The Sugar House

chapter 29

TESS HAD JUST CRESTED THE HILL AT THE TOP OF HER parents’ street when she saw the shower of sparks go up, like the tail end of a low-rent fireworks display.

The roof just went, she thought. Which means the house is gone.

Take the roof, she told whatever deity lurked in the night sky, and I’ll believe in you. Take the house. Take her bedroom, which her mother had turned into a sewing room eight years ago. Take the pine paneled basement, site of all her early forays into vice. Take the sunporch, where she had done her homework in the late afternoon. Take her mother’s carefully chosen furnishings, which matched so perfectly they made Tess’s teeth hurt. Melt the plastic covers on the living room furniture. Take everything, take whatever you need to be appeased.

But please, don’t take my parents. Not yet, not this way.

She saw the body bag first, lying on a gurney, then smelled the sweetish smell she knew from the fires she had covered as a reporter. Funny, she had never asked anyone what that smell was. It was probably insulation, or some other construction material, but Tess had always worried it might be flesh. She knew most people did not actually burn in fires-they died from breathing smoke, they were dead long before flames ever touched them. Still, she had never wanted to know for sure the source of that smell.

A firefighter stopped her, and it was only then she realized she had been running toward the house. Toward the body. “It’s my parents’ place,” she told the rubbery sleeve blocking her path. She kept trying to move toward the body, but the sleeve held her back. Only one body, she saw, only one. Not good enough. She wasn’t prepared to make such a choice.

The firefighter forced her to turn away from the house, to face across the street. She thought he wanted to shield her, but he was trying to get her to look at the neighbor’s lawn, where Patrick and Judith stood, holding on to one another. Their faces were impassive; they might have been watching someone else’s tragedy on the eleven o’clock news. The scene was made only more surreal by the Christmas decorations that surrounded them, an elaborate gingerbread house with grinning gingerbread men who twisted on mechanized bases. Six-foot candy canes, illuminated from within, lined the walkway.

Tess felt as if she had wakened from the worst nightmare of her life and found her parents at the foot of her bed, smiling, reassuring her.

The only difference was that their house continued to burn.

“Mommy,” Tess said, running across the street. “Daddy.”

They opened their little circle to her, and now they were all three clutching one another. Tess finally understood what it meant to hold on to someone for dear life.

“I never really liked that house,” her father said. “All these years, I never really liked it.”

They laughed, a little shakily, but they laughed. The smoking shell was a more traumatic sight for her than it was for her parents, even if they were the ones who still lived there. Tess had never known another home. She had gone from there to college, from college to an apartment on the North Side of Baltimore, and then to her little place at the top of Kitty’s building. But none of those had been home. In her mind, this white frame Colonial was the only house in the world, the place she thought of when she heard the word home. She had known it wouldn’t always belong to her family. In fact, she had thought her parents silly to cling to such an oversized place. But she had assumed the house would always be here, that she would have the rest of her life to drive by this spot and measure herself against the girl she had been fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago.

She knew too well that people died, but she had thought houses lived forever.

Crow arrived, alerted by Jackie, who had taken Esskay home when Tess went racing into the night. He didn’t try to join the circle of family, but stood respectfully apart, quiet and subdued.

“Arson,” he said after a while, and it wasn’t a question. He pointed with his chin at the investigators who were beginning to examine the scene.

“Where were you?” Tess asked her parents. “How is it that you weren’t here when it started?”

“We had an errand, then some dumb Christmas party,” her father said. “The woman from your mother’s work, who makes that awful eggnog.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking eggnog anyway,” Judith said. “You have to watch your cholesterol. Not to mention what can happen eating raw eggs.”

Their house seemed to sigh and settle just then, as if to remind them cholesterol and salmonella were not the only threats to one’s longevity.

“Why would someone want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“It might not be arson,” Patrick said, but he didn’t sound convinced. There was, after all, the matter of a body on his front lawn. “The wiring’s always been a little off.”

The fire captain came over to them.

“If it hadn’t been for the wind tonight, we might have been able to save it. As it is, I’m afraid it’s a total loss.”

“That’s okay,” Patrick said. “I’ve got everything I need right here.” He hugged Judith and Tess closer to him. “Do you know what happened, though? I mean, the body you found-”

“We think he was an intruder. There’s glass inside the house, from where a pane on the kitchen door was broken. The fire appears to have been started there, and that’s where we found him when we arrived. The M.E. is going to have to autopsy him. My guess is he slipped on the gasoline he had spread and knocked himself out while trying to get away from the very fire he started.”

