St. Albans Fire

Chapter 4

Gunther stepped back into The Cuttses’ front hall and paused before the open living room door, again listening for telling sounds. Unlike the first time, there was no crying or murmured consoling. Only silence.

He approached the threshold and peered inside. A worn-looking couple, no older than he but certainly more battered, sat beside one another on a sagging couch facing a blank TV. It was a rough-and-tumble room, clearly decorated to absorb whatever human tornado might pass through it, from riotous small children to a Super Bowl party. The floor was bare wood aside from two old, thick rugs, the furniture sturdy and functional, and the walls covered with photographs and crayon drawings. Here and there, in an ornate lamp or a dark oil painting, were signs of family heirlooms, but otherwise, the room’s history reflected only the present-a point in time now as potentially stalled as the silent grandfather clock in the corner.

Calvin and Marie Cutts sat hand in hand, quiet and dryeyed, pale and drawn, like two weary travelers awaiting transport at a bus station.

Gunther stepped inside the room. “Mr. and Mrs. Cutts? My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m with the police.”

Calvin Cutts rose quickly to his feet, a strained smile on his face, extending his hand in greeting. “Call me Cal. I’m not big on formalities.”

“Same here,” Gunther replied. “I’m Joe.”

Cutts indicated his wife, who stayed resolutely staring at the darkened TV set. “This is Marie.”

Joe nodded toward her, delivering the sad, appropriate, but curiously tinny phrase “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Would you like to have a seat?” Calvin asked, touching the edge of an armchair off to one side of the couch. “Or maybe a cup of coffee?”

Gunther accepted the seat, saying, “No, thanks. Your son-in-law already offered. Nice guy.”

Cutts resumed his seat next to his wife, who still didn’t seem to have noticed Joe’s arrival. “We’re very proud of Jeff. We and Linda both got lucky when he joined the family.”

Joe smiled broadly. “Yeah. He told me the story. That must’ve been a little surprising when he and Linda got together.”

But Cal shook his head pleasantly. “Most natural thing in the world. Didn’t surprise me in the least.”

“Did me,” Marie said shortly, not moving her eyes.

Both men hesitated, then Cal laughed carefully. “Well, I wasn’t bothered at all. You could tell they had eyes for each other from the moment he found us. Part of me wonders why it took as long as it did to surface. Guess they had to work out the ‘are we brother/sister or not?’ part first.”

His wife snorted.

Calvin looked a little tense. “After that, it didn’t take long. Anyhow, what can we do to help?”

Joe was still thinking how best to approach them. For his purposes, this was hardly ideal-both of them together, tangled in grief and something older and more complicated that he knew nothing about. He wished he could find a way to split them up, preferably remaining with the man.

“To begin with, I just wanted to repeat how sorry I am to be meeting under these circumstances. I and everyone involved in this case will do everything we can to move things along quickly.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and gave it to Calvin Cutts. “If anything comes up you’d like to talk about along the way, no matter how small, don’t hesitate to call.”

The farmer slipped the card into his breast pocket after studying it politely for a moment. “Thank you. Don’t worry about us, though. You just do your job.”

Joe nodded. “We will, and please tell your daughter the same thing-anything at all. Where is she, by the way? I sort of thought she’d be here with you, or with her husband.”

“She went upstairs,” Cutts said without further explanation.

“She all right?”

Marie Cutts finally looked straight at him, her eyes narrow with anger. “Her brother was just burned to death. No, she’s not all right. Are you the idiot who’s supposed to catch who did this? God help us.”

“Marie,” her husband cautioned.

“I understand how you feel, Mrs. Cutts,” Joe began.

“Oh, spare me,” she cut him off sharply. “And can the sympathy. You don’t know us from Adam’s off ox. This is your job, and if we’re lucky, your ambition will give us what we want, which is the son of a bitch who burned my son alive.”

“Maybe you should check on Linda,” Cal suggested gently.

“Check on her yourself,” came the quick reply. “This man wants answers. I’m going to give them to him.”

Cutts looked at a loss, suddenly on the hooks of his own suggestion.

“Go on,” she ordered him. “You’re wasting time.”

Hesitantly, he rose to his feet, smiling awkwardly at Joe. “Maybe a good idea. She’s taken this pretty hard. I won’t be long.”

His heart sinking, Joe conceded. “Take however long you need.”

They both waited until Calvin had left the room.

“What do you want to know?” Marie Cutts demanded.

Joe took the direct route, hoping it might earn him some small amount of credit. “For one thing, I’d like to reconstruct the last hours of Bobby’s life-maybe find out why he was out there in the middle of the night.”

“He went up to his room early, mooning about that tramp he was stuck on, and that’s the last we know.”

“What made you aware the barn was on fire?”

She made a sour face. “You think sixty cows and the barn they’re in burn without a sound? Mister, you haven’t lived till you’ve heard that.” She tapped her temple. “That’ll stick in my head till I die, ’cause somewhere in the middle of it, I’ll always think my son was calling for help, with no one to hear him. You don’t think that’s a mother’s nightmare, you’re stupider than I thought.”

Gunther sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his placid demeanor hiding the anger he now showed in his voice. “Mrs. Cutts, if you want me to stuff the sympathy and act like someone who’s just punching the clock, fine. But do me a favor. You stuff the attitude. I don’t need a lesson in heartbreak from you, ’cause you know absolutely nothing about me.”

Marie Cutts’s mouth opened in shock. For a long, measured moment, she said nothing. Joe waited, wondering how this version of a splash of cold water would work.

