The Law of Nines

“I’m afraid so. From the looks of it, the fire started downstairs in a workshop. That’s where we found the gentleman. One of my men looked in the basement door and spotted him reflected in a mirror. He was on the floor not far to the side. There wasn’t much left of him by then but we were at least able to use the hoses to cool the doorway enough to manage to recover his remains. I’m sorry, son.”

“I’m his only family,” Alex said in a distant voice, somehow feeling that it all couldn’t be real. “The only family left. I always told him to be careful with torches and soldering irons down there.”

“It very well may be that he passed on from a heart attack or stroke and then something hot left unattended started the fire. I’ve seen it happen that way with older people.”

“But he was burned?”

“I’m afraid so, but it’s very possible that it was after he was already gone. We don’t know yet.”

“Ben,” Alex said in a tearful voice as he knelt beside the remains covered in a gray blanket, “please don’t leave me like this. I need you so much right now.”

It felt like the world was falling in on him.

Some of the rafters gave way and the entire roof came crashing down. Huge flames roared up into the air. Columns of sparks and billowing smoke lifted into the night sky.

Alex laid an arm over his grandfather and broke down in tears.

13.

THE CORONER’S OFFICE HAD BENN unable to determine the actual cause of death. They said that the remains were too badly burned to make that determination, but that since he had been found on the floor down in his workshop, rather than in bed, it was improbable that Alex’s grandfather had been overcome by smoke in his sleep. The fire extinguisher, hanging nearby on the foundation wall, was charged and in working order, but it hadn’t been used. There was an exit door not far away.

Considering those factors and the lack of any evidence to the contrary, the coroner’s finding was that Benjamin Rahl had most likely lost consciousness or died of natural causes before the fire started, and the fire had been the result of something hot left unattended at his workbench while he was either unconscious or already deceased.

Alex had his grandfather’s remains cremated. Ben had always said that he didn’t want his corpse rotting in the ground, that he’d rather have the clean purification of fire consume his worldly self.

Still, considering what had happened, having Ben cremated seemed insensitive. Alex knew, though, that it was what his grandfather had wanted.

But more than that, Ben, who Ben was, was gone. The remains were not Ben, not to Alex, anyway. Those remains had been released by the fire to return to the elements of the universe.

The house was gone as well. Even much of the foundation had collapsed and what hadn’t was unstable, leaving a hazardous sight. After the fire marshal and the insurance company adjuster finished their investigation, they had turned the property over to Alex. At the city’s insistence Alex had hired a company to haul away the debris and fill in the hole.

Since then, whenever he walked up the street to his grandfather’s place, the journey felt dreamlike. Even standing there staring at the open gap in the neighborhood, at the smoothed-over lot, he couldn’t believe it. His mind filled in the empty hole with a ghostlike memory of the home. It seemed impossible that it was all gone—both his grandfather and the house where Alex had been raised for the last half of his childhood.

In the weeks that followed, that wasn’t all that felt dreamlike. Alex at times wondered if it was possible that he had imagined Jax.

In the beginning, under the choking weight of grief, he hadn’t thought a lot about her. He lost himself in the routine of his daily workouts. All he could really think about was Ben. He had real issues to deal with and there was no one else to handle things, no one else to help him.

But over time, nagging thoughts of Jax returned. With his mother in a mental institution it was only too easy to imagine that he was falling prey to the same sort of delusional madness that had overcome her. It sometimes felt like that madness was lurking just out of sight, ready to smother him, too.

He tried hard to keep such fears in perspective, tried hard not to give them any power over him, tried hard not to let his imagination get the best of him. Yes, his mother was sick, but that didn’t mean that the same thing would happen to him.

His mother hadn’t spoken since his birthday, when she had told him to run and hide, when she had warned him about a different kind of human who broke people’s necks. He worried at times that he’d somehow built upon his mother’s strange words to come up with Jax and her story—created a delusion of his own.