Pants on Fire

by Anne Hagan

  Opera House Ops

  Episode 5 – Pants on Fire

  A Morelville Cozies Serial Mystery

  Anne Hagan

  To Mrs. Rotunno for words of praise that sparked a lifelong passion for writing

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Jug Run Press, USA

  Copyright © 2016

  https://annehaganauthor.com/

  All rights reserved: No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed or given away in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without prior written consent of the author or the publisher except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages for review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are actual places used in an entirely fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1 - Fire

  Wednesday Evening, September 23rd

  Morelville Christian Church

  “I’ll pay back every cent, so help me!” Doris visibly shuddered as she looked at the faces around the table all peering back at her. “I’m so sorry,” she finished, her lower lip trembling.

  It was silent for several long seconds then Aiden Quinn began to speak. “That’s quite a bit to process and we as a group, I think, need to talk about the next steps we need to take but…”

  The scream of sirens pierced the night as trucks from the volunteer department just down the road from the church raced by outside. The President waited for calm and then tried again.

  “We need to talk about what’s going to happen with you,” he looked at Doris, “and about the money and so forth but we also need to talk about several other items of business that are before the board this evening, including the proposal that was introduced by Mr. Hanson, earlier.”

  “I know. I understand,” she said.

  Aiden looked to Evan Brietland, the board Vice President, its previous President and an old hand at all matters involving the church. “Any thoughts or advice?”

  Brietland nodded. “Yes; I think we should stop everything for a moment and pray.”

  Finding his voice for the first time in several minutes, Pastor Scott said, “That’s an excellent idea.” He got to his feet and moved around the table to stand behind Doris. After placing his hands on her shoulders, he intoned, “All bow.”

  Around the table, heads dropped and the Reverend began to pray for divine guidance. Sixty seconds into his litany, sirens again sounded as fire trucks screamed into town from the north.

  Kent Gross broke into the prayer then. “There’s something going on in town. Our guys go out to help all the time. That was the sound of another department coming into the village. Who could get here that quick? Philo? It’s only been a few minutes…”

  “Unless they were called in at the same time our volunteers were rousted,” Evan said.

  Seth lifted a hand from Doris’ shoulder and held it out to the other two men. “Shall we continue and pray for the safety of the firefighters and the security of whatsoever their task may be?”

  Somewhat placated, Kent nodded but, before the Pastor could add another word to his prayers, Faye’s cellphone rang with a few bars from a country tune.

  “I do so apologize, pastor. I thought I turned that off. Regardless, everyone knows not to call me when I’m here.” She reached for the phone to silence it but saw that it was Chloe and thought better of it so she proceeded to answer it instead. “It’s Faye; is something wrong Chloe?”

  Faye listened for just a few seconds before her other hand flew to the base of her neck and she exclaimed, “Oh my!” Her eyes sought Kent Gross and caught his. “Your shop; it’s on fire.”

  “My shop?”

  “The building next to the opera house!”

  ###

  Kent raced from the church in his pickup the two blocks toward the main street through the village, barely glancing right or left as he crossed it. As soon as he’d crested a small rise in the road and gotten past some old birches lining the tree lawn of the street, he could see smoke billowing into the sky a couple blocks to the southeast. He turned right on the State Route that served as the small village’s main drag and then made a quick left a block later at the store. The windows of the place were dark but the little lot was full all the way down past the attached bakery. There was a pickup blocking the road just past the little bake shop and Mel Crane, in jeans and a t-shirt, was standing there, holding a crowd of onlookers at bay.

  Kent screeched to a stop behind the row of park cars and jumped out of his truck as all eyes turned his way.

  He called out to Mel, “That’s my building and I’m going down there, Sheriff.”

  “I advise against it Mr. Gross.”

  He flipped a backhand toward her and half jogged down the street past old man Howe’s place and to the far side of the opera house, only slowing when he reached the ring of fire trucks arrayed around the front and the parking lot side of his own property. Closest to him, a crew manned a hose, spraying water along between the back of his building and the right side of the opera house in an attempt to keep the fire from spreading to the other building.

  Kent watched as streams of water shot up from the front side of the building that faced the parking area to battle the flames licking at what was left of the roof. Skirting around the crew working on containment, he moved to his right to get a view from the front for himself.

  Block walls formed the base of the structure but, a couple of feet above that base and the crumbling cement floor, the old auto body shop had been all wood framed. Now, as he watched, only the heaviest support beams remained.

  All around him, men shouted and wood cracked and sizzled and popped. The firefighters from both companies were making a valiant attempt to contain the blaze but he knew, deep down, that the only way they’d have been able to save the shop and the meager contents he’d kept inside it, would have been to be there as it started.

