by Donn Taylor
Mara wrinkled her nose. “You saw that, too? I thought I must be the only one who noticed.”
“Children, you have much to learn,” Dr. Sheldon said. “Many faculty members would notice Brill’s antics, but they wouldn’t gossip about the wife of a rich trustee.”
“Okay,” I said, “what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. So we know Brill was an exotic dancer and probably a call girl before she married Drisko. Where does that get us?”
The doorbell rang.
Dr. Sheldon ignored it and said, “Nowhere in particular, I’m afraid. You said you made some phone calls this afternoon?”
The doorbell rang again.
“I called several people about Dustin Industries,” I said. “The first—”
The doorbell rang a third time.
Mara arose with an exasperated expression. “Since you two are so busily engaged, I suppose I’ll have to answer the door.” It occurred to me that this was a radical change from her desire not to be seen in my house.
“The first call was to Emory Estes,” I said. “He says he never heard of Dustin. The next call was to Drisko—”
“I might have known I’d find you here.” The angry feminine voice came from the front door. “Where is Press?”
Mara didn’t answer. High heels clicked on the hardwood floor, and Cynthia Starlington marched into the dinette. My internal musicians returned with a vengeance. No soft clarinet this time but the hoarse wail of a jazz saxophone.
“Where have you been, Preston Barclay?” Cynthia demanded. “I’ve been trying to phone you for two days, and you didn’t answer. This afternoon your line was always busy. And you don’t even have voice mail. That’s not only rude, it’s … it’s Neanderthal.”
I hadn’t seen this side of Cynthia before, but it matched with the temper fit she’d pitched at Mitra Fortier.
“I plead guilty on both counts,” I said. “I’ve been out of town.”
“I don’t have to ask who you were with.” Cynthia threw an angry glance at Mara, who quietly slid into the chair she’d occupied before. Cynthia’s left hand held something hidden behind her.
“So it’s true,” Cynthia said, blinking away tears and gesturing with her free hand. “Everything they’ve been saying about you is true.”
“What’s true, Cynthia?” I asked. I knew what she meant, but I wasn’t about to admit it.
Her eyes blazed dark fire. “Those stories about you and Professor Fortier and this ... this blonde Wiccan.”
“Former Wiccan,” I said. “There’s no truth—”
“How could you?” Cynthia stamped her high-heeled foot and waved the free hand again, the other still hidden behind her. “How could you make those promises to me while you were carrying on with those other two women?”
My mouth hung open. “What promises? All I promised was that I’d look into Mitra’s death. Look into it, not—”
“I started calling you yesterday before I heard about those ... those disgraceful affairs. All I wanted was to give you this.” The left hand came out from behind her back and threw a soft object onto the table.
It was a long-sleeved shirt, the kind to be worn with the collar open. It was ornate with orange palm fronds on a background of deep blue, a far more expensive garment than I’d ever worn. It fit my personality like a boxing glove fits an earthworm.
Cynthia’s voice became an angry sob. “I wanted to get you out of those grubby old suits so you could relax and not be so stodgy. I wanted to bring you into the twenty-first century—nobody teaches in a coat and tie anymore.”
All three of us sat staring at her. I think my mouth still hung open, but I’m not sure.
Cynthia stamped her foot again. “I wanted to do so much for you, Press. You could have retired from teaching and devoted yourself to scholarship. You could have become anything we wanted you to. And I told you ... confidences ... things I wouldn’t share with anyone else ... because I believed in you. And all the time you were playing me double with this …”
She gestured toward Mara. “With this—”
I will never know what her next word would have been.
For that was when the house blew up.
CHAPTER 36
An explosion shook the house. Two more followed. Cynthia put her hands to her head and screamed. Even in the midst of shock, the old Special Forces part of me knew they were incendiaries, not high explosive. At the rear of the house, fire blazed into instant inferno. But I’d heard three explosions, one on each side plus one in the rear. That left the front as our only way out. The walls of our interior dinette would shield us momentarily, but we had only seconds to escape.
