Vane Pursuit Read online

  “But they’ve always been extra careful about fire hazards,” Helen protested. “Mrs. Lomax told me so. Those Swope boys who work there are her nephews or something, and they tell her everything. Not that she wouldn’t know anyway. You know how she is. But anyway, she says they give everybody a strict warning lecture their first day on the job. They have no-smoking signs all over the place and fire drills every few weeks. Cigarettes have to be left with the timekeeper and anybody caught with a lighter or even a single match in his pocket gets fired on the spot.”

  Peter shook his head, as if to clear it. “Did she happen to mention whether they’re still working double shifts?”

  “I know they are. I saw the day shift going off and the night people coming on while I was taking my pictures. Darling, I know we ought to stay clear of the area, but isn’t there some way we could at least find out if everybody got out all right?” Helen begged. “I don’t think I can bear not to know.”

  “There’s a place called Lookout Point over toward Lumpkin Upper Mills. It’s far enough from the factory so we won’t be in the way of the engines. We ought to be able to see what’s happening and there’s bound to be somebody around who’ll know whether there’ve been any casualties. Lucky we left our bird watching glasses in the glove compartment.”

  By the time they got to Lookout Point, the smell of the fire was enough to sting their eyes and throats even though the wind was blowing toward the east and they were half a mile westward. Through their field glasses they got a clear view of the burning factory down in the valley. Flames were shooting far above the building, scattering burning debris over the road, the fire trucks, and the roofs of nearby buildings. Helen saw one ember land on the cannon where she’d been standing a few hours ago. To her surprise, it set off a strange, bright fizzing flash.

  “Peter, look quick! The cannon’s on fire.”

  “Can’t be. No, by George, you’re right! That looks to me like black powder burning. It must have been fresh, too. Powder gets damp quickly.”

  “There certainly wasn’t any when I climbed up. I made sure the cannon was clean before I risked my pink sneakers. Silly of me, I suppose, but I always feel there’s something extra special about new sneakers. Oh, how ghastly! The whole roof’s caving in. Can’t the firemen do something?”

  “I don’t think they’re even trying to save the factory. They know it’s hopeless. All they can do is try to contain the fire and protect the surrounding properties.”

  “Another of Praxiteles Lumpkin’s weather vanes gone.” Helen sighed. “Both in the same week, and both by fire. You know, Peter, that’s awfully strange. The one I photographed this afternoon was right in the center of that section of roof we just watched fall in, but I didn’t notice it falling. Goodness knows there’s plenty of light to see by even if the smoke is so thick. Did you see it?”

  “No, I didn’t, now that you mention it.”

  “You don’t suppose some brave soul dashed up and rescued the weather vane?”

  “I expect they were too busy rescuing themselves,” Peter replied somberly. “I just hope they all got out.”

  As Peter had predicted, they weren’t alone on Lookout Point. Other spectators were crowding around them, looking far more worried than excited. Peter and Helen could overhear their anxious conversation.

  “There’s Bob Giberson down there wetting his roof with the garden hose. If only the water pressure holds out! Oh my God, look! The porch is on—nope, he got it out.”

  “You can damn well bet Soapy Snell’s porch isn’t on fire. Where is he? Can you see him anywhere? Say, mister, could we borrow your glasses a second?”

  “By all means.” Peter handed them over.

  After a minute or so, the other man returned them. “Nope, I can’t see him. Probably home countin’ his money. Huh! Chief Olson’s down there screwin’ up the traffic.”

  “He would be.”

  “I wanted to go help, but they wouldn’t let me past the fire line. Got engines there from Clavaton and Hoddersville and everywhere.”

  “They say half the cars in the parking lot were on fire before most of the people in the factory knew what was happening.”

  “Anybody get caught inside?”

  “Clem says they all made it out but Caspar Flum. Cas was in the tallow room, naturally. That seems to be where it started. Huntley Swope tried to go in after him, Clem says, but it was a solid wall of flames. Huntley’s clothes were on fire when they hauled him back; I guess he’s burned pretty bad. The police ambulance whooped him off to the Hoddersville Hospital.”

