Fire Raiser (4 page)

“You’re beautiful.”

“I know.”

“Gotta go. Tell Jamey to haul ass, and kiss Kirby and Bella for me. I may be late.”

“Wake me up.”

“Really late,” he warned.

“Wake me up anyhow. ’Bye.”

Sorting out Jamey’s gadgets and their information took an awkward while. After some more juggling—and an abrupt fall to the floor that could not have been salutary to the pager’s electronic health—he finally got the BlackBerry and its little stylus stashed in his jacket and the pager clipped to his belt.

Holly held up his phone. “Why don’t I bring sandwiches out to you guys at the site?” she suggested. “I’m sure Evan hasn’t eaten, and probably nobody else has, either.”

“Would you?” Jamey asked, abjectly grateful.

She thought about making it a condition of delivery that she could slide the phone back into his trouser pocket herself, but managed some restraint. “Sure. Get going.”

He started for the door, turned, frowned, felt his right hip, and looked sheepish as Holly dangled his phone by its antenna. He came to retrieve it, grinned, and then hurried outside.

When Jamey was gone, Gib cocked an eyebrow at her across the table. “A little young for you, maybe?”

“Well, there’s that,” she laughed. “But actually I’m too married—and
way
too female.”

Dark eyes widened. “Really?”

Holly regarded him with a mixture of amusement and affection. “You have to be the only man I’ve ever known—gay
or
straight—who has absolutely no gaydar at all.”

He gave a shrug. “I’ve never seen that gay or straight matters.”

“Evan’s the same way.
He
can always tell, though, and I can’t recall a single time when you’ve ever—”

“
Does
it matter? I mean, unless you’ve got ambitions to get a particular person into bed, who the hell cares?” Wadding a paper napkin with a bit more emphasis than strictly necessary, he went on, “Did I hear right, and another church has burned down?”

“This makes three since the end of September. Evan can’t figure the motive—I mean, it’s not as if there’s robbery involved, or insurance fraud. Baptists don’t go in for silver candlesticks and gold communion goblets. And neither of the first two churches had enough insurance to be fraudulent about.”

“All Baptist?”

“What?”

“Were they all Baptist churches?”

She thought for a minute. In September it had been Old Believers Church, out on Highway 4; in October, Calvary Weekly Fellowship in Silver Rock; and now—

“I’m sure Evan’s thought of it,” Gib said almost apologetically.

“Y’know, I’m not sure that he has. Two’s a coincidence, but three starts to look like a pattern. That’s nice detective work.”

“I read a lot,” he grinned. “You and Evan are coming over to the house soon, right?”

“Please don’t let Erika go to any trouble.”

“Are you kidding? How many famous writers does she get to entertain for an evening?”

Holly groaned and threw her napkin at him as she slid out of the booth. As Gib left the diner and Holly put in a lunch order with Gertrude, she reflected that if there was anything she hated more than the
“How’s the writing going?”
question, it was being treated as if what she could do made her something to be exhibited at the Tri-County Fair. Which wasn’t a nice thing to think, and unjust into the bargain. Trouble was,
knowing
that had never enabled her to ditch the feeling that she was expected to perform like Rex the Mathematical Horse.

There were times when she missed Susannah Wingfield for the most ignoble and selfish of reasons.

The circumstances of the arson—for arson it was, as Holly figured out when Evan threw a charred metal can in the back of his SUV—were too similar to the first fires to make this third one anything but connected.

“If they’d all been started in the same place, I’d maybe think it was somebody with a religious grudge. Thanks, babe,” he added as Holly handed him half of a tuna-on-sourdough. “But Old Believers started at the front door, and this one where the benches were stacked in the back corner. That’s where Luther found the accelerant.”

“Calvary was the pulpit,” she reminded him. “That’s psychologically suggestive, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “The whacko type can’t help it—they leave clues whether they want to or not. This isn’t even somebody trying to mess with our heads by
pretending
to be a psychopath. Significant dates, same day of the week, same phase of the moon, all that fun-and-games serial-killer stuff they love to do in the movies.”

“Was there gas in the paint can?”

“Wasn’t paint.” He took a long swig of coffee and looked startled. “Gerdie musta cleaned out the percolator—this is actually drinkable.”

