Fire Raiser

by Melanie Rawn

  Fifteen minutes later, Evan was surveying the last smoke rising from the Pocahontas County Lutheran Church. Holly stood nearby, sneezing quietly into her coat sleeve. Jamey Stirling had been there to meet them, having been in his courthouse office when the fire department got the call and sent the engine. “Shit,” was all he’d said.

  This fire totally screwed any tentative theories about the targets being only Baptist churches. The only upside was that this one had been spotted early, and the damage was confined to a closet where the vestments were kept. When the fire chief gave them the okay, they poked around a bit by flashlight, then decided to tape it all off and wait for morning. Evan sternly forbade himself to think about the klieg lights and crime scene unit and dozen officers looking for witnesses that he would have had at his disposal in New York.

  “Nothing?” Holly asked when the two men trudged back to the Beemer.

  “Nothing,” Jamey confirmed. “Less than nothing. If there’s a quantifiable amount that’s less than less than nothing, this is it.”

  “I’m really starting to get pissed off,” Evan remarked. “Getting pissed off is bad for my blood pressure.”

  “Come home with us, Jamey, have a Scotch, and we’ll talk about it,” Holly said. “Did you get dinner? I can make you a sandwich—”

  “Make your own sandwich,” Evan advised the young man. “Trust me on this one, Jamey.”

  A little while later—Evan having firmly replaced the flasher beneath the seat, telling Holly that she’d had her fun for the night driving really, really fast—he canted a curious glance at her. “Come home with us? Make him a sandwich? Is it middle age, motherhood, or frustration about not having a book to write that’s making you so domestic these days?”

  “Maybe I just like checking out Jamey’s ass.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He settled back in the seat, waiting. Sure enough, not two miles had gone by before she squirmed and glanced over at him. “What?” he asked innocently.

  “Are you trying to prove how unjealous you can be?”

  “Were you trying to provoke me into being jealous?”

  All at once she laughed and leaned over to rumple his hair. “Point taken, lover man.”

  Five

  LACHLAN ESCORTED LOUVENA COX into the ballroom, beckoned to the nearest waiter bearing champagne, and left her happily in possession of a bottle of Korbel while he sought out his host. He’d met Bernhardt Weiss four times, and liked him about as much as he liked Westmoreland.

  The first time had been right after the purchase of the property, and Weiss, with a thoughtful regard for decorum, had stopped by on his round of county officials to introduce himself. Jesse McNichol had still been sheriff back then, so Lachlan just sat back and watched, drinking coffee and nodding every so often, as Cousin Jesse made nice. A few words had been said about New York, and a few more words about Evan’s lovely and talented wife, and then the man departed.

  The second time was in Flynton, just outside the bank. Lachlan had been called out on a domestic disturbance—this was before the county in general had developed sufficient understanding of his attitude toward spouses who hit each other and parents who hit their children—and was coming out of the Dairy Queen with a cold soda that he wished was a jigger of single malt so he could get the taste out of his mouth. Weiss was getting out of his Mercedes and ten or so of his employees were getting out of the Westmoreland courtesy van. Upon seeing Evan, Weiss had paused while his workers entered the bank. A brief conversation about the virtues of saving one’s wages and the advisability of shopping around for interest rates ensued. Evan then excused himself to take Polly Henderson to the county lockup for attempting to carve her husband a new one, and the whole drive kept asking himself just what it was about Weiss that raised his hackles. It wasn’t as if the man had a comic-opera German accent, a monocle, military bearing complete with heel-clicks, or the blue-eyed-blond Aryan look about him. He was pleasantly spoken, polite, handsome enough in a thin-nosed, sharp-cheekboned way, and seemed genuinely charmed by rural America.

  The grand opening of Westmoreland in November 2004 was the third time Lachlan had encountered him. Holly and Lulah were introduced, hands were shaken, and that was it—except that Lachlan felt like he needed a shower.

