“I just got the package yesterday,” Jack was saying. “I thought you’d fixed that crazy mailing list of yours and finally got my address right, but it was still messed up—so it went across town from your office to mine via our warehouse in Omaha. Of course, they’re getting used to it out there and they know where to find me, but still—”
Emily enthused over the dress and said she couldn’t wait to see it. “But what I really want to know, Morganna, is what you’re planning to donate for the auction at the ball.”
At the moment, Morganna couldn’t care less. “Just a miniature room.”
“Well, of course it’s a miniature room,” Emily said. “That’s what you always do. But what’s the theme? I promise not to tell anyone. I think it would be hard to top last year’s, myself. That was the dreamiest, sexiest boudoir outside of a fairy princess’ castle.”
“Auction?” Sloan asked. “Nobody told me anything about an auction. If I’m supposed to stand up in front of a crowd and yodel prices—”
“Don’t panic,” Emily told him. “The hosts don’t have to act as auctioneers, it’s completely silent. The money we raise benefits the homeless shelter downtown, and we bring in a good bit—probably because people are feeling just a little guilty about what they’ve spent on sheer entertainment for the evening.”
“Entertainment being a relative term,” Jack said under his breath.
Sloan was laughing when a soft buzz from his coat pocket interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said and pulled out his cell phone as he moved away from the table.
Morganna heard him say, “Joel? Hang on a minute while I get out of a crowded restaurant. What do you mean, it can’t wait?” He stopped in midstep just a couple of yards from the table and went completely silent.
Emily had returned to the question of Morganna’s new miniature project. “I bet it’s not a bedroom,” she said. “That would be too much like the boudoir. Is it even something from a home, or have you finally created the antique shop you said you’ve always wanted to do?”
Sloan slapped the telephone’s antenna back into its slot. “Sorry,” he said, his gaze on Morganna. “Joel’s over at the factory, and something’s wrong. I’m going over. Jack—”
Jack Hamilton got to his feet. “Need a backup, buddy?”
Sloan shook his head. His voice dropped, but Morganna, who was sitting closest, caught part of what he said. “When he pulled up…someone running from the building…thought it was…guys I fired today…”
Jack lifted an eyebrow. “Sure you don’t need a hand?”
“No, it’s probably nothing. Stay and entertain the ladies. In case I do get tied up, will you see Morganna and Abigail home?”
“My pleasure,” Jack said lazily. “How often does a fellow get left with three lovely ladies concentrating only on him?” He pulled out his chair. “Another glass of wine, anyone?”
Morganna wasn’t listening. She was trying to remember exactly what Sloan had told Jack earlier about the employees he’d fired. Fragments of the conversation drifted back into her mind, and she wished she’d been listening more closely.
Despite Joel’s apparent panic, she told herself, Sloan was no doubt right—this was probably nothing. Of course, he was obliged to take any kind of threat to his business very seriously. But Joel tended to be a worrywart, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d interrupted Sloan’s leisure with something that had turned out to be completely unimportant. Obviously Sloan had remembered that, too. If he’d been truly concerned, surely he’d have called for help, or asked Jack to go with him.
And yet she’d watched him stride across the restaurant—and though he would never have been so rude as to push people out of his way, there had been something in the way he walked which told her he was in enough of a hurry that he’d like to.
It was so hard to keep her mind off what might be going on just a few blocks away at Sticks & Stones that despite her best intentions of keeping her project secret until the auction, she found herself describing the room-box she was building to Emily. “A little boy’s room,” she said, “completely done in a circus motif. The bed looks like a lion cage on wheels, and there’s a music box shaped like a carousel that’s less than an inch high and plays that wonderfully tinny music from the circus carnival.”
Emily sighed. “I may have to buy this room.”
“You already have two of Morganna’s creations,” Jack pointed out.
“Not like this one.”
Morganna laughed. “Come over for dessert and take a look. Maybe you’ll be lucky, Jack, and she’ll hate it.”
“Or unlucky and she’ll insist on building a full-size room onto our house to hold your miniature ones. I know which way I’m betting. But let’s go find out,” Jack said.
Only then did Morganna realize that she had finished her steak without noticing. The table had been cleared; the coffee cups were empty.
And Sloan had not come back.
While he waited for his car to be brought around, and while he drove the few blocks from the restaurant to Sticks & Stones, Sloan reminded himself of the many times Joel had believed he’d discovered something that required the immediate attention of the boss. Nearly all of them had turned out to be nothing.
It was a shame, Sloan thought, but the fact was that the very qualities which made Joel an invaluable second in command—his attention to detail, his unwillingness to overstep the authority he’d been assigned—were the same things that made it almost impossible that he would ever rise above his current position.
Still, this time there had been a note in Joel’s voice that Sloan had never heard there before. What he had seen had scared him, and badly. The man had sounded as if anxiety had crushed his chest till he couldn’t get a full breath. And Sloan had to admit, if Joel had indeed seen a pair of recently terminated employees running away from the building, obviously anxious to evade questions, he had good reason for anxiety.
