Fire Raiser (6 page)

“It would work,” Evan said slowly, “except for two things. It’s not just Baptist churches that burned, and the charity didn’t get organized until late last October.”

Louvena nodded. “Old Believers burned on the ninth of September.”

“Timing,” he muttered.

“Like I told you, we got four Baptist churches, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, and the Lutheran, all magic. Except for the Methodists.”

“Could be cover,” he mused. “A smoke screen—”

“That’s three puns, and that’s two too many,” she told him severely.

“Camouflage,” he corrected himself, bowing an apology.

“I said it wasn’t much,” Louvena reminded him. “Just somethin’ to ponder.”

“I will. Thanks. Now, let’s go inside and find you that champagne.”

“I hope it’s Californian, and not that prissy French stuff,” she remarked as they headed back toward the front door. “Nothin’ good ever came out of France except the books of Mr. Balzac. And maybe a couple of those haystack pictures.”

“Most people prefer the water lilies.”

“Huh. Very pretty, but what use are they? Haystacks, now—that’s the practical beauty of the gifts of the land brought forth by people’s hard labor. The water lily didn’t do nothin’ but grow. You look at those paintings, they’re all soft colors and make you feel nice and restful—but they don’t make you think because there’s nothing there to be thought about.”

“Except maybe weeding the pond?”

He sidestepped her slap at his ass, laughing. But mention of Monet coupled with a glimpse of white-blond hair nearby reminded him of the night of the Lutheran fire.

THE SECOND WEEK IN DECEMBER, the Ayalas had invited the Lachlans over for coffee and dessert. Erika’s note mentioned that she was trying out new recipes for pie and needed opinions on which to take to her mother’s in Atlanta for Christmas, her three boys having all the usual culinary discernment of teenagers—which was to say none at all. They simply inhaled whatever was put in front of them, and occasionally remembered to say thanks.

The house was just outside the county line, and quite a drive from Woodhush. Erika turned out to be a fragile blonde a little younger than her husband, with big hair and too much mascara. Evan hid a grin, knowing that around tiny women Holly always felt like a complete galumph, terrified of stumbling over thin air and breaking treasured family antiques. Sure enough, her body language changed completely as she sidled into the house, her usual caution with long limbs and big feet turning perfectly pathological. Erika’s sons by her first husband—Troy, Titus, and Tristan—showed up just long enough to be introduced, then vanished upstairs to their video games in the third-floor attic that Gib had turned into a family room. Much of the first floor had been gutted to make a single barnlike great room with formal dining at one end, kitchen in the middle, and living room that doglegged the southwest corner of the house.

The coffee was Dominican, the cream was real, and the pie crusts were so light they nearly floated off the plates. Evan gleefully pigged out on blackberry, apple-raisin, pecan, pumpkin, and coconut-banana. The only reason there was no lemon meringue was that the boys had hijacked it before dinner.

“Don’t worry about it,” Holly told Erika after she apologized a second time for the lack. “Evan will be having dreams about this for a week—which will help when all he gets for dinner is half a head of iceberg lettuce and a tomato.”

Later, on their way out to the car, Holly smacked Evan upside the head.

“Ow!”

“That’s for gobbling up those pies as if you never get a decent meal at home.”

He grinned. “I’ve been trying to remember one.”

“Oh, funny man. You just talked yourself out of the tomato.”

“You’re a cold, cruel woman, McClure.” He swung her around and planted a great big sloppy kiss on her mouth. “That,” he told her, “is for knowing that framed posters of Monet water lilies don’t belong in the same house, let alone the same
room
, with black Naugahyde sofas.”

She choked on a giggle even as she glanced over her shoulder to make sure Gib and Erika’s front door was closed. “God, you’re wicked!”

“Just observant. They do pay me for that, y’know. Which means I heard what she said when you asked if she’d been over to Monticello yet.”

Holly cast another guilty glance over her shoulder and slid into the driver’s seat. “I’m trying to think up something tactful to say, Lachlan. I’m not having any luck.”

“Could there possibly be anything tactful to say about a woman who goes to Monticello and talks about the lawns?”

“Wicked
and
nasty.” She switched on the engine and huddled into her coat while waiting for the heater to kick in.

Evan eyed her profile for a moment. “Please tell me you’re not going to ask why he married her.”

“Gently, Big Guy,” she advised. “Gib was the first person with a Y chromosome who, when he said I was pretty, I believed him. Besides, we’ll have to invite them to dinner soon. Social reciprocity, Southern hospitality, and all that.” When he snorted, she went on, “Yeah, okay, I noticed the Naugahyde. But furniture has to be washable when you’ve got kids running around the house.”

