Franklin slammed his fist down on the conference table. “Dang it! I still think she did it. I mean, what was her motive for burning the first building?”
Rob shrugged. “I can’t say, sir. The judge hasn’t unsealed her records.”
Franklin glowered at Chase. “Get on that. Right now. I want those records unsealed by close of business. Today. I got people breathing down my neck on this.”
“Yes, sir,” Chase said meekly. He shot a sharp eye at Rob, as if to say, “Thanks, buddy.”
“And you!” Franklin jabbed a long gnarly index finger at Rob. “You go back to that woman, and you question her about that first fire. Leopards don’t change their spots. Whatever her motive was on that, you can bet that’s the reason she burned this building down.”
CHAPTER TEN
ROB FOUND HIMSELF at Kari’s mom’s back door, his hand raised to knock, just as he realized his spirits were lifting at the prospect of seeing Kari.
Or maybe that’s the sugar high you’re getting already from the smells wafting through the door, bud, he warned himself. Get it together. Franklin may have a point. You don’t want it to be Kari.
But even with such a stern lecture, he couldn’t tamp down the way his heart leapt at the sight of her face: flour on her nose, a strand of blond hair strafing her check, her eyes that blue-gray that he found so arresting.
“Oh, it’s you—uh, come in—I can’t—can you close the door behind you?” Kari sprang back toward the stove, where she knelt down and squinted at a thermometer clipped to the side of the pot. “I miss my digital thermometer. This is my mom’s candy thermometer, and it’s not as reliable, and certainly not as easy to read.”
Rob eased into the kitchen. Cake layers and cupcakes and pastries and bread loaves were everywhere—across the counters and empty burners on the stove, on the table, spread out on a couple of TV trays, jammed onto a shelf that had been emptied of a small radio now on the floor. What counters weren’t filled with delicious-smelling baked goods were crammed with kitchen gadgets. The sink was full to bursting with pots and bowls, and the open dishwasher looked crammed full, as well.
“Wow. I like what you’ve done with the place,” he teased her.
She darted a smile in his direction before fixing her attention back on the thermometer. “I’m trying like mad to get some orders done before five o’clock, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t pay strict attention to you. It seems to keep the peace around here better if I can have the kitchen cleaned up before Mom walks through the door.”
“Got to be tough.”
“I have to admit, it makes me feel all of eleven again. I miss being master of my own place.” She straightened up in a hurry. “Okay! Cream!” She snatched up a measuring cup and started pouring cream into the pot, then stirring like mad. The contents of the pot bubbled up to the edges, threatening to spill over, but just in the nick of time, the boiling mass receded.
Rob meandered over and peered in. “What’s that?”
“A ganache for a cake—it’s to fill it.”
“Huh? You mean, hollow it out and pour it in?”
Kari chuckled. “You don’t know much about baking, do you? Good thing you’ve got your chicken and egg business to fall back on.”
“No, my expertise pretty much ends with eating the baking.”
Kari kept stirring but grinned.
“I do make a mean brownie from one of those box mixes. Hey, don’t make that face. It does the job. We can’t all be five-star cooks. And what else are you supposed to do at midnight when you want a snack?”
“Well...” Whatever she was beating had thickened into something that smelled divine and crawled out of the pot into a bowl with the slowness of perfectly cooked grits. “I’d bet you’d be surprised how easy it is to cook brownies from scratch.”
“You’ll have to teach me sometime. And I’ll teach you all about chickens. Oh, and growing beans and tomatoes, and Ma could show you a thing or two about preserves. Hey, you mind if I lick the pot?”
Her slim shoulders, bare except for the thin spaghetti straps of her shirt, shook with laughter. “Go ahead, but watch it. It’s still pretty hot. That’s molten sugar in there. I swear, I’m going to have to stop letting you come around. You can’t possibly have any time to do all your investigating and help out at what sounds like a full-time farm.”
Rob got a spoon from the drawer—realizing with a start that he’d hung around Kari so much that he actually knew where to look—and dug into what was left of the ganache.
“Oh, man. Ohhh, this is good. I’m glad Daniel can’t see me eat this. He’s on this push for all of us firefighters to stay fit. And the reason I can eat all this good stuff you have tempting me is that I do my fair share on the farm.” Rob let the spoon clatter against the side of the pot. “So how is it that you manage to keep so slim?”
“Because,” Kari replied primly. “Unlike some people I might name, I don’t eat everything that I cook. I just test it.”
“Who? Me? I’m just testing it.” He dug the spoon through a stream of ganache and popped it in his mouth. “And it needs...”
“What?” Kari was at instant alert, her frame at attention, focused on what he was about to say. “More vanilla? More salt? Wait, cinnamon, maybe it needs a touch of cinnamon?”
“Relax. It’s great. You’re...” He cut himself off before he could finish the sentence with “great.” Because this was rapidly falling into that easy, breezy conversation they always seemed to end up in...and that was not why he was here.
No. If he really thought Kari was innocent, he would do her no favors by soft-pedaling this. He needed to clear her. He needed to convince Franklin that Kari had no hand in this.
