“Did it have to do with Charlie? Bill was upset with Charlie today at the school. I couldn’t hear why, but he went into the classroom looking for a fight.”
Eleanor shrugged. “Bill is a man with a strong opinion on everything. He probably doesn’t like Charlie changing things at the school.”
“Is Charlie changing things?”
“Charlie is trying to get extra tutoring for one of the students on Bill’s baseball team. Bill’s best player, as a matter of fact. Charlie even told the boy’s parents that maybe it would be better if he was off the team until his grades improved,” she said. “Charlie played baseball from when he was a kid, so he knows better than anyone what kind of commitment it is, especially with someone as exacting as Bill Davis coaching. I think Charlie had some ideas on that as well.” She shrugged. “For someone like Bill Davis, it could feel like he’s being pushed out. At his age, and with his personality, he doesn’t have a lot of options if he lost his job.”
“Is that why his wife burst into tears?” I knew the answer had to be something more complicated, but it was the best way to find the truth. Eleanor had a very strict rule against mindless gossip. She did, however, answer direct questions, even questions that veered toward gossip. It was a fine line sometimes, but I didn’t mind walking it if she didn’t.
But this time I was on the tightrope alone. Eleanor’s bland smile was back. “Poor woman just needed a safe place to cry,” she said. “And what’s a better place, where you’re more sure to be surrounded by understanding women, than a quilt shop?”
With that, she opened the cash register and began to count the day’s take.
Chapter 3
We had beef stew with homemade bread and ginger cake for dessert. We were all bursting at the seams. My boyfriend, Jesse Dewalt, and Oliver White, my grandmother’s fiancé, managed second helpings of dessert while I just sat and digested the heavy meal. Barney, my grandmother’s twelve-year-old golden retriever, sat at my feet with the hope of a stray piece of meat finding its way to him. When Eleanor wasn’t looking, that’s exactly what happened.
Eleanor wasn’t just my boss and my grandmother, she was my housemate. I now occupied what had been my mother’s childhood bedroom in my grandmother’s rambling Victorian house on the edge of town.
“This is different from last year’s gingerbread,” I said.
“I’m trying out the ginger recipe for the Christmas party,” Eleanor explained, “though I don’t know if I like it.”
Jesse, who had a mouthful of the cake, gave it a thumbs-up, but Eleanor didn’t seem pleased with the review. In fact, all evening she hadn’t been pleased with anything. Not angry, not even sad, just quiet with an undercurrent of annoyed. She’d been that way since earlier in the day and Julie Davis’s mysterious crying jag.
Both men tried to engage Eleanor in conversation, got nowhere, and repeatedly gave me curious looks during dinner, but I had nothing to offer other than a shrug. By dessert they’d given up. Eleanor had promised to see if she could get a hint from Jesse of what he’d like for Christmas. I’d started a quilt but didn’t like it, painted a picture that didn’t seem special enough, and had gone as far as Peekskill to shop, and had still come up with nothing. But Eleanor seemed to have forgotten her promise, unless I intended to give Jesse more of her gingerbread cake.
“Things have been quiet lately?” Oliver directed the question at Jesse, who was resting his arm around me.
“Very,” Jesse told him. “All we had were four parking tickets for the entire month of November, and so far in December we’ve had nothing. Not one single call to the station.” Jesse was the chief of police in town, and while it might seem like a quiet job, Archers Rest had more than it needed of serious crimes over the past year. I wasn’t sure if Jesse was pleased or bored now that things had calmed down.
“It must give you plenty of time to keep the place organized.”
“It’s been organized, and reorganized. We’ve rearranged the wanted board a dozen times, polished the floors, even purged old cases from the file room. I think it’s time to get the officers a hobby.”
“You can always take up quilting,” I said.
He laughed. “If you have a class that starts with how to thread a needle, count me in.”
Just as he finished talking, Jesse’s phone rang. His mother was watching Allie, Jesse’s six-year-old daughter with his late wife. But the call wasn’t about Allie. Jesse’s quiet, serious tones made that much clear.
“I’ll be there in five,” he said. As he hung up, he turned to us. “I guess we’re about to get busy again. There’s been a fire at Charlie Lofton’s house. No idea if it’s bad, but I should get there.”
“We’ll follow you in my car,” Eleanor said.
Jesse shook his head. “It’s not necessary. It’s too cold to stand around outside watching a fire.”
“We can’t just sit here,” I said. I can never just sit when there’s trouble. I wanted to help, and I knew my grandmother felt the same way.
We had our coats on and were out the door before Jesse could object.
* * *
A light snow was falling, the first in what had been an unusually dry fall and winter. But even this snow was the kind that wouldn’t stick to the grass and certainly wouldn’t help put out flames. But it did make the scene somehow surreal. While Jesse and the rest of the police force kept order, Charlie’s neighbors stood around bundled in winter coats, huddled together. The houses near Charlie’s were lit up with colored lights and Santas on rooftops. If I looked toward the crowd with that as my backdrop, the neighbors seemed as if they might start caroling or passing around cider. But instead they stood watching the flames.
