Fire Spirit Read online

  Halfway along the landing she stopped at Jeff’s bedroom door and opened it. Jeff was sprawled across his quilt in his jeans and his green Morbid Angel T-shirt, with his iPod still in his ears, fast asleep and snoring. Ruth quietly closed the door again and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning, madam and welcome to your breakfast,’ said Amelia. She was already dressed in her favorite white sweater with brown knitted puppies on it, and jeans. She had set two place mats on the breakfast counter, with knives and forks and spoons and red gingham napkins folded into flowers. Outside the window the yard was just beginning to grow light, and a blue jay was squawking on the bare branches of their single apple tree.

  Ruth climbed up on to her stool and tried to smile. ‘Ammy, this is such a wonderful surprise. What time did you get up to do this?’

  ‘Three fifty-three,’ Amelia told her. ‘Would madam care for some coffee?’

  ‘Oh, yes please. What’s that smell?’

  ‘That’s your eggs. They’ll be ready in a minute.’

  Ruth frowned at the range on the other side of the kitchen. Something lumpy and yellow was sizzling in a skillet, but she couldn’t make out what it was. Amelia poured coffee into her mug, and then said, ‘Here’s your menu.’

  The menu was written in red, green and purple crayons. It read:

  Tuna lime refreshment

  Egg and orange omelet

  Pancakes with baked beans and crunchy topping

  Mexican energy juice

  Ruth read it carefully, and then nodded. ‘It sure sounds different, I have to admit that.’

  Amelia had been watching her, her eyes wide with anticipation. ‘You’re really going to enjoy it, I promise.’

  While Amelia went to the fridge, Ruth tried her coffee. It was scalding hot, but very weak, and it tasted strongly of maple syrup.

  ‘What do you think of the coffee?’ asked Amelia. ‘You always say how much you like those coffee and maple candies, so I thought it would be a great idea to make them into a drink.’

  She set two glass bowls on the table, each of them filled with a pale beige mixture with grated lime peel on top. ‘This is the first course. It’s meant to wake you up. Try it.’

  Ruth glanced at the menu. ‘This is . . . “tuna lime refreshment”?’

  ‘That’s right. I made it with flaked tuna, vanilla ice cream and lime juice. You mush them all together and chill them.’

  Ruth poked at the mixture with her spoon. ‘Amelia, honey . . .’

  ‘You have to try it. You’ll like it when you try it.’

  Ruth took a tiny spoonful and put it in her mouth. Amelia didn’t take her eyes off her as she slowly chewed and swallowed.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Ruth pursed her lips tightly, but only to stop her eyes from filling up with tears. She loved Amelia so much, she could never bear to hurt her. She was so loving, and so vulnerable, and so enthusiastic about everything. But she had spent more than an hour making a breakfast which Ruth couldn’t possibly eat.

  ‘You don’t like it, do you?’ said Amelia.

  Ruth put down her spoon. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with your breakfast. It all looks lovely. But I guess I never eat much in the morning because I’m never very hungry.’

  ‘It’s not lovely, is it? It’s all horrible.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I didn’t say that. Listen, put the tuna back in the fridge and maybe I’ll eat some this afternoon, when I get back home.’

  ‘No, you won’t. You’ll throw it away and pretend you’ve eaten it.’

  ‘Ammy—’

  Amelia went across to the range, took off the skillet and emptied it with a sharp bang into the pedal-bin. ‘Don’t worry about clearing up,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it when you’re gone.’

  ‘Ammy, please – listen to me!’

  But Amelia flounced out of the kitchen and ran noisily upstairs to her room, slamming the door.

  Ruth stood in the middle of the kitchen wondering if she ought to go after her. But from experience she would probably make things worse. Amelia’s condition meant that she didn’t see the world the way that other people saw it. She didn’t understand lies. She didn’t understand why some people were cruel and some people were untrustworthy. She didn’t understand why, at fifteen years old, she couldn’t take off all of her clothes to sunbathe. She didn’t even understand the consequences of crossing a busy road without looking.

