The ominous throbs of light were reflections of fire elsewhere in the room, but they didn’t relieve the gloom enough to help me find the way out. The stroboscopic flickering only contributed to my confusion and scared the hell out of me.
As long as I couldn’t see the blaze, I could pretend that it was in a distant corner of the house. Now I no longer had the refuge of pretense. Yet there was no advantage to glimpsing the reflected fire, because I wasn’t able to tell if the flames were inches or feet from me, whether they were burning toward or away from me, so the light increased my anxiety without providing guidance.
Either I was suffering worse effects of smoke inhalation than I realized, including a distorted perception of time, or the fire was spreading with unusual swiftness. The arsonists had probably used an accelerant, maybe gasoline.
Determined to get back into the foyer and then to the front door, I sucked desperately at the increasingly acrid air near the floor and squirmed across the room, digging my elbows into the carpet to pull myself along, ricocheting off furniture, until I cracked my forehead solidly against the raised brick hearth of the fireplace. I was farther than ever from the foyer, and yet I couldn’t picture myself crawling into the fireplace and up the chimney like Santa Claus on his way back to the sleigh.
I was dizzy. A headache split my skull on a diagonal from my left eyebrow to the part in my hair on the right. My eyes stung from the smoke and the salty sweat that poured into them. I wasn’t choking again, but I was gagging on the pungent fumes that flavored even the clearer air near the floor, and I was beginning to think I might not survive.
Trying hard to remember where the fireplace was situated in relationship to the foyer arch, I squirmed along the raised hearth and then angled off into the room again.
It seemed absurd to me that I couldn’t find my way out of this place. This wasn’t a mansion, for God’s sake, not a castle, merely a modest house with seven rooms, none of them large, and 2.5 baths, and not even the cleverest Realtor in the country could have described it in such a way as to give the impression that it had enough rattling-around space to satisfy the Prince of Wales and his retinue.
On the evening news, from time to time, you see stories about people dying in house fires, and you can never quite understand why they couldn’t make it to a door or window, when one or the other was surely within a dozen steps. Unless they were, of course, drunk. Or wasted on drugs. Or foolish enough to rush back into the flames to rescue Fluffy, the kitten. Which may sound ungrateful of me after I myself was this same night rescued, in a sense, by a cat. But now I understood how people died in these circumstances: The smoke and the churning darkness were more disorienting than drugs or booze, and the longer you breathed the tainted air, the less nimble your mind became, until your thoughts rambled and even panic couldn’t focus them.
When I had first climbed the stairs to see what had happened to Angela, I had been amazed at how calm and collected I was in spite of the threat of imminent violence. With a fat dollop of male pride as cloying as a cupful of mayonnaise, I had even sensed in my heart a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.
What a difference ten minutes can make. Now that it was brutally apparent to me that I was never going to acquit myself in these situations with even half the aplomb of Batman, the romance of danger failed to stir me.
Suddenly, creeping out of the dismal blear, something brushed against me and nuzzled my neck, my chin: something alive. In the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, I pictured Angela Ferryman on her belly, reanimated by some evil voodoo, slithering across the floor to meet me, and planting a cold-lipped, bloody kiss on my throat. The effects of oxygen deprivation were becoming so severe that even this hideous image was not sufficient to shock me into a clearer state of mind, and I reflexively squeezed off a shot.
Thank God, I fired entirely in the wrong direction, because even as the crack of the shot echoed through the living room, I recognized the cold nose at my throat and the warm tongue in my ear as those of my one and only dog, my faithful companion, my Orson.
“Hey, pal,” I said, but it came out as a meaningless croak.
He licked my face. He had dog’s breath, but I couldn’t really blame him for that.
I blinked furiously to clear my vision, and red light pulsed through the room brighter than ever. Still, I got no better than a smeary impression of his furry face pressed to the floor in front of mine.
Then I realized that if he could get into the house and find me, he could show me the way out before we caught fire with a stink of burning denim and fur.
I gathered sufficient strength to rise shakily to my feet. That stubborn eel of nausea swam up my throat again, but as before I choked it down.
Squeezing my eyes shut, trying not to think about the wave of intense heat that abruptly broke over me, I reached down and gripped Orson’s thick leather collar, which was easy to find because he was pressed against my legs.
Orson kept his snout close to the floor, where he could breathe, but I had to hold my breath and ignore the nostril-tickling smoke as the dog led me through the house. He walked me into as few pieces of furniture as he could manage, and I have no suspicion whatever that he was amusing himself in the midst of such tragedy and terror. When I smacked my face into a door frame, I didn’t knock out any teeth. Nevertheless, during that short journey, I thanked God repeatedly for testing me with XP rather than with blindness.
Just when I thought I might pass out if I didn’t drop to the floor to get some air, I felt a cold draft on my face, and when I opened my eyes, I could see. We were in the kitchen, into which the fire had not yet reached. There was no smoke, either, because the breeze coming in the open back door drove it all into the dining room.
On the table were the votive candles in ruby-red holders, the cordial glasses, and the open bottle of apricot brandy. Blinking at this cozy tableau, I could half believe that the events of the past several minutes had been only a monstrous dream and that Angela, still lost in her dead husband’s cardigan, would sit here with me once more, refill her glass, and finish her strange story.
My mouth was so dry and foul that I almost took the bottle of brandy with me. Bobby Halloway would have beer, however, and that would be better.
The dead bolt on the kitchen door was disengaged now. As clever as Orson might be, I doubted that he could have opened a locked door to reach me; for one thing, he didn’t have a key. Evidently the killers had fled by this route.
Outside, wheezing to expel a few final traces of smoke from my lungs, I shoved the Glock in my jacket pocket. I nervously surveyed the backyard for assailants as I blotted my damp hands on my jeans.
