He wasn’t good enough to pick up after my dog. “Listen, Piet’s a friend, that’s all. And your daughter is not here.” I waved my hand around at the porch, the wicker loveseat out on the lawn. “Do we look like we’re babysitting, Roy? Go on home.”
“Not till I see for myself. What if the kid got hurt in the fire? She needs her dad.”
She needed Roy Ruskin like I needed a swamp monster. Meantime, his shouting was going to wake Elladaire, if Little Red’s barking didn’t. I’d locked the Pomeranian in the house to keep him safe from the lightning bugs. Now I wished I’d taken him out, to take his chances.
Roy came farther up the path, after he stopped to spit into the bushes. I didn’t want him in the house or anywhere near the baby, so I started to walk toward him. “You go up on the porch to put the lights on,” I whispered to Piet, “and start dialing while your back is to him. I can handle this.”
Piet muttered, “You really are crazy,” but he stepped up onto the porch, the cell phone hidden in his hand. I saw him looking around for a weapon, and he squinted at the big ceramic mosaic pot filled with trailing petunias. “Don’t you dare. My mother brought that back from the Keys. She loves it.”
I met Roy halfway to the house. “Your little girl is not here, and you know you are not supposed to go near her anyway.”
“She’s mine, ain’t she? They take half my paycheck to pay child support, don’t they? My wife’s in the hospital, so now I get to take care of her.”
“Mary’s taken back her maiden name, Roy, to have nothing to do with you. And you’re in no condition to care for a baby.”
“You saying I’m an unfit father?” His hands clenched into fists.
He was an unfit human, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say that. “Think about it. You don’t have a crib or a carriage or a car seat. And you’ll be going out fishing. Who will look after her then?”
Janie told me Roy worked in Montauk now, on one of the long-liners that went out on the ocean for weeks at a time. He’d been fired from Rick’s boatyard when he broke Mary’s wrist. Rick wasn’t having any wife beater on his payroll. Roy lost his next job at the bowling alley when he was arrested for ignoring the court order to pay his back child support. An automatic pat down turned up several illegal substances. The judge sentenced him to time served, so he could keep working, to keep Elladaire in Pampers. The fish-packing plant in Montauk sent him packing when he got arrested again after pushing Mary down the stairs. One more infraction and he’d go to jail for serious time. “You don’t want to break any more rules, do you? Go home.”
“She’s my kid! That bitch Mary took everything I had, the trailer, my car, my big screen TV. Now her and her shyster lawyer don’t leave me enough to live on.”
“You’ve got a nice truck out there.”
“It’s Frankie’s, on the second crew. I use it while he’s out on a fishing trip.”
I wondered if Frankie knew that. “I’m sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help you.”
“Won’t, you mean, like everyone else in this friggin’ town.” He took another step closer, too close for my comfort. Sweat trickled down my back. I wiggled my fingers, hoping Piet got the signal to dial, fast.
“I’m sure people will help you if you follow the rules, which means going away, right now. Don’t you want Elladaire to be safe and healthy? She is, now, I swear.”
“Dumb-ass name. I call her Ellie. Mary hates it. And who says the kid’s safe with a bunch of freaks like you and your family?”
Now those were fighting words. I might have fear sweat dripping down my spine, but that spine was damned stiff. My grandmother was scary, my mother talked to dogs, and I—Well, we were not freaks! “Go away, Roy, before I have to call the police.”
“Not until I’ve seen my kid!”
He pushed me aside and stumbled up the path. Piet had the light on the porch on by now and he came forward to meet the troublemaker. “You lay one hand on her and you’re a dead man.”
“I’m not here for your girlfriend. I want to see my kid.”
“I cannot let you go inside.”
“You’re going to stop me, scarface? You and who else?”
Roy was bigger and broader than Piet and primed with Dutch courage, if not Columbian cojones. I really wished the plot went the way I wrote it, with the pyro-phage wizard casting flames at his enemies. Piet couldn’t cast a shadow if it was on fire. I wasn’t sure about punches.
