“She’s an old pro at removing cookie sheets,” said Marla. “Besides, I think Ms. Markasian is almost done, isn’t she?”
Frances Markasian closed her eyes and said, “Huh.” She rounded her back and stretched her arms out in front of her. Journalistic meditation. The buzzer went off and I took the doughnuts out. Julian had prepared a pan of melted butter and a mountain of cinnamon sugar, so I quickly dipped and rolled, dipped and rolled. I brought the first plate of plump, warm doughnuts over to the table and placed them in the sunlight, so that cinnamon sugar sparkled on the veil of melted butter. Marla delicately lifted one onto a plate and then took a huge bite.
“Please have one,” I said to the reporter.
She shook her head. Frances Markasian seemed to be unable to decide whether to share something with me. After a moment she put her pen and pad away in her enormous purse. “I’ll tell you like what parents will do. Last week we got a call at the paper saying we should run a story on how Stan and Rhoda Marensky had sent a full- length mink coat to the director of admissions at WilIiams.”
I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open.
“Listen,” said Marla in her one-upsmanship voice. She reached for her second doughnut. “I wouldn’t spend a winter in Massachusetts if I had a mink house.”
At that moment, yells erupted from the living room. Julian banged through the kitchen door. A cloud of smoke billowed in behind him.
“Something’s wrong!” he shouted. “The flue’s open but the smoke won’t go up! I’ll help Arch out the front. You all need to get out!” His face was white with fear.
“Out the front, hurry!” I yelled at Marla and Frances. We bolted.
Julian and Arch were already halfway down the front walk by the time we three adults came hustling through the front door. Julian had Arch’s arm draped around his shoulder and the two were half skipping toward the street. Frances Markasian reached the sidewalk first. With frighteningly effortless ease she spun around and scooped her camera out of her big black bag. Then she hoisted it and took a picture of Marla, midair, grasping a freshly baked oat bran doughnut, as she slipped on the iced steps and broke her leg.
14
With sirens blaring and lights flashing, the fluorescent chartreuse AMFD trucks arrived in a matter of moments, proving the local adage that the fastest thing about our town was the fire department. One of my neighbors had seen the smoke billowing out of the window Julian had hastily opened, and she’d put in the call. Over the incessant buzz of the smoke alarm, I screamed to Julian to stay out in the street with Arch. A wad of fur hit my calves and was gone ? Scout the cat making a streaking escape. Flames were consuming my home. But I refused to leave Marla’s side at the bottom of the front steps. Firemen clumped by up into the house. Marla clenched my hand and sobbed copiously. My schooling in Med Wives 101 adjudged it to be a broken right tibia. I shrieked for somebody to call an ambulance.
The firefighters rapidly assessed the situation and put a ladder up to the roof. Minutes later, clad in schoolbus-yellow protective gear, the first fellow descended the ladder, holding a blackened piece of plywood and shaking his head. With a screaming siren, the ambulance arrived and carted Marla off to a Denver hospital. I hugged her carefully and promised to visit just as soon as the smoke cleared. She begged me to call her other friends so that everyone could know what had happened. Marla’s idea of hell is enduring pain alone.
“What was that board?” I demanded of the one volunteer firefighter I recognized, a gray-haired real estate agent who had originally sold the house to John Richard and me.
“You had something on top of your chimney.”
“Well, yes, but… how did it get there?”
“You have some gutter or roof work done? This your first use of the fireplace this season?”
“It is not my first use of the fireplace this season, and the only work I’ve had done on the house recently was a security system I had put in this summer.” The blackened board lay propped against one of the tires of the AMFD truck. Two firemen stood in front of it, deep in conversation.
“Look, Goldy, it could have been a lot worse. We had this same thing happen to a summerhouse over by the lake. Smoke pouring everywhere. Usually it means you put too much paper on the logs, the chimney needs to be swept, or some birds have built a nest. Anyway, our guys went up. First one took off a nest, sure enough. Then he looked down the chimney and fainted. Second guy looked down the chimney and fainted. I had smoke, flames, and two guys out cold on the roof. Had to call an ambulance for the firefighters. Turns out this burglar had tried to enter the house through the chimney, got stuck, died of asphyxiation. In the spring some birds built a nest. Then the owners came back and built a fire. Once our guys pulled out that nest, they looked down at a perfectly preserved skeleton.”
I clenched my head with both hands. “Is this story supposed to reassure me?”
He shrugged one shoulder and moved off to help his men reload their equipment. The emergency, as far as they were concerned, was over. Several neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk to see what was going on. I asked if anyone had seen a person or persons on my roof recently. All negative. Then I crossed over to the house of a young mother, the only person on our street who had a good view of my place. Her forehead furrowed as she fixed the shoelace of one child and then gave antibiotic to another. She was raising four children under the age of six, and whenever anyone stupidly asked if she worked, she threw a dirty diaper at them. She told me she’d been preoccupied ferrying her kids to the pediatrician ? three, times in the last week ? and no, she hadn’t seen anyone.
Julian announced that he and Arch had decided they might as well go to school, was I going to be all right? I told them to go ahead. Frances Markasian stood on the sidewalk, snapping photos, as if the .fire were the biggest news event to hit Aspen Meadow this century. The crash of the Hindenburg had less photo coverage. She took a picture of me as I walked up to her.
“I thought you promised not to do that.” My life was beginning to feel out of control.
“Before, you weren’t news,” she said impassively. “Now you’re news. Any idea how this could have happened?”
“Zero,” I mumbled. “Did you see that plywood board they took off the chimney?” She nodded. “Maybe some workmen left it over the summer. I wish you wouldn’t publish those pictures. People will think I burned something In my kitchen.
“If something more exciting happens before Monday, no problem.” She shoved the camera into her bag and drew out a cigarette. No breakfast, diet cola with caffeine tabs, and now a smoke. I would give this woman ten years. She inhaled hungrily. “Listen, you were pretty discreet in there about the competition situation out at Elk Park Prep. So was I. But you’re wrong.”
“Oh?” I said innocently. “How’s that?”
“Well.” Fran blew a set of perfect smoke rings. “Parents seem to think we have an endless amount of newspaper space to run articles about their kids. First we did an article about Keith Andrews in September, at his request.” She tapped the cigarette, scattering ashes on her denim jacket. “Maybe you saw it: ‘First-place Andrews blends academics with activism.’ I mean, Keith helped us a lot during the summer covering the Mountain Rendezvous and the arts festival, so we figured we owed him the article when he asked. Anyway. We ran the piece and Stan Marensky called us, shrieking his head off. Said Keith Andrews had never marched in front of his store the way he claimed. Said the kid didn’t know a mink from an otter and couldn’t care less about the anti-fur movement. So we went back and asked Keith about it, and he confessed that he had used a wee bit of exaggeration, but that the profile was really going to help his Stanford application.” She exhaled another batch of white O’s.
“If only you all would check facts before you print things,” I murmured.
She flicked ashes. “Hey, what do you think we are, The New York Times? This was supposed to be a human interest thing. Then Hank Dawson shows up on our doorstep, waving a copy of the newspaper. He figures we should run a full-page profile on his daughter for our ‘Who’s Who’ section. When we say his daughter isn’t anybody special, Dawson yells he’s going to withdraw all of his cafe advertising. We say, well, he can buy a page of advertising for his daughter, and he stomps out. Then he cancels both his advertising and his subscription.”
The “Who’s Who” page usually ran stories of veterinarians saving elk calves and national celebrities showing up at local Fourth of July celebrations. If we weren’t talking the Times, we weren’t exactly talking People, either.
“Perhaps you should have run the profile…” I murmured.