“An intruder?” Patrick asked. “You mean a burglar?”

“Well, he didn’t take anything out of the house, as far as we can tell. We’re assuming it’s his car we found parked in the alley, although we won’t be able to make a positive ID until he’s in the medical examiner’s office. Car could be stolen, for all we know, but police say they have no report, not yet.”

Tess asked, “Did you check the registration?”

“Eugene H. Fulton, address on Erdman. Mean anything to you?”

The name seemed to float above their heads, another piece of charred debris from the fire. Gene Fulton. Her father’s colleague. The liquor board inspector with the side gig at Domenick’s.

“Why would Gene Fulton want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“I don’t know,” Pat said, looking at Tess. “What do you think, Tess? You got any theories about why Gene Fulton would be holding a grudge against me?”

Her mouth was dry, her throat raw from the smoke and the cold. “I’m not sure.”

The case was like a stray cat, she thought to herself. She kept trying to take it farther and farther away from herself and her family, only to come home and find it on the doorstep every night.

“You didn’t stop, did you? I asked you to do this one thing for me, I begged you. I told you that you were in over your head, and you still couldn’t listen to me.”

“No one knew what I was doing,” Tess said. “I was careful, I swear.”

“Why were you doing anything at all, Tess?” Her father’s voice was even, emotionless, and she realized he was as angry as she had ever seen him. “What’s really at stake here? The death of some glue-sniffing turd, a spoiled rich girl who ran away from all the help her parents were trying to give her, so she could be a whore in Southwest Baltimore.”

“I don’t think Gwen Schiller was-”

“A whore,” Patrick repeated. “A whore who was killed by a junkie, and then someone killed him in prison, which is what he deserved. So what? Why are their lives worth so much to you, and mine so little? I’m homeless and I’ll be jobless before they get through with me. This was a warning, a little bonfire to scare you off, and it got out of control. But just because Gene’s dead from his own stupidity doesn’t mean it won’t get leaked, what I did all those years ago. Did for you, Tess. Only for you.”

Judith looked genuinely confused. So he had held her harmless, too, fed her the same bullshit story about the scholarship.

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I never meant for this to come back on you. I thought-”

“You thought you could do whatever you wanted to. You always have. Did I ever give you any grief for the decisions you made? Did I mind that you went off to some overpriced fancy college and majored in English? Did I ever ask you to get a real boyfriend, or even a real job, one where you don’t sit in a car all day taking photographs of people cheating on their spouses and insurance companies? Everything I did, I did for you. By the way-” he pulled a rectangular jewelry box from his pocket. “This is what I was doing tonight. This was my errand. We went to see your Uncle Jules, because he gave us a deal on your Christmas present. You don’t have to open it, I’ll tell you what’s inside. It’s a watch, a goddamn gold watch because I knew even if you made it fifty years at your crappy little business, there’d be no one to give you anything. Merry fucking Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.”

Her father walked away and Judith, after one anguished look back at Tess, followed him. The fire captain interceded, began asking them questions, wanted to know if they needed a place to stay this evening. Do you have any family? Oh yes, plenty, Judith replied. Tess just stood where she was. It was bitter cold, she realized. But then it was December, it should be cold. The gingerbread men continued to twist in the wind. The gingerbread house had a gumdrop for a door knob. It was December. It was Christmas. It was cold.

Crow held her, angry not on his behalf, but on hers.

“He shouldn’t have said what he did. He’ll regret it. You were trying to do the right thing. One day he’ll understand that.”

“They could have died,” she said. “My parents could have been killed because of me.”

“Not even your father believes they were trying to kill him. Gene Fulton broke in while they were out. He wasn’t going to hurt them.”

“Not this time,” Tess said. “But what happens next? Last week it was Hilde. Tonight it was my parents’ house. Tomorrow it could be my parents. Or you. Or Jackie and Laylah. Or Whitney.” Tess realized she couldn’t begin to name all the people she loved, all the people who might be hurt in order to punish her. Such a list should have made her feel warm and happy, rich in relations. Tonight, all it made her feel was vulnerable.

“So what are you going to do, Tess?”

“The only thing I can do. Make a deal.”