Early Morning Investigation
I woke at some ungodly hour of the morning and went to the bathroom. I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t even hold my eyes shut. I put my summer robe over my pajamas and crept from our suite into the main house. I thought I might make some coffee and hoped to find a lemon cookie to go with it.
I was surprised by fresh coffee in the kitchen. The huge, sixteen cup stainless percolator sat on a cast iron trivet. I filled a mug and found the plate of lemon cookies with a piece of aluminum foil over it. I filched a few as I wondered who made the coffee.
The flame of a lighter attracted my attention through one of the kitchen windows. A figure on the porch lit a cigarette. I took my coffee and my snack to join whoever it was.
Charlie startled when I came through the screen door. I apologized for surprising him. “Nothing to worry about. It’s just an old man with insomnia.”
He offered me a rocking chair. I ignored it because it was too low and chose a regular chair on the opposite side of his seat. He took his wide-brimmed hat off the chair and swapped it to the rocker. He puffed his cigarette and exhaled smoke into the soft darkness. “I couldn’t sleep either. I tossed and turned. I got up and dressed. I keep thinking of the way dad blamed me for setting fire to Caroline’s house. I swear I didn’t, Mister Edwards.”
I drank some coffee and set my mug aside to nibble a cookie. “I appreciate the respect, Charlie, but you can call me Law. You’re obviously not a child, and even though I’m old enough to be your grandfather, I’d rather use our first names. As to the house, what else could have happened?”
He shook his head and nursed smoke from his cigarette. “I don’t know. Mitch and me were puttin’ insulation in the attic. I had a few cigarettes while we were working, but I always had them outside. I left my pack and lighter in the Jeep because I didn’t want to lose the lighter or crush the pack while I was crawlin’ around the attic.”
I was surprised to hear he hadn’t had his cigarettes inside with him. “You didn’t maybe bring them inside and have a smoke in the kitchen?”
“No, sir! Caroline hates smoke. She can smell a mouse fart in a whirlwind. I’d never hear the end of it if I smoked in her house.”
I chuckled at the boy’s phrasing and thought some more about his problem. “Did you smoke on the porch?”
“No. The windows were open ‘cause of the heat. I didn’t want it to go inside. Like I said, I left my smokes in the Jeep. When I wanted one, Mitch and me would take a break and come down. I either sat on the fender or stayed on my feet.”
“Where did you park?”
“The Jeep’s got black seats. If you leave it in the sun, when you sit down you fry your backside. The milk barn has an overhang in front with a block and tackle to load the hayloft. I parked under it.”
His story was getting interesting. I slid to the edge of my seat to look his way. “You parked all the way over by the barn? Where did you put your butts out?”
“There’s an old can screwed to the dash. I drop the butts in there.”
“Could the filters have caught fire and blown around?”
He took his pack from his pocket to show me. It was a green soft pack of Trafalgar Square Kings. They didn’t have filters. The sight of the pack made my mouth water. “That’s my old brand. May I?”
He shook the pack to make a cigarette stand proud of the cellophane. I took it with fingers that immediately remembered the motion. He passed his lighter over. I lit up and drew the smoke in. It was delicious. I gave him his lighter back and had another sip of coffee to accompany my cigarette. “What are you doing smoking cigarettes without a filter?”
“Filter cigarettes are for pussies.”
I roared with merry appreciation for his opinion. “I like you, Charlie. You’re a no-nonsense guy. Tell you what, when the sun comes up, take me back to the farmyard and show me exactly what you did yesterday. I don’t know if we’ll find anything, but it doesn’t hurt to have a look.”
He finished his cigarette and crushed it out in a ceramic tray on the arm of his chair. “Do you believe me?”
