“Jesus,” he said.
She looked up Seneca, and not a single thing was stirring. “The fire department will know there’s no one inside. They won’t go into a dangerous situation for no reason. I’ll meet you at our house in”—she looked at her phone—“at three o’clock. We’ll take one car. It’s probably best yours stays in your driveway. The snow will be coming down hard by then, and people will be home, hunkered down.”
“And then what?”
“Then we wait.”
It was just after eleven a.m. Several flakes drifted down, early harbingers of what was coming.
“What if you’re wrong and someone gets killed? They’re volunteers. What if they don’t have the training paid firefighters have? There are very young guys who do it. Like barely out of high school, I think.”
What he didn’t say: There was a person staying upstairs who I didn’t even know about. That whatever Tripp had done, he’d used the Half Moon as part of his plan. He was distracted by the thought of her coming over. At three o’clock she’d stand in their kitchen, walk through their rooms.
“If this goes the way I know it will, they’ll just let it burn and protect the other buildings. No one’s going to get hurt.”
She looked to the left and right of the Half Moon. No shared walls. The alleys on either side were at least ten feet wide. There was the tiny deli to the right with the offices upstairs. On the other side was Primavera. All closed since Friday.
“I don’t know what else to say. This is our only option.”
“That can’t be true,” he said. He’d already been thinking about how he might get Hugh’s address in South Carolina. He hadn’t seen John since the day he fired him for stealing, but he bet John was still in touch with Hugh, maybe even working for him again. If he could only get a few minutes with him in person, they could surely sort it out.
“Well.” She looked at her phone. “You have a few hours to decide.”
* * *
He stood there for a while after she left, watching the traffic light turn yellow, then red, then green, then yellow again. He wondered what she was doing in the meantime. Going to see her mother, she said, but how could he ever know what she said was true? She told Malcolm she wanted to see Siobhán in person, but Siobhán had said that with Patrick home her house was most definitely not the place to chat, and with the new storm coming and everywhere closed, they couldn’t exactly go out. They’d have to do it another time. Malcolm felt a flare of satisfaction at that, and when Jess saw it pass through him, she closed her eyes and shrugged as if to say that was his right, he’d earned it, there’d be a lot more where that came from. Patrick was his. Toby, too. (“Toby’s all yours,” Jess would say.) Everyone in Gillam, probably, except for Neil.
But she was the voice in his head, even when she wasn’t there in front of him. The men are yours, Jess might say. But the women? She’d make that face meant to warn him not to be so sure. They might understand: her girlfriends, her mother, any woman who listened to her whole story and really took it in. They’d never admit it to their partners—no, they’d never do a thing like that, risk their families, risk their predictable lives, my God, what had she been thinking—but to each other? To themselves, in the privacy of their own thoughts? There were those who’d sympathize with following a temptation to its conclusion. There were those who would admire a woman who had a problem and did what she thought might fix it.
When Malcolm went back inside, he went straight to the file she left flapped open on the basement floor. He took a good look at the numbers and then closed it, returned it to the cabinet. That was all her doing, the insurance policies. After she found out about his side deal with Hugh, she went out and purchased coverage for every possibility.
He shivered though he didn’t feel cold, exactly. He could sense her there, in the light she’d just been standing in, the red glints in her dark hair. Even as he insisted to himself that the whole thing was completely insane, he felt himself brush up against the lure. He closed his eyes and made himself picture it, the entire place aflame. He waited for the memories to come at him like echoes down a long corridor, but instead he felt peace. A new chapter. A chance to start over. Waking up in the morning without feeling like he was scrambling uphill before he even opened his eyes. Moving through his day without a physical weight pressing on his chest. He thought again of Tripp. Look at what he might have pulled off, assuming he wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere. Instead of whining to his bartender for the next twenty years like most people would do, he’d taken action. Instead of waiting for the Feds to come arrest him, he’d taken off. And now where was he? A place so far from a city that he could finally see the stars. In Malcolm’s mind he tried to place this village he’d never seen—sun-drenched, quiet—and next to it he placed Gillam, the endless jockeying for parking spaces, the relentless moaning about traffic and taxes.
When people asked whatever happened to the Half Moon, he wouldn’t even have to say it failed. It had been doing just fine up until the moment tragedy hit.
At home, he tried to think it out, every possibility, every reason it was a bad idea. He pulled the shades and stretched out on the floor. He stared at the ceiling. He was starving, but he was too tired to get up and hunt for a snack.
At three o’clock Jess knocked twice on the side door and then let herself in. The flurries had multiplied. He watched her notice the wire fruit bowl was now on the opposite end of the counter. She glanced out the window over the sink. “Those branches fell very close to the house.”
“I know,” he said, without moving.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
He drew himself up to full height. “How is it you’re so calm?”
“Because we don’t have a choice.”
“We could file for bankruptcy.”
“I thought about that. That could solve the debt with the bank. It might even solve our debt with the clinic. Our credit would be destroyed, but it can’t get much worse anyway. Problem is I don’t think Hugh accepts Chapter 11 filings.”
“I was also thinking my mom probably has something tucked away.”
“Stop,” she said, looking at him finally like the old Jess. “You’re not serious.”
He shrugged, held up his hands.
“Your mother’s going to need every cent she has. She’s only seventy-two. She makes eleven dollars an hour, Malcolm. No, we won’t be asking either of our mothers. We got ourselves into this, and we’re going to get ourselves out.”
He sighed. She was right.
“Look,” she said. “It’s not as if we’re going to have to sprint up the stairs with a fireball at our heels. We’re just placing things next to each other. Think of it that way. If a fire inspector finds evidence of gasoline, of chemicals, yes, that makes sense, that’s what was stored down there. We’re not trying to hide that. The whole staff knows what’s down there. In fact those things were part of the backdrop for so long that we stopped seeing them. You were so worried about pipes bursting that you just went ahead and put that ancient heater in the spot where it made the most sense to you.”
“But—” he said.
He tried to pinpoint exactly what he wanted to say, tried to find the precise thing that was nagging him. People didn’t get away with this, or else they’d do it all the time. Everywhere, times get tough, buildings would be burning. But they weren’t. Or were they? He thought of what happened at the café on Vanderbilt. Three in the morning, an electrical fire. They had to close the place for a few months, but when they finally reopened, they had a new kitchen, state of the art. They had beautiful custom shelves installed in the dining room.