Shattered Shell (2 page)

Diane ducked her head, like she didn't want me to see her expression, and she said, "A bit of an improvement. I don't worry now about checking my Volkswagen for bombs every morning, and he’s gotten to at least returning my calls after the third try."

"Oh," I said, not wanting to add anything more, and Diane nudged me with her shoulder and said, "I should get back to work, and make the most of a ruined evening."

"Previous plans?" I asked.

She winked. "A date, and one that was going to be --- if you excuse the pun --- an extremely hot one."

"There's always the weekend."

"Thank God for that." She looked around, perhaps to see if anyone was within earshot, and then she asked, "How goes the column you're writing, on these arsons?"

I shrugged. "About as well as your investigation. We've both been down those same roads, and I don't think either of us is missing anything. But I'm still, um ... I'm still doing the research."

She touched me with a gloved hand, her voice still low. "Glad to hear that. See you later."

Diane walked away, stumbled a bit in the snow, and went over to Sam Keller and his wife and started talking to them. Diane looked good, she looked skilled, and she had been my companion that day when I had bought my EMS parka up north. Yet spending the day on a mountain peak had not changed anything between us, for her heart belonged to another, and that was all right. I walked a bit nearer to the motel. The wind shifted and the smoke was thick for a moment, making my eyes water, and I coughed.

When I was out of the smoke I came up to a man and woman, talking to each other at one end of the unplowed parking lot that belonged to the motel. Paula Quinn, reporter for the
Tyler Chronicle
, gave me a little half-wave, holding her notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. A reporter who carries a pencil in the winter is a good reporter, for the new ones forget that ink can easily congeal in cold weather. Paula was experienced and Paula was good, but in her talks with me, she still expressed the same old frustration of having a big talent in a small town. She had on a black wool coat and red beret that looked nice on her long blond hair but probably didn't do much for giving her warmth. Paula has a bit of pug nose and her ears have a tendency to stick out of her hair just when she wants to look serious, and tonight the poor things were red with cold.

"Glad to see
Shoreline
is being represented here tonight," Paula said, giving me that smile of hers that managed to tickle something deep inside of me. "If the
Chronicle
has to be out here freezing, at least your magazine should be here, too."

"Thanks for the invite," I said. "When did you get here?"

She gestured to the bearded man at her side. "Jerry and I drove in a couple of minutes after they sounded the alarm. Message came over the scanner that this place was going to three alarms."

A little imp of the perverse came to me, that voice that tells you to jump when you're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. This time the voice was telling me to ask Paula just what she and Jerry had been doing before the fire alarm came in, but I managed to resist. I just smiled and said to Jerry, "Getting your fill of pictures?"

The man next to her was wearing a green heavy down jacket, with a bulky camera bag slung over one beefy shoulder. He had on jeans and, like me, Canadian-made Sorrels on his feet. His face and nose were bright red, and his brown hair was almost as thick as his beard. Jerry Croteau, sole photographer for the
Tyler Chronicle
, and a man I was beginning to dislike for no good reason except that he was spending time with Paula Quinn --- both on and off the job. It disturbed me, and it shouldn't have, for I had no formal hold Paula.  Just some pleasant memories and odd hopes. It shouldn't bother me but it did. Sorry for the contradiction.

His smile was almost as wide as his beard. "Got a bunch of great ones we first drove up. It was a hell of a scramble, with the hoses being dragged across the snow, and even though it only took a couple of minutes for the first truck to roll in, the roof was fully involved. Got some great shots of a couple of guys trying to ventilate the roof with axes, with the fire backlighting them. Gonna try to sell them to AP tonight."

“Sounds pretty good."

He nodded enthusiastically. "It does. Paula tells me you might be doing a piece on the arsons for your magazine. Let me know if you need anything. I also shot some color."

There was a smart-aleck remark in there about taking advantage of someone else's misfortune, which I left alone. Instead, I looked at Paula and felt that funny little tug, and wished that I felt comfortable enough to rub those cold ears.

Instead, I played professional and said, "Hear anything about arson tonight?"

She moved her feet, shivered, and said, "Not officially, but you can tell from the way the guys are working. They're tired and I think they're also scared. Firefighters are macho, but they get scared when an arsonist is working. Look at their faces. There's the story there."

There was another crackling and rumbling as another portion of roof caved in. More water was being brought onto the motel and the building was being transformed with each minute. When I had arrived, hard on the heels of the police cruisers and the fire engines, the building with its empty swimming pool in front and the two rows of balconies almost looked majestic, the flames and smoke pouring from the roof, so many men and women working desperately to save it, the lights from the vehicles making the white paint and black shingles look almost new.

But with the center and the roof gone, with the exposed beams and flying shingles and broken glass and hanging wire and pipes, the Rocks Road Motel looked sad and pathetic, like an old woman who had been hit by a car and who was lying dead in the road, pocketbook in her hands, before the EMTs could cover her with a blanket.

Jerry took another picture and shook his head. "Who could blame them for being scared?" he said. "Read once about arsons in New York City. Sometimes the arsonists, they'll cut holes in the floors and cover 'em with linoleum, so the firefighters fall through when they go in. Bad enough to go in a burning building; must be ten times worse when you know someone's busy setting the fires and setting you up."

"True enough," I said. "Good luck in getting the story. It's time for this magazine writer to get going."

Paula nodded and said, "Lunch soon?" and instead of looking at her, I quickly caught a glance of Jerry Croteau, seeing something pass over his face. Maybe it was concern, maybe it was jealousy, and maybe it was just a passing wisp of smoke.

"Sure," I said.  “I’ll call you."

I left the two of them there, and they bent heads together to talk, and I wondered if my name was coming up in the conversation.