Sloan approached the factory from the back and drove slowly around the block, checking the outside of the building. But he saw nothing unusual, nothing out of place. He noticed that Joel’s car was parked well out of the way, half a block down from the factory and across the street—where he would be close enough to observe the front of the building, but far enough away that anyone who was up to mischief probably wouldn’t spot him. The car, however, was deserted.
Sloan parked his Jaguar behind Joel’s car and started up the street. A flutter from the vacant lot across from the factory caught his attention. During the summer a homeless man had taken up residence on the corner of the lot, behind a sagging picket fence, and resisted all efforts to move him to more appropriate housing. But Sloan hadn’t seen him lately; with the weather cooling off, perhaps he’d given in to necessity and gone to a shelter. Which meant that whatever was moving in that vacant lot wasn’t necessarily innocent.
But when Sloan checked, the vagrant’s spot was empty, without so much as a soda can left behind, and the movement he’d seen turned out to be only a scrap of paper caught in a rogue breeze.
But of course whoever Joel had seen would be long gone by now.
Joel himself was still nowhere to be found. He must have gone inside—but why? What had made him disregard the orders he’d been given to wait for his boss on the sidewalk?
And now what was Sloan to do? He could hardly stroll into the building calling his controller’s name. But he didn’t want to go skulking in, either, for fear of startling an understandably-edgy Joel and getting clubbed with a half-finished chair leg.
Or what if Joel had blundered in and encountered someone who didn’t belong on the property?
Sloan pushed the door open and quickly stepped through and off to one side into the shadows, out of the faint stream of light from the street. He stood quietly for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness. Then he ran his gaze over the silent silhouettes of the machines that made up the assembly line, the massive rolls of upholstery fabrics and padding, the wooden fr
ames and metal springs and fasteners which stood ready for use.
Far above his head, an impression of movement caught his attention, but by the time he’d focused on the windows of his office, there was nothing to be seen—if indeed there ever had been. A scrap of paper in the vacant lot, a reflection in his office window—Sloan thought wryly that he’d probably start seeing monsters in the dark any minute now.
Everything was silent and at rest—but there was no sense of peace or serenity in the big open space. To Sloan, it seemed instead as if it were waiting.
And then, before he could analyze the feeling, the waiting ended in a split second of sensation that Sloan would remember for the rest of his life.
He watched as his office exploded.
He didn’t know if he saw the flash first or felt the concussion, because the two things hit him simultaneously. The fireball assaulted his eyes with brilliant, angry, bluish-red flame, and the shock wave felt as if someone had planted a hand in the center of his chest and given him a solid shove, almost rocking him off his feet.
The room above the factory floor disintegrated, loosing a fine cloud of dust, and an instant later there was a secondary flash as each particle of the powdery, almost century-old dust exploded into flame. He hadn’t heard glass shatter, but he saw the shards of his office windows as they fell like crystal raindrops, almost in slow motion, to the factory floor.
And with them, surrounded by the glass, fell something that looked as limp and boneless as a life-size rag doll.
“Oh, no,” he whispered. “Joel.”
The intense, unearthly light of the double explosion died, leaving behind a flickering and ever-strengthening bluish glow as the flames began to take hold in the paper and old wood that had filled his office. Black smoke rolled out of the now-open room like a boiling thunderhead, crowding against the ceiling but descending inexorably as the cloud expanded.
Joel had fallen between two rolls of fabric. It took Sloan precious seconds to extricate him, to smother the still-glowing spots on what remained of Joel’s jacket, and to fling the unconscious man over his shoulder. He had to stop a moment to orient himself before heading toward the door, because stress and exertion were already taking their toll. Though most of the heat was still well above his head, he could feel it beginning to build.
The fiery dust and scraps of the exploded wall had fallen to the production floor, and the hot embers started another host of fires. Each individual blaze was small, but they were growing greedily as they fed on wood and fabric and padding materials. Sloan picked his way between the secondary fires to reach the entrance.
He was staggering under Joel’s limp weight by the time he got outside. He paused to gulp cool air and then started across the street to the vacant lot, seeking a safer place to lay his burden down.
A car pulled up. The back door was open before it had stopped, and suddenly Morganna was standing there, staring white-faced at Sloan, at the body that was draped over his shoulder, and then beyond, to where flames licked from the open door and danced behind the still-intact windows at the front of the factory.
“It started in my office,” he said hoarsely. His voice sounded all wrong, as if he were talking through a barrel. “Somehow Joel got in the way.” Suddenly he started to laugh, a crazy but uncontrollable outburst that horrified him. “Talk about the luck of the draw,” he gasped. “We raised the fire insurance just this morning!”
Time seemed to turn into taffy, sometimes drawing out into impossibly long strands, sometimes folding in on itself, compressing and melting together. As long as she lived, Morganna would never be able to correctly piece together the incidents of that evening. Had the fire department trucks roared up first, or the ambulance? Who had finally relieved Sloan of the burden of Joel’s unconscious weight? Who had handed her the cup of hot but muddy black coffee? Was it before or after the fire burned through the roof that she had started to shake so violently that they wrapped her in a blanket and made her sit in Jack Hamilton’s car? When had the crowds of onlookers begun to gather, and—in a nearly deserted neighborhood—how had they grown so large?
