Late One Night

20

The day after Angel confronted Ronnie, and he claimed his knife, Wayne and Lois were in Read’s IGA, unloading their cart at the checkout. They heard a woman’s voice two lanes over from theirs.

“It was on the radio last night and again this morning.” The woman was Anna Spillman, who’d come down the street from the Real McCoy to buy five heads of lettuce. Here it was, almost the noon hour, and Pastor Quick had miscalculated how much they’d need for combination salads and sandwiches. And now she was talking to Roe Carl, who was working the register at that lane. “It just breaks my heart,” Anna said, “to know someone set that trailer on fire and Della and her kids inside.”

Roe shook her head and clucked her tongue. She had a pencil sticking out of her nest of gray curls, and she pulled it out and wagged it at Anna. “You just don’t know,” she said. “You never know about people. Now you can take that to the bank.”

“I keep hoping it wasn’t Ronnie,” Anna said. “Even after all the trouble he caused Della, I still think he’s got a good soul.”

Lois was reaching into the cart for the last bag of Brach’s candy — this one was Spice Drops — that she liked to keep on hand for the grandkids. Even Wayne was partial to them: Kentucky Mints, Root Beer Barrels, Star Brites. Not that she could afford them, what with Wayne having more trouble with the vertigo now. He was still having dizzy spells, which forced him to turn down jobs. The doctor said with vertigo, you could never tell. It might go away. It might hang on for a spell. Still, Lois wanted those candies. She loved their brightly colored packages and the way the Lemon Drops and Orange Slices glistened with sugar, the banana smell of the Circus Peanuts, the buttery toffee of the Maple Nut Goodies. Something to make her feel a little bit hopeful during these dark days.

But now this — what Anna Spillman had said. Lois couldn’t help but speak up. “They had a bad furnace.” Her voice was loud, as if she knew that if she didn’t shout she’d never get out what she wanted to say. Roe snapped her head up to see where that voice had come from. Anna turned on her heel to look. “That furnace,” Lois said again. “Della was burning wood. It was bitter cold and the baby had the croup. Something must have gone wrong with that furnace or with the Franklin stove.”

She looked to Wayne then, and he could see the pain and fear in her eyes. He felt the store start to tilt a little and he tried hard to keep it from spinning all the way around. He focused on a spot directly in front of him, the sheepish look on Anna Spillman’s face.

“It’s just talk about that fire being set.” He’d heard the rumors about the blaze being suspicious, and a man from the State Fire Marshal’s office had been to talk to him, asking questions about the condition of the furnace and whether he knew of any accelerants stored inside or outside the trailer. Wayne knew folks were talking about Ronnie. At first he wanted it to be true so he’d have someone to call to account instead of blaming himself for not making Della and the kids leave the trailer and bunk up at his and Lois’s house that night. Then he started to think it was better the other way, better if the fire was something no one could have helped. An accident flung down from the heavens. He wanted to believe that Della and the kids had been chosen because for some reason or an other that wasn’t for him to know, God needed them and this was his way of calling them home. Why he had to make them suffer so, Wayne couldn’t figure out. He preferred to think of them made whole again and at rest in the hereafter. He’d leave the mysteries to someone else to fret over. “All that talk about Ronnie,” he said, “it doesn’t amount to anything.”

“Wayne, you’re probably right,” Roe Carl said. “Hello, Lois. I didn’t see you folks come in.”

Lois held up the last package of Brach’s and said, “I came to get candy.”

“You didn’t have WPLP on this morning?” Anna said. “The local news?”

“We don’t listen to the radio anymore.” Lois threw the package of Brach’s onto the conveyor belt. “Ring me up,” she said to the girl at the register, a skinny-minnie of a thing with lipstick the color of black cherries.

“The fire marshal’s come to a conclusion,” Anna said. “Oh, Lois, I’m just sick over all of this.”

Wayne said, “You mean it was set? The fire? They know that for sure?”

He’d been by the place in the days after, and he’d seen the deputies from the fire marshal’s office combing through the debris. They brought a dog with them, the kind trained to sniff for accelerants — gasoline, kerosene, turpentine, that sort of thing. The deputies got down on their knees and dug around in the ruins. They took samples to send to the lab in Springfield. “Multiple points of origin.” Anna said the words carefully, recalling them from the radio news. “That’s what they’re saying.”

Just minutes before, she’d heard the sheriff talking with the fire chief in the Real McCoy using the same words: multiple points of origin. She’d lingered, clearing the table behind theirs, catching as much of the story as she could. The dog had sniffed out gasoline. The fire had started in more than one place. There were trail marks, more than one burn-through in the flooring, spalled concrete. There was crazed glass, finely cracked; collapsed springs in the furniture and the bedding; alligator blisters on the charred wood — all signs that the fire burned fast and hot. “It was set all right,” Milt Timlin said, and Biggs said, “The question now is who did it.”

“So it’s for sure?” Wayne said to Anna. The store was spinning fast now, and he couldn’t take it anymore.

“Lois!” Anna called out in a frantic voice.

The skinny-minnie girl let out a squeak and said, “Oh, what should I do?”

Lois turned her head to look for Wayne, but he was on the floor, tumbled down so fast she couldn’t have caught him if she’d tried.

At that moment, Roe Carl saw the sheriff’s car drive past, heading south on Main Street, and she watched it go for the briefest instant before she picked up the phone and called 911.