  The fourth time had been in the Sheriff’s Office again, the day after the fire at the Lutheran church—which was, in fact, the church Weiss himself attended. After a reasonably subtle but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to learn what Evan knew about the arson, Weiss had issued a personal invitation to the Lachlans to be his guests at the Westmoreland luncheon buffet the following Saturday. Evan declined with a polite smile; they were already engaged, but thanks very much, and so forth. Weiss accepted defeat on all counts and left.

  Before Evan could find his host this evening, he caught sight of Holly. She had paused in the ballroom doorway, scanning the crowd. He was the one she was looking for, no doubt of it. He smiled as she found him, both smug and grateful, because he was the only one who could put this look onto her face. To use an old-fashioned phrase, she prided him. She did him honor.

  As she approached, he took in the latest version of her Candidate’s Wife look. Denim skirt, sort of a dark butterscotch color, off-white silk shirt, and dark green corduroy jacket: sleek, classic, and modest, until your eyes got to the hem of her skirt and followed the legs down to the Fuck Me shoes. As he dragged his gaze back up—was it okay to ogle one’s own wife in public?—he noted the usual ensemble of jewelry: engagement and wedding rings, signet ring, and Susannah’s diamond bracelet, augmented tonight with small hoop earrings and the Fortis et Fidus castle-and-crown brooch at her lapel. As she took his arm and leaned up for a kiss he murmured, “The Lachlan crest on your hand, the Lachlan badge on your jacket—what, the Lachlan hunting tartan’s in the laundry?”

  Her tongue flicked out to lick his upper lip before she drew back and smiled her sweetest. “I’m making sure everybody knows who I belong to, O Light of My Life.”

  “Remind me to have your clan badge tattooed on my—Evening, Judge Schaefer,” he said hastily.

  “Nice to see you, Evan. Holly, you’re looking as stunning as ever. How are the twins?”

  “Rambunctious,” she said. “And don’t think you can sweet-talk me into believing you really want to hear about the rug rats, Your Honor—I know very well you’re hiding from Dulcie Whittaker.”

  The judge pulled a mournful face. “I see the good counselor quite often enough in my courtroom, thanks. I swear to you, Holly, two minutes into that woman’s opening statements, I expect the CSI crew to come in and lay down the chalk outline around the whole jury.”

  The schmoozing went like that for about twenty minutes as Holly and Evan worked the room. At last she dug her fingers into his arm and whispered, “If you don’t get me ice and vodka—mainly vodka—within the next ninety seconds, I’m going to tell them all the truth about you.”

  “But there are so many truths to choose from,” he murmured.

  “Indeed there are.”

  Evan considered. “Ice,” he said. “Vodka. Got it.”

  The regular staff at Westmoreland—almost all Europeans—had been given the night off. Serving the assembled locals were other locals who had volunteered their time, for tonight was not just a political grip-and-grin, but a benefit for the churches destroyed by fire and the charity that assisted victims of trafficking. Some of the wait staff circulated with bottles and glasses of specific liquors and soft drinks; others were behind the bar. Lachlan gave up trying to find somebody with a tray of iced vodka, and approached the gorgeous thirty-foot polished oak bar.

  Along the way he heard snatches of various conversations. Only a few of them were ordinary, everyday, how’s-the-wife, enjoy-your-vacation, fine-apple-crop-this-year chats. The good citizens of Pocahontas County were by and large a politically inclined lot, relishing the opportunity to get together and discuss anything and everything. Tonight, as he nodded and smiled at his constituents, Evan
made copious notes-to-self about people to keep his wife away from at this party.

  “—a big place, and most of it is sand. You don’t think there are plenty of places to hide WMDs where not even the United States Army could find them?”

  “—five deferments! Five! And as for his sidekick in the Oval Office—I don’t know about you, but I just feel so much better in retrospect that Dubya was in the National Guard, flying sorties to make sure the Viet Cong didn’t invade Boca Raton.”

  “Traditional marriage? Oh, c’mon, honey. Traditionally, marriage was between one man and as many women as he could afford.”

  “—mark my words, in 2006, the Democrats are gonna be the party nobody wants to go to!”

