Chapter 23
“Oh shit!” Thora cried.
By the time Lee got to the door, Thora could see the flames licking out from behind it. She tried to stop him, but fear immobilized
her again.
He grabbed on to the doorknob and recoiled in pain.
“Fuck!” he cried, cradling his hand against his chest.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” Thora said. She ducked back into her room to see if there was anything she absolutely needed
to keep. She decided she could not be parted from the quail lamp and pulled its plug out of the wall.
She noticed Lee’s chunk of sea glass also on the bedside table. In all their bedroom shuffling, it had been left here. She
grabbed the tote bag that had the notebook she used to outline her novel as well as her wallet, and ran down the hallway,
through the wave of heat by the basement door, and out the kitchen door. Lee was not behind her.
“I have your sea glass!” she called back.
With that, he came sprinting with a bag of his own and joined her outside. He was wearing her beloved hat, saving that singular accessory from the blaze.
“There’s a fire extinguisher in the kitchen,” he said.
“No, Lee. It’s too dangerous.”
They ran around to the front of the house. With the strings of lights glowing cheerily from the porch, nothing looked amiss.
A stately great camp in the Adirondacks, with the shabby sophistication of an old tweed coat. Once her favorite place, now
turned terrifying.
They stood, leaning against Thora’s Jeep, saying nothing.
A flicker of orange appeared in one window. Smoke began curling out of the tin roof.
“I’m so sorry,” Lee said the first time they heard the pop of glass shattering.
“I know. I’m sorry, too.”
There was nothing else they could do. They had to hope that someone with a view of Moonrise Mountain saw the smoke and made
a call. There were some places in Woodhill that had a view. But it was dark and gray, so the smoke wouldn’t be obvious.
As the fire grew more intense, Thora could feel the heat of it radiating onto her. The feeling of being at a campfire. The
cruel irony in associating this feeling with fun, simple times. But it was also the feeling she associated with hearing scary
stories.
She thought of the Green Man doorknob and the story they’d concocted about the ghostly man it represented. Then she remembered
Lee had burned himself.
“How is your hand?” she asked.
He held it out to her, a vivid shade of red and already starting to blister. She recognized the pattern perfectly. It was impossible to tell now, but he’d been marked like her. When his hand healed, it would stare back at him, taking him back to Juniper anytime he looked at it.
“It’s not that bad,” he said.
“Looks like second degree at the worst,” she said, gently cradling his hand in hers.
“You have the expertise there,” he said.
How could it be, that a building that stood for over one hundred years, could burn down before her in one night? As she clutched
the quail lamp under one arm, she thought of everything she didn’t save. The beautiful desk with the pigeonholes, where she
was to write her first book. The manuscript of George’s book Tree & Leaf. The beautiful collection of wood panels in the Wood Room that documented George’s love of trees. Luckily she knew the figurines
he carved were spread far and wide, but still, plenty of them were still in this house.
The Model T rusted in the basement. Antiques stuffed the Junk Room. Despite looking untouched to Thora’s initial inspection,
enough treasures had been scavenged to fund the restoration of Woodhill House. They’d never know what could be done with the
rest.
All the letters Lee had written George were burning right now.
“Did you save the letters George wrote you?” Thora asked.
“I did. At least those are safe. Everything I wrote to him is in the wind now.”
“I read your letters. I probably shouldn’t have.”
“When you bought the house, they became your letters.”
“You bared your soul to George. Did he reply in kind?”
“No, his letters were always cryptic, like they were coming from an oracle or Baba Yaga. It makes sense that he wrote Tree & Leaf.”
Thora laughed at that image. “I wish the house had chicken legs instead of that fucking basement.”
Lee smiled in agreement. “He would tell me a specific story of something he had observed in nature. A grander lesson was hidden there, I’m sure, but I couldn’t always dig it out.”
“Do you have an example?”
“He loved hoverflies.”
“Hoverflies?”
“You’ve seen them. They look like tiny little yellowjackets, but they fly differently. They zip from place to place, but they
can hover perfectly still.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Because they kind of look like yellowjackets, people are afraid of them. But if you watched them for even ten seconds, you’d
easily see how different they are.”
“The lesson’s not hard to find there.”
“I suppose not. But George wanted to deeply know those hoverflies. Instead of reading about them in a field guide, he decided
to recreate all the knowledge for himself.”
“You gotta fill the time somehow.”
“Whittling breaks, you know.”
This rhythm was easy to fall into, and knowing this was the last of it was bittersweet, like songs that fade out instead of
ending cleanly. The songwriter didn’t know how to end the song, so they turned the volume lower and lower. Maybe they could
imagine the song was still playing somewhere, even if they couldn’t hear it anymore.
Sheets of burning material began floating away from the house, catching updrafts and taking flight. Given the rain from earlier
that night, they could be quite sure that this house fire wouldn’t spread into a wildfire. A small consolation.
