Chapter 27 You’re Only Scared When Nothing’s Happening — Ii
“So what happens now,” she said. “You put it in a report. The town finds out. Pike finds out. The woman who’s been at every scene turns out to have the exact skills to be at every scene.
” Her voice went thin. “I’ve thought this all the way through, Wes.
I look like a suspect. Best case I’m the freak who was lying to the whole town for three years about who she is.
Worst case Lorna Pike likes me for the fires because who else in Halford would know how to make one whisper.
Either way the thing I built to be safe is gone, and I’m the calm one again, and everybody’s looking at me, and —” She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
“And everybody’s looking at you,” I finished, quietly, “and that’s the actual nightmare. Not the suspect part. The looking part.”
She didn’t answer. Which was the answer.
Here is the thing I decided, sitting on that tailgate, and I decided it fast and I have not once wanted it back.
I had, at that moment, everything an ambitious investigator could want.
I had solved the mystery of my second expert.
I had a witness, an asset, and, if I squinted the way the county board would want me to squint, a viable suspect who’d been present at every scene with means and skill to spare.
Writing it up was the clean play. Writing it up was, arguably, my whole job.
“I’m not going to put it in a report,” I said.
She turned and looked at me full on for the first time all night.
“You didn’t set these,” I said. “I know that the way I know the sun’s coming up, and I don’t say I know things I don’t.
You’ve been undoing them. You’ve been keeping a block full of people I’m supposed to protect alive, alone, for free, at a cost I can see all over you, while I’ve been three steps behind.
If I write down what you are, I don’t catch an arsonist any faster.
I just take away the one person in this county who can read what he builds, and I burn her to the ground to do it, and I hand a scared, decent woman to a town that’ll never let her be a person again.
I’m not doing that. Your secret’s mine now.
I’ll carry it. I’d like to carry it with you, if you’ll let me, because I’m out of my depth on what this man’s building and you’re not.
But even if you tell me to get lost, I’m not saying it.
Not to Pike, not to the board, not to anybody.
That’s a promise, and I don’t make many. ”
The blue lights turned. Somewhere a dog was going off about nothing.
“Why,” she said. Barely a word.
I thought about lying, or deflecting, or saying something dry to let us both off the hook, which is my whole native language. I didn’t.
“Because I’ve been reading people at fires for nine years,” I said, “and I have never once seen anybody as scared as you are do the thing you do anyway, over and over, for strangers, for free, with nobody watching and nobody thanking you. I thought I understood brave. I’ve been around brave.
Brave was always the guys who weren’t scared, or said they weren’t.
” I looked at her hands around the cup. Steady.
Terrified woman. Steady hands. “It turns out the thing I can’t stop looking at is the steel under the flinch.
The two of them in the same person. You, being that afraid, and going in anyway.
I don’t have a word for it that isn’t going to embarrass us both, so I’ll just tell you I’ve never seen it before, and I can’t seem to look away from it, and your secret is safe with me for as long as you want it kept. ”
She looked at me for a long moment in the blue and the dark. Then she set the coffee down on the tailgate, careful, both hands, the two-thumb thing along the rim, and she said, in a voice with no flutter in it at all, wrecked and quiet and real:
“That’s the nicest and most terrifying thing anyone has said to me in three years, and I have no idea what to do with either half of it.”
“You could start by not driving home,” I said. “You’re wrung out and you shouldn’t be behind a wheel. I’ll take you.”
“That’s not why I’d say yes,” she said, “and we both know it, and I’m going to say yes anyway,” which was, I’d learn, about as close as Birdie Vance gets to telling you the truth on purpose: a joke with the whole of it hiding inside, handed over while she watches your face to see if you’ll notice.
I noticed.
“You don’t have to do anything with it tonight,” I said, and we sat on the tailgate until the county tech waved from the door, a foot of careful space between us, both of us looking at the dark field, neither of us moving to close it, both of us, I think, aware to the inch of exactly how far apart we were.