Fire on the Island Read online

  Also by Timothy Jay Smith

  Cooper’s Promise

  A Vision of Angels

  The Fourth Courier

  Copyright © 2020 by Timothy Jay Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo credit by Michael Honegger

  Print ISBN: 978-1-950691-60-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950691-64-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Everything is for Michael.

  This book is especially dedicated to the

  Giannakou family of Molyvos, Lesvos

  Krallis family of Molyvos, Lesvos

  Damigos family of Vourvoulos, Santorini

  and

  my many Greek friends who inspired me.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Also by Timothy Jay Smith

  FIRE ON THE ISLAND

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOTHING HAD PREPARED NICK FOR the sheer beauty of the village perched above the purpling sea. Atop the steep hill, the last rays of sunset licked Vourvoulos’s lofty castle walls while necklaces of red-tiled roofs clung to the cliffs below. He pulled the small car off the road and grabbed his binoculars.

  His socks collected burrs as he trudged through the dried weeds to stand as close to the cliff’s edge as he dared in the gusting wind. Through the binoculars, Nick slowly panned the houses spilling down to the water. From a mile away, he couldn’t make out much detail, but after too many hours flying economy class, he was just glad to know that somewhere in that tangle of stone buildings was a bed with his name on it.

  He heard the putt-putt-putt of a motor and spotted a fishing boat aiming for the village’s small port. Shifting the binoculars, he searched beyond Vourvoulos’s headland for the black speck of an approaching raft silhouetted against Turkey’s distant shore. Nick didn’t expect to see one. The refugees usually arrived at dawn not sunset, and with winter approaching, their numbers had started to drop; though the traffickers would ensure that they didn’t stop altogether. Misery drove their business, and a few refugees drowned in the narrow channel wouldn’t change that.

  Nick was still looking for rafts when he smelled the smoke. The wind carried it to him. He panned the village again, looking for its source and saw nothing. Then he scanned the cove-dotted shoreline. At first he mistook the flames for the sunset’s reflection off a limestone outcropping, but with a second look, he saw the wind pushing the fire quickly uphill in the dry brush. A gust sent sparks into the tops of the tall trees overhanging a lone house.

  In its yard, a dog, barking frantically, strained at its leash.

  Nick sprinted back to his car.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  SHIRLEY TOOTLED ALONG THE COASTAL road with her back seat filled with nine dead cats. They weren’t exactly dead, only dead-to-the-world under anesthesia from being fixed, as if removing sensitive body parts could be considered a fix. Shirley didn’t think so. A cat meowed weakly and she sped up, wanting her daughter, who came up with the idea of fixing them, to have the pleasure of uncaging the maligned animals when they came to. A second cat meowed, and Shirley accelerated, her tires complaining as she took a curve too fast.

  In the same instant, Nick shot back onto the road and, slamming on his brakes, barely managed to avoid a collision.

  “Look where you’re going, you bloody fool!” Shirley shouted in English, seeing him screech to a halt in her rearview mirror.

  Moments later, he was on her tail, trying to pass on curves with no shoulders and a long drop to the sea. When they reached a short stretch of straight road, Shirley edged over. It was also where she habitually caught the first glimpse of her house, and that evening, she couldn’t see it for the billowing smoke. Forgetting Nick, who was already alongside her, she stomped on the accelerator, leaving him in the wrong lane approaching another curve. He hit the brakes hard, and swerved back behind her.

  He was still swearing at the stupid woman when she bounced off the road to park alongside a pickup truck with a swirling blue light fixed to its roof. Nick skidded to a stop behind her.

  Shirley scrambled from her small car as fast as her generous body would allow. “Apostolis!” she cried. “Dingo is up there!”

  The fire chief was busy directing villagers who’d shown up to fight the fire, some carrying shovels, others hauling water in the backs of pickups. “Are you sure only Dingo is there?” Apostolis shouted back.

  Nick sprinted past them, unbuttoning his shirt while clutching a water bottle. “Is Ringo the dog?”

  “Dingo!” Shirley shouted after him. “His name is Dingo!”

  Nick disappeared in the smoke.

  Airborne sparks had set the tops of the tall trees ablaze, but the weedy fire on the ground wasn’t especially hot. He moved too quickly for the flames to do more than singe his cuffs. “Dingo!” he shouted. “Dingo! Dingo!”

  The dog stirred.

  “Dingo!”

  He struggled to stand, shaking feebly.

  “Dingo!”

  He barked once and collapsed.

  Nick found the unconscious dog and slung him around his neck. He gripped its bony legs while using his foot to slide open the patio door. “Hello! Hello! Is anyone here?” he shouted, and moved quickly through the house, checking all the rooms. He kicked in a locked door. “Einai kanena etho?” The house was remarkably smoke-free, and the dog, bouncing on Nick’s shoulders, soon recovered, but he didn’t let go of him for fear he’d bolt back into danger.