“You’re just trying to talk your way into more dessert,” she said, waggling a finger at him. “I’ve got your number, sir. I know what a guy is really after.”
“Yeah? So what’s my punishment?”
“Those dishes.” Kari gestured toward the sink as she reached for a spoon. “I need some help, and I’m not too proud to swap pot-licking privileges for scullery-maid services.”
“Oh, you are not putting that stuff in a 13-layer cake, are you? Please, please tell me that some of the Monroes ordered that sucker?”
“Dishes!” she snapped saucily. “And, no, I’m afraid not. This goes to a teacher over at the middle school.”
“Dashing all my hopes today, aren’t you?” He set the now cleaned-out pot beside the sink and turned on the hot water tap. “Well, I’ll have you know that Ma trained me early on how to wash dishes. A dishwasher is an honorable profession.”
“Darn straight, and if that’s how well you scrub, you can lick my pots any old time,” Kari told him.
For a while they worked in a companionable silence. But as the minutes stretched on, and the sink emptied out, the weight of what he had to do pressed in on Rob. He hated to break this spell. Why couldn’t it be like this? Why couldn’t he have wandered into her bakery months before it burned down, met her when nothing was wrong?
Kari must have read his mind. “So...as much as I’d like to believe it, I know you didn’t come by here simply to eat my cooking and wash my dishes. Something up with the investigation?”
He noticed how carefully she asked that question, and yet how a tremble in the last few words gave away her nervousness. “I’ve been trying to track down the source of the tank used to start the fire—”
“Oh, thank you, by the way,” she interrupted brightly. “Jakayla told me that you gave her my number. I really appreciate that. It was for three dozen cupcakes, and the teacher was so impressed that she ordered a birthday cake for her son. Oh, and then another teacher that she knew has asked me to cater a reception for the high school Beta Club. So that was three—no, counting this cake, four orders. All because of you
r goodwill.”
Were those tears in her eyes? They were. They gathered along her dark golden lashes like tiny jewels. She turned away, but not before he could see one trace its way down the curve of her cheek. His hand itched to stop that tear in its tracks. He remembered how soft her cheek had felt when he’d done that very thing at the farmers market.
“You’re welcome,” he husked. “It was my pleasure.”
“So? Did you? The tank, I mean? Did you find it? That could lead you to who started the fire, right?” Kari’s circling back to his earlier topic nearly threw him.
“No. I’m afraid not.”
Was that relief that caused her frame to sag? Or disappointment? He couldn’t see her expression now, as she was bent over the cake, spreading out the ganache with quick and efficient moves. She was halfway done now, the layers assembling quickly and easily.
“Oh. So...” She didn’t finish her sentence.
Rob cleared his throat. “You still haven’t come up with anyone who might have a grudge against you?”
Kari shook her head, and flipped another cake layer atop the ganache.
“I don’t see why this has to be about me,” Kari told him. “Why am I the focus of your investigation?”
Then she blushed—a beautiful shell pink that sprang from her cheeks and suffused her face to the baby-fine curls wisping from her headband. “Oh. Right. My record.”
Here it was, the perfect juncture to ask about that fire. He couldn’t square the woman standing before him with someone who could burn down a building, willfully destroy something, ignoring the possibility that people could be hurt or killed.
“Er, actually, no,” Rob heard himself saying. He kicked himself for his cowardliness.
“Really?” She paused, spatula in midair, her eyes wide with surprise as she looked over at him.
He rinsed out the last bowl and stacked it on the drainer. “Really,” he said. “It’s where the fire started that makes me think it was about you. Someone wanted to make a point, you know? They had, what, six other doors they could have leaned their weapon against. So why you? Don’t tell me that you haven’t wondered the same thing.”
Kari sighed and flipped the last layer on. “I have. And honestly, I can’t answer that. Maybe there were security cameras at other businesses? Mine was in the middle of the block, so maybe they felt more secure? I really have no clue, Rob. I’ve stared at the ceiling many a night asking myself that same question. Why? Why me? Why now? What did I ever do to deserve—”
She bit off her last words. The answer to that question was patently obvious. Karma could be vastly unkind.
“Oh, shoot. I didn’t make enough.” She raked at the last scrapings of the ganache bowl and tossed the spatula into it in a fit of frustration. “I knew it didn’t look as though it would stretch, but I thought, maybe... Now I’ll have to make another batch.”
“Is it that hard?” he asked, feeling guilty for the healthy amount of ganache he had scraped out of the pot.
“Just tedious. I have to carmelize the sugar. It’s a caramel cream ganache, and you have to be careful or you’re sure to scorch it—oh, well. Nothing for it but to get it done.” Kari squared her shoulders and reached for some of the measuring cups and spoons he had just washed.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Rob said. “Maybe if I hadn’t—”
“No, no, it wasn’t you. I needed at least half again as much to frost the outside of this cake.”
“Well, one good thing, I get to see the magic in the making. Do I get to lick the pot again?”
“Only if you’ll agree to wash the dishes I’ll dirty. I had to let my part-time helper go because...well... Charlie’s still making me pay rent, believe it or not.”
