The third floor was inaccessible. Yellow CAUTION tape had been stretched across what was left of the stairs. Gaping holes in the stairwell traced the course of the fire as it ate its way through the rooms above. There was something unbearably creepy about the ruin everywhere. I made a circuit of the second floor, pausing at many of the windows to take in the view. Aside from the field across the road, there wasn’t much to see. One field over, a new crop of some kind was sprouting through layers of plastic sheeting that served to keep the weeds down. The illusion was of ice. Closer to the house, Tannie’s battle with the brush had uncovered meandering brick paths and a truck garden now choked with weeds. During the summer, a volunteer tomato plant had resurrected itself, and it sprawled over a wooden bench, cherry tomatoes in evidence like little red ornaments on a Christmas tree. I could see the outlines of former flower beds and trees stunted by lack of sun for all the overgrowth.

To the left, at an angle, I gazed down at an ill-defined depression that might have been a sunken pool, or the remnant of an old septic system. There wouldn’t have been sewer lines in place in the early 1900s when the house was built. A mound of newly cleared snowball bushes was visible along one edge. The uprooted plants boasted once bright blue blossoms as big as heads of cabbage. I felt bad at the sacrifice of bushes that had grown so impossibly grand.

In the side yard of the lot where our trailer had sat, my aunt had planted hydrangeas much the same color, though not quite so lush as these had been. The neighbor’s hydrangeas were a washed-out pink, and Aunt Gin took delight in her superior blooms. The secret, said she, was burying nails in the soil, which somehow encouraged the shift from pink to the rich blue shade.

Afterward I felt I’d been incredibly dense, taking as long as I had to add that particular two plus two. I stared down at the cracked and slightly sunken oblong of soil and felt a flash, the sudden getting of facts that hadn’t seemed connected before. This was where Winston had last seen the car. Amid dirt mounds, heavy equipment, and orange plastic cones, he’d said. A temporary road barrier had been erected, denying access to through traffic. No sign of Violet, no sound from the dog, but from that night forward, the Bel Air was never seen again.

Perhaps because it was buried here. Maybe all these years, the rich blue hydrangeas had been feeding on the rust.

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