We entered through the same door Rennie and I had used before, although you could have told that only from the outside. The inside was unrecognizable-the floor covered with a tangle of glistening, black, charred debris. The walls were stained with smoke and dirty water; the smiling half-gone, chunks of soggy plaster hanging to shattered pieces lathing. It brought back memories of the shell-blasted buildings I’d marched as a young soldier over thirty years before, my finger cramping round the trigger, ready to fire at the slightest movement.
Only here, any movement aside our own was out of the question.
he smells of damp plaster, wet wood, charcoal, and burned cloth were of death. The very dripping of water in the walls had a funereal sound to it.
Hillstrom, in the lead, paused to take a couple of pictures.
“Which ay, Lieutenant?” Despite our recent friendship, we had never dropped the official titles perhaps as a token of our mutual respect.
“To the foot of the stairs.” Sunlight was beginning to shaft down the staircase through the open roof above, giving me the sensation of being in a damp cave far below the surface of the earth. Dr. Hillstrom began picking her way slowly and carefully through the tangle, making sure of her footing, anscious not only of her own safety, but of the integrity of the scene as well.
All three of us knew that while her goal was to view the bodies in place, other experts would follow with different interests-interests we might obliterate if we just marched through the building, tossing bricks aside to make a path. It took us ten minutes to cross some twenty feet.
The foot of the stairs was especially cluttered, since the staircase had acted as a funnel for much of the debris from the floor above. The crystal-clear mental snapshot I had of the night before, of the white-hot stove spewing its column of flame straight up, and the blackened human m extending from its base, was now smudged and altered, covered with enough clutter to render it almost unrecognizable. Had it not been the staircase, I might not have even known where to start.
“Here?” Beverly Hillstrom asked, sensing my hesitation. I scanned the wall for the stovepipe flue and then pointed to the door. “That’s where the stove is, or was. The last I saw, the body was laying in the middle of it.” The sunlight was quite bright here. Indeed, looking up the stairs, we could see clouds against a blue sky where once there had been a skyline. But the shadows were correspondingly harsh, and made looking beyond the surface of the rubble difficult. Hillstrom pulled a flashlight from her shoulder bag and began probing the recesses. “Here we go.” She crouched suddenly to look more carefully. Both Potter and I instinctively did the same. Caught in the lamplight, its white teeth shining, was a charred human head, its eyes, nose, and lips burned away, its mouth open wide in a silent, agonized scream.
Potter straightened abruptly. “Jesus,” he muttered and staggered slightly, shifting a pile behind him.
Dr. Hillstrom looked over her shoulder at him. “Careful, Mr.
Potter. Would you like to wait outside? I’m not going to do much at this stage anyhow, and I won’t be issuing any findings before autopsy.”
“No, no. I’m all right.” She smiled brightly. “Oh, I know that. I just meant this will take a while and won’t tell you much. So, if you have other things pressing on your time, you might want to pursue them rather than watch me poking around.” Potter nodded and made a show of checking his watch. “Well, maybe that’s a good point. I’ll get out of your hair.” “You’re not in my hair. You’re certainly welcome to stay.”
“No, no. That’s okay. I’ll see you later.” He began to backtrack slowly toward the door.
Hillstrom didn’t say anything until he’d left. She took photographs and notes, shifting an occasional piece of wood or plaster and then replacing it carefully.
“Very diplomatic,” I said finally.
She chuckled. “I didn’t relish him throwing up down the back of my neck.” Her investigation was limited by what we could see without seriously altering the scene, so we soon made our way slowly and gingerly up the clogged stairway, occasionally going on all fours. I noticed her dress was beginning to suffer.
At one point, she paused to look back and take a photograph. “So you think he may have tumbled downstairs, knocked himself out, and spilled the stove in the process?” “Maybe. You ruling that out?” “No.
It’s very possible that kind of thing happens. There was no other source of fire?” “None that I saw.
“And no smell of petroleum or oil or something similar?” “Nope.” I was impressed she asked. I wondered what was going through her mind, but I also wasn’t about to inquire. Like most investigators, she was assembling pieces in her head, mentally constructing an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, hopeful that what she had might be enough for her to guess at an overall picture. She didn’t need me to bring up questions she’d already asked herself.
As we reached the top of the stairs, she asked, “Right or left?”
“Left.” The bedroom door hung open like the entrance to a dark lair a lack rectangle in contrast to the sun-drenched landing on which we stood.
Hillstrom looked up at the sky. “Amazing. Where were you when this went up?” “Right over there.” I pointed to the opposite door, which had been blown off its hinges.
She shook her head silently and smiled.
We picked our way to the bedroom door. With the sunlight now behind us, the room’s shadows receded somewhat. Here there were no reflective signs of catastrophe; aside from the cloying odor of damp smoke and wet plaster, the scene had an untouched feel about it, a peacefulness enhanced by the shape of seemingly sleeping figures clumped together n the bed. Hillstrom shined her light on them and revealed one small, waste-white face, its dull eyes half open.
She sighed and extinguished the light. I kept quiet. After just a moments pause, she adjusted her camera’s flash unit and began taking pictures, writing notes, and examining the bodies, being careful not to displace them more than Rennie and I had hours before. I admired her professionalism, tinged as it was by the stray compassionate gesture checking a loose strand of hair behind the mother’s ear, giving a small head an unconscious pat. It somehow seemed irrelevant that her parents were all dead, since the concern and attention she demonstrated could have been the same had they been living.
She eventually finished and straightened, looking around one last me. “Was the smoke very bad in here when you found them?” “No. More like a thin fog.” “And the window, presumably, was closed?” “Yeah.” She nodded, but stayed silent. She had told me once that several ears ago, she’d been encouraged to guess at a cause of death prior to autopsy and had been mistaken. Nothing adverse had come of the roar; she caught it almost as soon as the body was stretched out in her b back in Burlington. But she had learned a lesson, and had vowed ever to announce her findings from the field again.