Nora Pike wanted her blue coat.
The building manager had found her a black one in a donation box. It was warm, and she said so, because she didn't want Maya thinking she was ungrateful about a coat. But her own had an inside pocket sewn into the lining, and her bus pass was in it.
They sat in a café two streets from Lark. Maya had slept for three hours. Nora had slept on her niece's foldout couch, between a refrigerator that hummed and a child who got up twice to ask for water.
“Lovely children,” she said. “I would like a door.”
She held her fingers apart around the cup. A pale dressing crossed the back of her hand.
Nora had called the center that morning and asked about the officer who was upstairs before the fire. The duty manager had confirmed the warning and passed on her request to speak with the dispatcher who took it. Maya had come expecting questions about the caller. For ten minutes Nora told her about the coat, her glasses, the medicine she had left on a shelf.
“The manager keeps texting my niece. I gave him my own number twice.”
“You could ask him again.”
“Oh, he gets tired of me asking. He'll hear from me after this.” Nora looked up. “Unless you've got his number too? No, never mind. I'll do it.”
Maya sat back. “Sorry.”
“What I want from you is why somebody knew I'd have a fire.”
A spoon clattered behind the counter. Maya waited for the waitress to move away.
“The caller didn't give me a cause. He gave your name, your address, and a time.”
“Did he work on my heater?”
“His firm did.”
“Then ask him. I keep getting told they're checking it. Well, yes. They would be, now.”
Maya watched Nora turn the cup with her good hand. There was a smear of jam on the thumb. Nothing about this woman was an emergency now except that she'd lost the place where she could take off her coat.
“Did you hear someone knocking?” Maya asked.
“I was washing a pan. I thought it was that boy upstairs. He borrows a charger and brings it back when he's got another one to borrow.” She tried to lift the cup and lowered it. “I heard knocking. I didn't hear anybody tell me my room was about to burn.”
“They had a warning they couldn't verify.”
“I'm not arguing with you about policemen. I'm asking what I would have done if someone had told me.”
Maya had no way to answer that.
Nora pushed her plate away. “My niece said I should think how lucky I was. Then she lent me her nice pillow and I cried into it. I'd like people to let me be upset without explaining it to me.”
“All right.”
“Not you specially. Everybody.”
Maya nodded. Nora seemed relieved that she didn't have to smooth the remark into politeness. She wrote the incident contact on the back of a receipt herself. When Maya reached for the bill, Nora took it.
“I invited you.”
Outside, a gust made both of them hold their coats shut. Nora paused before going toward the bus stop.
“If your caller is from that firm, don't let him tell me this is all right because he was early.”
Maya drove to Vale Electric with that sentence in her head.
Three vans stood outside the shop under lettering she'd helped Elias choose when the business was new. The V still leaned farther forward than she liked. She could hear a radio inside, someone singing badly along to a song she knew.
Elias opened the service door. He had safety glasses pushed up into his hair. For a moment he looked so familiar that she expected him to move aside and ask if she'd eaten.
“Nora met you,” he said.
“She wants her coat.”
“I'll speak to the manager.”
“She can speak to him. She wants you to tell her why you knew.”
He let her into the workshop. The singing stopped. A young worker carried a box out to a van.
On the bench, a damaged control lay beside a folded sheet. Elias turned the sheet over as he passed it.
“That's the part?” Maya asked.
“Yes. The investigator has photographs. They've allowed us to examine the installation and asked us to keep the control for collection.”
“What have you found?”
“Heat damage. I don't know which of it came first.”
She looked at the blackened edge without touching it. “And last night?”
He took off his glasses. One arm snagged in his hair and he freed it with an irritated little tug.
“I don't have anything you would believe.”
“You could start with something I could hear.”
The side door opened. Rae came in with a bag of fittings over one wrist and her field notebook under the other arm. There was a pale mark across her nose where her glasses had pressed. She saw Maya, then the bench.
“Oh,” she said. “Now we're doing it.”
“Doing what?” Elias asked.
“Looking at the part. I asked last night.”
She put down the fittings and reached for the control. Elias lifted a hand but didn't touch her.
“Let me finish documenting it.”
“I can look without changing it.”
Rae stood close to the bench. She folded back the bent cover of her notebook, found a date, and ran a finger down the page. Maya knew that little book: addresses, parts, who was there, Rae's signature squeezed beneath whatever else needed recording. Her daughter used the same pen until it died and complained whenever Elias borrowed it.
“That's mine,” Rae said.
“It doesn't mean your installation caused it,” Elias told her.
“I said it's mine. I recognize it.”
She leaned in, keeping her hands behind her back now. Elias began explaining what fire could do to a connection. For a few sentences they sounded like themselves at work: her question precise, his answer useful. Maya had watched him teach Rae to strip wire when she was too young to be interested in the name of a tool, only whether she was allowed to hold it. He had been patient. There were things his daughter trusted him for that Maya could not dismiss because he had hurt her.
Then Rae asked, “How did you know before the fire?”
Elias stopped.
“Mom told me the time,” she said. “Eleven seventeen. You knew what happened when I called you.”
He slid his hand into his pocket. The corner of his old work phone showed above his knuckles, its case split along one edge. It was the phone with Rae's voice on the voicemail, the one he wouldn't replace because all his customers had that number.
“I received something,” he said.
“Show me.”
“Not here.”
Rae looked around the workshop. “This is where it happened. Whatever you received, you had it here.”
“I meant not like this.”
She closed the notebook. The sound made him look at her.
“I went to Nora last night. She kept asking whether the heater was something she'd done. I told her I didn't know. I would like that to mean I don't know, Dad. Not that you haven't decided to tell me.”
“You don't know,” he said. “I don't know what made it fail either.”
He sounded relieved. Rae was still waiting.
Rae picked up the fittings, set them down again, and walked toward the door. Then she came back for them because she needed them on the next job.
“Put your notes on my desk,” she said. “The ones you've finished. I'm not asking you to solve the rest before I can look.”
She went out. Through the front window, Maya saw her open the van and sit for a moment without starting it.
“She'll think she hurt that woman,” Elias said.
“She already thinks it. She's waiting for you to help her find out.”
He set his glasses on the folded sheet. The phone disappeared back into his pocket.
Maya wanted to take it from him. The thought was so quick and ugly that she kept both hands on the strap of her bag.
“Will there be another call tonight?” she asked.
For the first time since she'd arrived, he looked directly at her.
“I don't know.”
She believed him. It frightened her more than the answer she'd expected.