Steve Hamilton - Blood is the Sky

“Vinnie called me,” he said. “He was driving right by the reserve. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

That hit me in the gut. Spur of the moment or not, when Vinnie needed help, he chose one of his own people again. Not me.

Maskwa seemed to pick up on it. “It was too late to call you,” he said. “He needed help and I was right here.”

I didn’t say anything. I kept driving. I turned onto the road to Calstock, passing the sawmill and the power plant, then the spot in the woods where we had found the Suburban. The crime scene tape was gone now. There was no trace of what had happened here.

We drove past the sign welcoming us to the Constance Lake Reserve. The lake appeared on our left, and then the road to Maskwa’s house. Vinnie’s truck was parked outside.

When we pulled in, Guy and his mother both came out of their house next door. It was a cold and bitter day and they were walking with their heads down, Guy’s mother in a housecoat with her arms wrapped around her chest, and Guy in his baseball jacket. They joined us in Maskwa’s living room, all six of us in that one small room. Maskwa threw some more wood into his stove.

“How did it go?” Vinnie asked. He was sitting in the back corner, farthest away from the fire. Helen was on the couch, watching the fire through the glass door on the stove.

“We got through it,” I said. “They want to know where you and Helen are.”

“I imagine.”

“We told them we didn’t know.”

“Thank you.”

I was just about to ask when the explanations would begin, but then I found a measure of patience for the first time in my life. I kept my mouth shut and sat down.

Maskwa made coffee, and the rest of us sat there in silence. Finally, Vinnie took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to me. Helen didn’t look at me. She didn’t move.

I unfolded the paper and read it. It was a reprint from the Detroit News, dated January 21, 1985. The headline read “Death Toll in Hotel Fire Grows to 27.”

I glanced up at Helen. She had her hands clasped tight together in her lap.

The picture. It showed the burned-out remains of a building, a hotel on Warren Avenue, near Wayne State University. It was a grainy black-and-white photo, made even grainier in the reprint. It looked like something from a hundred years ago.

The story itself started out with two more people dying at the hospital, plus another person who had not been included in the initial count. Most of the dead were Canadians. A junior high school class had come down from Sudbury to take part in a choral concert at the college. Nineteen of the dead were students.

I looked up at Helen again. She kept staring at the fire. Something came to me then, something she had said to me at the lodge.

No kids. None of them had kids. Helen, Hank, Ron, and Millie-it was what they all had in common. The strange gloom that was hanging over the lodge when we got there-it occurred to me now that it wasn’t just because they were closing down the business. There was a much bigger reason.

I went back to the article. The fire had started next door, in a dry cleaner’s. It had spread into the hotel. There was some question about the sprinkler system in the old hotel, and the fire exits. An investigation was underway.

I looked at the date on the article again. I thought back to January of 1985. That was right in the middle of my lost year, the year after my partner and I were gunned down in that apartment building on Woodward, the year after my marriage ended and I left the police force. I remembered the fire, but only vaguely. It was just something on the front page of the newspaper.

The last paragraph was a long list, each name followed by an age and a home town. I scanned through the names. I found Stephanie Gannon, 13, Sudbury. I found Melissa St. Jean, 13, Sudbury. I found Brett Trembley, 13, Sudbury, and Barry Trembley, 13, Sudbury.

This time when I looked up at Helen she cleared her throat and spoke. “Now you know,” she said. She didn’t look at me.

Maskwa handed me a hot cup of coffee. He sat down next to Guy’s mother. Guy was sitting on the floor next to Vinnie. They were all watching the flames in the wood stove.

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Hank wasn’t there. Ron and Millie weren’t there. The kids wanted to go by themselves. Just their friends and a couple of chaperones. They were so excited.”

She looked down at the cup in her hands. She didn’t drink from it.

“Melissa and Stephanie were best friends. They were in that room together. They were planning on going to college together. They were going to be bridesmaids for each other.”

She swallowed hard.

“At least they were together when they died,” she said. “They had that much.”

There was silence in the room for a while.

“They say the smoke gets you first,” she finally said. “They say you never feel the fire itself. You don’t even wake up. But it started at midnight. That’s the thing. In a hotel room by themselves for the first time, there’s no way those two kids would have been sleeping at midnight.”

A single tear ran down her cheek.

“Afterward, we’d all get together once a week. All the parents. Sort of like a support group. We’d try to help each other. After about a year, people started to drop out of the group. It was time to move on, they said. It was time to stop dwelling on it. That’s what one woman said to me. It’s not healthy, she said. You’ve got to let go.”

Another long silence. The wood crackled in the stove.

“She had another child. That’s why she said that. She had somebody else. We didn’t. We had nobody. Maybe it was unhealthy, holding on to each other like that. All these years. But we were all we had. Nobody else could understand. I couldn’t be with somebody else, somebody who didn’t know how it felt. So we stayed together.”

She wiped her nose with her hand.

“Claude tried to look after us,” she said. It took me a second to realize who she was talking about now. “As much as he was grieving himself, losing his daughter, I think he felt responsible for us.”

Claude. I looked back down at the article, scanned the list of names. I didn’t see anyone named DeMers.

“Her name was Olivia Markel,” Helen said. “That was her married name. She was the music teacher.”

I found the name. Olivia Markel, 27, Sudbury.

“Claude found out about the investigation,” she said. “He had a friend, a detective down in Detroit.”

I skimmed through the article again. “The hotel,” I said. “The sprinklers and the fire exits.”

“No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“No?”

“The dry cleaner’s next door,” she said. “They were trying to put an arson case together. I guess it’s a hard thing to do. Especially a place like that, with all the chemicals… It’s not enough to prove that it was set intentionally. You have to prove that the owners did it themselves, or paid somebody else to do it.”

“The owners-”

“Red Albright. And his little gang. There were five of them. They owned a lot of businesses back then. The dry cleaner’s wasn’t doing so well, so they burned it down. That’s what happened. The police couldn’t prove it. But that’s what happened.”

“I’m not getting some of this,” I said. “I’m sorry. How did they get up here, all these years later?”

She shook her head. “Claude shouldn’t have told us about the investigation. I know he regretted it ever since. The way it just kept eating at us… Especially Hank. It was driving him crazy. He was going to go after them himself, he said. For a while, it was all he ever thought about. When we all bought the lodge together, he used to sit there by the fireplace… This was the fireplace you saw, the one he never let anybody build a fire in.”