Текст книги "Tin City Tinder"

Автор книги: David Macinnis Gill

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

THURSDAY

1

A hospital was a lousy place to sleep when you were so sore your bones were vibrating, and the only thing you wanted to do was drive over to the Loach’s house and drag Dewayne out of his bed and kick his ass for attacking a Japanese kid who wasn’t bothering anybody.

Fighting was the barbaric, illegal way of settling problems. But with the painkillers leaving my body, I was finding barbarism more and more attractive because I just knew it had been Dewayne and the other knuckle draggers who beat Luigi up.

All night long, I rolled back and forth on the hard bed. Off and on when I managed to sleep, my dreams were haunted by images of the ceiling collapsing and the echoes of a woman’s voice crying for help.

No one was ever happier to see Dr. Tetanus when he made rounds at 0600 the next morning. A few papers were signed, then a wheelchair took me to the curb out front.

Minutes later, Abner backed his Range Rover slowly out of the parking space. Mom’s plan was for Abner to take me home, and Cedar would check in on me after her morning classes.

Abner had other ideas.

“You hungry?” he asked when I climbed into the front seat.

I groaned from the sore ribs. “My stomach’s kind of—“

“Because I was thinking of stopping by this diner near Nagswood. It’s a little out of the way, but they make one of the best western omelets in the county. Care to investigate?”

“Now that you mention it.” I shifted in the seat so my ribs were in the least painful position. “Some investigation would hit the spot.”

“That’s my boy,” Abner said and pulled onto the highway.

2

The house in Nagswood was a road kill skeleton that had been picked clean. The charred remnants of the frame stood on the corners of the building. The frame on the west side was slightly more intact, with eight feet of unburned clapboard siding joining two wall studs and a window header. The glass in the window was long gone, but the siding was still white. The rest of the structure had given way, collapsing in on itself, burying a home within it. Only red brick chimney remained standing.

“They should’ve built the whole house out of brick,” I said.

“Think that would’ve save the house?”

“Worked for the three little pigs.”

“Just the third one. Come on, let’s get busy.”

Tendrils of smoke dust rose from the debris. Beneath the smoke was a pile of what was once furniture. Now it was a twisted mass cooked together in a carbon stew. If you were patient and could stand the smell, you might be able to tell that the large slab of wood that now resembled alligator skin was once a Chippendale sideboard. You might also see a colonial style secretary desk and a stained glass lampshade. Over in the far corner of the mess that had once been someone’s life, you might see the bedsprings of a queen-sized bed.

Abner discovered all of these things as he wandered through the foundation, carrying my hooligan tool.

“Stay out,” he warned me when I tried to help. “Poke around in the grass. See if you find anything interesting.”

“What qualifies as interesting?”

“Anything that’s not supposed to be there. You know, interesting. Like why an abandoned house would still be furnished? Why would the furniture be pushed to the middle of the room?”

Good questions, I thought, then caught the glint of sunshine off a windshield.

Two cars rolled up the driveway. The first was a navy blue Crown Vic. The second car was a white Marquis with an Allegheny County emblem on the doors.

“Doc!” A sharp pain in the ribs made me catch my breath. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to shout. “Doc, we have company.”

Abner pushed his glasses up his nose. “Fire marshal’s office. Wondered when he’d show up.””

The men from the Crown Vic wore blue and gray striped coveralls. One of them carried a tool belt, and the other was hauling a bulky evidence case.

The guy in the Marquis was a suit. He carried a clipboard and had a Bluetooth headset in his ear.

“Greetings and salutations,” Abner called out to the new arrivals.

They walked past me without a word.

The suit stopped at the lip of the foundation, where he pulled out the Bluetooth. “May I ask who you are?”

“Yes,” Abner said.

“Yes, what?”

“You can ask who I am.”

“Who are you?”

Abner carefully snaked his way through the piles of rubble to free them. “Abner Zickafoose, Ph.D.”

“Whoever you are, this—“ The suit stopped short. “The Abner Zickafoose?”

