Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

Sophia’s late husband, Otto, had been a friendly man who nonetheless valued privacy above most things he could hold in his hands. He made sure that the walkway he built from the road to the front door of their house was wide and welcoming and that the porch light was turned on at dusk, but he also planted a border of spruce trees around the house and tended them with care until they eventually made the loveliest sort of wall. They cast fragrant shade, gave the birds shelter, tempered the cold winter wind. Sophia liked to look at the spruce trees. They reminded her of Otto.

As she walked back from the store with her groceries tucked into the crook of her arm, Sophia admired the spruces from a distance, was captivated by their silhouettes against the pale night sky. They seemed, tonight, in the hard January freeze, to be edged with gold. As if the sun were rising behind them. Quite beautiful. Actually, she decided, quite odd. When she reached the brick walkway that Otto had built between the spruces, Sophia peered uncertainly through the trees and saw that her house was in flames.

Her neighbors, who had by then run from their houses, had to hold the old woman back. She kept calling out to her cat and to her small house while the fire grew with extraordinary speed into a shimmering, shrieking rage.

By the time the fire truck arrived, Sophia’s house was far beyond salvation and the spruces that had for so long graced it were blackened, mostly spoiled, their branches cooked to spars.

In the morning the fire inspector, surprised that the house had burned so quickly, traced its source to Sophia’s basement. Near the furnace.

“There was absolutely nothing wrong with my furnace,” Sophia insisted, her cold hands tucked under her chin. “Nothing whatsoever.”

She looked upon the black and broken hull of her house, the ring of ruined trees, every standing remnant wrapped in dazzling, tumultuous ice, and was unable to see the accidental beauty wrought so suddenly during the night.

A few blocks away, Joe walked into Angela’s Kitchen to find the breakfast crowd talking about the fire.

“Think it came up from underground?” he asked no one in particular. People shrugged, frowned, ate their eggs.

“Don’t think so,” said Ed, the mailman, who drove past a dozen boreholes every time he delivered the mail. “That fire’s been burning for a coon’s age, Joe. It’s not going anywhere. Not doing too much harm. Never come anywhere close to Sophia’s place before. She’s a good bit east of the tunnels.”

“What about the coal that was never mined? How do you know how much coal is buried right down under our feet? How do you know the fire’s not going to come and get it?”

“Well, we don’t,” said Earl, who made sure his hardware store was always well stocked with smoke alarms. “Things are okay so far, Joe.”

“I’m not sure Sophia would see it that way, Earl.”

“Fires do happen for all kinds of reasons, you know,” Angela said with Rusty by her side.

Cal, who ran the A&P, chuckled into his coffee cup. “Sophia’s living with her son and his family now. Probably rigged the whole thing.”

“I can’t believe you people,” Joe said, swiveling around on his stool. “There’s a great, big fire down there, and all any of you ever do is make jokes about it.”

“What’re you doing about it, Joe?” asked Earl.

“Come on, Earl. All I’ve got to worry about is an old motor home.”

Earl ate his eggs.

“What do you want us to do, Joe?” Angela sounded angry, looked angry, kept her hand on Rusty’s shoulder. “You think we should leave everything on the chance that the fire might decide to come this way?”

“Seems to me you’re taking an awful risk,” he said.

“Seems to me you are, too,” she said with a certain satisfaction.

And for a while everything in town was relatively quiet.

Chapter 18

        On the last Sunday in April, Joe decided to clean out the Schooner, stem to stern, and usher in the warming breeze. His landlocked ship was full of winter dust and smelled like dirty laundry. So he opened all the windows, dusted off the screens, polished the panes, shook out his blankets and pegged them in the sun. He scoured the bathroom, swept the floors, scrubbed the countertops. He cleaned out his small fridge, washed his clothes and his curtains, and made everything tidy.

He rarely stepped foot in the Schooner’s “wheelhouse,” as he liked to call it, for he seldom drove anywhere, even in winter; he biked or hitched instead and was usually content to leave the dusty dashboard to the spiders and the windshield to the frost. But spring cleaning was spring cleaning. So he filled a pail with soapy water, grabbed his sponge, and headed for the bow.

He sponged down the dashboard and the vinyl seats, swept the leaves out from under the gas pedal, washed the windshield inside and out. He polished the mirror and dusted the visors. Threw out the junk that accumulated in the glove compartment, including the letter he’d written to his father nearly a year ago. He did not read it first.

“Done,” he said, his mind on a hot shower and a cold beer. But there was one more thing he knew he really ought to do.

To the right of the driver’s seat, bolted into the floor, was a wooden trunk about the size of a sewing machine. It was handmade of hard wood and brass hardware, one of the things that Ian had noticed right off the bat, Joe’s first night in Belle Haven. Someone had taken great pains to build and install this trunk, presumably for valuables. But there was nothing in it now. Nothing but a few maps that Joe had transferred from the Jaguar. He was fairly certain about this. He tried to think back to that day when he’d pulled into Big Al’s, to remember whether the trunk had