A few episodes stood out, snippets that would be forever singed into her memory. One of them was Jack Hamilton, cell phone to his ear, almost screaming at a dispatcher who he seemed to think was being deliberately obtuse. Another was Morganna’s mother putting her arms around Sloan and drawing his head down against her shoulder in a vain attempt to keep him from watching the destruction of his dream.
And the third and perhaps most memorable of all happened as the paramedics started to move the stretcher carrying Joel into the ambulance, and Sloan stepped forward. “Guys, if you can take a second to find his keys, at least we can move his car. It’s upwind right now, so it’s not in danger, but if the breeze shifts it’ll be toast.”
“Help yourself,” the paramedic said with a shrug.
Gingerly Sloan bent over Joel, who was lying on his stomach on the stretcher, and reached into his trouser pocket.
Morganna was furious. “How can you even think of something like a stupid car at a time like this?” she snapped.
Sloan pulled back with Joel’s key ring in his hand. His eyes were dark with pain. “He loves that car. Right now, the only thing I can do for him is to take care of it. And I owe him, because he did plenty for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you smell it?”
Morganna wrinkled her nose. “I can smell lots of things at the moment. Smoke, chemicals, fumes. None of them pleasant. If that’s what you’re talking about—”
A man in fire garb, wearing a helmet that said Investigator, came up to them. “You the owner?”
Sloan shifted his foam cup of coffee and extended a hand. “That’s me.”
“Mr. Montgomery, do you have any idea who might have wanted to burn your business?”
The question hit Morganna on the raw. “You sound awfully certain that this fire was deliberately set,” she said. “Considering that the building is still belching flames, how could you possibly know?”
The investigator looked her over coolly. His gaze seemed to focus on the diamond bracelet peeking out from under the sleeve of her white wool coat. “For one thing, ma’am, the valves appear to be closed on the sprinkler system.”
“I wondered why all those expensive sprinkler heads weren’t doing any good,” Sloan said. “I was going to check, but I was a bit busy at the time, dealing with the injured. Yes, I’m afraid there are a couple of people who might have done this on purpose. When I terminated them just this morning, one said…let me get this right. ‘You’ll regret this.”’
“Nothing more specific?”
“They didn’t invite me to meet them here tonight for a wienie roast, no.” Sloan’s voice was dry. “When my controller stopped by the factory this evening to pick up some paperwork, he thought he saw one of them—maybe both—running from the building.”
“A devoted employee,” the investigator observed. “Picking up paperwork at this hour.”
“That’s Joel.” Sloan cleared his throat. “He’s very devoted.”
“And where is he now? I’d like to talk to him.”
Sloan glanced at his watch. “I hope he’s in the trauma unit at Nicolet University Hospital.”
“He’s the one that caught the blast? Where was he when the fire started?”
“In my office. At least, that was where he fell from when the explosion went off.”
Morganna began to tremble uncontrollably.
Sloan looked over his shoulder. “Jack,” he called. “Take her home, will you?”
“No,” Morganna said fiercely. “I’m staying.”
Sloan looked at her for a long moment with an unreadable expression in his dark eyes, and then he shrugged. “Have it your own way.” He turned back to the fire investigator. “What else can I tell you?”
“Why was he in your office?” the man asked.
“I can’t answer that question. He wasn’
t conscious when I pulled him out, so I couldn’t ask him.” Sloan’s voice cracked just a little. “I don’t know what he saw, or heard, or went to look at.”
Morganna took a deep breath of the acrid air and moved a little closer to him.
The eastern sky over Lake Michigan was beginning to pale and streak with light before the fire was under control. For a while, Morganna wasn’t certain if the glow she saw was from the coming sunrise or the remnants of the flames reflecting against the smoke-clouded sky.
Even after the flames were knocked down, hot spots continued to smolder, and the raw, throat-slashing smoke hung heavily across the entire warehouse district. In the dim grayness of first light the factory looked bleak. The thick masonry walls still stood, and the heavy beams which had supported the roof were still in place, though some—to her inexperienced eyes—appeared badly charred. Morganna could only imagine what the interior looked like, for fire hoses and yellow safety tape prevented anyone but the fire crews from getting close enough to see.
She wondered what Sloan was thinking. It seemed to be an hour at least since he’d spoken.
Jack Hamilton came up between them, draping one arm over Sloan’s shoulders, the other over Morganna’s. “I just talked to the hospital again, and Joel’s finally stable enough that they’ll let you see him for a minute.”
Sloan nodded. “I’m on my way. Take Morganna home, will you?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m going with you.”
“Morganna, you’re exhausted and in shock.”
“So are you,” she said stubbornly. “And I need to go. It’s my responsibility, too.” It sounded almost priggish, she thought. But it was true—as the wife of the business’s owner, she did have some obligations where Sloan’s employees were concerned. And in Joel’s case…
I owe Joel a lot more than a hospital visit.
She frowned at the thought, for it was so glaringly obvious that it was scarcely worth considering. Joel had been injured on the job, trying to rescue Sloan’s business—so of course she owed him whatever was in her power to do. She had never been particularly fond of Joel, but she’d respected his devotion to his job, and to Sloan.
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