At 1:17 am, a brilliant flash of orange light lit up Mark Sauer’s bedroom windows, followed a split second later by a boom that rolled over the house, rattling the windows and bouncing knickknacks off the shelves.
        The ex-Marine dove out of the bed to the cold stone floor, out of the way of flying shrapnel and machine gun fire, before he was awake enough to remember that he was no longer in Iraq or Chad, but rather in Lansdale, Connecticut, a place where nobody should be shelling his position.
        Staying clear of the window, he stood up and strode naked out of the bedroom, down across the long expanse of the living room and out the French doors onto the stone terrace.
        A ribbon of orange fire billowed up into the night sky above the trees to the south of his newly-inherited property. This being his first night in his dead grandfather’s country home, he didn’t know what was down that way.  Mentally reviewing the aerial survey map he’d memorized on the train ride up from New York City, the former-Marine-turned-private-eye judged the fire to be on the Dolliver farm, down the road leading to the Lansdale railway station, 11 klicks away.
        The column of soaring fire turned the night bright, and for one brief moment he was not in the cool forests of Connecticut but back in the burning oil fields of Iraq.
        He rudely shook off the memory and went inside to get dressed.
    
Sauer hiked down the hill to the Dolliver Farm and out of the trees into a painfully familiar scene: the chill night wrapped his face with cold while the flames gushing up from the blown well radiated fierce heat against his face.
        From the look of it, the farm had a natural gas well which had exploded.  Twisting in the night wind, the column of fire from the blown well writhed up into the sky like a living creature, illuminating the farm with a hellish light.  The explosion had demolished an old farmhouse nearby, and both it and the adjacent barn were engulfed in flames roiling out of every window and doorway.
        “You’d better stay back, Mister!” someone ordered. The voice of small-town authority belonged to a uniformed man whose inverted triangle shoulder patch bore the words: SHERIFF’S DEPT. and STATE OF CONNECTICUT.  He was of medium height, with the paunch of a tough man going soft in a rural posting, yet his face remained unbending.  It was a composed New England face which would have been completely out of place in downtown Manhattan, and reminded Sauer once more why his grandfather had built his home here, two-and-a-half hours from New York City.
    
The Sheriff coughed on the shifting smoke as he gestured for Sauer to leave.  “There’s no reason to be standing there gawking.”
        Sauer could have said he was a private investigator with Sauer & Steyr, up from New York for the weekend, and that he wasn’t gawking.  He could have explained that before that, he’d been a mercenary who’d commanded a private military company in Africa, and that when things blew up he wanted to know why.  He might even have gone to the trouble to explain that he’d once been a US Marine officer, and that no graduate of the United States Naval Academy would meekly sit at home while a neighbor’s house burned to the ground.
        Instead, Sauer just pointed back up Bald Mountain toward the forest that screened off his house from view.  “I own the property upwind of the fire.”
        The Sheriff frowned as he waved the smoke away from his face.  “Jim Blandings lives up there. And Hackett, the stone mason.”
        “I’ve got the property below Hackett.  In the forest below the big field. The house you can’t see from the road…?”
        “Oh, right. Old man Sauer’s place.”
        There was a curt dismissal in the man’s voice. Sauer cooled his gaze.  “He was my grandfather.  I just took over the property.”
        “Oh.”  The Sheriff watched all the fires blazing away unchecked.  “Well, there isn’t anything I can do until the fire department gets here.”
        Sauer shook his head.  “Your local volunteer fire company might be able to put out the buildings, but they won’t be able to do much about the well.  You need special equipment, and a crew who has experience handing a well fire.”
        The Sheriff gave him a suspicious glance.  “You know something about this sorta fire, do you?”
        “I was with the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq.  I saw my share of burning wells.  I saw what it takes to put one out; volunteers with a water truck and a hose reel aren’t going to be any good.  You’ll have to call in someone who’s equipped to snuff it and cap the well.”
    
The Sheriff’s radio squawked; he pulled it up and listened to it for a moment.  “Well, tell them to hurry up! Both the house and the barn are burning.  Call over to Seagate and tell them to send us two more trucks and another tanker.  I don’t want this thing to spread to the trees.”  He didn’t add the city folk up for the weekend are getting edgy out loud, but is was definitely there.
        Ignoring the silent barb, Sauer nodded toward the burning farmhouse.  “Was anyone inside?”
        The Sheriff gave an aggravated sigh.  “Don’t know yet.  Won’t know until they get the fire out.”  He squared his shoulders.  “T’aint nothing anyone can do until then.”
    
It was a clear suggestion to leave, but Mark Sauer remained where he was.  He watched the fires burn, then watched the volunteer fire company come up and fight the fire, managing to extinguish the house and the barn.  The firemen didn’t even try to put out the well, though, which drew a heated argument from the Sheriff.  As Sauer expected, the firemen were going to let the well continue to burn.  If they snuffed out the fire without also capping the well, natural gas would flood the area, eventually ignite again and do even more damage than before.
        So the well continued to burn, lighting up the night.
        A cold stare from the Sheriff told Sauer that Mister Up-from-Manhattan-for-the-weekend should find somewhere else to be, so he hiked back up to his house and turned in.
    
