by Lynn Red
“Hmm, I see,” Eve said slowly. “Well okay, I think I have everything I need. I’ll give you a call when I find a match.”
Almost like she was trying to hurry Rory out of the office, Eve stood up, tapped her stack of papers on the desk and smiled.
“Wait, I thought I was getting set up with that guy? The one that just left. I thought...?”
“Wrong is what you thought,” Eve snipped. “We don‘t do things like that around here. We’ve got processes and routines that we follow. That’s how you run a successful business and keep it going. You don’t let your secretary go out on a date and within the hour have the entire thing fall apart and go completely to hell!”
Eve was very obviously not having a good day. For a second, Rory watched the tiny, manic woman, wondering if she was about to crack up. “Is there... something I can do for you?” Rory finally asked. “It seems like you’re having a bad day to rival, I dunno, the day Napoleon had at Waterloo. Are you okay?”
“Yes! I’m fine! Does it look like I’m not?” Eve pushed her glasses up on her nose, and then shook her hair out. She had to push the glasses up a second time. “Uh... maybe I’m having a slightly tough time. You want to know the worst part?”
Rory shrugged. “If you want to tell me, I’m listening.”
“It’s only been an hour and a half since Dora left. If she knew how much of a mess I was, she’d never let me live it down. I might be good at what I do, but good lord am I terrible at keeping a business running.”
“Maybe you should tell her so,” Rory offered. “Let her know how much you appreciate her. God knows I could do more of that with Monte. So, anyway, I’ll catch you around?” Rory smiled courteously. “I think you’ll be fine, by the way. Just don’t let it get to you.”
“Don’t let it... get to me?” Eve asked her empty office as soon as the slightly puffy mink-shifting CSI worker hit the door. “How can I not let disorganization get to me? Or not having papers filed? Or not having... well, I guess those two things fit into the same category.”
She let out a long held puff of air. “I guess the first thing’s to get to work. Those two need to be together, and I have to stop pretending I can run my entire life on my own.”
Eve pushed her glasses up on her nose, let out a soft grunt, and stuck her fists into her lower back. “Maybe she’s right,” she said. “And maybe I do need to tell Dora how much she means to me. But for the time being, I just need to get these papers filed before I go insane. Insaner.”
She giggled at her horrible grammar, and sat down right in the middle of the floor, where the registration papers were, for some reason, piled. She pulled the pen out of her hair, and set to work. On Breaker’s paper, she wrote down his information, and then scribbled that she’d found someone for him, and would be pursuing the idea.
She took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled in a gust. She crossed out where she’d scribbled ‘mine’ and frowned. “Not my place,” she told herself. “Not mine, not now.”
Someday, it’ll be my turn, she thought. Someday the name on this line will be Yvette Lorraine, and it’ll be right. For now though, I do what I’ve always done. I find people, and I put them together. That’s MY life, that’s how I make the world better.
With a heavy sigh, Eve flipped through the pile of papers that flanked her on either side. One after another, as the hours ticked by, she nicked one and then the next from the list of possible mates for Breaker Hart. One of them was too worried about getting settled; the next concerned more with stability than being with someone like a firefighter. There was always a reason she could nix them from the list and move on to the next one.
Dora pushed open the door at quarter of four, and just stood there watching. As she finally made the decision to go and help her friend off the ground and to maybe start doing a little cleaning up, Eve wrote a name on Breaker’s line.
“You know,” she said, looking up at Dora, “I think you were right about that fate business. I still don’t believe in it at all, but sometimes it’s hard to take things and not think that maybe there’s more to life than what we see.”
She handed the paper to Dora. “You know the story here?”
The name on the line? Lorelei Roberts.
Dora took the paper, and watched as Eve went back to her office, shut the door, and collapsed into her chair.
4
“What the hell’s this?” Rory pulled a sticky cotton ball out of a test tube with a pair of tongs, stared at it for a second, and took a sniff. Whatever it was burned her nostrils and got her feeling a little loopy.
