An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [112]
"Did you set fire to the Mark Twain House?" I asked him.
"No," he said.
"I don't believe you," I said. "What about that burn on your hand?"
Thomas removed his hands from his armpits and showed them to me. There, on his right hand, was the burn mark: it was about the size of a quarter, red around the edges, and already starting to scab over. "I got this from the burner on your stove," he said. "You really ought to fix that thing."
"I already did," I said. I knew what he was talking about. A year or two earlier, our stove's front left burner wasn't getting as hot as its three siblings. Anne Marie told me it didn't matter and to leave it alone. This I did not do. I figured it would be easy to fix. I figured it was a loose wire, and so I went inside the stove and loosened and then reconnected the wire to its port, or thought I did. In fact I'd managed to rewire the stove in such a way that the rear left burner didn't work at all, and in fact, when you turned that knob, it managed to heat the front left burner instead. A person who didn't know this about the stove could easily burn himself on it. It could easily happen. I'd promised Anne Marie I would fix it, again, but I never did. I'd never gotten around to it. "So you really didn't try to burn down the Mark Twain House?" I asked.
"No. That's what I told your Detective Wilson, too."
"This was before you told him I was going to New Hampshire, correct?"
"Correct," Thomas said, his teeth starting to chatter a little. He returned his hands to the caves of his armpits, where they'd been hibernating.
"Detective Wilson believed you?"
"I had an alibi," Thomas said, and pointed to my house. "I was here that night."
"All night?" I asked, not really wanting the answer. My heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. I almost took my own shirt off, thinking that maybe the cold would numb the pain and persuade my heart to stay in its cavity, where it belonged.
"All night," Thomas said.
"I don't believe you," I said. "You told Anne Marie that you lied about my cheating on her and she still let you stay all night? Why would she do that? Didn't she want to know why you lied in the first place?"
"Of course she did," Thomas said. "She asked me why in the hell would I lie about you, of all people."
"Oh no," I said.
"It was an excellent question," Thomas admitted. "It deserved an excellent answer."
"Oh no," I repeated.
"So I told her I did it to get back at you for killing my parents."
"You told her the truth," I said.
"That I did," said Thomas. He looked so proud of himself, as though the truth was the thing he'd never thought he'd be able to tell. "But she didn't believe me, not at first. Even when I told her about it in detail, about the Emily Dickinson House and the fire and you going to prison, she didn't believe me."
"She didn't?"
"No, she was convinced you wouldn't have hidden those things from her. `Sam wouldn't do that to me' ― that's what she said." Here he paused, and I watched his pride turn to confusion, as it often does. "I don't get it. She seemed to have really loved you."
"She still does!" I said. "She still does!"
Thomas didn't pay any attention to this, wishful thinking being the easiest kind of thinking to ignore. "So then I told her that if she didn't believe me, she should go talk to your parents."
"Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.
"And that's when she told me what you'd told her: that your parents were killed in a house fire."
"Let me explain," I said. I could tell his low-grade anger was about to turn into pure hatred and rage, the way you can tell when rain is about to turn into one of the colder forms