The Winter Lodge

“Ha, ha.” She helped herself to another orange. “The doctor said I’m supposed to ask myself how anxious I feel on a scale of one to ten, consciously assessing my need for medication.”

Rourke lifted one eyebrow. “So if you’re a five, does that mean we should make an emergency run to the drugstore?”

“Nope. Not unless I feel like an eight or higher. I’m not sure why I don’t feel more panicked. After everything that’s happened, it’s a wonder I’m not having a nervous breakdown.”

“What, do you want one?”

“Of course not, but it would be normal to fall apart, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t think there’s any kind of ‘normal’ when it comes to a loss like this. You feel relatively okay now. Let’s leave it at that.”

She sensed something beneath his words. A certain wisdom or knowledge, as though maybe he had some experience in this area.

The morning air felt icy and sweet on her face as she followed him outside. He made sure the dogs had food and water and that the heater in the adjacent garage was on so they could come in out of the cold if they needed to. He closed the gate and then, with a flair of chivalry, he opened the door of the Ford Explorer, marked with a round seal depicting a waterwheel in honor of Avalon’s past as a milltown, and the words Avalon P.D.

Then he came around and got in the driver’s side and started up the car. “Seat belt,” he said. He noticed her looking at him and she wondered if he could tell she was thinking about what an enigma he was to her, the first person to distract her from her grief over Gram. He was being chivalrous because he was chief of police, she reminded herself. He would do the same for anyone.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “You’re looking at me funny again.”

She felt her face heat and glanced away. She was supposed to be in despair about losing her grandmother and house, yet here she was having impure thoughts about the chief of police. Please don’t let me be that girl, she thought.

“Other than these clothes,” she said, “I’m fine.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s focus on today. On right now. We’ll deal with things one by one.”

“I’m all ears. See, I don’t know the drill. No idea what happens after the house burns down.”

“You make a new start,” he said. “That’s what.”

His words took hold of her. For the first time since Gram died, she began to see the situation in a new light. Drowning in grief, she had focused on the fact that she was all alone now. Rourke’s comment caused a paradigm shift. Alone became independent. She had never experienced that before. When her grandfather died, she’d been needed at the bakery. After her grandmother’s stroke, she’d been needed at home. Following her own path had never been an option … until now. But here was something so terrible, she wished she could hide it from herself—she was afraid of independence. She might screw up and it would be all her fault.

Although she’d stood around the previous day and watched her house burn, even feeling warmth from the embers, she felt a fresh wave of shock when she got out of the car. With all the equipment gone, there was nothing but the scaly black skeleton surrounded by a moat of trampled mud, now frozen into hard chunks and ridges.

“What happened to the garage?” she asked.

“A pumper backed into it. It’s a good thing we got your car out yesterday.”

The loss barely registered with her. It seemed minuscule in the face of everything else. She could only shake her head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, patting her shoulder a bit awkwardly. “The fire investigators will be here soon, and you can have a look around.”

She felt an unpleasant chill. “Are you thinking this fire was set deliberately?”

“This is standard. If things don’t add up for the fire investigator, he’ll call for an arson investigation. The insurance adjuster said he’d be here soon. First thing he’ll do is give you a debit card so you can get the basics.”

She nodded, though a shudder went through her. A swath of black-and-yellow tape surrounded the house at the property line.

Seeing the house was like probing a fresh wound. The place was a grotesque mutation of its former self. Against the pale morning sky, it resembled a crude charcoal drawing. The porch, once a white smile of railing across the front of the house, had blackened and blistered into nothing. A couple of tenuous beams leaned crazily out over the yard. There was no front door to speak of. All the remaining windows were shattered.

The plumbing formed a strange, Terminator-like skeleton from which everything else had burned away. In the charred ruins, she could pick out the kitchen—the heart of the house. Her grandparents had been frugal people, but they had splurged on a double-door commercial fridge and a huge double oven. More than five decades ago, Gram had created her first commercial baked goods right in that kitchen.

The upstairs was down now, for the most part, and some of the downstairs was in the basement. Jenny could see straight through to the backyard fence, now a field of snow, including a rippled blanket of white over the garden bed. Throughout Gram’s life, the garden had been her pride and joy. After her grandmother’s stroke, Jenny had worked hard to keep it the way it was, a glorious and artful profusion of flowers and vegetables.

