Storm Front

across-the-street neighbor, Robbie. He pulled his jeans up the last two inches and popped the door.
    Robbie shouted at him, “Your garage is on fire.”
    “What?” He didn’t comprehend that for a split second, and Robbie screamed again and pointed to his left, and Virgil saw the flickering light in the side yard.
    He thought,
The boat!
    Virgil turned and bolted back through the house, into the kitchen, yanked open the cabinet under the kitchen sink, pulled out his fire extinguisher, ran through the mudroom, out the back door—barefoot—and around to the side of the garage.
    An oval of flame was licking up the clapboard siding, and Robbie came running around from the front and shouted, “I called the fire department, they’re coming. Where’s your hose?”
    Virgil shouted back, “On the other side of the back steps, it’s already connected,” and Robbie ran toward the steps. Virgil pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the handle, and foam began blowing out into the flames.
    He could knock down the flames for a few seconds, but when he moved on to another section, the fire returned to the first, but he continued hosing it down, making some progress, and kept thinking about the boat: the boat was inside, his pride and joy, a like-new Ranger Angler, with a couple of years yet to go on the financing.
    Robbie came running back, and Virgil realized the other man was still in his pajamas, and he was dragging the hose and turned the nozzle and fired it into the flames. The fire extinguisher ran out of foam and Virgil grabbed the hose and moved in close and Robbie shouted, “Watch your feet,” and, “Here’s the fire department.”
    The firemen came at a run, pulling hose, and hammered the fire with a flood of foam that the fire couldn’t compete with: in less than a minute, it was gone, but Virgil shouted, “We gotta look inside.”
    He got the garage door up, but there was no fire inside. He started to step inside and a fireman caught his arm, held him back. “Don’t do that, there might have been some structural weakening.”
    Virgil walked back out, calmer now, and asked, “What the hell happened?”
    “Did you have gasoline out here or something? I can smell gas,” a fireman said.
    “There was no gas out here,” Virgil said. “There’s a can in the garage . . . still there, right by the lawn mower.”
    “Hate to say it,” said another fireman. “It looks like a Molotov cocktail. Like somebody threw one at the side of the garage.” He pointed to the top of the oval. “It broke there. Splattered, ran down the wall.”
    “He’s a cop,” Robbie said.
    The second fireman said, “That could explain—”
    Virgil said, “Yeah but . . .” And the thought struck him. “Ah, shit,” he said, and he turned and ran back into the house, to the study.
    The stone was gone.
    —
    V IRGIL FELT LIKE SCREAMING , but he didn’t. The first thing he did was look around, to make sure he hadn’t simply moved it, and had forgotten about it, but he hadn’t, and he knew that when he looked. Then he went to the tracker pad: no sign of Ellen’s car.
    But it
had
to be Ellen, one way or the other. Nobody else, other than Davenport and Yael, knew that the stone was in his house. He tried to call her, but after five rings, her phone sent him to the answering service. He left a simple message: “Call me when you get this, and I may not go for a warrant for your arrest on charges of arson, burglary, grand theft, and aggravated assault.”
    He took no satisfaction from the message: he’d warned everyone, several times, that they were playing with fire, and virtually every one of them had ignored him.
    —
    B ACK OUTSIDE , the firemen were cleaning up, and the man in charge told him that the damage had been minimal, and confined to the garage siding. There were no structural problems, and the boat was untouched. “Not to say that it wasn’t serious. If your neighbor hadn’t seen it go up, and you guys hadn’t gotten out there, the roof would have caught and then it’d have been Katie-bar-the-door.”
    When the firemen and the rubbernecking neighbors had drifted away, and Virgil had thanked and re-thanked Robbie, the guy who’d seen the fire, called 911, and come to help—he’d send him a couple cases of Leinie’s Summer Shandy at the first chance—he went back inside the house and kicked an unfortunate wastebasket. He was a knot of frustration, four o’clock in the morning and