The flames rising into the sky had a terrible, powerful beauty as they grew.
There was nothing to do but try to remember, because all the touchstones in the house would be gone.
“Did George ever tell you anything about the bells? Who collected them, why they ended up at the house?”
“No. You?” Lee asked.
“I don’t think so. It’s possible he did when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t have listened. We thought they were so scary that
we replaced any truth with our own fictions.”
Oof. That felt terrible to say. She had basically accused Lee of replacing the truth of her with a fiction of his creation.
Perhaps she had created a fiction of him to be incompatible with her. Whatever she had done, she had burned it all down. And
he had the scars to prove it.
There were loud cracking sounds as the timbers that supported the house began to give way.
“I think there was more mystery about the house than there was memory,” Thora said.
“The bells were a mystery. What else?”
“Practically every object. I contacted as many family members as I could when I bought the house, to see what items people
had sentimental attachments to. Only my father wanted anything. So either no one knew the story of the bells, or no one cared
about it. The same for the birds, and the blue textiles, and all the stuff in the Junk Room. How could a house be so full
of interesting stuff, and yet it meant nothing to anyone?”
“It meant something to you.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks. There was no fighting it. At first, she’d been in a state of shock, but the magnitude of the
loss was sinking in.
“Because I could see there were stories there. Who was the person obsessed with the color blue? Enough that they needed to be surrounded by it at a vacation house they shared with their family?”
“You’ll have to create that person. You’ll have to write about them.”
Thora’s tears turned into ugly sobs. Lee did know her, and she’d fucked everything up.
He put his arm around her. His face, the shadows across it shifting as the fire engulfed the house, was also streaked with
tears.
It took all night for the house to burn. They watched it, occasionally piping up with a memory associated with the house,
but mostly remaining quiet. It felt important to witness. As the heat from the flames started to die and the air grew chill,
Lee placed Thora’s hat back onto her head. Along with it came the herbal scent of his hair. The gemstone beads on the hat
were for protection, and, well, both people who’d ever worn it made it out alive. She should never doubt Amethyst’s magic.
No one down the mountain saw the flames for a long time, not that it would have made a difference. Even if the volunteer fire
department had been able to rally, it would be nearly impossible to drive a firetruck up the driveway on a good day, let alone
with all the downed trees in the way.
When her family built Juniper, they hadn’t been thinking about access to emergency services or even civilization writ large.
The place was meant to be an escape from everything.
As dawn began breaking, they knew the fire would become obvious to people in Woodhill. It was only a matter of time. The first
person who came lumbering over the logs like the world’s worst hurdler was Mack.
“Holy shit,” she said between heaving breaths. “Are you two okay?”
Lee held up his blistered palm. “That’s the worst of it.”
Mack held her own palm to her chest, as if to calm her racing heart. “Thank goodness for that. What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Thora answered, “but it started in the basement.”
“The basement! What’s even down there besides that old Model T?”
“I don’t know,” Thora said.
“George used it as a place to germinate seeds,” Lee said. “Beyond that, I don’t know either. There is an old light fixture
down there. The house’s wiring was updated sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, but it might have been knob and tube down there.”
Thora had heard of knob and tube wiring as a pitfall of old houses, but she had assumed that everything had been properly
updated. Especially considering Lee’s work.
Her fear of the basement, rooted in a childish prank, kept her from investigating it seriously. The shame burned worse than
the doorknob ever had. This might have been preventable. Like George’s death. It always circled back there. This fire would
be one other thing she couldn’t forgive herself for.
Soon after Mack’s arrival, some other people from Woodhill started showing up. Volunteer firefighters, but also regular people
from town. Not coming to gawk, but coming to help. They brought first aid supplies, blankets, food and water.
Lee’s hand was assessed by a doctor who lived locally. People who knew George came. How they knew someone so elusive, Thora
didn’t understand. So she fucking asked. As people told her of memorable run-ins with George at Devil’s Cauldron or the gas
station, she could see he was more known than she’d realized. There had been people to witness his life, like the falling
leaf in Tree & Leaf. That knowledge was a balm to her soul. These folks’ memories could fold into her own, missing pages from that too-slim Book of George. She asked if people could send them to her, giving at least half a dozen people her email address.
Eventually more people came with chainsaws to deal with the trees, and then the smallest fire truck pulled up to the house.
Though nothing was salvageable, it was important to make sure the fire would not spread.
“Will I be able to walk through the wreckage and see if there’s anything I can save?” Thora asked one of the firemen.
“Probably not for a while,” he said. “This is a crime scene now.”
He pointed to a section of the ashes. Unmistakably, bright as fresh snow, the bones of a person’s lower leg and foot poked
out from the smoldering remains of Juniper.
The sight of this human skeleton utterly stole the breath from Thora’s lungs.
“Who is that?” Lee said.
Mack, never one to miss a punchline, piped up. “He’s known as the Godfather of Soul.”