The following is an excerpt from my novel, No More Real Fires. Drop me a line for more information.

Fin Adams had no need for witnesses when it came to fires.  He had learned all he needed to from seeing a few hundred of them, but also from observing other men do his job so well that he had felt honored to take over for them when the time had come.  There were old fires, predominately sparked by simple yet direct combustion or the venerable box of oily rags, and the new fires which where mainly electrical in orient.  He had seen them set many times and knew where to look and when, which was the most important part of arson investigation.  But so seldom was anyone that was involved anywhere to be found, unless forensically identified, that the investigations by their nature took a course of source-oriented hypothesizing.  So it was with a certain amount of freelance uncertainty that Adams, sitting in his official-looking Rover, crossed the small channel over to Chappaquidick on the On Time.
            Trappings can cause their own assurance, which construe themselves as trappings again, but behind the wheel of the Rover on the narrow roads of the smaller island Adams was able to comport himself.  During the preceding day, he had seen an interview with Martin von Fohrness as a long shot, a walk out onto a long thin branch in search of some supportable facts about the man.  The issue had gone beyond the night, for he thought he knew what he had seen, and passed on to the man, against or for whom some judgement was to be made.  However, driving out there, it didn’t feel like such an unsure proposition.  Adams had himself as a pretext, the authority of the fire chief, and fell back onto it, more comfortable as he pulled up to the house again than he had been in imagining himself doing so.    
            No answer came to the door as he waiting after knocking, and though he was sure it would be open if he tried it, Adams walked around toward the back of the house instead.  Much he hadn’t remembered about the house that night stood out to him as he rounded the first corner and saw the ocean; a low, thick brick wall jutted out from the side, dividing front from back and caused Adams to wonder if he was at the right address.  Looking to his left he recognized the scrubby woods and the incalculable number of steps he retraced to that point, however the wall and a large, single pane window above it seemed newer, added, and thus misplaced in his recollection.  But Adams continued around the house, his darkened memory in flight against the issues of the daylight, the ocean views especially.   Taking an unplanned look back at the brick wall, he turned around again to see a curious but smiling face on a thin man making light of his intrusion already.
            “I told the other man everything I knew,” the thin man said, sure that he had.  From his memory, Adams assumed it to be von Fohrness.
            “What other man?” Adams inquired with some merit toward the absolution.
“I don’t know,” he confirmed enigmatically yet decisively, and turned his back on Adams, walking a few steps away.  He had been tying some fishing line in tight, orderly bundles, to which he returned but did not resume, touching instead the arrayed spools of varying test as if to steady himself. 
            “Are you Mr. von Fohrness, Martin von Fohrness?”
            “Definitely.  Has anyone suggested otherwise?” he asked then turned his mouth into a scowl like it was in his nature rather than merely a habit.
            “Sir, I’m Finlay Adams, assistant fire chief on the island and I was out the other night when your house was…”
            “Adams?”
            “Yessir.  You want to maybe take me back to that night for what you remember?  I’ve been wondering whether, well, just exactly what happened that night,” Adams said, sounding to himself as if he had confided some secret to the man.  Von Fohrness turned a winced glance toward the sea then back to Adams; something discovered occurred to both men but the reach toward it was obscured.  Adams had not established his official presence with much conviction and von Fohrness had betrayed the indignant posture he normally took when bothered at home.  It was too late to recover and so he held silent, but not the silence that often precedes a thoughtful answer.  “You getting ready to go out?” Adams backpedaled in the direction of the lines.
            “I was out in the Indian Ocean once, many times really, but once at night, and these florescent sharks were milling all about, eating our bait and tackling the boat playfully, bastards.  One of the guides jumped in with them; he said it was some kind of religious power the sharks had in that water, which had the glow in it, not the sharks,” he clarified and looked at Adams to see if he understood. “I had a bad feeling about that night from the start, from early evening.”
            Having been lolled into distraction, Adams was caught off guard by the vague pronouncement but the feeling of discovery came over him again.  “It was a strange afternoon,” he offered.
            “Yes!  Yes it was,” the other agreed quickly and to seemingly more than one thing, then relaxed his posture where they stood in the yard.  “When Wes came over that day, I told him to clean out the jeep, that I had muddied it up.  But he started on the house just like always.”
            “Wes?”
“My friend… Benjamin…”
“You said his name was Wes…” Adams reminded him.  Fohrness grew impatient.