Two days later, Sauer stood in the Lansdale railroad station waiting for the train back to Manhattan.  He’d gotten a call from Madame Liu-Tsong, who’d had some paintings vandalized in her Chinatown gallery; she had reason to believe that the act might be politically motivated.  And Nelots Properties LLC had contacted him about some drug dealers that were working the streets around Seward Park.  The police had been unable to stop the dealers; Nelots wanted Sauer and Steyr Confidential Investigations to handle the matter, as discreetly and as permanently as possible.
        It was just as well he had work waiting for him: Lansdale County seemed to have used up its yearly allotment of excitement two nights earlier.  He was actually looking forward to getting back to Manhattan.
        As the MTA Metro-North commuter train pulled into the station, he noticed a discarded copy of the Lansdale Blade on the bench beside him. The front page was filled with news on the fire.  The natural gas well, an old one that had been tapped by the farm since the 1960s, was still on fire. The state police were advising citizens to stay away, the FAA was asking pilots to fly clear of the burning well, and the township was in contact with two oil well firefighting companies…and then he got to the part about how a dead body had been discovered in the burned-out farmhouse.
        He left the train station and hailed a cab.  A dead body turning up on the property next to his the first weekend he stayed at the house?  There was no way he could go back to Manhattan without knowing what was going on here.
    
The deceased appeared to be one Maryanne Dolliver, owner of the farm.  Said owner was missing, had last been seen at the house by her brother Ted Dolliver, and owned jewelry that had been recovered from the charred remains found in the debris of the farmhouse.  The death was being labeled an accident: the natural gas well was old and apparently “just blew.”
        Something didn’t smell right in all this. 
    
It didn’t take long to establish a few interesting facts.  Maryanne Dolliver and her brother Ted had been trying to sell their grandfather Anson’s house for years.  An offer had finally been made on the land by one Joan Vendrick from Boston, but Maryanne had dickered over it for nearly six months and, in the end, Ms. Vendrick withdrew the offer and went back to Boston.     
        “Oh yeah,” the old brunette waitress at the Blue Crock said, placing a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of him.  “Old Ted, he wanted to sell the property and get his     
    
    
    
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money out of it.  But Maryanne, she got greedy.  Kept driving the price up, and the
 buyer finally said ‘to-hell-with-this’ and went back to Boston.  Ted was pretty angry about it, I can tell you that.”
        Sauer tapped the newspaper.  “You think that’s Maryanne’s body they found?”
        She gave him a knowing nod.  “Hon, I know every face within fifteen miles of here.  Maryanne’s the only one nobody’s seen these past two days.”  She refilled his coffee cup and laughed.  “Why’d you come here for, anyway?  Nobody moves into Lansdale.  Me, I’d give anything to live in Manhattan.  They’ve got everything there.  No offense hon, but Lansdale’s quiet as a tomb.  Least ways when people’s houses aren’t blowing up.”
        Sauer shrugged.  “My grandfather had a place up on Bald Mountain.  It’s mine now, figured I should keep it in the family.”
        She gave a mirthless chuckle.  “Not much of that going on these days.”
        “So I gather,” he said.
    
The cool, antiseptic smell of the county morgue nauseated Sauer. All of the corpses he’d ever encountered had been lying out in the sun-baked sands of the Arabian and Sahara deserts, which severely colored his notion of how death should smell; in his book, corpses should naturally stink of burned meat, not smell of washed chemicals.
        The old man who ran the morgue, Dr. Rosewood, stood barely five-foot-five and appeared old enough to have taught Dr. Watson in London.  He pulled out the body, a curious cast in his voice as Sauer viewed the charred corpse without the least hint of unease.  “Are you a doctor?” he asked.  “Fireman?”
        “US Marine.  Iraq.”
        “Ah.  Your relation to the deceased…?”
        “Next-door neighbor.”
        One eyebrow went up.  “Well, death appears to be consistent with explosive force followed by combustion.”
        “Any signs of ante-mortem trauma?”
        The eyebrow went up again.  “Blunt force trauma to the rear of the skull, most likely caused by flying debris from the initial explosion…although it might have been introduced deliberately.”  He gave Sauer a once-over.  “Why should you be making such inquiries, if I might be permitted to ask?”
        “I’m just trying to understand what happened.  You’re sure of the identification of the body as being Maryanne Dolliver?”
        He waved a finger at Sauer.  “I matched her dental records to those of the deceased here.  Also, Maryanne Dolliver had a pin in her leg from a car crash a decade ago.  I extracted such a pin from the deceased and matched the numbers on it to the one they used to repair Maryanne Dolliver’s leg.”  He pulled the sheet back over the body.  “You think you have an idea that her death was not accidental?”  It was more statement than question.  “I suggest, young man, that this has already been judged an accident.  I imagine you will find it rather difficult to change Sheriff Borgnine’s mind on that, once it has been made.”
        “‘Borgnine’?”
        “Yes.  But no relation.  Ernest, he was born over in Hamden, in New Haven County.”
        “I see.”  He checked his chronometer.  “What’s the best place in town to find a good bowl of chili and a cup of black coffee?”
     
