Chapter 1

"The wiring in the addition was old and unpermitted," Chief Bo Traywick read, "and that's where it started."

He read it standing in what had been Ruth Ann Coker's front yard, on a Tuesday morning at 6:40, with frost still silver on the blackened siding and the smell of wet ash coming off the ruin in slow waves. He held the page out at arm's length the way a man holds something he doesn't want on him. Department letterhead. Typed.

Six neighbors stood at the mouth of the lane. Ruth Ann stood closest, in her navy quilted barn coat with the black band on the sleeve, hands in her pockets, reading glasses swinging on their beaded chain.

"The department responded at 9:22 p.m.," Bo went on. "Tanker supplied the hydrant at 9:41. Cause determined on scene." He looked up and softened his voice into something practiced. "I'm sorry, Ruth Ann. It's a hard thing."

Behind him, at the tail of the engine, a boy was rinsing soot off his boots with her yard hose. Nineteen years old, sandy hair flattened under a borrowed helmet with another man's name inked out. Junior Purdy. Bo's sister's son. The water ran off the boots and made a dark ring in the frozen grass.

"Did the tanker reach my hydrant?" Ruth Ann asked.

"It's in the report."

"I read the report. I'm asking you."

"Ruth Ann-"

"Did the tanker reach my hydrant, Bo?"

He folded the page in half and put it in his coat. "The cause is the wiring," he said, pleasant as a man handing back correct change. "You want to argue with the cause, you can argue with the state."

Doreen Kessler, from the next farm down, said something soft about how Ruth Ann had always kept a clean place, and Bo said, "I know it," and that was the end of that.

The trucks pulled out at 6:55. Ruth Ann stood in the yard until the diesel smell went off the air. Then she walked down the lane to the end of the gravel, where the county's hydrant sat.

She put her hand on the brass cap and turned it. It didn't give. It didn't give because it was painted shut - cap, threads and all - in the same gray paint the county used on guardrail posts.

She walked back up. The boy's boots were still wet. There was no water on her property. There had not been any water on her property all night.

She stood a while, looking at the wet boots and the dry ground, and then she went inside and got her notebook. She wrote the time first. Then, under it, one word.

Wet.