On Fire

by Carla Neggers

  “What does that mean?”

  It meant she’d have to wait. She staggered back to the waiting room, and after a few minutes, Straker joined her. He shoved a bottle of water at her. “Drink up. They won’t let anyone see Sig yet. I called your mother. Your father’s there, too. They’re on their way.”

  “They must be out of their minds with worry.”

  “The hospital’s calling Caroline Granger on Mount Desert.”

  Riley nodded dully. “She’s up for the weekend. Abigail and Henry are there, too.”

  “Then that saves you from having to tell Matt.”

  She bristled. “I’m not telling that son of a bitch anything. The hospital shouldn’t, either.”

  Straker’s eyes went dark. “Sig’s his wife. If they’re not divorced, the medical staff won’t really have any choice.”

  “For all I know he’s the one who set Emile’s place on fire!”

  Straker took her by the shoulders and pushed her, not that gently, onto a chair. “You don’t believe that.”

  “Do not tell me what I believe and don’t believe.”

  “Okay. I don’t believe it.”

  She started to shake. She was exhausted, irritable, smelled like a chimney. Here she was, so glad to have Straker with her, and she was barking at him. But her sister was hurting, and the only real home Riley had known as a child had just been torched. When she’d smelled the smoke, she’d assumed she’d messed up the dampers on the woodstove. She’d pulled on hiking pants and slipped on her sneakers before realizing it wasn’t that simple.

  “I felt the fire,” she said. “I was bending down to tie my shoes, and I knew. I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t have to. It happens all the time. Somehow you put together the danger signs on an instinctive level, before they register in your conscious mind.”

  “I was afraid Sig wouldn’t make it through the window. She’s tall, and her stomach—”

  “She did make it.”

  “I had to yell at her. She was still so done in from throwing up.”

  Riley couldn’t hold it in anymore. She couldn’t keep up the fight. She sank her head into her hands and cried, sobbed, coughed, choked. She smeared black gunk over her face.

  When she’d finished crying, Straker took her water bottle and dampened a couple of tissues for her. She wiped her face and hands, blew her nose. “I’m a mess.”

  “That’s the least of your problems.”

  He wasn’t going to pull any punches. And he was right. She flopped back against her chair. “I want to see Sig.”

  Lou Dorrman arrived, and Straker stood back while the sheriff had Riley tell him about her night, start to finish. She didn’t volunteer anything about her brother-in-law showing up after dinner, and Dorrman didn’t ask. When she finished, he turned to Straker, who calmly explained how he’d come upon the fire just as the St. Joe sisters were leaping off the woodshed roof.

  “Looks like we have a firebug on our hands,” the sheriff said. “Sam Cassain’s place burned down the other night. Now Emile’s.”

  “Any evidence they’re related?” Straker asked.

  “We got the fire out before Emile’s woodshed burned completely, found suspicious materials tucked off in the far corner. He has a nice selection of firebug favorites. Linseed oil, rags, beakers, candles, matches, string, an old-fashioned alarm clock.” Dorrman shook his head. “It doesn’t look good.”

  Riley shot to her feet. “That’s insane. Someone’s setting him up.”

  The sheriff was unmoved. “Your grandpa needs to come in and explain himself.”

  “You can’t possibly believe Emile would set his own place on fire!” She paused, tried to calm herself. Shouting wasn’t going to help the situation. “Sheriff, you’ve known my grandfather for years. He wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “The state police are involved. It’s not like what I think or don’t think’s going to make a difference. They have to go by the evidence.” His cop gaze settled on Riley. “We all do.”

  “But you have to look at the evidence with some degree of common sense.”

  “You talk to your FBI friend here,” Dorrman said. “He’ll tell you all about evidence. Now, I know you’re looking for Emile. I’m going to tell you this once and only once. You listening?”

  She sighed, nodded. Even her skin tingled with the frustration boiling through her.