Bill and Julie Davis were in the crowd, along with several of the members of the shop’s quilt group, the owner of Moran’s Bar, and even Jacob Schultz, holding tightly to his father’s hand. In fact, several members of the third grade class were there. Emily Long was crying, but the rest of the crowd stood silently.
The Morristown Fire Department was working fast, but more and more of the old house was giving itself up to the flames. Soon there wouldn’t be anything left.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked Eleanor.
We looked around. For several minutes there was no sign of him, but eventually his height gave him away. Across the street and several houses down, a tall man stood alone watching the house burn. I started to walk toward him, but when he saw me, Charlie turned and walked the other way, taking long strides so it would be impossible for me to catch up.
Chapter 4
I got into the shop early the next day and sewed the third graders’ nine-patch units into a quilt, adding sashing to break up the squares and make the quilt top larger. Natalie, the shop’s other employee, had offered to longarm quilt all of the students’ tops, so I left them on the cutting table with a note and headed to the school, and the fourth grade.
Bill Davis barely smiled at me, but he did introduce me to the class and stay at his desk while I explained how to make a nine-patch. I had two hours with the students. The fifth grade was this afternoon and then I would be done. The junior high was raising money by making handmade cards, and the high school was offering a “rent a kid” program to seniors looking for computer tutoring and help around the house. I loved that everyone in Archers Rest was pitching in to raise money for the fire department, an urgent need that had become unfortunately real to us in the past twelve hours.
“How’s Charlie?” I asked Bill, once the kids were busy sewing their squares.
“Haven’t seen him.”
“He hasn’t been at school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s he staying?”
Bill looked up at me and sighed heavily, as if I’d asked for a kidney instead of some information. “How would I know?”
I cou
ld have left it there, and probably should have, but I didn’t. “How’s your wife? Is she feeling any better?”
Bill squinted, trying to get a better look at me. “She isn’t sick.”
“I know that.”
“So why did you ask . . .”
“Yesterday at the quilt shop . . .”
“What happened?” His voice moved toward a shout and he sat up in his chair, looking about to leap out at me. But as he moved, a student held up a mangled-looking square and I went to the rescue, saving myself from whatever the easily angered Bill had in store.
* * *
That afternoon I brought the nine-patch units from the two classes back to the shop, and sewed them into quilt tops between turns at the cutting table and cash register. The shop hop was still in full swing, and between the shoppers, the Christmas decorations, the extra bolts of fabric we’d bought, and the students’ quilts, there was barely room to move about. Luckily, there was still room for conversation.
“No one has seen him since last night,” I heard Natalie telling her mom, Susanne, an avid art quilter.
“Poor thing. I heard the whole back of the house is destroyed. The kitchen, Charlie’s bedroom . . . ,” Susanne said.
“And what didn’t get burned got soaked with water from the fire department.”
I moved to join my friends. “Where could he be?”
They didn’t have an answer. In fact, as the day turned to evening, and locals and out-of-towners filtered in and out of the shop, no one had an answer. But everyone had a theory.
“The house is eighty years old,” said one person, “The wiring on a place like that can’t handle the load of TVs and computers.”
“We’ve had such a cold winter,” someone else said. “If he put some logs in the fireplace and didn’t open the flue . . .”
“Almost two years in Afghanistan, then his mother dies, and now this. It’s more than any one person should have to handle,” said a third. And on that, everyone agreed.
“There’s wasn’t a body in the fire, was there?” Natalie asked me. “I didn’t even think of that . . .”
“No body.”
“Did Jesse tell you?”
“He didn’t have to.” I told her how I’d seen Charlie walk away the night before without a word to anyone.
“But he must have spoken to Jesse,” Natalie said. “Given a statement about how it started. Jesse must know something.”
She was right. Enough with theories and gossip; I had a way to find out the truth.
Chapter 5
“I don’t know anything.” Jesse sat at his desk and closed a file on his desk, sliding it into the drawer. I couldn’t see the contents, but the file itself was labeled “Davis.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, and I’d love to talk to him.” Jesse took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Jesse always looked to me more like a professor than a cop. And like the best in both professions, he was methodical, serious, interested in only what he could prove. We made an odd couple—the logical and the intuitive, but it worked. “What I do know,” he continued, “is that it wasn’t faulty wiring or embers from the fireplace. It was arson. Started the old-fashioned way with newspaper on a pile of old junk in the backyard that spread to the house.”
“Who would do that?”
Jesse looked up at me as if I should already know the answer.
“Why would Charlie burn his own house down?”
“Money. The house was paid for, but it was old. It needed tons of work to get the kitchen and bathrooms up-to-date. Maybe he intended a little fire, something in the kitchen, and it got out of hand. Or maybe he wanted to burn the whole place down, collect the insurance, and walk away.”
“Why not just sell the house?” Even as I asked it, I knew why. A few years ago, New Yorkers were driving three hours north to buy weekend places in towns like Archers Rest, but as the economy soured, they put those homes on the market. And they were still on the market. An old house with no view of the river wouldn’t stand a chance of selling quickly with that much competition.
