Burn by John Lutz

then got out and limped over the hard ground toward the porch with the awning roof. Tiny insects swarmed into the air each time the tip of his cane entered the grass.
    The Cloys had heard him arrive. He was about to knock on the white metal door with his cane when the knob rotated and the door opened. A tall, thin woman in a salmon-colored, loose-fitting dress looked at him in a way that asked what he wanted. She was in her late fifties, with gray-streaked black hair and deeply etched lines around blue eyes that seemed to strain for focus. Her face conveyed a kind of amiable strength lent by classic bone structure. “You can tell she was once a beautiful woman,” they would say about her someday when she was laid out for view in her casket. The beauty of her youth lay immortal just beneath the surface of time.
    “Mrs. Sybil Cloy?” Carver asked.
    She nodded, smiling, obviously wondering who he was.
    “Detective Fred Carver,” he said. “I’m here to ask a few questions in regard to your daughter Marla’s complaints about Joel Brant.” Let her assume he was with the police. Let them all assume it, as long as he didn’t actually say it.
    Sybil chewed on her lower lip and looked confused. “What kind of complaints?”
    Carver was surprised Marla hadn’t confided her fears to her family. But maybe they weren’t close. “She says Brant is threatening her.”
    “About what?” Sybil asked.
    “She doesn’t know. He seems to be stalking her.”
    Sybil turned her head toward someone behind her. “It’s a detective,” she said, “saying some man is threatening Marla.”
    “Then she hasn’t mentioned this to you?” Carver asked, making sure.
    “Ask him in, why don’t you?” a man’s voice said inside the trailer,
    “Of course,” Sybil said, smiling like a hostess who’d made a faux pas. “Please come inside out of the heat.” She looked uneasily beyond him as she spoke, as if something that lived in the heat posed a danger.
    Carver climbed the two steps and entered the trailer. It was cool and bright inside, with dark blue carpeting and comfortable-looking early American furniture. Dividing walls were cleverly offset so there was no sensation of being inside two trailers attached together side by side. The interior was paneled in light oak to make it seem more spacious.
    A short, bald man wearing blue denim cutoffs and an untucked flowered short-sleeved shirt sat a small table. He was older than the woman and had a moon face, a deeply cleft chin, and very dark eyes beneath bushy black eyebrows. There was a beer can in front of him, and a complex-looking jigsaw puzzle half assembled to display startled and wary deer in snowbound woods. A glass containing ice and a clear liquid sat on a coaster on the other side of the puzzle.
    “I hope I’m not interrupting,” Carver said, pointing toward the puzzle with his cane.
    “It’s only a hobby,” the man at the table said. “I’m retired and got nothing else to do.”
    “I’ve come to enjoy puzzles, too,” Sybil said. “Didn’t at first, but Wally got me interested. Now we’re both puzzle enthusiasts.”
    “I’m Wallace Cloy,” the man at the table said. “Marla’s father. He tugged at his ear, tucked in his chin, and stared at Carver. “Threatened, huh?”
    “The man’s been warned, and we think everything’s under control,” Carver said, “but it still bears some investigation.”
    Wallace absently touched a forefinger to the cleft in his chin, as if it were an old wound that was still sore. He had wide, square hands with very broad fingers. There was something menacing about him. “Marla never mentioned any of this to us. You say a man is bothering her?”
    Carver said again that was the situation. “Does Marla talk with you often?”
    “Not as often as we’d like,” Sybil said.
    Wallace glanced at her, but said to Carver, “Who is this guy?”
    “Name’s Joel Brant. He’s a home builder over in Del Moray. Apparently he’s