Fire Raiser (25 page)

She started with the Episcopalian fire in April. It was the only one with a narrow range for a starting time: between eight-thirty, when a Bible study group had gone home, and nine forty-five, when the call had come in to the fire department. The ignition point was a cupboard where hymnals were stored.

“April 8, 2006,” Holly said again as Lulah started the second chart. “Nine to ten. Grant Newbury. You know what else? The Episcopalian wish list for tonight’s proceeds includes hymnals to replace the ones that burned—they were brand new the very day of the fire. Maybe Grant hands them out every Sunday, maybe he ordered them, or unpacked them, or pasted in the bookplates that say ‘Property of’—”

“Holly, honey, slow down.”

“Nobody turns out to be what you thought they’d be, do they?” she asked. “They always disappoint you. The fire at the choirboy’s church and his recreational hour with Evva coincide very nicely.” Holly pushed the cuffs of Cam’s shirt up toward her elbows. “God, how I hope the rest of these don’t match.”

“Let’s start with the first fire and see how it goes. September 9, 2005. Old Believers.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and visualized the reports Evan had strewn across their partners’ desk, swearing steadily as he tried in vain to make a pattern out of them. She pictured each one in her head, and rattled off the particulars of each. When all seven fires had been listed—including the Methodist, even though that one did not involve magic—she went through the files once more.

“September 9 last year was a real party,” she growled. “Chuck Driscoll was here from ten to eleven—”

“Peggy’s gonna pan-fry him with plum sauce.”

“I thought you didn’t want any of this known, so their families are spared?”

“I said I didn’t want Louvena to publish it,” Lulah corrected. “I didn’t say these men’s wives shouldn’t find out.”

Holly eyed her for a long moment. “Tallulah Eglantine McClure, are you going to use magic to out all these men to their wives?”

“If they went to one whorehouse, they’ve gone to others. That puts their wives at risk.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Noticed that, did you? Who was getting himself serviced that night?”

Holly returned to the screen. “Jacob Feuerstein, whom I don’t recognize but sure doesn’t sound like a Baptist-type name. Floyd Beaudry . . . no, he’s eight to ten, and Evan says the fire couldn’t have started before eleven.” She paused. “Although with magic, how could anybody tell? They’re going by how hot a fire usually burns when they estimate the time—Lulah, am I crazy to be thinking any of this? I mean, Grant may be a jerk, but—”

“Just keep going. September 9, 2005.”

“Judge Rausche—big surprise—from eight until ten. Hugh Chadwick, midnight to one in the morning.”

AFTER CHECKING OUT the other rooms and finding two more occupied—210 by a couple watching a movie while sharing champagne and chocolate truffles, 208 by a middle-aged man taking a shower—Nick told Cam to put the DVD player back where he’d found it. Not waiting to watch, he continued up the stairs. The part of his brain that craved logic and tidiness—that had kept thousands upon thousands of books organized for over forty years—told him that because the door into this place had been halfway up a flight of exterior stairs to the second floor, and this last landing had been the second they’d seen, they were inside the walls of the third floor. The part of his brain that was an accomplished practitioner of magic told him not to be an idiot. These steps would go where they had been spelled to go.

So he wasn’t all that surprised when a third landing appeared, with its now expected footstool and chest and flowers, and another flight rose above it. One more half-flight, one more landing—he stopped short.

End of the stairs.

“You don’t magic up something that goes nowhere,” Evan remarked.

“Maybe what they’re hiding is downstairs only,” Cam offered.

“Cam, you said the stairs weren’t originally magic?” Nick asked.

“No.” Cam was definite. “They’re built into the fabric of the house. It’s the ninth window that nobody notices because the architect was clever and who counts windows, anyway?”

“Ninth—?”

Evan said, “Eight to one side of the doors, nine to the other. The front suites have six windows—three for the sitting room, two for the bedroom, one for the bathroom.”

“And two for the main staircase,” Cam finished. “Which leaves this ninth one—” He pointed to the windows, one beneath the other, and very far away now that they were at the top of the stairs. “—to light this place.”

“But the magic is new?” Nicky persisted.

“Yeah. Before you ask—none of the Nevilles was a Witch, and none of them married into the local Witchly families. If there’d been any magic here before, somebody would’ve sensed it in the last two hundred or so years. I mean, it can’t have stayed hidden all that time.”