I tried to distract Roy. “The police are on the way.”
“I want the kid. I paid for her, didn’t I?”
Despite wishing I could run the other way, I hurried up the path to get between him and Piet. This wasn’t Piet’s town, or his fight. “It doesn’t work that way,” I tried to reason with Roy, “and you know it. A child needs more than food and clothes. She needs love and affection and someone to protect her. Do you want Elladaire to remember her father as a mean, cowardly convict?”
“Who are you calling a coward?” He pulled back his arm, but I ducked away. Piet roared and took the first step down from the porch.
“Stop!” I shouted before the testosterone started to boil over. “This is no way to get what you want.”
“I deserve to see her, don’t I?”
“Yes, but with the court’s permission, under their supervision. You know that. Not at night, barging into someone else’s house.”
“I want to see her!” he roared. Little Red must be frenzied by now. The big dogs were barking too, deaf as they were. And Elladaire was crying.
“That’s enough,” Piet said. “Go home.”
“I hear the kid. My kid. You lied, both of you. Now get out of my way.”
Piet stood firm. “You’re not getting past me.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Roy charged. He threw the first punch, too.
Piet staggered back against the front door. Roy came at him, but Piet landed a blow to Roy’s stomach that had him go “ooph,” and fall back, onto the porch railing.
“Stop,” I shouted again. No one listened this time either.
They exchanged more blows, back and forth. The railing cracked, the screen door ripped, the dogs barked, the baby cried, flesh smacked into flesh. And sirens sounded from the main road heading to Garland Drive.
“Roy, the police are coming. You’ll be arrested and sent away for life.” I had no idea how long they could keep him, but life wasn’t long enough. “Go on now and we won’t press charges.”
He swung at Piet instead. Piet’s lip was split, but Roy’s nose was bleeding. They weren’t going to stop and who knew how much damage the bastard could do to Piet’s healing burns before the cops got here? What were the police going to do, anyway, shoot them?
I did the only thing I could. I hefted up that big mosaic pot of my mother’s, petunias and all, and heaved it at Roy’s bare skull, shiny under the porch light. The pot landed right where I aimed. Unfortunately, Roy wasn’t standing there. Piet was. He got in a strong right to Roy’s jaw at the same time I pitched the petunias. Roy went down. The pot sailed over his head. Uh-oh.
I screamed. Suddenly the sky was filled with floodlights. No, the police cars had not arrived yet. The fireflies were overhead, as bright as a million shooting stars.
Holy shit! That meant Piet was unconscious.
Roy dragged himself to his feet by hanging onto the porch upright. “What the hell . . . ?”
“Emergency flares. My grandmother or my aunt must have set them off to get the police here faster. I bet my uncle’s on the way across the road, with a pitchfork in his hand, and you do not want to know what Grandma Eve will be carrying.”
He turned and left, heading for his truck.
He was going to get away before the police arrived, and Uncle Roger was away at an agricultural symposium. Grandma Eve was too far away to have heard anything and if she saw the fire in the sky, she’d only blame me.
“You better keep going, Roy Ruskin, because the police know where you l
ive. And so does Grandma Eve.”
“You can’t keep my girl from me, bitch. I’ll get her back, see if I don’t. I love the kid.”
He was almost to the truck when a contingent of fireflies dived at him. They gave new meaning to the old saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
CHAPTER 14
“DON’T TOUCH ME!”
“Stop being such a baby. It’s only ice for your head. And I said I was sorry, about ten times.”
“Yeah, but you’re sorry for missing Roy. You don’t seem to give a rat’s ass for beaning me or breaking my rib when you stepped on me to get inside.”
“I didn’t step on you on purpose. I tried to jump over you but slipped on the wet dirt from the flowerpot. And your rib isn’t broken. That’s what the EMT thought.”
“He said he couldn’t tell without an X-ray.”
“Which you refused to go have, so it couldn’t hurt that much. And what was I supposed to do, anyway? You were unconscious. You’re the one who told me that’s when your power quits. I had to stop Elladaire from crying before she set the house on fire.”