Like fishes schooling below the silvered surface of a pond, cloud shadows swam across the moonlit lawn.
Nothing else moved except the wind-shaken vegetation.
Grabbing my bicycle and wheeling it across the patio toward the arbor-covered passageway, I looked up at the house in astonishment, amazed that it was not entirely engulfed in flames. Instead, from the exterior, there were as yet only minor indications of the blaze growing from room to room inside: bright vines of flames twining up the draperies at two upstairs windows, white petals of smoke flowering from attic vent holes in the eaves.
Except for the bluster and grumble of the inconstant wind, the night was preternaturally silent. Moonlight Bay is no city, but it usually has a distinct night voice nonetheless: a few cars on the move, distant music from a cocktail lounge or a kid practicing guitar on a back porch, a barking dog, the whisking sound of the big brushes on the street-cleaning machine, voices of strollers, laughter from the high-school kids gathered outside the Millennium Arcade down on Embarcadero Way, now and then a melancholy whistle as an Amtrak passenger train or a chain of freight cars approaches the Ocean Avenue crossing…. Not at this moment, however, and not on this night. We might as well have been in the deadest neighborhood of a ghost town deep in the Mojave Desert.
Apparently, the crack of the single gunshot that I had fired in the living room had not been loud enough out here to draw anyone’s attention.
Under the lattice arch, through the sweet fragrance of jasmine, walking the bicycle, its wheel bearings clicking softly, my heart thudding not softly at all, I hurried after Orson to the front gate. He leaped up and pawed open the latch, a trick of his that I’d seen before. Together we followed the walkway to the street, moving quickly but not running.
We were in luck: no witnesses. No traffic was either approaching or receding along the street. No one was on foot, either.
If a neighbor saw me running from the house just as it went up in flames, Chief Stevenson might decide to use that as an excuse to come looking for me. To shoot me down when I resisted arrest. Whether I resisted or not.
I swung onto my bike, balancing it by keeping one foot on the pavement, and looked back at the house. The wind trembled the leaves of the huge magnolia trees, and through the branches, I could see fire lapping at several of the downstairs and upstairs windows.
Full of grief and excitement, curiosity and dread, sorrow and dark wonder, I raced along the pavement, heading for a street with fewer lamps. Panting loudly, Orson sprinted at my side.
We had gone nearly a block when I heard the windows begin to explode at the Ferryman house, blown out by the fierce heat.
16
Stars between branches, leaf-filtered moonlight, giant oaks, a nurturing darkness, the peace of gravestones—and, for one of us, the eternally intriguing scent of hidden squirrels: We were back in the cemetery adjacent to St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church.
My bike was propped against a granite marker topped by the haloed head of a granite angel. I was sitting—sans halo—with my back against another stone that featured a cross at its summit.
Blocks away, sirens shrieked into sudden silence as fire-department vehicles arrived at the Ferryman residence.
I hadn’t cycled all the way to Bobby Halloway’s house, because I’d been hit by a persistent fit of coughing that hampered my ability to steer. Orson’s gait had grown wobbly, too, as he expelled the stubborn scent of the fire with a series of violent sneezes.
Now, in the company of a crowd too dead to be offended, I hawked up thick soot-flavored phlegm and spat it among the gnarled surface roots of the nearest oak, with the hope that I wasn’t killing this mighty tree that had survived two centuries of earthquakes, storms, fires, insects, disease, and—more recently—modern America’s passion for erecting a minimall with doughnut shop on every street corner. The taste in my mouth could not have been much different if I had been eating charcoal briquettes in a broth of starter fluid.
Having been in the burning house a shorter time than his more reckless master, Orson recovered faster than I. Before I was half done hawking and spitting, he was padding back and forth among the nearest tombstones, diligently sniffing out arboreal bushy-tailed rodents.
Between spells of hacking and expectorating, I talked to Orson if he was in sight, and sometimes he lifted his noble black head and pretended to listen, occasionally wagging his tail to encourage me, though often he was unable to tear his attention away from squirrel spoor.
“What the hell happened in that house?” I asked. “Who killed her, why were they playing games with me, what was the point of all that business with the dolls, why didn’t they just slit my throat and burn me with her?”
Orson shook his head, and I made a game of interpreting his response. He didn’t know. Shook his head in bafflement. Clueless. He was clueless. He didn’t know why they hadn’t slit my throat.
“I don’t think it was the Glock. I mean, there were more than one of them, at least two, probably three, so they could easily have overpowered me if they’d wanted. And though they slashed her throat, they must have been carrying guns of their own. I mean, these are serious bastards, vicious killers. They cut people’s eyes out for the fun of it. They wouldn’t be squeamish about carrying guns, so they wouldn’t be intimidated by the Glock.”
Orson cocked his head, considering the issue. Maybe it was the Glock. Maybe it wasn’t. Then again, maybe it was. Who knew? What’s a Glock, anyway? And what’s that smell? Such an amazing smell. Such a luxurious fragrance. Is that squirrel piss? Excuse me, Master Snow. Business. Business to attend to here.
“I don’t think they set the house afire to kill me. They didn’t really care whether they killed me or not. If they cared, they would have made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”
Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff-sniff: out with the remaining bad air of the burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the bad, in with the good.
“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”
Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering. Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be done. Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master Snow. You’ll feel better.
A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a black oyster among the tree roots.
“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so much of James Dean?”
My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also felt greasy.
Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of the granite markers, the moonshadows of wind-trembled leaves danced like cemetery fairies.
Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high heaven.”
Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.
Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for sarcasm.
Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard dog are you, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come you didn’t bite them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the kitchen door, they went right past you. Why didn’t I find a bunch of bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and howling in pain?”
Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog. A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway? Villains and fleas. Good riddance.