Chapter 3

The laundry room was behind the locker rooms - two industrial machines on the left, a folding table, a wall of mops. Faye had been running towels since nine o'clock the night before because Faye always ran something. That's how she survives.

She heard my boots and turned around already talking.

"We're out of detergent - don't ask me for detergent, Willa, ask the Methodists."

"Faye."

"I don't want to hear it."

"I haven't said it yet."

She's sixty-eight, narrow as a fence post, gray hair cut short and wet at the temples. She's my mother's only sister. She was standing with a towel in both hands like a shield.

I closed the door behind me. "September fourteenth, nineteen ninety-four."

She dropped the towel in the machine.

"You drove him," I said. "Three years old in a car seat, over the ridge, to a house with a gate."

"They fed him." Her voice came out of her throat like gravel. "They fed him and renamed him and put him in a school with a pool. Your mother would've-" She stopped. "You think I wanted that?"

"I think you signed as a witness. I think you've sat at my table with a covered dish twice a year for thirty years and passed me the cornbread."

Faye sat down on the folding table. Just sat, like her knees had decided for her. The machines thumped. Water dripped somewhere behind the wall.

"He wasn't even crying by the time we got there," she said. "That's what I can't get out of my head. He'd cried himself out in the driveway. He sat in that car seat and looked at the trees. And I carried him up the porch steps and Corinne took him like he'd come from the hospital and I got back in my car and drove home and I have not had one good night's sleep since."

"Who told him I was dead?"

Faye looked up.

"In twenty-thirteen," I said. "He was searching. He's been searching eleven years. Somebody sat him down and told him his sister died in that fire."

"I did." She said it bare. No tears. That's the thing about Faye - she doesn't perform it. "He came to my house with your birth date written on a napkin and a photograph of a house on Coon Hollow Road. He asked me was there a little girl. And Marge was dying by inches and the family had been so good to me with the-" she flapped a hand at nothing, "with the truck, with the shed roof, with the money they slipped me when Harold passed. And I told him the girl in that house died of the smoke. I said it was the reason the fire was such a famous thing. And then I went in my bathroom and vomited."

"You told a boy his sister burned to death."

"I told a man his sister burned to death," she said. "He was twenty-two."

I stood there with my hands at my sides and felt something come unhooked inside me - not toward her, not toward my mother, just loose. All my life I'd been the survivor. Everybody said it. Poor little Willa Keene, burned at six, only child, that poor family. Thirty years of being the girl who lived through it.

The report. Thirty years of the report.

"It was electrical," I said. "That's the finding. That's what the fire marshal's file says. I read the summary in the paper when I was nineteen because I was applying for the department."

Faye laughed. It was an ugly little sound and it scared me worse than the crying would have.

"The report says electrical because Mr. Ferris wrote it that way after a conversation in a parking lot," she said. "The lawyer sat in his car with the engine running and the report came out electrical. There's no kerosene in it. There's no tank in it. There's no fence line in it. I was in that house the day before, Willa. I smelled it."

I thought about me at six, reaching back into smoke for the crib rail. I thought about me at nine, telling a doctor about the smell and writing the word "nightmare" on my own chart by having the bad manners to be six years old.

"Names," I said. "I want the fire marshal's office. I want the actual file, not the summary. I'm a volunteer engineer with the county and I have standing and I'm going to use it."

"You won't find the tank in it."

"Then I'll want to know who took it out."

Faye looked at the thumping machines like she wished they would swallow her. Then she said the thing I came for.

"His name's on the placement paper," she said. "The lawyer. He's still alive. He's still got the office next to the funeral home. He's been the man who does the Ottaways' paper for forty years." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "And Willa - when you pull that file, don't do it from the courthouse in town."

"Why not."

"Because the Ottaways own the paper here," she said. "And they'll read it before you do."