Chapter 10 That Wasn’t Nothing — Ii
I thought about telling Pike. I want that on the record, that I considered it, for about an hour, because the tidy part of my brain said: skilled person, present at both fires, present at this, motive unknown — that’s a suspect, Wes, that’s textbook, a person with exactly the skills to set these fires keeps turning up at them.
It even scanned. And I threw it out, and I threw it out fast, and it took me a while to be honest with myself about why.
Part of it was the evidence: a person setting these fires would not have burned forty seconds and a whole cover story to make a corn rig safe in front of two hundred witnesses.
Arsonists don’t fix things. But part of it, the part I sat with longer, was that I had watched her hands, and hands like that, doing that, are not the hands of somebody who wants people hurt.
Whatever she was hiding, she’d just spent it, all of it, spent the secret she’d clearly built her whole life around, on a corn vendor’s kid she’d never met, and then papered over it so nobody would thank her.
You don’t do that to get away with something. You do that when the not-being-seen is the whole point.
So I decided to do the only decent version of the thing I was going to do anyway, which was pay attention, quietly, and start with the smallest, most human move available, which is: I was going to thank her. Just thank her. Person to person. See what she did with it.
I told myself it was diligence. A good investigator confirms his read of a witness.
That’s a real thing, it’s in the manual, and I have used it as cover for exactly the number of feelings I was not prepared to have about a woman I’d known for two weeks and understood for two days.
My whole adult life I’ve read people the way other men read box scores, professionally, at a distance, for the job, and it had been a long time since a person read back.
She’d looked at me over that paint can and known what I was doing and hidden it again inside a second, and I’d driven home thinking not there’s my suspect but there’s the most interesting person in this county and she’d rather I never found out.
I found her Tuesday, at the store, alone in the paint aisle mixing a gallon for nobody, and I said, “That was a good thing you did Saturday.”
I have conducted formal interviews with people actively lying to protect a spouse, and I have never seen deflection at the level Birdie Vance produced in the paint aisle of Hollis Hardware over a simple thank-you.
“Oh — gosh, no — that was so dumb, I could’ve gotten hurt, everybody keeps saying, I know, I know—”
“You didn’t get hurt. You stopped a leak.”
“I got lucky, is what I got, I don’t even know what I grabbed—”
“You grabbed the right thing.”
“I grabbed a thing and it happened to be — you know how they say a broken clock—” She was shaking the paint can now, which did not need shaking, hard, both hands, using it as a wall between us.
“Did you need paint? This is somebody’s paint, actually, this is a custom, I can’t sell you this one but I could—”
“I don’t need paint.” I leaned on the shelf, unhurried, because I’ve learned that the one thing that unsettles a fast talker is a slow listener. “I need you to let somebody say thank you for once. You’re making it real hard.”
She stopped shaking the can. For about a second and a half she looked at me straight, and the flustered thing went out of her eyes, and what was there instead was tired, and smart, and older than the rest of her act, and it looked right back at me and knew exactly what I was doing.
Then it was gone, and she laughed and said something about how she’d probably trip on the way out and undo any good she’d done, and asked if I was sure about the paint.
“I’m sure,” I said. I picked up a paint stirrer I didn’t need, so I’d have a reason to come back, and put two dollars on the counter for it, and I told her to have a good one, and I left.
Marcy caught me at the door on the way out, because Marcy catches everyone at every door, and told me nine things, one of which mattered.
She said, laughing, that Birdie was hopeless, that she’d fainted practically dead away at a garter snake in the garden aisle last spring, that she once called Marcy in a panic because a smoke detector was chirping and she couldn’t bring herself to get on the stepstool.
And I stood there and smiled and filed it with the rest, because here is what I’d figured out about the flinching: it was too good.
Real fear is inconsistent. Real fear is scared of the snake on Tuesday and forgets to be scared of it on Thursday.
Birdie Vance was scared of everything, always, on schedule, publicly, memorably, in front of exactly the right witnesses, and a fear that reliable isn’t a feeling, it’s a job.
Somebody was doing the job of being afraid so well that a whole town had signed the timesheet.
I sat in my truck. I looked at the little wooden stirrer in my hand like an idiot.
And I noticed, with the specific alarm of a man who’d decided years ago that his life was the work and that was fine, that I was already thinking about the next reason to walk into that store, and that it had been a long time, a genuinely long time, since I’d wanted a next reason for anything.