Fire Spirit Page 7

  She turned on the hot water, full, and then she stood up and lathered herself all over, washing her hair and her face and her breasts and furiously soaping herself between her legs, even though she was so sore and swollen.

  I will not let them, she repeated. I will not let them break me. I will not. But at the same time the tears were pouring down her cheeks, and her mouth was dragged down in a silent howl of anguish and distress.

  She was still soaping herself when a voice said, ‘Belinda?’

  She twisted around, lost her balance, and dropped down into the bathwater with a catastrophic splash. A boy of about twelve years old was standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at her. He had dark tousled hair and a very pale face and he was wearing a faded black T-shirt and a pair of worn-out red jeans.

  Tilda grabbed her big brown bath-towel from the stool beside the tub and covered her breasts with it. ‘Who are you?’ She was so frightened that she was hyperventilating. ‘What are you doing in here? How did you get in?’

  The boy took a step nearer. ‘I’ve been trying to find you for days,’ he said. His voice was very flat and bland, but with a strong local accent, so that his words came out as ‘ahbin tryna fahnjew’.

  ‘Get out! Go away! I’m going to call nine-one-one!’

  But the boy ignored her. He came nearer, until he was standing close beside the tub. Tilda dragged the bath-towel into the water and stuffed it protectively down between her thighs.

  ‘Why didn’t you never come back, Belinda?’ the boy asked her. ‘You coulda saved me.’

  ‘Just get out of here,’ Tilda quivered. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want but you have to leave now.’

  ‘I looked everywhere trying to find you but I never could. Where did you go, Belinda? Why didn’t you never come back?’

  ‘My name isn’t Belinda,’ Tilda told him. ‘Now, I don’t know how you managed to get in here, but I’m calling the police right now and you’re going to be in big trouble, believe me.’

  The boy looked bewildered. ‘Why can’t you hug me, Belinda, like you used to? You went away and I never knew where you went, and Mommy was always sleeping or drunk or else she had the screaming meemies. You coulda saved me.’

  Tilda gripped the handle at the side of the bath, and started to lift herself out of the water, still holding the heavy wet towel in front of her to protect her modesty. But without warning the boy pushed her back down again. He didn’t have to push her very hard, because she was bruised and exhausted and still in shock, and in any case she always found it an effort to climb out of the bath.

  Then, to her horror, he stepped into the bath and climbed on top of her, fully dressed, still wearing his sneakers. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his head against the towel that covered her breasts.

  ‘Get off me!’ screamed Tilda, trying to lever him upward. She rolled sideways and thrashed at him, dragging at his T-shirt, but his fingers were digging deep into the flesh that girdled her hips and she found it impossible to get herself free. His clothes were sodden and he was panting with effort, but he kept his grip on her, even when she seized his wet brown hair and forced his head back as far as it would go.

  ‘Just like it used to be, Belinda!’ he said. His white face was shining with elation. ‘You and me together in the tub! Remember that? And then afterward, when we cuddled together, and you sang me that song?’

  ‘Get off me!’ Tilda babbled. ‘Oh God, just get off me!’

  ‘But it’s just like it used to be!’ the boy repeated. ‘It’s wonderful! It’s just like it used to be!’

  Tilda let go of the boy’s hair and attempted to seize him by the throat, but he butted her with his forehead on the bridge of her nose, so hard that she felt her cartilage crack. She slipped backward and downward into the bath, with a riotous splash and a ribald squeak of bare skin against enamel.

  Spluttering, half-choking, she reared up and went for his throat again. ‘Kill you!’ she shrieked. ‘I’ll kill you!’

  ‘Don’t hafta!’ crowed the boy, triumphantly. ‘Didn’t you know that, Belinda? Don’t hafta!’

  With that, he exploded into a fireball. The flames that enveloped him were instantly fierce, and actually roared. His hair blazed, his face blazed, his whole body blazed, and for one terrible second Tilda could see him staring at her through the fire, his eyes wide, his mouth stretched open in a high-pitched scream.