“I can’t imagine there are too many of us in the world.” Abner leaned on the hooligan like a farmer talking weather with a neighbor. “Have we met? My memory’s not as good as it used to be.”

“No sir,” the suit said, extending an eager hand. “Not personally, anyway. I attended several of your seminars on the collection of human remains at the AFPX conference. Your slideshows are pretty unforgettable, like the fireworks explosion you investigated. I mean, how many times do you see agents collecting body parts in cardboard flats?”

“I’ve seen it several times myself.”

“Really? What were the situations?”

“Ahem,” one of the men in the coveralls said.

“Sorry,” the suit said, getting back to business. “I’m R. L. Pickett, Loss Prevention, from the Allegheny County Clerk’s office. I’m standing in for the fire marshal while he’s at a conference. These gentlemen are Mr. Early and Mr. Stuart. They’re independent contractors specializing in site clean up and debris removal.”

My ears perked up. Loss prevention was code for arson investigation. “”Mr. Pickett, do you think the fire was set deliberately?”

Pickett twitched, as if he’d just noticed me. “I don’t think anything. Who are you?”

“The boy’s with me,” Abner said. “My research assistant. I’m investigating this fire, too.”

“Can I ask why?” Pickett said.

“Sure.”

“Sure what?”

Stuart checked his watch, and Early shook his head. They had reached consensus—Pickett wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

“You can ask why,” Abner said.

“Why are you investigating the fire, Dr. Zickafoose?”

I rolled my eyes. Pickett would make a perfect Naval officer candidate.

Abner swung the hooligan onto his shoulder. He looked perfectly at home standing in a dusty pile of debris, dressed in baggy jeans and an angler’s vest. His long beard and hair blew in a breeze that had kicked up. “There’s reasonable suspicion that an individual was killed here.”

Pickett shifted uncomfortably. His body language suggested insecurity. Fire investigations were complex and took years of training and hands-on experience.

Pickett had neither.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “There were no reports of casualties. Our records indicate the house was vacant. What are you basing your claims on?”

“Evidence.”

“What evidence?” Stuart said, almost laughing. “You’re wasting time, old fella, and time is money. If you don’t mind, just step aside and let us finish what we came to do.”

Stuart beckoned for Early. They climbed over the foundation.

Abner met them with the hooligan. “Actually, boys. I do mind. I’m trying to locate a body, and if you come tromping in here with those size twelves, you’re going to make my job that much harder.”

“You’re making our job harder, sir,” Early said.

"Too bad." Abner handed me a digital camera. “Take a shot every six seconds until we find something, and then every three. The memory chip’s big enough to hold a thousand pictures, so you won’t fill it up. Got it? Good.”

Pickett, realizing the situation was getting out of hand, stepped in front of Early and Stuart. “Let’s not do anything hasty, gentlemen.” He turned back to Abner. “Dr. Zickafoose, I respect your expertise, but the fire captain went over this site earlier. He found no evidence of human remains.”

“I’m not surprised. Firefighters don’t get much training in human identification.” Abner made his way through the piles again. He stopped in the back corner of the house. “That’s no fault of his own. Most people don’t know what to look for. Mr. Stuart, do you think we should be searching for a skull?”

Stuart scratched the back of his neck. “Well, yeah. I guess so.”

“You’re not going to find one. Temperatures in a house fire can get so hot, the victim’s cerebral fluid boils and the skull explodes. The mandible and most of the alveolar process usually survive, along with a few teeth. The other fragments are usually scattered. Mr. Early, where would you look for a body?”

“No place special.” Early shrugged. “Sort of all over.”

“Mistake number two. Anybody know where the bedrooms were?”

Pickett consulted his clipboard. “There were two. One on the second floor on the east side of the house.”

Abner pointed at the queen-sized box springs they had found earlier. “Confirmed.”

I snapped three pictures.

“The second,” Pickett said, reorienting the floor plan map, “was a developed attic space on the south side of the house.”

“Exactly where I’m standing,” Abner said. “Y’all care to join me? You, too, Boone.”

