I felt bad about it all, standing there looking at the sign Ben had stuck in his lawn for his daughters: "SANTA, STOP HERE. KATHIE AND KRISTIE HAVE BEEN GOOD ALL YEAR."
"Not sure I follow you, three feet off the ground." Rod had that puzzled look he gets sometimes when I forget that he can't be as inside my head as I am.
"Football. Ben was the running back for Hart High. For a big guy he could jump."
He nodded, hugged me again, headed me toward the blackened house.
"So what's Barclay Ober doing here?" I pointed at the Mercedes across the street. Barclay was a local, around my age, but rich, really rich. He'd married my sister.
"Ober called it in." Rod and I looked at the man in the hundred-thousand-plus car as he finished his cell phone call. "Said he was driving by, dropping his son off at a friend's, saw flames shoot out of the basement window, Ben's car was in the drive, so he called 911."
"He didn't try to get in the house, do something maybe?" I don't like Barclay Ober. My sister Gina would have been 31, like Barclay, two years older than I am, but she'd died a week before her 26th birthday. Cancer. My nephew Clay, her son, was 8 years old when she died. We had to drag him out of my dad's attic to take him to the funeral. I found out Barclay was cheating on Gina the last year of her life.
I looked at the burnt front door, hacked off its hinges, thrown over the juniper shrubs. Rod said, "Barclay tried to get in but it was locked. He broke a window and was about to crawl through, when the whole thing just blew. With the wind, it went fast."
"Yeah? So he sat in his Mercedes."
"Okay, well, let's give him a break, Jamie."
I headed toward the car. Barclay saw me and waved like we'd run into each other at the beach. But then he drove quickly away, though I suspected he knew I was coming over to talk to him.
Nobody had been able to reach Ben's wife Megan. The woman next door said the two Tymosz girls had gone to a birthday party with her daughter. The neighbor was going to take them over to Ben's mother's house until we could find Megan and tell her the news.
The house stank of burnt furniture. I recognized most of the volunteer firemen dragging it out of the living room. There were too many stuffed chairs and couches, most of them velour. Too many knickknacks. Framed family photos. Dozens of kitschy clocks (one of a lighthouse, one of Betty Boop). Assorted teddy bears now wearing Santa hats. A burnt spruce tree, 10 feet tall, ornaments and lights melted to the branches, lay on the wet carpet of the pine-paneled family room. Already at its base, piles of wrapped presents, safe in fire-retardant metallic paper. A recliner in front of a huge television. Dinner on a tray on the seat. Sausage and pepperoni pizza.
I looked down into the black hole that had been the basement. The bottom of the steps and most of the rail were burnt completely away.
I asked Rod, "Are you here because they suspect something?" As chief of detectives, he headed all divisions, including arson. "Insurance? Fire got out of hand?"
"No. Just checking. Looks like an accident." If things had to go wrong, Rod preferred them to be accidents. He'd come to Gloria after ten years in Center City Philadelphia, where over the years he'd headed a police crisis negotiation team, and served as a field training officer (teaching new recruits), and then worked at the job that burned him out and brought him to a small town where he had some distant relatives. He'd been running a South Philly youth bureau (dealing with criminal offenders 17 or younger). Just hearing his stories was rough.
Our volunteer fire marshal came over. He had a report ready to write up about what they figured had happened to Ben.
One of the giant stars on the Tymosz roof blew, shorting out the reindeer lights. Inside, the house went dark. Ben lost ESPN from the overload; according to the neighbor, the lights blew almost every Christmas. He felt in the dark, lit a couple of holiday candles, headed for the basement circuit breaker box, tripped on something at the top of the stairs, fell, kicked over a can of lawnmower gas. He was knocked out and the fire had a field day in the combustible junk heaped against the basement walls.
Rod signed off on how G.V.F.D. (Gloria Volunteer Fire Department) was going write up its report and then the marshal went away.
I didn't like the theory. "Why wouldn't he get a flashlight?"
Rod shrugged. "Maybe he couldn't find one. Those dumb Christmas candles were all over the place."
"You're going with accident?"
"Accident, Jamie."
"I didn't tell you this, but Ben called me out of the blue yesterday, wanted to talk to me tomorrow."
"About what?"
