Superstition

44

They checked into a hotel a few blocks away from Beekman Place. It was illogical, they knew, but they both felt safer surrounded by its bland impersonal trappings than they would have in either Joanna's or Sam's apartment.

Although neither had much appetite, they decided that having dinner would help them get through the evening, so they walked over to the Chinese place on Third where Joanna had been a regular for years. Its familiarity and cheerful service were reassuring.

She recounted her conversation with Roger, Sam nodding thoughtfully, managing a faint smile from time to time.

“It's rare that Roger drinks like that,” he said, “and it's usually when he's trying to get his mind around some puzzle-like one of Sherlock Holmes's ‘three-pipe problems.’”

“Yeah, well, it's at least a three-pipe problem we've got here.”

They turned things over for a while, eventually falling silent in tacit acknowledgment of how little what they said mattered anymore. Events had run away with them, and Sam knew no better than she what they should do now or what might happen next. They walked back to the hotel through the damp November air. Joanna had brought some sleeping pills from her apartment. They each took one, and curled up in each other's arms in the comfortable queen-sized bed.

In the morning they woke early and had finished breakfast in their room by eight. Joanna called her machine for messages, and he checked his. There was nothing of importance.

“I wonder if it's too early to call Roger,” she said, “just to make sure he got back all right.”

“If he's got a hangover, he won't appreciate it.”

“I'd like to anyway,” she said. “I don't know why, but I'm worried about him.”

She dialed his number. The phone rang several times, then a man answered whose voice she didn't know. The moment reminded her so immediately of the morning she'd called Maggie and spoken to her daughter that her heart at once began to beat faster.

“I was calling Roger Fullerton,” she said, her voice faltering slightly. “Is he there? Could I speak with him, please?”

“Could I ask who this is?” said the man on the other end, his tone grave.

Sam saw from her face that something was wrong and hurried to her.

“I'm a friend of Roger's,” she said. “Joanna Cross.”

She could hear the man at the other end speaking to someone else, but as though his hand was over the phone so she couldn't make out the words.

Sam took the phone from her. “Hello?” he said insistently. “Hello? Who am I speaking to, please?”

The man on the other end gave his name. Sam recognized it. He was a senior member of the university administration. Fortunately the two had met on more than one occasion, and he was more prepared to talk to Sam than he would have been to Joanna.

As he listened, Sam lowered himself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, and reached for Joanna's hand.

They took a train from Penn Station and were at Princeton Junction before ten. Instead of waiting for the shuttle they took a cab and were on the campus minutes later. By the time they approached the building in which Joanna had first met Roger many months ago, she knew as much about his death as Sam did.

Apparently there'd been a fire in his room. It had not spread but had remained confined to the room and had died out of its own accord. His body had not been found until morning, less than an hour before Joanna's call.

A fire engine was parked on the grass and a handful of firemen stood around with a faintly puzzled air, as though not sure why they were there. The entrance to the building was guarded by campus security and two members of the Borough Police Department, who were keeping curious onlookers back, but they let Sam and Joanna through when Sam gave his name.

The man they had both spoken to on the phone was called Jeffrey something-she didn't catch his full name. He was tall and wore a gray suit with a blue shirt and tie and had thinning hair brushed straight back. He was clearly badly shaken by what had happened, and glanced anxiously at Joanna as though to suggest this was no place for a woman.

“You can go in,” he said. “The medical examiner's still there, and the police. It's the strangest damn thing you've ever seen.”

Sam turned to Joanna. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked her quietly. “I can go in first, tell you how bad it is.”

She shook her head. “I'd rather do anything but go in there, but I think I have to.”

He slipped his hand under her arm. Someone in a uniform opened the door for them.

The room was exactly as she remembered it-the congenial clutter of books and papers, the photographs and pictures at odd angles on the paneled walls, the computer on the table by the stained-glass windows. Everything was the same, including the leather armchairs they'd sat in that afternoon, empty now-except for Roger's.

As it had been then, it was angled so that a reading lamp stood over it, and there was a table at one side on which were books, a box of the cheroots he smoked occasionally, and a half-finished glass of what looked like whiskey.

But sitting in the chair was a thing beyond description. Charred black from head to foot, it was a hellish effigy of what was once a man. Only one hand and part of an arm, resting loosely on the table by the armchair's side, had escaped the incinerating fire. The material of the sleeve was part of the suit that Roger had been wearing when Joanna last saw him.

She wanted to scream, run, or even faint. But she was frozen by the horror. Her feet wouldn't move, nor would her throat make a sound. She became aware of Sam's arm around her, and her own hands clutching at him as she fought to drag her gaze from the hideous sight before her.

