The Widower's Tale (55 page)

He hurried back through the kitchen to the porch, eager to get to the main event, to see the tree from below, as it was meant to be seen. As he walked through the back door, he heard the applause and the cries of delight rise still further; had Maurice started the bidding?

No one was looking at the tree; even Maurice faced in the opposite direction. There appeared to be a pillar of fire in the middle of the pond--no, two. Flames rose from a pair of dark objects floating across the water from the opposite shore. Ira laughed. This was over the top; had Clover arranged this second surprise? Too much spectacle would distract from the auction itself.

He had yet to reach the crowd when he saw the next two pillars of fire ignite. At first, it looked like they were in the middle of the sky, over Laurel Connaughton's house.

Just as Ira realized that the fires had nothing to do with the auction, light struck Laurel Connaughton's house across its entire white facade. The first thing he saw was that the twin flames appeared to emerge from the two chimneys--or from objects that sat like crowns on top of the chimneys. At the same time, an enormous piece of white fabric, whiter than the house, seemed to fling itself down over the front of the house, stretching from the roofline to the rhododendrons flanking the door. Some people gasped; others laughed.

Ira stood midway down the hillside, so transfixed that he couldn't move forward, couldn't look for Anthony in the crowd beneath him. He was aware that it had begun to disperse at the edges, that figures were running chaotically here and there.

Anthony reached him and held his arm. Neither spoke. They were looking at the curious message painted on the banner, lit by a pair of footlights similar to those illuminating the upstaged tree house.

FIDDLE-DEE-DEE, ROMANS:
WILL YOU DANCE WHILE
YOUR CHILDREN'S PLANET BURNS?

"Romans," murmured Anthony.
"Romans?"

"Nero. It's a reference to Nero," said Ira. "Oh my God."

People around them were talking rapidly into cell phones. Clover passed them, glancing tearfully at Ira. She ran toward her father's house.

That's when a gust of lovely warm wind ferried a luminous tangle of sparks from one of the fires on the pond toward the light show at Mrs. Connaughton's. It drifted into the edge of the banner, which appeared to recoil before catching fire. The word BURNS was the first to be consumed.

The sound of sirens swelled rapidly; almost instantly, the flash of the fire engines pierced the trees lining the road. By the time the trucks drove in, the banner was a sheet of flame, yearning toward the shingled roof. The great columns of fire that had burned so fiercely at the outset--both those on the pond and those supported by the chimneys--had died down to quietly brazen embers. But the burning banner had a cause all its own, the fire a robust complaint, as if raging against the house itself.

"Oh my God," said Ira. "What if they can't put it out?" In an attempt to stop trembling, he took Anthony's hand. He let go when he saw Sarah running up the hill toward Percy's house.

Ira caught up with her at the back porch and said, more loudly than he'd intended, "He's not home."

She looked miserable. Ira tried to think of something else to say, but both of them turned toward the neighboring house when their attention was captured by an odd noise, a grating and crumbling.

One of the chimneys began to slump forward. Embers from the pyre resting on top poured like rough jewels down the steeply pitched roof; a large dark object fell to the ground. A new gust of wind ripped the entire flaming banner off the house and carried it, twisting, through the air. Like a gaudy specter, it passed over the fire engines, over the row of maples separating Percy's property from Laurel's. It loomed closer, rising steadily, still burning, until the crown of the beech tree, the highest point before open sky, snatched it from the air. Sparks rained down through the branches, and the tree house, its exterior composed so frugally of long-dead timber, caught fire after just a slight, suspenseful pause, along with the playful paper cutouts gleaming in the purple light.

Celestino made himself a pork chop, with beans and peppers on the side. He turned on the radio, tuned it to the college station, based in Lothian, that played a strange jumble of music: jazz, hip-hop, sometimes a song from a musical, a piece of opera. You never knew what to expect.

Before him lay a catalog of courses for a "business and vocational" school. You could study electrical engineering, bookkeeping, hairdressing, auto repair. Everything taught at the school seemed to be about fixing things, though not the things that Celestino wished he knew how to fix. But here was a section on landscaping and gardening.
Shaping Public Spaces. Running a Nursery. Science of the Modern Lawn. Understanding Trees
.

