Oh, hell. I hated eating at Grandmother Eve’s. She wasn’t above experimenting on the family and you never knew what you were eating. Or what she’d say. An order was an order, though. “Okay. We might have a baby.”
“You just met him!”
“I mean a baby with us. I’m minding a friend’s child.”
“Is your friend insane?”
Thanks again, Gran. “Mary Brown is in the hospital. Janie had to go help her.”
“That baby? I heard whispers about her. The rain is stopping. We’ll eat outside.”
“You don’t have to do that. Elladaire is fine. Piet took care of the little problem she had. I don’t know if it’s permanent yet, but she’s not a threat as long as he’s here.”
“Thank the goddess. What does he like for dessert?”
Janie had left me a baby car seat, in case I had to take Elladaire with me somewhere, like the hospital. As if I knew how to install one of the contraptions.
Piet did. We were off.
Our first stop was the Fire Department, for Piet to offer his assistance. Micky, the kid who maintained the trucks and the building, called over to Town Hall for the captain, who was also the village building inspector. While we waited, Micky proudly showed Piet the shiny equipment. I bet Piet’s would make him cry. His firefighting equipment, that is. Micky was gay; Piet wasn’t. Micky’s ESP told him every time; that flutter in my innards told me.
The fire captain came and gave a hard sniff after Piet volunteered his expertise. Mac didn’t ask how Piet could help, or why he’d come. The stranger was with me, which meant everyone was better off not knowing. “You’ll do,” he said and tapped his nose. “I can always tell a good firefighter. There’s a smoky smell to them years before they join the department and years after they retire. You’ll be welcome.” Except Mac’s pipe tobacco wouldn’t light for some reason. He gave Piet a beeper for direct communication and a police scanner to monitor the fire calls.
We paid a courtesy call at Town Hall next. The mayor remembered to come to work that afternoon, but he forgot about the fires.
Chief of Police Haversmith, whom everyone called Uncle Henry, was glad to have outside help, but he wanted to know a little more of what I was bringing to the town this time. “He’s been with the Army and the Forest Service, and knows a lot about scientific firefighting. He’s got this new technique, a canister filled with—”
“Bullshit.” Uncle Henry belched, excused himself, and reached for a bottle of antacid tablets. “Damn it, Willy, you know what lies do to my stomach.”
Piet grinned. “You warned me.”
“I wanted to prove it.”
Uncle Henry put his pills away. “Just don’t let him stir up more awkward questions no one can answer. In fact, might be better all around if you let folks think you’ve landed another prospect.”
“Uncle Henry!”
“They’re going to suspect that anyway. He’s staying at your house, isn’t he?”
Grandma Eve had already been on the phone.
Piet said that wasn’t such a bad idea. DUE warned him against being too obvious, as always. So I let him hold my hand when we left the police department.
While he fastened Elladaire in her car seat, Big Eddie, the young cop who ran the K9 section, the arson squad, and the missing persons department when he wasn’t giving parking tickets, whispered to me: “I think this one is a keeper. He smells of antiseptic and milk and your mother’s shampoo. Nice.”
Okay, he was a nice guy. He opened my door for me. So what? We were partners, nothing else. We split the lunch bill at the deli, and let the village gossips make what they wanted out of that. I paid for Elladaire’s grilled cheese sandwich. He left the tip. And bought me a chocolate bar on the way out.
Very nice.
CHAPTER 11
PIET WANTED TO GET FAMILIAR with the village, so we went on a tour through Main Street on the cloudy, cool late morning. Elladaire’s stroller, diaper bag, bottle, toys, blanket, sunscreen and hat took more time packing than I needed for a weekend.
Downtown was déjà vu, with differences. I’d done the same route with Barry only a few days ago. This visit wasn’t as fraught, because Piet knew about the Harbor’s quirks. I didn’t have to explain how we had a blind postmaster, or how the barber gave a thumbs-up for Piet’s strong power aura or how Joanne at the deli knew the way he liked his coffee. By now everyone who mattered knew what baby we pushed, and that Piet made her safe to take out in public. What they thought about us together was easy to tell, without any added perceptions. Smiles, nods, and a “Come see me,” from the jeweler whose engagement rings told him if a match was right said it all.
