Only the Women Are Burning. Nancy Burke
to the circulation desk and asked if anyone had seen her.
“No. We actually let the police know she is missing. We are worried. If you do happen to see her, please call Sargent Finn at the Hillston station.”
“How long?” I asked.
“How long what?”
“Since she’s been seen,” I said.
The circulation librarian turned to her colleague at the reserve desk. “When did you last see Helene?” she asked.
“Day before yesterday,” said the brunette with very pink eyeglasses framing her brown eyes.
They exchanged a look that contained a sudden dawning. “Oh, God,” said the first one.
“It fits the pattern,” I said.
“Wouldn’t the police put this together?” asked the reference librarian.
The first one left the desk and lifted the phone. She explained, “He can’t really speak to us. Or he won’t. She does all their talking. They might link her disappearance to the women who died in the fires. It may be nothing, right? But well, let’s leave it to them to find out.”
I decided I’d leave it to them. Heffly and his men or this Sergeant Flynn could put this together without me. I wanted to get away from this and from my own terror and my anxiety for the morning. If I didn’t, I might burst into flame myself. On my way to my car I walked near her things, searching for gray ashes like I’d seen under Ann Neelam’s clothes. Her gap-toothed friend intercepted me, waved in my face, and shouted as though I were a thief. I backed away without finishing my search.
“The world’s flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:
eat less of it, for it is full of fire.
Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,
but its smoke becomes visible in the end.”
Chapter 6
I left the library. I worried about my re-entry to home and if Pete was doing okay with the kids and if they were doing okay with him. I told myself the cell phone in my pocket would ring if things weren’t going well. And, just as my hand touched my cell phone, it vibrated. It was my sister, not Grace, but Lou.
“Hi,” she said. As a ten-year-old tomboy Mary Lou had insisted we call her Lou. We still did even though she was in her late thirties. “Are you busy?”
“I’m out running errands. Is everything okay?”
“I’m having a garage sale. I wondered if you want to go through some of this stuff, see if you want anything.”
“What stuff?”
“Old stuff. From childhood. Some of Mom’s.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Grace there too?”
“Yes. She helped me organize everything. I would have called you during the week but you work.”
“I could have helped. The schools are doing standardized tests so we only had a few visitors.”
“Wish I had known. Can you come?”
“You would know if you had tried earlier,” I said. “I don’t want you giving away stuff without me seeing it...”
“Yes, well, okay. Come over. I’ve got to hang up. People are arriving...” and she clicked off and I took off in the car.
Grace and Lou, that old familiar twinge of my otherness fired up as I drove. Saw horses blocked the sidewalk in front of our childhood home, the one Lou bought from the estate when Mom died. A Victorian, tall with a narrow driveway between it and the mirror image of it next door. Parking was already difficult, SUVs and Volvo station wagons at the curb all the way down past the bend in the narrow street. The bend separated two towns, Glen Brook and Hillston. Lou’s house was just this side of the town line. Lou was at the sawhorses explaining the sale would not open for another twenty minutes. Grace was lugging a carton of books across the garage to a folding table covered with a plastic green tablecloth. I had been too hastily called to this. I rapidly took in the display tables, the rack full of clothing that looked familiar, and small end tables, chairs, and lamps Lou must have stored in her basement for these last five years.
Grace said, “Cassandra, can you lift this? My back is bothering me. I took an Advil but I can’t do this kind of physical work.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t cancel this,” I said.
“What, the sale?”
“Yes, considering the danger. You do realize three women died yesterday. All outdoors.”
“Once it’s in the paper it’s impossible to cancel. That’s what Lou said.”
“But they’re telling women to stay indoors.”
“I am indoors,” she said, indicating the garage roof.
“But what about the customers? Isn’t this putting them in danger?”
“That’s their choice, Cassie,” she didn’t look at me when she spoke. “The mayor advised it, but it’s not like an order.”
“Do you have the garden hose hooked up yet?” I heard myself saying this, but I knew it might be futile if something happened again.
“Cassie,” Grace said. “Stop. There won’t be any self-immolating women here. There won’t be any snipers with flame-throwers. We’re safe.”
But I noticed she would not leave the garage. Lou was doing all the work in the yard, uncovered and vulnerable.
I reached down and lifted the box for her and the flimsy table tipped and the box spilled at my feet.
“Well, at least this wasn’t the tea pot collection,” Grace said. “Or it would be in fragments...or what would you anthropologists call them, shards?”
“Where are the teapots?”
“Really, Cassandra, don’t be so much in a hurry. Lou and I have been at this for days. Help me pick this up first.”
I ignored her. I went over to Lou, “I want the teapots. They were my gifts to Mom. Where are they?”
She pointed. “On a table in there. There’s a box and tissue for wrapping under the table.”
I worked quickly. The crowd at the sawhorse barrier was growing. While I wrapped and gently packed up the collection, my eyes wandered to another table. Jewelry. “Everything must go,” read a tent card with $5.00 each in parentheses.
Strewn on the table lay not only Mother’s jewelry, but the jade, opal, and lapiz lazuli I had sent from India to my sisters for the holidays I’d missed. The gifts for Lou’s wedding. The special piece of blue for her. All for sale. A heavy woman in a flowery peasant skirt was heading in my direction. With a sweep of my arm, I gathered all of it into my purse, letting the pieces tangle and fall to the bottom, into a dark pocket-like abyss, and grinned at her. “I’m one of the sisters who owns this stuff. I just changed my mind. Sorry.” The crowd was now stepping quickly up the driveway, descending upon all these tables, in a mad frenzy. I went back to the tea set, finished the final cup, and slid the box under the table.
I needed to calm down. I felt hot despite the early morning cool air. Here was the collection of books Lou and I had shared, swapping mysteries in this very back yard on summer afternoons, reading in the shade before restlessness took over and we hopped on bicycles to the nearby park. Grace had just lifted the last one to the table and I saw them evenly distributed so the flimsy table would not tip again. My twins were just the age Lou and I had been when we read them.
A woman from the