Playing with Fire

by Debra Dixon

  “Trade secret,” he told her. “You’re gonna need a new latch on that side door though, and I told Gwen to stay in the kitchen. She’s an obedient beast if not friendly.”

  Stunned, Maggie paced away from him and turned back. “She let you in? Just like that?”

  “Yeah, Maggie. Now, why don’t you follow her lead and let me all the way in? I can’t help you if you don’t start trusting me in increments longer than nanoseconds. You need to talk to someone. Why not me?”

  “You mean besides the fact that you’d like to arrest me for two fires I didn’t set?”

  “Jesus, Maggie, you’ll let me strip you naked and do whatever I want to your body, but you can’t tell me what scares you so much, you sit in a dark room and cry? You trust me for the one, but not the other?”

  “Trust doesn’t have anything to do with it. You can’t help me, Beau, because you can’t change the past.”

  “Oh, I know that. Believe me, I know that so well, it chokes me at night sometimes.” He paused for a moment and grabbed the railing. Then he shook his head as though telling himself to move on. “Neither of us can change the past. All we can do is forget it, or face it and let it go.”

  “Great little plan, but that’s not going to work for me,” she said softly. “Because you’ve got it backward. The past won’t let me go until I can remember it.”

  The unexpected remark jolted Beau. “What are you talking about?” He straightened. “What don’t you remember?”

  In a calm voice, too calm really—as if she were telling a stranger’s story or fiercely guarding against any slip of emotion—she explained, “I don’t remember the fire that killed Sarah Alastair. There’s a big black hole in my life where that night is supposed to be.”

  “You mean a type of stress trauma amnesia?”

  “Yeah, exactly like that. The shrinks thought the memories would come back eventually, but they never did.”

  Beau made the leap of logic and closed his eyes a moment as the pieces clicked into place. “Never came back, that is, until you opened that closet door and discovered the hospital fire. That explains the panic attacks. They’re flashbacks. The first one was that day, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it was. So do you get it now, Beau? It’s the past that won’t leave me alone. How are you going to help me with that?”

  She turned away and stared toward the levee, toward some distant point. “The memories have turned me inside out today, and all I have are more questions. It’s a jumble of nothing, and I still don’t know. Maybe I never will.”

  “You’ll never know what?” he asked, realizing that she hadn’t given him all of the pieces yet.

  “I’ll never know what happened that night. If I was the one who set the skillet on the stove. If I was the one who killed Sarah.”

  The answer explained so much about Maggie, about her childhood, about how she saw the world. He wanted to find all the people who’d raised this woman and strangle them. How could they have missed her guilt? How could they let her believe it for one second? How could they not care?

  “You were a kid,” he told her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “How do you know?” Maggie fired the question at him, wondering if he’d believe she was blameless when he found out little Maggie St. John had been fascinated with fire. “How could you possibly know whose fault it was?”

  “Carolyn told me about it.”

  Stunned, Maggie backed away. “You … you talked to Carolyn about this? About me?”

  “She was worried about you. You weren’t answering the phone.”

  She gaped at him in disbelief. “Carolyn was worried about me, so she called you? What for? That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “She thought someone needed to check on you.”

  “Carolyn asked you … to check on me? Why would she think someone needed to—” Her eyes flashed to his, reading the answer. “Oh, my God. She thinks I’ve gone round the bend. I am not crazy.”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “She didn’t have to. I’m sure you said it for her.”

  “No. I know you’re not crazy. I’ve lived with crazy,” he told her bluntly, “and you don’t even come close.”

  He hesitated a moment, bracing his forearm high against one of the white posts. “Any way you want to look at it, my mother was certifiable. She loved me when she could, but most of the time she couldn’t even love herself. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. Other days she could outorganize the marines. Medication never quite worked. She stopped taking the one that did because she said it turned her into a zombie.