  “That’ll be something for his brother to put in the paper, I reckon.”

  “Yup, there’s Cronk down there now taking pictures an’ hectoring the fire chief. Where’s Brinkley, I wonder?”

  “Brink’s on days this week. I saw him down at Johnny’s Spa, just after he got off his shift. He was buying cigars for his father-in-law. They got the old man living with them now, him and Cynthia. So Cas Flum got caught in the fire? God, that’s awful! Poor old bastard must have worked in that tallow room fifty years or more. Well, at least he won’t be out of a job like the rest of the town.”

  “Think Soapy Snell will ever rebuild?”

  “Who knows? I don’t see how they could have enough insurance on that old firetrap of a building to make up half of what it’d cost ‘em to put up a new building at today’s prices. Soapy won’t give a damn. He’s got plenty. Be just as well pleased to retire, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “I don’t know what people are going to do if they don’t rebuild. Wind up slinging hamburgers at fast-food joints, I expect, or clerking in supermarkets. This is one hell of a situation, if you ask me. Boy, if we ever find out who fired that cannon—”

  “You surely don’t think the cannon had anything to do with starting the fire? Hell, that old popgun couldn’t shoot a hole in a paper bag.”

  “Who says it couldn’t. Sure made one hell of a bang, didn’t it? We heard it clear up here to our place the wife and I ran out to see what the hell. was going on and the tallow room was all in a blaze as if a bomb went off inside. I never saw the like before. And, believe me, I never want to see it again.”

  “But you can’t even aim those old cannons like the modern ones.”

  “What’s to aim? The damn thing was pointed right at the tallow room window and not more than twenty feet away. Cas could look straight into the muzzle. He used to kid about being under bombardment.”

  “But a cannonball wouldn’t start a fire even if it landed plunk in one of the vats.”

  “You wouldn’t use a cannonball. You’d ball up some rags around a rock or something, ram it in on top of the powder, and it’d be on fire by the time it left the cannon. Wouldn’t travel far, but it wouldn’t have to. Can you imagine what a wad of blazing rags would do to a vat of hot tallow?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be around when it fell in, that’s for sure. But who’d be fool enough to take that risk?”

  “Somebody was fool enough to fire the goddamn cannon. You can’t get around that.”

  “Aw, it could have been coincidence. Maybe some kid shoved a big firecracker down the barrel.”

  “Well, I expect we’ll find out fast enough, if there’s any of us left alive by morning. Cripes, this smoke is getting to me. I’m going back in the house.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Peter and Helen had had as much as they could take, too. They drove home with the car radio on, catching emergency bulletins first from the Clavaton station, then from the network. Jane Austen was waiting for them inside the house, indignant at having been left so long, notwithstanding the fact that Mary Enderble had dropped over to open a fresh can of cat food and hold Jane’s paw for a while after Helen had telephoned from the Horsefalls’.

  They tried to apologize, but she turned up her nose at the smell of smoked soap fat and stalked off in a huff, so they went upstairs to shower and shampoo. Once rid of the stench, they changed into clean night gear, put th
eir stinking garments down cellar to be washed or outdoors to be aired, as the case might be, and at last persuaded Jane to join them in front of the television set.

  Seeing on the screen snatches of what they’d already watched live was rather an odd experience, but it didn’t last long. Caspar Flum was the big news. His death was official. The Fane and Pennon’s archives had furnished a lovely picture of Mr. Flum beaming among his tallow vats on the occasion of the factory’s centennial in 1972. There was a more recent shot of him accepting his fifty-year service pin from the august and, needless to say, spotlessly clean hand of President Soapy Snell.

  Mr. Flum had been a childless widower, but the news-hounds had managed to round up a sister and a couple of nephews, all of them bleary-eyed from tears or smoke or both, and none too eager to parade their grief in front of the camera. They were unanimous in agreement that tallow had been Caspar Hum’s life. The sister was willing to allow that maybe perishing among his vats was the way Cas would have wanted to go, but the less inarticulate of the nephews blurted out that he’d still like to get his hands on the murdering son of a bitch who’d fired that cannon.

