Fire Raiser (3 page)

“Nah, we just let the major donors cop a feel.” She knelt and finished wiping off Bella’s chocolaty fingers with her skirt. “No, sweetie, I don’t think the Diplodocus wants a peanut butter cup. She might get a tummy ache.”

“But, Mommy—”

“Maybe some of that nice oregano. Go see if she likes it.” As Bella set off to investigate, Holly straightened up and surveyed her skirt. “I have to go back to the house and change. You take the SUV, I’ll follow in the Beemer.”

“It’s gonna take you more than five minutes to put something else on?” When she gave him a look, he shrugged. “Yeah, stupid question.”

“Yow!”

“Bella!” Lulah admonished. “Did you hear what I told Kirby about the tails on these animals?”

Evan bent to inspect the scratch. “You’ll live, Bella mia.” His daughter looked up at him with an expression that clearly said,
Thank you, Daddy, but I figured that one out for myself
, reclaimed her hand, and carefully set the steg down. Then she went about coaxing the flying whatsis out from behind a palm frond to perch on Lulah’s third-best willow wand.

“Speaking of donors,” Lulah said, “Alec and Nicky sent a check. Not a penny over the legal limit, the cheapskates. They know we could’ve cooked the books. There’s a note for you, Evan. On the hall table.”

He went to collect it. From within a sealed envelope he drew a note scrawled on dove gray stationery left over from Nick’s bookstore days.

Dear Evan:

Alec orders me to mention at the outset that we were only a little drunk at the time. A day or two ago we had the gemstones and teacups out, practicing for our biennial Election Prediction Ritual, and something curious came up. The gist of it is that at some point in early September one of your children will be at risk. At risk for what, of what, why, exactly when, and which one, we have no idea. These things can be maddeningly vague. Alec (who insists that we weren’t really that drunk) is asking if perhaps you’d send along a few strands of hair from our niece and nephew so that we can get a clearer read. You probably won’t want to mention this to Holly or Lulah.

As ever, with love to all,Nicholas

Lachlan chewed his lower lip for a moment. Had Nick and Alec been really worried, they would have sped down here from Connecticut. But had they felt it nothing more than an oddity produced by mild inebriation, the letter would never have been sent. So he’d raid the kids’ hairbrushes tomorrow, and not tell Holly or Lulah.

“Anything interesting?”

He slid the envelope into his breast pocket and turned to his wife with an easy smile. “They want to know if I want the next check drawn on Simon’s account or Kate’s. I’m wondering if I’d have a better chance of winning by outspending my esteemed opponent or doing it the way everybody’s gonna suspect me of anyway.”

“Physical intimidation?” she suggested. “Parking tickets?”

“Magic.” He grinned.

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t smile. “There’s not a single person in this county who ever thought Jesse McNichol ever won a single election any way other than merit. We have rules. We stick to them.”

“Hey, relax! I was just kidding.”

“It’s not funny, Evan. I thought by now you’d understand.”

“I was kidding!” he repeated. “Geeze, Holly, downshift it from fifth gear, would you? I wouldn’t
want
to get elected for any reason other than that the county wants me as sheriff.”

“I know. So let’s go to this thing and make sure everybody knows what a prize you are.” She went back into the parlor to say goodnight to the children—who ignored her, too busy helping Lulah construct a watering hole out of a saucer and some sphagnum moss. The triceratops family looked interested.

On the short drive back to the main house, Evan brought out his olive branch. “Y’know, being a mother agrees with you.”

She picked at some of the dried chocolate on her skirt. “Kirby and Bella agree with me. Mothering as an abstract concept, however—let’s just say it’s a good thing I’m raising Kirby and Bella, and not abstract concepts.”

“I forgot to ask—are we getting anything besides nibbles at this thing?”

“You’re getting free booze. What more do you want out of life?”

“A great-looking girl to bring home and fuck through the floorboards.” He paused. “Oh, and world peace.”

Holly gave up and laughed.

THE STEGOSAURUS THAT HAD infinitesimally wounded Bella wandered off unnoticed out a slight gap in the screen door. Being very tiny, it took the creature all night to traverse the porch, drawn by the scent of flowers in the lavishly planted beds surrounding the house. Sometime around dawn, the steg tumbled off the porch and broke its neck.