  “—Coulter? Oh, you mean the Paris Hilton of the neo-cons?”

  “—ask me, that man is living proof that evolution doesn’t exist and ‘intelligent design’ never got off the ground—”

  “—we can’t just cut and run—”

  “—determined on adherence to Levitcal law in the Old Testament, you might want to get rid of that bacon-wrapped shrimp on your plate. Double treyf.”

  “—beg your pardon! ‘Mormon’ and ‘archaeology’ are not mutually exclusive terms!”

  “—gettin’ sick breathin’ the formaldehyde in those FEMA trailers down in Louisiana—the Katrina victims have been gettin’ screwed for a solid year now, and—”

  “—administration isn’t muzzling scientists! Global warming was invented by Al Gore—”

  Definitely keeping Holly away from that one, Lachlan told himself. First on the list, of course, was anything to do with Iraq. Should she happen to be feeling mellow, she’d enter into a reasoned discussion. If not, she might do anything from give a ten-minute lecture on precisely why the entire Bush Administration ought to be horsewhipped by somebody who knew how, to merely singing a Vietnam-era protest song under her breath, usually “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore.”

  One might have assumed that because her husband was running for office, she would tone it down. The noteworthy thing about PoCo was that everybody knew what everybody else thought about everything, and anybody who backpedaled or prevaricated in the interests of winning votes was looked on with what had to be the prototype of the term withering contempt. They liked a good debate, these folks. They considered, rightly so, that the bizness of the USA was their bizness, and had been since the very beginning—certainly since long before independence from Great Britain was even a gleam in John Adams’s eye. And they’d kept on arguing through all the issues of war, society, law, politics, ethics, and religion that had come up ever since.

  Only in matters of race had violence occurred. In this, the county was truly Southern. There had been murders before the Civil War, and lynchings during Reconstruction, and the resurgence of the Klan in the ’20s had intensified the nightmare. The last act of race-related violence had been almost forty years ago: the murder of Holly’s parents on their way back from an NAACP meeting. This had shocked the entire community so profoundly that when the Klan abandoned Pocahontas County, nobody mentioned how odd it was that some of the families had been residents for generations. As for how many people knew the departure had been prompted by magic . . . who could say?

  “It was Holly’s Aunt Lizza,” Lulah had explained. “She was that good—and that heartbroke over her sister’s death. She didn’t care if Mr. Scott took her Measure and then shredded it to bits right in front of her. We couldn’t any of us figure out what was goin’ on, until one day Griff found her collapsed on the kitchen floor. When she came to, first thing she did was start reweaving—Clary Sage had to knock her out with things you don’t want to know about. We all got together and discussed it, and decided if somebody wanted to punish us for usin’ magic against these people, so be it. And we finished off what Lizza had started. Hexes, spells, blights and blastings, all sorts of things nobody suspected the girl had in her. She nearly wrecked her health, physical and magical. But one by one the Klan members sold up and left. There was an investigation, of course, but we had precedent—I ever tell you about what a McNichol did to a slavecatcher way back when? Anyhow, Mr. Scott came in to have a look—he was short on deputies like Alec and Nicholas at the time, so he investigated us himself. He wrote the whole thing off as not quite kosher, but none of us had profited materially or magically, so he let us be. Lizza was sick for almost a year after—and much as she wanted to, there wasn’t any chance of her bein’ able to take care of her sister’s child. So Griff took her to California, and I took Holly to raise. And we never from that day had another whisper of trouble. We had equal justice, and we had peace. My brother and Marget bought it with their lives.”

  Forty years later, the Westmoreland Inn was hosting a county gathering that featured every possible shade of human skin. If anybody had a problem with it, they kept it to themselves. But Lachlan was pretty sure nobody had problems. It reminded him of something he’d sensed when Holly had taken him to a couple of Civil War battlefields during their first spring at Woodhush: it was as if all the violence and hatred and bitterness that could possibly exist in that particular piece of land had simply exhausted itself. Nothing was left but quiet, and a certain weariness—and the grass, doing its work, just as Sandburg had written. Evan had tried to explain what he’d felt on the drive home; Holly had given him an odd look, then patted the growing curve of her belly and said, “Daddy is a very wise man, did you know that?”