  “The real kicker is that half the magic drugs we throw at manic depression today weren’t available when she killed herself.” Beau finally cocked his head to look at Maggie. “So I know crazy, darlin’. I know crazy inside out, and you ain’t it.”

  Impulsively Maggie put a hand on his arm and then drew back. Beau wouldn’t want sympathy any more than she wanted it when she talked about her own mother. “I didn’t mean to bring up sad times. I’m sor—”

  Beau cut her off by pressing a finger against her lips. “They weren’t sad times. It’s just the way it was. If I’d thought for a moment that you were truly beyond understanding your heart or your mind, nothing would have happened in that bedroom. This is just a bad patch in the road for you. Not a way of life.”

  He narrowed his eyes suddenly. “If you were going to exact revenge on Bennett, what would you do?”

  As he asked the question, he watched her expression carefully, looking for anything that would shake his faith in her innocence. Nothing did. All he found was surprise at the abrupt change of subject. There was no wariness, no careful selection of words. Her response was instantaneous.

  “I’d start a rumor that he had an incredibly small penis.” Instead of the laughter Maggie expected, he frowned.

  “That’s exactly what Maggie St. John would have done. They made a mistake.”

  “They who?” A tingle of apprehension skittered across Maggie’s rib cage. “What mistake?”

  “Someone set Bennett’s kitchen on fire shortly before noon.”

  “Why would someone—?” Despite the heat, Maggie felt a chill glide up her spine. Beau was as grim as she’d ever seen him. “I didn’t do it, Beau. I don’t know what’s going on, but it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t have—”

  “I know, but someone wanted you to be first on my list.”

  “Bennett.” The word was off like a rifle shot.

  “What did he have to gain?”

  “You know exactly what he had to gain. He wanted me gone. Out of his hair.” She paced as she worked it out. “If he manages to implicate me, then his house fire is the nail in my coffin.”

  Beau snagged her arm and brought her up short. “Think, Maggie. You were already gone from the hospital. He’d already won. Why would he burn down his house just to point a finger at you? What did he have to gain? Dr. Just-Call-Me-God doesn’t inconvenience himself, and a kitchen fire is one big inconvenience.”

  Shaking her head against the truth, she whispered, “If not him, then who?”

  “I don’t know.” Beau dropped her arm, but not before he’d trailed his hand from shoulder to elbow. “You tell me.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Then make sense of it,” he ordered. “Someone’s got an ax to grind with you, Maggie. I’ll buy the fact that the hospital was an accident. But the second two aren’t.

  They’re escalating. Who’s to say that this house won’t be next? With you in it?”

  She turned without answering and walked back into her room. Beau might think better in the sunlight but she didn’t. All that intensity made her head hurt. Fear made her stomach hurt.

  Her thought patterns locked on Bennett, turning the problem over and over in her mind. Nothing else made sense, but Beau was right—Bennett’s goal had been to run her out of his hospital, not to destroy her. She was an annoying gnat to him and not worth the personal i
nconvenience. There wasn’t another doctor who had—

  “Thibodeaux.” Maggie whirled, confronting Beau with the answer as he crossed the entrance. “Thibodeaux. What about him?”

  “The guy you assaulted with a scalpel? What about him?”

  “It fits, Beau. His pride took a beating over that incident. He’s an ER doctor. He’d know all about the hospital fire. I’m sure he knew about my tiffs with Bennett. The whole hospital knew I was on thin ice. Thibodeaux knows how to work hospital politics, how obsessive administration is about public image. And he gets his kicks from harassing women.”

  After laying her logic out, Maggie waited, her stomach in a knot of anticipation. It didn’t take Beau long to find the flaw.

  “His whole plan comes apart if you have an alibi for Bennett’s fire. How’d he get around that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How’d he know you’d be unable to account for your time? How’d he know you wouldn’t be gabbing on the phone? Or having lunch with a friend? What good is the fire to him if you can prove you had no opportunity to set it?”