The high-pressure stream from the firefighters’ hoses had criss-crossed the yard in clean, arching swaths. The spray had formed icicles on the back fence and gate, turning the backyard into a sculpture garden.

Heavy boots had tamped down the snow on the perimeter of the property. The entire area smelled of wet charcoal, a harsh and stinging assault on the nostrils.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said. “Interesting question, huh? When you lose everything you own in a fire, what’s the first thing you buy?”

“A toothbrush,” he said simply, as if the answer was obvious.

“I’ll make a note of that.”

“There’s a method. The adjuster will hook you up with a salvage company, and they’ll walk you through the process.”

Cars trolled past slowly. She could feel the sting of gawking eyes. People always stared at other people’s troubles and breathed a sigh of relief, grateful it wasn’t them.

Jenny put on protective gear and followed the fire investigator and insurance adjuster up a plank that sloped up to the threshold of the front door in place of the ruined steps. She could pick out the layout of the rooms, could see the filthy remains of familiar furniture and possessions. The whole place had been transformed into alien territory.

She was the alien. She didn’t recognize herself as she tonelessly responded to questions about her routine the night before. She answered questions until her head was about to explode. They ran through all the usual scenarios. She hadn’t fallen asleep smoking in bed. The only sin she’d committed was unintentional and inadvertent. She tried to detach herself, pretend it was someone else explaining that she’d been up late working at her computer. That she’d felt as if she were about to jump out of her skin, so she went to the bakery, knowing someone would be there on the early-morning shift. She answered their questions as truthfully as possible—no, she didn’t recall leaving any appliances on, not the coffeemaker, hair dryer, toaster oven. She had not left a burner on, hadn’t forgotten a burning candle, couldn’t even recall where she kept a supply of kitchen matches. (Under the sink, one of the investigator’s techs informed her.) Her grandmother used to take votive candles to church, lighting row upon row in front of the statue of Saint Casimir, patron of both Poland and of bachelors.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

“Miss?” the fire investigator prodded her.

“I did it,” she said. “The fire’s my fault. My grandmother had a tin box filled with things from Poland—letters, recipes, articles she’d clipped. The night of the fire, I was … I couldn’t sleep so I was doing some research for my column. I got it out, and—oh, God.” She stopped, feeling sick with guilt.

“And what?” he prompted.

“I used a flashlight that night. Its batteries were dead so I took the ones out of the smoke detector in the kitchen and forgot to put them back. I disabled the smoke alarm.”

Rourke seemed unconcerned. “You wouldn’t be the first to do that.”

“But that means the fire was my fault.”

“A smoke alarm only works when there’s someone to hear it,” Rourke pointed out. “Even if it had been wailing all night, the house would have burned. You weren’t present to hear the alarm, so it didn’t matter.”

Oh, she wanted him to be right. She wanted not to be responsible for destroying the house. “I’ve heard that alarm go off,” she said. “It’s loud enough to wake the neighbors, if it’s working.”

“It’s not your fault, Jen.”

She thought of the tin box filled with irreplaceable documents and writings on onionskin paper. Gone now, forever. She felt as though she’d lost her grandmother all over again. Trying to hold herself together, she studied the fireplace, picturing the Christmases they’d shared in this house. She hadn’t used the fireplace since before her grandmother had died.

Gram used to get so cold, she claimed only a cheery fire in the hearth could warm her. “I used to wrap her up like a ko-lache,” Jenny said, thinking aloud about how she and Gram had giggled as Jenny tucked layer after layer of crocheted afghan around the frail little body. “But she just kept shivering and I couldn’t get her to stop.” Then her face was tucked against Rourke’s shoulder, and it hurt to pull in a breath of air, the effort scraping her lungs.

She felt an awkward pat on the back. Rourke probably hadn’t counted on finding his arms full of female despair this morning. Rumor had it he knew exactly what to do with a woman, but she suspected the rumors applied to sexy, attractive, willing women. That was the only type he ever dated, as far as she could tell. Not that she was keeping track, but it was hard to ignore. More frequently than she cared to admit, she’d spotted him taking some stacked bimbo to the train station to get the early train to the city.

“… go outside,” Rourke was saying in her ear. “We can do this another time.”