Evan was dividing a frown between the two side walls, with their cabinets and flowers. “Why do you build one of these, anyway? Aside from the fun of it.”

“Smuggling,” Cam said. “To hide money or moonshine, or some other contraband. I’d bet that guns and ammunition were hidden here during various wars—maybe soldiers, too.”

“And of course,” Nick added, “there’s always the simple desire to get into and out of one’s house without anyone’s knowing about it. That catch in the wainscoting can’t be original, though.”

“But the doorway was there, so they used it,” Cam replied. “Whatever mechanism was already there, I mean. Only they also disguised it with magic.”

“There must be at least one other way out,” Evan said, still scrutinizing the walls. “This has to lead
somewhere
besides two blank walls at the top.”

“Well, where are we right now? This has to be the attic. Same thing at Woodhush. There’s an entry there, so—”

“You’re applying logic to magic,” Nicky said with a tight smile. “You should know better than that.”

“But there
is
logic to it,” Cam protested. “Otherwise none of it would work!”

“Fascinating as this is,” Evan drawled, “it’s not getting us anywhere.”

Cam was peering down the stairs to where Jamey stood guard. “Maybe they sealed up the original entry to the attic. Maybe the important stuff that the magic is hiding really is downstairs, not up.”

“I repeat,” Lachlan said, “you don’t bother to spell something useless.
That’s
logic. Find the door, Cam.”

Reluctantly dragging his gaze to the walls, he started to explore as he had earlier. He had neither the bloodstone nor the holly-rowan talisman, but he knew now what to feel for. Or so Nicholas surmised—correctly, as it happened, for within a few minutes he had found a pressure-sensitive panel at a juncture of wallpaper stripes, and a quite ordinary door swung open.

“Cam, Evan—down the hall.”

The young men set off obediently, and Nick pondered the pleasures of being old enough to issue orders that were obeyed without question. He recalled very clearly a time when he and Alec had been the ones deferential to their elders—and how much trouble they sometimes got into when they weren’t. He looked out a dormer window that proved they were indeed in the attic, seeing but not hearing the rain. He missed his partner, missed the immediacy of their bond. There was a sense of Alec remaining, like a memory—nothing like the solid sense of his presence that Nick had known for so long that he had, he realized, become complacent. And he wondered, with a sudden unwelcome chill, if this was what it would be like if he outlived his lover.

“Uncle Nicky!” Cam was beckoning. “Man, you gotta see this.”

He left the dormer window and hurried down the hall. The room was painted in sunshine yellow and leaf green. A stationary bike, a treadmill; blue exercise mats rolled up against the wall; a soft-cushioned green chaise framed by a pair of sunlamps; a hospital bed; a crash cart.

Cam braced his fists on his hips, head cocked to one side. “What’re the statistics on people croaking during a stress-test?”

“I may become such a statistic if I don’t find something that makes sense,” Nick snarled.

Evan spoke from down the hall. “You may want to check out who’s behind Door Number Two.”

“Don’t you mean ‘what’?”

“Come see for yourself.”

Two girls, maybe fourteen years old and maybe not, were sitting up in twin beds. Both had blond hair, blue eyes, and sharp, sloping Slavic cheekbones. They wore plain blue flannel nightgowns and their braided hair was tied with blue ribbons. Neither reacted to the appearance of three strangers in their doorway. They didn’t look as if someone had given them drugs. They looked as if someone had taken their souls.

HOLLY GLARED AT LULAH’S two charts, feeling as if someone had just told her the jigsaw puzzle had 1001 pieces. Hugh Chadwick was the right time for the fire at Old Believers, but after some thought Lulah recalled that he was heading up the rebuilding committee for Calvary Baptist. Tom Van Slyke, whose visit to Westmoreland coincided neatly with the Calvary Baptist fire, belonged to Old Believers.

They looked at each other with frustration carving identical furrows in their foreheads. Lulah yanked the clip from her ponytail and looked for a moment as if she might start kicking things. But all she did was begin gathering her gray-streaked russet hair up again to knot at the back of her head. “Start again,” she said.

“For the sixth time,” Holly muttered. “Old Believers. Wooden front door burns like a son of a bitch, the fire’s so hot that even the bricks melt—”

“Bricks?”

