Rocket Science by Jay Lake Page B

a terrible death. I prayed no one was dying with it.
    Augusta’s lone fire truck pumped valiantly as men rushed around the house with buckets, blankets and axes, but there looked to be no hope for the building. Mrs. Swenson stood in the front yard crying into Ruthie Milliken’s arms, her dressing gown dotted black with ember burns. I looked up toward the window of my room on the second floor. It was a roaring inferno.
    There wasn’t much I had that I really cared about. My childhood things and most of my college books were still at Dad’s house. Mr. Bellamy’s pickup was far enough down the street to be out of danger. All I was really losing were my clothes and some notes and keepsakes. But the sheer effrontery of it really angered me.
    I was sure the fire was deliberate, and that it was aimed at me. Small towns in Kansas were supposed to be safe, not crawling with Nazis and Army investigators, arsonists and father-beaters.
    “Well, I guess there ain’t much call for these axes.” Mr. Bellamy leaned on the front fender of the Cadillac, watching the house burn and fighting his hacking cough.
    “I’m going to check with the hose crew, see what help they need,” said Floyd. He ran off toward the fire truck.
    I walked around the yard, looking for Ollie or another Augusta cop. Instead, almost immediately I found Sheriff Hauptmann, flipping through a notebook. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Sheriff, what are you doing in town this early?”
    The Sheriff turned. His eyebrows rose as if he was surprised to see me, but then he smiled. “Vernon, how are you? I was afraid you might still be inside.”
    He didn’t look very afraid. I glanced at his notebook. I recognized it as one of my engineering workbooks. “Where did you get that?”
    He looked down at the book as if he had never seen it before. “This? It was on the lawn. I was trying to figure out whose it was.”
    “My name is written on the cover,” I pointed out. “How did it get on the lawn?”
    “You do remember our conversation of last night? I think the fire was deliberately set, by someone searching your room. They could have thrown this out the window.” Sheriff Hauptmann looked concerned, as if Nazis were going to leap from the lawn and drag me away.
    I glanced back toward the burning house. There was certainly plenty of junk scattered around it, thrown out of windows or dropped as the residents fled. Now it was all getting soaked by hoses and trampled by eager firefighters. “Anybody hurt?”
    “You were the only one unaccounted for. Where were you, by the way? I didn’t see how you got here.”
    I looked at Sheriff Hauptmann holding my notebook, and I wondered what I could tell him. The same instinct that made me hold back the night before kept me quiet again. I just wasn’t ready to squeal on the Bellamys yet. I looked him straight in the eye and lied. “I was at my dad’s place, sir.”
    If he caught me out by hearing from someone else that I had just driven up from east of town with Mr. Bellamy and Floyd in the car, so be it. With any luck, I’d be away from him before that happened.
    Sheriff Hauptmann smacked his forehead. “Son, son, I completely forgot. It’s this house fire — it put me off. Your dad, we don’t know where he is.”
    My sense of terrified dread from yesterday returned as if it had never left me. “What do you mean? Deputy Truefield took him to Wichita. How lost can he get?” It was all of a fifteen mile straight shot into the city from Augusta.
    Hauptmann shook his head. “Truefield was tired, so he stopped for coffee just outside Wichita. When he got back to the cruiser, your dad was gone. He must have wandered off. We have the Wichita police and the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department out looking for him.”
    I could barely contain my anger. “Coffee? I can’t believe Truefield stopped for coffee with an injured man in his car. What the heck is the matter with that idiot?”
    Hauptmann frowned.