‘I’m still at Ted’s,’ she said, and now her voice was queerly flat. ‘I guess I’ll be at Ted’s for quite awhile to come, like it or not. Someone burned our house down, Mort. Someone burned it right to the ground.’ And suddenly Amy began to cry.
15
He had become so fixated on John Shooter that his immediate assumption, as he stood numbly in the hallway of the one remaining Rainey home with the telephone screwed against his ear, was that Shooter had burned the house down. Motive? Why, certainly, officer. He burned the house, a restored Victorian worth about $800,000, to get rid of a magazine. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, to be precise; June of 1980 issue.
But could it have been Shooter? Surely not. The distance between Derry and Tashmore was over a hundred miles, and Bump’s body had still been warm and flexible, the blood around the screwdriver blade tacky but not yet dry.
If he hurried
Oh, quit it, why don’t you? Pretty soon you’ll be blaming Shooter for your divorce and thinking you’ve been sleeping sixteen hours out of every twenty-four because Shooter has been putting Phenobarb in your food.
And after that? You can start writing letters to the paper saying that America’s cocaine kingpin is a gentleman from Crow’s Ass Mississippi named John Shooter. That he killed Jimmy Hoffa and also happened to be the famous second gun who fired at Kennedy from the grassy knoll in November of 1963.
The man’s crazy, okay … but do you really think he drove a hundred miles north and massacred your goddam house in order to kill a magazine? Especially when there must be copies of that magazine still in existence all across America? Get serious.
But still … if he hurried …
No. It was ridiculous. But, Mort suddenly realized, he wouldn’t be able to show the man his goddam proof, would he? Not unless …
The study was at the back of the house; they had converted what had once been the loft of the carriage-barn.
‘Amy,’ he said.
‘It’s so horrible!’ she wept. ‘I was at Ted’s and Isabelle called … she said there were at least fifteen fire trucks there … hoses spraying . . . crowds … rubberneckers … gawkers … you know how I hate it when people come and gawk at the house, even when it’s not burning down . . .’
He had to bite down hard on the insides of his cheeks to stifle a wild bray of laughter. To laugh now would be the worst thing, the cruellest thing he could possibly do, because he did know. His success at his chosen trade after the years of struggle had been a great and fulfilling thing for him; he sometimes felt like a man who has won his way through a perilous jungle where most other adventurers perish and has gained a fabulous prize by so doing. Amy had been glad for him, at least initially, but for her there had been a bitter downside: the loss of her identity not only as a private person but as a separate person.
‘Yes,’ he said as gently as he could, still biting at his cheeks to protect against the laughter which threatened. If he laughed, it would be at her unfortunate choice of phrasing, but she wouldn’t see it that way. So often during their years together she had misinterpreted his laughter. ‘Yes, I know, hon. Tell me what happened.’
‘Somebody burned down our house!’ Amy cried tearily. ‘That’s what happened!’
‘Is it a total loss?’
‘Yes. That’s what the fire chief said.’ He could hear her gulping, trying to get herself under control, and then her tears stormed out again. ‘It b-burned fuh-fuh-flat!’
‘Even my study?’
‘That’s w-where it st-started,’ she sniffled. ‘At least, that’s what the fire chief said they thought. And it fits with what Patty saw.’
‘Patty Champion?’
The Champions owned the house next to the Raineys’ on the right; the two lots were separated by a belt of yew trees that had slowly run wild over the years.
‘Yes. just a second, Mort.’
He heard a mighty honk as she blew her nose, and when she came back on the line, she seemed more composed. ‘Patty was walking her dog, she told the firemen. This was a little while after it got dark. She walked past our house and saw a car parked under the portico. Then she heard a crash from inside, and saw fire in your big study window.’
‘Did she see what kind of car it was?’ Mort asked. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach. As the news sank in, the John Shooter business began to dwindle in size and importance. It wasn’t just the goddam June, 1980, issue of EQMM; it was almost all his manuscripts, both those which had been published and those which were incomplete, it was most of his first editions, his foreign editions, his contributors’ copies.
Oh, but that was only the start. They had lost their books, as many as four thousand volumes. All of Amy’s clothes would have burned, if the damage was as bad as she said it was, and the antique furniture she had collected – sometimes with his help, but mostly on her own – would all be cinders and clinkers now. Her jewelry and their personal papers – insurance policies and so on – would probably be okay (the safe hidden at the back of the upstairs closet was supposed to be fireproof), but the Turkish rugs would be ash, the thousand or so videotapes melted lumps of plastic, the audio-visual equipment … his clothes … their photographs, thousands of them …
Good Christ, and the first thing he’d thought of was that goddam magazine.
‘No,’ Amy was saying, answering the question he had almost forgotten asking in his realization of how enormous the personal loss must be, ‘she couldn’t tell what kind of car it was. She said she thought somebody must have used a Molotov cocktail, or something like that. Because of the way the fire came up in the window right after the sound of breaking glass. She said she started up the driveway and then the kitchen door opened and a man ran out. Bruno started to bark at him, but Patty got scared and pulled him back, although she said he just about ripped the leash out of her hand.
‘Then the man got into the car and started it up. He turned on the headlights, and Patty said they almost blinded her. She threw her arm up to shield her eyes and the car just roared out from under the portico …
that’s what she said . . . and she squeezed back against our front fence and pulled Bruno as hard as she could, or the man would have hit him. Then he turned out of the driveway and drove down the street, fast.’
‘And she never saw what kind of car it was?’
‘No. First it was dark, and then, when the fire started to shine through your study window, the headlights dazzled her. She ran back to the house and called the fire department. Isabelle said they came fast, but you know how old our house is … was … and … and how fast dry wood burns … especially if you use gasoline .
. .’
Yes, he knew. Old, dry, full of wood, the house had been an arsonist’s wet dream. But who? If not Shooter, who? This terrible news, coming on top of the day’s events like a hideous dessert at the end of a loathsome meal, had almost completely paralyzed his ability to think.
‘He said it was probably gasoline … the fire chief, I mean … he was there first, but then the police came, and they kept asking questions, Mort, most about you … about any enemies you might have made … enemies …
and I said I didn’t think you h-had any enemies … I tried to answer all his questions . . .’
‘I’m sure you did the best job you could,’ he said gently.
She went on as if she hadn’t heard him, speaking in breathless ellipses, like a telegraph operator relating dire news aloud just as it spills off the wire. ‘I didn’t even know how to tell them we were divorced . . . and of course they didn’t know … it was Ted who had to tell them finally … Mort … my mother’s Bible … it was on the nightstand in the bedroom … there were pictures in it of my family … and … and it was the only thing
… only thing of hers I h-h-had . . .’
Her voice dissolved into miserable sobs.
‘I’ll be up in the morning,’ he said. ‘If I leave at seven, I can be there by nine-thirty. Maybe by nine, now that there’s no summer traffic. Where will you stay tonight? At Ted’s?’