by A. J. Goode
“She’s been asking for the same thing,” he admitted. “As your lawyer, I would advise against it. But then again, I’m not technically your lawyer. If they agree to bring her in here, you have to know that there will most likely be a guard in here with you the entire time, and everything you say is probably going to be recorded. Don’t say anything that can be twisted and used against you. And whatever you do, don’t try to touch her.”
That was easier said than done. When Maggie was ushered into the small room with him, it took every ounce of strength he had not to jump up and wrap her in his arms. She’d been crying; her eyes were red-rimmed and her face looked drawn and pale. Without a word, she sat down across from him, carefully perched on the edge of the chair as though ready to flee in an instant.
“So. Maeve, huh?” he asked after a long moment of silence.
“I never meant to lie to you!” she burst out.
“Then why did you?”
“It all just sort of . . . . snowballed.” She jumped up and began to pace. “I was telling the truth when I told you about wanting to open my own restaurant. What I didn’t tell you is that I’ve been through five jobs in less than a year, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to work as an assistant long enough to earn the kind of money I’d need for that. I signed up for the reality show because I thought all I had to do was go in and do a bunch of silly challenges to try to get chosen to marry Devon Rock. I didn’t think I’d win. But I’d get paid just for being on the show; the longer I lasted, the more I’d get paid.”
“So you agreed to marry a man for money.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. Not at first, anyway. I really didn’t think I’d win,” she repeated. “They gave me a fake name and history because, let’s face it, Maeve Renault the struggling actress is a lot more glamorous than Maggie Reynolds the assistant-to-the-assistant chef. I just wanted to stay on the show as long as I could to make as much money as possible, and then I figured he’d choose someone else. I wanted to make the final round and then it would be over.”
“But you agreed to marry him.”
Maggie made a helpless sound that was somewhere between a groan and a growl. “I was stupid, okay? Devon Rock was smooth and charming and seemed so romantic, and I guess I forgot that he’s an actor. I got caught up in all of it. But then I woke up, I guess you could say. I freaked out at the church once I was in that awful dress and all dolled up, and I just couldn’t go through with it. I went to find Lindsay or Devon or anyone to try to call it off, but --”
Sean watched her silently, waiting.
“Turns out I found both of them. And they were, ah, busy. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to get away from there, and Devon’s keys were right there, so I just took his car. I didn’t really think of it as stealing,” she protested.
Sean listened as she told him the rest of it. How she had hidden her backpack under the seat so she could have her own clothes and cash on the honeymoon. How she had gotten lost and ended up hiding the car behind Ben Jacobs’ barn. How she had hit her forehead with the corner of the trunk lid.
“So that explains the duct tape and the blood,” he said as she finally wound down. “But how did you get in the back of my truck? How did the wedding dress end up in my garbage can?”
She hung her head. “After you got out of your truck and started shouting in the rain, I opened the tailgate and climbed in. I’m sorry; I just wanted a way out of the rain. I rode all the way to your house and changed clothes in your garage. Stuffing the dress in the garbage can seemed like a good idea at the time.”
A thought occurred to him. “You were in my garage,” he said. “I heard a noise and went to look, but I thought it was the neighbor’s cat messing with my garbage can again. I was . . . ”
“Naked,” she finished for him, blushing. “When you woke me up in the restaurant and I recognized you, I thought you’d come to have me arrested for trespassing.”
The silence stretched out between them.
“Maggie, I need to know,” he began. He stopped and cleared his throat. “That night on the beach. Did I . . . was that . . .”
“No, you didn’t. We’re both adults. There was nothing that happened on the beach that I wasn’t 100% okay with,” Maggie said firmly. “I’m sorry about everything, Sean. I never meant to hurt you. Can you ever forgive me?”
Sean laughed bitterly. “Forgive you? Maggie, you ruined my life, and you want me to forgive you?”
“Sean --”
“Just go. Go back to Chicago, or back to Devon Rock, or wherever it is you want to go. Just go.”
Chapter Fifteen
Maggie managed to keep it together until she was safely out of the interview room. As soon as she knew Sean couldn’t see her any more, she started shaking. She wanted to break into a run, but she still had enough presence of mind to know that running out of a police station wasn’t a good idea. She was already in enough trouble.
He was right. She’d lied to him from the start, and her lies had ruined his life. She couldn’t think of one single excuse that didn’t come back down to the very simple fact that she had been thinking only of herself.
She was a terrible person.
I am not going to cry. Maggie drew a deep, shaky breath and plunged onward toward the exit. Out the door, to the train station, get the hell out of Dodge. Go home, get out of his life, stay away from Sean Jackson.
She’d find a job. No more shortcuts. No more looking for the easy way out. She’d just have to start at the bottom and work her way up if there were any gourmet restaurants in Chicago that would still have her. If not, she was just going to have to get a job as an over-trained burger-flipper at some diner where no one would recognize her as Maeve Renault.
No more running away. No more looking for the easy way out.
She pictured Sean’s face and suddenly her chest felt tight. She could see the trust in his eyes, the sincerity in the way he had reached out for her and tried to help her before he knew the truth, and she was ashamed of herself.