“Not paint?” she asked, to bring him back to the point.

“Varnish. Jamey recognized what’s left of the logo—he spent most of last month sloshing the same stuff all over the bookshelves at his place. Before you ask, it’s a common brand, and we can trace the lot number punched onto the can but that only tells us where it was purchased, not when or by who.” He held up a finger. “Don’t say it. ‘By whom.’ ”

“Hey, Evan!”

They both turned to see Jamey approaching. He really was scandalously gorgeous, Holly reflected. If he had this effect on a woman insanely in love with her husband, what havoc did he wreak when he was actually
trying
to attract someone?

Evan nudged her in the ribs. “Stick your eyes back in their sockets,” he murmured, laughter rippling through his voice. “You’re took.”

“Looking isn’t against the law.”

“Well, at least stop drooling. It’s undignified for a woman of your years, social standing, and reputation.”

She was vastly tempted to stick out her tongue at him, but Jamey had reached the SUV by then. “Whatcha got?” she asked, passing over a turkey and swiss.

“Thanks, Holly. I’ve got absolutely nothing. I was hoping more than that can of varnish would be lying around, waiting for us to find it.”

Evan shook his head. “Nope. No footprints, no tire tracks, no torn fabric conveniently flapping on a tree branch.” He set aside the rest of the sandwich and scowled at the charred rubble of wood and brick that had been a church. “I’m not liking this, Jamey. Third church fire, no evidence at any of them.”

Holly touched his arm lightly. “Gib pointed out that they’ve all been Baptist churches.”

He shrugged. “More Baptists around here than any other denomination. We’ve got one each of Catholic, Episcopal, Mormon, AME, Lutheran, and Methodist, plus a synagogue that draws from the Tri-County area. And before you ask—none of these churches were exclusively white or black. It’s possible this is religious prejudice, but I think we can rule out racism.”

“You’re forgetting where you live now,” Holly said quietly.

“This is the South,” Jamey nodded. “Lacking a solid case contrariwise, racism can never be ruled out.”

“Yeah, okay,” Evan admitted. “That was wishful thinking on my part. But now that you’ve mentioned it, there’s not a square mile in this whole country where bigotry of one kind or another can be ruled out. After all, it’s the Constitutional right of every American to hate.”

“And the least American thing any American can do is tell another American to shut up.”

Holly shifted impatiently. “Now that we’ve established our liberal credentials by reaffirming our belief that everyone in these United States has the right to be a moron, can we please get back to the point? You don’t have any evidence. You don’t even have any guesswork. The only thing remotely resembling a pattern is that all three churches were Baptist—but not even the same kind of Baptist. How am I doing so far?”

“How would you write your way out of it?” Evan countered.

“You know I’m hopeless at mysteries.”

“Yeah,” he said with a smile, “but you make up for it in other ways.”

Jamey grinned. “Am I about to be embarrassed by a PDA?”

“Nothing so decorous,” Holly said sweetly. “With him, it’s always PDL.” When Jamey looked confused, she elaborated. “Public Display of Lust.”

“You should be so lucky,” Evan shot back. “Go see if Louvena can find anything in the archives.” He bent and kissed her soundly on the lips. “Thanks for lunch.”

By the time she got back to town, she had consulted via phone with Cousin Louvena Cox, and they had devised a plan. Louvena shut the Pocahontas County
Record
’s back office, told the front desk staffers she didn’t want to be disturbed, and locked herself and Holly in the archives room.

“Y’all ready?”

“Say the word,” Holly replied cheekily, and the old woman made a face.

“Cute don’t get you nowhere with me,” she warned.

“Yes, ma’am,” Holly answered, properly subdued. Cousin Louvena could do that to a person with one twitch of emphatic eyebrows. She belonged to what was discreetly termed a “collateral” branch of the Coxes—which meant she was a descendant of Ezekiel Cox and his slave mistress of thirty-two years, Jubilee. That he had insisted on acknowledging his children, giving them his surname, and teaching them to read and write in defiance of the law didn’t begin to compensate for the fact that he hadn’t freed a single one of them.

