Night seemed to fall quicker and more colorfully in Libbie than it did in the Cities. Out here it went from orange to red to purple to dark blue to black, and it went through this transformation in mere minutes. I found myself sitting in my car next to the Pioneer Hotel watching it, wishing I didn’t have to wait twenty-four hours to see it again.
Sharren Nuffer was back behind the registration desk when I finally stepped inside the hotel. Her eyes were still red and puffy.
“Hi,” she said.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m okay. It’s been a tough day. I think the whole town is in mourning.”
“I can appreciate that.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before.”
I liked how she said “us.” In the greater Twin Cities, which boasts a population of about two-point-eight million, us was a comparatively small group of people consisting of families, friends, and co-workers. Murders occurred with some frequency, yet they nearly always involved someone else, rarely us. Out of either indifference or self-defense, we didn’t take them personally. In a small town like Libbie, which had far fewer people than your average Twin Cities high school, us was everyone. In a very real sense, what happened to one happened to all. Presumably it was the reason people in small towns looked out for each other more than we did in the Cities.
“How did it go with Mr. Miller?” Sharren asked.
“About what you would expect. Are you sure that Rush received a call from Miller the Tuesday night he disappeared?”
“That’s what the caller ID said. Does he deny it?”
“Yeah, but he’s the only one that does.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. Can you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I need a list of the names of all the city council members and where I can find them. Tracie was going to introduce me, but…”
Sharren stood perfectly still for a moment; she didn’t even blink.
“Of course,” she said. “I am so sorry about Tracie and Mike. It’s depressing. It makes me feel old. I don’t like to feel old.”
“I understand.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot.” She reached under the desk and produced a sheet of white paper. “This was faxed to you.”
I studied the sheet. Sharren did the same, looking over my shoulder.
“What is it?” she said.
The fax was from Greg Schroeder, and it listed the addresses and phone numbers of a couple of dozen men named Nicholas Hendel. Most of them lived in Chicago. There were also a few in Skokie, Oak Park, Cicero, Winnetka, Arlington Heights, Ashton, Joliet, and more.
“A needle in a haystack,” I said.
A moment later, the lobby was filled with the whoop and wail of a fire truck siren. It started low, increased in volume, and then decreased as the truck passed the hotel’s large windows. Seconds later, another truck passed.
“Volunteer fire department,” Sharren said. She rushed to the window and looked out. As she did, Evan, the blond bartender, backed into the lobby through the front door, watching the trucks pass as he did.
“What’s going on?” Sharren asked him. “Do you know?”
“It’s the Dannes—Rick and Cathy—over by the high school. Their house is on fire.”
By the time I reached the site, the eight-man volunteer fire department was already hard at it. I could see them clearly in the high-intensity lights that they had trained on the building. Two two-man crews were hosing down the side of the house where the fire was visible, while a third team cautiously crossed the roof. One of the firefighters powered up a chain saw. He carefully cut a hole in the roof to release the intense heat while the second gave him a steadying embrace. I wanted to help, but I didn’t even know where to begin, so I stood back like a couple of dozen other gawkers, staying out of the way as best I could.
The flames licked one side of the house, but the opposite side had remained untouched. A fire ladder was set against that wall, and the two men who had used it to reach the roof now scrambled back down. A firefighter with an ax smashed a window on the ground floor, and smoke began billowing out, rising until it disappeared into the night sky. A moment later, he smashed another window.
A woman screamed. I followed the scream to the front of the house, where Rick Danne was holding tight to his wife, trying to console her. It didn’t seem to do any good. She writhed in his arms as if she wanted to run into the burning building. I wondered if someone could be trapped inside until I heard a voice announce, “No one was home when it started.”
The flames cast frightening orange shadows against Cathy’s face and white shirt. Her sorrow and fear and rage were agonizing to watch. It reminded me of those times when I worked traffic control at fires when I was a cop in St. Paul, sometimes having to restrain residents from braving the fire to recover some cherished heirloom. I knew what she must have been feeling, what other fire victims felt—the terrific sense of loss. It wasn’t just her belongings that were going up in smoke; it was the nourishing routine of her life. After all, shelter isn’t that hard to come by. Clothes, furniture, appliances, the house itself—those all could be replaced. Wedding photos could not. Nor could music collections, books, childhood mementos, the little black dress that fit just so, the comfy chair that was just the way we liked it, the mug we reached for whenever we wanted a cup of joe, or the prized souvenirs of a life lived long and well. They were the things that anchored us to our lives. Without them, we were like kites cut loose from their strings.