  She couldn’t see why tuna tasted delicious and vanilla ice cream tasted delicious but if you mushed them up together, that didn’t make them twice as delicious, that made them inedible.

  Ruth emptied her coffee mug into the sink, and as she did so she heard whining and scratching at the back door. She opened it, and Tyson came trotting in, with his long pink tongue hanging out like a facecloth.

  ‘Hi, Tyson!’ she greeted him, and knelt down on one knee to stroke him and tug at his ears, which he adored. ‘Did Amelia let you out to do your business? Look – she cooked me breakfast! Wasn’t that sweet of her? Would you like some? I’d hate to see it all go to waste.’

  She set down the plate of tuna lime refreshment in front of him. He sniffed at it, and snuffled, and then he let out a sharp bark, as if she had deliberately tried to poison him.

  ‘OK, boy, sorry,’ she said. She picked up the plate and scraped the tuna lime refreshment into the pedal-bin. When she looked inside, she saw that Amelia had made her omelet with eggs all scrambled up with whole segments of orange. She couldn’t begin to imagine what was to be put into the ‘Mexican energy juice’, but she could see that she had already taken a bottle of green Tabasco sauce out of the cupboard.

  Tyson followed her around the kitchen as she cleared up the table mats and the cutlery, nudging her repeatedly with his nose.

  ‘Tyson!’ she complained, as she almost tripped over him. ‘You know what your problem is? You should stop thinking you’re a human being. You’re not. You’re a Labrador retriever, and it doesn’t matter how clever you are you will never be able to drive a car or take me out to dinner or even have a half-decent conversation about the economy. It’s a bummer, I know, but there it is.’

  Tyson looked up at her with his sad amber eyes. She tugged at his ears again, and he growled in the back of his throat, as if she had given him hope that he did have a chance with her, after all.

  The phone warbled. She picked it up and said, ‘Cutter residence. Hallo?’

  ‘Boss? It’s Jack Morrow here. We’ve got ourselves a suspicious fire – corner of South McCann and West Maple. And I mean highly suspicious. I’d say you’d want to get over here as quick as you like.’

  ‘OK. What’s the scenario?’

  ‘You’ll see when you get here. It’s pretty darn weird, to tell you the truth. No major property damage, but one fatality.’

  ‘On our way then.’

  She knew that Tyson could tell they were going out on a call because his tail began to beat frantically against the kitchen units and he kept on licking his lips and snuffling, the way he always did when he was excited.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ Ruth said. ‘Give me a couple of minutes to get ready and then we’re on our way.’

  Back in the bedroom, she lifted her dark blue uniform off the coat hanger behind the door and dressed as quietly as she could. Before she left, she went around to the other side of the bed and tugged down the blue-striped comforter. Craig snorted, but he didn’t open his eyes. Most nights, he spent hour after hour wrestling with the bedcover, but when morning came he could never wake up. Ruth suspected that he didn’t want to wake up, the way things were.

  ‘Craig, honey?’

  ‘Whuh?’

  ‘Craig, honey, I have to go to work. I’ll call you later.’

  He opened his eyes and blinked at her as if he didn’t know who she was. ‘Whuh?’

  ‘I’m going now. I’ll call you later, OK? Don’t forget that Ammy has to be at school by eight.’

  ‘Urgggh. O
K.’

  ‘Are you going out today?’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Tuesday? Damn it. I have to go over to the Mayfield Drive development. Meet those assholes from Kraussman Brothers. I doubt I’ll get back to the studio till gone twelve.’

  ‘OK. That’s OK. I’ll call you then, OK?’

  She kissed him on the forehead, and then kissed the faint scar on his left cheek. When she and Craig had first met at college, he had told her that he had been cut across the face when he was fighting with a local gang, but his mother had later told her that he had fallen off his bicycle when he was six, the first time his father had taken off his training-wheels. He dragged up the comforter to cover his face.

  She stood beside the bed for a moment, looking at his dark hair sprouting out. ‘I love you, you daydreamer, you,’ she said, although she probably said it too quietly for him to hear her.