“She didn’t, did she?”
“No, and she went right back to sleep as soon as the shouting and barking ended. But how could I know that would happen? Who’d believe she was cured after so short a time?”
“When I put out a fire, it stays out.”
“She’s a baby, not a casserole left in the oven too long. Don’t ask. And she’s not a fire; she causes fires, like the fireflies. They proved you’re not infallible. They burst back into flames the second the pot hit your head, bigger and brighter.”
“I told you, they’re otherworld creatures. They don’t just have magic; they are magic. The rules of earthly logic—Royce logic—do not apply.”
“And a good thing, too, or Roy might have gotten away without a trace when he abandoned Frankie’s truck. Thanks to the glow beetles, the police will know if he stops at the hospital or the immediate care center. The lightning bugs put him on the hot seat, all right.”
“You’re sure the police didn’t see your friends form a fireball?”
“You woke up seconds before the first car arrived, thank goodness. The beetles turned off and disappeared from sight right on cue. God only knows what kind of acid reflux I’d cause Chief Haversmith if I tried to lie my way out of a lightning bolt chasing his suspect or hovering in the sky over my house. The truth would give him an ulcer.”
“Your flying pals knew Roy was bad, though, didn’t they? How do you suppose they figured that out?”
“I have no idea unless they picked vibes up from me when we were getting attuned, or they sensed hostility in his voice. Beings from Unity are supposedly all telepathic with each other, across species and families. That’s how they communicate, the people from Royce believe. The horses could. I’ve seen it myself. I don’t know if anyone’s ever studied insects or fish or birds, or if they have xenozoologists at all. I think not, or they would have sent someone.”
“Instead of a firefighter. Go on and say it, I’m not much help.”
“You saved me from trying to stop Roy Ruskin on my own, and stopped him from carrying off the baby. I’d say you were just what I needed.” I quickly amended: “At the time.”
“Sounds like they didn’t like him picking on you, that’s for sure.”
“Unless they were protecting Elladaire as one of their own.”
“She’s not one of them!” Piet sat up suddenly, then groaned.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room? The EMTs said you didn’t have a concussion, and the split lip doesn’t need stitches. But if you are in agony . . .”
“I have my own pain pills.”
“They thought you’d be fine except for a headache.”
“Yeah, and her name is Willow Tate. What the hell had you going after Roy Ruskin in the first place? I was winning!”
“That’s not what it looked like from my angle.”
“I could have put him down anytime. I was stalling to let the cops get here, so he couldn’t claim I attacked him.”
“Good thing I am no lie detector. He was bigger and meaner. Anyway, they set up roadblocks and have Roy’s room staked out. They’ll get him. If not tonight, Big Eddie and Ranger will track him through the woods tomorrow. There’s a lot of open space, but he’ll have to surface sometime.”
“Unless he steals a boat and crosses to Connecticut or Rhode Island.”
“Good riddance to him. He didn’t get Elladaire, and that’s all that matters. The chief says the town’s got contingency funds to help Mary out with whatever Social Services won’t pay. No one will hire Roy whether he goes to jail or not, so she won’t be getting money from him. She won’t be living in fear, either.”
He held the glass of iced tea up to his sore lip. “At least something good came from tonight.”
“And we made some kind of contact with the fireflies. I know they can recognize my pictures, and I know they are concerned about a creature with six limbs.” I started to sketch the figure I’d seen while it was fresh in my mind.
“But we don’t know if it’s a fish or an insect, if it’s a friend or a foe, if it came with them or keeps them here. So we have more questions than we had before. And not a lot of answers.”
“I have a question for you. You instantly extinguished the fires in the entire swarm, but then they all started to glow. I can understand when they were high up, out of your range, but they kept that warm half-light when they landed right on us, too. I thought your knack was all or nothing.”
“So did I. I’d love to sit near embers in a fireplace, or have one tiny birthday candle, but it’s never worked that way.”