“Teenagers ought to be civilized enough not to destroy stuff.”

“Tell me that again in a dozen or so years,” she advised wryly. “But—oh wait, I forgot.
Your
children are perfect!”

“Damned right they are,” he affirmed.

She unlocked the parking brake and shifted into reverse. “You’re just being smug because you know Clary Sage has a foolproof spill spell. Although if we really want to do it up right, I’ll have to find out where Cousin Cam is gallivanting around to this millennium—he does things with textiles that you wouldn’t believe.”

“Are you trying to change the subject?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“To deflect me away from discussing your old boyfriend.”

“He wasn’t.”

“But he wanted to be. Or at least his wife thinks he wanted to be, and maybe that he still does.” As she slanted him a skeptical glance, he shook his head. “Look, Holly, I know he’s an old friend or whatever, but let’s get real, huh? A guy knows when another guy’s pussy-whipped.”

She gave a derisive snort. “Is there any woman in the world so incredible in bed?”

“I assume you’re asking out of pure intellectual curiosity.”

“There’s nothing intellectual about the fact that if I ever tried to pussy-whip you, you’d be gone faster than—”

Evan shook his head again. “That’s not how it works, babe. It’s not just the fucking. I mean, he’s her second husband, right? And they’ve only been married a few years. It’s gotta be something about her that makes him panic every time he thinks about losing her. And before you say it, I don’t want to lose
you
, ever—but it’s not the same. A man like that, he doesn’t think any other woman would ever want him.”

She laughed. “You conceited son of a bitch!”

“That’s not what I meant. Why don’t you astonish the world and just listen for a change? Thank you. This kind of guy, he’s always scared that somebody else is gonna look better to her than he does. That what he has with her isn’t enough to make her stay with him.”

“But that makes
him
the controlling one.” She braked at the intersection of Highway 3 and Highway 8, and turned to stare at him.

“It makes him create situations to test whether she still wants him enough to be suspicious. He flirts a little, passive-aggressive, nothing overt—just to make sure she still wants to own him.”

“I don’t understand,” she said plaintively. “A man doesn’t trust that his wife loves him enough to stay with him, so he tries to make her jealous to prove to himself that she does love him? And this involves flirting with other women, so that his wife thinks other women want him, which makes her jealous—except that he doesn’t
really
think other women want him, which is why he has to reassure himself by flirting with other women so they
will
want him, thereby provoking his wife’s jealousy that proves other women want him even when he’s convinced they really don’t?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Y’know, I didn’t completely follow all that.”

“Neither did I,” she admitted. “And I’m the one who said it.” Somebody behind them honked, and she hastily shifted back into gear to make the turn. “So what was the point, again?”

“That’s just it. I don’t see that there is a point.”

“To what?” she asked, more confused than ever.

“Jealousy. It’s all about possession, right? Ownership? The idea of anybody trying to own
you
—”

“But I’m your wife.”

“Because you chose to be. Holly, you made me a promise. I trust your promises.
Jealous and possessive
means
suspicious and controlling
to me—and I just don’t see the point. How do you control the thoughts in a person’s head? You can’t, so why bother trying? Do I go ballistic when you look at Jamey?”

“He’s gay. Not a valid example.”

“If you look at one guy, you’re gonna look at others.”

“You look at women, too.” She snorted again. “If you didn’t, I’d have you hospitalized.”

“Look, what are the classic questions? For the man, it’s
Did you fuck him?
But the question a woman asks—”

“
Do you love her?
Are we really still that primitive? Men dedicated to making sure their offspring are in fact theirs, and women manipulating a man’s emotional commitment so her children are provided for?”

“What would be your first question, if you thought I was foolin’ around?”

She thought for a moment. “Evan, I’m trying to imagine it, and I can’t. I mean I really
can’t
. You made me a promise, too. And I trust you.” She lobbed a whimsical smile at him. “Are we evolved, or just kidding ourselves?”

“Do you really want to find out?”

“No. But you’ve convinced me that the whole jealousy thing is fairly psychotic.”

“That’s the way a lot of marriages work.” He paused, then shrugged. “My parents’, for one. Dad was the jealous one, always suspicious. He had good reason to be, of course. She always kept him on edge, just to prove what a catch she still was.”

Holly shook her head. “I couldn’t live like that,” she stated, repressing a shudder. “Always suspicious, always distrustful—trying to control what you think and feel—”

“Seems to work for some people.”

“Does it?” she mused. “Partnership or power trip? I know not every-body’s lucky enough to have what we have, but—oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe it’s that we actually
like
each other?”

