It is no small feat hoisting up the slabs and chunks of broken fireplaces and placing them onto flatbed wagons. Each time the workmen lift another section I stand as close as I can to see if Martin’s crushed body is lying underneath. There are indeed charred remains beneath the heavy stone, but I don’t know what any of it is and no one shouts that they have found human remains. While they are dragging away a piece of marble from what had been the dining room, and where Martin could have possibly dragged himself if he had tried to crawl out of the house, I see a blackened shard sticking up out of the mess and I’m thinking it could be bone. I kick at the rest of the debris and I see another sliver of something that resembles the first, but surely no one else would think it was bone—only someone who thought there’d been a body there before the fires would think that. The workmen come back from the wagon to find me poking about the piles of ashes and spreading them thin, and they’re no doubt thinking I’m looking for something precious. I look up at them and shrug as if to say that I can’t find what I’m looking for when in fact I think I have. I pocket the first shard to bring home with me and show to Belinda and Candace. I toss the other one.

It takes the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to clear and haul away the shattered, burned remains. When the workmen are done, there is nothing left of my old house except for the foundation and the stone steps leading up to where the front door used to be, which one of the men says he’d like to come back later to remove and take to a salvage yard to sell, if I am amenable to that. I am. I send a telegram to Elliot’s shop from a Western Union office that I pass on the long walk back down to Townsend Street that I will be returning before dark.

It is late afternoon when I get to the station and buy a ticket for the next train south. When I arrive at the San Mateo station at dusk, it is Belinda who has come for me with Elliot’s carriage. She waits until I am inside the cab and we’re pulling away to ask me if I found Martin.

“There wasn’t much left of the house or what had been inside it,” I answer. I explain to her about the intense heat and how the second story’s heavy fireplaces fell to the first floor as the house burned, crushing whatever lay beneath. I pull from my pocket the shard, and she glances at it.

“Is that him?” Her voice is tinged with an emotion that I don’t recognize, a variant of grief, perhaps.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” And then I tell her about Libby seeing me poking about the ashes and my unplanned trip to the police station and then Libby and Chester offering to help me clear away the remains of my house.