Guilty Until Proven Innocent Read online

  Guilty Until Proven Innocent

  A Short Story

  by Sarah Billington

  Copyright © 2012 Sarah Billington

  Cover design © Billington Media

  Two house burning down in the middle of the night © Patricia Marks

  Horror scene of a dead like arm image © Jeff Thrower

  Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Sarah Billington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  Sarah Billington reserves the right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Kindle edition

  This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ***

  The night the Gabarski house caught fire was a real event. The whole town turned out – it’s not like you could have ignored that it was happening. Black smoke puffed straight up into the sky and the flames roared and crackled, licking at the timbers, support beams unsettling and crashing straight down into the living room. The night was lit with orange and shadows, shadows dancing all down Bridge Street as slowly we all came outside, wandering over from next door, a couple of blocks away, we watched in shock as the California bungalow family home burned down.

  The sounds of fire was soon drowned out as every fire truck in Carringwood roared down the usually sleepy streets, sirens deafening us all, horn blaring as Kenny Buchanan slammed his palm into the steering wheel again and again, the horn blaring as he swore at us sticky-beaks to get off the road or get caught in the hubcaps.

  They flooded the building with water and the Gabarski’s, Shana and the two kids under ten, Rita and Renee huddled together, shadows flickering over their bleary-eyed, soot-smeared faces as they watched their lives change forever. Craning my neck, searching through the crowd, peering at the faces of concerned friends and neighbors that huddled near their shell-shocked loved ones, I couldn’t spot Peter, Mr. Gabarski anywhere. I guess he wasn’t home. I felt sorry for whoever was going to make that phone call.

  The Sheriff waved Paddy O’Mara through the crowd and he pulled the ambulance in beside the fire trucks. Paddy took the Gabarski’s to hospital for smoke inhalation, the fire was soon drowned and the excitement over. Slowly the crowd shuffled in their slippers back to their homes, wrapping their dressing gowns tightly around themselves as they relived the excitement and horror of what they saw with anyone and everyone around them.

  I walked home by myself, glad for the Gabarski’s, that Shana, Rita and Renee were alright. But I couldn’t help but wonder where Peter was. And what exactly had started that fire.

  The next morning, the early birds were already seated and faces turned toward me as the sensor above the café door chimed cheerily as I entered, unraveling my scarf from around my neck.

  Without even glancing at the register, I knew it must have been Noah who opened this morning, and it was confirmed by a “Wassup, D” from behind the coffeemaker. Bodecker’s Café felt as if the oven had been left on, and open all night, flooding the whole building with heat. As I made my way around the counter and nodded at my friend, I took in the short sleeved linen shirt and shorts, flip-flops on his feet.

  “You do know you’re not in Tahiti anymore, right?” I said as I cranked the central heating knob down. “You’re fogging up the windows.”

  “So?”

  “People are sweating,” I added, pushing my sweater sleeves up my arms. “No one around here expected they’d be having breakfast in the tropics.”

  “It’s cool, man,” Noah said, shaking chocolate powder onto the top of a takeaway latte.

  “Everyone likes a vacation now and then.”

  I slapped him over the back of the head with an order pad and scooted back away from the counter before he could retaliate. It wasn’t actually wise to roughhouse with Noah. A light tap to the head might encourage him to tackle me through the plate glass window. All in fun, of course. Misguided fun, but fun all the same.

  “So how about the bonfire last night, huh?” Noah said. “Pretty righteous. I was thinking of getting marshmallows.”

  “You were there?”

  Noah narrowed his eyebrows at me, like I was stupid. “Dude, everyone was there.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I probably hadn’t spotted him in the crowd.

  “You know who wasn’t there?” I turned around to see old Mrs. Pomphrey and Garry Saunders sitting at their regular table, the one with the worn red formica, Sunday morning fry ups and mugaccinos set in front of them.

  “Who wasn’t there, Mrs. P?” I said. The door opened and I smiled in greeting at Fiona Herman, taking a deep breath of the crisp autumn air that blew into the stifling heat.

  “Peter Gabarski.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Yeah, have they contacted him yet?”

  “Well that’s the thing, he was supposed to be home last night.” Garry said, shoveling a forkful of bacon and hash brown into his mouth.

  “Apparently Shana’s worried sick,” Mrs. P said. “She was calling him all night at the hospital in between tests, and his phone keeps going to voicemail. He’s vanished. My Nina’s a nurse there, she told me,” Mrs. P puffed up with pride.

  “I know Nina,” I said. “I went to school with Nina, remember Mrs. P?” I said.

  She touched her forehead and sighed to herself. “Of course, yes, sorry, Dustin.”

  “Doug.”

  “Doug!”

  It wasn’t unusual that I knew her daughter. Most of Carringwood were born, raised, schooled, worked and died in Carringwood, and I wasn’t special enough to get out. Everyone knew everyone here. Sometimes when they got to be Mrs. Pomphrey’s age, they started to forget everyone too. But not the gossip. I smiled to myself as I wandered over to the table in the corner where Fiona was unloading her outerwear onto the chair beside her.