  With a mighty crack, the final roof truss that could even be identified as such, gave way and crashed to the floor. Flames jumped from it to other fallen debris and caught on anything that was still dry enough to burn. As Kent watched, the men manning the hose with the stream that had been trained on the beam refocused and began to spray the rubble on the floor to staunch the spread of the fire.

  Smoke billowed toward Kent. It stung his eyes and the acrid smell burned his nose. He covered his nose and mouth with the crook of his arm but a coughing spell came anyway. In the process, he heaved in even more of the polluted air.

  Finally noticing him, a man rushed to his side. “Sir,” he ordered, “you need to go back behind the trucks now. You can’t be here.”

  “I own the building…what’s left of it. Just who are you?”

  “Mike Cotrell, sir. I’m the Chief. Now, please, step back. There’s nothing you can do here right now.

  Chapter 2 – Loss

  Thursday Afternoon, September 24th,

  Morelville General Store

  “It’s a total loss,” Chloe told Faye. “There’s nothing left down there but a big pile of mess.”

  Faye clucked her tongue and then let out a heavy breath. “When you called during our meeting, Kent lit out of there like his own pants were on fire. The way I understood it, he never kept much of anything in that building. Lord knows, if he wanted to replace it, it wouldn’t be a hard thing or even an expensive thing to do but I don’t know that it’s any great loss to him.”

  “What did he even own it for if he wasn’t using it?”

  Faye shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The land I guess. He wants the opera house to
o so I suppose, whatever his next grand plan is, it included leveling both of those buildings.”

  “Not on our watch!” Chloe smiled at her friend.

  They both turned toward the door as it swung open and Jesse Crane walked in.

  “Well, here you are,” he said to Faye. “I thought you were helping Hannah today?”

  “I was…I am. I just stopped over here first.”

  “You two were gossiping, that’s what you were doing,” Jesse said as he turned to give a look to Marco who was seated on his customary bench at the front of the store, taking it all in.

  “Leave me out of it,” Marco laughed. “Those two get me in enough trouble.”

  Chloe gave her husband a dirty look as Faye flipped a dismissive hand his way.

  To Jesse, Faye said, “That fire is the talk of the town. Chloe and Marco were right here last night after closing. They saw everything. I just wanted to get the real story.”

  “Well, not everything,” Marco said. “Your daughter kept most of us back pretty far from everything. The guy that owns the place steam rolled her pretty quick though and went on down there.”

  “I come’ around that way,” Jesse admitted. “He isn’t down there now. They got it all roped off, like, and the Fire Inspector out of Zanesville is there.”

  “Fire Inspector?” Faye and Chloe both asked in unison.

  “That’s what I read on the side of the vehicle parked out front.”

  “Whatever for?” Faye wondered, aloud.

  “I bet they suspect arson,” Chloe said.

  Marco laughed again. “You watch entirely too much TV.”

  Faye turned to her own husband and asked, “What brought you into town in the first place?”

  “Fishin’. I promised Beth all summer that we’d go, just me and her like I do with Cole and,” he said sheepishly, “I never got around to taking her. She got out of school early today because of teacher meetings and she asked.”

  “What on earth did you come into town for?”

  “She wanted to get some minnows. I told her the best place to find some quick was that little sinkhole area of the stream not far from the gas station so I dropped her out over there.”

  “What did you need me for?” Faye asked.

  “Didn’t. I was just stopping in to get some night crawlers as back-up and figured I’d give you a hard time.”

  Faye swatted at his shoulder and then announced that she was headed back to see what Hannah was up to. Chloe followed her through the store.

  “Do you suppose it really was arson?” Marco asked Jesse as he reached into the little refrigerator behind the counter for a container of fishing worms.

  “Don’t know why it would be,” Jesse said. “If the man wanted it down, he could have just torn it down. It was his building.”

  “I don’t pretend to know a lot but I do know that arson is usually about money or hiding something.”

  “Maybe arson, maybe not. Never was much of anything in there; not since the body shop closed down more than ten years ago. Everybody knew that, and it ain’t like Gross needs money.”

  “What do you suppose that building was worth?”

  Jesse took off his tattered old ball cap and scratched his head. “Dunno. It sits on about a half-acre and the land isn’t devalued by the loss of the building but the building was just a shell of a place; four walls, one of ‘em with three bay doors, and it had power. There was only a sink in the place, no bathroom.”

  “How’d they get away with that?”

  “Weren’t no need back in the day. The old man that owned the place lived in the house on the other side, across the parking lot. He worked alone or with one of his two boys. Nobody ever ‘come checking around.”

  “No lift or anything in there for repair work?”

  Jesse shook his head. “Naw. It was more a scratch and dent shop than anything. Car bodies today aren’t like they were when he was in business.” He laughed then, “Hell, if they were still around, they’d be making a killing off the stuff that passes for a body today. A little fender bender ‘ll cost you thousands in body work.”

