Darwinia

Tim had been his partner since ’39, when the shop expanded. Tim ran the commercial side of the operation. Guilford stuck to photography these days and spent most of his time in the portrait studio. It was — or had been — a good business. The work was often routine, but he didn’t mind that. He enjoyed the studio and the darkroom and he enjoyed bringing home enough money to pay for the house on the headland and Nick’s school and a future for himself and Abby. He did some electronics repair on the side, now and then. He had arranged to import a big stock of Edicron and G.E. receiving tubes when the radio tower went in above Palaepolis — did a booming business for a while, since half the radios people had brought in from Stateside arrived with bad tubes, solder joints eroded by salt air, or parts knocked loose by the sea voyage.

Things had been rough after London, of course. Guilford had spent his first five years in Oro Delta crewing the harbor boats or taking in crops, exhausting work that left little time for thought. Nights had been especially hard. The Campanian farms were already producing bounty harvests of grain and grapes by ’21, so there was no lack of local liquor and wine, and Guilford had taken some solace — more than a little solace — in the bottle.

He put the bottle down after he met Abby. She had been Abby Panzeca then, a second-generation American-Sicilian who had come to Darwinia with family stories of the Old World rattling around her head. In Guilford’s experience such people were usually disappointed; often as not they drifted back to the States. But Abby had stuck around, made a life for herself. She was waiting tables at an Oro Delta dive called Antonio’s when Guilford found her. She joked with the Neapolitan longshoremen who frequented the place, but they didn’t touch her. Abby commanded respect. She wore an aura of dignity that was almost blinding, like the glow around an electric light.

And she clearly liked Guilford, though she didn’t pay him serious attention until he stopped coming in to Antonio’s with the stink of fish all over himself. He cleaned up, saved his salary, worked double shifts until he could afford to buy the gear to start his own photo studio — the only portrait studio in town, even if it wasn’t much more, in those days, than a storeroom over a butcher shop.

They were married in 1930. Nick came along in ’33. There had been another child, a baby girl, in ’35, but she died of influenza before she could be christened.

The shop had fed his family for fifteen years.

Nothing remained of it but bricks and char.

Mackelroy stared woefully through a mask of soot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”

“You were here when it started?”

“I was in the office. Thought I’d make up some invoices before I headed home. A little after business hours. That was when they came through the windows.”

“What came through the windows?”

“Milk bottles, it looked like, full of rags and gasoline. Smelled like gasoline. They came through the window like bricks, scared the crap out of me, then boom, the room’s burning and I can’t get through the flames to the fire extinguisher. I called the fire department from the phone in the diner, but the fire burned too fast — it was just about a done deal before the pumper got here.”

Guilford thought: Bottles?

Gasoline?

He took Mackelroy by the shoulders. “You’re telling me somebody did this on purpose?”

“Sure as hell wasn’t an accident.”

Guilford looked back toward his car.

Toward his son.

Three things, perhaps not coincidence.

The arson.

The picket.

The stranger Abby had talked to this morning.

“Fire chief wants to talk to you,” Mackelroy was saying, “and I think the sheriff wants a word too.”

“Tell them to call me at home.”

He was already running.

“Son of a bitch!” Nick said in the car.

Guilford gave him a distracted glance. “You want to watch that kind of language, Nick.”

“You said it first.”

“Did I?”

“About five times in the last ten minutes. Shouldn’t we slow down?”

He did. A little. Nick relaxed. Summer-brown wildlands fled past the Ford’s dusty window.

“Son of a bitch,” his father said.

Abby was safe, if concerned, and Guilford felt somewhat foolish for hurrying home. Both the fire chief and the sheriff had telephoned, Abby said. “All of that can wait till morning,” he told her. “Let’s lock up and get some sleep.”

“Can you sleep?”

“Probably not. Not right away. Let’s get Nick tucked in, at least.”

Once Nick was squared away, Guilford sat at the kitchen table while Abby perked coffee. Coffee this close to midnight signified a family crisis. Abby moved around the kitchen with her usual economy. Tonight, at least, her frown resembled Nick’s.

Abby had aged with supreme grace. She was stocky but not fat. Save for the gray just beginning to show at her temples, she might have been twenty-five.

She gave Guilford a long look, debating something with herself. Finally she said, “You may as well talk about it.”

“What’s that, Abby?”