—

By the time I get to the farm the volunteer firefighters have cordoned off the blaze, spraying it down from different angles, like it’s some monstrous animal they’re trying to tether in place. The fields are all tinder, brittle from lack of rain, just waiting to go up.

The barn is gone. Little evidence is even left of what happened. It’s just a flat portion of foundation and a tunnel of ash whirling hot to the sky. Gallagher’s house got scorched, too, but not as bad. The damage is contained mostly to the paint job, although part of the east side has succumbed to the heat and crumbled away, leaving a view into his kitchen. The noise sounds like violent messy eating, like something giant snapping its jaws. The dogs are freaking, too, and for a terrible second I think of the cows and the donkey Gallagher keeps around.

Joe must know what I’m thinking, because the first thing he says is, “None of the animals were hurt.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “Gallagher’s fine, too. It was the barn they were after.”

That’s all he has to say. Whoever did it, it was a stupid, desperate, clumsy move. Maybe the fire was meant to scare us off. Maybe it was somebody who is worried about having a job and a brand-new community center and plastic swing sets in the park.

Standing there in the smoke-choked morning, staring at the ghost silhouette of our makeshift office, now nothing more than ash and rubble, I feel almost giddy. This fire proves we’re right. It proves that we’re getting closer to the center of the maze. There will be answers in Optimal’s records. I’m sure of that now. And those records are sitting in the trunk of my car. Perfectly intact.

By noon the fire has been extinguished completely, and we waste an hour picking through the remains. It’s just something to do, a way to shove the day back into some kind of order while we wait for the men from the sheriff’s office to finish poking around, like they might find a can of gasoline with an address and a signature. Joe answers some questions, all the same way (Seen anything? No. Know anything? Nope. Anybody giving you trouble? No.), until the conversation finally lands on Optimal.

Now they want to know what we’re doing, what we’ve heard, what ridiculous stories Gallagher’s been feeding us, and do we know he got busted back in the day with enough illegal fireworks to blow the whole town apart, and do we know that Optimal employs sixty percent of Barrens half- or full-time, not counting the locals who run the bars and grocery and post office, all of them busy again after the town was nearly dead, if you thought about it that way you couldn’t count the people in Barrens who weren’t on payroll one way or the other…

And if there is something in the water it sure as hell ain’t running out of Optimal.