The Arsonist Read Online Free PDF

and her father made his quiet laughing noise, his head tilted slightly back, his face transformed in pleasure.
    “It woke me actually,” Frankie said. “Though I’d been up earlier. I’d been out walking around. Jet lag.” The moon on the road, the cool night air. “I wondered what that was. That noise.”
    “That’s what it was,” he said.
    She had some more coffee and set the cup down on the broad wooden arm of the chair. “Was there, in fact, a fire?” she asked.
    He nodded. “The Kershaws. It’s gutted, they say.”
    They , in this case as in most cases when they were quoted, referred to Sylvia, the one who went out into the world and heard the gossip and brought it home. Frankie’s father almost invariably repeated it in this form, which she and Liz used to laugh at behind his back. Now she made herself respond as he clearly wanted her to: “My God! Are they okay?”
    “Oh, no one was there. They’re not up yet.” Meaning they hadn’t arrived from wherever else in the country they lived, almost certainly farther south—which was why to be here was to be up . Probably farther west, too.
    “Well, that’s good, I guess.”
    “Yes, they were lucky, in that sense. It’s a terrible thing otherwise, of course.”
    “Of course. It would be.” After a moment she said, “It’s funny it should burn with no one there.”
    “Oh, these old houses.” He shook his head, sighed. “They’re tinder, basically. Anything could have caused it. They’d had the electricity turned on for the season, they say, so it could have been that—some old, worn-out wiring. Or someone told your mother that the painters were in over the spring. Who knows? Maybe rags, that kind of thing.”
    “I suppose it’s possible.” Though this had always seemed unlikely to Frankie. But then it occurred to her that she was probably confusingspontaneous generation with spontaneous combustion. One a fairy tale, one not. She thought.
    “Eminently possible.” They sat in silence for a moment or two. She wondered what he was thinking. His eyes, she noticed now, were empty in repose, staring out at the meadow, the hills.
    “I sort of forget who the Kershaws were.” She corrected herself. “Are.”
    He turned to her, looking almost startled. He cleared his throat, a tic she’d forgotten until just now. He said, “Well, she’s the Olsens’ daughter.”
    And he went on to bring her up-to-date with their history—how the elder Olsens were retired now and had moved to California, how they came up now only for a week each year and stayed with the Kershaws, who’d taken over the house. How “young Kershaw”—this was what her father called this man who must be fifty-five or so—was a lawyer for some white-shoe Boston firm and got up only for a week or two himself each summer.
    Frankie wasn’t listening to his words so much as she was hearing the shift from what had been his fleeting sorrow over the fire to eagerness about all this information; and she was struck again by the intense preoccupation he, as well as her mother, had with this little, closed-in world.
    And then she checked herself. This wasn’t fair, and she knew it. They read the Times every day, they watched the news. They could commiserate with her—they had commiserated—about the repressive and corrupt nature of the Moi government, about the violence in Sudan or Somalia or Kenya or Uganda, about clean-water issues in Africa generally, about the criminality of the banking system in Switzerland. They could speak of these things passionately. But always, Frankie felt, with a certain inherited vocabulary: Tribal conflict. Numbered bank accounts. Globalization. Islamic radicalism .
    And when she spoke of her work, of the children—of the dying, or even of the rescued—they had trouble listening. “I don’t know how you do it,” they’d say, and Frankie thought she could hear in this the wish not to have to listen to any of the details, not to have to imagine