“Sort of.”

“You don’t think it was just bad luck?” And though the boy hardly bothers to shrug Harry understands his answer: luck and God are both up there and he has not been raised to believe in anything higher than his father’s head. Blame stops for him in the human world, it has nowhere else to go.

The firemen of one truck are coiling their hoses. A policeman, the one who asked after Nelson, comes over. “Angstrom? The chief wants to talk to you where the boy can’t hear.”

“Dad, ask him if that was Jill.”

The cop is tired, stolid, plump, the same physical type as—what was his name?—Showalter. Kindly patient Brewerites. He lets out the information, “It was a cadaver.”

“Black or white?” Rabbit asks.

“No telling.”

Nelson asks, “Male or female?”

“Female, sonny.”

Nelson begins to cry again, to gag as if food is caught in his throat, and Rabbit asks the policeman if his offer is still good, if a cruiser might take the boy to his grandparents’ house in Mt. Judge. The boy is led away. He does not resist; Rabbit thought he might, might insist on staying with his father to the end. But the boy, his hair hanging limp and his tears flowing unchecked, seems relieved to be at last in the arms of order, of laws and limits. He doesn’t even wave from the window of the silver-blue West Brewer cruiser as it U-turns in Vista Crescent and heads away from the tangle of hoses and puddles and red reflections. The air tastes sulphuric. Rabbit notices that the little maple was scorched on the side toward the house; its twigs smolder like cigarettes.

As the firemen wind up their apparatus, he and the police chief sit in the front of an unmarked car. Harry’s knees are crowded by the radio apparatus on the passenger’s side. The chief is a short man but doesn’t look so short sitting down, with his barrel chest crossed by a black strap and his white hair crew-cut close to his scalp and his nose which was once broken sideways and has accumulated broken veins in the years since. He says, “We have a death now. That makes it a horse of another color.”

“Any theories how the fire started?”

“I’ll ask the questions. But yes. It was set. In the garage. I notice a power mower in there. Can of gas to go with it?”

“Yeah. We filled the can just this afternoon.”

“Tell me where you were this evening.”

He tells him. The chief talks on his car radio to the West Brewer headquarters. In less than five minutes they call back. But in the total, unapologetic silence the chief keeps during these minutes, a great lump grows in Rabbit, love of the law. The radio sizzles its words like bacon frying: “Mrs. Fosnacht confirms suspect’s story. Also a minor boy in dwelling as additional witness.”

“Check,” the chief says, and clicks off.

“Why would I burn my own house down?” Rabbit asks.