Fire Season by Leyna Krow

Author:Leyna Krow [Krow, Leyna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Quake led on long legs. Hornsweller had to take little jogging hop-steps every few seconds to keep up. This pleased Quake. It made Hornsweller seem like a pet—a dog, easily trained and desperate not to get left behind.

“What are we going to do?” Hornsweller asked in a gaspy voice.

“We’re going to ask Heydale if he’s an anarchist.”

“He’ll lie. He’s unscrupulous. You know how unscrupulous he is.”

“No, he won’t,” Quake said. “When a man takes action in the name of a political cause, he becomes a champion of the cause, does he not? He needs people to know his reasons. What good is championing a cause if he lies about it when asked? None at all. He may as well not have acted. So, if he is really an anarchist, he will admit to it readily. Otherwise, his anarchism has been in vain.”

Hornsweller conceded this made sense.

Back at the jail, the scene Quake had engineered played itself out. Hornsweller jammed his face against the bars of Heydale’s cell and demanded to know if he was an anarchist.

Heydale, of course, said no.

Hornsweller looked to Quake, disappointed.

“Mr. Heydale,” Quake said, “what do you think about the prospect of Washington Territory achieving statehood? Are you for or against it?”

“Oh, I’m very much for it,” Heydale said. “Who wouldn’t be? Isn’t everyone tired of living in this filthy backwater?”

“Don’t call my city a filthy backwater,” Hornsweller snapped. “You’re the filthy one.” Then the police chief walked off, leaving Quake and Heydale alone, presumably convinced that Heydale was not an anarchist and that to continue to suggest as much publicly would do no good. Quake allowed himself a rare smile.

“What was all that about?” Heydale asked.

“Hornsweller believes the Spokane arsonist may have set the fire as a result of his feelings over statehood,” Quake said.

Heydale’s face took on a knotted look. “Oh dear,” he said. “He’ll think it’s my fault for sure now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because fire is good for Washington. He’ll think I set the fire because I wanted to accelerate its becoming a state.”

When Quake asked for further explanation, he was treated to one of the more lucid statements he’d heard from Heydale, who offered up a theory that he said had been imparted to him by his former boss, the owner of the First Bank of Spokane Falls. The man’s name was Zane Zeeb. Heydale admitted to disliking him for personal reasons, and that in his darker moments before his arrest, he had even become somewhat obsessed with Zeeb, convinced he was seeing him everywhere, though Zeeb never acknowledged him in any way and seemed, in fact, to be avoiding him.

“I was hallucinating him. I know that now,” Heydale said.

But in spite of this dislike, Heydale said he had the utmost respect for the man as both a banker and a student of politics. The Zeeb doctrine of fire, apparently, was that the disasters gave the territory a chance to show off its best self in the face of adversity, and that this would help assure it a place in the union.

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