Cause to Burn

by Mairsile Leabhair

  I inhaled sharply when I saw the familiar scribblings of my dad’s poor handwriting. It used to be a family joke trying to decipher his notes. Sometimes Mom would bring them to me to read because I got pretty good at it. I chuckled at the déjà vu and then cleared my throat. “To whom it may concern,” I began reading, “I have known Jeremiah Phillips since we were kids in college together, over twenty years ago. A better man you will never find. His integrity is irreproachable, his professionalism unmatched, and his benevolence unprecedented. He is a fireman’s fireman and there’s no one I’d rather have by my side when fighting a fire. His record speaks for itself, but it can’t tell you how hard he works, and how family oriented he is. He is very circumspect with his family, very protective. When he first came to me with the idea of—” I stopped and looked at Robbie as if she had grown two heads.

  “What?” Robbie asked. “What’s wrong?”

  What the hell? How can this be? I tilted my head as though reading it sideways would clear up my confusion.

  “Please, Jordy. What does it say?” Robbie whispered.

  “I… uh…” Hesitating, I swallowed hard and continued reading out loud. “When he first came to me with the idea of adopting his wife’s little girl, he asked if I would agree to be her godfather.”

  “What? No. You must be mistaken.”

  “It was written a couple of months before my dad and your stepdad were killed,” I retorted gruffly. “Did he have another wife or stepdaughter that you didn’t know about?” I didn’t mean to be snotty, but anger and a pang of jealousy overwhelmed me. I cut a look at Robbie and my anger was immediately replaced with empathy when I saw the tears stream down her face. “I’m sorry. Please don’t cry.” I couldn’t stand to see a woman cry like that and not do something to make it all better. I just wasn’t sure why she was crying. I jumped up and grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and then knelt in front of her. “Please don’t cry,” I repeated, dabbing at her tears with the tissue.

  Her eyes floated in a pool of tears as she gazed down at me. Her face was flushed, her eyes puffy, and her nose was running, and I couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was. “Uh, you know, we might have been god-sisters.”

  She took the tissue from my hand and smiled. “You’d make a great big sister,” she said, cupping my cheek with her small hand.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur and then Tina grabbed Robbie’s hand and jerked it away.

  “Get your hands off her, bitch!”

  “Tina, what the hell?” I barked, jumping up. “It’s not what you think.”

  “I’ve got eyes. I know what I saw. She comes into our home and tries to seduce you before I’ve even left the country.”

  “Damn it, Tina, what’s gotten into you?”

  I glanced at Robbie and my heart sunk into the acid churning in my stomach. Her face was the brightest shade of red I’d ever seen, and her lips were quivering. Holding the tissue to her face as she tried to catch the fresh river of tears running down her cheeks, she grabbed the letter from my hand and stuffed it into her messenger bag. Then she jumped up, and without looking at anyone, rushed to the door.

  “No, wait, Robbie. It’s all just a misunderstanding,” I pleaded, but it wasn’t enough, she was out the door without saying a word. I turned back to Tina with a mixture of confusion and anger. “Damn it, Tina,” I repeated.

  “Don’t you dare glare at me. I’m not stupid. I saw her holding your hand at the fire, and then tonight—”

  “You don’t understand, Tina. It’s been a tumultuous day. I almost died right in front of her today. And just now, we learned that our fathers were such good friends that my father agreed to be her godfather. It blindsided us and things got emotional.”

  Her face completely drained of its anger. “Oh, damn. I didn’t know,” she muttered.

  “I thought you understood.” I walked over to the counter and picked up my badge, gun, and car keys. Tina must have left them there when she undressed me earlier. Even though I was officially off duty, I felt naked without them. “You can’t have it both ways, just as I can’t. If you and I are going to be just friends, then we have no claim on each other. This wasn’t even a flirtation. She was upset over hearing about her stepdad. I tried to comfort her, end of story.” I picked up my billfold and tucked it into my back pocket. “I have to go find her. I barely know the woman, but Robbie and I are connected now, through our fathers. I have to know more about what happen to them.”

  “No, I understand. It just took me by surprise and I wasn’t ready for it, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I replied. “I would have probably reacted the same way if it had been you.”

  “Please, tell her I’m sorry. It was a momentary lapse in judgment.”

  “I will, and I promise we’ll talk more when I get back,” I said, squeezing her hand and kissing her on the cheek before I walked out the door.

  ***

  “Robbie, please let me in. I just want to talk,” I pleaded through the hotel door. When I’d brought her by the hotel yesterday, I had waited in the car. So, if it hadn’t been for my badge tonight, the desk clerk wouldn’t have told me her room number. I didn’t flash it at him, he just saw it on my belt beside my gun, which was serendipitous for me.

  I tried calling her before I left my driveway, using the number she had called me from when I was trapped, but it went straight to her voicemail. “I’m sorry. I’m busy putting out fires at the moment, so please leave a message, and I’ll return your call as soon I can.” I left a message asking what her message was when she was researching for the police book. Then I got serious and asked her to call me back right away. She never did. Tina may have scared her off, but I had the feeling there was more to it than that. Robbie was tenacious and not afraid of confrontation. Heaven knew she’d called me a jerk more than once, and admittedly, I probably deserved it. “If you don’t let me in, I’m going to pull the fire alarm and then you’ll have to come out.” Technically, that would be illegal and I was bluffing anyway.