Celestino liked to think he understood trees. Loud had even said so: "
Hombre
, you understand trees, you've got a friggin' knack."

The day had been beautiful, and as he did on all the beautiful days this spring, Celestino had tried to absorb the pleasure of the sun, the first warm winds. There were no indoor jobs this week. Loud sent him back to Rose Retreat, the garden by the church. He'd already removed the salt hay, unwrapped the bushes, folded the burlap and returned it to Loud's storage shed. He'd left the bushes alone for a few weeks, to let their canes loosen, relax into their natural posture. Today had been the best part: clipping out the deadwood, pruning back. Thousands of tiny new leaves, shiny and red as blood, had begun to assert themselves. Buds would form surprisingly soon. Roses, when they flourished, were a source of deep satisfaction. Celestino dug compost and lime into the soil, still faintly moist from the rainstorm several days before.

The sound of the gate had startled him: two women. "Oh, hello," the younger one called out. "We're just looking. Is that okay?"

Celestino smiled and waved to indicate that she wasn't intruding.

The two women were mother and daughter, searching for the right place in which to hold the daughter's wedding that summer. They talked as they followed the circular paths. The mother wanted a big wedding, with more guests than the garden would hold. The daughter said she saw no reason to invite anyone who didn't know her and her fiance well.

"Why do you want to pay for a lot of strangers to see me get married?"

"They're not strangers, they're part of our family circle. Your father and I have known some of these people for years. This wedding isn't just about you."

"No, it's about me and James. And we can always elope."

"I'd call that an empty threat. That dress of yours in my closet tells me so. That registry list at Williams-Sonoma."

Celestino's sister would be getting married in a month. He wondered if Marta and his mother were having arguments like this one, arguments about the details. It occurred to him that his own life lacked details--or the kind of details shaped by things like "family circles." This made him think of the Christmas party the Lartigues had held for the French families, the ones with whom they shared their culture. He remembered the way that Isabelle had enfolded him into those parties, though he would never have belonged. He wondered if she saw those families still. In France, would she find yet another circle? For Isabelle, friendship was easy.

After eating dinner, he went downstairs. Mrs. Karp had left him a note, asking him to hang the kitchen curtains she had washed. Celestino got the step stool out of the broom closet and slid the yellow fabric onto the rods, clicked the rods onto the brackets. Mrs. Karp went back to her TV show.

When he returned upstairs, the college-student deejay was reading the news. "And this just in," said the boy, deepening his voice as if acting in a play. "A major fire involving two historic homes in Matlock, continuing to burn as I read this news to you." When the boy named the street, Celestino sat down on the nearest chair.

The stunned revelers, those who had driven to the auction, had no choice but to walk the half mile back to the library parking lot; the shuttle bus that brought them over would never be allowed past the cordon of fire trucks and squad cars spilling from the two driveways onto the road in both directions. Ira wondered what it must look like to anyone driving by: a procession of shell-shocked people dressed as flower children, martyred rock stars, yellow submarines.

Stranger still was the scene they left behind. Folding chairs and tables had collapsed. Tie-dyed tablecloths had blown into bushes. Lime-green paper plates had scattered in every direction; some floated on the pond like Day-Glo lily pads. The party tent, so painstakingly mounted over the cantilevered dance floor, had been caught in the deluge of pumped water and buffeted down the slope toward the playground, slumping over the miniature castle. The one exception to the mayhem was a row of gift baskets, sprouting colored tissue and ringlets of ribbon, that stood undisturbed on a table at the opposite end of the barn.

Laurel Connaughton's house had burned down to a heap of smoldering antique rafters and planks. Of the two chimneys, one still stood, pointlessly resolute. The other had shed bricks and leaned askew, like a tall man in a posture of defeat.