Out the door, to the train station, get the hell out of Dodge. Go. What are you waiting for?
Maggie shook herself and pushed open the police station door. And froze.
The parking lot was jammed with vehicles emblazoned with names of different TV and radio stations. A throng of camera-waving strangers swarmed the entry, thrown into a frenzy by her sudden appearance.
“Maeve! Maeve!” they shouted. Those closest to her began to pepper her with questions about Sean and Devon. They pressed in on her until her back was flattened against the glass door she had just come through.
“Please, just let me --” she tried.
“Is it true you just talked to your kidnapper?”
“Are you still going to marry Devon Rock?”
“Why didn’t you try to escape?”
For a moment, she considered making some kind of statement and trying to clear Sean’s name, but she’d learned enough from her time on the reality show to know better than that. Anything she might try to say right now would only make things worse.
Through the crowd, she caught a glimpse of a familiar person moving quickly across the street. He was tall and thin, and there was something sneaky about the way he kept glancing over his shoulder as he headed away from the crowd. She searched through her memory for a name and finally came up with Tim. The rookie firefighter that Sean liked to call Nipper because he was so excitable.
At last, a familiar face! He turned away to stow something behind the driver’s seat of his truck, but she had seen enough to be sure it was him.
“No comment!” she bellowed, and plunged into the throng, pushing at warm bodies and heavy cameras and really not giving a damn if anyone dropped or broke any of their expensive equipment.
By the time she broke through the paparazzi, Tim was in his truck. She shouted his name and sprinted across the street. He was just turning the key when she wrenched open the passenger door and jumped into the seat with him. H
e gaped at her, his freckles standing in stark relief against a very pale face.
“Please, just get me out of here,” she gasped. “I’ll explain later, just please drive!”
Tires squealed. Tim floored it and headed off through town as she buckled her seatbelt.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Train station. But can you drive around a little bit and try to lose them?”
“S-sure.” The young firefighter blinked a few times and glanced up in the rearview mirror. He seemed nervous.
“They think I’m somebody else,” she explained.
“Maeve Renault.” Tim grinned for a second, glancing at her, and quickly sobered. “My girlfriend loved that show. I can’t believe how different you look now.”
“You don’t look so hot yourself,” Maggie observed. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t look okay. He was terribly pale, and she noticed now that his hands on the wheel were trembling. He licked his lips nervously and looked up at the mirror again.
“I-I’m just tired. We had a bad call last night. Grass fire got out of control and took out a little rental cabin. I’m surprised Spiffy didn’t tell you -- oh, right.”
“Was anyone hurt in the fire?”
“Just Spiffy. When I got there, he was in the cabin eatin’ smoke. Me and the chief had to go in and drag his silly ass out.”
Maggie’s heart pounded at the thought of Sean being dragged out of a burning building. She opened her mouth to question the rookie, but stopped as she became aware of a strong odor of gasoline. She sniffed and started looking around.
“See, that’s the thing about grass fires,” Tim was saying. “They don’t hurt anybody when they just burn grass, you know? Our guys are usually fast enough; we put everything out before anybody gets hurt. Nobody’s supposed to get hurt.”
“Tim, why do I smell gas?”
He glanced at her again and said nothing.
“S-Tim . . . please tell me you’re taking home gas for your lawn mower or something.” She glanced out the window and realized they were outside the city limits, driving through the green countryside. “Would you please take me to the train station now? I think we lost the paparazzi.”
“I’m so sorry, Maggie,” he said softly. “I can’t do that.”
# # #
“All charges have been dropped?” Sean asked for what seemed like the hundredth time. He stared at the little pile of his belongings -- wallet, watch, pager, cell phone -- and shook his head in disbelief
“You had a pretty good alibi,” Dan Harding told him. “Not to mention a couple of stellar witnesses who could place you at the scene of a grass fire at the time of the ‘kidnapping’.”
Sean glanced over at Chief Griswold, one of those “stellar witnesses” who had vouched for him. He wasn’t sure just how much the chief had told the policeman.
“Spiffy, as far as I’m concerned, you’re still my Lieutenant,” Griswold said, as though reading his mind. “I never accepted your resignation, and I don’t see that you’ve done anything wrong.”
“But I left the scene--”
“No, you didn’t. You left a con artist running around in the woods in a wedding dress at three in the morning, that’s all. You identified yourself as a firefighter and made every reasonable effort to locate her. She made the choice not to accept your help. End of story.”
“But the pictures on the beach--”
Harding held up his hand. “The girl says it was consensual. And honestly, the less we know about your sex life, the happier all of us are going to be.”
“Just avoid beaches with cameras in the future,” Griswold added. “Good Lord, Spiffy, your mother saw those pictures. She was ready to come in here and tear your head off for being so damn stupid. Only reason she’s not here right now is that I fed her some line about you needing a superior officer down here overseeing the case. When she finds out I lied to her . . .” His voice trailed off and he shuddered, obviously unhappy about incurring the wrath of Suzanne Jackson.
Sean signed the forms that Harding put in front of him and put his things back in his pockets. He stared at his badge for a long moment before carefully putting it away. “So what do we do now?” he asked.