Ronnie was on the porch of Brandi’s house when he saw the sheriff’s car coming at him down Locust Street. He’d spent the morning alone — Brandi at work and the kids at school — trying to figure out what he could and couldn’t tell Angel about that pocketknife and how it came to be behind the trailer. Yes, he’d gone back there the night of the fire, but he didn’t yet know how to tell that story in a way that would make any sense, because he still didn’t understand why he’d done what he had — didn’t like to think about it, truth be told. Didn’t like to think about Shooter either and what story he might be spinning.

Here toward noon, Ronnie had finally decided to give up all that thinking and to drive over to Brick Chapel about that job the way he was supposed to have done the day before, but Angel hadn’t come home, and he’d been too worried about her to do anything but get on the telephone and call anyone he could think of who might have seen her — even Missy Wade, as much as it galled him. He’d driven the streets looking for Angel. Then he gave up and went back to Brandi’s, and that’s when Shooter called.

Ronnie would have to find a way to explain all that to the man in Brick Chapel, and then hope he understood and still had that job. It was a good job at a garment factory, working in the warehouse running a forklift, moving bolts of material, loading and unloading trucks. A job with health benefits and profit sharing and a week’s paid vacation every year. A steady job worth driving sixty miles there and back every day. He could work at it for years and years to come and make a life for his girls. Now that he had them, even with Brandi’s check, things were going to be tight, especially with the new baby on the way. He’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to ask Missy for any of the money in the bank, not unless he absolutely had to. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of playing Good Samaritan to his need. He’d rather that money turned to dust in the bank and Missy would have to explain to all the good folks who made donations why she’d never let Ronnie use it for his girls.

That’s what was on his mind when he stepped out onto the porch and saw the sheriff’s car. He watched it come, hoping it might turn left onto Jones Street and move on out of his day, but he could already see that the car was slowing. It came to a stop along the curb just to the left of Brandi’s drive, and Ronnie didn’t wait. He went out to see what Biggs might want, fearing that he knew exactly why the sheriff was there.

“I told you I wasn’t filing charges against Wayne,” he said to Biggs, who had put his window down. Ronnie laid both hands on top of the car and leaned down. The two-way radio crackled, the heater fan blew out warm air. Biggs had an aroma made up of leather and fried foods and some sort of pine-scented aftershave.

“I’m not here about that.” He reached over and squelched the two-way. “I need to talk to you about the fire.”

“Now? I’m on my way to see about a job.”

“I don’t think we should wait. Haven’t you heard?”

“It’s over at Brick Chapel. A good job at the garment factory.”

“Ronnie, the fire marshal’s report came in. We need to talk.”

Biggs wanted him to get in the car and ride over to the courthouse in Phillipsport with him.

“Like I’m some damned criminal?” Ronnie said. “Let people see me like that? Bad enough I got to stand out here talking to you and all the neighbors peeking out windows.”

“I’m not out to make things hard for you. Lord knows you’ve had trouble enough.” Biggs rubbed his hand over his mouth, considering. “Get in your car, then, and drive on over to the courthouse. I’ll be behind you.”

Next door, Willie Wheeler had come out to spread some salt on his walk, even though that walk was clear and there was no new snow in the forecast. Ronnie knew he just wanted to see if he could eavesdrop. A car came down Locust, Alvin Higgins in his old green Ford pickup with a tool case across the bed. He slowed down and took a good long look.

“All right,” Ronnie finally said. “But I can tell you I haven’t done a thing wrong.”

By the time the ambulance got to the IGA, Wayne was sitting on a folding chair that Roe Carl had found for him. The medics checked him over, took all his vitals, asked him whether he thought he should go to the hospital.

He told them, no, he just got dizzy sometimes. “It’s the vertigo,” he said. “That’s all. Tell them, Lois.”

“He gets the spins,” said Lois. “Been happening for a while now.” She was stroking Wayne’s head. “You feel better?”

“I feel all right.” He met the eyes of the two medics. He cursed the vertigo and how it turned him into a fall-down dizzy old man. “I’m sorry for all the upset,” he said, and that was that, so he thought. Just a little scare on a Thursday morning, that, thank goodness, came to nothing.

Ronnie eased his Firebird into a parking spot on the south side of the courthouse and watched Biggs pull his patrol car up the inclined drive reserved for the sheriff. Biggs got out and waited for Ronnie to come up the courthouse steps. It was twelve o’clock and the fire whistle was blowing to mark the noon hour the same way it’d done every weekday as long as Ronnie could remember. He knew Brandi would be leaving the Savings and Loan to slip out for lunch and maybe a little window shopping if she had time. She was starting to look at things for the baby. It would be a few weeks before the ultrasound would tell them whether they were having a boy or a girl. “It’ll be a surprise no matter when we find out,” Brandi told him when they were debating whether to have the ultrasound done, “so isn’t it better to find out in advance so we can be prepared?” But she was starting to look at things for both genders. One night, she’d come home from work all excited about a Willie Nelson Born for Trouble onesie. The next night, she’d be laughing about a pink Baby Boop and then get all teary-eyed over a Mommy’s Little Girl. Since it was her first, she was excited about everything, and because of that, Ronnie was thrilled too, even if he couldn’t always bring himself to show it. “Aren’t you excited?” Brandi asked him one night, and he said, sure, without a doubt, but she had to keep in mind that he’d just lost three of his children, and surely she didn’t expect him to ever get over that. It was no good to even try.

