Slapping Bucky on the rump she sent him trotting away, the other three following him closely, as if Bucky might protect them. Ryan’s short dark hair was atangle, the collar of her jacket turned under as if she’d pulled it on fast, leaving the house in a hurry. With the horses moved, Charlie let the two big mutts out of the barn and put them in the south pasture with the horses. They took both vehicles, heading for the blaze, Charlie following Ryan’s truck. She could see Joe Grey sitting tall on the back of the seat. A right turn, and right again a quarter mile down the hill, and they bumped along the narrow dirt track that skirted the bottomland, heading into the smoke and the tangle of men and vehicles, the confusion of fire hoses spewing water, undulating like muscular pythons. They parked short of the burn, against the hill, and got out. Charlie smiled as Ryan threatened Joe Grey.
“You stay in the truck, Joe. I mean it.”
Joe sighed, put his head on his paws, his ears down, as if browbeaten. He couldn’t say a word in front of the firefighters. How was that fair?
“Don’t scold him,” Charlie said softly. “It was Joe who called in the report.” She reached in to stroke his head, and gave him a wink. “Ryan worries about you,” she said. He gave her a smile and a cranky sort of purr.
As the two women headed into the burn, a little smoky breeze whipped ashes in their faces. Most of the flames had been smothered, but where the blackened walls had fallen in, their remains burned cherry red. The smell of wet, burned wood was mixed with the odors of melted plastic, melted electrical wires, burned food, a stink that made them gag. Four men were raking refuse farther away from the smoldering boards, piling it against the hill beyond a tangle of old timbers, wooden barrels, and an old door with peeling veneer. Past the black, sodden remains of the shack, the white EMT van stood parked near the two fire trucks. The firemen and two medics stood there in a circle with Max. His thin face was streaked with soot, black smears stained his western shirt and jeans. He had turned away from Charlie and Ryan. That, and the look on the medics’ faces, made Charlie go cold; turning, she took Ryan’s hand.
Not twenty feet from the burn, the other two cabins stood untouched, their rough wood siding soaked from the beating water, the roofs dripping. As Charlie and Ryan moved toward the group of men, a sick smell reached them, the stink of meat singed too fast on a hot barbecue. The circle of men nearly hid the portable gurney beside the EMT van. They could see it held a stretcher, strewn with a heap of blackened rags.
But not only rags. Charlie made out a frail body tangled among burned blankets.
Max turned to look at her, his mouth and jaw drawn tight. “She never left her bed, Charlie. She was there under the blankets, dressed in her flannel nightgown.” Charlie pressed her fist to her mouth. Max said, “There was glass in her bed, shards of glass under the blanket, as if a bottle had exploded in the flames.”
Behind them, up the dirt road, the coroner’s white van pulled in off the two-lane, and behind it came a kid on a bike, leaning over the handlebars pumping hard, kicking up dust as he skidded off the highway onto the dirt lane, following the van. Skidding to a stop beside it, dragging his foot in the dirt, Billy Young sat looking at his burned house and the group of silent men.
6
Joe crouched on the dash of Ryan’s truck looking out through the windshield, watching Billy. The boy sat on his bike looking at the black and smoking remains of his home: the heap of fallen timbers, steam rising up from the alligatored wood. His fists were clenched hard on the handlebars, his face gone white. He was so thin his protruding wrists looked like the bones someone would throw to a hungry dog. His face was long, his cheeks sculpted in close, his brown eyes huge with shock, a look that made Joe’s belly twist, that made embarrassing cat tears start—this was as sad as watching an orphaned kitten whose mother had been hit by a car.
He was dressed in frayed jeans limply shaped to his legs, run-over boots, a ragged khaki jacket that might have come from a local charity. Brown hair clipped short and uneven as if Gran took a pair of dull shears to it once in a while. Joe had seen him out in the fields when he and Dulcie and Kit were hunting, they’d see him scrounging the mom-and-pop vegetable farms, picking up culls, dropping them in a black plastic bag: cabbages that had been accidentally cut and were left to rot, ears of corn that might have been wormy, tomatoes that had been missed or that the birds had pecked open.
Max stepped over, blocking Billy’s view of the gurney, and put his arm around the boy, but Billy had already seen what was there. The firemen and medics had turned away, with their backs to him, so as not to stare at his grief. Joe watched Billy try to get his mind around what had happened, try to come to terms with the body on the stretcher.
Did the boy have anyone else, besides his gran? What happens to an orphaned boy? Joe wondered. Will some county authority take him away, tell him where to live, put him in a foster home or institution? Tell him he can’t work anymore, that he’s too young to work? Confine him in a straitjacket of legal hierarchy? Is Billy Young nothing more than county property now?
Max walked the boy away from the stretcher, talking softly; they talked for some time, Billy hesitantly asking questions, Max’s answers direct and brief. When Billy turned again toward the medics’ van, Max shook his head, discouraging him from approaching the burned body, and guided him instead toward Ryan’s truck. Watching them, Joe dropped to the seat and curled up, his chin on his paws, his eyes slitted closed.
“No one else has been around here?” the chief was saying. “Anyone who might have accidentally started the fire?”
“No one ever comes here,” Billy said. “Except Mr. Zandler, to get the rent.” He didn’t bother to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. Joe knew Zandler, he was the kind of scruffy and rude old man that a cat made a wide path around. A lanky and stooped man, shaggy black hair and bristly beard, old black three-piece suit, grubby white shirt, a necktie loose and crooked and dark enough to hide some of the grease stains. Billy said, “Sometimes my uncle comes, my aunt’s husband. He likes Gran. But Aunt Esther never comes, neither of my aunts do. Gran’s own daughters.”
“That would be Erik Kraft,” Max said.
Billy nodded. “I need to tell him. So he won’t come, find the house burned.” Joe thought if he were to reach out a paw and touch Billy, he’d feel him shivering, the kind of tremor you didn’t really see, that came from deep down inside.
“Did your uncle come often?” Max asked.
Billy shook his head. “Maybe three or four times a year. He’d give her spending money, fill up her whiskey stash. He said if her daughters wouldn’t give her money, he would. Said it was no one’s business what she did with it. He said her daughters didn’t realize how hard it was on her, raising me alone. But I always worked,” Billy said, “ever since Mama died I worked to help out.”
“I know you have,” Max said. “The other two cabins, they’re empty? Isn’t there another tenant?”
“A woman lived in one, Emmylou Warren. After Christmas she lost her job and couldn’t pay, and Mr. Zandler made her leave. Gran . . . Gran wouldn’t let her stay with us, she said we didn’t have room. Well, there is . . . was only the one room. Emmylou’s my friend, but I don’t know where she went.”
“And the other cabin?”
“It’s empty, half the roof’s fallen in, the floor rotted. The back room, where it doesn’t leak, I have some cat beds there, for my strays. I need to find them, they’ll be so scared.”