  “He’d have to be certain I was alone.”

  “Yeah. That would be the minimum he’d—” Beau broke off, concentrating on the solution floating just at the edge of his consciousness, and then he caught it. “All he had to do was trigger an attack. What set you off this morning, Maggie? Why’d you come up here and ignore the phone?”

  Maggie’s stomach twisted unpleasantly as she remembered the bomb she’d found on the kitchen table this morning. Thibodeaux couldn’t have left that. Where could he have gotten such an old clipping? How could he have even known that the clipping would upset her?

  “It’s not Thibodeaux,” she whispered, lifting a troubled gaze to Beau. Suddenly Maggie was afraid the fires had nothing to do with the hospital. “Someone was in my house this morning, Beau. They left an old newspaper clipping about Sarah’s fire. Right on the kitchen table where I’d find it. Someone’s playing mind games with me, and I don’t know why.”

  “This is no game,” he said as he approached her.

  As much as he wanted to reassure Maggie, he couldn’t. Because it wasn’t going to be okay. The past that had come back to haunt her could very easily get her killed.

  The contrast of her dark lashes and too pale skin made her eyes, already wide with fear, look impossibly big. Beau hated the fine line he had to walk—the line between the man who’d fallen in love with her and the investigator who had to remain objective to keep her safe. For the moment his job was to work the angles and worry the details.

  “I need you to tell me about the night Sarah died.”

  “I don’t think I can.” Panic paralyzed Maggie. Shaking her head, she took a deep breath and sat down on the foot of the bed. Her hands were shaking and damp.

  Beau hunkered down in front of her. “I don’t want you to try to remember anything new. Just tell me what you know. I’ll be right here, Maggie.” He caught and held her gaze. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore. Understand?”

  Run like hell from a man like that, baby. You can’t lie to him, and you can’t cheat on him. No, but you can count on him, Mama. Suddenly Maggie was certain she could trust Beau to catch her if the world went spinning.

  “The first memory … was the fire on the staircase.” She looked at her hands, focusing on them and not the remembered terror. “I could see it coming up. It was like it was coming after me. And I could hear the smoke alarm right above my head. It was so loud. Everything else came back later. Never in any particular order. We were supposed to be alone that night—Sarah and me. Her parents had gone to a party, and Sarah was babysitting. I remember going to bed like normal, and then waking up because of a fight.”

  “Who was fighting?”

  “I don’t know.” She exhaled the words on a sigh. “Sarah and a man. I don’t know who it was. It was eighteen years ago. I don’t remember details and names and dates. I just remember how it felt to hear hateful, bitter voices. I remember wanting to throw up and being mad at the same time.” Maggie looked up at him with a sad smile. “I didn’t want anyone to hit Sarah the way men hit my mother.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need. That’s just the way it was,” she said, echoing Beau’s explanation of his childhood. “I don’t know what happened after that. At least not what happened to the fight. I woke up a second time, or maybe I never went back to sleep. I can’t remember that either.

  “I just remember hearing a crash—like something broke—and came out of my room. Sarah yelled at me. Told me not to come down again, so I must have actually gone downstairs during the fight.” Maggie sighed, frustrated. “It just wasn’t like Sarah to yell. Not at me. Even when I ruined three of her lipsticks she didn’t yell. But she yelled that night. I went back to my room.” Maggie shrugged and stopped, finished.

  Beau stood up. “That’s all you remember?”

  “Yeah, except that she told me the crash was her mother’s favorite bowl breaking. That bowl wasn’t broken that night. I remember Mrs. Alastair carrying it out of the house after the fire.” Maggie nervously sprang off the bed to pace. “None of this makes any sense.”

  “Not yet. Maybe it will when I get the case file.”

  “You can get a file that old?” Her tone was more fearful than surprised.

  He checked his watch. “With any luck it’s already sitting on my desk. Don’t worry, Maggie, I won’t ask you to look at it.”