So he found himself moving through his days like he was in a dream, which is how he felt now as he came up the steps to where Biggs waited, and he knew there were people passing by watching him — the office girls from the Reasoner Insurance Agency on the east side of the square, the opticians from LensCrafters, some mechanics from Albright Chevrolet, even a few high school kids who’d walked uptown to grab lunch at the new Mi Casita Mexican place. Lord, what if Angel was one of them? What if she saw him there with Biggs, about to enter the courthouse? After that ugly run-in with her last night, he didn’t need something else to try to explain.

“I know I don’t have to talk to you,” he said to Biggs. “Not unless I’ve got a lawyer with me. I know that much.”

Biggs opened the heavy glass door to the courthouse and motioned for Ronnie to step inside. “This is just a friendly talk. There are things I need to tell you.”

“You couldn’t have told me back in Goldengate? You had to drag me over here?”

“It’s better done here,” Biggs said. “Just in case our little talk goes somewhere interesting.”

Ronnie hesitated. He had things he wouldn’t tell Biggs, not if he could help it. He had things he’d rather keep to himself forever.

“You’ve got no call to throw me in jail,” he said, “if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

Someone in a car going by called his name. He thought it came from a red GMC Sierra pickup crammed full of high school boys going by on Fifteenth Street.

“Ronnie,” one of the boys said out the open window. He had red hair and freckles, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Hey, Ronnie. You got a light?”

The truck went on by, the boys’ hoots and whoops fading.

“Some people,” Biggs said. “If I could only arrest someone for being stupid or mean in the heart, I surely would enjoy it.”

“Let’s do this,” Ronnie said, impatient.

He stepped into the courthouse and then followed Biggs into the sheriff’s office, where a deputy, a man with neatly combed white hair and sad eyes, was sitting behind a desk. Biggs nodded to him, and then he took Ronnie into his office and closed the door.

“So what’s the fire marshal say?” Ronnie wasn’t going to wait for Biggs to work his way up to giving him the news — not give him a chance to hem and haw and see if Ronnie would squirm. He’d just ask him straight out. “Must have found something out of the ordinary?”

He hadn’t even sat down yet, didn’t know that he felt like it, didn’t want to give Biggs the notion that he meant to stay long.

Biggs unzipped his trooper jacket. He took it off and hung it on a coat rack in the corner. An American flag stood in the other corner, and Ronnie saw the plaques on the wall and the framed picture of the president, a man Ronnie hadn’t voted for but no one he wished any particular bad fortune. One wall held a large map of Phillips County, and Ronnie knew if he were to trace his finger along the right roads, he’d eventually end up down the blacktop out of Goldengate to where he once had a home with Della and their kids.

“You think there’d be a reason for the fire marshal to find something worth us talking about?” Biggs walked around behind his desk and peered at a computer screen for a moment. He put his closed fists on the desk and braced himself with his knuckles. The office smelled of the limestone walls, damp and moldy — that and the cherry-scented air freshener that Biggs was using to try to make things more pleasant. He had a row of photographs lined up on a wide ledge that ran beneath the wall of windows behind his desk. Ronnie could see the pictures were of him and his family: a blond-haired woman with her arm around Biggs, a boy in Marine dress blues, Biggs with what must have been a grandson riding on his shoulders. “Ronnie, is there anything I ought to know?”

The pictures of Biggs’s family had Ronnie all out of sorts. Here was a man who had everything right where he wanted it. A man with a wife and kids and grandkids, and here was Ronnie, a man fighting to keep his family together.

“I thought you already knew everything.” He sat down then, sat right down on the chair across from Biggs’s desk and let the sheriff look down on him. He sat down because he felt a trembling in his legs, and he feared if he didn’t sit he’d fall over. “Didn’t you say you had things to tell me?”

Biggs eased himself down onto his own chair. He rested his forearms on his desk and put his hands together, his thick fingers laced. “All I know is what the fire marshal’s office told me.” He looked at Ronnie for a long time, and Ronnie made sure to hold his gaze steady and not to glance away. “That fire didn’t start all by itself,” Biggs finally said. “It had help.”

“Someone set it?” Ronnie said. “Someone put that trailer to burn with my kids inside?”

“With your kids and your wife.”

“Who’d do that?” Ronnie jumped up from his chair. “Find out who it was and I’ll kill the bastard.”

“No one’s going to be doing any killing,” Biggs said. “Not if I can help it.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Ronnie,” he said, “where were you the night of the fire?”

“I was home,” Ronnie said. “At Brandi’s. I was with Brandi.” He pointed his finger at Biggs. “Surely you don’t think I’d do something like that. Try to kill my whole family?”

Biggs got up and walked around the desk. He stood with his face just inches from Ronnie’s own. “I truly hope that’s not the case, but someone set that fire, and now it’s my job to find out who. I’m going to have to start talking to folks.”

“You do that,” Ronnie said. “You talk to everyone you can find who can tell you something.”

“I may be back to talk to you.”

“What can I tell you that I haven’t already?” Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, I was with Brandi.”

“I just want you to know that I’m going to be pushing this hard,” Biggs said. “I’ve got a family of my own, and what someone did to yours makes my blood boil. It’s the saddest damn thing that’s ever happened around here. You get me?”

“You think it doesn’t do the same thing to me?” Ronnie’s voice shook and tears came to his eyes. “I may have left Della, but I had fourteen years with her, and we had all those kids. And now three of them are dead. I was their father. You remember that.”

