He swigged the tequila, feeling the half-remembered chill creep into his bones.

"It was strange, what happened that night. I woke up. I don't know how long I'd been asleep but the moon was high and bright. I woke up because I had a nightmare—I remember that much, but not the nightmare itself. I know I'd dreamed it before. It felt familiar, when I woke up. The fear. I was terrified but somehow the fear was comforting. It was the same way I felt every time we visited Ruby in the hospital after what happened."

"Hmm," Sheila said. She sipped her drink.

"Anyway, I woke up screaming. That's what woke Aunt Norma up. Not the smoke creeping up the stairs, not the fire alarm in the upstairs hall, because it never went off. And that was weird, you know, because Norma checked those batteries religiously. It would go off if you scalded water. Later, the police said the battery had come loose. But Aunt Norma knew better. Because ever since Ruby was committed, she'd seen them watching the house."

"Them?"

"Aunt Norma never did tell me who she thought they were. She told me I was better off not knowing. The police claimed it was arson, but they had no suspects in mind, at least that they told us. But that night, I woke up screaming, and my screams woke up Aunt Norma, and the second she stepped into the hall she smelled it. If I hadn't had that nightmare, we probably would have died of smoke inhalation, if not burned to death. Norma came running down the hall to get me and the first thing she noticed was my bedroom door was locked. I didn't lock it. I told the police that, but I was five. I'm not sure if they believed me."

"Would your aunt have locked you in your room for some reason?"

"No. Ruby might have, if she'd still been living with us. But I don't think it was locked at all. It locked from the outside. Even if Norma had locked me in, she had a skeleton key. The two of us tried to get the door open, her shouting at me to pull while she twisted the key in the lock and pushed on her side. It just wouldn't budge. Someone had jammed it or wedged it closed somehow. Either way, the intent was clear. Whoever set our house on fire wanted me to burn with it."

"Jesus, Martin." She shook her head. "And they never figured out who did it?"

"It's still an open case. I looked into it a few years back. There were a handful of suspects. A drifter from Canada. A local troublemaker. A weirdo who lived on the edge of the woods, liked to set fires in the county dump. But they all had alibis and not a single one of them had a motive. Whoever it was is probably in jail or long dead by now."

"No history of arson in the area?"