“You’d think people like this would know better,” he said. “My mother always told me it wasn’t good manners at all to chase fires.”
Gregor had known a president of the United States who liked to chase fires. “Maybe they’re chasing a murder,” he told Pete Donovan.
They turned into the Bailey house’s drive and went up as close as the knot of vehicles there would allow them.
“Come out to the back and see it while you still can,” Donovan said. “By now the kerosene fumes ought to be mostly cleared out. They were so strong when I got here, I almost vomited.”
“Really,” Gregor said.
Pete hopped out onto the drive and waited for Gregor to follow him. “We go this way around back. It gets you the closest you can be. God only knows what’s left of her now.”
The import of that statement became clear almost as soon as Gregor got out of the car. Because of the way the house was built, it was difficult to see anything of what was going on at the back. Gregor discovered later that the floor plan was a fat tee, with the short wide end at the front. It was possible, however, to feel what was going on. Now that it was full dark, the air was hard and cold. The stars above their heads looked like chips of mica against black velvet. The wind was cold, too, but it brought with it intimations of something else, short gusts of heat that came and went so quickly, they might have been fantasy. That they weren’t was attested to by the glow of red and the spirals of black smoke rising up from the back. Pete Donovan got Gregor by the wrist and pulled him along.
“Move,” Donovan said. “We really don’t have much time.”
Gregor moved as fast as he was able, and in no time at all he could see what Donovan was getting at, about everything. Donovan had been wrong about the kerosene. The smell of it was thick in the air. Gregor found himself thinking that she must have poured it on in buckets. God only knew where she’d gotten hold of all of it. Then there was the position of the conservatory, and the greenhouse. Donovan had brought Gregor around the building to the right. Farther to the right were broad lawns covered with untouched carpets of snow. To the left were trees, ancient and massive. Up from the middle of them rose the glass panes of the roof of what must have been a three-story greenhouse. Just behind those panes, just where the trees cleared, the house was in flames.
“You’ve got to climb the wall,” Donovan told him. “I mean, you’re supposed to climb the wall. It’s got a ladder built into it. Miriam’s father built it as an observation post for sky watching. He used to have the local Boy Scouts out here. You just—”
But Gregor shook his head. There was indeed a ladder in the wall Pete Donovan was talking about. The wall itself created a division between the property’s front and back yards. Gregor and Donovan had had to walk through the gap between it and the house to get to where they were now. The wall was made of stone and the “ladder” was made of the lack of stones, here and there, in a hand-over-hand pattern that made Gregor seasick just to look at. It went up three stories and ended in a little square roofless turret.
“I don’t think so,” Gregor told Donovan. “I don’t think it’s my kind of thing. Is this as close as you’ve been able to get?”
“Hell, no,” Donovan said. “When we first got here I walked right up under her practically. I put on one of those asbestos suits they’ve got and went right through the fire until I was standing in the middle of all those animals. I broke a couple of windows and let the animals out.”
“Good idea.”
“I wanted to get her out,” Pete Donovan went on, “but the fireman said there wasn’t enough time. The conservatory was going up really fast and you can’t get to the greenhouse any other way. It’s like I told you. With those trees you’re stuck going in through the conservatory or not at all.”
“You said she was on a ledge?”
“Like a shelf,” Pete Donovan said. “The greenhouse has got these glass shelves, or clear shelves anyway—”
“Could they have been some kind of plastic?”
“I guess. Do you need that for something?”
“No.” Gregor sighed, “not exactly. Go back to telling me about this shelf. How far off the ground was it?”
“Ceiling of a room second story up,” Donovan said promptly. “I could reach it without a ladder, and there wasn’t a ladder.”
“In a greenhouse? In a greenhouse where they keep animals?”
“I thought that was fishy, too,” Donovan said. “The way I look at it is, we were never supposed to find her—Miriam, I mean—but she took the ladder away just in case. Ann-Harriet I’m talking about now.”