Beside Percy's house, the great copper beech was a dark skeleton of its formerly glorious self, still--weirdly--illuminated by a single ultraviolet footlight. Percy's roof, at least what Ira could see from the rear, glistened black, its surface wet but thoroughly charred. Most of the panes in the old windows on the second floor had been shattered by the pressure of the water, and no doubt the furnishings in those rooms were soaked. But the fire itself had been halted at the roofline. According to the police chief, that heavy rainstorm the week before had helped spare Percy's house; Laurel's had gone down so fast because of the fuel used in the pyres set by the terrorists. That's what Chief McCord called the perpetrators, as if he had a second 9/11 on his hands. Ira detected the stench of melted rubber along with the smells of burning pitch and spilled oil. Now and then, an indifferent breeze stirred up the innocent fragrance of moist green grass.

The barn had survived without so much as a singed shingle; the eaves still dripped with cascades of water from the engine that had pumped water directly from the pond (leaving thick muddy ruts across the lower lawn when it departed). Evelyn's and Clover's offices, where the windows had been left ajar, were strewn with a pasty stew of ruined papers and books.

They were gathered now in Ira's classroom: Evelyn, Clover, and the seven teachers who'd attended the auction. All of them, even Evelyn, would have given anything to turn their backs on this nightmare at least for another eight hours. Most of them had spent every waking hour of the past few days in this place, preparing for a party that should have ended in showers of money, not cinders, flame-retardant foam, and cold, stagnant pond water. More than dancing or dressing up or chowing down on coconut shrimp, they'd looked forward to a good long sleep. What kept them there, however, were the urgent questions of Chief McCord, his counterpart from the fire department, and a Matlock police detective. Anthony, too, had stayed, and though he sat apart from everyone else, he had found a pad of construction paper and, ever the lawyer, was taking notes.

Maurice seemed to have taken off, but Heidi told Ira that she'd seen him up the hill, walking around the house, inspecting it. Perhaps he'd been assigned to wait for Percy's return. Clover had been standing by the house when she called her father's cell phone--and heard it ring through an open window in the living room. The police reached Laurel, in New York, by getting her number from a member of the Historical Forum.

Chief McCord had split them into two groups. Someone had dragged in full-grown chairs for him and his detective, but those who worked at E & F were accustomed to children's chairs and throw pillows. Anthony had claimed the couch in the reading nook.

You could put it however you liked, but they were being interrogated. The use of the word
children
on that banner meant, of course, that the DOGS' latest escapade--the first in more than a month--had been aimed squarely at the Elves & Fairies community and must therefore involve an "inside" connection or a grudge. Or so said Chief McCord.

"We are not maintaining that any of you are suspects," he said (immediately putting the opposite thought in Ira's head--and everyone else's, too, according to the looks exchanged across his circle), "but we need to know if you'd've seen anything suspicious whatsoever. We have detectives working over Mrs. Connaughton's residence, but if experience serves us here, it tells us these terrorists left no clues. We'll crack this one, however. We doggone will. That's a promise." (Actually, thought Ira, it sounded more like a threat.)

"One thing we can tell you is that Mrs. Connaughton's residence was fully alarmed, and the system wasn't violated. We suspect the terrorists could not create the setup they did without penetrating the premises. We are investigating that angle with Mrs. Connaughton, but if anyone here saw someone lurking around that house today--or anytime since she left on Wednesday--that would be of valuable significance."

Or significant value, thought Ira. During the silence that followed, he gazed around the room, his room. He did not like the careless way McCord and his men had thrown their jackets and paraphernalia on top of the book racks and baskets of children's drawings.

The chief tried again. "What about visitors here this week? You've had caterers, deliveries for the party, comings and goings of all kinds. Maybe visits from people claiming to be prospective parents?"

This would have been a question best answered by Clover (Evelyn was in the other half of the interrogation), but Clover was staring into space. She looked practically comatose with grief. Only the tears running perpetually and silently down her cheeks betrayed that she was conscious.

"She needs a break," Ira said to McCord. He reached across Heidi and touched Clover's knee. "Honey?"

She turned and stared at him. "This is too much," she whispered.