“Rocket fuel,” Monte said in his deadpan voice. “Try huffing more of it. I’ve been wanting to get rid of you and hire some college kid that’ll work for half your rate. If you die, I won’t have to figure out some reason to fire you.”
Rory coughed and frowned. “Didn’t smell like rocket fuel. Smells more like formaldehyde.”
Monte shrugged. “Take another sniff. Or hold a match up to it and see what happens.” He was hunched over a microscope, adjusting the slide with minute touches.
“How was your date?” she asked, out of nowhere, as she put her hair back in a reasonable lab-safe bun.
With a snort, and a jolt, Monte sat up stiffly. “My what? I, uh...”
“Really? You’re gonna act like a middle school kid whose mom just found a Playboy between his mattresses? I think it’s awesome. You’re a great guy, and Dora is—”
“Who?” Monte cut her off. “Date? Get back to work, Rory, you’re making me sound like a horny old man.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Nah, you’re just a dirty old scientist who isn’t that old. You’re all the same. Ever seen those things about Einstein hitting on his students at Princeton? Same thing, just... well, I won’t say less of a genius, but—”
“Get back to work,” he said. He tried to sound gruff and impatient, but she knew him well enough to recognize the little smile that twisted his voice. “If you get done with that analysis before I finish this one, I might even tell you about the date. It wasn’t a date,” he corrected himself. “It was just lunch.”
“Yeah, that lasted three and a half hours,” Rory said as she dropped the cotton ball back down the test tube, stuffing it to the bottom like she was loading a musket. “Sounds like a date to me,” she mumbled.
“What was that? Speak up!”
“Nothing, nothing,” Rory said. “I gotta get to work, quit distracting me!”
Monte grumbled, but he was still smiling. Somehow, going out with someone he was able to just sit and talk to—or more accurately, listen to—had made him feel ten years younger. And, what the hell? He was only forty after all. No reason for him to feel anything less than spry and vigorous. He had enough naps to justify all the vigor, anyway.
“Hey Monte?” Rory called a few seconds later. “I’ve got a crazy idea.” She had begun pulling fibers out of the cotton ball with her tweezers. “Do you think maybe it wasn’t some kind of accelerant in that house, but what the carpet was made of?”
“How do you mean?” he turned around on his stool and pushed his bifocals up on top of his head. “It had to be accelerant, there’s no way that house could have gone up like that unless it was either an electrical blowout that traveled through the walls or an accelerant had been placed. That’s assuming I believe you about it being arson, which I still don’t, by the way. Wait, where are you going?”
As he asked, Rory already had her purse, and was filling it with stuff from the lab. “What are you doing? You can’t take that stuff out of here, it might blow up!”
“How would that happen? I’m not gonna try to snuff out any cigarettes with it.”
“Well,” he paused for a second, “I don’t know. Just seems like the responsible thing to say. But what the hell are you doing?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But who would know more about starting fires than a fireman? If any of the things I’m th
inking make any sense in the real world, I know where I can get some answers.”
“Whoa, hold on just a second,” Monte said. “You can’t go to the scene, you know that. It’s taped off. The WCPD won’t let us lab rats in there without police escort.”
“But they always get in the way of the really good ideas,” Rory said. “Anyway, I’ll have an escort, just not police. And if what I’m thinking is true, it’ll prove one way or the other whether this really is just some freak electrical accident, or if there’s more to it.”
Monte screwed up his face, and then shrugged. “I’m not going to be able to stop you, am I?”
“Do you want to? You know you like how excited I get about this stuff. You see yourself in me, and wish you could still get so worked up over the minutiae of a case these days. You’re old, you know, and jaded. You’ve seen it all, but with me, you know I’m an eager greenhorn with moxie to spare and—”
“Lorelei?” he asked. He only used her full name when he was either being very serious, or acting like he was.
“Shut up?” she asked with a smirk.