“Yes!  Wes Benjamin, he’s a friend… my… he comes over a few times a week and helps out with things.  We’re friends, sometimes,” von Fohrness admitted to Adams, but suggested something else to himself to which he slightly bowed his head.  The two men continued to step formally around a recollection of the night without ever calling it a fire or talking about the smoke.  The older man had identified something in Adams, some willingness to speak with him and let him speak that von Fohrness admired.  He had spent much of his life in the company of guides and professional hunters, simpler men who mastered certain basics and nuance about their surroundings and then earned their living by knowing them.  Many if not all of them had about their roughness a sincerity that transcended the dollars, Rubles and Rand that passed between them and their clients.  Friendships were cemented in hours, marked by bloody animal skins carried for miles, and remembered forever.  But the respect that was reared in the wilds was one of simple, pedestrian honesty men like von Fohrness would otherwise believed had outlived its time.  To a very slim degree, the older man recognized this streak of the genuine in Adams, and though he wasn’t eager to make a friend, neither did von Fohrness recognize an enemy in the younger, thicker man.
Shortly, Adams was invited into the house and stepped through the sliding glass doors with his eyes darting to the walls, the furniture, to the many heads poking out of their mounts, looking for a hint that would re-establish what he had seen there nights before.  But a more permanent atmosphere had replaced the smoke and its smell.  The scent of refined hubris and the grace of a man’s liberty were invoked in the way the leather chair and couch were arranged and random items misplaced upon them.  Magazines about travel and architecture were opened and lying unread on a table; two large but dissimilar knives sat on the table gleaming like new purchases; two different shoes sat next to a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray.   Adams noticed the deep shag of the rug on the verge of admiration of its color when he spotted the flare pistol on the floor next to the chair. 
“I don’t have anything else on it,” von Fohrness explained as he handed Adams a slip of paper that was a copy of a receipt.  “You don’t need a permit to have one of those, but that young Benjamin could sure use some lessons.”
“Yeah… well, you or anybody else doesn’t need to be using this thing in the house anymore, Mr. von Fohrness.  I’m going to…” he was saying but the older man had walked away.  Adams heard him shuffling a drawer in an adjacent room, then he returned.
“Here,” he said, and handed Adams the spent shell from a large rifle.  “Now if I had been meaning to get ‘im, I would’ve known what to use.  I’ll let this speak for itself.  You go on, take it.”
Adams shrugged then slipped the metal casing into his pocket.
On the way back to Chilmark he could think of little else aside from the life of the old man, and how it had led up to the night in question.  From what he could ascertain, there was little that was understood about the man if everything was known.  But he was troubled in that, even with this being the case, it offered no clear distinction among Eliot’s version, the sister’s wishes, and his own as to what could be considered accurate, much less just.  In this, Martin von Fohrness had accomplished little in allowing the intrusion of Adams; his general appraisal of the man had only succeeded in creating a portrait of himself that was slightly deserving of both penury and solitude.
He re-entered an empty Chilmark firehouse and went upstairs to find a note for him that said there had been three messages from Celeste von Fohrness.  On the chalkboard outside was an address written in green chalk, denoting that the call wasn’t a call but a drill, one mile away at Menemsha harbor.  Adams wrestled with some forms that were scattered on the desk he shared, stacking them haphazardly and off to one side.  He had at one time been more of a stickler for organization than he noticed at that moment, and it creased his forehead to compare himself that day with a removed other properly fixated on quotidian detail.  He could not tell how long it had been since he had abandoned the regard he once held for the paper and forms of his position, but it occurred to him for the first time that some sense of a return to normalcy lay just beyond the visible horizon.  He knew he might achieve this with the dispatch of the von Fohrness case but then, looking at the answering machine on the cluttered desk, he wondered just what this might mean.
“If you can’t get here by then… well, I don’t know if I can stay another day.  Look chief,” she said, weaving a thread of hardship into her otherwise threadbare insouciance, “what is exactly the holdup, anyway?”
“There are still some matters to be resolved,” Adams explained evasively.  But then he naturally turned toward the plain talk he might typically reserve for face to face encounters. “Normally my reports on a call are not in dispute.”  As much as he had assumed that he would charge the older von Fohrness for attempted arson and turn the case over to the state solicitor, Adams knew then that he would not.  He listened to the perturbed voice of the sister who ransomed much on the possibility that he would yet provide her something tangible to use against her brother, unsure if he was able to use only his own judgement.  Without the pressure from Eliot he would have already done the man a grave injustice, and it occurred to him that he was perhaps about to the do the same to the woman.  Adams felt the one-way slice of the realization that he had nothing to fall back on, and so he was conscious of the sinister revelation that he purposefully did not make to Celeste von Fohrness, that he would do nothing.  He hung up the phone, disappointed in himself somewhere earlier down the line but at that precise moment bearing the brunt of it.  He began to collect himself and in doing so realized that the danger of rationalizing what he had performed by omission was upon him.  It was easy, Adams considered, to make exceptions and to rewrite one’s rules on new paper.  It was all marginal, the fudging, and probably how people ultimately murdered, even were able to lie to children; but him, he looked up at the old statue of his authority and shook his head like an unknown poet.