  “Beau—” She stood for a long time with her mouth open, poised to speak, and then said, “Never mind.”

  Maggie still had a secret, it was obvious. “Are you sure you’re telling me everything?”

  “That’s the problem, Beau. I don’t remember what I don’t remember. And it’s not just that night. So many bits and pieces of the time in that house are gone.”

  “Someone’s afraid you do remember everything, Maggie,” he told her bluntly. “As soon as they realize we haven’t arrested you for Bennett’s fire, the stakes are going to go up.”

  “Why?”

  “If we had put you in jail for arson, it wouldn’t have mattered what you remembered. Your credibility would have been shot. No one would have believed a word you said. Especially not about a fire that happened so many years ago.”

  Understanding dawned, and she whispered, “But I’m not in jail. And if they can’t discredit me, the only thing left is to shut me up.”

  “Permanently,” Beau said grimly. “Who knows you’re having flashbacks? Which friends? Did you call an old shrink?”

  “No. No one knows. Just you and me and—” She clamped her mouth shut, denial holding the word prisoner.

  “Carolyn,” Beau finished for her and headed for his clothes. “Carolyn, who called me and sent me out here to find you. In one brilliant phone call, she blew your alibi and insinuated that you weren’t stable.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Maggie argued. “She’s like my sister. She wouldn’t hurt me like that.”

  Silence pressed against her like a physical presence, forcing her to deal with a betrayal that was unacceptable and a question that wouldn’t go away. Why would Carolyn do this to her? She wouldn’t. If not Carolyn, then who? Who else could have known about her flashbacks? Who could have guessed?

  It took Maggie a few minutes to come up with an answer and force herself to move. By then Beau was all but dressed.

  “It’s not Carolyn,” she announced.

  Beau didn’t pause as he tucked in his shirt. “Does she have a key?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then she had access. She knew Sarah.” He scooped up his wallet from the table. “She knows you. She knows about the flashbacks. Gwen would let her in.”

  “Anyone can get past Gwen. You proved that already.”

  Beau clipped on the badge and picked up his gun. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I know you don’t want to believe this. But right now we—”

  “Carolyn isn’t the only one who know
s about the flashbacks.”

  That got his attention, stopping him halfway through the process of shrugging into his holster. “What do you mean?”

  “The day of the hospital fire, after I talked to you, I went straight to Carolyn’s beauty shop. I blurted everything out in the middle of a room full of people.”

  Settling his gun, he told her, “Those people don’t care about your flashbacks.”

  “Wait.” She held up a hand to halt him when he started for the door. “I’m not explaining this right. That beauty shop is a beehive of gossip. A lot of Carolyn’s clients are people she and Sarah grew up with. Carolyn paid her way through beauty school cutting her friends’ hair. They still go to her. The shampoo girl’s been there ten years.”

  “Maggie,” he said softly, “it doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. Just listen. I was over the edge, Beau. I said it all. The fire, Sarah’s name, about the flashbacks starting. Maybe someone in the shop went home or to dinner and told someone else about how out of control Maggie St. John was. You could have heard a pin drop in that shop when I got through blurting it all out. Carolyn made me shut up and dragged me back to her office. Anyone could have been there that day.”

  “How big is this shop?”

  “She’s got five beauticians besides herself. They rent space and sometimes they work on two clients at once.”

  “That means she has a big appointment book.”

  “I can call her,” Maggie volunteered.

  Beau grabbed her arm and backed her out of the door. “Not yet. First I want to look at the case file. You’re going with me. I can’t leave you here.”

  “What’s the file going to tell you?” she asked softly.

  “I won’t know until I look at it.”

  Maggie knew. Or at least she was afraid of what the file would tell him. If Beau found out that she had been a fire starter as a child, he’d doubt her again. He’d wonder if she was telling the truth. He’d wonder about everything. In sixty seconds she’d go from victim to culprit.