  As she went back along the landing, she saw that Amelia’s bedroom door was an inch ajar, and that Amelia was watching her. She decided to say nothing. Amelia could never sulk for very long; it wasn’t in her nature.

  ‘Bye, Ammy,’ she called out. ‘I’ll see you after school, OK?’

  Amelia didn’t answer right away, but as Ruth went down the stairs, she suddenly came out of her room and leaned over the banister rail.

  ‘Mom – don’t go.’

  ‘What? I have to go. Bill Docherty’s off sick so there’s only Jack Morrow and me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go, Mom. Please. Something’s not right.’

  Ruth hesitated. Amelia was looking genuinely worried.

  ‘What do you mean, something’s not right?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I have to go. It’s my job. But I promise I’ll be careful, OK?’

  Amelia bit her lip, but didn’t say anything else. Ruth blew her a kiss and then whistled for Tyson, who came careering out of the kitchen with his leash in his mouth.

  Ruth looked upstairs again, but Amelia had gone back into her room and closed the door.

  THREE

  Last night’s storm had blown over to the north-east and it was a dry, gusty morning. The sky was a strong artificial blue, like a hand-colored postcard, and rusty-colored leaves were rattling along the streets as if they were warning Ruth that winter wasn’t far away.

  Six emergency vehicles were already parked outside the pale green house on the corner of South McCann and West Maple: an engine, an ambulance, the arson investigation truck and two vans, including the battalion chief’s new red-and-white Dodge, and a police squad car. Ruth parked up behind them and climbed out of her battered white Windstar. She lifted the tailgate to let Tyson jump out, and to drag out the heavy metal case which contained her investigator’s tool kit.

  This was a neat, tree-lined neighborhood, shabby-genteel, and it was usually so quiet that it looked as if nobody lived here. Ruth had been called out here only once, about three years ago, when an irascible old woman had complained that her neighbor had deliberately used paint-thinner to set fire to her conifer hedge, because it was blocking the sunlight to his patio. This morning, however, there was a crowd of more than thirty local residents gathered on the sidewalk, as well as a reporter and a photographer from the Kokomo Tribune.

  Jack Morrow and Bob Kowalski, the battalion chief, were waiting for her on the porch. Jack was a lean, serious man with a thinning white pompadour and permanently narrowed eyes. He was a much more experienced arson investigator than Ruth, with almost twenty-five years on the job, but for various unexplained reasons he had always resisted promotion. He spoke in a slow, grinding growl, so that it was always hard to tell if he was excited about what he had discovered or not.

  By complete contrast, Bob Kowalski was tall and broad-shouldered, big-bellied and bluff, with flaming-red cheeks and a gingery-white buzz cut, and every one of his sentences sounded as if it had an exclamation point after it. He liked a beer and a joke and he always played Santa at the Fire Department’s Christmas party.

  ‘Morning, Ruthie!’ he welcomed her. ‘Sorry to drag you out at such a goddarn unsociable hour!’

  ‘Hey, that’s OK, sir. Tyson always enjoys an early morning run, don’t you, Tyson?’

  Jack Morrow nodded to her, cleared his throat and said, ‘What we have here appears on first impression to be a Class B fire that was very limited in area and probably of very short duration, no more than five or ten minutes, but at the same time it was very intense. To tell you the truth I never saw nothing exactly like it.’

  ‘Do we know when it happened?’ Ruth asked him.

  ‘Round about five thirty a.m.,’ said Bob Kowalski. ‘A delivery truck driver was taking a short cut to the Top Banana Farm Market, and as he passed the house here he happened to see flames leaping up behind the drapes. We dispatched Engine Number Three and it arrived within less than seven minutes, but the fire had pretty much extinguished itself by then.’

  ‘Did the truck driver see anybody else in the vicinity? Any other vehicles?’

  ‘Whole street was plumb deserted, as far as he could see.’