  Still, it worked. She opened the door.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” she asserted and started to close the door again.

  I slipped my foot in the doorframe, and she opened it again. “Please,” I implored. “Tina asked me to tell you how sorry she was. She misread the situation.”

  “That’s nice,” Robbie responded, again attempting to close the door.

  “That’s not really the problem, is it?” I countered.

  She stopped and looked at me with a scowl on her face, but her eyes couldn’t hide the confusion she was feeling.

  “Listen, I’m confused, too. I was sixteen when my dad died. Why didn’t he tell me he was going to be your godfather? That’s not something you’d keep secret from your family.”

  Finally, her anger melted into contemplation. “Maybe he was waiting to see if the adoption went through first.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. But, surely he would have said something to my Mom.”

  “Mine, too,” she said and walked into the room. I followed her in, shutting the door behind me, but I didn’t move any further. “I mean, my stepdad would have asked my mom, first.”

  “Then we need to talk to our moms,” I said eagerly. “Get some answers.”

  “I agree, but not tonight. I’m too rattled right now, and I’m afraid I would scare my mom, or worse.”

  I shook my head. “Worse?”

  “Worse would be I take my anger out on her.”

  “You’re right. We don’t want to accuse our moms of something, without all the facts.”

  She gazed at me with a question in her eyes. “Jordy, did Tina really apologize?”

  Nodding, I smiled. “Yes, she did. Once I explained what we had discovered, she understood how emotional it made us.”

  “Good. I’m glad. I would never encroach on another woman’s partner. I’m not one of those types of people.”

  “First off, I totally get that.
Second, Tina and I have agreed that we’re just going to be friends, but we’ve been together as a couple for so long that it will take some time to remember that.”

  “And you love her,” Robbie stated.

  “Yes, I do, very much so. But you said it yourself, neither of us loves each other enough to give up everything for the other. I want to fall in love with the woman who would, and Tina deserves that as well.”

  A smile played across her lips as the color came back to her cheeks. “Um, I know it’s late, but would you like to stay and finish going over those files?”

  “Yes, I would like that, thank you,” I said, finally relaxing.

  “Can I get you something to drink, maybe order a snack?”

  “Can I get a—”

  “Beer?” she laughed, walking over to the telephone. “This is the South. Of course, there’s beer. What kind would you like?”

  “Anheuser-Busch from the tap, please.”

  She picked up the phone and dialed the operator. “Yes, this is room 1204. Can I get a pitcher of Anheuser-Busch, two glasses, and a plate of fried green tomatoes? Yes, thank you.”

  “Fried green tomatoes?” I asked after she hung up the house phone.

  “When you live in New York and you were born in Tennessee, you start to develop cravings for real Southern foods.”

  “I’ve never been out of Tennessee, but I don’t believe I’ve ever had green tomatoes, fried or not.”

  She smiled as if she were about to give me a present. “Then you’re in for a real treat.”

  Her room wasn’t the presidential suite, but it was spacious with a queen-sized bed and a three-drawer nightstand, a coffee table sitting in front of a sofa and a plasma TV mounted to the wall. There was an armchair tucked in the corner where she had left her messenger bag. She walked over to it and pulled papers and folders out. Then she walked over to the sofa and sat down sideways with one leg curled under her so that she was facing the opposite end. She spread the papers out in front of her and then looked up at me.

  I realized that I was still standing near the door as if waiting for permission to come all the way in. “Okay, let’s do this,” I said and joined her on the couch.

  Two hours later, after examining all the reports, taking copious notes, and discussing possibilities that were then systematically discarded as unlikely, we had come full circle. Back to the letter my father had written. Not because we thought it might be a clue, but because it was still a shock.

  “Your stepdad, what was he like?” I asked.

  She gazed off into the distance for a moment, then brought her glistening eyes back around to me. “He tried so hard to be the perfect dad. I was ten when he married my mother so by the time he got used to a precocious ten-year-old, he had to do an about-face for a belligerent teenager. The more I loved him, the more I pushed him away.” Her eyes misted with unshed tears as she continued, and I felt an urge to reach out and comfort her, but I didn’t. “You see, my own biological father had abandoned us, and I was afraid Jerry would do the same. Then for my fourteenth birthday, he handed me a long silver box with a beautiful indigo bow on top. That beautiful gift changed my world completely.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Adoption papers filled out with his and my mom’s signature. That’s how he asked me if he could adopt me. Of course, I said yes.” She got up and grabbed her cell phone off of the table. After clicking on a few buttons, she brought it over to me. It was a picture of Robbie and Jerry posing with the silver box. My eyes welled up at the huge smile on Robbie’s face. “We went through the process,” she continued as she sat down again. “I had to give a sworn statement that I consented to Jerry legally adopting me. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jerry had to find my biological father and have him give up his parental rights to me.”

  “That might explained the reason why my parents didn’t say anything about becoming your godparents. They hadn’t found your father yet.”

