Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“He was still angry. I was downstairs when he got up, getting Brie ready for my next-door neighbor Adelle. She takes Brie, along with her own three kids, to a summer day camp in Shaker Heights that her sister runs. Adelle came and got Brie, and then a few minutes later I could hear him upstairs banging around. Then he comes downstairs and goes into the den and all of the sudden there he is standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. He’s giving me this look — like the way he looks at the cat when she goes on the rug. He’s holding the three remote controls that go to each of our three television sets in his hand. He yells at me: ‘How can all three of our TV remotes be broken at the same time? The law of averages says that’s an impossibility.’

“‘It’s probably the batteries,’ I say. I tell him I’ll go to Radio Shack and buy replacements.

“He sits down at the kitchen table and starts to take out the batteries, telling me I should take them with me or I’ll get the wrong ones. The sliding part doesn’t come up very easily on one of them and this ticks him off. And then he says he can’t trust me to do it right — this is just plain meanness on his part — and he stuffs them in his pants pocket and says he’ll stop by Radio Shack on the way home from work. I tell him I’m sorry about what I said the night before and he says he still wonders if we’re going to be able to stay together until Brie goes off to college. I notice that he’s cut his neck shaving.

“‘I was watching that goddamned Bigham mutt taking a shit in our backyard. We should have fenced in that goddamned yard the day we bought this house, but we didn’t, and now all the neighborhood dogs come over at their goddamned leisure to use it for a toilet. I guess my hand slipped. I’m going to shoot me a dog one of these mornings.’

“I got him calmed down. I got his oatmeal and coffee. He ate. Things seemed to be getting back to normal — or at least what we call normal. There was so much that we needed to address from the night before, but I was just happy that we weren’t at each other’s throats anymore. We didn’t have to love each other, I thought, but there had to be some way we could learn to tolerate each other while we were still stuck together.”

Randi got quiet for a moment. She was replaying the conversation in her head. She had said all the right things and Josh had stopped being hateful, had looked a little contrite even, as the two sat staring at one another in silence across the table. Suddenly, the silence was shattered by the sound of a dog barking in the backyard.

“He flew out of his seat and threw open the back door and went after the dog — I don’t know whose dog it was. But he literally chased that dog out of the yard and halfway down the block. He was panting and winded when he got back. I was standing on the patio watching him. I was about to ask whose dog it was this time, when suddenly he burst into flames.”

“Spontaneous combustion?” asked Lieutenant Leggio, shaking his head skeptically.

“Yes.”

“You know, Ms. Bryce, that we don’t believe you.”

“But that’s what happened. I saw it.”

What was to be done? Randi had watched this terrible thing happen to her husband, she had been snatched up before she could see him at the hospital, before she could tell him that she would stand by his side just as he had stood by her side through the cancer. It is the thing that spouses do. Even those who no longer love each other. Randi worried about her daughter, who was, no doubt, worried sick about her mother and father while in the temporary custody of her grandmother. It was a horrible situation made even worse by the alarming accusation leveled against Randi — that she had somehow set her husband on fire.

How had she done it? It baffled the two police detectives. When the Cuyahoga River burst into flames in 1969, some said that it was spontaneous combustion. But it didn’t take long to discern the real reason, the one based upon scientific fact: the river was covered with oil slicks, and oil was combustible. One match, dropped in just the right spot, would have done it. Where was Randi’s match — both figuratively and literally?

What had happened to Josh Bryce continued to baffle the two detectives as they made their way to the precinct captain’s office. It baffled, as well, the medical examiner who had been brought in to answer questions about how a person could set another person on fire and leave no evidentiary trace behind. It was the medical examiner, a thoughtful, deliberate man nearing retirement, who decided, instead, to shine a different sort of light on the incident by asking a question that had not yet been asked: “Why did Ms. Bryce attempt to put out the fire if her purpose had been to see her husband fully consumed by it?”

“A change of heart maybe?” asked Lieutenant Leggio as he and his companions settled into chairs around the police captain’s desk, leaving Randi Bryce in temporary limbo in the interrogation room.

“Perhaps. But let us consider the following,” said Dr. Graybeal, the M.E., scratching the bristles of his once old-fashioned but now suddenly trendy goatee. “Seemingly spontaneous combustion does on occasion happen. It’s a rare, but documented, occurrence.”

“Seemingly?” asked Captain Samuels.

“Combustion for which a cause can never be determined.”

“Uh-uh, Graybeal. Not really buying it.” The captain’s best detectives weren’t buying it either. Leggio all but suggested with his look of amused incredulity that it was time for the good doctor to take his forty-year gold watch and go hit the rocker.

Graybeal had dealt with disrespectful cops before. “What was the victim wearing?” he pursued.

“Well, we’re certain it wasn’t anything flame retardant,” answered Leggio, his mordant humor going unappreciated by the others in the room.

“What was in his pockets?” asked the doctor.

“You’re not giving up on this, are you, Henry?” asked Lieutenant Selvera. “Nothing unusual. Keys. A wallet. He was getting ready to leave for work.”

“Anything else?”

“There were three lithium batteries. The fire pretty much melted them.”

“Oh.”

Now the medical examiner smiled. For a brief moment Josh Bryce became not some poor victim of backyard immolation, but a riddle completely soluble. “The batteries weren’t melted by the fire, officers. They were the reason for it. The keys and the batteries jostling together in his pocket. The morning was hot. There must have been some friction. Had he been moving around the yard?”

Lieutenant Selvera nodded. “He’d chased after a dog.”

Graybeal nodded. “The friction of the keys rubbing against the batteries short-circuited one or more of them and ignited the fire in his pocket. It happens, and not that infrequently. Have the crime lab run some tests. I’m sure the findings will bear this out.”

“The woman was telling the truth?” asked Leggio, after a long, arced whistle of astonishment.

“Lo and behold, she must have been,” said his partner. “Okay to get her over to the hospital to be with her husband, captain?”

“Of course. Take one of the patrol cars.”

Randi Bryce reached the hospital at six. Josh was awake, but just barely. Their eyes held on one another for a long moment as Randi gently touched her husband’s one bandage-free hand with one of her unbandaged fingers. “I told you I’d go to Radio Shack,” she said.

“I know,” he responded groggily, the intravenous painkillers sucking him back into somnolence. “I know.” And then he was asleep.

Randi did not leave her husband’s side all night. It is the thing that spouses do.