  ‘And what color were the flames? Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yellow. And real fierce! That’s what he said. Right up to the ceiling. We let him leave about twenty minutes ago to deliver his load of apples, but I took his cell number if you need to talk to him some more.’

  Ruth took off her pink-tinted Ray-Bans and took a long look at the sightseers on the sidewalk. Six-and-a-half years with the fire/arson investigation unit had given her an eye for anybody who appeared overexcited, or anybody who was trying to keep themselves hidden behind the rest of the crowd. This morning, however, nobody immediately caught her attention, except for a dark-haired boy of about twelve who should have been getting ready for school by now.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Tyson and me had better take a look.’

  Jack Morrow led her through the hallway to the living-room. There were three firefighters and two KPD detectives there already, as well as Val Minelli from the police crime lab. They all greeted her with ‘hi’s and ‘how’re you doing, Ruth?’, but they were unusually subdued.

  Ruth immediately saw why. In the center of the living-room lay a charred mattress, burned right down to the springs, and lying on the mattress was an incinerated human body. The fire that had engulfed it had been so fierce that it had been reduced to a blackened monkey, with grinning brown teeth, and it was impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman.

  The whole room stank of burned cotton batting and that distinctive bitterness of carbonized human flesh.

  Tyson gave the body a tentative sniff. He let out a whine and looked up at Ruth with a questioning expression in his eyes. They rarely came across a cadaver as seriously burned as this, even in some of the worst fires they attended. Tyson strained at his leash, impatient to start searching the room for any lingering smell of accelerants, but Ruth said, ‘Heel, Tyson,’ and he stayed where he was, although he didn’t stop trembling and licking his lips and keening in the back of his throat.

  Ruth hunkered down and inspected the body more closely. ‘You’re not wrong, Jack. This is one very unusual fire. Like you say, it must have been very short-lived, but while it lasted it must have burned hotter than hell.’

  Jack said, in his expressionless voice, ‘Your average commercial crematorium runs at more than a thousand degrees Celsius. Even then, it would usually take over a half-hour to reduce a cadaver to this condition.’

  ‘Was the front door locked when the firefighters arrived?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack told her. ‘But only with the regular mortise lock. It wasn’t bolted, or obstructed in any other way. They were able to break in right away.’

  ‘OK.’ Preventing firefighters from gaining easy access to a fire was a tell-tale indication of arson, but it didn’t appear to Ruth as if that had happened here.

  She circled the room. The walls were decorated with a fr
ieze of V-shaped plumes of soot, from which grayish-yellow runnels of human fat had slid down to the floor. In spite of the intensity of the fire, however, the upholstery of the four armchairs that were arranged around the mattress had only been slightly scorched. If the fire had been hot enough to reduce a human body to bones and ashes in only a matter of minutes, she would have expected a flameover, and the air temperature to have risen so high that everything in it would have ignited spontaneously: chairs, cushions, carpet and drapes. And yet there was a plastic snow-dome from Chicago on top of the fireplace, and that had only been dimpled by the heat.

  ‘Do we know the victim’s identity?’ she asked.

  Detective Ron Magruder shook his head. He had a bristly little brown moustache and a cheap tan three-piece suit, with three cheap ballpens in his breast pocket. ‘The house is currently unoccupied. The owner is a Mrs Evaline Van Kley, but she moved into the Paradise Valley sunset home about three months ago and the property has been up for sale ever since.’

  ‘Who has access?’

  ‘Apart from the realtors, both Mrs Van Kley’s son and daughter have keys, but the son lives and works in Gary and the daughter works for some investment bank in London, England. The state police are double-checking the son’s whereabouts for us, and we’ve already contacted all the staff at Sycamore Realty. But so far, zip.’

  Val Minelli came over. She was a petite girl, with a long dark ponytail and an oval face like an Italian Madonna, and she did everything gracefully, even taking samples of burned human flesh. ‘Whoever this is, man or woman, they were probably married, because they were wearing a gold wedding band. So it’s possible that we’ll get a missing persons call within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Unless, of course, it was their spouse who set them on fire,’ said Ruth.