Chapter 41 The Woman at Every Scene
BIRDIE floated for about thirty-six hours, which I want on the record because it may be the only thirty-six unbroken hours of floating I’ve had since I was nineteen.
I floated through a Thursday close at the store and Marcy caught me smiling at a display of caulk guns and said “who is he,” instantly, because Marcy is a bloodhound in a cardigan, and I said “nobody, I love caulk guns, they’re so useful,” and she said “you are the worst liar in this county, Birdie Vance, which is saying something because half this county lies for a living,” and I laughed and floated on, secure in the belief that the worst thing that could happen to me that week was Marcy finding out I’d kissed the fire marshal.
Then Lorna Pike sat down across from me at the diner and brought me back to earth with the exact sentence I’d spent three years running from.
“Here’s my problem,” Pike said. Fran set coffee down and drifted off to give us room, because Fran can read a booth.
“And I’m going to say it plain because the marshal says you like plain.
I’ve got a string of arsons. And I’ve got a consultant who reads them like she wrote them.
And every time I put a pin in a map, there’s a woman standing near it who nobody can quite explain. ”
The coffee went to ice in my hands. I did the Birdie thing on reflex, the little laugh, the “oh, me, I just live in the neighborhood,” and Pike let me finish it and then set her own cup down and looked at me with a patience that was somehow worse than suspicion.
“Larch and Delaney, you were on the sidewalk,” Pike said.
“Rec center, you were signed in as a volunteer. Ostrander’s block, three of my witnesses put a woman matching you walking it the week before, checking gates.
And now you’re the marshal’s consultant on the whole thing, and you happen to be able to look at a burn and tell me the arsonist’s mood.
” She wasn’t unkind about it. That was the terrible part.
“Miss Vance. You understand that if I were a stranger to this town, and I put those facts on a whiteboard, I would not write ‘helpful clerk.’ I’d write ‘person of interest.’ I’d write it in permanent marker. ”
There it was. The arithmetic I’d feared since the night Pike first walked into Wes’s kitchen.
Not the fear that someone would see I was competent.
The fear that being competent, at every fire, ahead of everyone, looks precisely, exactly, like guilt.
I’d spent three years terrified of being seen as the calm one who fails.
I had not once budgeted for being seen as the calm one who lights the match.
I want to tell you I stayed cool. I did not stay cool.
My body did the whole show without asking me, because thirty-six hours of floating had left the door unlatched: I went white, and my hands did shake, real shaking, and I heard myself say, too fast, “You think I — you think I set fire to George Ostrander’s house?
George waves at me every morning, George gave me tomatoes, I moved his cinder block so he could get out, I—” and then I heard what I’d said and clapped my own mouth shut, because I moved his cinder block was not on the list of things a not-person-of-interest says.
Pike’s eyebrows went up about a millimeter, which on Pike is a shout.
Across the diner, Fran had abandoned all pretense of refilling anybody and was openly watching us over the pie case, and I thought, with the small hysterical clarity you get at the worst moments, that by suppertime the entire town would know Birdie Vance had cried in a booth at the detective, and would decide it was because the poor jumpy thing couldn’t handle being questioned, and would bring me casseroles, and I would eat the casseroles and let them believe it, because that was the deal, that had always been the deal, and I was so tired of the deal I could have laid my head down on the sticky table and slept for a year.
“You moved his cinder block,” she said.
“To hold the gate open,” I said, and now I was crying a little, furious about it, the wrong emotion at the wrong time, three years of hiding cracking sideways under the one pressure I’d never rehearsed.
“Because his hip’s bad and the gate was rusted shut and I knew — I looked at that block of houses and I knew somebody was going to burn one of them and I wanted the old man to have a way out in the dark, and he did, and it worked, and that is the single best thing I have done since I moved to this town, and you’re sitting here about to write my name in permanent marker for it. ”
The booth was very quiet. Fran, across the diner, had gone still with a coffee pot.
Pike looked at me for a long moment. Then she did something I did not expect from a career skeptic: she got gentler.