We stomped through the sticky, black mixture of ash and water. I took it easy. Although I was anxious to see what Abner had found, my ribs were killing me.

Abner followed a swarm of blowflies to a mound of debris. “Don’t forget. Pictures in, pictures out.”

There was something off-key in Abner’s voice. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m making double sure that this scene is preserved.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to disturb it.”

“Hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “Lamar says that you need a warrant to investigate a fire after the crews leave the site.”

“He’s right,” Abner said. “But I’m not a cop. I’m a senile old man, according to my former dean. One good thing about senility, you don’t have to stand on ceremony just to make politicians and bureaucrats happy. If anybody asks, I’m just following the flies.”

 We stopped next to a shape that resembled a small hill.

Abner looked at the sun. “Any of you gentlemen ever cleaned up a site after an old house burned?”

They all shook their heads.

“Plaster acts different from gypsum board in a fire. The lathing behind it burns, and sheets of the stuff collapse. Super heated plaster behaves almost like modeling clay, forming around whatever it hits. Like a box springs, for instance.”

Abner shoved the hooligan under the mound and used an unburned rafter as a fulcrum. The mound lifted up, revealing a twin bed box springs.

“You boys mind pushing this over? It’s a might heavy for an old man.”

Early and Stuart shoved it to the side. It landed on the ashes and sent up a cloud of dust.

“Don’t breathe that,” Abner said. “It’s toxic.”

We quickly covered our noses with our shirts.

Abner poked at the box springs under the mattress. “Hmm. Interesting.” He carefully pulled the twisted metal out of the soot. “And voila! There she is.”

The body was a lump of roasted tissue. It reminded me of a marshmallow dropped into a charcoal fire. The skin was toasted brown in places and charred black in others. There were also maggots. Thousands of them. Coating the eye socket, the nasal cavity, and the mouth.

I picked a maggot up with a fingernail. “Blowfly larvae. Note the yellowish color and pointed heads. Takes them less than a day to hatch.”

The men turned away and promptly lost their lunches.

What a bunch of wimps.

With Abner’s camera, I clicked one photo after another. I’d grown up helping him catalog evidence and even helped boil bones. It felt like I had been training for this moment for years. From the moment that Abner pulled the mangled box springs aside, I knew there was no going back.

My first body.

No, not a body, a person, a dead woman whose life had been ended by a fire.

I bent over for a closer look. As Abner predicted, the top of the skull had exploded, and the hair had melted.

“You said she, Doc. How do you know it’s a she?”

Abner pointed at the base of the skull. “Two reasons. First, see that area of exposed bone? The occipital protuberance is not pronounced.”

I knew, of course, that one of the several ways to determine the sex of skeletal remains was the occipital protuberance, a small notch of bone at the base of the skull. It was generally large in males. In females, it was almost absent. Any grad student could find it in a dry skull, which I had often done myself, but to spot that one characteristic out of a blackened mass was nothing short of amazing.

“Second reason?” I asked.

“She was wearing a synthetic house dress.”

The victim wore a housedress and one sock. Fire had burned off most of the floral patterned fabric, except for a patch on her trunk. Her unburned skin had a glossy look to it, like she had been lacquered down, and her face had crumpled up, the lips curling away from the teeth and the lids peeling away from the red sockets where the eyeballs had melted. Her arms were drawn up in what was termed the “pugilist position,” the fingers formed into tight black balls.

“You’re right.”

“Not bad for a senile old cuss, huh?”

This is what death looks like, I thought. I felt the color drain from my face. I handed the camera to Abner and slowly walked away.

“You all right, Boone?”

“Just need some air.” But what I really needed was to tell somebody.

“We found a body,” I said as soon as Cedar answered her cell.

“Come again?” Her voice was drowned out by other students in the lab. “Wait, let me stick my head out in the hallway. Say that again.”

 “Abner and I found a body at the Nagswood property. I was right. There was someone inside the house.”