I drew on my cigarette and talked the smoke from my chest. “I believe that you believe you didn’t start the fire. The trouble is, you were the only ignition source at the house yesterday; the only one that we know of, anyway. I’m not a fire investigator. I wouldn’t know how to look at a burned house and tell where the fire started or how it spread. I was a beat cop, a police detective, and a private eye from 1919 to 1944. I can tell when someone believes what they’re saying. You obviously do. Let’s go back to the scene and see what we can see.” I finished my cigarette and stubbed it in the ashtray. “What time is it?”
He checked his wristwatch. “A little after five. It gets light at six-thirty.”
“I’ll go get cleaned up. I should be ready by the time it gets light.”
Mitch came though the door from the kitchen and wished us a ‘good morning’ through a yawn. He popped his hat on and eased the door shut so it wouldn’t slam. “Come-on Char, it’s time for chores.”
I was shocked. “Chores? Now? It’s dark out.”
The boys laughed and Charlie scoffed, “city folks, huh, Mitch?”
“Yeah, Char. If he thinks this is early, he should see us during harvest.”
Charlie explained. “We have chores from five to eight. Breakfast is at eight, then we either go to school or to work. I just graduated and Mitch is off for the summer. I can take a little time after breakfast to show you around, especially if you think you can prove I didn’t start the fire.”
Charlie got up to go with his brother. Mitch grabbed his arm. “Does he think you didn’t do it?”
“He’s not sure. He wants to look.”
Mitch thanked me. Charlie offered another cigarette before he left. I accepted. He lit it for me, then hurried to do his work. I smoked peacefully and enjoyed my coffee for a few moments.
I almost leapt out of my skin when David stormed through the screen door with red-faced fury. He was a few words into a tirade when he realized the person on the porch was me and not Charlie. “Law? Why are you smoking? I thought you quit. What are you even doing awake?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I came out and had a chat with Charlie. He gave me a cigarette.”
David chewed his teeth and forced his hands into his pockets. “I better not catch him smoking on this porch or anywhere else.”
I took the ashtray from the arm of the chair Charlie vacated and pointed for my friend to sit. He sat, but he didn’t seem happy about it. I asked if he trusted me.
“Of course, I do. What kind of question is that?”
“I had a nice chat with your son. He doesn’t think he set the fire.”
He drew a breath to bluster, but I held a hand up to stop him. I had one more draw on my cigarette and crushed it out.
“I’m not saying he didn’t set it. He might have. I’m saying he doesn’t think he set it. I want you to let me look around with him. Call it an investigation if you like. I don’t know what we’ll find or if I’ll be able to prove anything, but I’d like to try. If I can prove to him that he set the fire, he’ll have to face up to it. If he’s as much of a man as I suspect he is, he’ll accept responsibility. If I can prove to you that he didn’t, you’ll have to apologize for slapping his face. It won’t cost you anything except a couple hours of his time. What do you say?”
“Alright, Law. I hope you can prove he didn’t do it. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I kept wondering if this would come between us. I don’t want it to, but I’m so mad right now, I can’t hardly see straight. I saw someone smoking out here, and I thought I was gonna chase my boy right off the porch and half-way to town. I’m glad it was you and not him.”
He stood up. “I’ve got work to see to. Breakfast is at eight. I’ll tell Charlie and Mitch to work with you today. There’s always a lot to do on a farm, but I can spare them for one day. Keep ‘em as long as you need.”
“Thanks, David. Have a good morning.”
“You too.” He hurried away to his work.
* * * *
A few hours later, after one of the richest breakfasts I’d ever had, me and Walt and Mitch and Charlie were bumping our way across the farm toward the scene of yesterday’s fire. I was stuffed to bursting and each sharp jolt made me want to heave my guts. Charlie was going as slow as he reasonably could, but the road was rutted and the Jeep had a very choppy ride. It felt like we were speeding when we were barely moving.
Abby and her youngest daughters made breakfast for the family and all the men who worked on the farm. They cooked piles of food. Once I saw the spread, I understood why breakfast was at eight even though the day started at five. Abby was in the kitchen by five because it took hours to get the meal ready. Feeding the farm crew was a herculean task. She made dozens of scrambled eggs, fresh biscuits and gravy, pounds of bacon and sausage, hominy grits, oatmeal and syrup, gallons of coffee, fresh milk, and pitchers of reconstituted frozen orange juice.
