An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [44]
A confession: my mother never let me read detective novels when I was a child, not even child detective novels. Once, when my mother caught me reading an Encyclopedia Brown book (it was, I believe, about the neighbor's cat and who had caused it to go missing), she confiscated it and said, "If you want to read a mystery, read this." She handed me Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, which, as far as I could tell, was not a mystery but instead a book about black people who weren't, and white people who weren't, either, and an outcast New York fingerprinter and some Europeans and Virginians in Missouri, and the only mystery as far as I was concerned was how these non-Missourians got to the state in the first place, and why they then stayed there for as long as they did.
My point: if I'd ever read a real detective novel, about a real mystery, then maybe I'd have known what to do next. Instead I muddled through the best I could. I seemed to remember hearing, or maybe seeing on TV, that detectives drank impressively, even (especially) while on the case. So I had a drink, the last beer in the fridge, left over from the previous night's family binge. While drinking, I thought about who might possibly have set fire to the Bellamy House. Thomas Coleman was the first person I thought of, obviously. I knew he was going to make more and greater trouble for me, and maybe this was it. He would burn down the Bellamy House and somehow blame it on me. But then again, how would he even know someone wanted me to burn down the Bellamy House in the first place? After all, the letter was here, in my shirt pocket; I patted it to make sure.
But if not Thomas Coleman, then who? Could it have been Mr. Harvey Frazier himself? After all, he'd been waiting such a long time, and maybe he felt he couldn't wait anymore. Or maybe it was someone else entirely, someone I obviously hadn't yet thought of. I didn't know, but I decided to visit Mr. Harvey Frazier and find out. How I would find out, I had no idea. Again, if I'd read the right books, I might have known how to be a proper detective. And if I hadn't quit my job at Pioneer Packaging and had something else to do, then maybe I would have been too busy to try to be one. And if I hadn't been all alone, if there had been someone else in the house, then maybe they would have warned me: maybe they would have told me not to go near the Edward Bellamy House, just to stay put and not go anywhere.
But then again, maybe that's who a detective is: someone with nothing else to do but act like a detective and with no one around to tell him not to.
MR. HARVEY FRAZIER of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was awfully cagey for an old guy and pretended not to recognize me or my name at first. And he was old, at least eighty, and spooky, too, because he opened his door just as I was ready to knock on it, as if he were expecting me right at that moment. Even though I was startled, I managed to say, "Sir, it's me, Sam Pulsifer," then unclenched my knocking fist and extended my hand for Mr. Frazier to shake. He didn't shake it; instead he said, "I was about to walk," and then he did, right past me and down the street. He was difficult to read, all right, and suddenly I wanted not only to know whether he'd set the fire or not, but also to know him, to really know why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn't known anyone else ― not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids ― and you could