My Special Forces training took over in earnest. I seized the screaming Cynthia by the shoulders, aimed her at the front door, and shouted, “Run!”
She did not move. Flames leaped toward us from the back of the house. Heat closed in on either side like an oven in hell.
I pushed Cynthia toward the front door and applied a resounding slap to her derriere.
That time it took. She ran screaming for the front door. I turned to Dr. Sheldon, knowing too well that the flames would soon suck all the oxygen out of the air.
“Hold your breath,” I shouted.
“Get Mara out of here,” he commanded. “Don’t waste time on me.”
Even in this crisis, I remembered he was more accustomed to giving orders than to following them.
Mara stood beside him with his computer tucked under her arm, watching me for a signal. I scooped the protesting Dr. Sheldon up from his wheelchair and ran for the front door. The moment we moved into the blazing living room, heat attacked viciously from all sides. I held my breath and ran, wondering how I’d open the front doors with my arms full of Dr. Sheldon. Smoke filled my eyes with tears. Through the blur I saw Faith’s Steinway burst into flames. I stumbled on something, kicked it aside, and saw it was a high-heeled shoe, evidence that Cynthia had fled in total panic.
I need not have worried about the doors. The main door stood wide open where Cynthia had left it, and the storm door had locked where she must have flung it into the full open position. I charged through and instantly felt relief on my face and sides, for now the heat burned only the back of my ears and neck. I ran for Mara’s car, which was still parked at the curb. As I neared it, the door locks released with a click. Dr. Sheldon reached down and opened the car door, and I deposited him in the passenger seat.
I had a fleeting impression of Cynthia’s Lexus disappearing two blocks down the street, but I had no time to think about it. We had to get Mara’s car away before the fire spread to it.
Dr. Sheldon pointed behind me and shouted one word, “Mara.”
I turned, ready to dash back into the house for her but dreading the near-certain death I would suffer. Then Dr. Sheldon’s wheelchair catapulted into my shins. Mara came close behind, car keys in hand and her arms full of topcoats and Dr. Sheldon’s computer. I should have known it was she who unlocked the car. I opened the car’s rear door. Mara threw the coats on the back seat and eased the computer in under them, then ran to the driver’s door. As she did, I folded the wheelchair and plopped it onto the floor behind Dr. Sheldon’s seat. I slammed the door shut as Mara drove the car out of harm’s way.
The heat at my back had grown intolerable. I sprinted away from my house, now all ablaze except for the front wall. Only when the heat grew less did I stop and look back. My neighbors were already in the street, those from next door in obvious distress for their own homes.
One neighbor ran up to me and said, “I called the fire department, Press. What on earth did you do to set that off?”
“Someone firebombed it,” I said.
He ran back into the crowd as if he thought my body itself might erupt in flames. Sirens and horns of fire trucks sounded in the distance.
“Make way here!” Dr. Sheldon’s booming voice announced his return. The crowd made way for his wheelchair.
Mara followed close behind
. “Here,” she said, handing me my topcoat.
For the first time, I realized the midwinter cold was freezing my back while the fire still threatened to scorch the front. Mara and Dr. Sheldon had donned their coats. But none of us had hats or gloves.
Thus far I’d been acting on reflex, but now my mind began to awaken. We’d been firebombed on three sides, but not on the fourth. Only now I remembered an old guerrilla trick—confront the enemy on three sides but leave an apparent escape route on the fourth. Then shoot him down as he attempted to flee. The arsonist’s obvious intent had been to kill us, yet we hadn’t been shot as we escaped. Something about this didn’t ring true. I searched for it in vain.
The first fire truck roared onto the scene, horn blaring. As it did, the thought I’d been searching for clicked into place. I ran to meet the truck and seized the first fireman as he dismounted.
“Firebombs on three sides of the house,” I shouted, “but none in the front. There has to be a fourth.”