Walt had a reasonable plate of eggs and bacon and one biscuit. I ate like one of the farm laborers and then some. I made biscuit sandwiches of eggs and bacon and smothered them in gravy. I ate two bowls of grits, one with maple syrup and one without. I drank coffee and orange juice until I thought it would run out of my ears.
I don’t know why I ate like I did. The atmosphere around the table was so boisterous and fun, it felt like a party. I guess I got caught up in it. The men treated me and Walt like we were one of them. None of them questioned what we were doing there or why we belonged. We were just two more faces at the table. They teased us just like they teased each other. They made fun of our city clothes and our refined speech. I didn’t mind because we weren’t singled out. The men were just as bad with each other as they were with us.
I made an error early in the meal when I asked one of them to pass the popovers. Had we been at Walt’s Special, that’s what they would have been. I knew what buttermilk biscuits were, but they are not a staple food in Philadelphia. The man near the biscuits laughed himself silly. He held the plate up with a grand smile on his face. “Boys, all this time I thought we was eatin’ plain old biscuits. The man here calls ‘em popovers.” He held his pinky up like he was being dainty. “Any of you gents care for a popover?”
The man next to me laughed and put on an awful British accent. “Here, here and pip, pip and all that rot. I shall take a popover, my man.”
The man with the plate threw a biscuit to the man next to me. “Cheerio, what?”
I laughed at their antics and my mistake. The man next to me slapped my back in fellowship and the one across the table passed the biscuits with a laugh. It was probably the most fun I ever had at breakfast.
When it was all over, the food was demolished. There wasn’t enough left in scraps and crumbs to feed a church mouse. The women set to work cleaning up and the men returned to the fields or the equipment sheds or to wherever their labor was required. Walt and I joined Mitch and Charlie for the start of my investigation.
Charlie drove us into the farmyard and parked under the overhang of the barn. The youths jumped from the Jeep while Walt and I clambered out as gracefully as our ages and various infirmities allowed.
Charlie lit a cigarette and pointed it around. “That’s the dairy barn and the pumphouse is that little shack over there. The metal building past the barn is the tractor shed. I parked right here. Every cigarette I smoked was right here.”
The dairy barn was a massive wooden structure on a stone foundation. The main building was a traditional barn shape, at least three stories tall with a roof like an arch made of six flats. There was a single-story wing on both sides with shed rooves. The tractor shed was a plain building of corrugated grey metal. The pumphouse was an unpainted wooden structure like a tool shed. The house was reduced to a stone foundation filled with charred wood. The acrid stench of fire filled the air.
I didn’t see any obvious way Charlie could have started the fire if he was telling the truth about his smoking. The barn was more than a hundred feet from the house across a yard of hard packed gravel. Even a cigarette carelessly discarded on a windy day would have had difficulty reaching one from the other.
“Show me what you were doing.”
Charlie dropped his cigarette into the can on the Jeep’s dashboard and led us up the ramp to the main barn door. The big door ran on a slider, but there was a man-door cut into the panel. He opened the man-door and took us inside. The entire space was bright white. I touched a wooden column, and my hand came away chalky. “What is this?”
He explained. “Dairies use lime wash to keep bacteria out of the wood. Cows are filthy. They shit everywhere. It takes a lot of work to make sure the milk doesn’t get contaminated. The lime wash fills the cracks in the wood so anything that splashes can’t fester.”
He showed us a pallet of paper sacks labeled ‘vermiculite.’ One of them was split open. It was filled with brownish grey stuff like pebbles with square sides. It felt like coarse lamb’s wool. “What is it?”
“It’s a mineral like asbestos. I don’t know how they make it. It’s good for insulation because it gets into small spaces and it’s fire-proof. Me and Mitch hauled a bunch of it into the attic, then spread it around.”