It took a few more minutes of walking through the snow and looking at the backs of firefighters' turnout gear before I found the man I wanted. Mike Ahern was sitting on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette. His fire helmet was off and the top of his sweaty head steamed in the cold air. He was writing with some difficulty on a notepad, wearing fingerless gloves, and he looked up at me and went back to work as I came over.

"Wish you'd change your mind about an interview, Mike," I said, standing in front of him. His pullover pants and fire boots were wet and black with soot and debris.

"And why's that?" he said, not looking up again from the pad.

"What advantage would I have in talking with you?"

"Maybe not an advantage to you, but an advantage to others. Readers of my magazine. People in town. This is becoming a story, whether you like it or not."

"Hah." He put down the notepad and stretched. Mike was about as tall as I was, but was easily a foot wider, with thick forearms and hands.  His black hair was trimmed short and was streaked with gray, and on the side of his face, above his left ear, his skin bore the shiny and wrinkly marks of burned skin that had not healed well.

“Let me tell you this:  I don't have to tell you anything," Mike said, removing his cigarette and pointing it at me. "Newspaper writers, maybe.  They’re here in town and taxpayers like to read them, and since the taxpayers have an unholy grip on my balls every budget time, I gotta keep them happy and amused. But not magazines from Boston. I don't owe you, I don't feel like wasting my time with you, and you can't hurt me."

Even without looking, I knew that the battle for the motel's timbers was almost over. The heat on my back from the flames was easing up.  I said, "You're probably right in everything you said, and it’s true I can’t hurt you, but maybe I can help you."

His eyes narrowed at that and he took another drag from his cigarette. I’m not sure why so many firefighters smoke. Maybe it's just fatalism.

Mike said, "Yeah? How? Free subscriptions?"

I shrugged. "Information. Let's just say I do a lot of research for my columns, and not all of my research appears in print."

That seemed to get his attention, and he looked away and said quietly, "This is the fourth major fire in as many weeks, and I’m getting mighty tired. A winter like this, you plan for maybe a couple of suspicious fires, when a guy who runs a restaurant decides to cut his losses and move to Orlando with an insurance check in his back pocket."

Then he looked to me, the light from the flames and the strobes from the fire trucks and police cars making his face look like it was shimmering with some emotion. "But not this time around. This time, it's crazy. No link. None of these guys who owned these hotels had a bad year. But here we are. With four hotels burned to the ground in a month. So far we've been lucky, with nobody getting hurt. They've all been closed for the winter and were empty. But next time?"

Mike stood up from his car and put his fire helmet back on, tugged at the chin strap. "Next time, we might need flatbed trucks here to pull away all the bodies, if our nut friend decides to try his or her hand at a motel with people in it. You say you can help? All right. We'll talk next week, when I catch my breath from this latest disaster."

After some fumbling on my part, I passed over my business card, which lists my name, home phone number and my post office box in Tyler, and my job at
Shoreline
magazine: columnist. I'm not sure if it's against the law to lie on business cards, but so I’ve gotten away with it. The IRS and a few others think being a columnist is all I do, and I've never been one to discourage that fantasy.

Mike Ahern trudged across the snow to meet up with Diane Woods, and I gave her a half-wave as my own thermostat told me it was time to go. I silently wished her luck on her hot date, and then I began to walk away from the rubble that used to be a business that contributed something to this town. Maybe not a big deal as far as disasters went, and I knew that only the local papers might cover it, but for many lives, this was a big story. For those vacationers who came back to the Rocks Road Motel each summer, that place was now gone. For the chambermaids and clerks and short order cooks for its restaurant, their jobs at the Rocks Road Motel were gone. For the other businesses that supplied the motel with towels, soap, and food, one big customer had just been lost.

A lot of losses, all due to a man, woman, or a gang who was having too much fun with flammable liquids and incendiary devices this past month. As I walked to my Range Rover, parked skewed near a snow bank, I passed Sam and Amy Keller, still holding each other, still grieving at seeing so many years of work and effort being reduced to ashes.

For the drive home I took Atlantic Avenue --- also known as Route l-A --- and the road hugged the beaches of Tyler as it headed north. Driving here in winter is always disorienting. It's like going back to your childhood home and seeing a garage has been added and the familiar red paint has been replaced by ugly ivory siding. All along the beach road there were hundreds of empty parking spaces, and except for a set of taillights far ahead, I was the only one on the road.

Six months earlier I would have been in bumper-to-bumper traffic, at a time when fistfights sometimes break out over the privilege of parking near the sands. Instead of nearly a hundred thousand vacationers and moms and dads and kids and bathing beauties of both sexes, I had an empty road, flickering streetlights, closed-up motels and, and beach sand and snow blowing across the pavement.

It was a cloudy night, promising more snow, and I saw not one star as I neared the border between Tyler and North Tyler.  Near that dividing line is a resort motel that stays open year-round, the Lafayette House, and I pulled into the tiny parking lot across the way.  A large sign at the entrance said PRIVATE PARKING FOR LAFAYETTE HOUSE ONLY, and I turned into the lot and went to the north end, passing a few parked cars, BMWs and Volvos. The lot was plowed clean, which wasn't the case for my destination.

At the end of the lot was a low stonewall and an opening where some of the rocks had fallen free. There was a narrow, snow-covered path there, just wide enough for my Rover. The path went to the right past two homemade no-trespassing signs, and my house came into view. It's a two-story house that's one step above a cottage, that’s never been painted, and that has a dirt crawl space for a cellar.  The snow-covered lawn rises up to a steep rocky ledge that hides my home from Atlantic Avenue, and I parked in the sagging shed serves as my garage. Just beyond my house is another outcropping of land called Samson Point, which used to be a Coast Artillery station, and which is now a state wildlife preserve.