“Nice friendly town,” Piet noted, the same as Barry had. Sure it was, now that I had a man of talent, a possible problem solver, with me. Suddenly I wasn’t esper-sona non grata.
I told Piet not to go into the drugstore when he wanted to get a newspaper and a new toothbrush. And end up with a sack full of mortifying condoms? I volunteered to go while he stayed outside with the baby. I wanted to pick up some videos and books for her, I explained, which was true.
I wanted to get some books about the fireflies, too, so I could compare beetle pictures without having to flip through a hundred computer screens and links. The problem was, I didn’t know if Mrs. Terwilliger would let me into the library, even if I left the pint-sized threat of fire outside with Piet. While I stood on the sidewalk, debating whether to confront the dictator of the Dewey Decimal System, the eighty-year-old librarian came outside. To see if the grass was dry enough to hold the reading group on the lawn, she claimed. I didn’t believe her, not when she handed me a tote bag filled with books.
“Bring them back on time. They are all checked out properly,” she declared.
I didn’t doubt that for an instant. Or that the books would be about beetles, babies, and burns. She’d put in a couple of books for Elladaire too, and a history of Paumanok Harbor for Piet.
“How did she know . . . ? Did you call ahead?”
I smiled. “How do you put out fires?”
“Got it.”
I took him to our new arts and recreation center so he could meet my friend Louisa, who had absolutely no para-skills. Louisa, who was immensely pregnant, was directing a man on a ladder hanging pictures for a new gallery show while she tried to design a brochure for the opening, feed her son a yogurt, admire her daughter’s crayon drawings on the floor, and talk to her husband on one phone, a newspaper editor on the other. A harried assistant, a frantic artist, Joe the Plumber, and fifteen kids wandering in for the after-school programs waited for directions. She waved to me and yelled across the room: “You look good with a baby, Willy. Want two more? My babysitter is sick.”
I waved back and left quickly.
“Normal, huh?”
“But not dull.”
Outside again, a cold drizzle turned the town gray and dreary, so we halted the tour and got back in the car. Piet wanted to see the sites of the recent fires, following the list Mac at the firehouse gave him.
We saw scorched trash cans in the center of town, but everything in or around them had been swept up and sanitized days ago. A few of the torched mailboxes on the side streets still waited for repairs. Ignoring the rain, Piet got out and touched and smelled and walked around six of them.
He did the same at the charred old shed behind the bowling alley while Elladaire and I read the new books. The Wheels on the Bus book had wheels that turned! What would they think of next?
Piet came back with a handful of dirt or leaves that he wanted to examine later. I found my mother’s stash of pooper-scooper bags under the backseat for him. He stuffed some in his pockets while I drove out to the demolished beach cottage.
You could smell soot, even with the rain and the distance from the house where I had to park the car. A narrow crushed-shell path led down to the ruins on the shore, but you couldn’t see much from here.
“Do you have to go? It’s awful
ly far away. And I think it’s raining harder.”
“I have my rain poncho.”
“The county arson squad’s been here, and the insurance inspectors. None of them found anything. Big Eddie sniffed for accelerants, anything suspicious. I thought the cause of a fire was not your field of expertise.”
He was pulling the plastic raincoat on over his head. “I’ve seen a lot of fires,” was all he said.
“But you won’t see Elladaire from there.” That was my main concern, of course, not that he’d get wet or waste his time. “The building could be out of your range.” He’d said his extinguishing distance varied with weather and terrain.
“You want me to take her out in the storm?”
The baby’s lip was quivering already, and her eyes started to fill with tears. Her Pipi was leaving. “Do you want her to cry in a closed car when you’re gone?”
“Damn. How far is it to the house?”
“How should I know? I’ve never been down that path.”
