Of course.
Obviously Kane had a thing for him. Interesting to realize that she felt Lisa might be a threat to that. Less interesting to acknowledge was her own instinctive spurt of antagonism toward Kane.
So, what does that tell you?
The short answer was: Nothing she cared to think about at the moment.
Strictly for Kane’s sake, Lisa summoned a warm smile for Scott.
“Thanks. And the prince is Alan Rinko. He’s a law student, and he’s been working for you in Siberia since May.”
Scott’s brows rose. “Siberia?”
“Where you sent me yesterday. The basement, to sort through the cold-case files. Everybody in the office calls it Siberia, because you banish people to it when you’re mad at them.”
“First time I’ve ever heard it called that.”
“I’m not surprised.” Her voice turned tart. “They’re all too afraid of you to say it to your face.”
“What? That’s not true.”
“Want to bet? For your information, Mr. Boss Man, the whole office tiptoes around on eggshells when you’re in a bad mood. Which the word is you have been quite a bit lately.”
“Who says?” He sounded faintly defensive.
“Think I’m going to start naming names? No way.”
“If you’re not naming names, Princess, it’s because it’s not true.”
“Believe what you want. And don’t call me Princess.” She gave him a blistering look, then shook her head and gave up. “So, what’s happening with your dad? Did you get him out of jail yet?”
“I got him a lawyer, and I’m staying out of it. Listen, I don’t have time for chitchat. I’m on my way to a meeting. We’ve got an informant who’s apparently ready to spill his guts on McDonnell and Coley.” As everyone in the office knew, McDonnell, a prominent local businessman, was under investigation for bribing Circuit Court Judge Arthur Coley to return a favorable ruling in a case involving McDonnell’s divorce. It had the potential to be a very big, and very messy, case. “I just came by to give you some news.”
“What news? No, wait, there’s something I have to tell you first.” Determined to put her transgression behind her, she wanted to get it out there and over with. “There was a cold-case file I came across yesterday that interested me. I took it home last night. Um, I’m afraid it probably burned in the fire.”
His face tightened. If she hadn’t known him so well, she thought, she probably would have started quaking in her boots about then, because he looked displeased, to say the very least.
“There’s a rule about taking cold-case files out of the building.”
“I know.”
“You did it anyway.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“You get permission from anybody? Sign it out? Anything like that?”
“No.”
“You know anybody caught taking cold-case files out of the building without permission is subject to being fired, right?”
“So, are you going to fire me?”
He hesitated, then looked disgusted. “What, and make it twice in two days? Are you going for some kind of record?”
“Scott . . .”
“You are a major pain in my ass, you know that? You want to tell me why you took that file?”
“The woman looked like me.”
“What?”
“A local family disappeared about thirty years ago. Mother, father, two children. There was a picture of them in the file. The mother looked enough like me to be my twin. You should see it, the resemblance is amazing.” She tried a small smile, which elicited no comparable re sponse.
“I’m never going to see it, am I? Because it just burned up.”
“There’s a copy,” she said with dignity. “The good news, as Rinko just informed me, is that the file had already been uploaded to the system when I took it. Everything in it was copied before it was destroyed. Including the picture.”
She was almost sure.
“Wonderful. In fact, that’d make everything just peachy keen, except, number one, the file was not supposed to be removed from the building, and, number two, if by chance we ever get enough evidence together to identify a culprit and take the case to trial we’ll need the original documents to get a conviction. Copies don’t actually count.”
“I know. I’m sorry. So, you’re not going to fire me?”
He gave her a glinting look. “Consider this strike two.”
This time Lisa’s smile was genuine. “As in, one more and I’m out?”
“Fuckin-A, baby. And I mean it, so you’d best take care.” His frown lightened fractionally. “So, how’s your mother doing?”
“They think she may have had a stroke. Most of the time she doesn’t seem to remember that the house burned last night.”
“Which reminds me—”
He broke off as his cell phone began to ring. Fishing it out of his pocket, he identified himself and listened. As he did, he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and looked harassed.
“Okay, I forgot all about them. Give me a minute here while I try to come up with something they can do. I’ll call you back.” Pressing a button to end the call with Adams, whose barely heard voice Lisa was certain she recognized, he frowned at Lisa, who was regarding him questioningly. “You wouldn’t happen to have a suggestion for what I can do with a bunch of high school kids, including my dumbass nephew, who I caught partying in my old man’s house last night, would you? Instead of busting them, I told them to meet me in my office this morning, thinking I’d come up with some kind of a junior-grade pretrial diversion program before they got there. But what with one thing and another”—as in, she thought, his rescue of her from a burning house, subsequent hours spent at the hospital, and whatever else he’d been doing in the meantime—“I forgot all about them, and now I’ve got somewhere I have to be and I’m drawing a blank here about what to do with them.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You caught some kids in your father’s house last night? Before or after the fire?”
“Before. Right after I talked to you on the swing. That’s why I was still around when the fire broke out.”
