Cracking noises were now audible somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t feel any heat yet apart from the strong heat of the day. With my hand as a visor I took a look all around, from this view I had never before enjoyed and never would again, at the grounds, at the tiny featureless figures of the people with whom I had worked and of the people who would save me, at the lawns and orchards and hedges, at the shadows of the clouds pouring over the scorched contours of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the firefighters finally signaled that they were ready I put one leg, then the other, over the iron railing of the balcony. It’s no easy thing to make a drop like that, even when you have no choice, even if you’ve seen it done before. My fingers were tight around the balustrade. But I wasn’t ready to die yet, that’s all it really comes down to if you wait long enough, and so I closed my eyes, opened them again, and with one last loud exhalation to calm myself, I jumped.
3
HOURS LATER, SORE and still a bit lightheaded from the impact of the fall, John sat apart from the others on Palladio’s broad front lawn and watched the firefighters pounce expertly on each last small stubborn flare-up of the great conflagration. The western end of the house was burned close to the ground; the columns at the entrance were blackened but apparently intact, and the east wing, though gutted to near-transparency on the bottom two floors, had not collapsed at any point. In just the past few minutes the whole ruined structure had seemed to take on, as the twilight smoothed it into silhouette, a more abstract wedge shape. During the lulls in all the shouting, John could still hear the fierce, diminishing hiss of water on embers, and an occasional ominous tick or crack. Smoke — dark at first, then whitening once it reached the heights still lit by the last of the sun as it dropped behind the mountains — rose straight as a chimney in the hot, motionless air.
He wondered if he might have a slight concussion. Red emergency vehicles of every description had torn a rough circle in the manicured grass around the mansion; they were idle now, though their engines had been left running and the flashing lights stuttered more vividly in the growing darkness. The Charlottesville police had set up a barricade at the driveway entrance, primarily to keep out the press. Of course, some of those guests still sitting on the lawn, or lying down or coughing or breathing through portable oxygen masks brought to them by the EMTs, were invited press themselves. John could make out several people talking into cell phones. Part of the general dreaminess that was overtaking him, as he sat on the grass with his arms around his knees, had to do with the knowledge that the whole thing had escaped his control once and for all.
Near his hip he felt an insistent pulsing, and he thought for a moment he might be bleeding; but in fact it was his own cell phone still clipped to his belt — he had set it on vibrate for Milo’s premiere. He knew who was trying to reach him. More than he could ever remember wanting anything, he wanted not to answer Mal’s calclass="underline" but though the place was now gone from under him he still had a sense of stewardship about it, and so — after standing and walking a safer distance away from Fiona, who was being held upright under the arms by Jerry as she shrieked (that was the only word for it) into his chest — John answered.
“What’s going on?” Mal said angrily. “I call your office I get no answer, I call my office I get no answer. Where are you? What’s all that noise?”
John broke it all to him as gently as he could, which wasn’t so gently, considering that there were times when he had to shout into the phone just to be heard over all the engines and indecipherable radio calls on the lawn. He told his boss that the mansion had caught fire, a fire set by Jean-Claude, whose art of self-sacrifice had culminated in what was apparently a work incorporating his own suicide. Even when John had described everything as best he could, it was clear from Mal’s tone of businesslike optimism that the magnitude of what had happened would not sink in right away.
“Well, the important thing is that everyone’s okay,” he said.
John had to explain more carefully that everyone was not okay — that, while nothing was official yet, it seemed impossible not to conclude that Milo himself was dead. The fire was now almost out, but the house was beyond saving. And there was one other person still unaccounted for.
Mal fell silent. John then asked if by any chance he had spoken to Molly that day.
“Not since last night,” Mal said. “Oh no.”
“Now look, I actually think — it’s true no one seems to know where she is — but I actually have reason to think she wasn’t here at all when it happened. I … I went upstairs and looked all through your quarters. Every room. She wasn’t there.”
“Did you look for her car?”
John winced, and hit his head softly a few times with the heel of his hand. “No,” he said, starting to sprint across the lawn toward the house, “I didn’t think of it. God damn it! Hold on.”
But the firefighters had run another barricade across that end of the driveway and wouldn’t let him through. John pleaded, phone in hand, with the commander of the emergency rescue squad, telling him that the safety of one of the house’s residents was at stake. Too dangerous, he was told; what remained of the house on the eastern end was still being examined to determine the danger of collapse. As for whether or not anyone was still inside, they had people sweeping the place now.
“Ten, twenty minutes,” the commander said, his gray hair flattened with sweat. “Try to calm down.”
When John raised the phone to his ear again, Mal was already in the back of a taxi, speeding toward the Rome airport.
“I’m going to lose you,” he said. “Keep trying me.” Then the connection was broken.
John sat down in the grass beside one of the empty ambulances, between the house and the path to the orchard. Ten, twenty minutes. No one came over to console him or to see if he was all right. They sat and stood in little knots of shadow around the lawn. Maybe they were waiting for some official word about Jean-Claude; maybe they were unable to take their eyes off such an epic disaster and were waiting only for the fire department or someone else more thick-skinned in these matters to tell them when it would be seemly to leave. At the other end of the driveway, out by the road, John saw a portable arc light snap on in the dusk, beside the satellite trucks. He told himself that even if the red Sonata was still in the driveway, it didn’t mean anything for certain.
Finally the commander let loose with a startling whistle, as one would to a dog, and indicated to John with a nod that it was now permitted to walk around behind the house. Four or five ash-dusted cars, including his own, were there in the driveway behind the kitchen — one, an airport limo, had even had its hood smashed when one of the chimneys had fallen on it — but the red Sonata was not among them. Molly was gone.
John felt a huge spasm of relief, of physical relaxation, roll through him; in his weakened state, it all but knocked him down. With his hand on one of the dusty cars for support, he stared up at the intact balcony from which he had jumped. Just then one of the EMTs, a younger man, helmet in hand, walked up to him.