Outside the courthouse, a cold wind had come up out of the north and the temperature had dropped. By the time Ronnie got to his Firebird he was wishing for his gloves. He fumbled with his keys and they dropped to the street. He stooped to pick them up. Finally, he got the car unlocked and he slid in behind the wheel.

Anyone driving by just then would have seen a man pounding his fist on the dashboard, and if they didn’t know he was Ronnie Black — and if they didn’t know about what had happened at that trailer — they might have thought him a crazy man. Still others, just moments later, might have seen the Firebird backing out of its parking place and not thought anything about Ronnie and what he might be up to until they got home that evening and read about the fire marshal’s report in the Phillipsport Messenger. Then they might recall seeing the Firebird on the courthouse square, and they might think about how slowly he drove, taking a left onto Fifteenth to the stoplight at State. Maybe they sat behind him there in their own cars. Maybe they saw him start to turn left when the light went to green — left to Goldengate — and then change his mind and turn right instead with a squeal of tires and a roar of engine like he didn’t care who might be in his way.

_________

Brandi came home from work and found the girls alone. “Where’s your dad?” she asked Hannah.

“Don’t know,” Hannah said.

She was playing a game of Operation with Sarah. The two of them were on their knees on the living room rug, the large oval braided rug Brandi bought last fall to celebrate Ronnie’s moving in. “This has just been a house,” she told him. “Now it’s going to be a home.” When she found out she was pregnant, she counted back and thought that night must have been the night they made the baby. First part of October, the nights starting to cool and soon the leaves would turn and there’d be the lovely part of autumn that she’d always treasured. The leaves, and pumpkins on people’s porches, and scarecrows on straw bales in front yards, and corn shocks woven around the gaslights. Indian summer days — a last time of warm sun and golden light before the turn toward winter.

“Don’t know?” Brandi tossed her car keys onto the marble top of the old washstand that she kept just inside the front door. The house was full of things she’d inherited from her grandmother — a pie safe with punched tin panels, a Hoosier cabinet, a library table, a Morris chair, an apothecary dresser, a sleigh bed, a cedar chest. “I like old things,” she’d told Ronnie. “They’ve got character.” And he said, “Must be why you like me.”

“Why in the world wouldn’t you know?” she said now to Hannah. “Didn’t he say where he was going?”

“Haven’t seen him,” Hannah mumbled. She was concentrating hard on removing the Adam’s apple with the tweezers. “Don’t know where he is.”

The tweezers touched the side of the throat as she was lifting out the Adam’s apple, and the buzzer went off and the red bulb of the patient’s nose lit up.

“You lose your turn.” Sarah clapped her hands together. Her bangs needed cutting. She kept brushing them out of her eyes. “Doesn’t she, Brandi? Doesn’t she lose her turn?”

“Where’s your hair barrettes?” Brandi asked her.

Sarah chewed on her bottom lip and twisted up her mouth as she thought. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

Brandi put her hands on her hips and gave Sarah a disapproving look. “Did you lose them again? Oh, Sarah.”

Secretly, Brandi was pleased. This silly, forgetful girl needed her to keep track of her hair barrettes, to comb the tangles from her hair, to cut her bangs, to remind her to brush her teeth before she went to bed. And there was Emma who liked it when Brandi read stories to her. And dear, dependable Hannah, who had woven her that friendship bracelet. It was Hannah who’d made room in her heart for Brandi first, and then the other girls had followed suit. All but Angel. She was the stubborn one, but Brandi was determined to win her over.

Last night, after the ugly scene with Ronnie, Brandi had a talk with Angel, just the two of them, in the privacy of Brandi and Ronnie’s bedroom. Brandi sat on the bed with Angel, and she put her arm around her. Angel let her hold her like that, rocking her a little, stroking her hair.

“Your daddy loves you, and I love you,” she said. “We’re just waiting for you to love us back.”

Angel said, “You’re not my mother,” and Brandi admitted that she wasn’t. “No, I’m not, and I know this is all complicated for you. You’re at that age when you’re trying to figure out things about love, and I know your daddy and I haven’t made that any easier for you, but trust me, Angel, I love you like you were my own. In truth, you are my own now. You and all your sisters. We don’t have any choice.” Angel levered herself away from Brandi’s embrace. She got up and walked across the room to the door. Before she opened it, she turned back and said, “Maybe we do. At least I do. Maybe you don’t know everything.” Brandi asked her what that was supposed to mean, but Angel wouldn’t answer. She just opened the door and left the room.

Brandi had spent a good part of her day mulling that over and had eventually dismissed it as Angel’s way of saying how hurt she was, how much she was suffering, how confused she was. A girl who’d lost her mother and not willing just yet to let the world be kind to her. Brandi could forgive her that and try to be patient and persistent with her love.

“Where’s Angel and Emma?” she asked Hannah.

Hannah was in her gawky stage now, all skinny arms and spindly legs, but Brandi could see she’d grow into a beautiful woman. That lustrous skin, those blue eyes.

“Angel’s in our room,” Hannah said, “and Emma’s in her closet talking to Emily.”

Poor Emma. She was having such a hard time being a twin on her own.

“Well, at least someone knows something around here.” Brandi gave the girls a smile to let them know she wasn’t angry with them. “Did your father pick you and Emma up at school?” she asked Sarah.

Sarah glanced at Hannah, and Brandi took note of how Hannah’s eyes opened wide, as if someone were trying to pull something from her and she wasn’t willing to let it go.