  ###

  “Do you suppose,” Chloe asked Faye once they’d reached the storeroom and were out of earshot of the men, “that maybe that Kent fellow had his shop burned down to claim the insurance money?”

  Faye stopped walking and pondered the idea for a minute but then shook her head no. “He wouldn’t have any reason to. He’s pretty wealthy, all told.”

  “Maybe he is but I’d be willing to bet he isn’t,” Chloe said. “Think about it. He’s a real estate developer. They’re always leveraged to the hilt. If he needed quick cash, and he wanted to, say, get a building out of the way…” She let the thought hang in the air.

  “I suppose. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way but then, how would he have done it? He was at the board meeting with me and a number of people could vouch for that, myself included, as much as it might pain me to do so.”

  “Maybe he paid someone to do it for him…I’m just throwing it out there, you know. He might be as well off as you think, in which case, none of it makes any sense.”

  Faye pondered for only a moment. “You don’t think he’s wanting money fast to buy the opera house out from under us, do you?”

  Chloe nodded. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  Chapter 3 – Fishing

  Thursday Afternoon, September 24th

  Beth picked her way down the embankment to the narrow stream. She was a good thirty yards downstream from the hole where minnows usually could be found but the bank was much steeper there and, even lying on her stomach, she hadn’t been able to reach that far with her net.

  The stream was low, the water seeming to barely flow even though they’d had a good amount of rain. Where it usually came to her knees, now it was barely ankle deep. She trudged up the rocky creek bed carefully in her old mucking boots. They were made for cleaning animal stalls, not for wading but they were all she had. Maybe, she thought, I can get Papa to buy me a pair of waders like he bought for Cole.

  When she reached the hole, she dipped the lip of her bucket into the water away from it and tried to catch enough to fill it. With that done, she set it in the creek bed and wedged a couple of rocks around it to keep the water from moving it but she wasn’t much worried, as low as it was.

  She looked into the hole. There were plenty of tiny fish swimming around in there, most of which weren’t big enough to scoop out and transfer to the bait pail.

  Frustrated, Beth looked around. The water was so low, there were hardly any fish at all to be seen. She turned back to the sink hole and dipped her net in as deep as she could and scooped then pulled it up. It was full of tiny fish but none big enough to be used for bait. She stooped then and tipped the contents of the net back into the water.

  “This was a bust,” she said aloud.

  She picked her way upstream then, toward the road. Where it came the closest, she rounded a bend in the creek rather than try and scale the five-foot bank that was nearly vertical while carrying her pail and net. She continued to follow the creek as it paralleled the road for another fifty yards.

  Ahead, she could see the gas station where her mother worked, nearly fifty yards beyond the bank where the creek turned again; this time to run under the road. The bank was lower there at that bend so she continued toward it, thinking she’d climb out, run in and say hello to her mother and then go and find her grandfather.

  As she approached it, the flow of the water got a little heavier and that’s when she heard it; the sound of water spraying. Looking around again, at first she didn’t see anything but then, as she got close to the bank where she intended to wade out of the stream, she looked to her right and saw the cause of the commotion. A five-gallon, red plastic gas jug was wedged tightly into the drain pipe. It was holding most of the flow back, allowing only a little water to pass around it through the gaps.

  “A square peg in a round hole, Grandma would
say,” Beth spoke aloud again and then smiled to herself, proud of herself for thinking of it. She leaned out over the low bank on the left and put her pail and net down, as far away as she could so she would have room to climb the two and a half or three feet out herself later, then she turned back to face the gas jug.

  She tried to move forward but the rocks were moss covered and more slippery there. Instead, she edged closer to the opposite bank and moved half sideways, clinging to it the last few feet to the wall of earth and rock that formed the road bed for the road passing over the pipe.

  Beth looked back toward the station. A car pulled into the pumps but her mother, apparently busy inside doing something, didn’t venture out to greet the customer as she often did. She focused back, instead, on her self-appointed task.

  The heavy rocks below the road were dry above the creek bed and Beth was able to edge along them the six feet or so back toward the pipe.

  The pipe stuck out a few inches around the top from the earth packed tightly over it. She grabbed for the edge with her left hand and, when she got a hold of it, she pulled her right hand from the rock wall quickly to join it. Her position though, she quickly realized, was now at odds with her task. Her feet pointed into the rock wall and her body mostly faced it while her hands were crossed out to her left, hanging onto the pipe, only inches above the jug.

  Here goes nothing, she thought. Maintaining the backwards grip of her right hand, she reached down with the left and scraped with it at the gas jug. It didn’t move at all. She tried again; this time trying to push in and down to knock it more flat. It budged just a fraction of an inch but got tighter, not looser.

  Beth realized she was going to have to get back in the water and use two hands to have any hope of freeing the can and the water flow. She moved her left hand back up to the pipe’s rim and then started to move her right hand toward the rock wall. That’s when she saw it; a baby water snake slithering along, toward her boot.