send your children to visit my grave, ladies, and leave me the hell out of your little lectures on playing with matches.
I know you despised me, and you know what I thought of you.
Poor Lorna. Nobody knows what happened, but everybody knows what she looked like at the end. It was in all the papers, on TV, those pictures! How humiliating for a proud woman like her.
In this town, extraordinary things come down – Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds – hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like that. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch, but these things happen to outsiders, not people you know, although our mayor did get struck by lighting on the eighteenth hole.
In towns like ours, where lizards come indoors and scorpions as big as lobsters can tumble off rafters in old garages, anything can happen.
Anything.
But – spontaneous human combustion?
We’ve had three, right here in Fort Jude!
Now, people may combust in broad daylight in London or Paris or even in downtown Dallas, but never in Fort Jude. Some poor soul may burst into flames in public where you live, but not here. The society is much too private. We will do anything to protect our own. Fort Jude’s crimes and love affairs, the betrayals – our great mysteries – unfold in secret, late at night.
In Fort Jude, there are close to half a million people.
Then there are people you know.
The whole world knows about Muriel Keesler, although she wasn’t from here. She’s famous, because she was the first. Old Muriel combusted and burned to a cinder sitting in her chair back in the Fifties, and to this day nobody knows why. Experts still study it. People from all over the world come to Fort Jude to reconstruct the scene and come up empty. Nobody in town knew her until it happened.
Then everybody did. It’s a very great mystery. No sign of arson; it wasn’t suicide. Nobody broke in and set her afire. She just burned up, and nobody knows why. The only things burned were the chair she sat in and Mrs Keesler, of course. Charred bits that fell on the rug. Police and fire marshals, the coroner, scientists, nobody could explain it. Forensics experts and scientists, psychologists, journalists from all over the world came to investigate. Movie people came, even mediums came, psychic pathologists. They studied it from every angle; they wrote books about it, but it’s all speculation. All that snooping, all these theories and all these years later, we still don’t know how it happened, or why.
In the Sixties, a Mrs Arbruzzi flared up in her trailer and burned to a crisp, front page news in the Star, but she didn’t gather a crowd. It was interesting, but she was a foreigner, came here from Sicily or someplace like that. Everybody ooohed and ahed, but for families that have always lived here, it was like it happened to some old lady on Mars.
Things like that don’t happen to people like us.
But the third was Lorna Archambault. Lorna Archambault! Past president of the Junior League and the museum board, her father founded the Fort Jude Club, but she lit up and flamed out all the same.
As if such fires are specific to the person.
When these things happen to somebody in a society as tight as this one, the mystery lingers. Thirty years later, people still talk about it in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What happened to Lorna Archambault, really?
How am I supposed to know?
Lorna was divorced: nobody to see, nobody to throw a blanket over her or pour water into the smoking cavity where her guts had been. Poor Lorna, how awful. And because she was prominent, it got in the papers and on TV. There were photographs of it in the Star – how embarrassing! Like the others, she just burned up from the inside out. As if a stealth missile homed in and