“That’s awful! I mean, it’s cool that you’re right and everything, but that’s awful! Someone’s….somebody’s…”

Dead.

“I know.” My voice dropped lower. “Look, I have to call 911 to alert the sheriff. I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice echoed in the metal locker. “Text me. I’ll be in class.”

I ended the call. Cedar was right. It wasn’t cool to find a dead person. It was awful. It was even worse if the person is dying in the belly of an aircraft carrier, and you were on the fire crew that wasn't able to save him.

I dialed 911 and waited for the operator to pick up.

3

There’s something about the finding a human body that draws law enforcement like rubberneckers to a highway wreck. Fifteen minutes after I called it in, the cops came en masse to Nagswood. The routine fire that had been nothing more than the burning of the leftovers of a life suddenly became fascinating to ninety percent of the Allegheny County Sheriff’s department.

The first officer to arrive was Deputy Mercer. He parked on the west side of the property, apart from the other cars. His front tires sank several inches into the clay soil. Mercer was taller than I remembered, with cropped hair, a boxed chin, and shoulders that tapered to his waist. A swimmer’s build.

Abner and I waited near the foundation. We had left the evidence where we had found it. I was leaning on the hooligan tool. Pickett and the others were smoking cigarettes and trying to get a signal on their old flip phones.

“Stand where you are.” Mercer swung himself out of the prowler. The Taser was clipped to his gun belt. His radio was flipped over his left shoulder, dangling by its twisted cord. “Which one of y’all called 911?”

“Does it matter?” Pickett said. “Dr. Zickafoose is the one who discovered the corpse.”

“I’d rather use the term individual, if you don’t mind,” Abner said. “Abner Doubleday Zickafoose, Ph.D. My grandson, Daniel Boone Childress.”

The deputy glared at me. I wasn’t surprised. Mercer looked like a guy who held grudges.

“Where’s the corpse?” Mercer pulled a pair of wraparounds out of a pocket and put them on. The effect, I had to admit, made him look a lot more intimidating. Too bad he needed sunglasses to scare people. “I need to examine it.”

“This way.” Pickett led him to the body. “Don’t you need a warrant to do a search, Deputy?”

Mercer ignored him. He jumped onto a rafter, then crossed over the ruins of the woman’s bedroom. He had excellent balance and hopped nimbly from one spot to the next until he stood atop the mound of plaster.

“We came in through the front, initially,” Pickett said.

Mercer wrinkled his nose. “And destroyed valuable evidence in the process.”

“Which is what he’s doing,” I whispered to my grandfather. “The more they investigate, the less evidence there will be.”

Abner patted the breast pocket that stored his camera. “Pictures in, pictures out.”

His habit of taking photographs of every step of an investigation allowed him to revisit a crime scene as many times as he wanted, no matter how many cops had stomped the evidence into oblivion.

Mercer squatted on the plaster mound. “This is it? I can’t see a body here, just a bunch of maggots—Whoa! Whoa!”

His weight cracked the plaster. The mound crumbled. His feet scrambled for purchase in the rubble, coating his gray uniform in soot and dumping him onto the bedsprings.

Mercer landed hard.

“Can I get a hand?” he asked Pickett.

Pickett, Early, and Stuart shook their heads.

Abner took my hooligan and offered it to Mercer. “Take hold of this, deputy. Watch out for the tip, it’ll poke a hole clean through you.”

With a quick yank, Mercer was on his feet. “Thanks for nothing, Pickett. “

He was smacking the dust from his uniform when three more prowlers pulled in. They parked behind Abner’s Rover.

“Pete!” Sheriff Hoyt yelled. “What’re you doing wallowing in a crime scene?”

Mercer looked at us and then ran to meet Hoyt. “Sheriff! Maggots! Everywhere!”

“He didn’t even say thanks,” I said.

“They never do,” Abner said. “Take that poker back to my truck. Cover it in plastic so the blade doesn’t cut my seats.”

“Yes sir.”