  Tilda screamed, too. She struggled wildly to get out from under him, but the flames overwhelmed her. She felt a scorching blast of heat, as if somebody had suddenly opened up a furnace door. Her curly hair frizzled and her eyebrows were burned off, and the skin on her cheeks tightened and shriveled, layer by layer, quicker and quicker, until her face was charred black.

  The boy burned so ferociously that the bathwater started to bubble, and within seconds it had reached boiling-point. Tilda jerked and shuddered, her arms and legs moving as stiffly as a giant puppet. She had never known that human beings could feel such excruciating levels of pain. Surely it wasn’t possible. Surely she ought to be dead. Her face and her shoulders and her breasts were being seared by fire, while at the same time her back and her thighs and her buttocks were being boiled.

  Oh Mommy, she thought, oh please Mommy, help me.

  Then she screamed out, ‘Help me!’ and her heart stopped.

  The boy continued to burn until his skeleton dropped apart, and even his skull collapsed into fragments. The last of the bathwater crackled dry, leaving the bathroom foggy with steam. Tilda’s blackened body lay on its back, with both arms raised as if she were still trying to fight the boy off; her legs raised, too. The plastic shower-curtain drooped from its hooks in long melted strings.

  The morning passed. Nobody rang. Nobody knocked at Tilda’s door. For a while, a Hoover droned in the corridor outside, and the cleaner sang ‘Baby, Don’t Change Your Mind’, but then there was silence.

  SIX

  Ruth was twenty minutes late arriving at the Fire Department headquarters on West Superior Street. She pushed open the door to the Fire & Arson Laboratory with her elbow, because she was carrying a cappuccino in one hand and a raspberry espresso and a bag of donuts in the other. Jack was bent over the burned-out mattress from South McCann Street, wearing his white lab coat and magnifying eyeglasses, so that he looked like a studious insect. The whole laboratory was filled with the sour reek of charred cotton.

  ‘Sorry I’m so late,’ said Ruth. ‘I had to do the school run this morning and the traffic was a nightmare.’

  ‘I thought you had good old Craig trained to do that,’ said Jack, without looking up.

  ‘He usually does it, yes. But when Ammy came down to breakfast this morning she was acting kind of fretful, so I thought that I ought to take her.’

  ‘She’s OK, though?’ Jack was Amelia’s godfather and always took a special interest in how she was doing.

  Ruth put down the two cups of coffee and the bag of donuts. ‘She was much more settled by the time I got her to school. But she kept on saying that she felt worried.’

  ‘Worried? She’s only fifteen! I know she’s kind of special, but what does she have to worry about?’

  ‘Believe me, Jack, even ordinary fifteen-year-olds have just as much to worry about as we do, if not more. But she couldn’t say why she was worried. She said she felt like a storm was on its way. You know her. She says things like that.’

  Jack came over, pushing his magnifying eyeglasses on to the top of his head and snapping off his latex gloves. He took the espresso and removed the lid. ‘Thanks. I’ve been gasping for this. What flavor donuts did you buy? Right at the moment, everything tastes like charred mattress.’

  ‘Apple spice cake.’

  ‘My favorite. Why are you so good to me, boss?’ He said it so dryly that he was right on the edge of sounding sarcastic.

  Ruth patted him on the shoulder. ‘Because a good boss has to show the people who work for her that she appreciates their skill and their exper
tise, and apart from that, apple spice cake is my favorite too, so don’t eat them all, capiche?’

  Jack sipped his coffee and then he put his cup down. ‘I’ve found something passing strange,’ he said. He walked over to the mattress and Ruth followed him. Most of the interior of the mattress had been burned out, leaving only the springs, and heaps of blackened fiber.

  ‘You can see here the remains of the cotton batting, and the springs, which have been annealed by the heat. Of course there are still a few bits and pieces of human residue, too, which originated from the cadaver we found. I’d say that on the Crow-Glassman scale, the cadaver burned to a little over CGS level two. Unrecognizable as to sex and identity, of course, but not totally destroyed.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruth. ‘So what’s so strange?’