  When certain no one was trapped inside, he ran back out. Dingo, unhappy to be in the smoke again, bucked hard as Nick jogged downhill through the burning brush. A glowing ember landed on his forehead, but he couldn’t risk letting go of the dog to brush it off. Once back on the road, he gladly rolled the unhappy animal off his shoulders.

  “Dingo!” Shirley cried as he leapt up to kiss her.

  Nick, between coughs, told the fire chief, “Kopsete ta megala dendra na pesoun pros to meros mas.” Cut the big trees to fall toward us.

  “Not Lukas’s beauties!” Shirley exclaimed.

  “If they fall this way,” he continued, “they will suffocate the fire on the ground. Then your men can get above the house and shoot water down on the flames. But you can’t wait.”

  Apostolis made a split-second assessment of the situation and agreed. He shouted an order, and trucks carrying water took the scrubby hill on both sides of the endangered house.

  Two cars pulled up.

  Lydia jumped out of the
first one. “Mum! Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” Shirley replied. “It’s your father I’m worried about.”

  That was Lukas, who got out of the second car. The flames played on the old fisherman’s face, bronzed by years at sea. He asked the fire chief, “Can you save the house?”

  “Only if we cut your trees.”

  Lukas’s beauties. The four red eucalyptus trees he had planted, one for each of their daughters, cutting notches in them as the girls inched up, until they stopped growing taller though the trees never did. Eventually even their tallest notches towered over the house. Lukas clenched his jaw, tears welling in his eyes; and that was all the time he had to grieve for his beauties, or he’d be grieving for his home, too. “Do you have a spare chainsaw?”

  “In the back of my truck,” Apostolis told him.

  Lukas grabbed it and trudged up the hill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NICK WOKE UP IN A big brass bed in a white room and at first didn’t know where he was. A full-length mirror in the corner confirmed he was the only familiar thing in it. He lingered under the covers, recalling his last twenty-four hours: his grandfather’s funeral, a hasty departure for the airport to catch his flight to Greece, the long wait in Athens for his connection to the island, and the fire and the dog. When he’d finally found his room—and the bed with his name on it—he had sipped wine on the terrace watching moonlight spill across the sea to the dark shadow of Turkey. Slowly the village had gone to bed, and eventually he did, too, crawling between sheets that smelled a lot fresher than he did.

  Outside his window, the cawing birds that woke him could have been Baltimore crows. He got out of bed to open the shutters overlooking the small port with its restaurant umbrellas and brightly colored fishing boats. Only the black fuel tank looming behind the buildings marred the otherwise idyllic scene. What sounded like crows were hundreds of noisy seagulls flocking around a fishing boat coming into the harbor. Nick moved quickly, wanting to get down the hill to see them. He had forgotten the burn on his forehead until he glanced in the mirror, and decided he should tend to it. That led to a shower, ointment, and a bandage.

  By the time he made it down the steep cobbled road, the birds had flown off. A man heaved a crate of sardines onto the dock, shouting “Sardeles! Sardeles! Sardeles!,” but his entreaties to buy the fish were unnecessary. Village women, attuned to the fisherman’s routine, were already appearing along the wharf, adjusting a strap here or blouse there, and walking with a spryness that sometimes belied their advanced years.

  Having eaten nothing except bad airline food for as long as his stomach could remember, Nick hungrily checked out the restaurants pressed in a single line along the wharf. The only options for breakfast appeared to be bread and honey or yogurt and honey, until Nick spotted English Breakfast on a sandwich board outside Vassoula’s Bar. As a bonus, the place had a lush arbor of lavender roses that were especially fragrant in the warming sun. He sat at a waterside table where he could watch the fisherman untangle sardines from his nets.

  “What do you want, bread or yogurt?” he heard, and turned to Vassoula. Her eyes, as black as the thick hair falling down her back, were hardened by too much makeup, making it hard to guess her years; thirty, maybe thirty-five, Nick wondered. Despite a thin sweater buttoned against the morning chill, her cleavage wasn’t shy. “Honey comes with both,” she said, and flicked her cigarette into the water.

  “I’ll take the English breakfast, please.”

  “We don’t have an English breakfast. That’s the restaurant next door.”

  Nick realized his mistake when he glanced over and saw a waiter shaking out blue tablecloths beneath a sign for Lydia’s Kitchen. His table had a yellow one. “You only have bread and yogurt?” he asked.

  “Stavros!” Vassoula called to the fisherman. “Save some sardines for me.”

  “I always save some for you.”

  She said to Nick, “You want fresh sardines?”

  “Sardines? For breakfast?” Fresh or not, Nick could not imagine eating them first thing in the morning. “I was hoping for something unhealthy, like sausage and runny beans. Sorry,” he said, and slipped from Vassoula’s yellow zone to Lydia’s blue one.

