Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 06 - Behind the Walls (14 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE HOUSE I WAS to appraise on Thursday was one of Lester’s properties.
He was hot where prices are generally lower, and this neighborhood certainly was one of the lowest-priced in Ocean Alley. I asked him about this once, since he’s always pushing Harry and me to appraise for more than we think a house is worth so he gets a bigger commission.

His reply was, “Get ‘em while they’re young and they’ll buy their McMansion from you later.”
Crafty guy.

Usually I take exterior photos after I look at the interior of a house, but in the interest of not getting soaked, I grabbed my digital camera and took a couple of quick shots from across the street. I thought I heard a crack of thunder in the distance and hurried to the side yard.

I took one, and since I couldn’t get to the back yard without going through the house, I took one more picture in front and was about to go in when a car horn gave a light beep.

The woman in a BMW put the passenger window down and took off her sunglasses.
“Hey, Jolie.”

“Jennifer.
Hi.” I walked toward the street and she pulled up to the curb. A couple of drops hit my head. Since her family owns the town’s far larger appraisal business, we were kind of edgy around each other when I first moved to Ocean Alley, or maybe it was just me. She’s also realized that with low interest rates and the size of Steele Appraisals, we aren’t really competition.

“You have the popsicle district sewn up with Lester,” she said.

“And you know how he is.”

She smiled.
“I love any business of course, but I don’t miss his faxes when he doesn’t like what we come up with.” She looked toward the house. “I didn’t even know this one was on the market.”

“And you know how hard it’ll be to assign a decent value.”

She grimaced. “Don’t I ever.”

On the spur of the moment, I said, “You want to come in?
Maybe you’ll have some ideas about what would bring up the value.”

I didn’t need her help, but I thought it would be good to hear what she thought. She and her staff are the only other people in town besides Harry and me who have to figure out house values in the ever-changing post-Sandy market.

She glanced at what looked to be a very expensive watch. “Sure. I’m heading to the far north end of town, but I’m in no rush.”

I stood on the narrow sidewalk, typical for this low-rent side of town, while she parallel parked.
Expertly, of course.

As she locked the car, rain drops plopped more quickly on my head.
We both looked up at the darkening clouds.

“Oh well, this is supposed to pass quickly,” she said, as she smoothed her linen slacks.

We dashed for the porch and I pulled out the key Lester had provided and jiggled the lock until it opened.

I never expected to see a fire jump toward me as I opened a door.
I only looked at it for second or so. It was yellowish orange and climbing up the stained paneling and across the likely recently refinished floor. It moved really fast.

After my initial jump from the porch to the ground, I crouched and rolled maybe fifteen feet away from the house.
Jennifer had been behind me, and she had jumped back before I did and was sitting on the lawn about ten feet from the porch.

“Get over here, Jennifer!”

She scrambled to her feet and we stood on the sidewalk about twenty-five feet from the house. My palms were so sweaty I dropped my phone. I had more success the second time I dialed 9-1-1.

“Fire!
Hurry, hurry!” I yelled.

“Are you at
549 Ferry Street?” the dispatcher asked.

“Yes, I’m here!
We’re here!”

“Are you in the house?” he asked.

“No, no, I’m outside. It’s supposed to be vacant.”

“Move as far from the house as you can,” the dispatcher said, calmly.
“Alert neighbors if you can do so with no danger to yourself.’”

By this time neighbors were running outside and I could hear sirens.
Two boys about middle-school age came toward us on bicycles. “Is anyone in there?” one of them yelled, as they jumped off the bikes.

“No, it’s vacant,” I tried to inject calm into my voice.

“I’ll move my car,” Jennifer said, walking faster than I’ve ever seen her. She peeled rubber and made it to a parking spot a few houses down the street just as the fire trucks came roaring toward us. I didn’t feel calm enough to drive, but luckily my car was not directly in front of the fire.

The boys and I were getting soaked, but they were oblivious. “Pick up your bikes, move back,” I ordered.

They obeyed, not taking their eyes off the fire, which had just blown out a window on the side of the house. “Wow, another vacant house on fire,” one of them said, almost reverently.

BY THE TIME GEORGE showed up ten minutes later the fire fighters had two hoses on the small house and were spraying the roofs of the houses on either side. The nearby houses had probably been helped by the four-minute downpour that had moved through. The sun was already peering out behind grey clouds.

George and I stood in silence watching the hoses soak the hole in the roof that a few seconds ago had been the escape hatch for a huge plume of smoke above the small frame house.
There was a pungent odor of burned wood.

“Why are you here?” he asked, after a moment of simply staring at the house.

“I’m supposed to be appraising it.”

His head turned around so fast he could have expected a whiplash injury.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have this job, you see,” I began.

“That’s not funny,” he snapped.

“I unlocked the door, and there was this kind of whooshing sound.
I almost dove off the porch. Oh, Jennifer.”

“What? She was here?”

I looked down the street. She had been next to me for a couple of minutes, but her car was now gone. “I think she probably went home to change.” I was careful not to sound too bitchy as I pushed my soggy hair behind my ears.

George looked at me for several seconds and then back at the fire.
“This doesn’t look like curtains on fire,” he said.

“The realtor’s listing says it’s vacant with no furnishings.”
I stared at the fire, mesmerized. “I think they may have just varnished the floors, because the fire was tearing across it.”