“Evan said they looked like clinkers—black, even shiny in places, like obsidian.”

“Hugh Chadwick,” Lulah declared.

“He’s Calvary.”

“What does he do for a living?”

Holly sighed. “Construction. He put in a bid for the brickwork at your house. Does that make a second connection, or—”

“Let’s just keep going and see what happens. There’s no link between Van Slyke and Calvary. Let’s move on. First Baptist . . . the only one who fits is Jack Wheeler—”

“—who manages that home-improvement monstrosity out on Route 12!” In the next instant Holly’s excitement drained away. “But even if his store has a gross of the same varnish that was the accelerant, we don’t know if he belongs to the church, or has any kind of association with it, or—”

“The Lutheran is next,” Lulah interrupted. “December tenth, early morning, the closet where the pastor’s vestments are kept—dammit! It’s not at night, and there’s no customers here that day until nine that evening. The Methodists, which started about five in the morning—”

“That one doesn’t figure into it. Louvena told Evan tonight that it’s the only one that didn’t have any magic about it.” When a look of exasperation was leveled at her, she added, “Sorry. Forgot to mention it. Okay, after the Methodists were the Episcopalians, and that’s Grant. Last one—”

“Wait a second, this thing just died on me.” Lulah tossed the pen over her shoulder and grabbed one from another CryoCache coffee mug. “Okay.”

“Gospel Baptist, sometime before midnight, in the church office. Ignition point was a metal chair, which is really bizarre.”

“We’ve got somebody called Valentin Maximovich Saksonov—isn’t that Nicky’s patronymic?—anyway, he matches the timeline but can pretty much be crossed off, unless you can think of a reason why a Russian would be in the office of a Baptist church. The only one that really fits is Louis LaPierre, in Room 208 with Vilmos from nine until ten. But he’s Catholic.”

“Saksonov—that name comes up a lot. And regularly.”

“Focus, please. Louis LaPierre, Gospel Baptist—”

Holly ruminated a minute or two, knowing she’d heard something about—“Got it! Gospel Baptist is in the process of suing him for installing faulty fire-alarm equipment!”

“Well, of course they’re suing,” Lulah observed tartly. “Their church burned down!”

“Evan said that the very afternoon before the fire, LaPierre swore uphill and down dale that everything was fine. But of course it wasn’t.” She grinned. “What do you want to bet the conversation took place in the reverend’s office?”

“All right, I
might
be convinced that you’re right. But it doesn’t explain the magic. Nobody on our list is a Witch. Whatever magic started these fires, it didn’t come from any of them.”

“So whose magic
was
it?”

NEITHER GIRL SAID A WORD.

It took a couple of tries, and a clearing of his throat, before Nicky could speak. But then he couldn’t think of anything to say. Evan was at the closet, dragging out a pair of blue terrycloth bathrobes, and over his shoulder said, “The nametags read ‘Marika’ and ‘Agrafyna.’ Russian?”

“As good a guess as any.” So in Russian he told the girls that no one would hurt them, they were safe. Telling them they’d been drafted as power forwards for the Lakers would have had much the same effect. Coaxing them into the bathrobes proved no trouble. Cam, knotting the belt around one girl’s waist, cast a frustrated look over his shoulder at Nick.

“They’re in a walking coma. Magic or drugs?”

Evan said, “They’ve been so scared for so long that I don’t think anything will ever scare them again. They don’t know how to feel anything else, but they don’t even feel
that
anymore.”

One of Nick’s specialties was what Lulah called Come-Hither; with a little tweaking it became Go-Thither. The only way he knew the spell had taken was that both girls looked him in the eyes. But just for a moment.

“Take them downstairs,” he said, “and get them out through that threshold.”

“Uncle Nicky—” Cam looked like a spooked colt. “There’s too much magic here. Don’t you feel it?”

“I’ll take your word for it. Go on. I’ll go take a look into the other rooms.”

“I’m serious. It’s not these girls, it’s this whole set-up—”

“Theorize some other time,” he snapped, wondering why he was so irritable. Perhaps Cam was right, and there was a surfeit of magic here. Or, more likely, he was simply missing the solid support of his partner. “Take those children somewhere safe.”

He watched them descend the first few stairs, the girls moving placidly enough as Cam encouraged them with the occasional “
Horosho
”—good. Then he turned toward the next room, and opened the door.