“He was in your class at school, wasn’t he?”
Jesse nodded. “He was a great guy. Friendly. He was captain of the baseball team in high school, drew cartoons for the school paper, was really into science. A well-rounded kid.”
“Do you think he’s changed?”
“He joined the army as soon as we graduated and I haven’t really seen much of him since. But two tours in Afghanistan have to change a person. He hasn’t seemed happy since he’s been home.”
“He was an only child, right?” I asked. “His parents are dead. Maybe that’s why he’s unhappy. He’s lonely.”
“He hasn’t done anything to make friends. Or rekindle old ones.”
“Maybe not, but it doesn’t make him an arsonist.”
“So where is he?”
I didn’t have an answer to that, but I was determined to find out. And Jesse picked up on that immediately. He’d known me for just over a year, long enough to not argue when I got an idea in my head. And I had an idea. Or, more accurately, a location.
* * *
Charlie clearly wanted to be alone. He’d stayed away from school all day, and from his house while the police and fire department were going through it. But they were finished, and unless he was willing to ask for help from someone in town, there was only one place left to go—home, even if there was only a little of it left.
I explained this all to Jesse on the way over, and he explained to me that parts of the house were structurally unsound and I should let him go first. But when we got there, I almost ran to the door. From the front, it looked pretty against the setting sun. The porch was untouched and the light yellow siding looked dirty and a little waterlogged but was still standing. As we walked around to the side of the house, though, the light yellow gave way to a dark brown, the effects of the smoke and fire on a frame house. At the back, where there had once been a door to the kitchen, there was a hole. What had been a pile of discarded furniture and old drapes was a black mass—the start of the whole horrible mess.
“Don’t go in.” Jesse stood behind me, his flashlight already aimed at the darkness inside.
“Just one step. Enough to call his name and see if he’s here.”
He nodded. Jesse was used to my stubbornness and I was used to his carefulness.
“Charlie?” I called out as I entered the back of the house. There was no answer. The kitchen was a disaster. Even in the dim light, I could see that the table and chairs were broken and burned, the wallpaper was covered in soot, the floor was black and the knickknacks that must have once been precious to Charlie’s mother were now in pieces. I wanted to cry and I barely knew the Loftons. My heart broke for Charlie.
As I moved a few steps farther, Jesse pushed ahead and lit the way with his flashlight. He had one arm on the light and one on me.
“Stay right behind me,” he said. “We go five more steps and that’s it. All of this was okay this morning, but the floor seems weak in the dining room and I’m not chancing it.”
“Okay.” I’m all for investigating, but I didn’t want to break my leg going through the floor any more than he did.
We counted out the five steps. With each one, I called out Charlie’s name. There was no answer. The farther we walked into the house, the more fragile the structure felt. I could hear the wood boards groaning under me. I could smell the combination of water and fire that had wrapped itself around everything. In every object we passed, shape, color, and form were all melted away, leaving a sort of freak-show effect to everything from a toaster to what looked like collection of family photos hung on the wall.
“Satisfied?” Jesse asked once we’d walked the five steps.
“Not really, but if it’s not safe . . .
” I stopped speaking when I saw a light move across the hall, a light that wasn’t coming from the flashlight in Jesse’s hand.
“Who is that?” Jesse called out.
“Don’t come any closer.” It was Charlie’s voice coming from what seemed to be the living room. There were heavy footsteps and the sound of something scraping against the floor. A moment later I could see a shadow outlined against the dining room window. In Charlie’s right hand was a rifle, which he was dragging behind him.
“Why don’t you put the gun down and come to us?” Jesse said. “We need to get out of the house. It’s not safe.”
“There are no safe places anymore, Jesse.”
“Yes, there are. I’ll take you to one.” Jesse sounded calm, but he turned to me and in a low, quiet voice said, “Get out of the house now.”
I almost protested, but he was right. There was no telling what Charlie might do. “I’ll call the station,” I whispered, and made my way out the same way we’d come.
Once outside, I did as I promised and then I waited. I went to the front of the house, fully expecting Jesse and Charlie to emerge. Jesse was a strong police chief, but he was also a nice man. Hopefully they would talk it out as old schoolmates and then come out of the house before it fell around them.
But nothing happened for several minutes. All I could hear was the silence of Archers Rest at night. Until the gunshot.
Chapter 6
An Archers Rest squad car pulled up in time to hear the shot. Greg and Mike, two of Jesse’s best officers, got out.
“Jesse’s in there with Charlie Lofton,” I said. “Charlie has a gun.”
They pulled their weapons and headed toward the house. I waited and prayed, and tried hard not to panic. There had been only one shot, so at least one person was okay. I didn’t want anyone to be hurt, but I couldn’t bear the idea that Jesse . . . I wouldn’t let myself finish the thought.
Just as the officers reached the front door, it swung open. Charlie came out, unarmed and looking nervous.
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