“We go back to the station and try to figure out who our firebug is.” Griswold clapped him on the shoulder and turned toward the exit. “That last fire was definitely arson, and it’s a whole different ballgame now that a building has been destroyed. He’s escalating.”
“Might want to go out the back way,” Harding called after them. “Buncha Hollywood people out front trying to get pictures. I thought I was going to have to send an armed escort out there for Maggie, but she’s not as helpless as she seems.”
That’s not the only way Maggie isn’t what she seems, Sean thought. “I’m sure she had them eating right out of her hand,” he said bitterly.
“Well, no, she didn’t. That’s what was so odd. She looked about ready to cry, but all of a sudden just shot through the crowd like a bat outta hell. She flagged down one of your guys and jumped in his truck.”
“’One of my guys’?” Griswold frowned.
“Yeah, the Connor kid. You know, the one with the fancy green truck that’s about to be repo’d. He was across the street, at the gas station.”
Sean looked back and forth from Harding to Griswold. “Chief . . . wasn’t Tim just talking about getting a huge check this quarter because of all the grass fires?”
“Yep. Funny thing, he was also the first on scene at the structure fire last night.”
“Come to think of it, he’s been the first on scene at a lot of grass fires lately.” Sean didn’t like the direction his thoughts had taken. “Dan, what could you see what Tim was buying at the gas station?”
Harding thought about it. “Let’s not jump the gun here,” he said, after a moment. “Tim’s got that big place over on Phoenix Road, with a lot of grass to mow. He may have been buying gas for his mower or tractor. But yeah, he was putting a couple of gas cans behind the seat.”
“You think he might be our firebug?” Sean asked.
“I think he’s a pretty strong suspect,” Griswold told him. “Wouldn’t be the first time a firefighter crossed the line. Can’t hurt to go have a little chat with him, right, Dan?”
“Chief, he’s . . . got Maggie.”
“Which is why you’re not going with us,” Harding said firmly. “You’re going to go home and wait to hear from one of us. I don’t want you anywhere near that girl until all of this mess is cleared up.”
Sean knew both men well enough to know that it was useless to protest. He nodded and watched them leave together before making his way toward the back door of the police station. His truck was there, having been towed to the police lot during the investigation. The thought left him shaking his head, wondering how he had been so oblivious to the woman hiding out in the back of his truck that night.
He slid into the seat and leaned his head back against the headrest for a moment, remembering. He’d been so exhausted that he could hardly think straight, and he’d dismissed the open tailgate as his own mistake. He had even looked under the tonneau cover with his flashlight without noticing her.
His thoughts were interrupted by the high-pitched tones that represented his department. “Beach Haven Fire, stand by for dispatch to a possible barn fire.” The dispatcher read off an address that was becoming uncomfortably familiar to him.
Ben Jacobs’ barn was on fire.
The barn where Maggie had hidden Devon Rock’s car.
Griswold thought the arsonist might escalate at this point, burning buildings instead of open fields. And if Tim was the arsonist, he had Maggie with him.
Griswold’s orders to stay away were forgotten in an instant. Sean ran with lights and siren.
Chapter Sixteen
Thick black smoke was pouring out the door of the sagging old barn when Sean arrived. He recognized Tim’s new Ford F-250 parked out in front and swore out
loud. Right up until that minute, he hadn’t wanted to believe that the rookie firefighter was really an arsonist. He’d repeated it to himself over and over all the way here: It can’t be him, I must be wrong, it can’t be Tim.
Sean parked beside Tim’s truck and hopped out. On impulse, he reached inside and grabbed the other man’s keys.
“Spiffy?”
Sean spun around. Tim stood just a few feet away, staring at him. The younger man’s face was flushed and streaked with black soot. His lip was swollen and there was a long row of deep, painful looking scratches across one cheek.
“Where’s Maggie?” Sean demanded.
“I--I don’t . . . the barn was already burning . . .”
“Where is she?”
Tim said nothing. He reached up to touch the scratches and winced before glancing over his shoulder at the smoke billowing toward them.
She must have put up one hell of a fight. Sean tried to push the other man out of his way, but Tim caught his arm.
“It’s too late, Sean,” he said. “Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Don’t you see? It was just a few extra bucks, that’s all. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
“Let me go!” Sean jerked his arm away and broke into a run. He had made it only a few steps, however, when he was hit from behind in a jarring tackle. Both men slammed into the ground.
“Nobody was supposed to get hurt!” Tim repeated.
“Get off me!” Sean twisted, turned, and felt a brief moment of satisfaction when he landed a solid blow to the other man’s jaw. Tim reeled back but clung doggedly to him.
It was time to try something else. “Tim, please. Listen to me,” he begged. “This is murder. You’re not a murderer. Let me go get Maggie.”
“Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
“I know. You said that. So let me go get her. Come on, Tim, you don’t want anybody to die.”
The rookie sat back and blinked, suddenly looking confused. In doing so, he relaxed his hold on the Lieutenant. Sean seized the opportunity and shoved him aside, springing to his feet. When Tim tried to grab him again, Sean slugged him so hard that his own arm ached from the impact.