“So when I told you to tone it down, you weren’t controlling the dampening effect?”
“I tried. I’ve never had to put out half a fire. Never saw a reason for it, never thought I could. For that matter, I’ve never had to consciously think about snuffing flames. It was always get there, get it done, get out. As if all that was required was my presence, not my brain. Tonight was different. I didn’t want to hurt your bugs. They made me feel, I don’t know, peaceful? Content? Protective, too. I wanted to help them, and you. I tried my damnedest to find a way to let them keep the light. Maybe I did have something to do with it, or else it’s the alien magic thing again.”
“This is important, so we know for next time. If you were in control, not the pyrates, how did you do it? How did you negate or minimize the fire dousing?”
He took the cold glass away from his lip and smiled, which made the hurt worse. “Ouch.” But he kept smiling. “I thought about something else.”
“You what?”
“I directed my thoughts elsewhere, to not be thinking of fire. It worked.”
“Great. What did you think about, so you can use it next time we try to converse with winged matches?”
He grinned, and a drop of blood formed on his cut lip. “I thought about making love to you by candlelight.”
There were seven of us in the living room: Elladaire all snug in her canvas mesh crib, three sleeping dogs, Piet at his computer, me with the library books and my sketch pad, and the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of sexual tension.
I was attracted to Piet of course. Who wouldn’t be, despite the scars? And I liked him, which naturally made the attraction stronger. My heart almost stopped when I thought I’d killed him with the petunias. And I was flattered that he reciprocated. I was not, under any circumstances, going to act on that mutual attraction and admiration. He’d be leaving. He’d be in constant danger. He was a confirmed bachelor. If I wanted a man, I’d choose someone like the nice, reliable vet. But I’d sworn off men. All men. So there.
I had to get back to my career, not go gaga every time a handsome, hero-type dude smiled and said he wanted me. But, oh, tell that to the parts of me that hummed and vibrated and glowed.
I opened the book to close my mind to opening that can of worms. Scary, slimy, stomach-
turning worms.
The insect book was extensive, indexed, and not much help. It was better than the Internet, because I could flip pages and skim and look at hundreds of color plates without having to open new windows or hit the go-back button every time a new link petered out. What wasn’t helpful was the fact that my bugs weren’t in it, of course.
I kept reading, anyway. A lot of stuff I already knew from quick Google searches, like how the entire order of beetles was called Coleoptera, which had over half a million separate species. The fireflies belonged to the family of Lampyridae, and there were hundreds of different ones, commonly called Luminaries, spread around the globe. They’d been called Lucifers, not for the devil, but for early matches and the chemical Luciferin that caused them to glow. Mythology had them minions of Vulcan, a god of fire. The English called them Lantern Beetles, which I found charming and more accurate, since they were neither flies nor bugs.
After that, the book got technical about what was common knowledge, that the iridescent flashes came from a chemical reaction, not any kind of flame. Right. Tell that to the German shepherd, or Barry, or Roy. My beetles had real sparks. I didn’t care about the chemicals’ names or how they got extracted for use in warfare and medicine, which may benefit mankind but didn’t do much for the beetles. Now that I had friends in the field, or in the sky, my attitude toward the bugs took a turn toward compassion.
I read about how those chemicals made fireflies poisonous to a lot of species, which was why the beetles had few predators. Which didn’t tell me if anything tried to prey on Lucifers.
Nor did the book provide any guidance about my bunch’s lives or behavior.
Some fireflies lived underground, I read, some in trees. Some ate other insects; some ate plants, carrion, or wood. Others ate everything and a few ate nothing after the larval stage. Some were short-lived, dying in days after laying eggs for the next generation, others lived long, for insects. Mine could be eternal for all I knew, in their own environment.
According to the experts who wrote the book, all fireflies used the illumination to signal, attract, and identify a mate of their own species, depending on how long they flashed, with what frequency. In some varieties, only the males flew or glowed, in others both sexes hit the sky, like an open-air pickup bar with strobes.
Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) Page 10