The smoke was a black finger cutting the pale morning. It rose slow and thick above the Vance place, a column that blacked out the cornfield sky like someone had smeared ink across the horizon. Elias Thorne saw it before he knew he was moving—muscle memory, old hairline anxiety that lived behind his teeth. He killed the radio, pulled on his jacket, and hit the gas. The county road was narrow and forgiving. The town, not so much. Every half-mile a sagging porch, a pickup with a dent in the door, a mailbox with a child's name crooked in the wood. He watched the smoke swell and grow. Closer now, he could see it through the bare limbs of the sycamores—two towers of black, one thicker as if someone had dropped a match in a barrel of oil. His phone vibrated. Chief Baker, then two missed calls, then Sully. "Thorne, you see it?" Baker's voice came through scratched and urgent. "Get down here. Vance house is—" "I'm on my way," Elias said. He didn't tell the chief what he already knew: bad fires were loud and honest. They told you a thing had happened. It was the quiet ones you learned to fear. The Vance place sat like an insult at the end of a tidy driveway: a two-story box with white columns, new paint so bright it hurt. Neon lights at the auto shop across the lane cast an accidental glow