His face showed his unbelief. He pointed toward the crowd and ordered, “Get back over there.”
Even as he spoke, the fourth firebomb exploded. Flames leaped up to engulf the front wall of the house. The skepticism on the fireman’s face dissolved into surprise, quickly replaced by a grim set of jaw. He gave me a push toward the crowd, then directed his crew toward preventing the fire’s spread to neighboring houses. Mine was obviously lost.
From that point, the evening grew jumbled. I remember sitting on the curb several doors down from the fire, Mara beside me and Dr. Sheldon in his chair nearby as I watched twenty years of memories go up in flames. Only then did deep sorrow strike home. That house held everything I had left of my life with Faith and with Cindy’s growing-up years. All I had now were the clothes on my back and (thanks to Manny Clampett) the little voice recorder in my pocket.
I remember being glad Cindy had moved most of her things to her apartment near the university. I dreaded having to tell her why our home had gone up in flames: Once too often, I’d stepped on the wrong toes.
Emergency medical personnel arrived and checked the three of us for possible injuries. They only found the equivalent of moderate sunburn, so they gave us a useless referral for psychological counseling and retreated to the vicinity of the fire trucks.
The head fireman questioned us separately about how the fire started. We must have told the same story because his only follow-up question was why anyone would want to kill me. I could only shrug. I didn’t understand it myself. All I knew was that I’d made someone very, very angry. But I was no closer to knowing who that someone was than I’d been a week ago.
When the fireman finished with me, I returned to my place on the curb by Mara and Dr. Sheldon. Mara surprised me by slipping her arm in mine. Apparently, sympathy overrode her abhorrence of touching.
My neighbors stood in groups, muttering and casting disapproving glances in my direction. Apparently, I would become the neighborhood pariah as well as the campus pariah. The firemen had saved the homes adjacent to mine, though paint on both houses had blistered.
From my position on the curb, I watched walls and roof collapse into the house that had been my home for more than twenty years. Their collapse brought deeper depression than I had ever felt, aggravated by the bitterness of failure. I had made no significant progress toward solving Mitra’s and Jerry’s murders, I’d found no usable evidence toward disproving the false rumors about me or the false accusation against Mara, and I had no idea how to go about saving my job. It looked like everything I valued in life had come to an end.
As if to taunt me, my internal pianist played that haunting melody from the movie Enchantment—the one that distracted me during the faculty meeting. As before, the piano began softly, high on the keyboard, and I recognized Faith’s inimitable touch on the Steinway that no longer existed. In memory I relived the intimate times she’d sent that melody to call me for an embrace. My internal orchestra picked up the theme with strings and flutes, and it seemed I could hear Faith’s voice singing her version of the words:
I’ll live for a soldier
And follow my love.
As suddenly as it began, the music stopped and left me sitting on the curb staring at the smoldering ruins of our house, the ashes of Faith’s Steinway among them, now forever silent. The winter wind off the plains chilled my ears and my hatless head. I pulled my coat collar closer about my neck and put my gloveless hands in the pockets.
Then I remembered the only other time a theme from a movie had possessed me in a faculty meeting. It happened last fall and repeated itself later when Mara and I were in desperate straits. That repetition had triggered my memory of a single sentence I’d heard in the faculty meeting, and that sentence proved the key to solving the Laila Sloan murder. Since then I’d often wondered if the memory trigger was a gift of Providence.
Hopeful now, I searched my memory for the first thing I’d heard after this present melody possessed me during the faculty meeting.
I came up empty.
I remembered words and phrases from the meeting but nothing I could connect to anything learned in my investigation. My prime suspects were trustees who were not present at that meeting, so how could that melody point toward one of them?
My hopes dissolved into the atmosphere like smoke from the smoldering ruins of my house, and my depression grew more bitter. If, as Pastor Tammons said, God was continuously working in this world, He must be working somewhere else. I was not angry with God. Only skeptical. Then as I stared at the ashes, anger came. But not with God. I felt a deep, burning anger against my unseen enemies. But I had no idea who those enemies were. So my anger soured into frustration and then into even deeper despair.
