My mother didn’t like him. She thought I was settling because Dad had died less than a year before and I wanted stable and normal. At the time it didn’t feel that way. Then, in our senior year, Kevin got accepted into a graduate program at CalTech. He invited me to move with him to Pasadena. I told him I couldn’t. My family was here, my business was here, and I couldn’t just abandon it all. He said he understood, but he couldn’t miss this opportunity. Neither one of us ended up being that upset about it. There was no ugly breakup, and there were no tears. I was bummed out about it for the first few weekends, and then I moved on. Kevin was in Seattle now, working for an engineering firm. He was married and he and his wife had twins six months ago. I had looked him up on Facebook. It made me a little sad, but mostly I was happy for him.
The point was that, while I was in college, I didn’t do all those typical things. I was never in a sorority. I didn’t belong to any clubs. If I came home at dawn, it was because there was some surveillance involved. People spoke about their college “experience,” and I really had no clue what it was all about.
I glanced at Bern. “Hey. You know, if you want to join a fraternity, you totally can.”
My cousin’s shaggy eyebrows crept up. He reached over and carefully put his hand on my forehead. Checking for fever. “I’m worried about you.”
I pushed his hand off. “I’m serious. I don’t want you to feel like you have to miss out on anything.”
He pointed at himself. “Programmer and cybermagician. We don’t join fraternities. We hide in our lairs in darkness and bloom under the glow of computer screens.”
“Like mushrooms?”
“Just like that. Except that mushrooms don’t bloom. They produce spores.”
The door to Professor Itou’s office opened and a girl with a dark ponytail walked out, waving a stack of papers. She glared at us. “He can take his B and shove it. A B! It was the best essay in the class!” She stomped down the hallway.
Bern caught the door before it closed. “Professor? I emailed you earlier?”
“Come on in,” a cheerful male voice called.
Professor Itou was about my height and about fifteen years older, athletic, with a compact, powerful build and hooded dark eyes. He seemed full of energy as he shook my hand and sat behind his desk, poised against a massive bookcase filled to the brink. His expression was cheerful.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Baylor?”
“I was hoping to find out more about your theories regarding the Great Chicago Fire. Bern mentioned that you didn’t think the cow had started it.”
Professor Itou smiled, threw one leg over the other, and braided his fingers on his knee. He looked like someone had just told him a really funny joke and he was still inwardly chuckling over it.
“It’s not something that’s often talked about in historians’ circles. In fact, my research into it has actually made me an object of not so gentle mockery. Academics.” He opened his eyes wide in pretended horror. “Vicious beasts. They’ll rip your throat out if you aren’t careful.”
Bern grinned. I could see why my cousin liked Professor Itou. This one academic clearly didn’t take himself too seriously.
“I’m armed,” I told him. “And if we get in trouble, we can put Bern in front of the door. He can hold off a whole hallway of academics. Nobody will get in.”
Professor Itou’s eyes sparked. “Are you sure you want the full account, because I’m not asked about this that often, and once I start, I will get giddy and might not stop for a while.”
I pulled out my recorder. “Yes, please.”
“Prepare to be amazed.” Professor Itou leaned back. “First the basic facts. It’s 1871 and the summer is very dry. Chicago, which was mostly wood, bakes in the heat, drying up until it becomes a tinderbox. It’s Sunday, October 8, 1871. Night has fallen and everyone is in bed. A few minutes after nine o’clock, Daniel ‘Pegleg’ Sullivan sees a fire through the windows of the barn belonging to his neighbors, Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. He sounds the alarm and runs to save the animals. Firefighters are notified, but they had spent the day before putting out a large fire and they’re tired. They go to the wrong neighborhood, and by the time they find the right house, the fire is blazing. They try to put it out and fail. For two days Chicago burns, until on October 10, rains finally smother the fire. Three hundred people are dead, over a hundred thousand are homeless, and the heart of the city is burned to the ground. The official cause of the fire was never determined. Later a Chicago Tribune reporter writes about the fire, claiming that a cow owned by Mrs. O’Leary kicked a lantern, knocking it into the hay. Mrs. O’Leary becomes a social pariah and dies a few years later, heartbroken, according to her family.”
Professor Itou leaned forward. His face took on a conspiratorial expression. He motioned me closer. I leaned toward him.
He lowered his voice and said softly, as if telling me a great secret, “The cow didn’t do it.”
“No?” I asked.
“No. The reporter admitted later that he added the cow for dramatic purposes. At the time, it fed right into anti-Irish attitudes. Here is another interesting detaiclass="underline" a study of the street proves that Pegleg Sullivan couldn’t have seen the fire from where he had been standing.”
“He lied,” Bern said.
“Exactly!” Professor Itou stabbed the air with his index finger, triumphant. “The Chicago fire was the subject of my undergraduate senior thesis. I have a somewhat obsessive personality, so I obtained a copy of an archived map of Chicago and was busily re-creating the spread of the fire on it by means of painting the buildings with a brush dipped in coffee.”
“Why coffee?” I asked.
“At the time it was the only dye available to me in large quantity. I was a poor college student, but I always had coffee. It was a required food group.” Professor Itou crossed his arms. “As I was mapping out the fire, a roommate of mine, silly practical mortal that he was, came to the kitchen in hopes of using the table for the mundane purpose of making himself a sandwich. He was a pyrokinetic, and he noted that the pattern of the initial burn was eerily consistent with burn rings that occur when a pyrokinetic employs concentric fire. Meaning someone had burned Chicago in circles. The fire had spread north and south, against wind direction. Furthermore, the velocity of the burn indicated presence of magic. Entire neighborhoods had been engulfed in moments.”
Late nineteenth century. The trials of the serum that brought out magic abilities were beginning, but it wasn’t common knowledge yet. It was possible that some early pyrokinetic made it to Chicago. “But why deliberately burn the city?”
Professor Itou raised his hand. “That’s the question I asked myself. I will spare you the full explanation. Here is the short version: the British military was administering serum to some of its officers in an effort to maintain its grip over the Commonwealth. One of these officers was Colonel Rudyard Emmens. The colonel had spent most of his service to the British Empire in “the Orient.” Unfortunately I could never quite figure out which part of the Orient. Eventually he retired to Chicago. We do not know for sure what his talent had been, but we do know from his personal journals that it had to do with fire. He was very conflicted about it. He was equally disturbed that these “hellish” powers had passed to his only son, Edward. At the time of the Chicago fire, Edward was eighteen. Here’s an interesting account: according to a noted Chicago historian, the center of the city remained extremely hot for almost two days after the fire died down. When firefighters were finally able to enter the steaming wreck that was Chicago, they found Edward Emmens in the middle of it. He was exhausted, dehydrated, and smeared in soot but otherwise unharmed.”