Evan had a lot of trouble with local history, and especially Holly’s family’s role in it. That first spring at Woodhush, he’d returned from a long walk around the property completely unable to believe what he’d seen about a half mile from the main house: the splintered wooden markers of the slave cemetery and the bare river-rock foundations of the slave cabins. Holly hadn’t exactly forgotten that the evidence was there, but it wasn’t something she thought about much, either. Nobody ever understood anything about slavery until they stood looking at its physical remnants, the scars it had left on the land that attested to society’s still-open wound. That afternoon, watching her husband pace and seethe, Holly had realized she’d stopped seeing what
had
to be seen. And her parents would have been as ashamed of her as she was of herself.

The extended McClure-Flynn-Cox-McNichol-Bellew-Goare-and-so-on clan had a blotchy record: most had owned slaves at one time or another, some had freed all or some of them in the decades before the Civil War. The only thing entirely in their favor, as far as Holly was concerned, was that not one of her ancestors had fought for the Confederacy. She supposed that was something, anyway. Not much, but something.

It was surmised within the family that Louvena’s slave ancestor had bequeathed her progeny an African magic totally unlike the Celtic strain. Certainly no one not descended from Jubilee could do what her great-great-great-granddaughter now did with nothing more than a shell, a square of silk, two candles, and a pinch of what looked like plain grayish dust.

A large abalone shell, its iridescence shimmering by candlelight, was balanced on a glass stand atop brown silk. Drops of light shone through the holes punctuating the shell, shifting as Louvena switched the candle slowly back and forth, left hand to right and back again. Holly watched, fascinated, chiding herself for the many years she had spent paying as little attention as possible to other people’s magic simply because she had so little of her own. There was beguilement and grace, and sometimes great beauty, in the act of magic—but even more in observing each individual practitioner. The particular tilt of the head, the sure gestures of the fingers, the melodies of whispered phrases, the eyes that might haze over with the intensity of concentration or burn with clear, fierce power—though she had never felt herself to be fully one of them, and probably never would, still she could appreciate and savor their gifts and their expertise, and watch with a smile the individual quirks and flairs.

Louvena was not the sort of ostentatious Witch who not only enjoyed but positively cherished her own cleverness—and wanted everyone who witnessed it to be as enamored as she was. Deliberate, almost businesslike in her work, she went about her spellcasting in near silence until a snap of her fingers startled Holly.

Her turn. She pricked her index finger, squeezed up a drop of blood, and painted it on the interior of the shell as Louvena directed: a slow five-pointed star. Stepping back, she watched the old woman sprinkle fine gray-brown dust across the inner curve of the abalone. Holly wondered distractedly how many hundreds of dead spiders had been ground up to produce this powder—then flinched again when Louvena turned the shell over and slammed it onto the brown silk, almost forcefully enough to break it.

A tall, thin candle, colored gold outside and red at its heart, was lit from the wick of the first. A moment’s burning of its end melted enough wax to affix it to the overturned shell. Holly had never seen a candle burn so quickly, the wax sliding down in a steady stream. No impertinent drafts disturbed the flame or pushed the melting wax to one side or the other. Soon it had burned down to a mere inch or so, and the shell was swathed in red and gold wax.

Louvena blew the candle out. Carefully, she lifted the abalone from the silk and set it aside. Then, with exquisite delicacy, she pinched one corner of the cloth between thumb and forefinger and peeled it from the table.

Holly was amazed to see that the underside of the brown silk was printed with black letters and numbers—and that the heat from the melted wax had seeped through the shell to liquefy some of her own dust-thickened blood. This had left tiny marks on the silk: letters and numbers. Months and years.

“Spider-crush,” Louvena remarked, “works different ways. What I was after here was the web between past and future. The pattern. The shell and the brown are good for finding things. Red and gold are Fire, of course.”

Holly nodded mutely. No, she would never feel herself one of them—but she had at least developed enough wisdom to appreciate her fellow Witches.

Now Louvena’s face creased in a shrewd, wonderfully youthful smile, and from a pocket of her skirt produced an unlikely implement. Holly felt her eyes go wide, and couldn’t help grinning as she asked, “You like doing that, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes.” Louvena chuckled as she uncapped the Magic Marker. “Here—take that steno pad and start writing down what I tell you.”