“We came home from school,” Sarah finally said.

“Sarah,” said Brandi. “Don’t lie to me.”

“They walked home from school.” Hannah spoke up for her. “They were here when I got home.”

“And your father nowhere to be seen and no way for me to call him.” He refused to carry a cell phone. Hadn’t had one all his life and didn’t see any reason to start now, even though Brandi tried to convince him he might wish he’d changed his tune someday. “Maybe Angel knows something,” she said, and went down the hallway.

Angel was lying on her bed listening to a new iPod. Her old one, of course, was gone in the fire. She’d begged her father for a new one, but he’d said no.

“Where’d you get that?” Brandi asked her.

Angel took her earbuds out and propped herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you think.”

“I didn’t say you stole it. I asked you where you got it.”

Angel rubbed her thumb over the smooth face of the iPod. “It was a present.”

“From a boy?” Brandi was aware of her voice rising in alarm, but she couldn’t help herself. She knew what a boy would be after with an expensive gift like that, and it wouldn’t be just friendship. “Was it that Tommy Stout?”

“No, not from a boy.” Angel made fun of Brandi’s anxiety, making her voice squeak with mock fear. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend.” Her voice went flat and she gave Brandi a long stare. “I’m not on the prowl like you.”

“That’s enough, Angel. You don’t know a thing about what brought your dad and me together.”

Sure she’d locked eyes with him at Fat Daddy’s one night back in the summer, had told him he looked good in those new jeans. Had said, “Della better keep an eye on you.” She slow danced with him when the jukebox played Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road,” and she sang all low and sexy in his ear, “Every long-lost dream led me to where you are.” When the song was done, she said goodnight.

Then she just waited. It wasn’t long before she’d hear a car coming slow down Locust, and when she’d look out her front window she’d see Ronnie in his Firebird, taking his time as he made the turn onto Jones Street. She came to know the sound of that Firebird. Five nights running, Ronnie came by. On the sixth night, she was waiting on her porch, and when she saw him coming, she went out to the curb and flagged him down. She leaned in through his open window. “Might as well come in,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

Angel didn’t know how it could happen. You could be out there looking and not even know it until all of a sudden you were in the scene from your life that you’d been heading toward all along. Then, like that, it all made sense — every damned move you’d ever made, right or wrong. You were where you were supposed to be. Didn’t make any difference that Ronnie was married. Didn’t matter a snap that he had all those kids.

“I know one thing,” Angel said. “You hurt my mom. You and my dad. Maybe you’ve got a way of not thinking about that, but I don’t. I think about it every single day.”

Brandi did too. She couldn’t get it out of her head, the fact that she and Ronnie had ended up together and now Della was dead. At her darkest times, Brandi thought about how part of that was her fault. If she hadn’t come up to Ronnie that night at Fat Daddy’s. If she hadn’t gone out to that Firebird that night at her house and told Ronnie to come in. If, if, if. A world of ifs, forever and ever. For that reason alone, Brandi was determined to love Angel and her sisters and to give them a good home. To make that one good thing she could do.

“That iPod.” Brandi wouldn’t admit to Angel how much what she’d said had shaken her. She made her voice go hard. “Who gave it to you?”

“Missy,” Angel said. “She’s taking us to 4-H tonight.”

“Does your dad know about this?”

“Maybe you should ask him,” Angel said. Then she stuffed the buds back into her ears, and gave Brandi the sweetest smile.

Soon it was evening, the dark coming on early. Out in the country, off a gravel road that snaked back a mile to the west of where the trailer had been, the pole light came on in Lois and Wayne’s barnyard.

They’d been resting, dozing in their reclining chairs, waking from time to time to watch out the picture window as the squirrels and jays and quail came to feed on shelled corn tossed around the blue spruce. They’d kept the lights off, and now it was dark in the room and they talked back and forth in that quiet, just the two of them out there in the country.

“Have things stopped spinning for you?” Lois wanted to know, and Wayne told her he thought he felt some better and maybe could eat a little supper.

She made some grilled cheese sandwiches with sliced tomato, the way he liked them, and opened a can of tomato soup she’d brought home from the store. He said he could come in to the table to eat, but she told him there was no need. She’d set up TV trays, and they could eat in their chairs, maybe even put on the television. Not the news — they’d had enough of that — but maybe that Wheel of Fortune television show they liked to watch. They’d sit there and eat their supper and try to guess the puzzles on Wheel, and little by little — though they didn’t say this — they’d try to get back to some normal way of living.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t try to take on the girls,” Wayne said when Lois brought him his supper. “The way I am, and you having to take care of me, I don’t know how we’d manage.”

Lois turned on the TV and found the channel for Wheel. She and Wayne sat there, eating, watching the pretty woman turn over the letters of the puzzles, but they didn’t try to guess like they usually did.

“It couldn’t be true about Ronnie, could it?” Lois finally said. “He wouldn’t have done anything like that, would he?”

“Turn it up.” Wayne pointed to the TV. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

_________

Missy had been thinking about Angel all day and how maybe she shouldn’t have given her that iPod — even Pat said it was bad business — but she’d wanted to do something nice for her, something to let her know she didn’t hold any bad feelings over the way Angel had treated her after the funeral when the girls had packed up and left with Ronnie and Angel hadn’t told her a word of goodbye, hadn’t even waved at her as Ronnie drove away.