  No, he hadn’t seen it fired. Nobody had, as far as he knew. But it must have been the cannon that set off the blaze because what the hell else could it have been? It just went to confirm the big bang theory, the other and presumably more studious nephew added, having at last got his Adam’s apple free from his collar.

  The sister contributed the further information that Cas had always been a good brother to her. She’d already bought his birthday present a month ago and what if the store wouldn’t let her return it after all this time? Her voice became totally choked with tears, and the cameraman at last showed the decency to move on.

  “Poor woman,” Helen commented. “I don’t know why they always have to go pestering the families at times like this. Let’s have a spot of brandy, dear. I’m ready to drop and so are you, but we probably won’t sleep without something to settle us down.”

  The brandy must have worked; the pounding on their front door at half-past seven dredged them both from fathoms deep. Peter stuck his head out the window without bothering to open his eyes and yelled, “Hold your horses. I’m coming.” He then held a brief wrestling match with his bathrobe, borrowed his slippers back from Jane, and went downstairs.

  The too-early visitor was Cronkite Swope, begrimed, bedraggled, reeking like a smoldering tallow vat, and tottering from exhaustion. Peter grabbed him by the arm.

  “For God’s sake, come in before you fall down.”

  He steered the young reporter through to the kitchen, shoved him into a chair, and began making coffee. “Want some juice?”

  “Huh?”

  “Here, drink this.”

  Swope examined the glass of orange juice as though it might have been an apport from the astral plane, finally appeared to remember what it was for, and drank. Perhaps the fruit sugar revived him to some extent. He shoved back his chair and stood up.

  “Mind if I wash?”

  “Go right ahead. In there.”

  “I know.”

  Swope had visited the Shandy house a number of times since Peter had, by several odd twists of circumstance, become the resident sleuth of Balaclava Junction and environs. He found the downstairs bathroom with little difficulty and emerged somewhat less begrimed though no less kippered. “Professor, you’ve got to help us.”

  “What’s the matter, Cronkite?” Helen was downstairs now, looking far more human than either of the men in her fleecy pink bathrobe and cerise slippers with pompoms on the toes. “Sit down, Peter, I’ll do the coffee. Who wants bacon and eggs?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she got out the big frying pan and began rooting in the refrigerator. “You’ve been up all night, I’ll bet, Cronkite. Did they get the fire out?”

  “They got flames down, but it keeps starting up again. It’ll probably go on smoldering for a week, the fire chief says. Thanks, Mrs. Shandy, I guess I could use some food. Though I sort of remember eating a doughnut from the Red Cross canteen sometime or other.”

  “Here, take one of these muffins to gnaw on till the eggs are ready. Would you like a bowl of cereal?”

  “This is fine, thanks. Gosh, I didn’t realize how hungry I was. But it doesn’t feel right, sitting here.”

  “Why not?” Peter wanted to know. “What’s eating you, Swope?”

  “It’s my brother.”

  “Huntley? We heard he was burned trying to rescue Caspar Flum. He’s not—?”

  “No, Hunt’s doing all right, the last I heard. It’s mostly on his arms and chest. His shirt caught fire. He’ll be awhile healing and they had to dope him up for the pain, but it could have been worse. It’s Brink I’m worried about.”

  “Brinkley? What happened to him?” Helen asked. “He wasn’t in the factory, was he? We heard somebody mention that he’d been working the day shift yesterday.”

  “That’s right. No, Brink’s okay physically. But while he was taking his sister-in-law over to see Hunt at the hospital, somebody heaved a cannonball through his picture window with a burning rag tied around it.”

  “My God!” said Peter. “Did it do much damage?”