  “Is it unusually hot in here?” she asked, fanning her face with the menu as I approached.

  “Yeah, Noah opened.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well that explains it. I’ll just have the porridge and apple juice this morning hon. Did you hear about the Gabarski house?”

  “You mean the fire?” I said as I scribbled her order onto my pad. “Everyone’s heard about it.”

  “Yes, well three white vans pulled up outside this morning and Sherriff Taylor and the Deputy cordoned off the whole lot. It’s completely barricaded with police tape all the way up to the edge of the property, stuck in the grass which is all water-logged because of those hoses.”

  “Who was in the white vans?”

  “They looked like space aliens, I tell you,” Fiona said, shaking her head. “Covered head to toe in white radiation-looking suits. Deputy Kelley told me they were arson experts and forensic investigators but I never saw them dressed like that on CSI.”

  Joel Hatherley swiveled in his seat. I noticed we had the whole room’s attention. “So they think it was done on purpose?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Kelley wouldn’t tell me. But they must do, right?”

  Bodecker in the kitchen rang the bell and slammed some plates on the counter. “Order’s up!”

  I weaved through the tables and over to the plates. Hanging Fiona’s order I scooped up Table Five’s eggs benedict and granola and wove back through.

  “Who would want to burn their house down?” Someone said.

  “Do you think they knew there were people home?”

  “Of course they knew, it was one o’clock on a school night. They knew.”

  “So it was attempted murder, then.”

  “You’ve got
to be kidding. In Carringwood?”

  “We’re not capable of that.”

  “Have there been any strangers through town lately? Any tourists?”

  “Tourists? Here?”

  “Passing through, I mean.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. I glanced up. Everyone was looking at me, or Noah, waiting for an answer. If there had been strangers in town, they would have stopped here. We would have known about it.

  “Nah, man,” Noah said. “No newbies around since August.”

  I shook my head and picked up Mrs. P’s empty plate. “No one that I’ve seen.”

  “So it has to have been someone from here,” Garry Saunders said. He pushed back his coffee and looked suspiciously around the room. An uncomfortable silence grew as the breakfast crowd studied each other.

  “Peter’s still missing, remember,” Mrs. P said quietly.

  Eyes widened.

  Hands went to mouths in shock.

  Hushed conversation took over.

  “Peter?”

  “It couldn’t be.”

  “Why would he want to hurt his family?”

  “He loved them. He loves them.”

  “But why isn’t he here? Where is he?”

  That was the best question of them all. Where was Peter Gabarski?

  Snippets of news sped through the town and Bodecker’s Café became the hub, the one stop shop resource for anything and everything to do with the Gabarski Fire.

  Each new patron added to the discussion, I didn’t need to even step outside to hear what was happening. Apparently a handful of reporters from the city had ventured into town, not looking overly hopeful of an interesting story (it was after all, a domestic house fire in which no one had been hurt) but I guess the junior reporters had been assigned the story so they made the trek all the way to Carringwood on the off chance of a slow news day.

  Like Dave Keller, the editor, photographer and sole reporter for the Carringwood Gazette, they had stuck their voice recorders (Dave) and iPhones (city reporters) under the Sherriff’s nose, snapped a few photos of the arson investigators doing their thing and high-tailed it out of Nowheresville, USA as fast as their company cars would take them.

  Word went around that Sherriff Taylor and the forensic team had been very tight-lipped about what they found inside the house, and according to Dave when he came in for his afternoon deadline double espresso and raisin and oat cookie, their serious faces and hushed conversations said it all: The Gabarski’s had definitely been the unfortunate victims of an arsonist.

  “You better not be writing that,” Frances Billingsley said as she waited for Noah to whip up her vanilla chai latte.

  Dave blinked at her and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Why on Earth not?”

  “Oh come on, Dave,” she said. “There’s what, 200 people in Carringwood?”

  “204,” Garry Saunders said, gumming his lips. Mrs. P had left their table hours ago, but the old man refused to give up his table. I didn’t push him for it, though. On days like this when there was good gossip to be heard, Garry could spend the whole day with us, waving me down with irritation to refill his coffee whenever it got a bit low. After a couple of weeks on the job I not only learned to keep Garry’s cup a quarter full and above, but after 2pm to switch him over to decaf or he’d start getting the twitches and downright argumentative. Two years ago Garry bopped Teddy Berg on the nose because he ordered onion rings and Garry doesn’t like onion rings. Teddy had to be driven over an hour to the hospital in Ratchet Creek to have his nose set since happy-go-lucky Garry Saunders had broken it and all.

  Teddy never did get those onion rings.

  “Wait – 203. Ernest Berkowitz carked it on the crapper on Tuesday,” Garry said.

  There were murmurs and winces, but no one was overly surprised. The man was 96, after all.

  “Oh,” Frances said. “Okay, 203. And we all know every one of those 203, right?”

  “Right,” Dave said, nodding. We all nodded too.

  “So if it was arson, it would have to have been one of us.”

  The café went silent. The only noise was the steam hissing on the espresso machine. A car engine as Lucky Mike drove today’s haul down to Catch of the Day Restaurant for the dinner crowd.

