Page 2 of Her Off-Limits Mountain Man

Fact: none of that matters, because this is a job, and I am going to do the job, file the report, and drive home. A week, maybe two. I've held this line for a decade. Two weeks is nothing.

My phone rings through the truck speakers somewhere around Kingston. WES MERCER fills the dash display, because the universe has a sense of humor and it's mean.

I answer, because not answering would be a data point. "Mercer."

"You're doing it." He sounds delighted. Wes always sounds delighted, which is one of the most annoying things about him and also the reason people follow him into burning buildings, sometimes literally. "Alden told me you took the assignment. I owe you, man. Seriously."

"You don't owe me. It's a work order."

"I owe you," he repeats, "because my sister is going to fight you on every single line item, and you're the only person I know who won't cave. She's got this event coming up — it's huge for her, Brady, like actually huge, she's been building to this for three years — and if somebody rubber-stamps that barn and something goes wrong—" He stops. I hear him exhale. "I can't be objective about her. You can."

I watch the road. The lines come at me and slide under the truck, one after another, steady as a pulse.

"I can," I say.

Somewhere, a lie detector spontaneously combusts.

"She's going to hate you by Friday," Wes says cheerfully. "Fair warning. She still tells the story about the county inspector who made her move her wax melter. There are impressions. Voices."

"I've been hated by professionals."

"Not like this. She's—" and I can hear the shrug, the fondness, the total obliviousness of a man describing his little sister to the one person on earth who should be issued a restraining order pre-emptively. "She's a lot. In a good way. You two have barely ever talked, right? You'll see."

Barely ever talked. Correct. Documented. By design.

"I'll send the interim report by end of week," I say, and he laughs and calls me a robot and hangs up, and I drive the next ten miles at exactly the speed limit with both hands on the wheel like the truck might try something.

The last real conversation I had with Sloane Mercer was ten years ago, and I remember it with a clarity I reserve for fire scenes and nothing else.

It was the Fourth of July, Wes's parents' backyard. She was twenty-two, home from her last year of college, and she'd planted herself across the fire pit from me and announced that I was building the campfire wrong — too tight, she said, no airflow, a fire needs room to breathe — and she'd been right, which was the problem. We argued about marshmallow load-bearing capacity for the better part of an hour. She laughed at something I said. Nobody laughs at the things I say. And at some point between the sparklers and the finale, I looked at her across that fire I'd built wrong, and I understood with the same cold, factual certainty I'd later learn to apply to accelerant patterns: this is going to be a problem for the rest of your life.

She was my best friend's little sister. She was six years younger. Wes had asked me — joking, not joking, the way guys do — to keep an eye on her at parties, keep the creeps off her.

I was the creep. So I handled it.

I stopped coming to things. Then I came to things but arrived late and left early. Then I got very good at knowing which holidays she'd be home and scheduling field work accordingly, and after enough years the avoidance stopped feeling like effort and started feeling like architecture. Load-bearing. Permanent.

She thinks I don't like her. I know she thinks that, because at the wedding two years ago she looked at me across the tent with an expression like a filing cabinet closing, and then didn't look at me again.

It was the worst thing that has ever worked.

The GPS tells me to turn off the highway, and the Catskills close in around the road, all rust and amber, the kind of October that makes people quit their jobs and buy orchards. Woodbridge Falls announces itself with a hand-painted sign, a pumpkin display with a security presence of one arthritic golden retriever, and a main street so aggressively charming I check my mirrors out of habit.

I slow through town because the speed limit demands it and because professional habit makes me read buildings the way tourists read menus. Steep Grade Coffee, original structure, probably 1910s, knob-and-tube wiring if nobody's touched it. A bookshop with candles burning in the front window — unattended, in a window display, next to paper products, and I grip the wheel a little harder. A bakery. A hardware store with a sandwich board out front that says ASK US ABOUT FIRE EXTINGUISHERS, which is either a good sign for the town or a very bad one.

Four fires in two months, I think, looking at all that dry timber dressed up in fairy lights. Somebody up here has been lucky.

That's the other thing riding shotgun the whole way up, the thing I haven't said out loud to Alden or Wes or the steering wheel. Four fires is a number with a shape. Brush fire, equipment shed, a dumpster behind the feed supply, half an acre of fallow field — I read the incident summaries twice before I left, and none of them alarmed anybody individually, and that's exactly the profile that alarms me. Small fires that don't hurt anyone are how somebody practices.

Or it's dry weather and bad luck and teenagers, which is what it usually is. I remind myself of that. Usually, it's nothing.

I'm two miles from Sloane Mercer's barn full of open flames, and I'd like the record to show I don't believe in omens.

The Mercer property is three miles out of town, up a gravel drive lined with sugar maples. And there's the barn from the file photos — big, gambrel-roofed, painted a deep red that's going to look great in the "before" pictures if the insurance company's fears ever come true. There's a hand-lettered sign over the doors: WICKED GOOD CANDLE CO.

There are cars in the gravel lot — a dusty Subaru, a minivan, a rental with a bumper sticker that says BRIDE'S LAST RIDE, which suggests a bachelorette party has been operating open flames in there today, a detail the insurance carrier would love. Music leaks out through the barn walls, something with a beat.

I park. I don't get out.