The Arsonist by Sue Miller Page A

through the meadow instead of using the road, because Frankie wanted to look at the pond along the way.
    The dock was still pulled up on the rocks. Several slats were missing. As they walked around the pond’s edge, the frogs jumped from the bank into the water, a steady plop, plop, plop that preceded them. There were sweeps of algal growth visible under the water. Frankie saw a turtle’s head break the pond’s surface. A snapper? she wondered. Time would tell.
    They mounted the hillock beyond the pond, stepping carefully through the low-growing wild blueberries and the thorny, arching blackberry canes. As they reached the top, the vista below opened up.
    “There ’tis,” Alfie said. In the meadow below was the small, simplehouse—a cottage, really—shingled in wood that still looked raw, a wide unscreened porch on the uphill side facing them.
    They started down toward it. “It’s almost done, isn’t it?” Frankie asked.
    “You’ll see,” Alfie said.
    Frankie followed him through the overgrown meadow, holding her palms out on either side to brush her fingertips along the tops of the grasses and blossoms. Bees hung in some of them. The ground was uneven, and Frankie felt a jolt in her body with each step.
    The area around the house was gravel and dirt. They crossed it and stepped together onto the porch. There was no door—a piece of plywood had been hammered into place where it would have been. Alfie stood back while Frankie peered in through a window, framing her face with her hands. Though it was dim inside, she could see that there were no finished interior walls, just the vertical studs announcing where they’d be. Foil-backed insulation lined the house’s outer walls like silvery wallpaper, and some of the windows were in place. The openings for others, like the doorway, were boarded over. There was a table in what seemed to be the kitchen area, chairs set around it.
    Frankie said something pleasant, noncommittal: It looks like it’ll be very nice .
    Alfie didn’t answer, so she turned to look at him. He’d taken a step back off the porch onto the packed dirt. He was looking at the house, his eyes squinted, a slightly puzzled frown on his face.
    “Don’t you think, Dad?”
    He turned to her. “This is … I believe this is Liz’s house,” he said, dubiously. And then, more certainly: “Yes. I think it is.”
    She had said yes, stunned. She wasn’t sure what else to say to him. Was it a joke of some sort? Was she supposed to offer something witty in response? She had no idea.
    But he turned then and started back up the rise. Frankie followed him, up the hill, down through the berry patch, and around the pond, then up again, across the meadow. She could see her mother on the porch, waiting.
    They didn’t speak until they got back home. As they opened the screendoor, Alfie said to Sylvia, “We’ve had the house viewing. What’s our next assignment?” and they both laughed, to Frankie’s amazement.
    Had she misunderstood his lapse at Liz’s house? She thought she must have.
    Now her parents’ car was steadily mounting the hill behind the town, and at the last turn, the Mountain House Inn came into view, a looming white frame building that looked across the valley to the tallest of the local peaks, their tops rising bare and rocky above the tree line. This was where the tea was held every year.
    They parked at the edge of the wide, semicircular driveway cut into the rising lawn, behind a long string of other parked cars. Frankie looked up at the hotel as they got out of the car. There was a deep porch across the entire front span of the ground floor. Above the porch roof, on the second floor, there was a row of evenly spaced windows with dark green shutters. Several of these had fallen off, and the ones that were left sagged at the sides of the windows. There was a third floor above that with a line of smaller dormer windows.
    She and her parents started up the sloping lawn toward the