Guilty Until Proven Innocent
A Short Story
by Edwina Ray
Copyright © 2012 Sarah Billington
Published by Billington Media at Smashwords
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
Discover other titles by Edwina Ray at
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/EdwinaRay
LICENCE NOTES
Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Edwina Ray 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.
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 kid’s bedroom. 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 who would listen
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 buzzed 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 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 guess I 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 said, puffing 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 here, and I wasn’t special enough to get out. Everyone knew everyone. 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?”