Then she sees the gurney, covered by a sheet. It looks flat, but Polly’s not fooled. She was an arson investigator’s wife. She knows what an explosion can do to a body, how it collapses the internal organs. There’s something—someone—under that sheet.
Everyone stares at Polly as if she’s a ghost. In a sense, she is. Back from the dead, just that quick. Of course everyone would have assumed it was her, the tenant, in the wreckage. Who else could it be? But as she looks around, she realizes that most of the spectators are horrified in a bland, rubbernecking way. Belleville is a small town, yet few here know her. She spots her landlord, talking to one of the firefighters. He, at least, looks upset in a specific, visible way, but then—he’s just lost a significant property. Maybe if Max and Ernest strolled by, they would care that Polly is alive. As it is, only Adam knows this is her former home and he didn’t have to worry for a moment that she had been harmed because he’s holding her hand, sure of her. He knows it’s not her on the gurney.
She wonders when he’ll realize it has to be Cath.
Part Two
Fire
22
Adam stands at the grill, making the usual lunchtime items. He has his own method of frying burgers: He takes a ball of meat—larger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball—then smashes it with great force, using two spatulas one on top of the other. After flipping, he places a thin slice of American cheese on each patty. There is simply no better cheese for burgers, no matter one’s culinary aspirations. He uses two patties per burger, otherwise the customer will feel he’s being shortchanged. Almost everyone values quantity over quality. The patties cook very fast when they are this thin, and he ruins two in a row, mesmerized by the way the flames lunge greedily for the drops of fat.
Cath probably did not die by fire. Almost no one ever does. If smoke inhalation didn’t get her, then it was probably the explosion itself. A horrible way to die, but quite fast. He hopes it was fast. An official ruling is expected soon.
Polly told investigators that morning she had no idea why Cath was in her apartment. The door was unlocked, a custom of small-town living she had come to appreciate. Besides, it couldn’t be locked since Adam kicked it in early Wednesday, although Polly didn’t mention that part to the investigators. She did tell them that she and Cath had a habit of stopping by each other’s places after work.
“You said that?” Adam asked. “That it was a habit?”
“I had been by her place last week, she came to see me two nights ago and apparently returned. That’s enough for a habit, right?”
“You make it sound like you were friends.”
“Just being factual. Lots of people saw me sitting with her at the trailer park last week, having a drink after work. Sure, she probably came by to make trouble for me, but I can’t know that. I did tell them that she was trying to blackmail me. And I told them that she couldn’t, because I had already let you and Mr. C know what she had on me.”
The stove was old, faulty, finicky. You had to turn the handles just so. Adam knew that. Cath couldn’t go more than thirty minutes without a smoke. Everybody knew that. She had probably used the burner to light a cigarette, then failed to turn it all the way off. Lit another and—
“It could have been my fault,” Polly said. “I could have been the one who didn’t turn it all the way off. And you know how I keep that scarf on my bedside lamp—what if it slipped, fell against the bulb? I had closed the windows because I knew rain was coming. And if there was already gas and a little fire started—I kept meaning to tell the landlord about that stove, but the rent was cheap and I didn’t cook much, not in this summer heat.”
Her story makes sense, Adam thinks, tossing the overdone burgers. Some chefs would try to serve them, wait to see if the customers complained, but he would never do that.
He pounds another globe of beef into submission. Story. Why did he think of it as a story?
There was so much confusion at the scene. The first responders were the local volunteers, unused to dealing with a blaze of this magnitude, hampered by the heavy rains, which helped keep the flames from spreading to the other buildings on Main, but made a sodden mess of the wreckage. They thought they were doing the right thing, moving Cath’s body when they found it in the early morning hours, but they compromised the investigation into her death.
They also began to question Polly on the spot, as she stood there holding Adam’s hand. “Where were you?” “Who is this?” She told them she had gone to Adam’s place about midnight, that she had no idea who was in her apartment, but she recognized Cath’s car, parked right there on Main. Later, they found Cath’s key ring, a heavy knob of turquoise, in the wreckage.
When Adam was asked during a more formal interview what time Polly came by his room, he agreed it was about midnight. But the fact is, he doesn’t know. He was asleep. He knows what she said to them. He assumes it’s true.
He’s pretty sure it’s true.
It has been five days since the fire. Cath’s sister came to town Sunday, husband in tow, screaming and crying and hurling accusations. They told the Delaware State Police investigators that Cath had all sorts of dirt on Polly, that the whole thing had to be a setup. But Polly had already owned her past, said she had told Mr. C and Adam what was what, and that Cath was angry because she had no real leverage. Polly begged police not to let word get out, but it was a small town and the gossip skipped and whirled from mouth to mouth, too delicious not to be shared.
Yet when the gossip settled, all anyone really knew was that Polly had a sad, brutal past. Yes, she had killed her husband. Yes, there was skepticism about her exoneration, but what was done was done. No one could see how Polly, in bed with Adam, could be responsible for an explosion almost a mile away. Maybe Cath had gone there to confront Polly, then decided to lie in wait for her.
“Maybe,” Polly told the state investigators. “I should tell you—she had other reasons to be mad at me. She had a thing for Adam. We tried to keep our relationship quiet, out of respect for her feelings, but that was the real source of her anger, the reason she wanted to run me out of town. Adam chose me over her.”
There is no daily newspaper in Belleville. Cath’s death received a scant mention in the Wilmington paper and was the third story in the second break on the so-called Delmarva stations, out of Salisbury. “Belleville woman dead in explosion.” That’s that. Nothing’s going to happen. Adam doesn’t have to say or do anything more.
“I guess you could call it karma,” Polly said at one point. “She tried to hurt me, and she ended up hurt.”
Karma. That’s a name for it. Coincidence, too. Accident.
A check comes in, he flips it around: Adam and Eve, whiskey down.
“Very funny,” he says. They don’t have to plan their rendezvous anymore.
“It’s the real thing,” Polly calls over her shoulder. “Do we have any rye bread?”
Polly has to cover all the shifts now. Business is still brisk this first week of September. When she’s not working, she sits on his bed in room 3, looking at the classifieds. She’s circling things. Houses. For sale, not rent, and in the best part of town, where the streets are named for flowers and trees.
“You really want to put down roots? Here?”
“I thought that’s what we agreed to.”
Did they? He feels his restlessness kicking in. The fall is when he usually travels. It wasn’t that long ago that he thought he might go to New Zealand this autumn, catch its spring. Or somewhere on the other side of the equator. Flip the seasons, flip your life.
Flip this burger, Adam. Don’t burn another one.