Thereby was possible ecological disaster averted when a real dinosaur—
a real dinosaur
—might have found its way to the nest of a snake or a lizard or a bird (though this would be unlikely; stegosaurs were not known for climbing trees), fertilized its eggs or had its eggs fertilized (it was unclear whether the formerly plastic animal had been male or female), and all genetic hell would have broken loose.

The dead stegosaurus eventually slid into the mud caused by that night’s rain and slowly decomposed in the flower beds. The next spring, when the soil was troweled preparatory to planting more flowers, missed entirely was the tiny skeleton with its unique row of plates like sails along its spine and spiked tail.

More importantly, perhaps, it was
not
discovered that night that Susannah Rowan Lachlan was indeed a Spellbinder, just like her mother.

Three

BACK AT THE HOUSE, Holly set her dress to soak in something Clary Sage swore was the sovereign remedy for stains from red wine to spaghetti sauce to chocolate, and went upstairs in her underwear to dig out something to wear. Remembering what she’d decided earlier about the weather and the venue, and her husband’s dictum about the Fuck Me shoes, she made several selections, threw them all onto the bed, and stood there staring at them. Five minutes later she was dressed in nice, conservative, wife-of-the-candidate slacks and a tailored blouse.

On the stairs, she got as far as the watercolor portrait of Bertha Myrtle Cox dressed as Cleopatra for a fancy dress ball in Richmond,
circa
1803. The hell with it. If Bertha could bare both shoulders and wear sandals at the age of fifty, Holly could show some leg at forty-two.

Besides, anything with a longer hem wouldn’t do justice to the shoes.

Which was as good an excuse as any for her real motivation: there would be more than one man at Westmoreland tonight who liked looking at her legs, and she was coming to the age when a woman is more and more grateful to be looked at.

November 2005

“SO HOW’S THE NEXT BOOK coming along?”

Holly supposed Gib couldn’t help it. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and certainly not since she’d become a successful author; she couldn’t expect him to know that he’d asked the Second Worst Question anyone could direct to a writer. (The First Worst was, of course,
“Where do you get your ideas?”
)

Therefore, because he really couldn’t help it and she really was fond of him, she smiled across her Cobb salad and replied, “The usual. Late nights and rewrites.”

They were having lunch at the Fourth Street Diner, scene of a hundred teenage angst-fests, and catching each other up on their lives had taken them through two rounds of iced tea and half their lunches. Gib Ayala’s family had spent only a few years in PoCo during the late ’70s, leaving a semester before high-school graduation. He and his two brothers and five sisters were used to moving, and took it all in stride; Air Force brats, the Ayalas always had each other for company. Their father’s career had taken them to seven states by the time they got to Virginia, and before his retirement they racked up two more. Gib and Holly had become friends when his siblings Pedro and Rosa started spending Saturdays helping Lulah with the horses at Woodhush in exchange for riding privileges. The Ayalas had two varieties of fanaticism: horses and flying. Horses scared Gib silly.

Oddly, he hadn’t followed his father into the Air Force. He’d gone into business instead. After earning his M.B.A., he’d given himself twenty years to build a company that would net him enough on a buyout to fly whenever he wanted for the rest of his life. He’d done it in eighteen—partly because he was his own best advertisement. His chosen field of endeavor had been a chain of upscale fitness centers scattered through Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.

So here he was, sitting opposite Holly at Fourth Street as if it were 1979 again. Now, though, he was the new director of flight operations at Shenandoah Regional Airport, and she was a bestselling writer. They were both married with children, they were both getting gray hairs—but in the last twenty-five years Gib hadn’t gained a single ounce that wasn’t solid muscle, and Holly would have quite cheerfully strangled him for it if his grin hadn’t reminded her why she’d always liked him so much.

Until he opened his mouth again and said, “I Googled you a few months ago, before we moved here from Atlanta.”

“Oh, I can’t wait. Okay, hit me with it. What are they saying?”

Black eyes twinkled at her in a way that, once upon a time, had made her a little fluttery. “That you and your publisher have a new McClure novel all written and ready to go, and you’re just waiting for the right moment to release it so it’ll make the most money.”

Strangling annoyance, she told him, “Actually, I’m waiting for somebody to option it for an ice show.”

He grinned the familiar lopsided grin. “They seemed pretty sure about it.”

