Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [47]
Emily reached out and embraced him, the ribs in her back prominent under his palms. As always, she was spry and remarkably pretty.
Emily embraced him for a long time. “You are so tense, John.”
“Am I? It must be the dampness from living on the lake.”
Once they were ensconced in Finney’s living room, he offered Emily a seat and a drink, both of which she declined. Dimitri eyed her warily from across the room, prepared to bolt at any sudden move.
“You’ve done a lot with this place. It’s going to look nice,” she said.
He glanced around. He’d taken the carpet up and hadn’t replaced it, exposing a wooden floor scarred with nail holes and scratches. There were tools scattered in the corner, a skill saw on the floor behind the couch, and next to one wall, unpacked cardboard boxes. The trim had been removed from around the doorways and windows where he had yet to paint. “I’m a little behind schedule. It should look better in about . . . twenty years.” He tried to laugh. It came out as half-burp and half-chuckle.
“No. I can see it’s going to be quite nice.” They were quiet for a few moments.
It was odd to be alone with her because the Cordifis clan had always done everything in clusters, the rowdy Christmas parties and the annual spring trip to Hawaii en masse. He could count on one hand the times he’d been alone in a room with Emily, mostly this past summer when they’d fallen into a reversal of roles, she striving to console him over her husband’s death, he desperately inconsolable.
She’d aged. Her once-steady eyes had a haunted look. She’d given up whatever it was she’d done to keep her skin youthful, and her face was a skein of wrinkles, bags ballooning under her eyes. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“I still expect to hear his voice booming up from the workshop in the basement, ‘When’s the eats, Babe?’ You know what bothers me more than anything? The house is so quiet.”
“I wish—”
“I know you do, John, but he’s in the Lord’s hands.” She sighed and let the silence widen around them like oil on a pool of water. After a few moments she said, “I’ve come to ask a favor.”
“Anything you want, Emily. Anything at all. You know that.”
Her eyes had a liquid sheen, seemed almost to glow in the dim light. “As a courtesy, I suppose, I was given one of the first copies of the fire department’s report, which won’t come out officially until sometime next week. I want you to read it, see if you can spot any inconsistencies, anything that doesn’t make sense.”
“Emily, you know I’d do anything for you, but I’m not sure—”
“They’re talking about units taking lines here and there and hydrant pressure and vertical ventilation, and I try to put this together with the story you and others told me, and I just get confused.” She pulled the report out of the tote bag she was carrying and handed it to him. It was the size of a small phone book, its heading in bold, black ink: SEATTLE FIRE, JUNE 7, 2000. “I need to know exactly how this relates to what you saw and remember, John. I need us to talk about this.”
“Emily, I’d do anything for you, but I don’t know if I’m the person you want for this.”
“You’re the only person, John. Bill said you had the best natural instincts of any firefighter he’d ever worked with. He told me if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you for the truth. He said you would know.”
“He said that?”
“Many times.”
Finney wondered if Bill had had a premonition he was going to die.
He wanted to help her, but what was she going to think after he was charged with arson? And he would be charged. He couldn’t tell her and he couldn’t turn her down.
“I’ll need some time.”
“Just read it and get back to me when you’ve come to a conclusion. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but it all seems so artificial, like a huge construct. It should be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some sort of meaning, but it’s just a bunch of loosely assembled facts that don’t jibe. At least not