  “If you find him and don’t tell us, you’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble.” He paused, let his words sink in. “That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

  “You know Emile’s not your man.” She crossed her arms over her chest as if to keep herself from flying apart. “He didn’t kill Sam, and he didn’t set those fires. It’s just not possible.”

  “Then let him talk to the investigators, straighten everything out.” Dorrman’s tone said he was finished arguing with her and she’d better figure that out before he lost patience. The trauma of jumping out of a burning building with her pregnant sister would only excuse so much. He yielded slightly. “How’s your sister?”

  “I’m still trying to find out.”

  He nodded. “I’ll talk to her later. Hope she’s okay.”

  He left, and Riley dropped back onto a chair next to Straker. “You trying to make yourself disappear?”

  “Emergency rooms aren’t my favorite place. How’re you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess.” She gulped in air, trying not to shake. “I need to see about Sig.”

  “Go ahead.”

  But as she got to her feet, Caroline arrived, with Abigail and Henry right behind her. “Oh, Riley—my God! Are you all right? We couldn’t just sit out there and wait.” Caroline took in Riley’s soot and scrapes, her tear-streaked face. “We had to come. Is there anything we can do?”

  Riley shook her head. “Thanks for being here.”

  “No thanks are necessary.” She dipped into her expensive handbag and pulled out a handful of individually wrapped, lemon-scented wipes, which she tucked into Riley’s palm. She gave a comforting smile. “You look as if you’ve stepped out of the pages of a Dickens novel.”

  Abigail was fighting off tears. She asked about Sig, and Henry promised to find out what was going on. Straker, on his feet, started to pace. Riley knew the inaction was getting to him, just being in a hospital again after his ordeal six months ago.

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” she said. “I know you wanted me to get far away from trouble, and here I’ve just jumped from a burning building.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” he said. “The important thing is that you and your sister are all right.”

  Facing Henry Armistead, however, was nothing compared to facing Mara Labreque St. Joe. She burst into the waiting room with the air of a woman who’d flown up the coast on a broomstick. She was disheveled, frantic, refused to wait for anyone to tell her where to find her daughter. She grabbed Riley and took off into the treatment rooms, muttering, “Damn Emile, damn him.”

  “Mom, I should warn you. Sig’s pregnant.”

  “Damn it, I know she’s pregnant! I have eyes in my head!”

  “She’s having twins,” Riley added.

  Her mother faltered. Her dark eyes shone. Her lower lip trembled, but she rallied. She turned on Riley as if she were Emile’s clone. “And you let her come up here with you? The least you could have done was stay in a motel. You didn’t have to stay at the cottage. Damn it, Riley, what were you thinking?”

  “Mara.” Richard St. Joe eased in behind them. “Riley’s been through a rough time tonight, too.”

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry….” She put a hand on Riley’s cheek, tried to smile through her tears. “You’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “I spoke to a doctor,” her father said. “She said Sig’s doing well. She sprained an ankle and had some smoke inhalation, and she’s dehydrated.”

  “Can we see her?” Mara asked.

  “Yes, but she’s asle
ep right now. They want to get her into a regular room and keep her at least until morning.”

  “I want to see her,” Mara insisted.

  Richard nodded. “I know. Me, too.”

  A nurse escorted the three of them to Sig’s treatment room. She was asleep on her side under a thin blanket, her pregnancy obvious even to someone who wasn’t looking for it. She was still hooked up to an IV but had been taken off oxygen. Riley stood back while her parents came to terms with the reality of how close they’d come to losing not one daughter this time, but two.

  “Come on,” Richard said, putting an arm around his wife, “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I’m not going anywhere until she wakes up and I hear her voice. Riley?” He attempted a smile. “You look like you could use a whole pot of coffee.”

  “I’ll be along.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “Tell the rest of the crowd Sig’s okay, will you? Then send them home. Henry’s ready to fire me as it is.” She breathed in. “Forget Straker. It won’t matter what you tell him. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

  “He’s always been that way,” her mother said.

  After they left, Riley moved next to her sister and tried to let the relief she knew she should be feeling register. Her mind was all set: Sig was okay. She hadn’t died. She hadn’t lost her babies. Intellectually, Riley could grasp those basic facts.

