Son of Destruction by Kit Reed

cooperation, he says, ‘That’s why I have to get inside.’
    If Carter came by right now he would be jealous, seeing the two of them standing together here. Steffy backs into the steps and sits down. He is still out there studying the second floor. ‘So, what are you looking for?’
    ‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know.’ Unlike grownups, he doesn’t sweep the step with his hand; he isn’t scared of sitting on something gross. ‘Why this woman burned down to grease spot, I suppose.’
    ‘Ewww.’
    ‘First they thought it was the husband.’ He pulls a notepad out of a pocket on his thigh. Cool cargo pants. Muttering, he runs his pencil down the page. ‘Harold P. Archambault.’ He taps the eraser on the note.
    ‘You have notes?’
    ‘Big story. Research.’ He looks up. ‘They were divorced.’
    Steffy hates that word. Divorced. ‘Like, he set her on fire?’
    ‘No. Nobody knows what did it, that’s the thing.’ Frustration makes him squint. ‘But, you’ve gotta wonder. What if he was here and they had a fight?’
    ‘People fight all the time,’ Steffy says uneasily. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
    ‘These things, it’s usually the husband.’
    ‘Just because they had a fight?’ She is really uncomfortable now.
    ‘Because usually, it is. But this guy was with his girlfriend at the Prince Edward, out at the beach, it’s on the Web. They were together all night.’
    Steffy gulps.
Oh God. Oh, God
. She’s not afraid of this gentle guy with eyes that turn green in direct sunlight, but she is afraid. She’s scared of something that she won’t name and hates to think about. ‘Like, he set her on fire because they had a fight?’
    ‘No. It was spontaneous. I’m not creeping you out, am I?’
    Yes
. ‘No.’
    ‘Sitting there one minute,’ he says thoughtfully, ‘and the next minute – whoom.’
    ‘Ewww!’
    He ticks off another point. ‘But the room was untouched.’
    She has quit breathing. It comes out in a rush. ‘Up there?’
    ‘Yeah. And I’m here because . . .’ Steffy has no way of knowing that this is not a sentence he can finish. After some thought he says, ‘If I can just get into that room and mail back a couple of screen shots . . . I can buy some time.’
    ‘Time?’
    His face changes. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ When she doesn’t say anything he says helpfully, ‘If you want, I really can show you my press pass.’
    Steffy would like to see it; she’d like to follow up with a question but she’s squirming. It’s nothing he said. Something else is gnawing at her. ‘So they were divorced. She burned up and it’s the husband’s fault.’
    ‘The girlfriend said he was with her all night.’
    Oh God.
‘Girlfriend.’
    ‘“Other woman,” they called it back in the day.’
    Oh, God.
    ‘He opened a magnum and turned up the music and that was it. They didn’t know until the police came.’
    ‘So it couldn’t be him.’
    Bemused, he says, ‘It wasn’t anybody. It just happened.’ He’s waiting for her to follow with another question, say
something
, but Steffy is too far gone to speak. He jogs her arm. ‘Are you OK?’
    ‘Yeah.’ But she is thinking, thinking, boy is she thinking. The sun burns hotter. The breeze stops. She gets up. ‘So. Want to see inside?’
    ‘I thought it was your private place.’
    ‘Not really.’ She is never coming back here. ‘Not any more.’
    ‘I did creep you out. I’m sorry.’
    Still sitting, she opens the screen door. ‘Really. Feel free.’
    Nice, he says carefully, ‘Are you sure? After all, it’s, like, your house.’
    She gets up. ‘Come on, it’s anybody’s now.’
    Now that she knows, the house is over with for her, but she sort of owes it to him to show him where this lady burned up and in its own way the prurient, curious part of her has to see. In school she flunked spatial relations on the standardized tests, which means she never knows where she is in a building, which is weird. Between that and