Fire Spirit (13 page)

‘How about his car?' asked Craig.

‘I'm afraid that's headed for the Carter Street parking facility,' said the trooper. He meant the thirty-acre scrap metal site on the east side of Kokomo, by the railroad spur. ‘You should go out there tomorrow, talk to the foreman. If you're lucky he'll give you twenty bucks for it.'

‘Thank you, anyhow,' said Ruth. ‘I'm relieved Jeff wasn't injured, that's all.'

‘So are we, ma'am. But there's a few ducks out there suffering from shock.'

When the trooper had gone, Craig and Ruth locked up the house again and went upstairs. Craig knocked on Jeff's door and said, ‘Jeff? Everything OK?'

Jeff didn't answer so he opened the door and they stepped inside. Jeff was lying on his bed in his crimson Indiana Hoosier hooded sweatshirt and scrub pants, with his iPod in his ears, texting furiously on his cellphone.

They waited until he had finished his message and then Craig made a lifting gesture to indicate that he should take out his earphones.

‘I'm
OK
, OK?' Jeff protested.

‘Glad to hear it,' said Craig. ‘Do you mind telling us what exactly happened?'

‘You really want to know? We were driving south on Davis and I was hanging a right on to Jewel when there was this, like,
bang
!, and we went clear off the highway and straight through all of these bushes and, like, ker-
sploosh
!, we drove right into this frigging lake that somebody had left there.'

‘
Language
,' said Ruth, sharply.

‘You want to hear language?' Jeff retorted. ‘You should of heard what Lennie and me were shouting out when we started to sink. If that lake'd been any deeper than four feet we would of drowned.'

‘The lake was only four feet deep?' Ruth asked him.

‘It was still wet, Mom, and I still drove my car right into it.'

Ruth looked at Craig and she was trying very hard not to laugh. But Craig's expression was serious. He sat down on the end of Jeff's bed and said, ‘Listen, we're sorry for what happened to you, and we're really glad that you and Lennie didn't get hurt. We should have made sure that you had a decent car to drive.'

Jeff said, ‘Forget it, Dad. I know you don't have the money. I'll just have to get a job, like you said.'

‘Believe me, Jeff, if we
did
have the money—'

‘I know, Dad. I know. You'd buy me a brand-new Mustang Bullitt, in midnight black, with black-tinted windows and a Magnaflow exhaust, right? But you don't have the money, so you can't, so forget it.'

Craig continued to sit there for a little while longer, while Jeff replaced his earphones and closed his eyes. Ruth could see how hurt Craig was, how inadequate he felt, and she stroked the fine gray hair at the back of his neck.

‘Come on,' she coaxed him. ‘Let's go back to bed. You don't want to miss
Special Victims Unit
, do you?'

Shortly before dawn, Craig shifted himself closer to her and slid his hand up her thigh, underneath her nightshirt. He gently stroked her with his fingertip, and then slipped his finger inside her. She felt herself becoming slippery, and a warm sensation began to rise between her legs.

‘
Craig
,' she whispered, and kissed his eyelids and his lips and his ears.

He tugged her nightshirt up around her waist, and she lifted her hips to help him. Then he climbed on top of her, kissing her in that hungry way he used to kiss her when they first went out together.

‘
You're so beautiful
,' he breathed. ‘
I love you so much
.'

When he tried to put himself inside her, however, he was still too soft. She reached down and took hold of him and stroked his penis up and down, harder and harder, but it still refused to stiffen.

After a few moments he rolled off her and fell back on to his pillow. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Guess I'm not such a love god after all.'

She snuggled up close to him and gave him an intimate squeeze. ‘You need to stop worrying, that's all. It's the stress. We can try again later.'

‘I'm no damn good at anything, am I?' he told her. ‘Can't keep my business going. Can't pay the mortgage. Can't even make love to my wife.'

Ruth stroked his chest. ‘You're the best man that any woman could wish for. You're the best husband. You're the best father. You're the best lover, too.'

‘Oh, really? I can't make any money, I give you one daughter with a chromosome disorder, and a son who thinks he's a latter-day Fonzie. I can't even get my dick up.'