“What did you do with the empty sacks?”
Mitch pointed through the door. “They’re in the burn barrels.”
“Show me.”
We went outside, down the ramp, and across the yard to a weedy cluster of rusty machinery and cast-offs. There was a pair of steel drums with holes poked in the side. Both were filled with empty paper bags. Neither drum had been recently burned. Even if they had been, they were plenty far away from the adjacent structures for safety.
“Tell me about yesterday.”
Charlie did as I asked. “Mitch and me did our morning chores like usual and we came over here after breakfast. We worked on the attic all day.”
I interrupted. “What about lunch?”
“Mom packed us sandwiches. We ate at midday, then worked until it was time to wash up for dinner.”
“What time?”
“About four-thirty.”
I spoke my memory of the previous day aloud. “We were having coffee when Eddie came to tell us about the fire. I guess that was about six, maybe a little after. He said he saw smoke on the horizon and ran to get David before he went to check.”
Charlie agreed. “I was on the porch with Mitch and we came along behind.”
Walt spoke up. “The house was completely on fire when we got here. How long does it take for a house to burn like that?”
I answered. “It happens fast. Wood in houses is very dry. It stands for decades out of the weather. That’s why people die in house fires. If they’re asleep and the smoke wakes them up, by the time they realize there’s trouble, there’s fire everywhere. I bet the fire hadn’t been going for more than ten minutes by the time Eddie saw the smoke. We were here in about five minutes and the whole place was engulfed. It collapsed a little while later.”
Walt looked toward the charred foundation. “What do you think, Law?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
He asked another question. “What about gas? Could there have been a leak?”
Charlie answered. “The house didn’t have gas. They heated with coal. Everything else was electric.”
I went over to the foundation. It was built of mortared fieldstone and the top of it stood three or four feet above the ground. The front half of the roofless porch hadn’t burned but the paint was blistered. The structure tilted back toward the house because the wood that supported it had burned and failed. The steps and plain pipe railing remained relatively untouched.
“What kind of house was it?”
Charlie took a cigarette from his pocket and looked at it. He lifted a shoulder in a half shrug and lit up. “No harm in smoking here now, I guess.” He used the cigarette to draw the house in the air. “It was an old two-story place. The first floor was a sitting room in front, a little dining room and a kitchen in back. The second floor had one big bedroom and two little ones. The bathroom was upstairs. The basement had the boiler and another section that was like an old root cellar.”
“You said the windows were open because of the heat. Did they have screens?”
“The first floor did. They had add-on screens. In the winter you could take them out and put in storm windows. One of the screens was out. It’s in the barn waiting for me to fix it.”
“Did you lock up when you went home to dinner?”
Charlie drew on his cigarette and shook his head. “No reason to. The house was empty, no furniture or nothing. Even if it wasn’t, folks around here are honest. Besides, there’s more valuable stuff in the tractor shed than in the house.”
I took a slow walk around the foundation. There were some hearty shrubs at the base of the stonework, probably the farmer’s dead wife’s idea of landscaping. The tops of the greenery were burnt, but the base of the plants looked healthy enough. They’d been planted too close to the house. All the stems or trunks or whatever-you-call the base of a shrub, were gnarled and twisted away from the stone so the plants could grow into the sun.
A couple of the plants were trampled. I didn’t think much of that because the farm hands had been dragging hoses around to douse the embers. They probably got close to make sure the fire was out. I stepped into the trampled spot to peer over the foundation wall. I didn’t see anything except a tangle of charred wood.
I stepped back but stopped when something caught my eye. There was a red cardboard cylinder behind a shrub. I thought it was a shotgun shell. I pushed the charred greenery aside for a closer look and noticed it wasn’t a shell at all. I left it where it was.
“Charlie, Mitch, do you have a camera at the house?”
The boys answered almost in unison. “Yes, sir.”
“Go get it.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to take some pictures of the crime scene.”
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