“Oh.” It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder about that, Lisa realized. Having Scott there at the exact moment when she had needed him had seemed so completely unremarkable that she hadn’t thought to question it. “What do you mean ‘partying’?”
“What do you think I mean? Smoking pot and drinking beer. Six of them, fifteen and sixteen years old, with Chase—my nephew—the ringleader.”
“You didn’t call the cops.”
Remembering her own teenage partying days, she felt a residual tickle of gratitude. Knowing Scott’s own attitude toward that kind of underage fun—he was agin it, to put it mildly—his restraint surprised her.
“Nope.”
“You’re a nice man, Scott Buchanan.” She smiled at him again, with genuine warmth this time. Then, remembering various incidents over the years, she temporized. “Well, occasionally.”
“Careful, you don’t want to get carried away with the compliments.” He grimaced, glanced down at his phone, then looked impatient. “Look, do you or don’t you have any suggestions for what I can do with those kids? I got things to do and places to be here.”
The proverbial lightbulb came on in her head.
“Send them to Rinko. In Siberia. They can help him upload the cold-case files. There are thousands of them. Without more help than he’s been getting—which is basically whoever you’re mad at—somebody’ll be down in that basement working on them until the end of time.”
He looked struck. “That’s not a bad idea. They could actually do something use—”
Kane appeared behind him just then and laid a hand on his arm, interrupting. Her eyes met Lisa’s. They were the opposite of warm.
“Hi, Grant.” Her perfunctory smile matched her eyes. “Sorry to hear about what happened last night.” She switched her attentio
n to Scott. “Um, I hate to interrupt, but Gamboli just called me to see if we’re going to be much longer. He said his guy is getting antsy.”
Scott’s expression as he looked down at Kane was unreadable, but Scott had always been one to play things close to the vest. Still, as far as Lisa could tell, the attraction was all on Kane’s side.
It was annoying to have to admit she was glad about that.
“Yeah, I’m coming.” He looked back at Lisa, who, conscious of once more being the target of Kane’s hard gaze, smiled at him again. Warmly.
He gave her a narrow-eyed look in response but didn’t say anything.
“I can handle your wayward lambs for you. If you want, I’ll call Rinko and set something up,” Lisa suggested. “That kind of work I can do from the hospital.”
“Yeah, you can. Okay, I appreciate it. Whatever you can arrange.” He looked at Kane again. “You and Hendricks head on down. I’ll meet you in the lobby. I won’t be but another couple of minutes. I just want to say a quick hello to Mrs. Grant.”
“Sure.” Kane nodded her acquiescence, but she didn’t look pleased as she turned and walked away.
“My mother’s probably asleep,” Lisa told him with an apologetic grimace.
“If she is, you can say hi to her for me. Like I said, I’ve got some news for you. This morning I put out a few calls to some people involved in the investigation of your fire. I got a call back from Greg Watson, who’s now the chief detective on the case, just about half an hour ago. They’re not positive yet, but they’re working under the assumption that the cause was arson. I wanted to let you know before you got ambushed with it.”
12
“I understand you’ve been under some financial strain.” The statement—it wasn’t a question—came from Woodford County Sheriff ’s Detective Greg Watson. “For one thing, you’ve got a pretty hefty mortgage on this place, don’t you?”
Unable to believe what she was hearing, Lisa looked away from the burned-out shell in front of her to turn incredulous eyes on him. She’d already had a difficult day. Ambushed by reporters not long after Scott had left, she’d been surprised into saying that she’d been inside the house asleep when the fire had started before realizing her mistake in talking to them at all and clamming up. But it was too late: Her words had made the local news at noon, which had aired footage of the fire, complete with pictures of the damaged house, on all three channels. Since then, her cell phone and the phone in her mother’s hospital room had been ringing off the hook. They’d been swamped with visitors, both welcome and unwelcome, to the point that she’d been forced to greet people who weren’t part of her mother’s inner circle at the door with the sometimes true and sometimes not claim that her mother was asleep, after which she would chat for a moment and then gently turn them away. She’d had to talk to her father by phone again and listen to his excuses about why he couldn’t come to the hospital until she stopped them by telling him briskly that she was fine and her mother certainly didn’t want to see him, so nobody needed him anyway. She’d had to deal with the insurance company, the police, the doctors treating her mother, and the hospital red tape. Confronted with the reality of her charred and damaged home, her chest ached with loss. Her throat was tight, and her stomach knotted from the knowledge that nothing was ever going to be able to put Grayson Springs back the way it had been. Now this deputy was giving her a hard time. She had to swallow before she could reply.
“There’s a mortgage, yes.”
Having showered and put on some makeup and loaner clothes that Nola had brought by the hospital for her earlier, she was glad to think that probably she was looking better than she felt. In deference to the swampy end-of-June heat, her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she wore lipstick and mascara only. Although Nola, who loved all things pink and ruffly, had been left to her own devices when choosing the clothes, she knew Lisa’s taste well enough that she’d brought classics: a navy skirt and white polo, and a pair of slip-on sneakers.
