Three Can Keep a Secret (12 page)

Hillside Terrace this time was a far cry from the near-empty street that Joe and Les encountered on the night they'd met William Friel and his mother. Despite the time taken for the news of the fire to reach police channels, for Sammie to contact Joe, and for him to leave Burlington and reach the center of Shelburne Village, the street was still jammed with fire department apparatus, pickup trucks, and police cruisers, along with coils of fire hose as crisscrossed as a plate of spaghetti.

He settled for a space by the curb two blocks away and walked to where a group of men stood across from the charred remains of the modest home Joe had barely left. Clouds of steam and smoke drifted into the afternoon sky from a blackened pyre of collapsed wall studs and roofing material. The air was thick with an eye-watering pungency and the sounds of radio chatter and idling diesel engines.

Joe approached a firefighter dressed in the white helmet and coat of an officer, pulling out his credentials as he drew near. He waited for the man to stop talking into his portable radio, aware of the others in the group all staring at him, and showed them his badge.

"Chief?"

The man's eyes traveled from badge to face. "Yeah?"

"Joe Gunther. Sorry to bug you when you're knee deep, but the people living here are part of an investigation I'm running."

"Guess that makes you out of luck, then. They didn't make it."

Joe pocketed his shield. "So I heard. Anything you can tell me?"

The chief shook his head. "VSP arson guy is on his way. You'd do better to talk to him." He pretended to see something in the distance, invisible to the rest of them, and abruptly said, "I gotta go."

He shouldered through two people opposite and went diagonally across the street without another word.

An awkward silence among the others ended with one of them saying, "He doesn't like cops."

Joe merely nodded at that. "Any of you know anything?"

"Yeah," the same one said. "The call came in about ninety minutes ago. I was on the first truck. Place was fully involved, right through the roof, like it had been cooking for hours. Hadn't been, though, not according to the neighbors. It just looked that way."

"Why would that be?" Joe asked them all.

"Looked like a gas fire to me," another of them said. "Fast and hot. Plus, it was an older building, like a match head."

"Anyone see anything suspicious beforehand?"

A third man answered, "I work part-time for the PD here, and volunteer for the fire department," he added, explaining his being in turnout gear. "Our people asked up and down the street, but nobody saw anything out of place. No strange cars or people hanging around. We asked if there'd been any comings or goings to the house. Did you come with a real tall, skinny guy when you did your interview a while ago?"

"Yeah."

"You were seen, then, but nobody else. These people apparently didn't socialize much."

"Did you know them?" Joe asked, taking them all in. "Any of you?"

They shook their heads as a group. "Where were they taken?" he then asked. "To Burlington for autopsies," the cop said.

Joe glanced across at the remains of the house. "How was this called in?"

"One of the neighbors. It was real sudden, according to her. One minute, everything was fine; the next, it's like a firebomb."

"That's why I'm thinking gas," the first man said confidently.

"It was gas," Jonathon Michael said flatly.

It was a few hours later. Joe had set up quarters in the corner of a normally closed Shelburne coffee shop that had kept a side door unlocked and a couple of lights on, just for the personnel who were still stuck at the fire scene one block over. The shop's owner lived upstairs, had once been a volunteer firefighter, and was predisposed to lending a hand.

"Accident or arson?" Joe asked.

The two of them were nursing mugs of coffee. Michael had also located a sandwich that he was largely ignoring. They'd known each other for more years than either could recall, and had developed a trust that they now took for granted. Michael was with the Vermont State Police, as he had been for his entire career. He was now chief of their arson division, but still regularly came out on assignment to keep his hand in.

"Hard to tell," he said, then taking a bite of the sandwich. He continued speaking as he chewed. "If it was arson, it was well done. The house was old and cheaply built, central heating and cooking were supplied by the propane tanks to the left of the bulkhead door."

