Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

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CHAPTER 6

The next morning, I at least had one small consolation prize. The paper Tina thoughtfully left on the coffee table for me had my story stripped across the top of A1 with the headline “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

I don’t mind admitting that, even after a couple thousand bylines, I still enjoyed seeing my name in the newspaper. I was just settling in to read the latest one when my phone rang. It was from the 973 area code, but it was a number I hadn’t seen before.

“Carter Ross.”

“Sir, this is the Nutley Police Department calling.”

“Hi,” I said, bewildered.

“Sir, I have some bad news about your house,” he said. “There’s been an explosion.”

Before hanging up the phone, the cop told me “the incident” occurred at 7:29 A.M., when several 911 calls were received. The Nutley Fire Department arrived at “the residence” by 7:34. EMS arrived at 7:35 but there were no known injuries. I tried to stick the details in my mostly numb brain and agreed to meet the police at my house. I hung up before I had the presence of mind to ask any meaningful questions, such as, “Explosion? What the hell do you mean by explosion?”

I staggered into Tina’s kitchen, where I found a sticky note: “7:45. Went jogging. Bagels in the cabinet next to the fridge. Back by 8:30. Tina.”

I considered waiting for her to return, because it might be nice to have some company, then decided against it. She had already seen enough of me blubbering for one lifetime.

Grabbing a pen, I scribbled, “8:10. Had to leave in a hurry. Call you later. Carter.”

I swiped a bagel then went down to my Malibu, wondering if it was now the only thing I owned besides the wrinkled clothes on my back. This thought alone should have freaked me out, but I still felt detached, like this wasn’t really happening. House fires were something I wrote about, not something I experienced firsthand.

As I drove toward Nutley, I forced myself to think rationally. Had I left the stove on? Couldn’t be. My last meal at home was cold cereal. Lightning? No. It was December. Faulty wiring? Gas leak? Had to be something like that. The house is old. Was old.

I tried to become aware of my breathing and remind myself there were worse things. Sure, all my belongings were probably destroyed. But most of it could be replaced. And, sure, there was some irreplaceable stuff-the pictures, the keepsakes, the school yearbooks, every newspaper article I had ever written. .

But, hell, it could have been me in there. Most any other morning, it would have been me in there. This was clearly a rare triumph for the power of thinking with the little brain: if I hadn’t been trying to get into Tina’s pants, the Nutley fire chief would be explaining to my parents that his crew was busy picking up my remains with tweezers.

Really, as long as Deadline had managed to find a way out, the insurance would cover everything else, right? I would get a new house, a whole bunch of new stuff. I’d probably even get new golf clubs out of the deal. And how bad would that be?

As I approached my street, I began hearing this awful chorus of car alarms-there had to be fifty of them going off at once. I made the turn on my street but could only get partway down, what with the logjam of emergency vehicles.

Then I saw it, amid the usual neat row of houses along my street: this big, gaping hole, like someone had punched out a tooth. As I got closer, I saw a scrap heap where my bungalow once stood. There were pieces of siding and other various splinters on the lawn and street-even a few pieces stuck in my neighbors’ trees-but nothing that resembled a house remained.

A small clump of my neighbors, most of whom only knew me as the childless bachelor who wasn’t home very much, had formed at a safe distance on the sidewalk. As I got out of my car, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scalabrine, rushed up to me. Mrs. Scalabrine was a youngish widow, maybe sixty-five, and I don’t think we had talked about anything more than the weather the entire time I lived there.

But she was suddenly my best friend.

“Oh, Carter, thank goodness,” she said, giving me an awkwardly intense hug. “We thought you were inside.”

I hugged her back, even though I didn’t want to. The rest of my neighbors were just staring at me, ashen-faced, as though they were expecting something dramatic: ranting, raving, collapsing on the sidewalk, flipping out. I got the feeling they were mostly there for the theater of it and now they were expecting a show.

Speaking of which, where were the TV trucks? It was odd they weren’t here. Generally those guys religiously monitored the incident pager, a network of nuts who listen in on fire and police frequency and send out real-time messages about what’s going on. My house blowing up certainly would have been mentioned. A good house explosion usually got the TV trucks swarming from all angles.

Instead, it was just me, the broken remains of my home, a variety of people in uniforms, and my gawking neighbors.

“So what happened?” I said. They all looked at me like, What do you think happened, you halfwit? Your house blew up. Then they all started looking at Mrs. Scalabrine, who clearly had something to say.

“I saw a man in a white van,” she said nervously. “I mean, I saw him getting out of a white van. I didn’t see his face-the police asked me if I did, but I really didn’t. All I saw is he was white and he was big, like six five, and real husky, like three hundred pounds at least.”

The other neighbors, who had heard this story already, were nodding in corroboration. I thought about what Rosa Bricker had said about the size of the shooter, and how it was probably someone between six three and six five.

“I saw him run up on your lawn, right over there,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the pile of lumber where my house once stood. “And it looked like he threw something inside. And then he ran back to the van and was gone.”

Another neighbor, whose name was probably Cavanaugh-he was an actuary, I think-took the story from there.

“I heard the wheels squealing as I got out of the shower,” he said. “It was like the guy wanted to get away fast. And all of a sudden there was this huge BaaBOOOM. It was just like that: first it went baa and then it went boom.

The other neighbors nodded, confirming that the “baa” and the “boom” had been recorded as separate incidents.

“It was like a bomb went off,” said one of my neighbors, who was either Nancy, Pat, or Angela-I could never quite remember.

“All of my windows on this side of the house blew out,” Mrs. Scalabrine said, pointing toward her place.

“Some of my unicorn figurines fell off my mantel,” Nancy-PatAngela said.

I nodded, as if I shared concern for NancyPatAngela’s unicorns, unable to quite grasp the absurdity that they were talking about their windows and knickknacks when I had lost my entire house and everything inside it.

“Anyone seen my cat?” I asked.

No one answered.

The neighbors eventually filtered out, wandering off to work or the gym or whatever it was they had planned for their mornings. I had a brief conversation with the Nutley police, who said they were starting an investigation based on Mrs. Scalabrine’s eyewitness account-though, as I already knew, she wasn’t giving them much to go on.

Before long, I was left alone with the realization that someone in this world wanted me dead. It was a surprisingly difficult concept to grasp, especially for a typically healthy thirty-something guy who lumped in dying with hearing aids, estate planning, and regularity in the category of Things I’ll Worry About in Forty Years.

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