Two forms moved-one that had been kneeling by the corpse, another standing by the wall in shadow, now suddenly outlined against the window. She heard a strange noise, and realized that it came from herself. She hadn't breathed since she entered the room, and now she was gasping for air.

“I'm all right,” she managed to say, letting go of Sam to show that she meant it and could stand unsupported. “I'm all right. What happened to him?”

The man at the window came toward her. “That's what we're trying to figure out. Lieutenant Daniels, Borough Police.”

They introduced themselves. “Roger Fullerton was my old physics professor,” Sam said. “We'd remained close friends. We saw him yesterday. Joanna-Miss Cross-saw him after me. They had a drink together, then he came back here.”

“I arranged a car for him,” she said. “It must have been around seven, seven-fifteen when I left him.”

The detective nodded and made a note. “Sounds about right. I was told he was seen back here by nine.” He looked at them both. “Anything you can tell me? Anything unusual? Any particular state of mind he was in?”

Sam shook his head. “I don't think you're going to find this is suicide, if that's what you mean. Do you mind if I take a closer look?”

“Go ahead.”

He stepped forward. Joanna stayed where she was. The medical examiner looked up at Sam. He was fifty-ish, his face round and pale. There was fear in it.

“Did you ever see anything like this before?” Sam asked him.

“Not in all my born days.”

Sam moved around the back of the chair, then reached out and touched part of the unburned leather near the corpse's shoulder. “No residual heat,” he said. “Did anybody actually see this fire?”

“Nothing was reported until cleaning staff came in this morning,” the man called Jeffrey said from the door.

Sam looked over at him, then back to the medical examiner. “Have you ever heard of SHC-spontaneous combustion in human beings?”

The other man put a hand on his knee and pushed himself to his feet. “I've heard of it, but I don't believe it. People don't just catch fire for no reason.”

“You should read some of the case histories,” Sam said.

“This has all the signs.”

He walked around the far side of the table on which the corpse's arm still rested, coming to a stop in front of the chair, looking down on it and its hideous occupant.

“I don't need to tell you the kind of heat it takes to burn a human body this badly,” he said. “At least three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. And look,” he pointed, “the chair's only burned for a few inches around the body. Nothing on the table caught fire, the carpet isn't even singed.” He looked up. “There's some soot, a thin film, high up on the wall and ceiling. And have you noticed something else? There's no odor. A human body burns like this, there should be a distinctive smell. There's no trace. It wouldn't have evaporated yet.”

“You're only telling me what I know,” the medical examiner said. “I'm sure we'll find some combination of circumstances that'll explain this incident in time. Until then, forgive me if I don't join you in jumping to any unjustified conclusions.”

“Spontaneous human combustion,” Sam murmured softly, as though to himself. “Sometimes known as ‘Fire from Heaven.’”

Lieutenant Daniels ran a hand over his face and rubbed his chin.

“If this fire came from anywhere, it wasn't heaven, Dr. Towne. It was some other place.”

They sat together in a corner of the near empty train car as it rattled back to Penn Station.

Sam glanced at his watch. “Lend me your phone again, will you?” he said.

She handed him her cellular and he tapped in a number; it was the third time he had tried to call Ward Riley since leaving the campus. Still no reply, and no service or answering machine.

“I'll try again when we get in,” he said, handing the phone back to her. “If there's still no reply we'll go straight up there, find out what's happening.”

They had said nothing to Lieutenant Daniels about Adam Wyatt or the experiment in which Roger had been a participant. It would come out later, they knew, and there would be questions about why they had stayed silent. But time enough for all that then. Getting entangled now in a slow-moving police inquiry was the last thing they needed, though what precisely they intended to do next, aside from telling Ward what had happened, they didn't know.

SHC, Sam had told her when they were clear of the building, was thought by some, including Sam himself, to be a form of poltergeist phenomenon: there were many recorded cases of people, children and adults, unconsciously causing fires of extraordinary intensity that caused injury or death to others or to themselves.

“The facts are there, people just have to look at them,” he said. “This is one of those times they're going to have to.”

Joanna shuddered involuntarily and looked out of the window, trying to escape the appalling image that kept flashing in merciless detail into her mind. Sam knew what was happening and took her hand.

“I don't think I'll ever sleep again,” she said.

“You will,” he said. “I promise.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, but dared not close her eyes.

When they stepped off the train at Penn Station, Sam stabbed Ward's number into the cellular again. This time it was answered almost at once. The Chinese manservant's voice was high pitched and distressed.

“You better come, Dr. Towne,” he said. “Mr. Riley leave message for you-and Miss Cross. Come quickly, please.”