Frank lay in the hospital bed at St. Charles with an IV in his arm and the early light on his face, looking, for the first time in years, exactly like the fire chief I had married. I held his hand. He said it quietly, without hurry, as if he had rehearsed it in the dark. “Barb, I killed three people in 1989. Not with my hands. With a signature.” I said, “Frank, you did not start the fire.” He shook his head. “No. But I knew who did. And I let him walk. That is the same thing.” The monitor beeped. His eyes were wet and very clear.
I did not argue with him. A dental hygienist learns to listen for the thing under the thing. I had spent thirty five years watching people tell me they flossed. I knew that my husband was not asking to be forgiven. He was asking to be finished. “Frank,” I said, “who else knows about the report?” “Only the man Kyle brought,” he said. “His name is Garrett Voss. His father owned the building. His father hired a man to burn it for the insurance.” I stood up. “Then we are going to take it from him.”
I called the one person I trusted completely, a lawyer named Dolores Whitaker, an old friend from our church in Spokane who had spent twenty years as a prosecutor. She drove to Bend that afternoon, four hundred miles, in a battered Subaru, and sat at the foot of the hospital bed with a yellow legal pad. She listened to Frank for an entire morning. At the end she took off her glasses and said, “Chief, you have just handed me the best witness I have had in years. You are going to be very unpopular. And you are going to sleep well.”
A man who buries a truth in his heart will find that his wife can dig it up and make it hold.
Kyle and Amber were arrested on Monday at a motel outside Redmond, with the mink coat in the trunk and my emergency envelope almost untouched. The state police had found them using the telephone of Amber. Kyle, when they put him in the interview room, wept openly. He told the detective he had been in debt to a man in Seattle, and that when Voss approached him with a plan, he saw a way out. He said he had never meant to hurt his father. He said it three times. The detective, a kind and exhausted woman, slid a box of tissues across the table.
Garrett Voss was a harder matter. He was sixty one years old, a developer in Spokane with a reputation for charity, and he lived behind a gate in a house on the South Hill. The sheriff of Spokane County sent a team to his door with a warrant on the morning of the fourteenth. In a locked drawer in his study they found a manila folder labeled RIVERSIDE, the original fire marshal report, forty pages, stamped and signed, naming the cause of the fire as arson, with the name of the man who set it and the amount his father had paid him.
The man who set it had died in 2004. The father had died in 2011. But the son had profited from the buried report for thirty five years, by using it, quietly, to bend one person after another. Frank was not the first. He was the fifth. A councilman. A judge. A banker. Each had been frightened into silence by a folder they were told would one day be released. Dolores Whitaker had them all in her office by December, one by one, in a series of quiet interviews that ended in four resignations and a grand jury.
Frank gave his statement in January, in a plain gray room at the Spokane County courthouse. He was seventy seven years old, in his good brown suit, with a cane he did not need. He told it from the beginning. He told it without sparing himself. When he finished, the prosecutor asked whether he understood that his testimony would be public. He said, “Madam, I have kept it quiet for thirty five years. I would like to be loud for a while.” And the whole room, the clerks and the detectives and the stenographer, rose to their feet.
The families of the three people who died in the Riverside fire came to the hearing in March. A gray haired woman in a wheelchair, whose daughter had perished on the third floor. A man in a veterans cap who had lost his brother. A young man, now a firefighter himself, who had been a child in the building that night and had been carried out by a neighbor. They sat in the front row. Frank stood before them and said, in a clear steady voice, “I am sorry. I should have said it in 1989.” The mother in the wheelchair said nothing. Then she nodded, once.
Voss was convicted of extortion, obstruction, and conspiracy, and sentenced to fourteen years. Kyle received probation and a requirement of treatment. Amber pleaded to theft and went home to her mother in Idaho. Frank was never charged, because the time had long expired and the district attorney, after a conversation with the families, did not wish to pursue it. The Spokane Fire Department sent him a letter, signed by every captain in the city, calling him a man who had finished the work. He framed it and hung it over the recliner.
We still live in the cedar house on the Deschutes River. Smokey and Ladder sleep at the foot of the bed, and they never go out without water. In the mornings I sit with Frank on the porch with our coffee, watching the mist rise off the current, and he forgets a few things, but never the things that matter. Last week he turned to me and said, out of the quiet, “Barb, thank you for not letting me go to my grave with it.” I took his hand. I said, “Frank. A woman can tell a lie by the way a mouth moves. Yours has been telling the truth for months.”
