HERE IS THE RECIPE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP: a Pyrex bowl; potassium chloride—found at health foodstores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer. Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto astove burner. Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it with thehydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room temperature, and filter out the crystals thatform. This is what you will save.
It’s hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there’s something to be said for the hero who charges off tobattle, but when you get right down to it there’s a whole story in who’s left behind.
I’m in what has to be the ugliest courtroom on the East Coast, sitting in chairs until it’s my turn, whensuddenly my beeper goes off. I look at the number, groan, and try to figure out what to do. I’m a witnesslater, but the department needs me right now.
It takes a few talking heads but I get permission from the judge to remove myself from the premises. I leavethrough the front door, and immediately I’m assailed with questions and cameras and lights. It is everything Ican do not to punch these vultures, who want to rip apart the bleached bones of my family.
When I couldn’t find Anna the morning of the hearing, I headed home. I looked in all her usual haunts—thekitchen, the bedroom, the hammock out back—but she wasn’t there. As a last resort I climbed the garagestairs to the apartment Jesse uses.
He wasn’t home either, although by now this is hardly a surprise. There was a time when Jesse disappointedme regularly; eventually, I told myself not to expect anything from him, and as a result, it has gotten easierfor me to take what comes. I knocked on the door and yelled for Anna, for Jesse, but no one answered.
Although there was a key to this apartment on my own set, I stopped short of letting myself inside. Turningon the stairs, I knocked over the red recycling bin I personally empty every Tuesday, since God forbid Jessecan remember to drag it out to the curb himself. A tenpin of beer bottles, lucent green, tumbled out. An emptyjug of laundry detergent, an olive jar, a gallon container from orange juice.
I put everything back in, except for the orange juice container, which I’ve told Jesse isn’t recyclable andwhich he puts in the bin nonetheless every damn week.
The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the stakes have been ratcheted up a notch.
Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school. This beingsummer, no one was on the premises when the fire was started. But there’s no question in my mind it was dueto unnatural causes.
When I get there, the engines are just loading up after salvage and overhaul. Paulie comes over to me rightaway. “How’s Kate?”
“She’s okay,” I tell him, and I nod toward the mess. “What’d you find?”
“He pretty much managed to gut the whole north side of the facility,” Paulie says. “You doing a walkthrough?”
“Yeah.”
The fire began in the teacher’s lounge; the char patterns point like an arrow to the origin. A collection ofsynthetic stuffing that hasn’t burned clean through is still visible, whoever set this was smart enough to lighthis fire in the middle of a pile of couch cushions and stacks of paper. I can still smell the accelerant; this timeit was as simple as gasoline. Bits of glass from the exploded Molotov cocktail litter the ashes.
I wander to the far side of the building, peer through a broken window. The guys must have vented the firehere. “You think we’ll catch this little fuck, Cap?” asks Caesar, coming into the room. Still in his turnoutgear, with a smudge across his left cheek, he looks down at the debris in the fire line. Then he bends down,and with his heavy glove, picks up a cigarette butt. “Unbelievable. The secretary’s desk melted down to apuddle, but a goddamn tobacco stick survives.”
I take it out of his hands and turn it over in my palm. “That’s because it wasn’t here when the fire started.
Someone had a nice smoke while he watched this, and then he walked away.” I tip it onto the side, to wherethe yellow meets the filter, and read the brand.
Paulie sticks his head in the shattered window, looking for Caesar. “We’re heading back. Get on the truck.”
Then he turns to me. “Hey, just so you know, we didn’t break this one.”
“I wasn’t gonna make you pay for it, Paulie.”
“No, I mean, we vented the roof. This was already broken when we got here.” He and Caesar leave, and afew moments later I hear the heavy drag of the engine pulling away.
It could have been a stray baseball, or a Frisbee. But even in the summertime, janitors monitor publicproperty. A broken window is too much of a hazard to be left alone; it would have been taped up or boarded.
Unless the same guy who started the fire knew where to bring in oxygen, so that the flames would racethrough the wind tunnel created by that vacuum.............