The Sugar House

“They’re my parents.”

“Their house is on fire.”

Because she was still holding Laylah, Tess did not cry out or rush for the door. Denied reflexive action, she had a moment to think. She wished she hadn’t. Thinking was highly overrated.

“Herman-why all this effort to get a house fire in on deadline? That’s pretty mundane by the Blight’s standards, isn’t it?”

Herman Peters asked questions, he was not used to answering them. She could practically feel him squirming at the other end of the phone line.

“I’m not…It’s just that…”

Her voice low, in deference to Laylah, she repeated herself. “Why are you working a house fire?”

“Because-because it’s a fatality, too. They took a body out. I’m sorry, Tess, but we heard it on the scanner. There’s a body, they’ve called in arson, and they’re saying it’s a suspected homicide.”

chapter 29

TESS HAD JUST CRESTED THE HILL AT THE TOP OF HER parents’ street when she saw the shower of sparks go up, like the tail end of a low-rent fireworks display.

The roof just went, she thought. Which means the house is gone.

Take the roof, she told whatever deity lurked in the night sky, and I’ll believe in you. Take the house. Take her bedroom, which her mother had turned into a sewing room eight years ago. Take the pine paneled basement, site of all her early forays into vice. Take the sunporch, where she had done her homework in the late afternoon. Take her mother’s carefully chosen furnishings, which matched so perfectly they made Tess’s teeth hurt. Melt the plastic covers on the living room furniture. Take everything, take whatever you need to be appeased.

But please, don’t take my parents. Not yet, not this way.

She saw the body bag first, lying on a gurney, then smelled the sweetish smell she knew from the fires she had covered as a reporter. Funny, she had never asked anyone what that smell was. It was probably insulation, or some other construction material, but Tess had always worried it might be flesh. She knew most people did not actually burn in fires-they died from breathing smoke, they were dead long before flames ever touched them. Still, she had never wanted to know for sure the source of that smell.

A firefighter stopped her, and it was only then she realized she had been running toward the house. Toward the body. “It’s my parents’ place,” she told the rubbery sleeve blocking her path. She kept trying to move toward the body, but the sleeve held her back. Only one body, she saw, only one. Not good enough. She wasn’t prepared to make such a choice.

The firefighter forced her to turn away from the house, to face across the street. She thought he wanted to shield her, but he was trying to get her to look at the neighbor’s lawn, where Patrick and Judith stood, holding on to one another. Their faces were impassive; they might have been watching someone else’s tragedy on the eleven o’clock news. The scene was made only more surreal by the Christmas decorations that surrounded them, an elaborate gingerbread house with grinning gingerbread men who twisted on mechanized bases. Six-foot candy canes, illuminated from within, lined the walkway.

Tess felt as if she had wakened from the worst nightmare of her life and found her parents at the foot of her bed, smiling, reassuring her.

The only difference was that their house continued to burn.

“Mommy,” Tess said, running across the street. “Daddy.”

They opened their little circle to her, and now they were all three clutching one another. Tess finally understood what it meant to hold on to someone for dear life.

“I never really liked that house,” her father said. “All these years, I never really liked it.”

They laughed, a little shakily, but they laughed. The smoking shell was a more traumatic sight for her than it was for her parents, even if they were the ones who still lived there. Tess had never known another home. She had gone from there to college, from college to an apartment on the North Side of Baltimore, and then to her little place at the top of Kitty’s building. But none of those had been home. In her mind, this white frame Colonial was the only house in the world, the place she thought of when she heard the word home. She had known it wouldn’t always belong to her family. In fact, she had thought her parents silly to cling to such an oversized place. But she had assumed the house would always be here, that she would have the rest of her life to drive by this spot and measure herself against the girl she had been fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago.

She knew too well that people died, but she had thought houses lived forever.

Crow arrived, alerted by Jackie, who had taken Esskay home when Tess went racing into the night. He didn’t try to join the circle of family, but stood respectfully apart, quiet and subdued.

“Arson,” he said after a while, and it wasn’t a question. He pointed with his chin at the investigators who were beginning to examine the scene.

“Where were you?” Tess asked her parents. “How is it that you weren’t here when it started?”

“We had an errand, then some dumb Christmas party,” her father said. “The woman from your mother’s work, who makes that awful eggnog.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking eggnog anyway,” Judith said. “You have to watch your cholesterol. Not to mention what can happen eating raw eggs.”

Their house seemed to sigh and settle just then, as if to remind them cholesterol and salmonella were not the only threats to one’s longevity.

“Why would someone want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“It might not be arson,” Patrick said, but he didn’t sound convinced. There was, after all, the matter of a body on his front lawn. “The wiring’s always been a little off.”

The fire captain came over to them.

“If it hadn’t been for the wind tonight, we might have been able to save it. As it is, I’m afraid it’s a total loss.”

“That’s okay,” Patrick said. “I’ve got everything I need right here.” He hugged Judith and Tess closer to him. “Do you know what happened, though? I mean, the body you found-”

“We think he was an intruder. There’s glass inside the house, from where a pane on the kitchen door was broken. The fire appears to have been started there, and that’s where we found him when we arrived. The M.E. is going to have to autopsy him. My guess is he slipped on the gasoline he had spread and knocked himself out while trying to get away from the very fire he started.”

“An intruder?” Patrick asked. “You mean a burglar?”

“Well, he didn’t take anything out of the house, as far as we can tell. We’re assuming it’s his car we found parked in the alley, although we won’t be able to make a positive ID until he’s in the medical examiner’s office. Car could be stolen, for all we know, but police say they have no report, not yet.”

Tess asked, “Did you check the registration?”

“Eugene H. Fulton, address on Erdman. Mean anything to you?”

The name seemed to float above their heads, another piece of charred debris from the fire. Gene Fulton. Her father’s colleague. The liquor board inspector with the side gig at Domenick’s.

“Why would Gene Fulton want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“I don’t know,” Pat said, looking at Tess. “What do you think, Tess? You got any theories about why Gene Fulton would be holding a grudge against me?”

Her mouth was dry, her throat raw from the smoke and the cold. “I’m not sure.”

The case was like a stray cat, she thought to herself. She kept trying to take it farther and farther away from herself and her family, only to come home and find it on the doorstep every night.

“You didn’t stop, did you? I asked you to do this one thing for me, I begged you. I told you that you were in over your head, and you still couldn’t listen to me.”