CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They discharged him on the ninth with a folder of instructions, two prescriptions, a follow-up with pulmonology in January, and a referral to somebody in behavioral health with a four-month wait.
We went to Jess’s house.
The next morning Ostrander called and asked whether I could come in.
“I can mail it,” he said. “I want to be straight with you, I’d rather not. There’s photographs in it and I’d rather you weren’t opening it alone at a kitchen table.”
“I don’t have a kitchen table.”
“That’s fair,” he said. “Thursday?”
Same room. Same water bottle put down where I could reach it and not mentioned again.
He had a folder on the table in front of him. Dark blue, with a clip down the middle, about a quarter inch thick.
“This is preliminary,” he said. “Final comes in maybe six weeks, and the final one has more in it, but the cause section won’t change. I’ve got a copy here for you and you can take it with you.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want me to walk it, or do you want to read it?”
“Walk it.”
He opened it.
“The fire originated in Apartment 3B. That’s the unit directly below yours. It started in a junction box in the wall on the west side, about eight feet in from the exterior wall.”
“Under my son’s room.”
Ostrander stopped for a second.
“Yes,” he said. “Directly under the north bedroom.”
“Go on.”
“The building went up in nineteen seventy-three. It’s got aluminum branch circuit wiring, which was common in that window and is a known hazard. At some point, and my best guess is the nineties, somebody spliced copper to that aluminum inside the box using standard wire nuts.”
“Which you’re not supposed to do.”
“Which you are not supposed to do, no, because the two metals behave differently under load and the connection loosens over about thirty years and then it heats.” He turned the page. “That’s what happened. It arced inside the wall cavity, and it got into the framing, and it ran up the void.”
“Who did it?”
“No way to know. It wasn’t permitted. Whoever did it is probably dead.”
“Did Mr. Renner do it?”
“Almost certainly not. He’s been in that unit since eighty-seven and he’d have had to hire somebody.
It’s not the kind of work an eighty-year-old does himself.
” He looked at me over his glasses. “For what it’s worth, and I don’t usually say this, there’s nothing in here that puts anything on him.
He didn’t overload anything. He wasn’t running a space heater. His smoke detector was current.”
“He can’t hear it anyway.”
“No,” Ostrander said. “He can’t.”
I sat there for a second.
“I don’t want anybody going after that man.”
“Nobody’s going after that man.”
“Because people will want somebody, and he’s the easy one, and he feeds pigeons in that lot every morning and calls me kiddo.”
“Mrs. Halloran.” He put his pen down. “There is no scenario in which that man is at fault for this. He’s an occupant. The wiring is the building’s.”
“All right.”
“That’s a different conversation and it’s not mine either, but you should probably talk to somebody about it at some point.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that the building’s wiring caused a fire that put a seven-year-old in a hyperbaric chamber,” he said. “That’s all I’m going to say about that and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t quote me.”
Then he said, “Photographs,” and turned the folder around.
I want to describe what a fire scene photograph is, because I had never seen one and my idea of it was completely wrong.
They are not dramatic. There is no orange in them. They are shot flat under a work light, straight on, from about five feet, and there is a numbered plastic tent in most of them and sometimes a folding ruler laid down for scale.
They look like insurance photographs of a construction site.
And then you recognize something.
Photo 14. A hallway. Everything black. Ceiling gone in patches, joists visible, wet debris ankle deep on the floor. On the left, about a third of the way in, a doorway.
That is the hallway I crawled down on my elbows. That is eleven feet of floor. I have carried a sleeping child down it about four hundred times.
Photo 19. The front door.
It is off the frame and standing against the wall, and somebody has stood it up on purpose to photograph it, and the frame is torn open on the latch side with the metal peeled back in a curl.
It is not burned. That is the thing. It is dirty and it is bent and it is completely, obviously intact, and the two deadbolts are still in it, thrown, sticking out of the edge like teeth.
This one’ll outlive us, Ren.
Photo 26. The kitchen.
The cabinets are gone. The window over the sink is a hole with the vinyl frame melted down the sides in strings. The floor is unrecognizable.
And in the middle of it, sitting on the debris, upside down where it came off the shelf when the shelf burned, is a cast iron Dutch oven.
Black. Round. Completely unbothered.
It looks exactly the way it has always looked, because it has been black and round and unbothered since about nineteen sixty-five, when it was purchased by a woman who did not like me and who handed it over at my wedding with the words let’s see how long this one lasts.
Everything in that room is a memory of an object.
That pot is a pot.
I put my finger on the photograph and Ostrander said, quietly, “That’ll have come through fine. Those are hard to hurt.”
“Can I get it?”
“There’s a process. I’ll write down who you call.”
He wrote it on a sticky note and put it on the corner of the table.
Photo 31. The refrigerator.
Still standing. Scorched down one side, door warped at the top, handle gone.
The front of it is filthy. Uniform, heavy, greasy black, from the top down.
Except in one place.
There is a rectangle, about four inches by six, at chest height, just below where the handle was. It is clean. Not clean like somebody wiped it. Clean like the black went around it.
“What is that?”
He turned it toward himself.
“Soot shadow,” he said. “Something was flat against the surface. Smoke deposits around it and not under it. Then whatever it was burned off or fell off and you’re left with the outline.”
“It was a piece of newspaper.”
“Okay.”
“It was a photograph of my husband,” I said. “In a newspaper. My daughter put it there three years ago on a magnet.”
Ostrander looked at that photograph for a while.
“They come out sharper than people expect,” he said.
I sat in that room with a blue folder open in front of me and looked at a clean rectangle on a burnt refrigerator, and I did not know yet that in a little over two weeks I was going to stand in a lobby on the west side and look at a different one, on a different wall, in a wooden case, where a laminated eight-by-ten had been taped for two years.
He let me sit with it.
He is not a talker. I have thought about that a lot. Every other person I dealt with that winter filled every silence with something, and Dean Ostrander sat across a table from a woman looking at pictures of her own apartment and let ten minutes go by without saying a word.
Then he turned to a tab about two-thirds of the way back.
“There’s one more section,” he said. “It’s short. It’s four paragraphs.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to stay in the room while you read it.”