“Come with me, Press,” Mara said, her voice resonant with the soft melody of her Kentucky upbringing. “I have to take Dr. Sheldon home. Then we have to find you a place to stay, and we have to get you a hat and gloves before you catch pneumonia.”
I said nothing. I was too busy drowning in despair. Mara’s arm linked in mine and the touch of her shoulder should have brought reassurance, but in my despair I was hardly conscious of them.
Mara tugged on my arm. “We have to get moving, Press.”
I tugged back. “It’s no use. I’ll just stay here.” How dare she interrupt my despair! Everything meaningful in my life was ended.
Then her cell phone rang.
Mara answered, but her words flowed past me like unknown words in a foreign tongue. Then she shook my shoulder and handed me the phone.
“Take the call, Press. It’s Leonard Morley.”
I took the phone and muttered a dull hello.
“I’m sorry about your house,” Len said, “but the fact that someone firebombed it means you’ve got your teeth into something big. I think I know what it is.”
“Then tell the police,” I said. “I’m beaten.”
“All right. Then quit.” Len’s voice reverted to his Infantry colonel days. “You’re within sight of the finish line, but quit if you want to. There doesn’t seem to be much of Special Forces left in you.”
My anger boiled up, but curiosity also stirred. “What’s this ‘finish line’ bit? What have you learned?”
“That’s more like it,” Len said. “I’ve finished tracing the Dustin Industries outfit. I thought the Caymans ownership was a dead end, but I pulled some strings and found out the Caymans company is owned by an outfit in Toronto.”
“How does that help?” I asked.
Len ignored the question. “Here’s what I think is happening. Some corporation—call it Company A—lands a juicy cost-plus contract from the Defense Department. So Company A puts out bids for subcontracts. Company B submits the low bid on one of them, but it doesn’t win. Dustin Industries wins that subcontract with a substantially higher bid. Then Dustin turns around and subcontracts the job in toto to that same Company B for its original low bid. So for doing nothing but paperwork, Dustin makes a handsome profit at the expense of Am
erican taxpayers.”
My interest quickened. “Wouldn’t Company B blow the whistle?”
Len sputtered a few times, then said, “Some companies would and some wouldn’t. But there are plenty who’d just shrug and take the money.”
“So who is the ‘Company A’ that’s getting the original contracts?” “I’d have to see the contracts to be sure, but tracing the ownership to that company in Toronto gives me a pretty good idea.”
“How is that?” I asked.
Len chuckled. “The company in Toronto is owned by two men. One of them I never heard of, a guy named Guido Stefano.”
I’d heard that name recently, but I couldn’t place it. “And the other man?”
“You know him well.”
Len actually laughed.
“It’s your good friend Steven Drisko.”
CHAPTER 37
I rang off and sat staring into space, trying to work out what that information meant. As the flames of my home dwindled into smoldering embers, the winter cold gave my ears and back of my neck a burning sensation.
Mara shook my shoulder and gave me an anxious glance. “What was it, Press?”
“Later,” I said. “Right now, we have to get Dr. Sheldon out of the cold.” I’d just seen him shiver. One side of his face looked like a good case of sunburn, and it must have felt as sensitive as my ears. We got off easy. If that fourth bomb had gone off on time we’d have been too well-done for a starving cannibal to stomach.
We wheeled Dr. Sheldon around the corner to Mara’s car. We settled him into the passenger seat while I took the back. Mara turned the heater on. Strange contrasts—running out of the burning house, I’d have traded both ears and one eye for the winter cold. But with the wind off the plains gnawing at my flesh, I’d have done the same for more heat. Mara’s car heater provided a comfortable compromise.
“All right, Press.” Dr. Sheldon turned in the passenger seat and spoke to me. “What did you learn?”