A minute later, I opened the back of the Rover and slid the bare end of hooligan between the rear seats. I covered the head the way Abner asked, which seemed like overkill. The tool had never cut anything in my truck. But Abner was meticulous, and I’d learned a long time ago to follow his rules.

By the time I rejoined my grandfather, two deputies were carrying a body bag to the site. Another pair was stringing yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter, and Deputy Mercer stood next to the sheriff, still covered in plaster dust, taking notes as Hoyt questioned Abner. They moved on to Pickett’s men next.

I watched them intently for a few minutes as they gave nervous answers, with Pickett gesturing toward the house and then pointing at Abner.

“They’re making sure,” Abner said, “the cops knew I disturbed the crime scene.”

“If not for you, this wouldn’t be a crime scene.”

“Boone, it would’ve been easy to convince yourself the victim’s screams were wood whistling or air popping. Especially when your own folks thought you were wrong.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“I call ‘em like I see ‘em. For example, does the sheriff look like a man investigating a potential murder case to you?”

“Murder?” My voice dropped. “Is that what you think?”

“I think lots of things. It’s called an open mind.”

I tugged on my ear. “I’ll be glad to help in any way I can. If you need me, you know, to help investigate.”

“Didn’t you just get out of the hospital?”

“I’m tough, and I have meds.”

“There’s one problem,” Abner said. “Your mama. She thinks you’re at home, instead of picking through a burned out house.”

“She’s at work. We’re good.”

“Galax is a small town. Word travels fast.”

“If she catches me, I’ll tell her—“

“The truth. It’s not always the easiest thing to admit, but it’s the easiest to remember.”

Hoyt shook hands with Pickett. He walked the investigators to their cars, then called to us.

“Dr. Zickafoose,” he said. “Mr. Pickett tells me you popped that body out of the ground like you were harvesting carrots.”

“That’s about all there is to it,” Abner said patiently, as if he were explaining the mechanics of osteoarthritic lipping to a college freshman. “I used the floor plan to locate the two bedrooms. The individual wasn’t at the first location, so I traced fly movement to the second. There she was.”

“She?” the sheriff said.

Abner explained how he had identified the sex. “I’ll be glad to do a more through examination when the coroner is done. I could assist, if you like. Is Leroy Sweeney still your man? We’ve worked a couple cases together.”

Hoyt shook his head. “Leroy’s dead and buried two years at least.”

“Dead?” Abner said, sounding shocked. “You sure?”

“I was a pall bearer.” Hoyt let the news sink in. “And I’m going to have to pass on your offer, considering past history with this department. We’ll be contacting Dr. Windsor-Smith down at the university. She’s a crackerjack young forensic expert. Emphasis on the young part.”

“Very subtle, Hoyt,” Abner said.

I stepped in front of Hoyt. “Are you saying you don’t want Doc’s help?”

“I’m telling you to get out of my way.” Hoyt pulled his leather belt higher on his gut. “Be glad you’re a vet, Boone. Or your ass would be sitting in my prowler, handcuffed to an O-ring. Now excuse me, I got to go play with the grownups for a while.”

Hoyt waited until I stepped aside and then called for a deputy. He put on a pair of sunglasses and pull out a cellphone. What a pompous, officious, over-bearing, patronizing—

“Jackass,” Abner said.

“Sheriff!” I was going to find out who set the fire, and no expert, including the sheriff, Lamar, or that officious prick Mercer, was going to stop me. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, after I caught up to Hoyt. “Doc found the body, and you’re blowing him off?”

“Deputy,” Hoyt told Mercer, who was still shaking dust from his uniform, “escort Mr. Childress and Dr. Zickafoose to their vehicle.”

“What if I decide not to leave?” I said.

“Son,” Hoyt said, “after thirty-two years on the job, I got no sense of humor left, so I do not kid around. Go on, before I have to call your mama.”

Before I could dare him to to it, Mercer walked toward me, arms wide, like a human lariat.

“Keep walking,” Mercer said. He was on my heels the whole way to the Rover. “You heard the sheriff.”

“There’s no speed limit for walking.”