Jonathon swallowed before resuming. "What happens is, there's a leak, usually at a juncture. If it's somewhere like in a kitchen or bathroom, people usually smell it before it becomes explosive. But most of those lines run where you can't see them. From what I could piece together, this one was in the basement, not far from the water pump. If someone suggested that the cellar filled with gas just before the pump went on, creating a small spark, I wouldn't call them a liar."

"Is that what you're saying?" Joe asked pointedly.

"Not in so many words," Jonathon replied. "I'm leaning toward 'Undetermined
—
Accidental,' since I don't have anything telling me otherwise. It did originate in the basement, and I'm pretty comfortable with the water pump scenario."

"But," Joe suggested leadingly.

"Two things," Jonathon explained. "First is that it actually takes a lot of gas to blow up a building like what witnesses described. That tells me that the whole place should have smelled of the stuff, which begs the question of why the occupants
—
or at least Friel
—
didn't react somehow. The second thing, which might tie in to the first, is that we found the bulkhead door unlocked. Could somebody have slipped downstairs from the outside and caused the leak
—
and just let dumb luck and circumstance supply the rest? Sure, The woman never left the house, from what I was told, and except for maybe groceries or post office runs, her son was pretty much a hermit. If I'd wanted them dead, I would've been happy to bide my time. The fewer alterations a bad guy makes to a scene, the harder it'll be for someone like me to discover them later. Of course, that still doesn't explain why Mr. Friel didn't react to the odor.

"Keep in mind," Jonathon added, "there was another bedroom set up down there. It's hard to tell if that's where Friel slept or if it was just a guest room, but it suggests the possibility that something might've been done to keep him from sounding the alert."

"Was that where his body was found?"

"Nope," he said. "I'm just saying that someone apparently lived in the basement, at least some of the time. I have nothing telling me that a linkage exists between that
—
or any of my ideas
—
and what actually happened."

Joe pushed at his mug with his finger, thinking back. "We went into one bedroom, on the first floor, that clearly belonged to his mom, and there was at least one other. But I have no idea where he slept. I didn't have any reason to look."

Jonathon remained silent.

"Are you totally done with your investigation?" Joe asked him.

"With the physical stuff, yup. I've got the usual odds and ends to deliver to the crime lab. But assuming they either come up blank or deliver their own version of 'Undetermined,' then I will be done unless you tell me otherwise." He took a swig of coffee and eyed Joe carefully.
"
We
re you telling me otherwise?"

Joe sighed, thinking of how similar this conversation was to the one he'd just had with Hillstrom. "No," he said sadly.

It was almost midnight by the time Joe got back behind his steering wheel and did a U-turn in a now dark and deserted Hillside Terrace. He was therefore surprised and touched with a sense of foreboding when his phone began vibrating. He pulled over by the curb once more and held it up to his ear. "Gunther."

He recognized the soft laughter on the other end. "My, you are official sounding. How was your fire?"

Joe matched her tone. "You ought to know, Beverly. The two victims should be in your cooler by now."

"Oh, they are," Hillstrom said. "Dispatch informed me a couple of hours ago. I spoke to my investigator at the scene. You two must have just missed each other."

"Yeah," Joe told her. "I got there right afterwards. You talk to him?"

"He didn't have much to tell," she told him. "The police were saying at that point that there was nothing particularly suspicious about it. Did you find otherwise?"

"Not by talking to the arson investigator, I didn't," Joe said. "But I don't like this
anymore
than I liked Gorden Marshall's death." He asked suddenly, "Not to get off topic, but what're you still doing up, and how did you know to call me now? I just got in my car."

She laughed. "Part calculation, part dumb luck. I knew where you were, and I knew the duration of the average arson investigation, having attended a few in my time. After that, I just guessed."

"Well, you did well. I'm just pulling onto Route 7. I figured I'd grab a room somewhere and maybe drop by your office again tomorrow morning, assuming these two will be on your to-do list."

There was a moment before she said, "I live just north of Shelburne, Joe, and I have more guest beds than I know what to do with. Have you had anything to eat yet?"