  “She’s not really English,” Vassoula warned him.

  “That’s okay. Neither am I.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  LYDIA HAD HARDLY SLEPT ALL night. Every time she closed her eyes she saw fire, or smelled smoke, or imagined the scratch of a match by someone creeping up to the Coast Guard’s fuel tank not fifty meters from their front door. She finally left her husband, Lefteris, alone in bed and brewed a pot of tea.

  She carried a cup out to a small balcony. The sun had barely peeked over the horizon. She felt like a zombie seeing that side of dawn, though growing up she’d certainly seen it enough times. If a fisherman’s daughter didn’t know the sunrise, she’d have to be blind. She watched the night fishermen chug into port, and the day fishermen head out, and her father wasn’t among them. She would have been surprised to see Lukas set out that morning after losing his beauties, but then, the solace of the sea might be exactly what he needed. They all needed solace. They had all lost their beauties.

  A cloud of squawking seagulls announced Stavros rounding the end of the dock. No other fisherman attracted so many of the birds. They flocked around him competing for a chance to dive at his glistening sardines. He tied up and heaved a tub of them onto the wharf’s wooden planks. A few lucky fish spilled out and flipped themselves back into the water. He hooted and playfully grabbed for them, not caring if he caught them; they’d be back in his nets tomorrow. Lydia felt a pang of desire for him. At some point most of the village women had. Stavros was a man to share, and none would complain that he shared himself too generously, including Lydia—who’d had all she’d wanted of him, though not necessarily all she desired.

  Ping! she heard from the living room.

  “Damn it!” Lydia muttered and went inside to find the phone. Her daughter had a habit of tossing her stuff anywhere on the way to bed, and that morning she found the girl’s bag scrunched on top of the microwave. She was rummaging through it when Athina came into the room.

  The girl’s green eyes filled with accusation. “That’s an invasion of privacy,” she said.

  “It’s an invasion of your father’s sleep is what it is,” Lydia said as quietly as possible while still conveying her annoyance. She handed her daughter the phone. “You better turn it off before he kills you. I’m too tired to clean up the blood.”

  Ping!

  From the bedroom: “I’m going to kill that girl!”

  “See what I mean?”

  “All right. Okay.” Athina made a point of turning it off. “You woke me up making tea, but I guess that doesn’t matter.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Your grandparents’ house almost burned down last night.”

  “But it didn’t. I heard.”

  “Maybe you could try to be more sensitive to other people?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Athina said, unable to keep her voice down.

  “Shh. Some people have good reasons why they don’t want to be woken up by someone sending you a heart message.”

  “You read my message?”

  “I didn’t read your message. I saw your message. There’s a throbbing heart on your screen. So who is sending you his heart this early in the morning?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You could look.”

  Exasperated, the girl checked her phone. “I can’t tell. It’s a blocked number.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Let me see your phone.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “We don’t have secrets in this house.”

  “We don’t have any fun either!” Athina said, throwing off all pretenses of whispering.

  She pocketed her phone and stomped off. />
  From the bedroom: “I’m going to kill her!”

  Lydia considered aiding her husband. Their daughter’s terrible twos had continued unabated to the present, only days shy of her eighteenth birthday. She replenished her tea, picked up her map of the fires, and returned to the balcony, mulling over the land mines that could hijack her day. Was her daughter’s secret admirer one of them? If secret, he wouldn’t be for long. The competition for the girl was too fierce for the hapless boy not to declare himself. No, Lydia’s land mine was not a message with a beating heart, but the fires. They weren’t going to stop until the arsonist was caught or achieved his goal.

  She unfolded her map, wrote #11 where her parents’ house was located, and circled it. She shuddered when she thought of how different last night’s fire could have turned out. The danger was no longer theoretical but real. Initially, the fires had been attributed to refugees, careless with their cigarettes or cooking fires while hiking through the hills to reach the island’s capital. Lydia never took the notion seriously; for one thing, all the fires had been in a craggy and steep valley that the refugees mostly avoided, preferring instead to hoof it across the island on the flatter, albeit longer, main road. Blaming the refugees was entirely debunked when a detonator was found after the fifth fire, and more thorough searches discovered that similar devices had started the previous four fires.

  The fires’ isolation had conveyed a sense of randomness, but once the detonators were discovered, Lydia felt something more sinister was afoot. After the ninth fire, she decided to map them, hoping to reveal some clue that would identify the arsonist. It took her time to find some sites, so she didn’t map them in their actual chronological order, which is why initially she overlooked how they relentlessly approached the village of Vourvoulos. They jumped between the two sides of the valley, which further obscured their steady march. It was not until she numbered the fires that their pattern—and threat— revealed itself. Lydia was convinced that burning down the village was the arsonist’s goal, and what better way to do it than blowing up the Coast Guard’s fuel tank?