  “Set fire to an arrangement of silk flowers and dried native grasses, retail value forty-nine dollars and fifty cents, that his wife Cynthia won at the raffle when they opened that new flower shop in the mall. Lucky Cynthia’s father was in the house with the kids and hadn’t gone to bed yet, or the place might have gone up in smoke and them with it. And whoever threw the cannonball would have blamed the fire on a burning ember and got away with it.” Swope jabbed his fork savagely into a fried egg.

  “So somebody actually believes Brinkley fired that old Civil War cannon into the tallow room?” Helen asked incredulously.

  “Somebody, heck. Everybody, from what I was hearing all night at the fire. Even the volunteer firemen were all sore as boils about losing their regular jobs. I don’t have to tell you what the loss of the factory’s going to mean to Lumpkinton, do I? It’s the town’s only industry. If they don’t rebuild, it’s going to do a real number on the real-estate tax base, which will hurt the families even worse than they’re hurting now. I understand how people feel, but what gets me is how anybody in his right mind could think my brother would do a crazy thing like that. Just because Brink kidded about it a couple of times and I was dumb enough to—”

  “Shoot your mouth off in front of Hilly Horsefall’s youth group last Sunday night,” Peter finished for him. “But the kids knew you only meant it as a joke.”

  “Which wouldn’t have prevented some smart little twerp from trying it out,” the reporter said bitterly.

  “But how could they have got their hands on gunpowder?” Helen wanted to know.

  Cronkite snorted. “Are you kidding? Half their fathers probably belong to the Lumpkinton Militia and have black powder for their muzzle-loaders. If three or four of them each swiped half a cupful or so, that would be enough to do the job, I should think. Anyway, if they walked into a gun shop and said they were buying it for their fathers, they mightn’t have too much trouble talking the clerk into letting them have a pound or so. Or they could get one of the big guys to buy it for them, same as they get their beer. There are screwballs enough around. That bunch up on Woeful Ridge would do anything, so long as it was what they think of as real he-man stuff.”

  He meant a group of self-styled survivalists who met on weekends to hone up their machismo. Cronkite had held a personal grudge against them ever since he’d tried to get an interview and had been ignominiously run off, but most of Balaclava County took them as a crude joke.

  “Woeful Ridge is a long way from the soap factory,” said Helen. “Have another egg. So what you want is for Peter to find who really shot off the cannon, right?”

  “I want him to help me find out how the fire really got started. Brink says he didn’t fire the cannon. He doesn’t believe the ball would have gone through the window
anyway on account of the trajectory, whatever that means.”

  “It means the ball most likely wouldn’t travel in a straight line,” Peter explained, “and you’d have the devil’s own time figuring out just where it would go, unless you’d fired a number of preliminary shots to get the range, which obviously wasn’t done in this case. I’m inclined to agree with your brother, but I expect we’re going to have one hell of a job figuring out what actually did happen. Is anything at all left of the tallow room?”

  “There’s not much left of the whole factory except a few jagged hunks of brick and mortar and a lot of ashes, as far as I could see.”

  Helen’s face twisted. “No sign of the weather vane, I don’t suppose?”

  One might have thought she’d just laid a roc’s egg. Young Swope stared at her for fully ten seconds, a piece of toast halfway to his mouth, before he realized what she was talking about. “The weather vane? Oh, that’s right. You’re doing a feature article for the Fane and Pennon about them.”

  “Am I? I didn’t know.”

  “Well, I assumed that had to be why you were going around taking all those pictures. I mentioned it to my editor and he’s pretty interested. But, gee, I don’t know, Mrs. Shandy. It’ll be a while before those ashes are cool enough to sift through. If they did find the weather vane, I don’t suppose there’d be much left but a blob. I’ll mention it to the firemen, though, if you want.”

  Cronkite drank the rest of his coffee. “I hadn’t thought about the weather vane. It’s a shame, isn’t it. I always liked that skinny old guy in the tub.”

  “So did I. Let me get you some more coffee. So, Peter, what are you going to do?”

  “Well, er—”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Well, drat it, Helen—”

  “I understand perfectly, dear. The Enderbles are primed to take care of Jane, and you can get your meals at the faculty dining room.”

  “And where will you be, for God’s sake?”