“It can’t be too far. People have to carry groceries and get fuel deliveries.”
“It’s a beach cottage. Sorry, it was a beach cottage. I think they said there was no furnace to malfunction, only a fireplace and an electric heater. Neither used recently. The place didn’t rent this summer, with the poor economy.” I gave Elladaire a dog squeaky toy I found under the seat when I looked for the poop bags. She put it into her mouth. Oh, hell. But she stopped crying. “What if you’re not looking at her?”
“I’ll walk backward, okay?”
Down the steep path? “Don’t be absurd. Go. Listen if I call.”
“You really are a worrier, aren’t you?”
“World-class. It runs in my family, on my father’s side. I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be a nag. That’s from my mother’s side.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s kind of cute.”
Cute? I’m waiting to be turned into a charcoal briquette and he thinks it’s cute? “Are you sure your thing will still work if you’re out of sight?”
“My thing is working fine.” He gave a devil’s grin. “My fireproofing works unless I’m unconscious. That’s the only way to turn it off. A doctor from DUE tested when I was a kid having my tonsils out. They checked again during the last surgery. Not in the OR, of course. But one of their agents tried to use a cigarette lighter before I recovered from the anesthesia. The lighter worked.” He got out of the car. “I’m wide awake now. You and Edie will be fine. Trust me.”
I did, except. Except Elladaire was cranky and tired of being in the car and he was gone for hours, it seemed. So what if my watch said ten minutes? What if he’d fallen and was unconscious after all? I wrapped the baby in a hairy dog blanket from the trunk. I drew the line at giving her a dog biscuit to teethe on, but I thought about it—and picked my way down the path with her in my arms. The cottage was a sad heap of charred timbers at odd angles, facing what must have been a beautiful view of the bay on a clear day. People loved coming here once, I thought, with the beach in their backyard and no neighbors in sight. Of course if there’d been neighbors, someone might have noticed the fire before it got out of control.
Piet circled the house. He’d stoop, put something in a plastic bag, then circle again, farther and farther away from the ruins. At last he pointed back up the path. I handed him Elladaire, who’d gotten heavier by the minute, then hurried to the car ahead of him to start the engine and warm us up. When he got in, he told me he’d found some dead beetles. Once we got back to my house, we’d look through the books to see if they were a recorded species or not. The arson squad would never think anything suspicious about bugs in the undergrowth, I conceded, and Big Eddie would ignore their smell as a natural part of the countryside.
Sight unseen, I was sure they were my fireflies. And guilty, like everyone assumed. Damn. I didn’t want to think of the lovely creatures as malicious criminals.
Piet picked up on my upset. “A couple are squashed.”
“Sure, with all the firemen dragging in their equipment, then the investigators going over the area.”
“I don’t think that’s it. If your bugs set the fire on purpose, they wouldn’t have killed their buddies. Two were missing wings. I think they were tortured to make a blaze.”
“Who could do such a thing? They’re gorgeous and shine with all the colors of the rainbow, and they’re smart enough to fly in patterns. You’ll see tonight, if they come.”
“How can I see? I’ll shut the fires off.”
“They’re magic. Maybe yours won’t work.”
“You better hope my magic is stronger than theirs or I can’t help.”
Janie looked exhausted when she came to fetch Elladaire that afternoon. This was the first time I’d ever seen the hair stylist with her own hair in a rats’ nest. She was haggard, but relieved.
“I was worried I’d get here to find the place surrounded by fire trucks and police, I’m glad you had no trouble, but now I’m afraid to face another night with her, I’m so tired. I stay awake the whole time in case she wakes up and starts crying.”
“Why don’t you leave her here tonight?” I heard a stranger saying. Cripes, the stranger was me. “She isn’t crying fire anymore, but I don’t know what will happen if she’s away from Piet.”
She never heard my two-syllable pronunciation. “Pete, you are a godsend.”
