the floor and what’s left of the walls can tell us where a fire was set and how fast it burned. That helps to establish the fact that he set the fire himself. I’ll show you.”
They went to the ruins of the pig house. Warren tried to imagine the man sitting there, typing away at his typewriter, lifting the bottle to his lips every twenty minutes or so. Warren imagined him swearing as he typed, rising to his feet, perhaps taking a can of gasoline from the front of the barn and dousing the hay on the barn floor with it. He smoked. Surely there had been a book of matches in the barn. And then … had he just lain down on the narrow bed frame and waited for the smoke and flames to get him?
He pointed to the pattern of black on what was left of the walls. “The fire investigator will be interested in this too. I’m going to try to take a panorama of photos, so we can recreate it if we have questions later.” He spun around, clicking pictures of the scene, then went out and took five photos each of the main barn doors and the hardware on them, and the back door, which he confirmed was blocked by the stacked hay.
He explained to Pinky what he was doing and then said, “You going back to the barracks?”
“Yeah.”
“Take the camera. But be very careful with it. And let’s get these developed as soon as we can so we’ll have them by the time the autopsy’s back.”
The smell of charred wood from the barn was still strong, like sour milk you couldn’t get off your tongue. The sun was high in the sky now and Warren could feel a thin rivulet of sweat make its way down his back toward his beltline. He examined the backside of the main barn door one more time; the metal bolt, blackened by the fire, was still in its engaged position, as it had been yesterday. From what he could tell, it was as Sylvie Weber had said, it had to have been bolted from the inside.
“What are the facts that favor suicide?” Warren said out loud. He meant it as a question for himself. It was part of his process to ask questions out loud and answer them.
But Pinky obviously thought the question was intended for him because he said, “Detective?” When Warren looked over, the blush had gotten him.
“Sorry. What aspects of this case make you think this was suicide, as opposed to homicide?”
“The bolt.”
“Very good. But if it was a homicide, the perpetrator might have done that too,” Warren said.
“Yes, but how did the perpetrator get out?” Pinky asked.
Warren scanned the front of the barn. The boards were flat and smooth. “There’s a window way up there,” he said, pointing to an opening high on the burned face of the barn. “Even if you could climb up the boards on the inside—and I don’t think you could—you’d need a ladder, and a tall one too, to get down the exterior without killing yourself or breaking a few bones. I don’t see any ladders around. I suppose he could have taken it with him, but that means he came in a vehicle and she would have heard that.”
“That’s right,” Pinky said. “She would have heard it.” Neither of them said what they were both thinking: Unless she knows who did it and she’s lying to us.
“Right.” Warren thought for a moment. “If it was suicide, I want to know his frame of mind, so I need to get those letters to the editor. If it was homicide, well, then we’ve got to figure out who had it in for him. He have any enemies in town?”
Pinky looked contemplative and then he said, “That’d be a lot of people, now. He was from away, but … it was more than that.” He scrunched his eyebrows together, thinking. “It would be faster to maybe make a list of who didn’t have a bone to pick with him, if you see what I mean.”
Warren smiled. “I guess I need to get out and pound the pavement then, get to know my new hometown. I’ll go see Williamson first,” Warren said. “And, I’d like to talk to the doctor, see if he has any evidence of his state of mind. What was the doctor’s name again?”
“Falconer,” Pinky said.
“Would he be Hugh Weber’s doctor, as well as hers?”
Pinky looked confused, then said, “He’s everyone’s doctor.”
Warren smiled. “Ah, well, that makes it easy. I’ll go down there right now.”
“He’ll be having his lunch, I’d say,” Pinky said. “Best to wait until this afternoon.”
“I’ll start with Williamson in that case,” Warren said cheerily, but Pinky’s face clouded over. “Will he be on his lunch hour as well?” he asked. Pinky nodded. “Perhaps I’ll stop at home for some lunch myself and then walk down to see them all when I’m through.” Pinky seemed to like that.
Sylvie Weber was standing on the porch now. There was some kind of vine climbing the posts of the porch, and standing there, thoughtful-looking and framed by the green leaves, she could have been out of a painting. Warren hadn’t thought of her as attractive, and she wasn’t exactly, but there was a beauty to her, surrounded by the greenery and looking wistful, that surprised him.
Warren called out to Mrs. Weber, “Thank you, Mrs. Weber. I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll be in touch.”
She waved hesitantly. After he had reversed and was heading back down Agony Hill, he turned to look out the window. She was watching him go. The cows were too. The fields blazed green and gold in the midday sun.