I turn.
The east wing is already going. Orange behind the second-floor windows, a slow bloom that will be a roar inside four minutes. I can hear the first beam crack from here. The house is old-money frame with stone veneer. It will burn like kindling once the draft finds it.
I am counting the seconds to the fire becoming fully involved when I see her.
She's in a window on the second floor, west wing. Wrong side of the house. Completely wrong side. A pale shape at the glass, hands flat, hair loose. She is screaming something I can't hear at this distance, through this glass, over the low roar of a fire that hasn't even hit its stride.
My body processes before my brain does. The turnout gear is in the truck. The truck is a quarter mile away. The west wing isgoing to catch inside eight minutes. She has a kitchen window if she knows where the kitchen is, and she has the front door if the lock hasn't warped, and she has a hundred and twenty feet of house between her and any exit the fire hasn't already taken. She has options. I tell myself this while I stand in the treeline and watch her hands slide down the glass.
Daniel was supposed to be alone.
Val said Daniel was supposed to be alone. Val is playing games.
Wife's out of town until Thursday.
I can see the shape of Evangeline’s beautiful face even at this distance. Pale hair. Long neck. The mouth I already know, now open, now shouting, now pressed to the glass. There is smoke.
The photo. The second photo. The one Val knew I would come back for.
I understand what Val has done to me before the thought finishes forming, and then I shove the understanding down a hole because I do not have time for it. Val doesn't make mistakes. Val put the photo in the folder and Val told me not to look and Val knew I would look and Val lit this match through me anyway. She's testing something. She's always testing something.
The test is: will I do what I was told, or will I do what my body is already deciding.
I stand in the trees.
The fire reaches the stairwell. I can see it through the transom window over the front door, a throat of orange climbing the wall. The west wing's smoke detectors are going off now, a sharp stacked chirping I can hear through the glass. She's turned away from the window. Coming back. Pounding. Her palms flat,her mouth open, a sound reaching me that might be the wordplease.
I should walk to the truck.
I've walked to the truck each time before. Each night after I set a fire of driving home in the dark with the taste of gasoline on the back of my teeth and the knowledge in my chest that I did what Val asked and that was enough. That has always been enough.
I don't walk to the truck.
I stand in the dark at the edge of the trees and I watch Evangeline Clark beat her hands against the wall of glass of a burning mansion, and I feel the reflex rising in me the way it rises when a child is in a car in water, when a man is trapped under a fallen beam, when the whole training of my life wakes up and saysmove.
The reflex is, protect.
The override is, obey.
I breathe in. I breathe out. I taste smoke already, on the wind, a cold autumn wind coming down out of the hills and pushing the stink of burning frame house right at me. Nineteen days. Nineteen days of rank back on my shoulders. Eleven years of stairwell. One folder Val wanted me to open.
If I walk to the truck, the woman in the window dies and I drive home and I sleep tonight and I show up to drills in the morning and nobody knows anything ever happened. Val keeps her hand on my shoulder. I keep my rank. The world closes up over this house and over Evangeline Clark the way it closed over the other fires I have set.
If I don't walk to the truck, I don't know what happens. I have no next step for that. I have no folder for it. I have no knock protocol. Val hasn't written me the route and I've never once gone anywhere Val hasn't written me the route for.
The window cracks. I hear it from here, a sharp dry sound, the kind of split that says heat has found the frame and bowed the glass. Evangeline Clark flinches back from it.
Evangeline Clark will die tonight.
2
EVANGELINE
Iwake up because the house feels wrong.
It's the smell first. Not the smoke, not yet. Something under the smoke, the way copper sits under blood. A heat in the air that the house isn't supposed to have. The air in this house is always sixty-eight degrees in autumn and sixty-six in winter and Daniel sets it that way because Daniel sets everything that way. The sheets on my skin should be cool. They aren't.
I open my eyes in the dark. The west guest room ceiling is above me, the tray plaster molding Daniel's decorator picked out of a catalog in the second year of our marriage. I don't sleep in the primary suite. I haven't slept in the primary suite since the spring, and Daniel hasn't asked me to and I am grateful for that. I sleep across the hall from the east wing, one wing away from him, in a room I've made small and plain and mine. The bed is a queen. The sheets are white cotton. There are no flowers in here because Daniel doesn’t like them in the house. I have considered disobeying him, but I haven’t. Yet.