“What would get that started?” he murmured.

We stood without speaking, shoulders almost touching, for another minute. At some point I had dropped the small notebook I use to jot measurements when I visit a house. If it didn’t burn it was squished under firefighters’ rubber boots. I did have the listing sheet folded in my purse and I pulled it out, grateful that I had not lost the purse when I dove off the porch.

“Utilities were supposed to be off,” I said, quietly.

“Deliberate,” George muttered, taking the page that described the number of rooms and had estimated measurements and other information. He glanced at it and handed it back to me.

Squealing tires made us both look halfway down the block, beyond a couple of sawhorse barricades that firefighters had placed a few houses away.
Sergeant Morehouse got out of a car and walked briskly toward the chief who had been directing the fire fighters. Since the water was having its intended effect, the chief was now talking quietly to a guy in some sort of fire uniform, but not in the heavy coat and triangular hat worn by those actively fighting the fire.

Morehouse spoke to both men for a couple minutes, and then his posture straightened and he looked around until he saw me.
He pointed a finger at me, which I took to mean not to go anywhere.

“I bet he accuses you of meddling or something,” George said.
I could tell he enjoyed the idea.

He walked a couple of feet away and started talking to some of the bystanders about when they noticed the fire.

One of the middle school boys said, “It was freakin’ big, I’m telling you. Me and Eddie were the first to see it.”

I thought my eyeballs were first, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

Morehouse walked toward me and jerked his head to one side, indicating we should move away from the most dense area of gawkers. “Chief said that dispatch identified you were one of the first to call this in.”

I nodded.
“When I opened the door, it…”

“You opened the door,” he said, slowly.

“I was going to appraise it.” Surely he would have figured this out. I pulled the listing page back out of my purse. “This tells you everything I know about the place.”

Morehouse scanned it and gave it back.
“You see anything?”

“Other than the fire jumping toward me as soon as I opened the door, no.
I had just gotten here. I took a couple of exterior pictures and…”

“I’m gonna need that camera card.”
He held out his hand.

“Not again.
I’ll make you copies in your office, but I’ve got pictures of my house and Jazz and Pebbles on there.”

“Some of them are pretty racy, from what I hear.”
Scoobie was just behind me.

“Where were you?” Morehouse asked, none too nicely.

“Not my week to watch her.” Scoobie looked at the charred remains of the now smoldering house and gave me a brief one-armed hug. “Besides, even if I wasn’t at school, I wouldn’t have been with her.”

“I’m right here, you know.”
I scowled at Scoobie. “Oh, and Jennifer was with me. I think she went home to change.”

“Home to change,” Morehouse said, slowly.

I pointed to my head and let my hand fall down my torso. “Rain. Rain. Did not go away. She’ll be back.” I had no idea of this, nor did I have her phone number with me. Surely she would return.

“All right, Jolie,” Morehouse said.
“Come down to the station and we’ll copy the photos. You take any after the fire started?”

I shook my head.
“I never even thought of it.”

“Which is why she’ll never be a reporter,” George said.
“I took a few, but it was well underway by then.”

“I got nuthin’ for you, George,” Morehouse said.
“But you got photos for me. Email ‘em. I won’t release them to anyone else.”

Morehouse is so charming.

“You think this is related to any of the others fires?” George asked.

“What part of nuthin’ don’t you understand?”
Morehouse looked at me. “See you down there in two minutes.”

“See you where?” George asked, as Morehouse moved away.

“Shut up, George,” he called over his shoulder.

MOREHOUSE STUDIED my pictures without saying anything, and then called down the hall.

“Corporal Johnson, come look at these, will you?”

Dana came in with a questioning expression and he pointed at the pictures of the house that we had loaded onto his computer. “You patrol this area a lot, right? Anything look out of the ordinary?” He stood up so she could sit in his chair to look at the screen more closely.

She scrolled through the few photographs slowly, looking at each one for ten or fifteen seconds.
I looked at them, too. It was a typical older beach cottage, which had four rooms with a hallway that connected them and kitchen and bath in the back, both added on, probably in the 1920s or thereabouts. There were off-street parking spaces for two cars, and the graveled area took up much of the small front yard.

“There’s something different about the first and fourth one,” she said.
They were both the front of the house, one taken when I first got there, one about a minute later, after I took a shot from each side of the house.

I looked more closely.
“Is that a glare from the sun or fire, in the second shot?”

“Fire, I think,” she said.
“It must have just started, or just moved to the front of the house, anyway.”

“Or just gotten hot enough to flame.”
Morehouse turned to me. “Did someone know you were going to that house?”

“It was with Steele Appraisals for the work, but no one would have had any idea of when I would go there.”

“Coincidence, I guess,” he murmured. “Why was Jennifer with you?”

“She was driving by and stopped.
I asked her to come in with me.” I shrugged at his raised eyebrows. “It’s harder to establish values these days. After Sandy. I asked her to come in.”

“Who owns it?” Dana asked.

“A bank, I think. Harry can tell us if you can’t get Lester. I recall the prior owners had it for maybe fifteen years.” I looked at the photo again. “It wasn’t updated much, you can see from the listing sheet. Wouldn’t bring a lot in insurance if someone set the fire.”

“There are a lot of deteriorating properties on that street,” Dana said.
“The real estate bust kept people from spending more on upkeep recently, and a couple were foreclosed.”