“Delay a book that you’re stone cold certain will make money? Now, that’s a career move if ever I heard one. Almost as good as the one where you die so your sales—especially the autographed copies—go through the roof.” A quick swallow of iced tea did nothing to help her simmer down. “I know about those rumors. In the first place, why anyone should be so anxious to read
anything
is completely beyond me. I love the Harry Potter books, but does my mental health and/or physical well-being depend on reading the final one in the summer of 2007? Not so much, no.”

“You’re not flattered by the interest?”

“Of course I’m flattered. It’s lovely that people are so involved in what I write. It’s my job to make sure they do get involved, because ultimately it’s my job to sell books. I’ve got two kids to raise and educate, and a farm that shows a profit about twice a decade, even with all Lulah’s hard work. Evan’s salary pays the bills, keeps us all fed and clothed, but it’s my job to provide the rest of it.”

“I thought your job was about art.” He paused, and it was more or less a toss-up whether his next words were ironic or not. “With a capital A.”

“I tell stories. Sometimes they’re true stories, and those are the biographies. The others are called novels, because I make stuff up. Either way, I tell stories. When I’m on top of my game, I’m pretty good at it. They’re functional. They serve a purpose. One of the main purposes they serve is to keep my kids in shoes that fit. That means I have to write stories that other people want to read, and therefore want to buy—preferably in hardback. The books are also functional because they serve the purpose of entertaining, or instructing, or just occupying somebody’s attention for a few hours.”

“Functional, but not Art? Can’t they be both? What about Dickens?”

Holly grimaced. “You
know
how I feel about Dickens!”

“ ‘Never trust anybody who gets paid by the word.’ Yeah, I’ve been hearing that one since the last millennium. My point is that his books were mass market, and he sure as hell wrote them to keep his family clothed and fed—”

“And people lined up on the docks of New York by the thousands to find out whether or not Little Nell had croaked!”

“But they also qualify as Art. Well, to everybody but you.”

“Anybody who gets paid by the word, it’s in their best interests to draw it all out as long as possible. I don’t know, maybe it’s our information age. People want their popular entertainment the same way they want their news summaries: quick, concise, pared down to the bare bones. Doesn’t leave much leeway for nuance.”

“Says the girl whose last novel was six hundred pages long!”

Holly thought for a minute about
Jerusalem Lost
—which had started life as
Jerusalem Found
—and what her life had been like when she’d written it. “Six hundred thirty-two pages,” she corrected with a little smile.

“Whatever. But that was—what, two years ago?”

“Three.”

“So why does it surprise you that people are wondering about the next one?”

“I’m not surprised by anything anymore. Look, whatever I write next, there will be people who’ll complain because it’s not the book they want to read. It’s this sense of—of
entitlement
that’s sort of basically hilarious.”

“You know what I think? I think they think your books get written by magic.”

He laughed, so she laughed. “If only! Unfortunately, it’s just me and whatever’s inside my head—plus a computer and a halfway decent word processing program.”

“Just wind her up and plug her in, tell her what you want, and six months later—”

“—the book
you
want to read!” She spread her hands wide and wiggled her fingers like a good conjurer was supposed to. “Specific to your desires in all details, with explicit regard to your preferences in everything from battle scenes to sex scenes to what the characters eat for breakfast—”

“—delivered personally to your door by the author herself—”

“—on my knees, with a bottle of Dom Pérignon—”

“—and two dozen roses—”

“—with abject apologies in advance for anything that might disappoint your expectations!”

They toasted each other with iced tea and laughed. Even so, Holly realized something fundamental about the way they related to each other. The thing about him was that he let her get away with it. Halfway through her ranting, Evan would have given her A Look: brows slightly arched, mouth quirked in a little smile, head canted just a bit to one side. If that didn’t do it, he’d simply tell her,
“Lady love, shut the fuck up.”

And she
would
shut the fuck up. She trusted his judgment. If he’d reached the point where enough was an oversufficiency of enough, he said so. And she believed him. If Gib had said the same thing, if he’d ever said,
“Holly, honey, shut the fuck up,”
she would have had his balls on a barbeque skewer.

And that, she reflected as she managed to shut herself up, was why she was married to Evan and not to Gib.

Well, that and the fact that she’d never been able to keep her hands off Evan.