Sitting in Pep’s Diner, Sauer crumbled crackers into his chili as he ran his web search.  It appeared that a botanist living in Boston, one Joan Vendrick, had for whatever reason tried for some months to buy the Dolliver farm on Bald Mountain, but failed in that endeavor.
        Fact:  Ms. Vendrick wanted the property, but Maryanne Dolliver kept jacking up the price.  Ms. Vendrick didn’t want to pay that much, left town and bought a house back in  Boston instead.
        Theory:  How likely was it that a Boston botanist would come back here and blow up the Dolliver Farm in revenge?
        It just didn’t feel likely.  Some creative digging revealed that she’d flown to Europe the day before the well blew, which eliminated her from Sauer’s suspect pool.
        Next Fact: Ted Dolliver had lost out on his half of the money from the unfulfilled sale of the family farm.  He lived in a mobile home on the edge of town, working as an itinerant laborer at odd jobs.
        Really Interesting Fact? It turned out that he had insurance policies on both the farmhouse and his sister.
    
He realized he was spooning an empty bowl—he’d finished the chili without even realizing it—and looked around for the waitress to bring him the bill.  That’s when he noticed two things: the TV set mounted up near the ceiling in the corner of the diner, and that Sheriff Borgnine was sitting three stools away from him, watching the TV.
        The news was showing an aerial shot of the burning well, and then cut to a fat, unshaven and stringy-haired man standing awkwardly in front of the blazing column of fire—with the text identifying him as TED DOLLIVER, BROTHER OF DEAD WOMAN.
        The TV reporter held a microphone close to Ted Dolliver’s face.  “I understand you’re the one who called the fire department?”
        He nodded.  “My sister…”  He covered his mouth.  “She didn’t get out.”
        “How’d it happen?”
        Dolliver turned toward the fire.  “I was on my way back from Harry’s Bar and decided I’d stop in and see my sister.  Well, when I got out of the truck, the smell of natural gas was so strong I knew it had to be the well leaking.  I ran into the house and told her to get out!  Maryanne, she doesn’t have a phone, so I had to run back to my truck and get my cell phone so I could call the fire department…and that’s when it all went up. Quick as a flash.  No time at all for me to save her.”
        The screen cut back to the aerial shot of the burning well, while the reporter recapped how the fire had destroyed the farmhouse and barn.
        “So much for that,” Sauer mused aloud. “I’d say we found our killer.”
       
Sheriff Borgnine turned, obviously recognized him from the previous night at the fire, and sized him up.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”
        “Ted Dolliver killed his sister, and just admitted to it on television.  You saw his interview.  Didn’t you hear what he said?”
        The Sheriff growled in exasperation.  “Mister—”
        “He lied.”  Sauer picked up his coffee cup.  “He never warned his sister to get out of that house.”
        “And how would you know?”
        “Easy.  When natural gas first comes out of the ground, it’s odorless and colorless. The gas company has to add a special sulfur-based compound to give it that ‘rotten-egg’ odor you smell when your pilot light goes out.  Since natural gas comes out of the ground odorless, he had to be lying when he said he smelled a heavy odor of natural gas in the area right before the explosion. And the only reason to lie about that would be if he was the one who touched off the well.  And,” Sauer pointed out, “he just incriminated himself on live TV.”
        Sheriff Borgnine stared at him, then back at the television, and then got up and bolted out the door.
        “You’re welcome,” Sauer called after him.
    
Long after the Sheriff had driven off in his patrol car, Sauer sat there with his coffee, facing the window.  He’d taken possession of his dead grandfather’s house thinking that rural Connecticut was going to be a world away from New York City: quiet, dull, even boring.  Instead, he’d found this small town as hard and sharp-edged with life and death as any alleyway in Manhattan.
        To which he had to be returning.  He still had to look into the vandalism of the artwork in Madame Liu-Tsong’s art gallery, and then work up a plan to deal with the drug dealers who had taken root around Seward Park.  Things that paid the rent.
        Funny.  After having his neighbor get blown up the first night Sauer spent in his new house, the jobs waiting for him in New York seemed almost banal.
        He drained his coffee cup and walked outside into the gathering dusk.
    
    
                    About the Author
     
        J. F. Benedetto served for three years as a Writing Mentor in the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, and another four years as one of the editors of the Triangulation speculative fiction anthology.  Now a contributing editor for Calliope, his fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and short story collections, including Golden Visions Magazine, Renard’s Menagerie and Woman’s World, and he is a Derringer Award nominee for excellence in the creative art form of short mystery and crime stories.
        J F’s last fiction appearance in Calliope was a short story, “Grave Consequences,”  (Winter 2010, Issue #126) which earned Third Place in the 17th Annual Fiction Contest.