Like something tossed into the ocean, and now a wave washes up on my little stretch of the beach. Life giving you back something you don't deserve.
Don't get carried away, he thinks. Take a step away from yourself. She's not back because she loves you; she's back because she needs you.
Because there was a fire and her sister died.
He gets a spare blanket from the hall closet and puts it over her.
Her story doesn't change a thing. Pam had a history of alcoholism, a history of pills. Her blood tested positive for both.
Nothing Letty says can change that story.
The only thing that can really tell the story, Jack knows, is the fire.
41
Fire has a language.
It's small wonder, Jack thinks, that they refer to 'tongues of flame,' because fire will talk to you. It will talk to you while it's burning — color of flame, color of smoke, rate of spread, the sounds it makes while it burns different substances — and it will leave a written account of itself after it's burned out.
Fire is its own historian.
It's so damned proud of itself Jack thinks, that it just can't help telling you about what it did and how it did it.
Which is why first thing the next morning Jack is in the Vales' bedroom.
He stands there in that dark fatal room and he can hear the fire whispering to him. Challenging him, taunting him. Like, Read me, you're so smart. I've left it all here for you but you have to know the language. You have to speak my tongue.
It's okay with me, Jack thinks.
I speak fluent fire.
Start with the bed.
Because Bentley called it the point of origin and because that's just what it looks like.
They had to scrape her off the springs.
In fact, Jack can see the traces of dried blood on the metal. Can smell the unmistakable smell of a burned body.
And the bedsprings themselves — twisted, congealed. It takes a hot fire to do that, Jack knows. This kind of metal only starts to melt at 2,000 F
That's the fire telling you, I'm bad, baby. I'm a badass fire and I did her in the bed.
Then there's the hole in the roof. What's known in the trade as a BLEVE, a boiling liquid evaporation explosion. Also known as a chimney effect. The fire ignites at the point of origin, and the superheated gases rise and form a fireball. The fireball hits the ceiling and boom. Which certainly means that something hot and heavy happened around the bed. Fire saying, I'm so bad you can't even keep me in the room, Jack. I'm so big and bad I have to fly. Break out, baby. Show my stuff to the sky.
Jack looks down and sees where Bentley dug through the ashes on the floor by the left side of the bed, and he can see the vodka stain — the spalling — literally burned into the wood floor. He can see some shards of smoked, oily glass, including the neck of the bottle.
He can see where Bentley got his theory.
But the lazy bastard just stopped there. Saw an Insta-Answer and grabbed at it so he could start packing for the big fishing trip.
So Jack keeps looking.
Not only because he thinks Bentley is a cretin, not only because of Letty's story, but also because it's just laziness to repeat someone else's work. That's where mistakes — if indeed there is a mistake here — get perpetuated. One lazy bastard after another copying each other's work.
A circle jerk of error.
So start again.
Start from scratch with no preconceptions and listen to the fire.
The first thing that the fire is telling him is that it burned a whole lot of stuff in this room, because Jack's standing in char up to his ankles. He clips his Dictaphone inside his shirt and starts talking notes.
'Note ankle-deep char,' Jack says. 'Indicates the probability of heavy fuel load. Whether primarily live load or dead load I can't tell at this point.'
The heavy char tells Jack something else he isn't going to speak into the tape. Usually heavy char means a hot, fast fire, simply because it shows that fire had the chance to burn a lot of stuff — fast — before the Fire Department could get there and put it out.
So the next thing he looks at is the char pattern.
If fire has a language, then the char pattern is its grammar, its sentence structure, its subject-verb-object. And the sentences this pattern is banging out are like Kerouac on speed, because it's like verb-verb-verb, it's talking about a fire that was moving, man, not stopping for periods or commas or nothing.
Jack's thinking that this fire was rolling. Because Jack's looking at what's known in the business as 'alligator' char. It looks like what it sounds like, the skin of an alligator. What happens is that a hot fire moves fast. It burns quickly and moves on, so it leaves sharp lines of demarcation between what it burns and what it doesn't. Turns out looking like alligator skin.
The hotter the fire, the faster it burns, the bigger the alligator you got.
Jack's looking at one big alligator here.
He scans the charred remains of what had been the expensive white-and-gold wallpaper, which is going to cost a bundle to replace, and he questions whether this wallpaper, pricey as it was, was sufficient fuel to feed this hungry an alligator.
He doesn't say that into the tape recorder, though. He keeps those thoughts to himself. What he says into the recorder is, 'Moving along the west wall of the bedroom, I observe large, alligator-type char.'
Observing it's one thing, recording it's another, because the room is black, and black photographs like nothing. So Jack hauls out his portable flash unit and starts 'painting' the room with the light.
He stands in one corner and looks through the camera viewfinder as he moves the light out from one wall toward the center of the room. He observes where the light fades so he knows where he'll need to start for the next shot. He snaps his shots — color and black-and-white — and then moves the flash in toward the center of the room. Then he moves to another corner and repeats the process and so on and so forth until he has the room covered. He jots down a note for every shot he takes and speaks what he's doing into the tape recorder.
Then he draws a rough sketch of the room and notes where he was standing for each shot and what part of the room the shot covered. So when the smart-ass lawyer asks him, 'You don't really know that you were standing in the southwest corner when you took this photograph, do you?' Jack can whip out the notebook and say, 'Actually I do, counselor, because it's my practice to make notes of my location when…'
Because the point is, Jack thinks, that you have to do it every time. Take your time, do it right, go on to the next task.
So the next thing he does is measures.
Gets out a steel tape and measures the dimensions of the room and notes certain 'landmarks' from which he can triangulate. He has a number of marks to do it from, because the big furniture in the room left heat shadows.
Pale marks on the wall — reverse silhouettes, if you will — where the heavy furniture shielded the wall from the initial flashover. So he uses two of the heat shadows as triangulation points and moves on, goes back to listening to the fire.
What else does the fire have to say?
The char on the rafters.
Same thing, alligator char on the wood, sharp lines of demarcation between the bottom edge of the rafters,