‘Shh,' said Ruth. ‘You're beginning to depress me.'

Craig had been very close to tears, but now he let out a burst of laughter. ‘You're right,' he said. ‘It
is
pretty depressing, isn't it? Thank God I'm an optimist.'

NINE

T
he next morning, it was still so dark at eight a.m. that it looked like the end of the world, and as though they would never see the sun again. A furious gale was blowing from the south-west, and rain was sweeping across the road and flooding the gutters. The basswood tree was thrashing its branches as if it had gone berserk and was trying to uproot itself.

Ruth had arranged to take two hours off so that she could take Amelia to see Doctor Feldstein. Before she left the house, however, she called Jack to find out how his tests on Tilda Frieburg's bathtub were progressing.

‘Pretty good,' he told her. ‘I've started to analyze the sludge we found at the bottom of the bath, and I should know what its principal constituents are in a couple of hours. And by the way, the shower curtains are telling me a very contradictory story. If that fire was intense enough to boil away that bathwater and cremate that unfortunate young lady, it should have melted the curtains completely.'

‘I thought that, too. Do you have any theories about that?'

‘I can only guess that the seat of the fire was highly concentrated, and that there was very little radiant heat outside of the bathtub itself. How that could have occurred, I have no idea whatsoever, apart from my original thought that maybe it was an exochemical reaction, set off by magnesium or sodium. But my tests on the sludge will probably tell us.'

‘OK, Jack. I should be into the lab by lunchtime.'

‘You take your time. Amelia always comes first. Oh – and by the way, I had a call from Detective Magruder. The ME has confirmed the vic's identity. It
was
Tilda Frieburg. The cops are round at her place of work now, interviewing her colleagues.'

‘Thanks, Jack. I'll see you later. I have some strawberry shortcake left over from dinner last night. Do you want me to bring you a slice?'

‘When you die, boss, they're going to make you an honorary angel.'

Ruth helped Amelia to button up her bright yellow waterproof, and then she put on her own black raincoat and pulled up the hood. The two of them ran hand-in-hand across the front yard through the clattering rain, with Tyson bounding after them. Just as they climbed into Ruth's car, there was a devastating cannonade of thunder, which almost seemed to split the air apart. Amelia screamed and clung on to Ruth's arm, and even Tyson started to bark.

‘They're coming closer!' Amelia panted. ‘I know they are! They're coming closer!'

‘Hush, Ammy. It's only an old electric storm. It'll pass over in a while.'

‘But something bad is going to happen. Something
worse.
'

‘Ammy, sweetheart, you mustn't allow yourself to get hysterical. Just remember that everything sounds much louder to you than it does to everybody else. It's part of your condition.'

‘It's not just the noise. I can
feel
them.'

‘Come on, sweetheart. Let's get you to Doctor Feldstein. I'm sure he'll be able to tell you that everything's fine.'

Amelia stared at her, her green eyes wide. ‘They never knew that they could come back. They thought they had to stay downstairs. But now they've found out that they don't have to.'

Ruth leaned across and held Amelia close. She was shaking, as if she were suffering from hypothermia. Ruth didn't know what to say to her. It was obviously no use trying to convince her that ‘they' were only a delusion. All she could do was try to reassure Amelia that she wasn't in any real danger.

After a while Ruth gave her a kiss on the forehead, and said, ‘OK? You ready to go now?'

Amelia nodded. But as Ruth backed out of the driveway and into the street, there was another deafening barrage of thunder, and Amelia cowered down in her seat with her hands clamped over her ears.

At the same time, over on North Jay Street, opposite Bon Air Park, Neville Ferris was pushing Mrs Ida Mae Lutz along the pathway from her house to the white Spirit of Kokomo bus that was waiting at the curb.

Mrs Lutz could walk unaided, but the morning was so wet and windy that Neville was using the wheelchair to pick up all of his passengers. He had collected seven of them so far. Three of them were headed for St Joseph's Hospital, two for the Fewell Eye Clinic, one for the Grace United Methodist Church, and one for lunch at the Senior Citizens' Center.

