Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“Mom!” I yelled, breaking the lip-lock. “Mr. Mirabelli!” This surprised the woman almost as much as my mother and father-in-law had surprised me.

“What did you just call me?” the woman asked. She backed up a little and also turned my body, so that my back was to my mother and father-in-law, although the woman still held on to my biceps. She had quite a grip, too, a grip that reminded me of Anne Marie’s at our wedding those many years ago, which makes me wonder if all women have this grip, this grip being the thing that keeps a woman steady while she’s deciding whether to hold on to or let go of the man she’s hitched to.

“Wait,” I said. I tried to break her grip and simultaneously twirl us around so that I could face my mother and father-in-law again, and the resulting motion no doubt came off as something violent, because the woman said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She asked this question loudly, several times — the band had finished the song and were watching us, as we’d become the real attraction — and then she disappeared and several guys took her place, guys who I think were either related to the woman or wanted to be, all of them wanting to know if I had a problem. Peter and his friends had noticed what was going on, and they came over and asked these guys if they had a problem. All this took a while to straighten out, since each of us had so many problems, and by the time it was, my mother and Mr. Mirabelli were nowhere to be seen. I ran out into the parking lot; they weren’t there, either, and there was no sign of her Lumina or his Continental. But as I walked through the parking lot, I passed by my van, and there, on the windshield underneath one of the wipers, was a bar napkin. On it were the words “I think I know you.” I took this to be my mother’s note (the handwriting was familiar in its loops and slants), although what the words meant exactly, I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know. How had my mother and father-in-law known where I was? Who had told them I was driving to New Hampshire? Was it my father? Had one or both of them been involved with the phone call? Did they know each other? How did they know each other? Had they driven there separately, or together? Did my mother know I’d told my wife, my in-laws, too, that she and my father were dead? Did Mr. Mirabelli know now that they weren’t? Were she and Mr. Mirabelli talking right now about the woman I’d kissed and the wife I’d betrayed? Why would they follow me to the bar and then leave before saying anything to me? And what was that note supposed to mean? Why did my mother think she knew me? I was her son, was I not? Why would she need to think about that?

These were all questions I couldn’t answer or at least didn’t want to, and as a detective you learn, sooner or later, to stop asking yourself these sorts of questions and start asking questions that you actually can answer. So I asked myself: What time is it? Then I looked at my watch: it was twenty minutes after midnight, and that meant I was already late.

I was late but not entirely stupid. I didn’t drive all the way to the Robert Frost Place, didn’t park in the parking lot as I’d done earlier. Like a real detective might do, I pulled off the road about a quarter of a mile from the house, into a slot in the snowbank that the snowplows must have used as a turnaround, parked my van there, and sneaked up to the house. This cost me some more time, of course, and by the time I got there, the bond analysts had already set fire to the Robert Frost Place and were standing in the parking lot watching the house burn. Their Saab was next to them with its engine on. The parking lot was ringed by white pines, and I hid behind one of them, close enough to hear what the bond analysts were saying.

“He’s not going to show up, is he?” one of the Ryans said, referring, I was pretty sure, to me. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. “What good is this if he doesn’t show up?”

“He’s missing one hell of a fire,” Morgan said, and then I knew why they’d called me: to show me that they could set fire to a writer’s home in New England without my help. They wanted me to be a witness. The bond analysts had always been like this: during their memoir-writing sessions in prison, they were always so eager to show one another how beautifully they’d written about the bad things they’d done. “One hell of a fire,” Morgan repeated.

“Who cares how good the fire is if he’s not here to see it?” the other Ryan said. Tigue and G-off were leaning against the Saab, staring silently at the fire, as though it had taken their voices and given those voices to the Ryans.

“Shut up,” Morgan said. “Trust me. He’ll be sorry.” He held up an envelope and then placed it in the middle of the parking lot, which had been plowed and was mostly clear of snow. With that, they piled into their Saab and drove away from the fire. As they pulled out of the parking lot, the Robert Frost Place’s second story collapsed onto the first. I wondered momentarily if the Writer-in-Residence was still inside the house, drinking bourbon, but there were no cars in the parking lot, and I heard no screams. I found out later on that the Writer-in-Residence was not in residence at all but was staying at a nearby bed-and-breakfast. The Writer-in-Residence had gotten lucky, the way Thomas Coleman’s poor parents had not.

I got a little lucky myself that night, or thought I did. I walked over to where Morgan had placed the envelope in the snow. Sure enough, it was Peter’s letter to me, written those six years earlier, asking me to do what the bond analysts themselves had just done. I read the letter right there, in the light of the fire, learned exactly why Peter had wanted me to do what the bond analysts had done themselves. Morgan had no doubt left the letter there to be found by the police or fire department and thereby to incriminate me, whereas he could have saved himself the trouble and just trusted that I would eventually incriminate myself. I put the letter in my pocket.

That accomplished, I stood there for a while, watching the fire. It was beautiful — huge and crackling, and with more sparks and explosions than the Fourth of July, which is further proof that fire is the most impressive of the four elements — much more beautiful than the house itself had been. Although the house and the fire had a lot in common: a fire was a thing you created and admired, the way the person who’d built the house must have admired it, too. But no matter how beautiful the fire was, it wasn’t particularly helpful and that saddened me: I knew now that the bond analysts had called me (or at least one of them had), and I also knew that they had burned the Robert Frost Place, and so those questions were answered. But those answers didn’t bring me any closer to knowing who had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House or the Mark Twain House. What good was answering one question when you couldn’t answer the others?

I heard the crunch of tires on snow, and so I turned away from the fire and crept back to my van. Before I got too close to it, I could hear an engine running, could see headlights boring through the night and bouncing off the snow, and so I slipped behind another white pine, white pines being as plentiful in New Hampshire as Volvos were in Amherst. It was another Lumina, and at first I thought it was my mother, but as it passed by, I could see Detective Wilson, hunched over the steering wheel, hauling ass in the direction of the burning Robert Frost Place, no doubt in search of his own answers to his own questions. When he was out of sight, I ran to my van and then headed back to Amherst. Because sometimes a detective shouldn’t try to answer the tough questions, being not so tough himself. Sometimes it’s better to let someone else answer them for you.