"No," he admitted before adding, "But I don't want to impose, Beverly. It's awfully late."

"Which is why I make the offer," she said. "I'll have a bowl of soup ready for you." She gave him directions.

It was a large house, and an expensive one, balanced right on the shore of Lake Cham-plain. Hillstrom was married to an A-list lawyer and had two grown daughters. The home spoke of the reasonable rewards that two hardworking, successful people could expect after several decades of concentrated labor.

Of course, Joe was a hard worker, too, and had been pretty successful by most people's standards, but he lived in a rental attached to the back of a Victorian pile on a busy street in Brattleboro.

By contrast, this place was a mansion.

He killed the engine in the turnaround before the three-car garage and stepped out into the cool night air. The stars stood out with electrical fierceness, horizon to horizon, their complete and mesmerizing silence offset by the sound of the soft lapping of waves upon the nearby shoreline, just out of sight.

"Soothing, isn't it?" Beverly's voice said from behind him.

He turned to see her coming across the lawn from around the corner of the building, where it fronted a view of the lake's expanse of light-absorbing blackness. The distant glow of Burlington's cityscape marked the lower edge of the sky's stippled sheet of stars.

She was wearing a form-flattering, full-length dressing robe, drawn in at the waist with a soft, thick belt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she looked, even in the near dark, comfortable and relaxed. Instinctively, without thought, Joe stepped over to her and gave her a hug, which she returned with a kiss to his cheek.

"You must be bushed," she said, slipping her arm around his waist and escorting him across the grass, from whence she'd appeared.

They rounded the corner to a wooden deck, one foot up from the lawn and running the length of a row of French doors, all facing the water.

He stopped on the deck and faced the view, his arm now draped across her shoulders. "How did you hold up against Irene?" he asked. "It doesn't look bad, but then again, it's the middle of the night."

She laughed. "That would help, but there's actually nothing to disguise. You folks got the worst of it, in the south. Of course, we're also a good twenty feet above the waterline, which has proved a godsend more than once. Quite a few people closer to the city were inundated, from what I heard." She paused, reflecting, "Terrible storm. Such a shame."

He couldn't argue the point, but it did make him ponder aloud, "Quirky, too, in some ways."

She looked up at him. "Oh?"

"Yeah. I heard how you sent a bunch of your people to Rochester, where the river had eroded the edge of the cemetery and swept a few dozen gravesites downriver."

"That poor town," she said. "As if the flooding wasn't bad enough, they had to contend with that. We're doing our best to help out, but it'll take weeks and weeks . . . and even then, who knows if we'll be able to find everybody."

"I had a similar thing happen in my neck of the woods," Joe told her, "in style if not substance, at least, since it only involved one grave. But the coffin was filled with rocks. There was no body."

She pulled away slightly to face him, her eyes wide. "You're joking."

"No. That's what I meant by quirky. If it hadn't been for the same kind of mishap that devastated Rochester, we never would've known that somebody'd pulled a fast one years back."

She stepped over to one of the French doors, opening it and ushering him into the house. "That's incredible. I hadn't heard a peep in the news. We better get some soup into you. I set it up in the kitchen."

He followed her as she walked through the living room and dining area without turning on any lights, the stars through the bank of windows bright enough to guide them. "I'm impressed the media missed it," he said. "Guess they have enough to keep them busy."

The kitchen, which they reached through a swinging door, was softly lighted, lined in dark wood, and had an island in its midst, adorned with a single place setting, facing a back-equipped barstool.

Hillstrom patted the stool and ordered, "Sit," before crossing to a yacht-sized stove and removing a simmering pot from the burner. "Nothing fancy," she warned him. "I hope you like chicken noodle."

"My favorite as a kid," he said, settling in. "That and a glass of milk, if you've got some."

She brought him a steaming bowl and a piece of bread, and poured him some milk before sitting catty-corner to him at the counter.