  But the rest of her was still in battle mode. She was tense and shaken, her guard up. This was her sister, and she’d nearly lost her tonight. She remembered Sig after the Encounter, the mix of horror and relief as she’d faced her father-in-law’s death and the accusations over Emile’s culpability.

  Her mother was right, Riley thought. She was guilty as charged. She never should have come up here with Sig, despite the fact that her sister had a mind of her own and preferred to make her own decisions.

  “Jesus.”

  She spun around. Matt was frozen in the doorway, white-faced. He stared at his wife. Riley shot over to him, put a palm on his chest. “Don’t you dare go berserk on her. Do you understand? If you do, I swear I’ll get the sheriff in here and have him haul you off.”

  His very blue eyes settled on Riley in confusion. The fury of earlier in the evening was gone. “Riley—my God, what happened? I saw Abigail. She said Sig’s okay, you two were in Emile’s cottage when it caught fire.”

  “We had to bail out the loft window. It was rougher on Sig than me.”

  He tried to take another step toward her bed, but Riley still had her palm on his chest and moved with him. He looked at her. “What? For God’s sake, I’m not a maniac. Sig and I have our problems, but she’s my wife.”

  “And she’s my sister. If you do anything to upset her, Granger, you’ll have me to answer to. I don’t care if I’m a foot shorter and a gazillion dollars poorer. I will strike you down. No matter what. Understood?”

  “Riley, what the hell are you talking about? I know you’ve had a shock, but—”

  He stopped. He went still, his gaze riveted on his wife. Riley held her breath, waiting. If possible, he turned even paler. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes stood out, his mouth was drawn, and she saw touches of gray in the stubble of beard on his patrician jaw.

  She let her hand drop away. He moved forward, slowly, and as much as Riley knew this wasn’t any of her business, she couldn’t leave. Her brother-in-law had behaved miserably, even bizarrely, for the better part of a year. A man was dead, two fires unexplained. She couldn’t rely on Matt’s good sense, his love of her sister. She had to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.

  “Sig.” He spoke in a croaking whisper, placed a hand gently on her swollen abdomen. “Jesus, Sig.”

  Riley shrank back to the door. She felt like a voyeur. “You really didn’t know?”

  He shook his head, not taking his eyes off his wife.

  “She hasn’t told anyone. She didn’t even tell me, but I figured it out. She went to great lengths to keep you from finding out.”

  “Why?”

  He really didn’t get it. Riley decided this wasn’t the time to point out what a jackass he’d been for months on end. “Would it have changed anything?”

  “I love Sig. I’d die for her.”

  “Yeah, well, tonight she almost died for you.”

  It was a damned, stupid, inconsiderate thing to say, but it had been a hell of a night and Riley instantly forgave herself. Matt, however, wasn’t in a similar frame of mind. He shot her a black look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Straker said behind her, “that sucking in a couple of lungfuls of smoke didn’t do anything for her big mouth. Come on, Granger. You and I need to talk.”

  “I want to stay with my wife.”

  Riley gritted her teeth. As if Matt had any damned right. And who was Straker to barge in and take over? She could feel her knees starting to shake again. She wanted to slap them both. She was indignant, furious. Yet some part of her warned her she was done in, getting more unreasonable by the minute, that stress and fear and all the damned smoke she’d sucked in were making her irrational.

  “They’ve got a room for her,” Straker said. “Let them get her settled.”

  Reluctantly, Matt nodded. He leaned over and kissed Sig gently, touched her hair, her stomach once more. And he went quietly, without a parting glance at Riley.

  Straker hung back a moment and thrust a finger at her. “You. Sit down before you collapse. I’ll be back.”

  He left. She pulled up a chair to her sister’s bed and plopped down, and not because Straker had told her to. Another minute on her feet and she’d collapse and end up on an IV herself.

  Sig opened an eye. “He’s gone?”

  “Sig!”

