tires, and bare in spots; it was also littered with splinters of wood,
pale bits of Sheet rock crumbled stucco, and a few fragments of glass
that sparkled darkly.
The strongest clue to the fate of the house was to be found in the
condition of the shrubbery and trees. Those bushes closest to the slab
were all either dead or badly damaged, and closer inspection appeared to
be scorched. The nearest tree was leafless, and its stark black limbs
lent an anachronistic feeling of Halloween to the drizzly January night.
“Fire,” Julie said.
“Then they tore down what was left.”
“Let’s talk to a neighbor.”
The empty lot was flanked by houses. But lights glowed on at the house
on the north side.
The man who answered the doorbell was about fifty-five, six feet two,
solidly built, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed grey mustache. His
name was Park Hampstead, and he had the air of a retired military man.
He invited them in, with the proviso that they leave their sodden shoes
on the front porch. In the socks, they followed him to a breakfast nook
off the kitchen, where the yellow vinyl dinette upholstery was safe from
their damp clothing; even so, Hampstead made them wait while he draped
thick peach-colored beach towels over two of the chairs.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m something of a fuss-budget.”
The house had bleached-oak floors and modern furniture, and Bobby
noticed that it was spotless in every corner.
“Thirty years in the Marine Corps left me with an abiding respect for
routine, order, and neatness,” Hampstead explained.
“In fact, when Sharon died three years ago-she was my wife-I think maybe
I got a little crazy about neatness. The first six or eight months
after her funeral, I cleaned the place top to bottom at least twice a
week, because as long as I was cleaning, my heart didn’t hurt so bad.
Spent a fortune on Windex, paper towels, Fantastic, and sweeper bags.
Let me tell you, no military pension can support the industrial habit I
developed! I got over that stage. I’m still a fuss-budget but not
obsessed with neatness.”
He had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, so he poured for them as well.
The cups, saucers, and spoons were all spotless.
Hampstead provided each of them with two crisply folded paper napkins,
then sat across the table from them.
“Sure,” he said, after they raised the issue,
“I knew Jim Roman. Good neighbor. He was a chopper jockey out of the
El Toro Air Base. That was my last station before retirement. Jim was
a hell of a nice guy, the kind who’d give you the shirt off his back,
then ask if you needed money to buy a matching tie.”
“Was?” Julie asked.
“He die in the fire?” Bobby asked, remembering the scorched shrubbery
and soot-blackened concrete slab next door.
Hampstead frowned.
“No. He died about six months after Sharon. Make it… two and a half
years ago. His chopper crashed on maneuvers. He was only forty-one,
eleven years younger than me. Left a wife, Maralee. A
fourteen-year-old daughter named Valerie. Twelve-year-old son, Mike.
Real nice kids. Terrible thing. They were a close family, and Jim’s
accident devastated them. They had some relatives back in Nebraska, but
no one they could really turn to.” Hampstead stared past Bobby, at the
softly humming refrigerator, and eyes swam out of focus.
“So I tried to step in, help out, advise Maralee on finances, give a
shoulder to lean on and an ear to listen when the kids needed that. Took
”em to Disneyland and Knott’s from time to time, you know, that sort of
thing.
Maralee told me lots of times what a godsend I was, but it was really me
who needed them more than the other way around because doing things for
them was what finally began to turn my mind off from losing Sharon.”
Julie said, “So the fire happened more recently?”
Hampstead did not respond. He got up, went to the sink opened the
cupboard door below, returned with a spray bottle of Windex and a dish
towel, and began to wipe the refrigerator door, which already appeared