  Her cheeks flushed crimson as she arched her eyebrows. “He is not my father,” she snapped. “He’s a low-life drug-addict who sold his parental rights to my stepdad for five-hundred dollars.”

  “Damn! That bastard.” I said angrily. I couldn’t even imagine what that must have felt like for her, but it really pissed me off. I had seen too many firefighters risk their lives because some dumbass junkie started a fire while cooking coke.

  Robbie tilted her head and stared at me. Then she burst out laughing. “We are two of a kind, you and me,” she said jovially.

  “Yeah? That’s a nice compliment.” The new bond between us felt warm and comforting, and I was surprised at how much it meant to me. It seemed easier to bear, knowing someone else knew what I was going through. It pained me though, that she was going through the same thing. I wish I had the answers for her.

  It was after midnight by the time I forced myself to leave her, and that was only because she was yawning so deeply she could barely speak. We had talked a little bit about everything, laughed as we ate fried green tomatoes, which I found disgusting, cried when we talked about our dads, and marveled at the little things we had in common. As we made plans to visit our mothers the next day, I pointed out how grateful I was that her reporter alter ego had not made an appearance. She laughed and then went on to compare the similarities between reporters and investigators. Come to find out, we weren’t that different.

  I hesitated at the door as she showed me out and gazed into her sleepy eyes. I wanted to kiss her in the worst way, but I lacked the courage. So, instead, I chucked her on the shoulder and turned to leave. She grabbed me by the arm and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said, her fingers feathering across my chin.

  “Uh… sure,” I replied, cursing my inability to form a complete sentence.

  I floated down the hallway and into the elevator. It was raining when I left the hotel, but I didn’t care. I walked down the sidewalk toward the parking lot, splashing in puddles of water and humming a well-known show tune about singing in the rain. I suddenly understood what Gene Kelley was singing about in that movie. It was truly a wonderful feeling. I was happy again.

  When I got home, after taking a quick shower and putting on dry clothes, I tiptoed into the bedroom, figuring Tina would already be asleep, but she wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t there. “Tina?” A feeling of dread came over me as I searched everywhere for her. I went back to the bedroom and looked in the closet. Her clothes were gone. Her drawers in the dresser were empty. She was gone. “Well, shit.”

  Chapter Ten

  Roberta Witherspoon

  I checked my hair, my makeup, tucked my split-neck white tunic into my mauve Capri pants, grabbed my messenger bag, and hurried out the door to the elevator. Jordy was waiting, and I was looking forward to spending the day with her. Last night had ended so well that I felt rejuvenated and ready to take on the world.

  When I got into her car, the first thing I noticed was her frown. The second was how suddenly chilled the air felt, even though the top was down on the convertible and the sun was warm.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerfully, pulling a scarf from my bag and covering my hair.

  “Morning,” she replied and pulled out onto the road.

  Despite her frown, she looked quite handsome in her black jeans and form-fitting black T-shirt with the firefighter’s emblem over her heart. She had on the same combat boots she always wore, which I’d begun to think of as her kick-ass boots, and her pistol was holstered at her side with her badge. My mouth went dry as I watched the wind buffet her short hair around. When I was younger, I dreamed of being in a convertible with a hot-looking woman just like Jordy. Dreams really do come true.

  “I brought some bagels in case you were hungry.”

  “No, thanks,” she grunted. “And I told you, no eating in my car, damn it.”

  Be careful what you dream for. “Well, somebody sure got up on the wrong side of the bed,” I sniped. “Oh, wait. That’s your lin
e, isn’t it?”

  Jordy growled and shot me a look of contempt with her piercing blue eyes. I smiled in response, not giving her the satisfaction of angering me. She cocked her lip and then started laughing, her eyes releasing their animosity. “As a matter of fact, that was my line, but under the circumstances, I deserved that. Sorry.”

  “Want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “No big deal, really,” Jordy said with a sigh. “Tina was gone when I got home.”

  “Gone?”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel,” Jordy said brusquely.

  “But why? I thought you two had reached an understanding?”

  “Yeah, I thought we had, too,” Jordy replied, studying the traffic as she turned onto the Danny Thomas Boulevard. “I tried calling her but it went straight to voicemail and she hasn’t returned my text messages.”

  Remembering how upset Tina was last night, I couldn’t help but think it was my fault. “I’m so sorry that I upset her.”

  Jordy glanced at me and shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Like I told you last night, Tina misread the situation. Besides, she is obviously mad at me, not you.”

  “Has she ever disappeared like that before?”

  “No, not while she’s been with me,” Jordy answered. “I’ll give her a couple of days to cool off and if she doesn’t call me back, I’ll go see her at work. She’ll have to talk to me then.”

  “You know, her taking off sounds to me like a jealous lover. Maybe she’s changed her mind about you.”

  “I don’t think so. A jealous lover is not the same thing as a soul mate.”

  “Ah… valid point,” I agreed, gazing at her for a moment. What does it mean when I feel sorry for Tina because she’s an idiot?

  Jordy shot me a questioning glance. “This better not end up in your book,” she said sternly. “I only shared with you because I trust that we’re friends, now. At least, I hope we are?”