crispy black-and-brown thing that might once have been a human being. Men rushed forward to help them. I took a step forward myself-a reflex action.
Just then, one of the propane tanks at the back of the building exploded, and we were all thrown off our feet. I landed facedown in the mud. When I looked up again, men were scurrying back from the building, terrified that the gas tanks of the Driskos’ vehicles, or some hidden cache of explosives, might detonate next. Guffey and the other man who’d gone inside had dropped the incinerated body, but they bravely returned to haul it outside the perimeter of the fence.
At that moment, the pumper truck came screaming up the road. If anything, the scene became even more chaotic as men gawked at the charred remains of either Dave or Donnie Drisko. The eye sockets were gooey and the gums were burned back from the teeth. Other men scrambled around to unroll hoses. The chief arrived, a tubby little character who ran an auto-repair shop in town that specialized in bilking out-of-staters. He began barking orders.
The firemen pulled this immense canvas object out of the pumper truck and then unfolded it next to the vehicle. It looked like a kid’s swimming pool, only on a giant scale. The tanker truck arrived and began dumping water into the pool. The engine inside the pumper truck functioned basically like an enormous squirt gun, sucking water from the canvas pool through one set of hoses and then blasting it out again at high pressure through others. The firemen used this second set of hoses to fight the fire.
Whenever the tanker truck became empty, the driver would rush away down the road to the nearest stream or pond to replenish the water supply and then would come racing back to refill the canvas pool. In a land without fire hydrants, this is how you fight a fire, and if you are skilled or lucky, it’s how you keep buildings from burning down.
The Cellar Savers were neither skilled nor lucky.
The Driskos’ trailer was made of aluminum, so it didn’t collapse. But the fire gutted the structure completely. And it took the state fire investigator a long time to collect the remains of the other Drisko.
Was it Donnie or Dave? Even at the end, no one could tell them apart.
35
I spent the afternoon at the scene of the fire, waiting and hoping that the cause of the blaze would be quickly ascertained. An investigator from the state fire marshal’s office had been summoned from Augusta, but determining the origin and cause of the fire would likely be laborious. Figuring out whether it was an accident or arson might take days. But I was hopeful for a quick answer.
Passing out drunk with a lighted cigarette seemed like something one of the Driskos might do. Father and son had both seemed destined for fiery ends. So I decided to stick around the smoldering trailer because I was curious. And I wanted to meet the mysterious Dane Guffey, who had materialized out of the past to haunt my recent conversations. I needed to ask him why he had resigned from the sheriff’s department. What had he been doing in the seven years since he’d arrested Erland Jefferts?
To keep myself occupied, I made a wide circle around the Driskos’ wooded property, looking for their pit bull. I figured Vicky must have broken free of her rope. Maybe the fire and smoke had given her that extra energy to escape. Having a vicious dog running loose through these woods would be dangerous to the local wildlife, not to mention the local children. For all their small-man bravado, I think the Driskos had been secretly scared of her, too.
The forest floor was sopped. I found no dog prints anywhere. At the very least, I could conclude that Dave and Donnie hadn’t been in the habit of letting their watchdog free to chase deer. The hollows between the oaks held pools of water that would soon fill with mating wood frogs and spotted salamanders. So far, the amphibians had failed to emerge from their hibernating places. To me, spring never truly arrived until I heard my first frog.
Eventually, I returned to the commotion. I leaned against the side of my Jeep, watching the volunteers scurry about in coats and boots that seemed too big for them, like boys playing firemen. Dirty smoke drifted through the treetops. The air carried the sour odor of wet ashes. I reflected on my last visit to this trailer and my subsequent confrontation with Dave and Donnie at the Harpoon Bar. I’d been struck by how gleeful they’d seemed on both occasions. How had Dave responded when I told him he seemed exceptionally happy? “You have no idea.”
What had he meant by that? The Driskos must have understood they were still murder suspects. There was evidence, in the form of deer hair and blood, tying them directly to Ashley’s last known whereabouts. So why had they been strutting around the Harpoon like little red roosters?
Was it possible they’d known the identity of Ashley Kim’s abductor? If they’d been on the scene that night, grabbing that deer, had they witnessed something they only later understood as significant? Rather than going to the police-since no reward had yet been offered-I could imagine them trying to extort money from the murderer. Had the Driskos made a fatal error in threatening the wrong man with exposure?
They’d been drinking with someone that night at the bar, a bald man who’d kept his back to the darkened room. Stanley Snow was bald, and I’d run into him in the rest room. I’d also just passed his speeding truck hours earlier on my way home from Parker Point.
Snow had keys to the Westergaard house. But what motive would he have had to kill his employer and rape and murder an innocent young woman? As a local boy, he would have known the particulars of Nikki Donnatelli’s death well enough to copy it. In all the reading I’d done about Erland Jefferts, I realized, the caretaker’s name had never come up. He was just about the only guy in Seal Cove whom the J-Team hadn’t added to its list of potential predators. That seemed odd in and of itself.
God, I was driving myself crazy with questions, especially when the likelihood was that Dave or Donnie had just passed out with a smoldering cigarette.
My friend Deputy Skip Morrison had shown up in his Dodge Charger to direct traffic away from the fire. But there was no traffic to direct on the dead-end road, so instead he had wandered up the hill to watch the firemen hose down the burned-out shell of the trailer.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I heard the call on the radio.”
“I thought you were on leave.”
“I am.”
He shook his head at me and chuckled. “So much for the Driskos.”
“Did you hear if anyone found any trace of their dog? They owned a pretty vicious pit bull.”
“Guffey said he saw a crispy critter inside.”
“That’s weird. Dave told me she never went indoors.
“Maybe he made an exception occasionally.”
“I think they were afraid of her. I was afraid of her.”
“Well, it sounds like she perished in the fire. Wherever Dave and Donnie are at the moment, I’m guessing it’s just as hot as where they left.”
I spotted Hank Varnum standing in a circle of volunteer firemen, some of whom I recognized and some of whom I didn’t. They were rolling up their heavy hoses, but they didn’t seem in any rush. “Excuse me for a second, Skip,” I said. “Hey, Hank!”
The tall grocer had ashes in his whiskers. He stuck a long finger out in the direction of my splint. “I heard you crashed your ATV chasing Barter. How’s your hand doing?”
“It’s all right.”
“If that kid dies, that son of a bitch should be tried for manslaughter.”
“He’s already facing a slew of charges, including child endangerment and felony OUI.”
“What about the damage he did to my trees? How is he going to make restitution for cutting down those oaks?”
“Calvin Barter is going to jail, Hank,” I said, beginning to feel exasperated with his abiding anger. “And his son suffered a potentially fatal head injury.”
“I was sorry to hear about the boy,” he said, not sounding particularly sorry to my ears. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