Out of all the girls, Angel was the one who most worried her. Angel, who seemed to have a turnip for a heart. Missy was determined to save her from her own anger, to keep reminding her that there were good people in the world who loved her.

“So you’re going to give her an iPod?” Pat said to her that morning at breakfast. They were sitting at the table just after dawn when the light was watery and the radio was on. WPLP was giving the farm market reports from the Chicago Board of Trade before turning to the local news. “That’s how you’re going to teach her about goodness?”

“It’s a start,” she said. “It’s just a way to love on her for a while. What’s wrong with that?”

Pat didn’t answer at first, but she could tell he thought she was overstepping her bounds and heading down a dangerous path.

“You control their money,” he finally said. “Isn’t that enough?”

Why did he have to say a thing like that, a thing that caught her by surprise and made her look at herself the way he saw her: a woman desperate with need? She couldn’t deny it — didn’t want to deny it, really. She wanted instead for the two of them to acknowledge what was lacking between them so they could let it draw them closer. She wanted to say, Don’t you see how this is our chance?

Then the local news came on the radio, and the first story was about the trailer fire and how the State Fire Marshal had confirmed its suspicious nature. The investigation, the radio announcer said, was ongoing.

Missy recalled the day at the bank when Laverne had practically begged her to say that Ronnie couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the fire, and Missy had left enough space for that rumor to spread.

Now she only looked at Pat and said, “Oh, my. My word. Isn’t that just the saddest thing? And after what Shooter told us about Ronnie.”

Pat got up from the table and grabbed his coat and lunch box. He looked at Missy a good long while. “Do you think he really did it?”

“God help him,” Missy said.

Pat nodded and then headed out the door.

She took her time washing the dishes, keeping an eye on the clock on the wall of the kitchen. The clock was round with a yellow sunflower painted on its center. Yellow numbers circled the sunflower just outside the reach of its petals. It would take thirty minutes to drive to the high school in Phillipsport, and Missy wanted to make sure that she got there in enough time to be waiting when the bus from Goldengate pulled to the curb.

At the school, she stood by her van, watching. When she saw Angel get off the bus, she called to her.

Angel stopped on the sidewalk, her backpack slung over her shoulder, while the students getting off the bus moved past her. They were laughing and shouting, their breath steaming in the cold air.

Missy waved at Angel, and her heart lifted when Angel finally raised her arm and waved back. Then she came down the sidewalk to where Missy was standing.

“I know you have to get to your first class,” Missy said, “but I wanted you to have this.”

Missy gave her the iPod, and Angel looked at it and looked at it and looked at it. When she finally raised her head, her lip was trembling.

“Thank you,” she said in a soft voice.

“Your dad said you’d been wanting a new one.”

Angel rolled her eyes. “He wouldn’t let me have one.”

Missy could have told her not to hold her father to account. She could have told her about the three-hundred-dollar check she wrote him and how he promised to make sure all the girls got something from it. But what she said was, “Sometimes dads just don’t know, do they?”

“That’s for sure,” Angel said, and Missy thought she saw the trace of a smile.

“It’s 4-H meeting tonight,” Missy said. “You and your sisters want to go?”

“We don’t have our goats anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Missy put her arm around Angel’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “We’d all love to see you. What say I come by for you around 6:30?”

Angel nodded. “Okay,” she said. Then the bell was ringing, and Missy told her to hurry so she wouldn’t get in trouble.

By six o’clock that evening, Brandi had called everyone she could think of who might know where Ronnie was. He hadn’t been in the Real McCoy Café or Casey’s convenience store or the IGA. Shooter Rowe hadn’t seen him, nor had Pat Wade.

“Tell Missy not to come and get the girls for 4-H,” she told Pat. They hadn’t had their supper, and Emma and Sarah were getting whiny. Emma was tugging at the leg of her slacks. Sarah was pressing the tweezers against the sides of the Operation game over and over so it made an annoying buzz. Angel and Hannah were back in their room.

“The girls?” he said, in a way that made it clear Missy hadn’t said a word about it to him. “She’s already gone,” he said, and before Brandi could say anything else, he hung up.

She happened to think then to call next door to Willie Wheeler’s.

“I saw Ronnie around noon,” Willie said. “He was out to the curb talking to the sheriff. Then Ronnie got in his car, and Biggs, he followed up the street after him.”

“Must have been something about the fire,” Brandi said.

Some time passed before Willie said anything else, and when he did, Brandi wished she wasn’t hearing what she was.

“Haven’t you heard?” Brandi couldn’t find her voice, afraid to ask what Willie was talking about. Finally, he went on. “It’s about the fire all right. Fire marshal says it was set. It’s all over the news.”

The rumors about Ronnie that she’d so readily dismissed now took her by the throat. Arson, and now Ronnie was more in the middle of it than she’d ever dreamed.

She got off the phone and marched down the hall to Angel’s room. She didn’t bother to knock. She just pushed open the door.

Angel was standing behind Hannah, braiding her hair. “Is there anything to eat before we go?” Angel asked.

“You’re not going with Missy,” Brandi said. “I need you to get supper for your sisters and then look after them.”

Angel took her hands out of Hannah’s hair. “Why haven’t you made supper by now?”

“I’m trying to find your daddy. Aren’t you even worried?”

Angel just shrugged her shoulders.

Hannah said, “What’s wrong? Is there something wrong?”

“No, there’s nothing wrong. I just need to find him.” She started to go. Then she turned back and said, “You’re to stay here tonight. Do you understand me?”

