John Lutz - Burn

He cranked down the driver’s-side window and let warm but fresh air swirl into the car, barely noticing the black minivan that fell in behind him almost a block back, riding low and listing to the left to accommodate the great weight of the massive man behind the steering wheel.

Sleepy Hollow, the trailer court where Wallace and Sybil Cloy, Marla’s parents, lived, was almost twenty miles outside Orlando. Carver saw a sign featuring the cartoonlike silhouette of a headless horseman, slowed the car, and turned right onto Crane Drive.

Trailer courts in Florida were unlike those in other parts of the country. One difference was that their residents usually insisted on the term “mobile home” rather than “trailer.” Carver, who had once lived in one himself and rather liked it, still thought of them as trailers even as he called them mobile homes.

Sleepy Hollow’s streets were alphabetized and apparently all intersected Crane Drive. The lots were landscaped and relatively large, with established trees and shrubs. The trailers themselves were mostly double-wides, with artfully concealed wheels and an air of permanence about them.

The Cloy trailer was a block off Crane on L Street. It was a white double-wide with wooden latticework around the undercarriage, a porch with a blue-and-white striped metal awning over it, and a small backyard enclosed by a four-foot-high chain-link fence. Though there was no carport, there was a concrete driveway that ended abruptly near the north side of the trailer. A late-model blue Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway up close to the trailer. Beyond it Carver could see a black kettle-style barbecue smoker and two blue-webbed aluminum lawn chairs on the grass that began at the driveway’s end. Next to one of the chairs was a Coors beer can in a coiled metal holder at the top of a rod stuck in the ground.

He parked the Olds behind its newer, smaller cousin, then got out and limped over the hard ground toward the porch with the awning roof. Tiny insects swarmed into the air each time the tip of his cane entered the grass.

The Cloys had heard him arrive. He was about to knock on the white metal door with his cane when the knob rotated and the door opened. A tall, thin woman in a salmon-colored, loose-fitting dress looked at him in a way that asked what he wanted. She was in her late fifties, with gray-streaked black hair and deeply etched lines around blue eyes that seemed to strain for focus. Her face conveyed a kind of amiable strength lent by classic bone structure. “You can tell she was once a beautiful woman,” they would say about her someday when she was laid out for view in her casket. The beauty of her youth lay immortal just beneath the surface of time.

“Mrs. Sybil Cloy?” Carver asked.

She nodded, smiling, obviously wondering who he was.

“Detective Fred Carver,” he said. “I’m here to ask a few questions in regard to your daughter Marla’s complaints about Joel Brant.” Let her assume he was with the police. Let them all assume it, as long as he didn’t actually say it.

Sybil chewed on her lower lip and looked confused. “What kind of complaints?”

Carver was surprised Marla hadn’t confided her fears to her family. But maybe they weren’t close. “She says Brant is threatening her.”

“About what?” Sybil asked.

“She doesn’t know. He seems to be stalking her.”

Sybil turned her head toward someone behind her. “It’s a detective,” she said, “saying some man is threatening Marla.”

“Then she hasn’t mentioned this to you?” Carver asked, making sure.

“Ask him in, why don’t you?” a man’s voice said inside the trailer,

“Of course,” Sybil said, smiling like a hostess who’d made a faux pas. “Please come inside out of the heat.” She looked uneasily beyond him as she spoke, as if something that lived in the heat posed a danger.

Carver climbed the two steps and entered the trailer. It was cool and bright inside, with dark blue carpeting and comfortable-looking early American furniture. Dividing walls were cleverly offset so there was no sensation of being inside two trailers attached together side by side. The interior was paneled in light oak to make it seem more spacious.

A short, bald man wearing blue denim cutoffs and an untucked flowered short-sleeved shirt sat a small table. He was older than the woman and had a moon face, a deeply cleft chin, and very dark eyes beneath bushy black eyebrows. There was a beer can in front of him, and a complex-looking jigsaw puzzle half assembled to display startled and wary deer in snowbound woods. A glass containing ice and a clear liquid sat on a coaster on the other side of the puzzle.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Carver said, pointing toward the puzzle with his cane.

“It’s only a hobby,” the man at the table said. “I’m retired and got nothing else to do.”

“I’ve come to enjoy puzzles, too,” Sybil said. “Didn’t at first, but Wally got me interested. Now we’re both puzzle enthusiasts.”

“I’m Wallace Cloy,” the man at the table said. “Marla’s father. He tugged at his ear, tucked in his chin, and stared at Carver. “Threatened, huh?”

“The man’s been warned, and we think everything’s under control,” Carver said, “but it still bears some investigation.”

Wallace absently touched a forefinger to the cleft in his chin, as if it were an old wound that was still sore. He had wide, square hands with very broad fingers. There was something menacing about him. “Marla never mentioned any of this to us. You say a man is bothering her?”

Carver said again that was the situation. “Does Marla talk with you often?”

“Not as often as we’d like,” Sybil said.

Wallace glanced at her, but said to Carver, “Who is this guy?”

“Name’s Joel Brant. He’s a home builder over in Del Moray. Apparently he’s developed some kind of fixation on Marla. It’s not because of anything she’s done.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Wallace said.

“Some men have that compulsion and settle on a particular woman for their own reasons. Marla said she didn’t even know who Brant was until he started harassing her. Have either of you ever heard of him?”

“I haven’t,” Sybil said.

“We wouldn’t know Marla’s friends,” Wallace said.

He picked up a potato chip from a bowl Carver hadn’t noticed on a counter within reach of the table, then bit into it almost savagely and began chewing noisily. When he’d bent over to reach the bowl, Carver could see behind him into the kitchen, where what looked like a complicated water filter with coiled white hoses was attached to the sink faucet. The Cloys seemed adequately protected from impurities.

“We’re very proud of Marla,” Sybil said. “We read all her work whenever it’s published, and last year she gave us that photograph.” She pointed behind Carver, and he turned around and saw an oak desk with a brass-framed color photo of Marla propped on it. It was a head shot, tilted so she appeared to be peeking around a corner while smiling. She was wearing makeup and had her hair styled in bangs. The Marla in the photo was wearing a demure white sweater and looked much younger and even prettier than the Marla that Carver knew. Prom queen material.

“Has Marla ever had any other problems with men harassing her?” he asked.

“She’s been harassed some, but no more than any other pretty girl,” Sybil said.

“She don’t send out the kinda vibes that’d turn a man onto her like that.” Wallace attacked another chip, then took a sip of beer to wash down the wreckage.

“Does she have any severe money problems that you know of?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Wallace asked.