  Bodecker’s iPod in the kitchen and the man himself singing along to Metallica. Maybe we should put the tip jar toward singing lessons.

  Noah handed Frances her takeaway cup. She fastened on the lid and her gaze wandered to each of us as she strode toward the front door once more. “Do any of you really think one of us would be capable of arson?” she asked. “Especially with the kids inside.” She opened the door, gave the room a little finger wave and was gone.

  She was right. I didn’t know one person in this town who I thought would be capable of murder. Well. Murder by arson, anyway. We have a lot of hunters in town, who come back after a day in the woods, a buck sprawled lifeless in the back of their pickup. They parade through the streets like they’ve taken down the beast, rifles slung triumphantly over their shoulders.

  If it was murder by gun, I honestly wouldn’t have such a hard time believing it.

  But Peter wasn’t like that.

  After an uncomfortable silence, glances slipping and sliding all over the café it was almost a health and safety issue, Brent Fisher sculled the dregs of his orange juice, slammed it down on the table and said “How well do we really know our neighbors, anyway? How well do we know each other? The neighbors of serial killers always say what a nice guy he was, wouldn’t hurt a fly. That is until the bags of chopped up corpses are dug up from his backyard.”

  As if the atmosphere hadn’t been uncomfortable already.

  “You’re right, Brent,” Frances said. “Who knows what he’s capable of. Or any of us.”

  After I flipped the lights off at the end of the night and Noah locked the front door, we left Bodecker counting the takings and we strolled down the empty main street, homeward bound.

  “Peter couldn’t have done it,” I said.

  “What?” Noah frowned at me, confused as I pulled him from his own thoughts.

  “Set his house on fire. He loves Shana. Anyone can see that. And he’d never do that to his kids.”

  “I guess.”

  “So where is he, do you think?” I said. “It can’t be a coincidence that his house burns down and he’s missing, right?”

  Noah shrugged. “I don’t know where the dude would be.”

  “Did you see him yesterday?”

  “Could have, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well I don’t know what the guy looks like, so…”

  My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “How do you not know what he looks like?” I said. “Peter.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Peter Gabarski.”

  “Yeah man, I know his name. I’ve been hearing it all day. I just don’t know the dude.”

  “He works at Darwin and Sons. He grew up here.”

  “I dunno, man. I always thought that old guy with the pet raccoons lived there.”

  “You mean Morty Lohman?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “No, he’s over on Roman Avenue.”

  “Oh.”

  Noah wasn’t born and raised here, but he’d appeared on Bodecker’s doorstep looking for work six years ago. He said he didn’t belong back wherever he came from, but he belonged here. He was as much a local as anyone. I couldn’t believe there were people in our tiny edge of the world that he didn’t know. “You know Shana, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “Dude, she comes into Bodecker’s all the time.”

  He stared at me, patiently. He didn’t even know Shana?

  “She’s about your height, blond and it’s always in a ponytail. She wears cargo pants a lot.”

  He held his hands up to his chest, cupping imaginary breasts. “Is she kind of lacking in the boobage department? Wears an ugly rugby sweate
r a lot?”

  “Yes.” I said. Not how I would have described her, but to each their own. “Yes, that’s her.”

  “Caramel macchiato,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  “She’s the caramel macchiato. That’s what she gets. And a dollop of irish cream.”

  “Okay, well it was her house that burned down.”

  “Far out.”

  We reached the intersection of Main and Bridge and paused to say our goodbyes. We paused longer than every other night. Both of our gazes peered into the darkness down Bridge Street. The streetlights hadn’t worked in forever and I wasn’t sure there were even plans for them to be fixed. Maybe now that someone had crept around in the dark without being caught, they would be.

  From the intersection, the Gabarski’s house down at number 24 looked fairly normal. The whole street did, like three people hadn’t lost their home and nearly lost their lives last night. The abandoned street was a big difference to the smoke, the crackling and orange shadows. To the danger and bustling activity of fire fighters, police and paramedics. Of rubbernecking over the mass of heads in the crowd.

  Now it was just a street.

  A street with room to move and take a good long look without the pushing and shoving and worry. The danger was over. I’d always wondered what a house fire really looked like, after the fire was gone. What sort of damage unimaginable heat could truly do.

  “Want to take a look?”

  Noah smirked. “Why, man? The excitement’s over. It’s just a burnt out house.”

  “You don’t think that’s interesting?”

  He scuffed his sneaker on the pavement. “Nah, man,”

  “Alright. Later, then. I’m going in,” I said, heading toward the house.

  “Isn’t it illegal or something?”

  “How come?”

  “Dude,” Noah said. “It’s a crime scene.”

  “Oh,” I said. I guess he had a point. “Right.”

  “Noah’s cell phone beeped and he fished it from his pocket. As he read the text message it illuminated a smile creeping onto his face. He started backing away toward Yarmuckle Street.

  “Later, man,” he said.

  “Booty call?” I asked with a smile.

  Noah’s mouth fell open in protest. “Dude, it hurts me that you would think that. I have a high level of respect for the ladies. Super high respect.”