Inside, she looked around the place as if she’d never seen it before. She walked through the kitchen, looked in the mop closet. She went downstairs to the storage room, and he followed her.
She got down on her hands and knees to look more closely at the ancient furnace. She crawled over to the shelf where he kept leftover construction supplies—half-empty cans of paint in case the walls upstairs needed touch-ups. Thinners. Polyurethane from when they refinished the wood floors. Random pieces of lumber. Old rags. Light bulbs. A drill. His toolbox. On the next higher shelves were boxes of alcohol, mostly fruit-flavored vodkas he’d over-ordered in the summer and that would now sit there until warm weather. He’d tried to sell them over the winter, save him from buying more of the unflavored, but people weren’t interested. She began piling empty boxes. She kept stacking until the pile touched the crossbeams over their heads. When she finished, she started another tower, this time against a wood support beam.
“What are you doing?”
Without answering, she carried an old barstool over to the wall with the window, climbed up, peered out.
“We have an extension cord, right?”
“Yeah it’s upstairs.”
“How long is it?”
“Why?”
“Why didn’t you put the space heater against the main? Down here? Warming the pipe that far up the line doesn’t protect the sections down here from getting frozen.”
“It’s too dangerous down here. All this stuff. Plus buildings freeze from the top down. Down here will be okay because it’s underground.”
“Hm,” she said, thinking about that. “Is that common knowledge? And why didn’t you get the valve on the main fixed? It’s been broken for what? Two years? How much would it cost? A few hundred bucks?”
He crossed his arms. “It’s been broken since Hugh’s day.”
“But why didn’t you fix it. I mean if someone asks you. What would you say?”
“Why would anyone ask?”
“Humor me.”
“I would tell them the truth. That I was waiting until I had more room in the budget. You know as well as I do that one thing leads to another. I had a plumber take a look at some point, but he wanted to dig up the whole floor. I’ve been working here for a lot of years and I never remember the pipes freezing, so I figured it would be fine for a while longer.”
“But we’ve never lost power for this long. Not as far as I can remember. And another storm is coming.”
“And? What’s your point?”
“You said it would be too dangerous to set up the heater down here,” Jess reminded him. “But it makes sense, right? If you wanted to protect the whole system?”
“No, I don’t think it does make sense.”
“What I mean is, if you explained your train of thought to someone, it would ring true.”
He waited.
“It’s part of my idea.”
She walked over to the metal file cabinet, pulled open the bottom drawer. That cabinet was where they kept the deed, the receipts from vendors, contracts, permits, licenses, employee 1099s, insurance policies. She ran her fingers along the tabs, removed a file, flipped it open, read silently for a moment, and then nodded as if to confirm something to herself. She handed the file to Malcolm, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing with it.
“What?” And then he knew. “No,” he said, handing the file back to her. “No, Jess. No way.”
“Listen.”
“You’re nuts.”
“I’m not.”
“You’ve completely lost it. Jesus Christ.”
“Statistically, this would be the time when it would happen. I’ve been reading since yesterday. A basement like this is ideal for producing a large fire. There are so many ways it could ignite accidentally. It would rise straight up and destroy the whole room above us. Everyone knows you love this place, that you’re worried about it, that you’d want to protect the plumbing and might not have thought out the consequences.”
“But I did think about it. Which is why I put the heater upstairs.”
“But what if you were in a panic and made a bad decision?” She looked up at him. “It’s believable, isn’t it? That you would have set it up down here?”
“Believable that I would do that? Malcolm Gephardt? Or that a person would do that?”
She hesitated. “A person. Anyone. Think about it. A power outage. A thirty-year-old space heater. What were the safety standards on those things back then? You know how many fires they cause every year? I looked up the stats. Who’s to say you don’t store gasoline for the generator down here? So what if you moved the generator outside that window, snaked the power cord through, pushed the space heater up against the main here in your hopes of keeping the whole system warm. And let’s say, oops, it was set up too close to that tower of boxes, all those chemicals. Let’s say the heater throws a spark.”
He stared at her. Together, they looked at the crossbeams over their head, the low ceiling. Together, they thought about the floor above.
“Several people can attest to the fact that the lever broke years ago, and that it was never fixed.”
“Please stop.”
“An accident caused by your best efforts to protect the place.”
When he didn’t say anything, she pointed to the document she wanted him to see. “Read it. Look at the numbers. Our fire coverage is better than our flood coverage. There’s loss of business income coverage, too. Add it up. We can get square with Hugh, with the bank. Then tell me that this is crazy.”
She could see she was breaking his heart for the second time.
“You want to go to prison, Jess? Because I definitely don’t. Stop. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“It’ll be deemed an accident. I know it will. We won’t have to worry about that.”
She had that preternatural calm she always had when she was right.
“And we’d be free. You could do whatever you want. Take everything you learned here and start from scratch. Me too. We could sell our house.”
“Sell our house?” He couldn’t read the expression on her face. “And go where? You’ll stay with Neil? At his house?”
“No,” she said, looking away. “I don’t think so.” She hadn’t even said it to herself so plainly yet, but she knew almost the moment she stepped inside his house that it was the end of something, not the beginning.
“You don’t think so?” He was embarrassed at how he clung to this small hope, not that he knew what to do with it.
“Thing is, Mal, this idea—it’s time sensitive. This storm will be here in a matter of hours. The utility company is working around the clock, but even they will have to call it when the storm hits. The moment the power comes back on, this no longer makes sense. And by the way, the snow, the freeze, those conditions would also prevent the fire trucks from getting here quickly. Everywhere is closed. No one will even notice the place is burning until it’s fully involved. The local patch said every town in the county is out of salt. The sand they trucked in has almost run out, too. No one can get anywhere quickly.”
“Fully involved,” he repeated. “You really have been reading.”
She walked over to him. She was so close they might as well have been touching.
“Plus,” she said. “Did you notice? Where are the hydrants?”
He pictured the street outside. “They’re all covered in snow.”
* * *
She told him to just read the files. One problem at a time and this would be first. When he walked her out, she turned and faced him once more. Her expression was all business, like it always was when she was worried about something.
“If you search anything online, make sure you’re on private mode but try not to because I don’t know to what extent those searches are protected.”