"Yes."
"You climbed out of an upper window."
"Yes."
"You did not require rescue."
"No."
"I climbed onto the roof. The window opens onto the loading-bay roof. The roof has a fire escape at the back of it. I climbed down."
“Did you see anyone at the property or anything suspicious Mrs. Clark?”
“I did not.”
I keep my voice level.
"I would also like to tell you, Detective, that I overheard an argument between my husband and one of his business associates two days before the fire. The associate is a man named Frank Vaccaro. The argument was about money, and it was about a property in Twin Falls, and the associate said, in my hearing, in the kitchen of our house, that he was going to put my husband in the ground if my husband did not do what he had been told to do. My husband laughed. My husband told the associate that he was a small man and that he should leave the kitchen, and the associate left the kitchen. That was Saturday the twelfth. The fire was on the fourteenth."
"Frank Vaccaro."
"Yes."
"You have not mentioned this until now, Mrs. Clark."
"I have been in hiding, Detective. I have been afraid I would be the next person Mr. Vaccaro put in the ground."
"All right."
"That is what I am going to tell you. That is everything I am going to tell you. I am not coming back to Redwater City. I am not at a number you can call me on. I will call you on this number again in seven days. I would like you to please write that name down."
"Frank Vaccaro."
"Yes."
"Mrs. Clark."
"Yes."
"Are you safe."
I look at the foothills.
"I am safe."
"Where are you actually."
"Goodbye, Detective."
I hang up.
I sit at the desk in Margot's office in the silk robe and the cashmere socks with the phone in my hand, and I look at the phone, and I take the back off the phone, and I take the SIM card out of the phone, and I bend the SIM card in half, and I put the SIM card in the small dish on the desk where Margot puts the orchids when she trims them, and I put the phone back in the drawer.
Frank Vaccaro is real.
Frank Vaccaro is a man I have heard my husband say goodbye to on the porch six times in the last two years and I have hated every time. Frank Vaccaro did not threaten my husband in my kitchen on the twelfth. Frank Vaccaro and my husband had a quiet dinner on the twelfth and Frank Vaccaro left at ten and Frank Vaccaro is, to my knowledge, in a courtroom in Reno this week on a different matter and is not in the state of Idaho.
I have just put a name into the mouth of a Redwater City detective.
