She expected him to cite his facts anyway, to deliver an apocalyptic climate screed like she had heard him raining down on Leroy Fanta. Instead, after a long pause, he said again, “And still you will pretend to wonder why. Oh, how you stroke your precious innocence. But anyway, I’ll show you why.”

He whispered into Taylor’s ear.

Taylor looked up beneath his hat brim.

Golly nodded and let go of Taylor’s jacket collar.

Slowly and uncertainly, Taylor descended the concrete steps and drifted squinting into the blazing sun. Then he tried to sprint so abruptly that he tumbled, rose with his face in a mask of naked terror, and sprinted again until he crashed into his mother’s duty belt and gripped her waist.

“The future,” Golly said. “That’s why.”

He flicked the lighter and exploded into flames.

CHAPTER 47

As Golly had planned, water from the hoses arrived far too late to save him. He flared, sizzled, and toppled below the window frame as flames jumped up.

The price of delay was the building. Fire tore across the spilled gas on the floor and hit Fanta’s desk, which acted like a heap of dry tinder. Those flames reached the paper-crammed balcony before the hoses were even unrolled. By the time the water arrived, the windows of the upstairs rooms were blowing out and raining glass shards down upon the firemen in the street.

Quickly, the only goals left were to keep the fire away from the fuel tank in the basement and to stop it from spreading down the block. After five minutes, both seemed attainable. The firemen soaked the insurance office on one side and the vacant former pizza parlor on the other. They pumped the basement full of water so that if the floor collapsed it would fall into a pond. Meanwhile, the fire moved up and back, sweeping through the old hotel rooms. One brave volunteer scampered up a long ladder just in time to hack through the roof so that water could rain down. Steam hissed high into the sky. Flames shot back out the windows. Charred scraps of newspaper floated everywhere. An already hot day in downtown Farmstead had become a steaming inferno, and Leroy Fanta’s old Broadcaster, all of it, was lost.

Sheriff Kick had drifted out of body. The adrenaline, the heat, the loss, the salvation—maybe she was in shock. At some point Taylor had released her waist and Harley had retrieved him. While another old woman warbled “Amazing Grace,” she could hear her mother-in-law squawking at her to come and give her brave boy a hug, and of course, drifting that way, she wanted nothing more.

But it didn’t feel over.

Still, warily, she let herself be drawn toward family. Her little boy had been saved. There could be celebration. But her guts still churned, her fists still closed and opened, her eyes still searched. It just did not feel over.