  Lachlan considered that Elizabeth Amarantha Flynn Griffen had been the general on that particular battlefield, with her rage and her grief as artillery. And after she’d won, Pocahontas County had been left in peace.

  At the bar, he smiled at the blonde who usually worked the counter at her family’s restaurant over in Prince Rupert, and asked for, “One large glass, two ice cubes, and the rest vodka.”

  “—Jerusalem artichokes are perfect. Has to be a hundred and ninety proof or it won’t do the job. Then—”

  Evan turned his head and smiled. “Jerusalem artichokes, huh, Rocky? Quite a change from corn mash.”

  There was a saying about the various nationalities that had settled Appalachia: the English came and built a house, the Germans came and built a barn, but the first thing the Irish did was build a still. Rocky Mc-Dermid and Jordy Conleth were just doing what came natural.

  Rocky’s big hand wrapped itself around a brown bottle of beer. “How ya doin’, Sheriff? Me and Jordy were just talkin’ about convertin’.”

  Jordy nodded. “With gas prices what they are . . .”

  Evan nodded thoughtfully. When Bush took office, gas had been about a buck-fifty a gallon. “There’s more money in selling something to pour in your car, instead of down your throat?”

  “That’s the long and the short of it, Sheriff.”

  If two of the most notorious moonshiners in the county—now that the Widow Farnsworth had gone to her reward—were teaming up to produce ethanol, three hundred years of family tradition had just keeled over with a thud, dead in the dust. Evan said, “Let me know how it works out. Maybe the county would be interested in switching its vehicles over. Thanks, Laura,” he said as the bartender slid the very full glass over to him. So full, in fact, that he had to lean down and slurp a little before picking it up.

  “I thought that was for Holly,” Laura asked innocently.

  “Which is why you filled it to the brim,” he countered. “She tips pretty good when she’s had a few—” Whatever else he might have said was muffled by the pimentoed olive she stuffed into his mouth. “Smartass kid,” he mumbled around it, and went to find his wife.

  Along the way, he kept hearing bits of conversation and hoped everybody was getting all their squabbles out of the way before the liquor had a chance to soak in.

  “Cheney can hold a meeting so secret even he doesn’t know about it—”

  “—Clinton handed Bush a healthy economy. The way things are heading, Bush is gonna hand over a pawn ticket written in Chinese.
”

  “—kidding me? Hubbard was the most successful con artist since Joseph Smith with the golden plates!”

  Well, soak into everybody but the Mormons, the teetotal variety of Baptists, and the recovering alcoholics in the crowd, anyway. A surfeit of juleps, martinis, or beer was the only thing in his experience that could turn the stately dance of Southern manners into a lurching verbal free-for-all. But it wasn’t entirely his problem tonight; Bernhardt Weiss had security guys. Lachlan had met them when they registered their guns. He hadn’t much liked them, either.

  He could see Holly’s russet hair over by the verandah doors, then got stuck in traffic. He heard Lexine Kimball’s earnest voice say, “You take care of Mother Earth so that Mother Earth will take care of you? That sounds suspiciously Pagan. It worships the creation instead of the Creator. We were given dominion over—”

  “What is this, a starter planet? Fouling our own nest can’t be what God had in mind.”

  “Earth is temporary. Science says that the sun will eventually swell up and fry everything out to the orbit of Mars. Just as prophesied in Second Peter: ‘But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.’ There’s another and better home waiting for us in the eternal heavens.”

  Evan heroically refrained from rolling his eyes toward the promised celestial abode. Lexine’s retirement plan was called The Rapture. She was more industrious about signing people up than an insurance agent with a monthly quota to fill.

  “—European Union and a reunified Germany sounds like prophecy about the ‘revived’ Roman Empire that’ll hold power before Christ’s return, so can the End Times really be that far off?”