  She propped herself up on one elbow, no color in her elegant, angular face. “Bastard. I hope he feels as rotten as he sounded.”

  “Sig, you scared him half to death.”

  “Then it was almost worth having to jump out that damned window. God, my ankle’s killing me. Did you push me off the roof?”

  “Not really.”

  She fell back against her pillow, managed a feeble smile. “He hasn’t touched me in months. When I felt his hand on my stomach…I was ready to forgive him everything.” Her eyes closed; she was deathly pale. “Go tell him I hate him, will you?”

  “Sure, Sig. Before or after I tell him you love him?”

  “Turncoat.”

  “Well, at least you don’t have the burden of keeping your pregnancy a secret anymore. Now everyone knows.”

  “Lucky me.”

  A nurse ran Riley out, but not before Sig warned her to watch herself. “We cut it close tonight. Too close.”

  Riley nodded. “I know.”

  Straker thrust a cardboard cup of coffee at Matt Granger. “You look like hell.”

  “I imagine so.”

  He sipped the coffee, Straker suspected, more because he knew he needed the caffeine than out of any real taste for it. They were outside the emergency room. Richard St. Joe had already managed to get Granger’s sister and stepmother and Henry Armistead to go home. Mara had gone up to see Sig. God only knew where Riley was. She might stay put and wait for him. She might not. He couldn’t predict.

  “It’s not easy to love a St. Joe,” Granger said. Even stretched to the limits, he had a patrician air to him, a private-school bearing. He wasn’t a regular guy, but he wasn’t a jerk, either. “Thanks for your help. I thought Riley’d eat me alive. Sig…Jesus.”

  “Hell of a way to learn you’re going to be a father.”

  Granger blew on his coffee. “I never wanted the two of them involved in this business. That’s why I got some distance. I should have known better, especially when Sam—” He broke off, fatigue and worry, probably even embarrassment, obviously clawing at him. “It would be Riley who found him.”

  “Look, Granger, they’re not the only ones out of their element. So are you.” Straker gave i
t to him straight. “You need to back off and leave this mess to the pros.”

  The clear blue eyes turned cold. “What makes you think I’ve done anything?”

  He seemed genuinely mystified. Straker said, “Sam Cassain came to you for help. Money. He wanted to bring up the Encounter, at least the engine. You financed him.”

  “If I did, it’s not against the law.”

  “If you did, it got Cassain killed, and now Emile’s missing.”

  Granger held his head up, almost haughtily. “Are you suggesting I had anything to do with Sam’s death? That I killed him?”

  “No. He probably used you for his own ends. I think you’ve got your finger in the dike, and you’re hoping you and your world don’t drown before you have a chance to figure things out.” Straker paused, gave him a chance to digest what he was saying. “Tonight you almost lost everything.”

  “And you suggest I do what? Leave it to you to bring Emile in? Leave it to Sheriff Dorrman? Emile’s a madman. He’s past caring about anyone except himself. Who the hell do you think set that fire tonight? Me? No.” He threw his coffee into a bush. He was deadly calm, rational, certain. “It was Emile.”

  “Did Cassain come to see you last week?” Straker asked. “Did he bring up the Encounter’s engine? Did he get his proof against Emile?”

  Granger had turned him off. He started down the walk toward the parking lot. He was a proud man, rich as sin, fighting shadows and demons and determined to slay them all before they could reach those he loved. But they already had, only he still couldn’t stop. Straker understood.

  “When you lose yourself in the battle,” he said, “you’re no damned good to anyone.”

  Granger glanced back. “Take care of my wife.”

  “How can you leave her?”

  The man’s eyes flashed with a pain so deep and penetrating Straker felt a certain sympathy for the poor bastard. “I have no choice. I wouldn’t be any kind of husband if I didn’t.” He hesitated, added in a strangled voice, “Any kind of father.”

  Hell, Straker thought, and he let the man go.

  He met up with Riley back in the waiting room. Sig was down for the rest of the night, her parents still with her.

  “Matt?” Riley asked.