“And you were having trouble making ends meet?”
Lisa took a deep breath, welcoming the anger that welled up inside her as an antidote to grief.
“You might as well quit beating around the bush and come right out and ask me if I set the fire, Detective.” She was polite, but her voice had an edge to it. Detective Watson, a sandy-haired, lanky, fortysomething man of average attractiveness, average height, and, she was beginning to think, somewhat less than average intellect, blinked slowly at her, reminding her of nothing so much as a sleepy turtle. “The answer is no. I did not try to burn down the house I’ve lived in all my life, the house my family has lived in for generations and that my mother, who is terminally ill and wants to live out the rest of her days in, loves, the house that I will now have to try to restore to something approximating what it was before I can even begin to think about selling it after my mother passes away, for a little bit of insurance money.”
“Quite a lot of insurance money, is what I’ve heard.”
“I’m not sure of the amount, but believe me, whatever it is can’t make up for this.” With a sweeping gesture she indicated the house, where a contingent of workers presumably called in by the insurance company was already trying to prevent further damage from the rain that was predicted to arrive overnight. Men in a crane worked with men on ladders to spread blue tarpaulins over the section of roof nearest to the part that had burned. Under Robin’s critical supervision—Lynn was at the hospital with Martha—more were busy inside the house.
Watson turned his attention back to the scene in front of them. They were standing in the backyard, on the now trampled grass in front of the low brick wall that bordered the Baby’s Garden. It was just before eight p.m., close enough to twilight so that the sunlight had softened and turned golden and the humidity had decreased to the point when it was just possible not to break into a sweat while standing still. The scorched smell that hung heavy in the air was strong enough so that the sweeter scent of the roses in the garden behind them was almost completely obliterated. Though her back was turned to the fountain, which operated on a timer that came on automatically at daylight and shut off at dark, Lisa could hear the soothing tinkle of falling water over the rumble and clank of the crane and the jumble of voices and other sounds. Like most of the grounds and the south wing of the house, the Baby’s Garden was untouched. The center part of the house where the tarpaulins were being placed had sustained some minor burn and smoke damage but nothing that couldn’t be repaired within a few days. There were scorch marks on the roof, and the white walls were black in places with plumy smears of smoke and soot, but structurally the center section was still sound and none of its rooms or their contents had been touched by the fire. It was the north wing, where her bedroom was located, that had burned. The outer walls still stood, as did the chimney on the far end, but the roof-line looked as though a giant with jagged teeth had taken a huge bite out of it. What remained was black and charred. The inside was practically gutted, and what hadn’t burned had suffered irreparable smoke and water damage. She’d lost everything that had been in her bedroom: her purse, with all her ID; her briefcase; her furniture; the majority of her clothes; her mementos, including the ceramic frog her mother had given her on the occasion of her first real breakup with her first real boyfriend—she’d been fourteen, tearful and tragic, and the frog had been presented in a little blue box tied with white ribbon along with a chocolate frosted cupcake (her favorite) and a note that read “You’ve got to kiss a lot of these to find a prince”—and the pink ballet shoes she’d worn when she’d taken classes as a little girl (ballet wasn’t her best thing, but she’d loved those shoes), and . . . well, so many things that if she let herself think about them, she would burst into tears there and then.
Her dolls—including Katrina—were lost, too. The thought was worrisome.
So, with Detective Watson’s eyes on her she did her best to block it out of her mind.
“You understand we
have to ask these questions, ma’am, when we’re investigating a possible arson,” Detective Watson said in his slow southern drawl. “They’re not meant to accuse you or anybody else.”
Lisa could almost hear the unspoken yet hanging in the air.
“What makes you think the fire was arson?” Lisa asked around the constriction in her throat.
Detective Watson shook his head, looking as tight-lipped and mysterious as a man who reminded her of a turtle could, but the insurance adjuster, whom she had driven out to Grayson Springs to meet and who had turned out to be a no-nonsense African-American woman in her fifties named Tracy McCoy, came up the path to join her and the detective in time to hear her question.
“They found traces of an accelerant.” Ms. McCoy was carrying a red leather-bound notebook with a calculator attached. Lisa had watched earlier as, walking around the house, she had made ample use of both. “If you would start getting some estimates together, Ms. Grant, we’ll see if we can’t get the ball rolling for you.”
“What kind of an accelerant?” Lisa could feel the blood starting to pound in her temples. She’d had almost no sleep, a quick lunch of hospital food, and more aggravation than any one human being should have to deal with in a single day. Add to that her worry for her mother and her grief over Grayson Springs, and it was no wonder that she was starting to feel as though her life was spinning out of control.
“Paint thinner. Isn’t that right, Detective?” Ms. McCoy looked to Detective Watson for corroboration.
“Yes.” Detective Watson sounded reluctant to part with even that much information.
“If you found traces of paint thinner, it probably wasn’t arson.” Relief bubbled in Lisa’s voice. “There were painters in the house yesterday, in the north wing, the part that’s burned. They would have had paint thinner, wouldn’t they?”
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