licked up the side of the house. She dropped the flare. Her heart was in her throat. She had to move quickly. This was happening now. There was no going back.
Claire jogged around to the side of the house. She struck the other flare and dropped it underneath the master bedroom. There was a whooshing sound, a puff of hot wind, and the flames roiled along the gas trail up to the plywood boards covering the window.
The heat was intense, but Claire was shivering. She ran back to her staging ground and wrapped the Mylar cape around her shoulders. The crinkly material barely covered her upper body. She looked up at the sky. The clouds were moving fast. The rain had gone from a fine mist to big, fat drops. Claire hadn’t counted on the rain. She watched the side of the house to make sure the fire was taking. White smoke spiraled high into the air. Orange flames licked out from behind the plywood.
Step three: in progress.
Claire grabbed the gas can and walked toward the back porch. She stopped ten feet away, perfectly in line with the steps. She put down the can. She took out the revolver. She held the gun at her side, barrel pointing toward the ground.
She waited.
The wind shifted. Smoke blew into her face. The color had changed from white to black. Claire didn’t know what that meant. She recalled a television show where the color difference was an important plot point, but then she also recalled an article that said the color of smoke varied depending on what was burning.
Was anything burning? Claire couldn’t see any more flames. There was only a steady plume of black smoke as she waited for Paul to run screaming from the house.
A minute passed. Another. She gripped the revolver in her hand. She swallowed down a cough. The wind shifted back toward the road. Another minute. Another. She listened to the rushing sound of blood in her ears as her heart threatened to beat out of her chest.
Nothing.
“Shit,” she whispered. Where was the fire? There wasn’t enough rain to wet the grass, let alone snuff out a burning house. Even the emergency road flare was sputtering out.
Claire kept her eye on the back door as she shuffled a few feet over to check out the side of the house. Smoke rolled out from underneath the plywood like a coal fire plant. Was the fire inside the walls? The wood siding was old and dry. The wooden studs had been inside the walls for over sixty years. Claire had seen thousands of diagrams of residential walls: the siding on the exterior, the thin wood sheeting for strength, the thick layer of insulation tucked between the wooden studs, the Sheetrock. There was at least six inches of material between the inside and outside of the house, most of it wood, much of it soaked in gasoline. Why wasn’t the fire blazing through the house by now?
The insulation.
Paul had replaced all the windows. He would’ve pulled the old Sheetrock off the walls and foamed in a fire-retardant insulation because no matter what Claire thought of, Paul was always six fucking steps ahead of her.
“God dammit,” she muttered.
What now?
The gas can. She picked it up. There was still a swill of gasoline inside. The paper wick had sucked most of it into the fibers. This was her one and only back-up plan: to light the wick and throw the can on the roof.
And then what? Watch that not burn, either? The point of directing the fire into a crescent was to send Paul running out the back door. If he heard something on the roof, he could just as easily go out the front or even through the garage door. Or ignore the sound as a fallen tree limb or maybe not hear it at all because he was too busy doing whatever it was that he was doing with Lydia.
Claire put down the gas can. She opened the flip phone. She dialed information and got the home number for Buckminster Fuller. She pressed the key to connect the call.
Inside the house, the kitchen phone started ringing. The sound still felt like an ice pick in her ear. She let the muzzle of the gun tap at her leg as she listened to the rings. One. Two. Three. This time yesterday, Claire was sitting on the back porch like a docile child as she waited for Paul to call her every twenty