Mercer gave my shoulder a nudge.

I spun around. “You really don’t want to to that.”

Grinning, Mercer reached for the Taser on his belt. His face fell, though, as his hand groped his empty holster.

The Taser lay on the box springs, covered in plaster dust and soot.

“Oh no,” he said and bounded after it.

With Mercer out of the way, I confronted the sheriff again. “Are you going to arrest Eugene Loach now?”

“Eugene Loach?” Hoyt drew back. “What for? He didn’t start this fire.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” I said. “But he refused to render aid to a victim, and that victim died in the fire. That makes him a killer in my book.”

“You ain’t old enough to have a book, son.”

“It’s the law!”

“In this county, I am the law.”

“This whole situation stinks to high heaven.”

“You don’t like it?” Hoyt walked away. “Then don’t breathe through your nose.”

4

When she came home early and found me in the barn instead of bed, Mom screeched like a cat dropped down a well.

“Boon! What are you doing out here?”

“Charting the effects of certain insect larvae on decaying flesh.”

I put a mason jar labeled "blow fly" on the shelf. The project consisted of forty-seven mason jars containing the flesh of dead animals. The mouth of each jar was covered with wire mesh of varying gauges. The variance allowed insects of specific sizes to reach the samples. Charting data helped me rein in my random thoughts, to reshape them the way a magnet realigns atoms.

“I can’t believe you’ve been conducting research in my barn. You know how I feel about desecrating the dead.”

“They’re dead animals. Not people.”

“I’m a veterinarian, so it’s just as bad to me. Killing animals for research is unethical and unacceptable.”

“You put down horses.”

“It’s part of my job. A sad part. I’m not going to justify myself to you. Understand?”

“It’s road kill, Mom. The only thing I hurt was the turkey buzzards’ choice of snacks.”

“You’re a terrible child.”

“That’s because I’m grown. We do that. Grow up. Have our own thoughts. Our own 401k plans.”

She put her fingers in her ears. “Lalala. I can’t hear you.”

“Cedar says that you’re experiencing empty nest denial syndrome. She read about in Psychology Today.”

“Cedar is a lovely young woman.”

“That she is.”

“Who should stick to her studies instead of psychoanalyzing a middle-aged woman’s relationships with her unreliable, single-minded, inconsiderate elderly father and the son who is just like him. I also suggest better reading material. Cosmo, for example. They have nice quizzes.”

“Essay or multiple choice?”

“Ha-ha.” She peered over my shoulder as I dumped a sample on a metal tray and counted the fly larvae. “In the 80’s, we used the word gnarly to described things so disgusting.”

“Gnarly or not.” I returned the bugs and the tissues to the jar. “This is an important project. Police will be able to use my data to accurately determine the date of death of an individual.”

“Yep, you sound just like your grandfather.”

“That’s a bad thing?” Abner said, stepping from the field and into the barn. His hair was helter-skelter, and his pants looked like twisted rope. “I happen to like his grandfather.”

“Dad!” Mom caught her breath. “You snuck up on me!”

“Would it’ve changed what you said?”

“Not one bit. You know how I feel about your disregard for simple human dignity. You treat people like pieces of meat.”

Oh, no, here they go, I thought. Mom’s dislike of Abner’s profession was no secret. Lately, she’d become an internet crusader for human dignity. She had been quoted several times in blog articles and had once done a Reddit AMA about her belief that forensic anthropology was a ghoulish hobby.

"That’s because we are all meat in the end. Including yours truly.” Abner stroked his beard as he scanned the specimens. “Boone, did you tell your mama what we did this morning?”

“This morning? I don’t recall anything unusual.”

“Mary Harriet.” Abner looked a man who would rather eat the contents of my jars than to confess, but he did anyway. “There’s something we’ve got to tell you. Right, Boone?”

“As I still maintain a Top Secret clearance,” I said, “my actions are classified.”

“Who says?”

“Me.”

“If he won’t tell you, then I reckon I will.”

