life that needs bizarre crimes and freaks of nature to explain itself. Unless. What? Dan is tortured by unanswered questions. What does this have to do with us? He browsed obsessively, lingering at this unsigned entry on unexplainedstuff.com and picked up later by a half-dozen other sites:
In December 1956, Virginia Caget of Honolulu, Hawaii, walked into the room of Young Sik Kim, a 78-year-old disabled person, to find him enveloped in blue flames. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, Kim and his easy chair were ashes. Strangely enough, nearby curtains and clothing were untouched by fire, in spite of the fierce heat that would have been necessary to consume a human being.
He should be packaging, storing, doing last things before he locks the door on his mother’s life. Instead, he trolls the Internet, gleaning details. At theness.com, a Dr Steven Novella pushes him into murk and confusion – hey, this is an MD putting his reputation on the line – when he says:
. . . Believers often cite as evidence the fact that a body has been completely reduced to ash, except for the ends of the arms and legs and sometimes the head. But there is a good explanation for this phenomenon. It is called the wick effect. The clothing of victims can act as a wick, while their body fat serves as a source of fuel (like an inside-out candle). The burning of the clothes is maintained by liquefied fat wicked from the body of the victim, causing a slow burn that can nearly consume the victim and resulting in the greasy brown substance often coating nearby walls.
Except for the ends of the arms and legs . . . The foot and the chair. The clipping. Another of those things she kept hidden but preserved: her secret, in code. As his mother tore the paper out of his hands that day, she smacked him hard. He reads on and on, chapter, verse, feeding on details, until he comes to himself with a shudder. OK, lady, what does this have to do with us?
Did she really leave Fort Jude because old women go up in flames for no known reason? He doesn’t think so. Once, when she let herself talk about her life before New London, Lucy told him she’d rather die than go back there, ever.
Which she did.
Die, and she left orders. He will throw her ashes into the Atlantic thousands of miles north of her home town. What came down there, he wonders, what was so bad that she had to go? Trouble in her family, or was it something worse? He won’t find the answers in his browser. He slams his laptop and turns to the pictures she kept.
If he stares at the house behind Lucy for long enough, will he see her parents grouped behind the leaded windows, snapped in black and white? Are they still in there? Would they come out and talk to him? He doesn’t know. In fact, there’s a lot he doesn’t know. When he was a kid he wanted to go live inside that picture, hang out on the beach with those five happy guys, laughing and not giving a fuck. The problem is, they don’t look carefree to him now; they look sinister and guarded.
Stupidly, he sits, half-waiting for a sign from his mother, but the dead don’t leave messages, right? Reason, Carteret. Think. One these dudes has got to be my father, he thinks, why else would she keep this thing?
The hell of it is that he could stare into those faces and never know which one; he could feed the Polaroid into a scanner and enlarge it, he could analyze every facial detail down to the last pixel and still not know, but Dan does know one thing. He’ll hunt down the careless, grinning bastard. He will, and when he does, he will damn well shake him until the truth falls out.
3
Lorna Archambault
Don’t ask me how it happened, don’t think you know what it’s like. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Did you quit gossiping or leave off gawking long enough to wonder how it felt to burn alive, with your heart splitting and a furnace in your fundament?
Or were you too busy surmising? Was it all about the phenomenon, and did you give me a second thought, or were you only scared because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you? Do not