Hannah said that she did. Brandi thought she might have seen Angel nod her head, but she couldn’t be sure. She guessed that was the best she could do. Now she needed to find Ronnie.

He was in a bar in Brick Chapel — the Kozy Kiln — and had been since three o’clock in the afternoon. He and Brandi had come there once in the summer before he left Della and they were looking for somewhere to be off by themselves. He drank a few beers while the daylight faded and the streetlights came on and the headlights of cars swept by the plate-glass window by the table where he sat.

The last of the afternoon shoppers hurried past, women with scarves wrapped around their faces and snow boots on their feet. They held shopping bags in their arms as if they were toting babies. From time to time, one of the women laughed so loud that Ronnie could hear it, a streak of a woman’s bright voice that was his for just a moment and then was gone.

The waitress came to see if he needed anything, said, “Darlin’, you’ve been in here a good while. Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

She was a girl with yellow hair falling over her shoulders. A girl with slender arms and long fingers. A girl with papery skin beneath which Ronnie could see the faint blue trails of her veins. A girl who put him in mind of Della when he’d first fallen head over heels for her. Della the way she was before the kids and all those years, and now he was starting over again, this time with Brandi, and he knew he should be home with her and the girls, but he hadn’t been able to lift himself up and make the drive back to Goldengate.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said to the girl.

Then he had to look away, had to turn his face to the window. The girl was too beautiful in the way that Della had been, and if he kept looking at her, he wouldn’t be able to think of anything more than the way he and Della had once promised themselves to each other and how he’d broken his end of that promise and now she was dead.

“I hope things get better for you, darlin’,” the girl said, and then he heard the heels of her shoes clicking over the floor and falling away to nothing.

He’d been to the garment factory to see about that job. The plant manager, a tall man with a big belly and a long, sad face, said, “Pardner, I had to get me someone in that warehouse.” He hooked his thumbs into his waistband, on either side of an ornate silver belt buckle that featured an eagle and the Alamo and the words TEXAS TOUGH.

“My girl.” Ronnie started in with an explanation. “She didn’t come home. I didn’t know what to do.” He knew he was talking too fast. “Then today I started out, and, well, you probably know about the fire. My wife. Three of my kids. Well, mister, it’s just been an unusual time for me. Otherwise, I’d of been here when I was supposed to. The truth is, mister, I need this job.”

“I know about your trouble.” The plant manager shook his head in sympathy. “Jesus, yes. But, Ronnie, I had trucks needed unloading, and I had to get another man in that warehouse.”

Ronnie looked the man in the eye, gave him a chance to change his mind. They were in his crow’s nest office, high above the factory floor where row after row of women had their backs curved over sewing machines. Even through the window glass, Ronnie could hear the angry buzz of all those machines.

“So that’s the way it is?” he finally said.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a damned thing to offer you now.”

Ronnie hadn’t gone home. He hadn’t wanted to face Brandi and tell her he’d lost out on that job, and he didn’t for the life of him know what he’d say to her about Biggs sticking his nose into things and where that might be heading. He’d driven around until he’d found the Kozy Kiln, and he thought he’d just hunker down there for a while. It wasn’t until it was too late that he realized he’d forgotten all about picking up Sarah and Emma from school, and the fact of his neglect sent him into such a funk that he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to face anyone ever again.

The phone was ringing behind the bar. Ronnie saw the waitress pick it up, and as she talked — he couldn’t hear what she was saying — he noticed that she kept looking over to where he was sitting. She nodded her head. Soon she put the handset down on the bar and made her away across the room to his table.

“Darlin’, are you Ronnie Black?”

“Who wants to know?”

She nodded over her shoulder to the phone lying on the bar. “You got people looking for you.”

Missy pulled her van into Brandi’s driveway and tooted the horn. She waited a few seconds and then saw little Emma at the front window, peeking out between the drapes. Missy waved, which seemed to startle her, because in a flash Emma was gone. Missy honked the horn again, and after a while Angel came out the front door and down the steps. Missy reached over and opened the passenger door for her.

“What’s keeping your sisters?” she said.

“They’re not coming.” Angel got in and slammed the door. “Brandi’s out looking for Dad.”

“Who’s looking after you all?”

“Hannah’s in there with Sarah and Emma.”

Missy looked out at the soft glow of light in the front room window. “So it’s just you and me for 4-H tonight?”

Angel shook her head. “We’re not supposed to. Brandi doesn’t like it that you gave me that iPod.”

“What did she say?

“She wanted to know if Dad knew about it. Then later she said I wasn’t to go to 4-H.”

Missy was disappointed, but more than that she was worried about the girls being alone. “Where’s your dad?”

“No one knows. He didn’t come home.” Angel’s coat was unzipped and she flicked at the zipper tab with her finger. Finally, she stopped fidgeting, and for the first time since she’d gotten into the van she looked fully at Missy and she said in a soft voice, “I think I know why. He’s done something wrong.”

Missy braced herself. Here it is, she thought. The hard thing. “Honey, you’re going to hear some things about your father. Some horrible things.”

Angel didn’t hesitate. “I already know he was at the trailer that night.”

Missy was doing her best not to poison Ronnie for Angel. “No one’s guilty until it’s proven,” she said.

Angel was quiet for some time. She turned away from Missy and kept looking out the passenger-side window of the van. The heater fan blew out hot air. The digital clock pulsed to another minute.