‘One hell of a day, isn't it?' shouted Mrs Lutz. She was one of the feistiest of Neville's regular pick-ups – a handsome seventy-seven-year-old who had once been a minor TV actress. She was always smartly dressed, although today she was wearing a bright red vinyl raincoat and a matching sou'wester.

‘Wasn't forecast, this storm,' said Neville. ‘Don't think those weather people got the first idea.'

He parked the wheelchair beside the bus and opened up the door. Then he helped Mrs Lutz to climb the steps and find her usual seat right behind his.

‘Morning, everybody!' said Mrs Lutz, taking off her sou'wester and shaking her white bouffant hair. ‘One hell of a day today, isn't it?'

‘Morning, Ida!' the rest of the passengers chorused, all except for Mr Thorson, who had throat cancer, and could only croak.

Neville folded up the wheelchair and locked it in place in the wheel-well. Then he started up the bus and called out, ‘Hold tight, everybody! First stop, Fewell Eye Clinic!'

He pulled away from the curb, but the rain was lashing so hard against his windshield that he didn't see the Buick Riviera until it overtook him and slewed across in front of him, at an angle. He stamped on his brake pedal and the bus jolted to a halt. Mrs Betty Petersen, who was eighty-four years old, was thrown on to the floor, and Mr Carradine knocked his teeth against the seat in front of him.

Neville said, ‘What in the name of—?' Then he twisted around in his seat and said, ‘Everybody OK? Anybody hurt? Mrs Petersen – are you all right?'

He made his way to the back of the bus and helped Mrs Petersen back up on to her seat. He found her eyeglasses on the floor and carefully placed them back on her nose.

‘I'm fine,' she told him. ‘I just hit my knee.'

‘Mr Carradine? Your lip's bleeding.'

‘Don't you worry, Neville. I bit myself, that's all. If I need any fixing, they can fix me up at St Joseph's.'

Neville went back to the front of the bus, opened the door and stepped down on to the road. The rain was hammering down now, so hard that he had to shield his face with his hand. The Buick remained in front of the bus, its engine running. It was an old car, 1969 or 1970, with a boat-tail trunk, and its steeply-angled rear window made it impossible for Neville to see who was inside it.

He approached the driver's door and knocked on the window. ‘What do you think you're doing, man? I got seniors here, two of them got hurt! Get this piece of junk out of my way before I call for the cops!'

At first there was no response. Raindrops continued to course down the Buick's window, and even when Neville wiped them away with his hand, he still couldn't clearly see the driver.

‘Did you hear what I said? Get out my way, man! If you don't, I'm going to call for the cops right now!'

There was a huge barrage of thunder, and the trees in Bon Air Park all thrashed around in panic. Before the thunder had died away, the Buick's driver turned and stared at Neville through the window. His face was utterly white, and to Neville's horror he appeared to be screaming with laughter. Neville said, ‘
Shee
-it!' and took two stumbling steps backward in shock.

The car's door opened, and the driver climbed out. He was tall, and wearing a long black raincoat and black leather gloves, and now that he was standing outside the car Neville could see that his white face was a mask. The rain rattled against it, and ran down its cheeks, so that it seemed to be laughing so much that it was crying.

‘I don't know what you want, man,' said Neville, ‘but you'd better get the hell out of here. I got seniors here, and if anything happens to any of them, you're going to be in real deep shit, I warn you.'

The man in the laughing mask came closer, and Neville backed away.

‘Calm down, Rastus,' said the laughing man, in a muffled, card-boardy voice. ‘We're not here to cause you any trouble. We're here to perform us a little ceremony, that's all.'

‘
Ceremony
? What in the
hell
you talking about? And who's “we”?'

At that moment, the Buick's passenger door opened and another two men climbed out. These two were also dressed in long black raincoats, and both wore white masks, except that one was utterly expressionless and the other was scowling in rage. They came around the back of the car and stood on either side of the laughing man, with their arms folded. Neville smeared the rain from his face with the back of his hand, but it was still raining so hard that water was running from his nose and his chin.