“Huh? Is that even legal?”
“He said that if I wanted that space, I needed to keep up with the terms of my lease. And...I want that space. It was perfect. Exactly the right size. And it was mine, Rob. Just like I liked it. Just like I needed it.” Her words broke with emotion.
“You’ll get it again. Or something better.” His attempts to jolly her into a more cheerful mood seemed wholly inadequate.
She dug into a cupboard, sorting through a few small saucepans until she came up with one that satisfied her. Setting it on a unit, she switched on the electric coil, then reached for a canister of sugar. Rob watched with interest as she sprinkled a thin layer of sugar onto the bottom of the pan.
The sugar melted as she peered into the pot, then began stirring the small amount.
“That’s enough?” Rob asked. “That doesn’t look anything like enough to finish frosting the cake.”
“No, no. You have to add the sugar a layer at a time—about an eighth of an inch,” she explained. Now Kari reached again for the sugar, dashing another dusting of granulated sugar into the pot. “That caramelizes the sugar, and that’s the base of the frosting.”
“So how much sugar do you have to cook this way?”
“Only two cups. That should be plenty.”
“Two cups! At this rate, you’ll be here all day.”
Kari glanced at the kitchen clock. “Not all day—but I might be pushing it to get this cake finished by five o’clock like I’d originally hoped to.” She sighed and swiped at her forehead with the crook of her arm. “I knew I should have made more. Oh, well. But you were telling me about the investigation—no, I was whining—oh, what were we talking about?” Her eyes crinkled at the corners and she lifted a brow. “I have no conversation skills when I cook. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“That’s okay. We were talking about the investigation. And...well, I have to ask you a few things.”
She scraped at the pot with her spatula. “I don’t know what else I can tell you. I know I keep saying that—”
“Actually, about this, you can. I need to know about the first fire.”
Kari had reached for more sugar and was in the process of sprinkling it into the pot when he asked. The question made her jerk, causing a small shower of sugar to settle on the stove. The smell of carbonized sugar filled the air. “The first fire?” she repeated.
“Yes. The one you confessed to.”
Kari had recovered, though, smoothly pouring the sugar into the pot in an even layer. “It’s all in the records. I thought by now you would have made it required bedtime reading.”
“The records are sealed. I admit, I’ve asked a judge to release them, but...it would save me time if you would tell me about it.”
Now why did he feel so awkward about asking her this? This was his job. More than that, if Kari were innocent, he was the one person in an official capacity who was actually motivated to look beyond the easy answer.
Kari’s jaw tensed—she was actually clenching her teeth. “I thought you said my record didn’t matter.” She shook more sugar into the pan with less control than she had before.
“Look, I’m trying to clear you,” he shot back. “If I can show my boss that the two fires were totally different, maybe—”
She jutted out her chin, her elbow jerking stiffly as she whipped the spatula through the sugar. Some of the mixture dribbled down the side of the pan in a thick, taupe-colored rivulet. “Maybe what?” Kari demanded. “Maybe he’ll quit trying to pin it on me? Because that’s it, isn’t it? You’re not looking for the real culprit. You’re looking at me.”
“That’s not fair, Kari. I’m trying, and you’re not helping—”
She whirled around to face him, the spatula trailing a thin stream of molten sugar. “No, the way you want me to help is to point the finger at somebody—anybody—and heaven help them if they’re actually innocent—”
“What if they’re not? What if they intentionally burned your shop? What if you telling me how—why—you burned that other building can free me up to really help you—”
Suddenly out of the corner of his eye, Rob spotted a curl of smoke winding its way lazily toward the vent fan. “Hey—Kari—is that—”
But before he could utter the word fire, a bright orange flame sprang up, licking at the trail of sugar that had spilled from Kari’s spatula down the outside of the pot. He’d seen plenty of fire in his time, but the quickness of this fire still startled him. It was like an animal unleashed, jumping from unit to pot to sugar.
“Fire!” Kari screamed. Her face went white as she saw what Rob did, the flames leaping toward the vent fan in an oxygen-hungry quest for fuel.
A smoke detector somewhere deeper in the house blared out, joined by another one, this one screeching, “Fire, fire, fire, please evacuate now, fire, fire, fire—”
Rob reached for a pot lid to smother the flames, but before he could, he heard the unmistakable sound of a fire extinguisher being cocked. He turned to see Kari wielding the extinguisher, laying down enough foam on the stovetop to blanket the burning pot—and all of her baked goods cooling on it. He just managed to snatch the 13-layer cake out of the way before she aimed the extinguisher at it, as well.
He set the cake down in a perch of relative safety, turned back and grabbed Kari, putting a hand on the extinguisher. “Whoa! Kari! The fire’s out! See? Enough. It’s out, so you can stop.”
He tightened his grip and locked eyes with her. “It’s over. It’s done. You put it out.”
She looked wildly from first him to the ruined stove and then back at him. A pulse thrummed in the hollow of her throat, and she was shaking—hard shivers as though they were standing on a windswept glacier. “Are—are you sure?” Kari quavered.
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