Holly was distracted from lusting secretly after her own husband (was that even possible, or did the person one lusted after have to be someone other than one’s spouse?) when Jamieson Tyler Stirling came into the diner. Jamey, she knew for a fact, had featured in the secret lustings of most of the female (and quite a lot of the male) population of Pocahontas County since his appointment as acting district attorney this September. It was a marvel that anything got done in a courtroom when he was in it.

What made Jamey astonishing was that he didn’t have the slightest consciousness of his own looks. Holly, an attentive observer of human nature and a truly dedicated observer of masculine attributes, had watched futilely for signs of narcissism. At last she had been compelled to admit that the man actually could comb that black hair every morning, shave that chiseled jaw, brush those perfect teeth, and perch rimless glasses on that sculpted nose (glasses that, happily, did nothing to obscure those silvery gray eyes) without realizing the effect he had on others. This wasn’t even taking into consideration the body, which was in a category all by its lonesome.

“Holly!” Jamey greeted her with a big smile. She suffered through a kiss on her cheek—really suffered, honestly—and then introduced him to Gib. “I’d heard there was an air ace over at Shenandoah Regional,” Jamey said as they shook hands. “Now for the really important question: Cessna or Piper?”

“Piper,” Gib replied. “Wouldn’t be seen driving a Cessna any more than Holly would be seen driving a Yugo. You fly?”

“Not if I can help it. My oldest brother’s a pilot for Delta. He’s a Piper addict, too.”

“Join us?” Holly asked.

“Thanks, but I can’t. I’m just gonna grab something to take back to the office. I haven’t seen daylight since seven this morning, and if I didn’t at least walk across the street to stretch my legs, I’d lose what little remains of my mind.”

“Which you’ll need for the Worthington trial,” Holly reminded him.

“Yeah. Evan knows he’s testifying next Thursday, right?”

“I’ll make sure he’s freshly laundered and wearing a tie,” she promised.

“He can arrive in a Santa Claus suit for all I care, as long as he’s on time. I want to get these people, Holly. They—” His pager and his BlackBerry went off at the same time. One hand fumbled at his belt while the other dipped into his breast pocket. The juggling act became more complicated when his cell phone shrilled from the vicinity of his right hip; he’d run out of hands and was in danger of dropping everything.

Holly silently begged her husband’s pardon and reached for the back pocket of Jamey’s trousers, sternly forbidding herself to cop a feel while she was at it. The young man nodded gratefully, bless his innocent heart, as she answered the phone while he checked the other two electronic killjoys.

She was astonished to hear her husband’s voice. “You’re gonna want to get out to First Baptist right now. There’s been another fire.”

“Evan? Me. The whole church burned down?”

“Almost to the foundation,” he affirmed.

“Anybody hurt?”

“Not even a singe. It happened after choir practice ended—” Away from the phone, he yelled, “Luther, get me a list of the choir members, okay? I want to know if any of ’em saw anything last night.”

Holly sighed. “Does that fall into the category of ‘long shot’ or ‘just plain hopeless’?”

“You never know. What are you doing answering the kid’s phone?”

“Let’s just say I was handy,” she said, knowing he’d hear the pun in her voice. “And if you don’t stop calling him that, eventually you’ll say it in court or something and he won’t like us anymore. Who reported the fire?”

“Mrs. Clark and the ladies changed their cleaning day this week. They called about twenty minutes ago. So help me, Holly, we gotta get some kind of alarm system set up for places like this. Way out here on undeveloped land—”

“—which they got cheap because nobody wants it,” she added. “At night you’d have to be looking really hard to see a fireglow—and smoke wouldn’t show up at all.”

“Cloudy last night, and no moon,” Evan agreed. “You’re not half bad at this. Luther!” he yelled again. “Send Charlotte to canvass the neighboring properties!” To Holly: “That’s in the ‘hopeless’ category, too. But if nobody saw or smelled anything—and most people around here get up at the butt-crack of dawn—then the place had burned out by sunrise. Shit! This means I gotta call in an arson guy.”

“How about the Fibbies?”

“Do I have to?” he whined.

“Play nice,” she advised, grinning.

“Do I have to? Listen, Holly, I gotta go. But could you check around a little? Probably another dead end, but I don’t have forty years of being familiar with this area. I’ll get Letisha looking into the Sheriff’s Office files, and if there’s anything similar anywhere in the tri-county area, but—”

She knew what he was thinking. “I’ll ask Cousin Louvena over at the
Record
office. What she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing, and if she knows something she can get the newspaper articles about it.”