I found myself moving far out of Cathy’s sight line for fear that seeing me would cause her even greater pain—and because I wanted to spare myself the reproachful stare and accusatory oaths that I knew I deserved. There was no doubt in my mind that Church had caused this fire, as he had so many others, to get back at the Dannes and to get back at me, to make a joke of my vow to protect them. I also had no doubt that Cathy Danne would blame me for this outrage, and she would be right to do so. The fire would not have happened if I had kept my seat in the Café Rossini, if I had not insisted on standing up to Church, if I had not been so quick to impose myself on someone else’s life.
There was a hole deep in my stomach now, and it was slowly filling with the black bile of guilt. I didn’t like the feeling it gave me, and I wished it would go away. I wished there were something I could do to make it all right. I wished I could put out the fire and rebuild their home, and I wished I could do it in seconds. The more I wished, the angrier I became.
A moment later, the hoses were shut down. Yet the fire still burned. The flames, hot against my face from the beginning, gained in intensity. The wind—the wretched wind had not stopped blowing since I arrived in Libbie—swirled the smoke and blew it into my eyes. I blamed the smoke for the tears that came suddenly. I wiped them with the back of my hand and eased farther away from the fire until I was across the street.
“What the hell?” I said.
A red tanker truck disconnected from the pump truck and sped off. A second tanker quickly replaced it, and a firefighter worked frantically until the hoses were resupplied with water.
“What the hell?” I said again.
“It’s the ol’ tanker shuffle,” a voice said.
An old man leaning on a cane was standing behind me on the sidewalk. He brushed his nearly nonexistent hair with his hand. I drifted back to where he stood.
“What do you mean?”
“We have only one water hydrant in this town that works properly,” he said. “We call it the sacred hydrant, down on Main. So what we hafta do, we hafta shuttle our water tankers back and forth from a fill site to the pump truck, kinda like a bucket brigade. One’s got twelve hundred and fifty gallons; the other holds fifteen hundred. Luckily, the fill site is less than a mile from here, so it won’t be much of a problem. If it were outside of town, this fire, we’d be fucked. As it is…” The old man lowered his head, gave it a slow shake, and raised it again. “Eight-man crew to cover a whole town—it’s ridiculous. Should have fifteen at least. I’d lend a hand, but…” He raised his cane for me to see.
Like everyone else, I kept staring at the fire. It was tragic, yet also quite seductive, almost beautiful. An enraged elemental beast slaking a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered. The mystery writer Nevada Barr wrote that. Now I knew what she meant.
I watched the fire crawl up the outside wall of the Danne home. Flames started venting in the open window on the second floor.
“Huh,” the old man said. “That shouldn’t be happening.”
“What?”
“The flames in the window. This here is an exterior fire; fire is burning mostly on the surface, not burning through the wall, you can tell. To spread so rapidly to the second floor like that, it must be feeding off an accelerant of some kind.”
“An accelerant?”
“Yeah. Look. You got black smoke coming off the wall, there. See it? Black smoke, usually that means petroleum-based products. The rest of the fire—that’s white smoke. Even the roof where you have tar paper and oil-based shingles, that’s white smoke.”
“Do you think the fire was set?”
“Looks like,” the old man said. “’Course, I could be wrong. These throwaway houses, the way they’re built now, using all them lightweight construction materials. Used to be, back in my day, builders used dimensional lumber to make your wood frames, had masonry walls, wood floors—there was mass to resist the heat; the building’s support system had a longer life expectancy. That woulda given you time for an interior attack. Go inside to get at the fire without worrying about the damn roof comin’ down on your head. Now, hell, the cheap crap they use cuz they wanna keep the cost down—your plywood and fiberboard and plastics and crap; walls built to carry only as much load as you need to meet code—you just can’t risk it. No, sir.
“Ten years ago, I woulda been the first to say you can’t put out no fire standing outside shooting through windows and holes in the roof. Now, now you gotta use them blitz attack nozzles to overpower the fire, cool the exterior and then go interior. ’Course, if you got someone inside that needs rescuing, you forget all that crap and just go get ’im.”
I stood silently and watched the firefighters go about their business. The old man said the boys knew what they doing, and I guess it must have been true because they managed to knock down the blaze in just over a quarter of an hour. After that it was all about cooling hot spots. My impression was that the water damage would be far greater than the fire damage.
Once the blaze was extinguished to their satisfaction, the firefighters used giant fans to help vent the house of smoke. The old man moved forward, and I went with him. The firefighters and a few neighbors began carrying belongings from the ground floor onto the lawn, where they were covered with a tarp. No one was allowed to go upstairs until an engineer determined if it was safe to use the staircase, although from the look on Rick Danne’s face, I knew that as soon as someone’s back was turned, he would give it a try. A man carrying a large overstuffed chair by himself became lodged in the doorway, and I helped him out. He and I made a few more trips in and out of the house, rescuing furniture, before I actually bumped into Cathy. Her face was smudged with soot, and her hair appeared singed. Her eyes held a kind of wild expression that I had never seen before, as if they were trying to convey too many emotions at once. She stared, and for a moment I thought she did not recognize me. A single word told me otherwise.