“Yeah. Get out of here. Don’t break any laws that I wouldn’t have broken before I got jaded and cynical. And if you do, make sure you don’t leave a paper trail. Then again, I guess that’s why being a forensic investigator is a good thing. You know better than to leave paper trails.”
“Damn right I do, Skipper,” Rory said. She only called him Skipper when they were playing this weird game of back and forth repartee. “And don’t worry, when I get the medal of honor for solving this grand mystery, I’ll give you some credit. I’ll say you signed my reports and did it very quickly and efficiently. I’ll say I owe every ounce of my investigation to your excellent paper processing.”
“Lorelei?”
“Shut up?” she asked.
“Get out of here. And say hi to Breaker for me. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”
As though it was a second thought, she called back that she would as she humped it out of the door and back to the parking lot. The whole time, she might have been considering the different properties of accelerants upon various fabrics, but in the back of her mind? Yeah, she was pretty much just thinking about Breaker.
*
“You what?” Chief Daniels was hardly able to keep himself from snorting chili. “You actually went?”
“You know I went, Chief,” Breaker said. “You sent me. It’s not like I can just ignore an order.” The big bear smiled as he stuck a ladle-sized spoon in his mouth. “Ignoring my superiors will get me written up.”
“I just didn’t think you’d go through with it. You’re so serious all the time. I didn’t know you were even capable of relaxing long enough to have a date, much less deal with one of Eve’s legendary interviews.”
“There was this girl there,” Breaker said, his voice trailing away slightly, like he was remembering her. “She was... I dunno, it was weird. I only saw her for a couple of minutes while Eve was getting ready, but there was something about her.”
“Forget that right now,” Daniels said. “Eve never lets people pick their own dates. Lady has some kind of psycho-paranormal-psychic thing. She knows what she’s doing.”
“No, it’s not that,” Breaker said, “I’d never propose to go over her level of expertise and make a request. It’s just that when we got into things, I found myself describing that girl.” Captain Daniels just watched while his old friend rubbed his temples deeply with his thumbs. “It was the weirdest damn thing. I just couldn’t stop myself. Eve kept asking me what I saw in a mate for myself, what kind of woman I was looking for, that kind of thing.”
“You don’t know her, though. How could you be describing someone you don’t know?”
“I mean at first it was just physical traits. I described her sort of crinkly, ringlet, black hair. You know what? This is stupid. You’re just gonna use this to make fun of me next time we have a station party.”
Daniels chewed his chili slowly. “Why the hell would I do that? It isn’t even a funny joke. That’d be like someone at a roast of Dean Martin saying he was successful with women and very rich.” He stood up and mimed having a mic in his hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, our hero, our favorite fire bear, Breaker Hart. You know what he did? He got a date! Ha!” He sat down heavily. “See? Not much of a joke. I’d much rather make fun of you for snoring like a goddam lumber saw, or perhaps, for your penchant for hoarding comic books.”
As though he hadn’t heard any of that, Breaker just looked off in the distance. “What if I’m getting sick?”
“Huh?”
“You know how you hear about people getting all weird and lonely when they know they’re about to die? Maybe there’s an aneurysm building up in the back of my head so I’m just looking for someone so I don’t die alone.”
“You smell any burnt toast or almonds lately?” Daniels took another bite, and then wiped the red remains out of his mustache. “I hear that’s a good way to know about an impending aneurysm. If not, then I think you’re probably just lonely.”
After a slight break for grumbling, Breaker looked up from his chili. “You really think that?”
“How long did you spend yammering on and on about a family? At least ten minutes? Maybe twenty?”
Breaker looked back at his chili. “Yeah, well, that’s different. I always get a little maudlin after fires. And anyway, there was something weird about that one.”
“Weird?” Daniels seemed fairly happy to be talking about anything other than dating. He’d had a long streak of marital mistakes, so even though he was willing to chat about relationships from time to time, it wasn’t his favorite subject. “Looked like a normal electrical fire to me.”
“Yeah, but it looked too much like an electrical fire.”