Finally, she pursed her lips, frowned, looked down at her hands for a slow count of five, and then glanced up-serious, honest, and for the first time, vulnerable.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. It was the noise that woke us up. I called 911 as Jeff and my husband ran out, but it was already too late. We couldn’t even free the animals. It seemed like the fire was everywhere. And that sound…”

Joe spoke softly. “Do you know of anyone, for any reason, who might have wished this on you?”

Her hands clenched tighter in her lap, but her eyes remained on his. “So it was set?”

He hedged. “We’re making that presumption so as not to miss anything.”

She shook her head. “People are so crazy nowadays. What’s it take to push them over the edge? Not getting a parking place or not wanting to wait in line any longer? I don’t know. We do our work, we mind our own business. It’s not like in the city, where people get on each other’s nerves.” She suddenly waved at the view out the window, similar to the one he and Jeff had shared earlier. “Look. We can’t even see our neighbors. We might as well be living on the moon.”

Joe let her calm down a few seconds before suggesting, “But you don’t live on the moon. You have neighbors, you belong to the dairy co-op, you interact with people in town. What’s the farm’s financial situation?”

She sighed. “Like everybody else’s. You borrow money against the year’s production, and then you keep your fingers crossed you’ll have something to produce. We have good years and bad. I heard the average farmer’s income in the U.S. is like twenty thousand a year, net. That fits us, if nothing falls on our head. This last year wasn’t too bad. But we have debts, if that’s what you’re asking. Cal and Jeff work all summer baling other people’s hay, to tilt the balance a little, ’cause Cal’s got the equipment for it when most others don’t.”

“And Jeff’s still set to take over when you and Cal retire?”

She looked surprised. “Where did you…?” Her voice then flattened, catching him off guard, and she turned away. “Oh, you were talking to him. Yes, that’s right.”

He studied her staring at the blank TV again. Her tone had turned hostile, as when the topic of Jeff Padgett marrying Linda had come up.

“You don’t seem very happy about it,” he said quietly.

Her eyes didn’t move. “It’s not my farm.”

Ouch, he thought, and pursued this new vein, taking an only slightly educated guess. “And it wasn’t going to be Bobby’s, either?”

She cut him an angry look. “What’s your name again?”

“Joe Gunther.”

“Well, Mr. Joe Gunther, if you want me to clean up my attitude, then you can stay the hell out of our private business. Bobby’s death has nothing to do with who gets what in this family. You do not get a free pass to poke around, leastwise not from me.”

Joe nodded. “Fair enough. You made it pretty clear you weren’t super fond of the girl Bobby was dating.”

“Marianne Kotch is a slut; that’s why.”

“How rocky could things get between them? I gather they had their ups and downs.”

Marie Cutts looked scornful. “Jeff tell you that? He’s just jealous. Probably wishes Linda wore tight clothes and no bra, too.”

“Is it true, though?”

“They weren’t happy,” she conceded. “Marianne tried to dump him once. I don’t know how they were doing lately, but my guess is, she was putting him through hell. I warned him about her, but that’s all he needed to make a big deal out of it. I even caught her in the supermarket parking lot, not long ago, making out with some long-haired greasy guy in a car. She was all over him. I told Bobby, like it would make any difference. I swear that half his interest in that girl was just to spite me.”

“You know who the greasy guy was?”

“No. I mean, I’ve seen him around. He’s a St. Albans kid. No good.”

“You have a name?”

Her eyes narrowed again. “What is it with you? We’re talking about a teenage whore making out in the parking lot. Who cares? You think either one of them killed Bobby? They know how to do one thing, and it isn’t striking matches, unless it’s to light a joint.”

Joe just watched her in silence.

Losing the staring contest, she looked away again. “It was John Frantz’s boy. I don’t know his name. Frantz runs a feedstore in town. You can find out that way.”

“How did Bobby react when you told him?”

“I didn’t actually tell him who it was. He pretended like he knew anyhow. Said he and Marianne had already talked about it, but I could tell he was lying. I saw the hurt in his eyes.”

“Would he have confronted this boy, do you think, had he known who he was?”

“I wish he had,” she said hotly. “Bobby would have kicked his skinny ass.”

“But he didn’t, as far as you know?”

“No,” she admitted mournfully. “Bobby was too much like his father that way. Not much of a fighter.”

As if on cue, Calvin Cutts appeared at the doorway, his expression telling Joe that he’d overheard-and that he was used to it. “Linda’s asleep, finally,” he said quietly, regaining his seat beside his wife. He reached out to take her hand again, but she moved it away.

Gunther kept focused on Marie. “What about Barry Newhouse? Jeff told me Marianne dumped him and used Bobby to rub it in. Barry lives nearby, doesn’t he?”

Marie turned on her husband, rather than answering. “Would you tell your fair-haired boy to mind his own business? He’s been shooting his mouth off with all sorts of crap about Bobby’s love life, none of which will have anything to do with the price of eggs in the end, assuming there is an end.”

She stood up abruptly, her husband’s return clearly triggering the fury she’d been barely controlling so far. “My son was just killed,” she addressed Cal, “along with your entire herd. Everything we worked for, saved for, everything we sacrificed for, is a pile of ashes. And what are we doing? We’re letting a cop give us the third degree based on a bunch of gossip from Jeff Precious Padgett.”

She’d been pacing the floor during this diatribe, and now came to a dead stop in the middle of the room, finally rendered motionless by her outrage. Her arms stiff by her sides, her fists clenched, she tilted her head back and yelled at the ceiling, “Goddamn you all,” before storming out the door, slamming it behind her. The two men stared at the door in silence before Calvin Cutts said in a soft voice, “This is hard on her.”

Joe shifted his glance to him, aware that he was speaking of far more than their son’s death.

“And maybe a bit on you, too?”

“Yeah,” Cal said softly. “A bit.”