“McKenzie,” she said.
“I am so, so sorry,” I told her.
I took a deep breath and waited for the angry words, even blows, that I felt I deserved—I promised myself I would accept them all without complaint or defense. They didn’t land. Long moments passed before Cathy spoke.
“It’s terrible,” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
“He’ll probably get away with it, too, just like he did all those other times.”
She was staring so intently that I found myself taking a backward step.
“The police can’t help,” she said.
In that instant, I knew exactly what she was doing. Cathy Danne was reminding me of the promise I had made Church in the Café Rossini: If anything happens to anyone in this room or their property, especially the Dannes—I don’t care if they’re struck by lightning’I will come for you. Not the cops. Me.
“I’m not the police,” I said.
“I know.”
“Good luck to you, Mrs. Danne.”
She bobbed her head purposefully. “McKenzie,” she said.
Cathy retreated into her home without a backward glance. The old man was still watching from the sidewalk. I thanked him for his courtesy and turned away from the house. That’s when I saw Church’s pal Paulie. He was sitting on the hood of a car down the street and drinking beer from a longneck bottle. I walked up to him. He smiled.
“Guess someone was careless with matches,” he said. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
“Tell Church to meet me at the Tall Moon Tavern tomorrow night at nine,” I said. “Tell him not to keep me waiting.”
“I ain’t your nigger,” he said.
I grabbed both of Paulie’s legs and yanked hard. His entire body slid off the car and fell straight down. His head banged off the bumper, and the rest of him bounced hard against the asphalt. The bottle shattered and splashed him with beer and glass.
I kept walking, not even bothering to look back.
Sharren was behind the registration desk when I entered the Pioneer Hotel. I asked her if she ever went home. She said a fellow employee was on vacation so she was working double shifts.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“Why do you stay here?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“In Libbie. Why do you stay here?”
“Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere with a future. There’s no future here. It was used up years ago.”
“You’re upset because of the fire.”
“Am I?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Who said it was?”
“Everybody knows what happened at the Café Rossini, McKenzie.”
“What is everybody going to do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many fires has that sonuvabitch set over the years? A dozen? More? Guys like Church get away with their bullshit because the people they hurt insist on following the rules even when the rules work against them, and he’s going to get away with this, too, unless—”
“Unless someone breaks the rules just like Church,” Sharren said.
“Yes.”
“What are you trying to talk yourself into?”
I flashed on the look in Cathy Danne’s eyes.
“Not a thing,” I said.
“I hate to think that you would stoop to Church’s level.”
“There would be a difference.”
“Doing wrong for the right reason, is that the difference?”
“Something like that.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Excuse me?”
“The kitchen’s closed. Everything in town is closed at this hour except for a couple of bars. I bet I could rustle something up for you in the kitchen if you wanted. When was the last time you ate?”
“I had something at the clinic this morning.”
Sharren glanced at her watch and shook her head.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Watch the desk for me. Give a shout if someone comes in or calls.”
I made myself comfortable in an overstuffed chair when she left. No one did come in, and I was starting to doze when Sharren returned with a club sandwich and a tap beer.
“Evan was just closing the bar, but I got him to pour this for you,” she said.
I thanked her profusely for both the sandwich and the beer and dug in. I didn’t know how hungry I was until I started to eat. She sat in the nearest chair and watched me. After a while, she said, “I thought about leaving, only I don’t know where I would go or what I would find there. It frightens me. If I were younger … Could you just up and leave your home?”
“It would be hard,” I admitted.
“What would make it hard?”
“Leaving the people I love.”
“That’s the thing, isn’t it?”
“Is there someone in Libbie you can’t live without?”
Sharren looked up and to her right as if she were remembering something. “Yes,” she said. “Finally, at last, yes, I think there is.”
Her answer surprised me, and I said, “Oh?”
“You’re thinking about Rush,” she said. “You’re thinking about the times I flirted with you.”
“More than flirted,” I said. “You opened the door pretty wide.”
“I suppose I was testing myself, making sure I was making the right decision. Have you ever done anything like that?”
I thought of Nina. I thought of a red-haired beauty named Danielle Mallinger, the police chief of a small town in southwestern Minnesota that I met months later. I thought of how I didn’t fully and truly commit to Nina until after I spent time with Danny.
“Sounds kind of juvenile,” I said.
“I guess, but you need to be sure, don’t you? It’s about peace of mind. Peace of mind is hard to come by for most people.”
I told her that was probably true.