Chapter 31 What I Used to Be
WES stood on Birdie Vance’s porch at nine at night with rain coming off the gutter in a rope, and I already knew, before she opened the door, that I wasn’t there as the fire marshal.
The fire marshal doesn’t drive to a witness’s house because a man he can’t yet name almost killed a retiree on Chestnut Street and the only person in Halford who might understand why is a hardware clerk who apologizes to furniture.
She opened it three inches, chain on, which was the first thing she’d ever done in front of me that I believed completely.
“Mr. Calder,” she said, and then remembered to add a small flutter to it, a little upward lift she put on the end of my name to make it sound like a woman who was surprised and mildly alarmed. “It’s late. Is somebody hurt? Oh gosh, is somebody hurt.”
“George Ostrander’s fine,” I said. “He’s at County getting a lungful of oxygen he’ll complain about for a year.
He’s fine because somebody propped his back gate open with a cinder block last week, and when the fire took the front of the house, an eighty-one-year-old man with a bad hip got out the back in the dark without stopping to think about it.
Gate that’s been rusted shut since the Clinton administration.
Somebody moved that block on purpose. Recently. ”
The flutter went out of her face. Not dramatically. It just stopped being maintained, like a fan when you cut the power, the blades still turning down but the wind gone.
“Take the chain off, Birdie,” I said. “I’m not here to write anything down.”
She looked at me for a while. Rain, gutter, the porch light doing its yellow best against the wet.
Then the chain slid, and she stepped back, and I came into the front room of the downstairs flat and understood in about four seconds that I’d been wrong about her house too, wrong about all of it.
I’d pictured clutter, because the woman I’d been sold was a person who’d have clutter.
It was spare. It was clean like a workbench, everything with a place, nothing you didn’t need.
There was one framed photograph on the wall by the kitchen door and it was turned a few degrees toward the wall, and I had the good manners not to walk over and straighten it, though I wanted to.
“You moved the cinder block,” I said.
“I’m going to make tea,” she said, “because I don’t know how to have this conversation standing up.
” She went to the kitchen. Her hands, filling the kettle, were not the hands of a woman who catastrophizes about kettles.
They were quick and economical and they did not spill.
I sat at her little table and watched a person set down a costume she’d been wearing so long the hem had grown into her skin.
“Ostrander’s a holdout,” she said, with her back to me.
“One of Holloway’s target parcels, corner lot, he won’t sell.
Two weeks ago I noticed his gate was seized and the front’s his only fast way out and he’s got a hip.
So I oiled the hinge and I moved a block to hold it.
That’s all. That’s a neighbor thing. Anybody could—”
“Nobody did,” I said. “You did. Because you knew his house was going to burn.”
The kettle ticked. She turned around and leaned on the counter and folded her arms, and she looked at me steady, and I want to be exact about this because I’d waited a long time for it and I’d like to keep it accurate: the jumpiest woman in Halford County held my eyes without one tremor, and it was the calmest I had ever seen a human being.
The kettle ticked. I looked around the room again while she worked, because looking is what I do when I don’t know what to say, and what I do when I do know what to say too.
A rack of good tools by the back door, hung by size, wiped clean.
A go-bag I hadn’t clocked as a go-bag on the first pass, sitting by the coat hooks with the casual permanence of a thing that’s lived there years.
A calendar with nothing written on it, which is its own kind of tell, a woman who keeps her whole life in her head because her head has been trained to hold worse.
“You’ve been circling this for two months,” she said.
“You already know most of it. So I’m going to hand you the shape of it and you’re going to sit there and not do anything with your face, and then we’re going to figure out what we do, because a man burned George Ostrander’s house tonight with George in it, and I am tired.
I am so tired, Wes. You have no idea how tired. ”
“Tell me the shape,” I said.
“I was Army,” she said. “Eight years. EOD.”
I knew the letters. Most people don’t, or they know them from a movie. Explosive ordnance disposal. The people who walk toward the thing.
“Bomb tech,” she said, when I didn’t perform surprise.
“Three deployments. I render-safed devices for a living. Improvised ones, mostly, the kind you can’t predict because a person made them, and a person is the least predictable thing there is.
My whole job was reading what a stranger built in the dark and figuring out what he wanted it to do to me, and then not letting it.
” She said it flat, a report. “I was good at it. I’m not being modest and I’m not bragging, it’s just true and you need it to be true for what comes next.
I had the steadiest hands on my team. I have, I would bet, the steadiest hands you will ever meet in your life. ”