Everett Webster, police sergeant.
I wasn’t there for the end of the sentence. I had already run out the door, back down the two flights, sprinting for the parking lot. I didn’t know what Lorne was talking about but I knew it was bad. And it was at my house.
Donna.
I made the thirty-five minute drive in twenty, maybe less. From a block away I could see flashing lights, lots of them; could hear sirens as two emergency vehicles screamed through an intersection that was normally, even in the middle of the day, quiet — an in-home hair stylist on one corner, residential homes on the other three. Tonight there were people on all four corners, standing in little groups like they were waiting for the Stampede parade to pass their location. Except they were all facing one direction … watching and pointing.
I turned the corner and saw the flames leaping into the night sky.
Please God. Please. Please.
By then three fire trucks were in place. Firefighters were running, their work a frenzied race, with a maze of hoses, all aimed at the house … my house … our house. I couldn’t get closer than three houses away. I jumped out of the Volvo, not bothering to shut it off or close the door.
I ran, not knowing what I’d do when I got there but knowing I had to get into the house, find Donna, get her out.
This battle was already lost, the firefighters’ work next to useless. It was too late to do much more than keep the fire from spreading to neighbouring houses. My home was unrecognizable, a lot of the front of the house having collapsed — the flames everywhere.
Even with all the flashing lights and the glow of the flames, or maybe because of those things, it was hard to see. I ran into what felt like a wall. This wall moved. And spoke. Wally Neis had seen me running, put his big body in front of me, and got me stopped halfway up the sidewalk. Wally Neis: former classmate, former high school football teammate, deputy fire chief, and maybe the strongest man I knew.
“Nothing you can do, Adam.” He bear-hugged his massive arms around me and another firefighter and two cops had hold of me as well.
I fought to get loose. “I’ll fucking kill you right here. Donna’s in there. I’ve got to —”
“Nothing you can do,” Wally said again.
Still I tried to get free. And I would have killed him if I’d been able to get my arms loose. I’d have killed them all. I’d have done anything.
“Adam, listen to me, she’s not in there.”
The words registered and I relaxed my body slightly. “Where is she?”
The answer didn’t come right away. “We … we found a body. I’m sorry, Adam. It’s burned … real bad. But we think it’s Donna.”
I struggled to turn my head … felt Wally release me as I saw the tarp on the lawn, covering something.
Someone.
A police photographer stood nearby studying his camera, maybe looking at the pictures he’d already taken. A cop and someone who looked medical were standing next to the tarp talking, the policeman writing something in a notebook.
I moved toward the tarp and whoever was under it. But I knew.
I knew.
May 4, 2005. The night the first half of my life ended.
The second half of my life started badly and stayed that way for a long time.
Knowing Donna had died horribly, then learning that the fire had been deliberately set, that someone had murdered my wife, realizing that I had to have been the one the killer wanted to die, or that the arsonists had simply made a mistake, burned down the wrong house, killed the wrong person … it was all incomprehensible. And impossible.
I spent the first weeks of long nights sitting in an armchair in the living room of the apartment I had rented on Drury Avenue, staring at the wall opposite and thinking the same thoughts over and over. Why had that night happened? Was I to blame?
Then came the investigation — and the suspicion that I had set the fire. It was beyond painful. Webster and most of the cops — I knew some of them from my work on the crime beat — were pretty good. They made sure I knew that none of them believed any of this shit. However, a few of the people I worked with, even a couple of my bosses at the paper and the investigators the insurance company sent, were a different matter. The latter were very good at what they did, but I hated the bastards.
One of them, a round mound of self-importance named Macrae, made it clear he was convinced that if I hadn’t actually set the fire, I’d had someone do it for me. He even managed to get charges laid against me. Conspiracy to commit arson with intent to cause bodily harm. The charge was based on one piece of evidence that Macrae found compelling — one of the neighbours, a guy I’d only spoken to a couple of times in the three years he’d lived in the neighbourhood, had seen someone who looked like me out in the backyard the day of the fire doing something near my fireplace woodpile. The something the neighbor saw involved the someone spreading what might have been some kind of chemical in and around the logs, presumably for the arsonist to set ablaze later when I was conveniently out of the house.
As for motive, Macrae had it all worked out. He convinced himself I was having an affair and murdered my wife in order to be free to pursue my real love. Checked phone bills, my Day-Timer, phoned people I had meetings scheduled with to make sure we’d actually met. Found nothing but remained unfazed.
With all those mights and maybes, the neighbour’s musings about possibly seeing me near the woodpile wouldn’t have earned a second look in a first year college criminology class. But in a case where there was damn little else that qualified as credible evidence and because the fire department investigators determined that the origin of the fire was at or near the woodpile, and, most of all because Macrae was looking for anything that made his theory more solid, it all took a long time to go away.
Macrae and his people couldn’t find anything more and I was finally dropped as a suspect. The day after the charges were set aside, I quit the Herald. That had been coming anyway. The newspaper business was changing. A nine-month-long strike that ushered in the new millennium had resulted in many of the best and brightest writers leaving the paper. They probably did the new publishers a favour.
Fewer full-time writers meant less overhead, no benefits to pay. It was cheaper to hire freelancers and stringers on an ad hoc basis.
I was now one of those freelancers. And I’d done okay with it. Even won an award for a piece on the bad shit people could learn on the Internet: how to build your own roadside bomb, how to poison your spouse and get away with it, how to manufacture crack in your basement…. Most people already knew a lot of what I was telling them, but nevertheless I won some minor award that I didn’t bother putting on my wall. Nobody would see it anyway.
I wrote a book too, a kids’ book. That was something I was proud of. Unfortunately it was published by a company that was very good at creating nice looking, well-edited books but couldn’t sell iced tea in the desert. My book, The Spoofaloof Rally, disappeared from the shelves of Chapters and every other Canadian bookstore faster than beer at a rodeo dance.
So I kept flogging stuff to the papers and a few magazines. And it had gone well enough. I was making my rent payments — I never bought another house even after the insurance company finally settled with me. I was making a pretty good living at a time when a lot of people were struggling to get by. I didn’t really mind that part of my life.
It was the rest of it, the part that included knowing that whoever had killed my wife had never been found … that part of my life was always there, never went away, and I hated every minute of it.
And there was one other thing — the note that I was sure had come from whoever had set fire to my house.
It came a year to the day after Donna