Because I had only a carry-on bag, I walked straight to a telephone and called the Meiers again. It was seven-thirty in the morning. No luck. Next stop was a car rental desk. Within minutes I was behind the wheel of a new-smelling yellow Ford. I figured it would take about two hours to drive from Kennedy Airport to Somerset, New Jersey, but once on the road, morning traffic was beginning. It would take more time.

In the years since we’d met, I had thought very little about the Meiers. The only time I put life aside and concentrated on them was in a dentist’s office one morning. Sitting there waiting my turn, I picked up an architecture magazine and started giving it the quick shuffle-through. I passed something, ignored it, and only seconds later did it register. Leafing back fast, I found the large two-page spread on the house I had visited one depressing afternoon in the middle of that first crisis. There it was! Anwen and Gregory Meier’s remarkable home. A cockeyed cupola and what looked like a kind of giant bat wing had been added on to the original building, but it was such a memorable place that no matter what, it couldn’t be disguised. The text said Anwen Meier’s Brendan House, one of the most famous examples of the Corvallis School of architecture, had received yet another prestigious award, this time from a European architectural organization. It spoke of the house as if everyone knew about it and wouldn’t be surprised by this latest tribute. I tore the article out and showed it to Lily. Shaking her head, she began to cry. The memory of her face reddening and the glistening tears on her cheeks stayed with me many miles.

Somewhere along those miles was the rest stop where Lincoln bought his supplies. It was the only place he could have gotten them in the middle of the night on the New Jersey Turnpike. He bought big bottles of Coca-Cola. I would guess four of them. Four would do the trick if he was clever and careful about it. Gasoline was no problem. Pull into a station, fill ‘er up, and ask the attendant if they sold those jerry cans you keep a couple of gallons of extra gas in for the lawn mower. Gallons of gasoline make quite a fire. What did he use for a wick? Probably underpants or a T-shirt. Maybe he took off his “Fuck Dancing—Let’s Fuck!” shirt, tore it to pieces, and stuck them into the tops of the bottles. That would have been appropriate: Coke bottles full of golden gasoline and “Fuck” shirt scraps. That’s all you need. Anyone who watches television knows how to make a Molotov cocktail, the poor man’s hand grenade.

I knew he was bad, capable of things I had never wanted to think about. But even later, after retracing his steps and grasping his motives, I was appalled by what he did that night. If only he had stopped a few minutes to listen, to ask questions and hear the truth, terrible as it was. None of it would have happened. Other things would have, certainly, but not that and not to them.

He was a fast driver and had his three-hour head start on me. He also had a great sense of direction and would have no trouble finding the house. When he was young one of his hobbies had been studying maps, particularly exotic ones—Cambodia, Mali, Bhutan—and finding the shortest routes from one heroic or otherworldly-sounding point to another. Timbuktu to Nouakchott. Bu Phlok to Snuol. One birthday we gave him a beautiful brass calipers to measure his distances exactly. He still had those calipers in a desk drawer, along with the bullet and the picture of Little White.

I envisioned him driving eighty miles an hour down the New Jersey Turnpike, stopping only to get gas and the supplies he needed for the job. What went through his head in those hours? At home he always drove with the radio on loud, impatiently turning the dial whenever a song came on he didn’t like. Add that to the picture. Add clicking on the overhead light while steering with one hand, looking quickly from his map to road signs approaching, then to the map again to make sure he was going the right way.

Lily had made this same drive sixteen years before, fleeing New York in a car she’d bought with money stolen from a drug dealer/pimp. She was only five years older than Lincoln was now. All three of us had made this same drive south, all for such different desperate reasons.

I got off at the New Brunswick exit and remembered certain landmarks from my last trip, although the town itself had been cleaned up since then in the typical ways—homogenized, mallified. Morning traffic was heavy. Stuck in a long line at a red light, I felt weariness creep up the back of my head and spread. The people around me had had their good night’s sleep, hot morning showers, breakfasts to get them up and out and going. Not me. As the light turned green and I was off again, I hated every one of them; resented them their stomachs full of savory coffee, the safe tedium of their jobs. They had children. Their children were not like mine.

New Jersey farm country, the sun only just up. Cows far off in fields, dogs running around free in backyards. Kids standing by the side of the road waiting for the school bus. The closer I got, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew. One last left turn and I was on their road. There’s where I pulled over last time because I had to pee so badly. Some of the ticky-tacky houses had been torn down and replaced with attractive, much more expensive-looking places. The invasion of the middle class.

The road dipped, rose, dipped again, and that’s when I saw the first fire truck. It was a long hook and ladder coming slowly down toward me. On such a narrow road out in the middle of that nowhere, the red truck looked twice as large as it was. Wherever it was going, it was in no hurry to get there. Up in the open cabin, the driver and another man sat with their helmets off, smiling. The passenger was smoking a cigarette. We made eye contact and he lifted his cigarette hand in a small half-wave. Another two men stood on the ledge at the back of the truck holding on to silver handles. Both of them were in full uniform and one leaned his head against the truck, looking either exhausted or asleep standing up. I kept driving, only faster now. Why was that truck out here? Where had it been so early in the morning? I saw the smoke about a quarter of a mile further down the road. A police car passed going in the other direction.

Smoke tells the whole story. When it’s slow and spirally, aimless, you know a fire has lost its fury or its energy. Without seeing the flame itself, you can be sure its back is broken and will go out soon. If the smoke is hard and fast and billows straight up into the sky, the fire is a bad one, still very alive and dangerous.

A wispy brown pillow of smoke hung unmoving in the pale pink morning sky over the Meiers’ house. Some was still rising off the burned part of the building, but it was more an afterthought than anything else. Two fire trucks and a police car were parked on the road in front. Firemen were curling thick gray hoses back into form and generally wrapping up their work before leaving. Three policemen stood close together, comparing notes. People stood around on the street and the edges of the Meiers’ lawn watching the goings-on. I parked my car back from the mass of other vehicles and got out slowly. The house was unmistakable except for one thing. Standing there looking at it, I realized the bat wing was gone. The vaguely asymmetrical addition I’d seen pictured in the architecture magazine was no longer there. In its place was a black, scorched, collapsed mess of burnt pieces of things scattered across a wide area, standing, piled, smoking: the metal frame of a butterfly chair, a wooden table that had oddly been burned on only one side, leaving it two legs to stand on, books strewn across the ground. Had the bat wing been their library?

“Tar.” An old woman came walking toward me and slowed a few feet away. It was clear she wanted to tell someone what she had heard. “One of the firemen says he thinks it was the tar. They’ve been working on that kooky roof for weeks and he says the gasoline must’ve hit right on the tar for the whole thing to’ve gone up so fast. Who on God’s green earth would want to burn their house down?” She thought her question over and suddenly stared at me with new, suspicious eyes. “You from around here, sir?”