Abner spilled the whole story. The trip to the Nagswood house. The discovery of the body. All without the truly gory details.

Mom turned to me with tears misting in her eyes, and I clenched up in anticipation of what was to follow.

A hug.

“What’s that for?”

“For finding that poor woman. And for restoring my faith in you."

“Sprained neck, Mom.” I grunted, and she patted my back in sympathy, which made me grunt again. “One more hug, and I’m going to be in traction.”

“Tough.”

Abner also told her about Hoyt chasing us off the property. He left out the fact we had gathered evidence from the hooligan and saved it plastic evidence bags. The bags were now stored in Ab’s Range Rover.

“My god." Mom sat down on a straw bale. To keep from fainting, she pressed a knuckle under her nose. “The victim. Do we know who she is?”

“Not yet,” Abner said.

But we will soon, I thought. Like a hound dog, Abner had his bone, and he wasn’t about to let it go.

“Who owns the house?” Mom said.

“Some corporation,” Abner said. “Bought from some band teacher named Blevins.”

“Troy Blevins?” Mom asked.

“That’s him.”

“Small world, huh?” I reached for another jar. The sudden movement sent a spike of pain through my back. The meds were wearing off.

“Sit,” Mom told me. “You’re pushing too hard.”

I sat next to her on the bale. “Happy?”

“I’m on the horns of a dilemma,” she said. “On one hand, I’m sorry a woman died because nobody believed you. You did a good thing finding that person. Now, she can be laid to rest properly.”

“Thanks.”

“Now, Mary Harriet,” Abner said. “Don’t turn on the boy. I was the one that took him there in the first place.”

“A fact that I very well aware of. You’ve betrayed my trust. Both of you.” Mom wiped her eyes. Then she shook a finger at us. “Dad, I left my son in your care. You promised to bring him home.”

“He’s home, ain’t he?”

“Taking him to a forensic investigation on the way from the hospital doesn’t fit my definition of home! And you, Daniel Boone Childress, you were to get bed rest. Instead, I find you out in the barn!”

“What’s going on?” Lamar stood silhouetted in the doorframe. “I heard the commotion all the way in the house.”

“You wouldn’t believe what these two did.”

“Since every firefighter in the county knows about the business in Nagswood," Lamar said, "I can make a good guess.”

“Boone.” Mom stuck out a hand. “Give me your license. You’re too injured to drive. Hand it over.”

“Not happening,” I said. “You can’t ground me anymore.”

“Then I reckon I’ll have to.” Lamar stood beside Mom. A united front. “Did I not put you on probation?”

“Yes, but—“

“No buts. You defied a direct order from your captain.”

“Seriously?” I swept past Abner. “We found a woman’s body!”

“No matter what y’all found, you still broke regulation.”

“If you really heard what happened,” I said. “Then you know that I was right about the screams. And I was right about Eugene Loach and those two other morons refusing to render aid. Instead of busting me, you should report them for misconduct.”

“Those are dangerous charges to make about a firefighter.”

“The truth shall set you free, Captain.”

“Not in Allegheny County North Carolina, rookie.”

Mom pulled Abner out of the barn. "Come on, Dad."

“Give me a holler,” Abner told me, “when your ears stop burning.”

“Deserter,” I mumbled and waited for Lamar to speak. As a teenager, the whole Clint Eastwood tough guy act really ground my nerves. Now, I was used to standing at attention. I could wait all day. But when Lamar spoke after a minute, I was relieved.

I needed to pee.

“I’m going to pass on the advice my captain gave me when I started out,” he said. “There’s horrible things we see that men aren’t meant to see. If you let them, the horrors turn into ghosts, and they’ll haunt you every minute of every day. That’s the first hard lesson about fire. When you walk away from the job, you walk away from the memories, too. You go on with your life like nothing happen, because it’s the only way to survive. You ain’t learned that yet. This fire’s stuck in your craw, and until you get it out or learn to swallow, ain’t nobody going to trust you.”

“I’m used to people not trusting me,” I said. “I can live with it.”