“Oh great,” Daniels said with a sigh. “Time to break out the X-Files, huh? I’ll call the FBI.”
“Hell,” Breaker grunted. “No, I’m just saying. Electrical fires start from the middle of a house and go out.”
“Usually, that’s right,” Daniels said. “But they can sometimes go outside in, depends where the fuse box is. And anyway, the PD already has their forensics lab rats poking around into all that mess. It ain’t our problem anyway, they’re the ones with all the fancy machines and telescopes and whatever.”
“Telescope? What’s that going to do for an arson investigation?”
“Shit,” Daniels grunted, “I dunno, look in some attractive young mink-shifter’s window? That’d help me out of a whole lot of weird situations that I can’t exactly quantify. The fuse box on this house was outside. Old as hell building, too. Built in the 20s. You know as well as I do that if any place is an electrical fire waiting to happen, it’s right there. Quit looking for things that ain’t there, Breaker.”
“Breaker,” the big bear repeated. “Breaker... breaker...”
“Oh good, he’s going nuts. I’ll go get my white coat and butterfly net and—”
“Where were the breakers? Did anyone actually check the fuse box? Were they old breakers or new ones? If they were GFI and halfway recent, they wouldn’t have gone up like that. At the worst, you’d have one of them go and a real slow fire would start at one outlet, but that place went up. We got there... eight minutes? Nine minutes? After Angie called us from dispatch?”
“Sweet girl,” Daniels said. “Nice figure too.”
“Watch it, I know her mate,” Breaker said out the side of his mouth. “He might play the piano but he’s also about three times your size.”
The old Captain cracked a smile. “Yeah, yeah. I guess about eight, nine minutes. But that house was really going by then.”
“Right,” Breaker said. “If it was electrical, they had to have old breakers in the fuse box. Otherwise, it couldn’t have been.”
“Ah damn,” Daniels growled. “Why do you have to have a point? Wait, where the hell are you going?”
“To check the breaker. And anyway, I got off eight min
utes ago. I’m not on department time.”
“Yeah, but you’re about to break the law. Hell below, Breaker, what am I gonna do if you get arrested and suddenly I’m out of bears to break down doors? No pun intended. Or maybe it was. It’s hard not to pun your name.”
“I won’t,” he replied. “I’ll just say I lost something out there if anyone asks.”
“You really think that’ll work?” Daniels asked, curling the left corner of his lip up into a smile. “Like, really? Why not just take the thirty minutes to file a request and get an escort out there so you don’t get up to any drama?”
“Thirty minutes to file, maybe, a day more to get it back. I just have a hunch that needs checking. It won’t be any trouble anyway. With how few cops there are walking the White Creek beat?”
“Yeah, probably. Well, be careful either way.”
“I will boss,” Breaker said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
“Yeah, tell me if you get laid.”
Breaker grabbed the old, brass door handle and froze for a second, then turned around. “I will, boss,” he said with such intense gravitas that it could have sunk Atlantis. “I promise.”
*
“Hello? Who is this?” Rory prodded the screen of her phone. “Shit. Hello? Oh Goddam thing. Shit!” She swiped furiously at the phone. “Answer you stupid son of a bitch, answer!”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” It was a familiar voice, but the owner of it didn’t immediately spring to mind.
“Well, no, she and I have been on the outs for a pretty long time. Wait, you’re there?”
“Nothing gets past this one.”
“Eve?” she realized. “Is that you? Please tell me it’s you and not my aunt Vera or someone who is going to lecture me first about swearing and then my lapse in church-going. Right now I just can’t take that.”
Eve snorted, which gave her away. There are only so many owls in White Creek anyway, and that particular sort of inward laughing snort combination was particular to the species. Rory didn’t know any other owls, so that sort of narrowed it down. “I’m just worried you might need to go to some sort of anger management class before I feel safe matching you with someone. If you get that angry over a phone being a dick, I can’t imagine what you’re like if you get into it with a boyfriend.”