Vineyard Blues by Philip R. Craig

possessions and getting her money. “How was the concert?”
    â€œSad and blue and funny sometimes,” said Zee. “Corrie Appleyard is terrific. Your folks were there and they’ll tell you all about it.”
    â€œThe blues,” said the twin. “I sing them myself, sometimes.”
    The twin said good night and left, and we went into the children’s room to check on the darlings. They were asleep and looked quite angelic. We adjusted a blanket or two, the way parents do, and went to our own bed. We read our bedside-table books for a while, then turned out the light. Zee threw a long leg over mine and snugged in close.
    â€œI love you,” she said.
    I pulled her against me. “Me, too.”
    â€œI had a good time tonight.”
    â€œMe, too.”
    â€œI hope nobody got hurt in the fire.”
    â€œMe, too.”
    I thought about the fire and the blues and Corrie’s frown. Maybe somebody would write a song about a house burning down. Somebody probably already had. Winners may write the history books, but losers write the songs.

—  7  —
    I heard the news at the Dock Street Coffee Shop, where the Jacksons were having breakfast: juice for everybody; coffee for the big people; cereal for Diana; toast, bacon, and a scrambled egg for Joshua, who didn’t care for soft egg yolks; a bagel for Zee; and the full-bloat breakfast—sausage, eggs, toast, and fried potatoes—for me. Delish! And with your food, you got to watch the cook do his work, never wasting a motion, his arms as graceful as a hula dancer’s, rhythmic as a symphony conductor’s. And you got the latest gossip. What more could you ask? Today the talk was mostly about last night’s fire.
    Opinions ranged from the mild to the wild: Another damned Ben Krane firetrap! Be a good thing if every slum he owned burned down! Just lucky that nobody got hurt. But maybe somebody did. A girl was missing. Girl named Millicent Dowling, according to a cop somebody knew. Her friends called her Millie, and nobody had seen her since the fire. As soon as they got the ruins cooled down enough to make a search, the firemen would go in and see if she maybe didn’t get out, or look for anybody else who might be in there. Fire marshals would have to figure out what started it, too.
    â€œWhat do you think, J.W.? Arson or just an accident?”
    I looked at Charlie Bensen. I was sitting between him and Joshua. Charlie liked fires and kept his scanner on all the time so he could go watch the firemen do their work. He’d been a volunteer himself until he got too old.
    â€œI don’t know, Charlie,” I said. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
    Charlie grinned, showing a good set of new dentures. “I know what they say about firebugs working as firemen, but no, it wasn’t me.” He sobered. “Thing is, there was that arson last spring. ’Nother Krane place. Maybe somebody’s got it in for Ben Krane.”
    â€œMaybe so.”
    Charlie chewed some toast. “You remember about twenty-five years back we had that string of arsons in town? Summer places, mostly, empty and usually off someplace where there wasn’t a hydrant anyplace close. I worked on most of them fires, but we couldn’t save many of the places. Us and the cops could never prove who did it, but finally the arson stopped. You remember that?”
    I’d been about fifteen at the time, but I did remember it. The fires had spooked a lot of people. I nodded. “The story I got was that the cops had a pretty good idea who did it even though they couldn’t prove anything, so they had a talk with the perp and he shut himself down.”
    â€œYeah,” said Charlie. “That was the scuttlebutt. I never heard who they had in mind. Say, maybe whoever it was is back at work and is torching Ben Krane’s places because he knows nobody’ll be too mad at him for doing