  ‘This,’ Jack told her, holding up a test-tube. It was half-filled with very fine gray powder. ‘When I sieved through the ashes, I picked out five or six sizeable skin fragments from the cadaver as well as the distal and middle phalanges from the cadaver’s left little toe. But these remains were mingled in with them, too. They’re human, but they come from somebody else – another victim, maybe, but a victim who was burned well beyond CGS level five.’

  ‘So we have two victims?’

  ‘I can’t say for sure, not yet. However this other person died, it looks likely that he or she was cremated in a professional crematorium. Not particularly well, because we still have a scattering of larger bone fragments, but I’d still say that after the body was incinerated the remains were put through a cremulator, which is not a piece of equipment you can readily obtain from your local Handy Hardware.’

  Ruth took the test-tube, put on her half-glasses and examined it closely. The gray powder looked exactly like the human remains that undertakers hand to relatives after a funeral – not technically ashes, although that was what they were commonly called, but very finely crushed bone. Some undertakers called them ‘cremains’ – a portfolio word for ‘cremated remains’.

  ‘How much of this did you find?’

  ‘By weight? Less than a kilo, so it could have been a child. On the other hand, I can’t tell you if what I found was all of that individual’s remains. It depends where they came from and how they got there.’

  ‘But you think this second person was cremated sometime well before the first person was burned, and most likely at a crematorium?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jack. ‘Which means, of course, that we have no way of knowing how he or she died. Not yet, anyhow. Not unless we can find out who it is. Could have been a homicide victim. Could have died in any kind of accident. Could have died of natural causes. Who knows?’

  ‘But how did their remains get into the mattress?’

  ‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar-and-ten-cent question. Maybe, when the first person was burned, they were holding a box containing the second person’s remains. Or maybe the remains were scattered on to the mattress before the fire started, either by the first person themselves or by a third person unknown.’ Jack picked an apple spice donut out of the bag and took a bite. ‘I’ll send a sample to Aaron Scheinman for a DNA test,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘You never know your luck.’

  ‘Hell of a long shot,’ said Ruth.

  ‘It’s worth trying. There are several larger fragments which could be bits of tooth. At least we may be able to find out if it’s a male or a female.’

  Ruth went to the closet and took out a starched white lab coat. She was still buttoning it up, however, when her cellphone buzzed against her hip. She took it out and saw that she had received a text from Amelia. ‘Sumthin BADS hpn.’

  She tried to call Amelia, but she didn’t answer. She must be in class, texting under cover of her desk. So Ruth texted her back. ‘Call me!!’

  Less than five minutes later, her cellphone buzzed again. It was Amelia, and her voice echoed, as if she were in the restroom. Ruth stepped outside the laboratory door so that she could get a clearer signal.

  ‘Mommy? I was right in the middle of math and I suddenly had this really terrible feeling.’

  ‘What kind of a feeling? It’s not your period, is it?’

  ‘It was like I was burning. I got so hot that I nearly fainted.’

  ‘Maybe you’re pining for that Asian flu. You didn’t feel too good this morning, did you? Listen, I’ll come right over and take you out of school.’

  ‘You don’t have to, really. I know you’re real busy.’

  ‘No, no. Jack can cover for me. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  She drove to Kokomo High and found Amelia waiting for her on the front steps, with one of her classmates, Rita Dunning, beside her. Rita had a snub nose and a ponytail and braces on her teeth and a very short kilt.

  ‘Thanks, Rita,’ said Ruth, as Amelia climbed into the car.

  ‘That’s OK, Mrs Cutter. Wish I could have a day off, just for being weird.’

  Ruth was about to say something sharp, but Amelia said, ‘Forget it, Mom. I’m used to it. She doesn’t mean any harm.’

  They drove off. Tyson was standing up in the back, panting hoarsely and thumping his tail against the back of the seat. He always got excited when Ruth picked up Amelia.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Not hot any more. But so thirsty. My throat’s so dry that I can hardly swallow.’

  ‘I really think you need to see Doctor Feldstein. There are all kinds of bugs going around right now.’

  ‘I felt like I was on fire,’ Amelia told her. ‘But it wasn’t like having a fever or anything. It was more like my skin was burning. You know when we went to Florida that time and I sat in the sun too long and got in the shower? It was exactly like that.’

