exploded in her belly. Dead. The other two women had to lie in the charred ruins of their lives for hours before the landlady or some other stranger blundered in and found them dead.
When you’re prominent, like Lorna Archambault, they miss you. Somebody misses you and comes looking. They find you right away.
Poor Claudia Atkinson found Lorna, they were roommates in the Pi Phi house at FSU. We were leaving for Europe today. I brought the tour labels to stick on her bags! Her luggage was right there by the front door, all zipped up and ready to go. Imagine. How sad.
Police came, the ambulance came, the fire truck came, although it was too late. The coroner came for Lorna, and until her son Dorian the doctor vetoed an autopsy, the cause was in dispute, but of course she ended up at DeForest, where everybody who is anybody goes. And oh, forensics people in flocks. Experts came. Thirty years later, they’re still coming, convinced they can find the clue that everybody else overlooked. Everybody wants an explanation to things that can never be explained.
Like this one. Nobody broke into Lorna’s house that night, so it wasn’t robbery; her wallet and her diamonds were sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Some of the exact same experts that came snooping around about Mrs Keesler came back to study Lorna’s case, for all the good it did. She didn’t use a space heater or cheap-jack kerosene stove, only poor people live like that. She used the divorce settlement to redecorate the house. Her designer had covered all the fireplaces, so it wasn’t a spark popping out on the rug. She had a brand-new furnace and all the wiring was up to code. Nobody came to see her that night, at least not that they know of. There were no signs of arson, but Lorna did smoke.
One doctor said maybe her cigarette set off her own gasses. It’s happened to ordinary old women in cheaper neighborhoods, but Lorna was a Southern lady. The idea! She would have died!
It could have been anything, but what? Alone in her empty house that night, snug in her nightie, Lorna Archambault kicked back in her plush recliner and mysteriously went up in flames, burning until the fire ran out of fuel. They found her lying there, split wide open like a hot dog left too long on the barbecue.
Where else but in Fort Jude? Now, the Keesler woman made history, because she was the first. Tourists still come looking for the house the way you’d visit Natural Bridge in Virginia, or in California, the Watts Towers. They keep coming even though there’s nothing left where she lived but a parking lot. This Mrs Arbruzzi was just a snowbird living in a trailer park, and she was foreign. The town is filled with old people from somewhere else.
They drift in from everywhere, looking for a better life. At 4:30 every afternoon you can see them poking at ATM machines on Central Avenue and lined up for Early Bird Specials in cheap restaurants from here all the way to the beach, restless old men and sad old ladies in workout suits or spunky Florida shirts; they’d talk to you if you weren’t in such a rush. They’re everywhere, like the three a.m. test pattern on a TV you weren’t watching.
See, Fort Jude may look like a big city to you, but to the lucky insiders who grew up on Saturday night parties and lessons in ballroom dancing and Sunday dinners at the Fort Jude Club, the ones who spend New Year’s Eve in the club ballroom and children’s birthdays at splash parties in the pool, it’s still a small town and it belongs to the generations. For them, everybody who matters in Fort Jude knows everybody else, and everything is related. Who you are, who your people are, and in this town, the truly local families protect their own. It is a given.
At the Fort Jude Club, somebody in the family – parents or grandparents – saw Lorna in the dining room the night she died, fresh from the hairdresser and dressed to kill, sitting down for a farewell dinner with her son. Dorian didn’t make his family sit down with her all that much, but it was a special occasion. Her favorite waiter brought her favorite Blanc de Noir and Dorian had a bottle sent to every table, so when he gave the toast the whole dining room