“No, only a one-trick pony. I don’t know if I can cure her. Maybe with another day or so the bug juice or whatever will pass through her system. She’s a sweetheart. I’ll be happy to look after her tonight so you can get a good sleep. Your niece is going to need you well rested when she gets home.”
“You can’t imagine how grateful I am.” Janie threw her arms around him. “I’ll fix up that beard for you whenever you’re ready. You’ll be as handsome as a fairytale prince or an English lord when I get done.”
I caught the reference to my former fiancé, Lord Grantham. And the slight to my new partner. “Piet is handsome right now.”
Piet smiled. Janie said, “Oh, by the way, Willy, you need to fix those roots.”
I had a lot to think about, besides what to wear to my grandmother’s for dinner. While Piet played with Elladaire, I considered that the fireflies might not be guilty of the recent mischief. Elladaire only spit flames when she was upset, frightened, or hurting. Perhaps the lightning bugs did the same, like when Barry swatted at one of them and Buddy snapped at another. Both got burned. So maybe some kid thought it’d be fun to stuff one in a mailbox with no escape, the way adolescents tossed cherry bombs. Or crush one and throw it in a trash can to see what happened. Then the pranks escalated into something dangerous and nasty. Who hated Paumanok Harbor that much?
I didn’t know. I tried to think about my writing instead while I took a shower. I still had no new ideas, rejected my old ones. That left something borrowed, something blue. What could I do with the Creature from the Blue Lagoon?
Or with the hero who offered to give Elladaire a bath because I was afraid of drowning the slippery kid?
Dinner at my grandmother’s started fine. She made incredible vegetable lasagna, and wrapped Elladaire in a towel to keep her clean. She didn’t pick on me or interrogate Piet, not at first anyway.
When I mentioned how we thought the fireflies had been forced to defend themselves, she told us that talk around town had them spotted out in the wetlands east of Paumanok Harbor. It was a flat stretch of land on the bay, intersected with drainage ditches to keep the area from flooding. Clams, mussels, and all kinds of shore birds made their homes in the muddy, brackish manmade creeks. Men made osprey nests on poles, too, to bring the fish hawks back from extinction. It was a wild, empty area, full of reeds and weeds and phragmites, the perfect setting for my swamp monster.
“They also say a beaver is out there, because of all the destruction some clammers saw.”
“Come on, we haven’t had beavers on Long Island since Indian times.”
My grandmother insisted one ha
d been seen last spring in East Hampton, with a lot of gnawed and felled trees to prove it. The naturalists reasoned that one had swum or rode a log over from Connecticut. “There’s no reason that poor lonely creature couldn’t come east, looking for more of its kind.”
“There are no trees in the flood plains, nothing for it to eat or build a lodge out of. No beaver in his right mind would come there.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Grandmother Eve said, passing around the salad bowl. “Besides, people are always swearing they see monsters out in the swamp. We used to tell children that the bogeyman lived there, so they wouldn’t think of exploring the sinkholes and stagnant water.”
“So what’s there now?” Piet asked.
My new, old, borrowed idea. I lost my appetite.
CHAPTER 12
SOME COOKS GET ORNERY when their efforts and artistry are ignored. Grandma Eve got even.
“I suppose that father of yours told you about the hulking monster living in the marshes. And you believed him, didn’t you? If so you were the only child in Paumanok Harbor to take the fairy tale seriously after they turned ten. For that matter, you’re the only one who ever held stock in any of the doom and gloom that man spouts. We all swear that’s why you’re afraid of the dark and everything else.”
“I did not believe a swamp monster lived in the lagoons—that is, the wetlands.” Then. Now I had my doubts. “Any more than I believe some poor beaver is hanging out there. And I am not afraid of the dark.” Lots of people slept with a night-light on. “And my father’s premonitions always come true, simply not in expected ways.”
“Hah!” My grandmother wiped Elladaire’s face so hard the kid had towel burn.
“Your father is a precog, isn’t he?” Piet asked in an effort to fend off an obviously ongoing family argument, at least until he finished the best meal he’d had in weeks.
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