  When they reached the next stop signal, Ruth turned and pressed her hand to Amelia’s forehead. ‘You look OK. I mean, you’re not flushed, are you? If anything, you’re kind of pale.’

  ‘But there’s this, too,’ said Amelia. She reached into her school bag and took out her math work book. It was dog-eared and covered in masses of elaborate doodles, because Amelia was always drawing over all of her books – flowers and fairies and princesses and cats. She opened it up in the middle and held it up so that Ruth could see it.

  Ruth was driving, but she managed to glance at it. On the lower half of the right-hand page there were three parallel scorch marks, about an inch-and-a-half long, and one of them was so deep that it had burned right through to the next page, and the page after that.

  ‘What on earth did that?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘My fingers.’

  ‘What?’ Ruth slowed down for another stop signal.

  ‘My fingers did it. I was writing with my left hand and I had my right hand resting on my book and when I lifted my hand up the paper was all burned.’

  ‘How could that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mommy. But it did. Rita saw it, too.’

  Ruth turned into the driveway in front of their house and parked. She took the math book from Amelia and examined it. She even sniffed it, but it smelled of nothing more than burned paper. The scorch marks were soft and smudged, and they were shaped exactly like fingerprints, but how was it possible that Amelia’s fingers had made them? Yet Amelia never lied. She didn’t know how to.

  ‘This doesn’t make any kind of sense,’ said Ruth. She took hold of Amelia’s hand and turned it over. ‘Look – your fingers aren’t blistered, are they?’

  ‘I’m only telling you how it happened. I felt like I was on fire and then my book was burned and I heard somebody say, “Andie”.’

  ‘“Andie”,’ Ruth repeated. ‘Who said “Andie”?’

  ‘Inside my head somebody said “Andie”, but it wasn’t me. It sounded like a boy’s voice.’

  Ruth climbed out of the car and Amelia followed her up to the front door, with Tyson snuffling right behind her. Ruth said, ‘You definitely have to see Doctor Feldstein. It could be you need your medication reassessed.’

 
‘But he did that only about a month ago.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart, but you’re growing up, your hormones are all running wild. Maybe you need to cut down on your beta blockers. Who knows? But you shouldn’t be feeling worried all the time, and hearing voices inside of your head, and burning up like that, should you? You’re my precious girl, Ammy.’

  Amelia hugged her. ‘You’re my precious mommy, Mom.’

  They went inside. Ruth went through to the kitchen, took a bottle of Gatorade out of the fridge and poured Amelia a large glass, with ice in it. As she put it down in front of her, the phone rang.

  ‘Ruth? It’s Ron Magruder. Jack Morrow told me I’d probably catch you at home.’

  ‘How’s it going, Ron?’

  ‘Well, we seem to be making some progress. The coroner has finished his preliminary report, and he says that the cadaver is that of a woman aged between thirty and thirty-five. She’s given natural birth to a child or children, too.’

  ‘Still no idea how she got burned up so bad? Because Jack and me haven’t, not yet.’

  ‘Nope. No evidence that any accelerant was used, just like you said. But we think we may have a pretty good idea who she is.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’ve had three missing persons reports in the past two weeks, but only one of them comes close to the coroner’s description. Julie Benfield, thirty-four years old. She’s a personal assistant at the Harris Bank. She was supposed to be home by six p.m. Tuesday evening but she never showed. Her Land Cruiser was found at seven fifteen p.m. at Casey’s General Store on South Dixon Road with the keys still hanging in the door and all of her shopping scattered across the parking lot.’

  ‘Sounds like she was abducted. Any witnesses?’

  ‘None. Nobody saw nothing. Nobody heard nothing. Her ex-husband Daniel Benfield is a partner in a local law firm – Jones, Hagerty and Benfield. He was working late at the office on North Washington Street until eight thirty p.m. so we’ve ruled him out as a suspect. Poor guy wanted to identify the body, but of course it was out of the question. We showed him the wedding band we found on the cadaver and he thinks it’s hers but he’s not one hundred per cent sure. Val Minelli took a mitochondrial DNA sample from one of their kids so we should know soon if it’s her or not.’