Then Angel said, “I can prove it. I know what happened. I found his knife in the snow behind the trailer.”

“His knife?” Missy reached over and took Angel’s hand. “Honey, he could have dropped it there anytime.”

Angel shook her head. “He was there that night. Mr. Rowe saw him.”

“He told you that?” Missy’s mind was racing. If that knife was proof of what Shooter claimed, that he’d seen Ronnie come out from behind the trailer that night, what else might there be waiting to be proven? She squeezed Angel’s hand. “Honey, I’m right here. Don’t be afraid.”

“But what if he tries to hurt me? What if he tries to hurt all of us?”

Missy leaned over and gathered Angel up into her arms. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She rocked her back and forth. She said, “Shh, shh, honey. Nothing bad can happen. You’re with me now.”

She took Angel into the house and made sure the girls were all right. Emma was trying to spread jelly on a piece of toast. Sarah was standing on her head, her feet up against the living room wall. Hannah was in her room doing homework.

Missy called Laverne Ott, the assistant 4-H leader, and asked her to go ahead and start the meeting without her. She had something to attend to.

The girls hadn’t eaten, so she found some ground beef in the fridge and a can of peas in the cupboard. She looked in the freezer and pulled out a bag of French fries.

“Burgers and fries?” she asked, and that was enough to get Sarah to stop standing on her head and Emma to jump up and down and Hannah to come out of her room. “And peas,” Missy said.

“No peas,” said Sarah. “Peas make me gag.”

“If you want fries, you’ve got to eat your peas.” Missy tapped her finger on Sarah’s nose. “Just pretend they’re candy, and you’ll do fine.”

After supper was done, and Missy was drying the last of the dishes, she heard the front door open, and there was Brandi. The girls were in their rooms doing their homework.

Missy came right to the point. “Do you know what he’s done? Ronnie? How can you be with him?” She’d never said the word before, but she said it now. “A murderer. How can you think he’d be a good father to these girls?”

“None of this is your business,” Brandi said.

But Missy wouldn’t stop. She told Brandi about Shooter’s claim that Ronnie had started the fire. She said Angel had told her about finding his knife in the snow.

Brandi couldn’t bear to hear it. She couldn’t stand to think that he was capable of what people were saying he’d done.

“I don’t want to hear that.” Her voice was trembling. She saw Missy’s coat draped over the arm of the couch. She picked it up and threw it at her. “You’ve got it in for Ronnie and me. That’s plain. Get out of my house. I don’t want you here.”

Missy was calm. She put her on coat and took the time to button it. At the front door, she turned back to Brandi. “I’m going to Sheriff Biggs with this,” she said. “You tell Ronnie he better get a lawyer.”

When she left Brandi’s house, Missy drove to Lois and Wayne’s, and there in the dimly lit living room she told Lois that, as much as it broke her heart to say it, facts were pointing to the possibility that all the rumors were true: Ronnie had started that fire.

“I don’t think the girls should be in that house with him,” she said. “Who knows what else he might do.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Lois. “My grandbabies. It’s just about all I can do to look after Wayne now.”

Wayne was in bed, sick again with the spins, but he could hear Missy and Lois talking in the living room. He said, “I don’t want to lose them to foster care. Missy, come back here.”

The bedroom was dark except for the dim glow of a nightlight plugged into the wall. Lois took Missy’s hand and led her to the side of the bed, where Wayne lay flat on his back, his eyes closed.

Then he opened them to look at her. “Della always thought you’d done well for yourself. Truth is, she envied you more than a little, though I shouldn’t tell you that about her. I know she asked God to forgive her for that, and surely He did.” Wayne closed his eyes, and Missy imagined he was trying to make the room stop spinning. He didn’t open them again. He said, “I’m old, Missy. I’m old and sick. Too old to be raising up those girls, as much as I love them. Della al ways said you had the nicest home, and she always thought the world of Pat. She always said it was a shame you having no kids of your own, because she could see how much love you had in you. That’s why she wanted you and Pat to be godparents to her kids. I know she wouldn’t want her girls with Ronnie and Brandi. I think you know what I’m trying to say. I think Della would want it. That is, if you’re willing. I expect I speak for Lois, too.”

“She told me to go on,” Missy said to Pat, when she was finally home and relating the story. “Lois. She told me we had their blessing.”

All of this happened after Ronnie picked up the phone from the bar at the Kozy Kiln and was surprised to find Brandi on the other end of the line.

“How’d you know I was here?” he asked her.

“I remembered you and I were there once. I figured you might have gone to Brick Chapel to see about that job, and then I just started adding things up.”

Her voice was tight and flat, not the baby-sweet-baby voice he was used to hearing from her.

“That job’s gone,” he said. “You heard about the fire marshal’s report?”

“I heard.” That same flat voice, like he was a stranger to her. “That was no call for you to forget about Emma and Sarah this afternoon. No excuse for you to be there in that bar, making me hunt you down.”

He was ashamed of that fact. He’d been so caught up in his own misery and trouble he’d forgotten how to be a father.

“Baby, I’m sorry.”

A long silence stretched out between them, as if she were on the other side of the world instead of only thirty miles away.

Then finally she said, “Ronnie, you better come home,” and it was clear to him from the way she said it that she wasn’t really sure she wanted him to.

“I’ll be there,” he said. “I love you, Brandi.”

He waited for her to say she loved him too, but there was no response, and finally he figured out that she’d already hung up the phone.