“Yeah, I guess I do kinda like you,” he teased. “But where’d a nice girl like you learn a term like ‘pussy-whipped,’ anyway?”

“Whatever gave you the impression that I was a nice girl?”

“Just what I wanted to hear,” he announced, and slid his fingers up her thigh.

Holly laughed, then slowed the car and pulled over to the side of the road—but not for purposes of fooling around. Just as the fire truck roared past, Evan’s cell phone played the opening guitar riff of “Life in the Fast Lane.” He snagged the phone out of his jacket pocket with his right hand while his left delved beneath the seat for the flasher he insisted she keep in the car.

“Don’t you scratch up my dashboard with that thing,” she warned. “Or scrape the paint off the roof with it, either.”

“You want I should roll down the window and hold it outside while you’re doin’ eighty miles an hour?” He flipped the switch and wedged the flasher against the windshield while hitting the button on his phone. “Yeah, I know there’s a fire—the truck just went past. Where at?”

Fifteen minutes later, Evan was surveying the last smoke rising from the Pocahontas County Lutheran Church. Holly stood nearby, sneezing quietly into her coat sleeve. Jamey Stirling had been there to meet them, having been in his courthouse office when the fire department got the call and sent the engine. “Shit,” was all he’d said.

This fire totally screwed any tentative theories about the targets being only Baptist churches. The only upside was that this one had been spotted early, and the damage was confined to a closet where the vestments were kept. When the fire chief gave them the okay, they poked around a bit by flashlight, then decided to tape it all off and wait for morning. Evan sternly forbade himself to think about the klieg lights and crime scene unit and dozen officers looking for witnesses that he would have had at his disposal in New York.

“Nothing?” Holly asked when the two men trudged back to the Beemer.

“Nothing,” Jamey confirmed. “Less than nothing. If there’s a quantifiable amount that’s
less
than less than nothing, this is it.”

“I’m really starting to get pissed off,” Evan remarked. “Getting pissed off is bad for my blood pressure.”

“Come home with us, Jamey, have a Scotch, and we’ll talk about it,” Holly said. “Did you get dinner? I can make you a sandwich—”

“Make your own sandwich,” Evan advised the young man. “Trust me on this one, Jamey.”

A little while later—Evan having firmly replaced the flasher beneath the seat, telling Holly that she’d had her fun for the night driving really, really fast—he canted a curious glance at her. “Come home with us? Make him a sandwich? Is it middle age, motherhood, or frustration about not having a book to write that’s making you so domestic these days?”

“Maybe I just like checking out Jamey’s ass.”

“Oh. Okay.” He settled back in the seat, waiting. Sure enough, not two miles had gone by before she squirmed and glanced over at him. “What?” he asked innocently.

“Are you trying to prove how unjealous you can be?”

“Were you trying to provoke me into being jealous?”

All at once she laughed and leaned over to rumple his hair. “Point taken, lover man.”

Five

LACHLAN ESCORTED LOUVENA COX into the ballroom, beckoned to the nearest waiter bearing champagne, and left her happily in possession of a bottle of Korbel while he sought out his host. He’d met Bernhardt Weiss four times, and liked him about as much as he liked Westmoreland.

The first time had been right after the purchase of the property, and Weiss, with a thoughtful regard for decorum, had stopped by on his round of county officials to introduce himself. Jesse McNichol had still been sheriff back then, so Lachlan just sat back and watched, drinking coffee and nodding every so often, as Cousin Jesse made nice. A few words had been said about New York, and a few more words about Evan’s lovely and talented wife, and then the man departed.

The second time was in Flynton, just outside the bank. Lachlan had been called out on a domestic disturbance—this was before the county in general had developed sufficient understanding of his attitude toward spouses who hit each other and parents who hit their children—and was coming out of the Dairy Queen with a cold soda that he wished was a jigger of single malt so he could get the taste out of his mouth. Weiss was getting out of his Mercedes and ten or so of his employees were getting out of the Westmoreland courtesy van. Upon seeing Evan, Weiss had paused while his workers entered the bank. A brief conversation about the virtues of saving one’s wages and the advisability of shopping around for interest rates ensued. Evan then excused himself to take Polly Henderson to the county lockup for attempting to carve her husband a new one, and the whole drive kept asking himself just what it was about Weiss that raised his hackles. It wasn’t as if the man had a comic-opera German accent, a monocle, military bearing complete with heel-clicks, or the blue-eyed-blond Aryan look about him. He was pleasantly spoken, polite, handsome enough in a thin-nosed, sharp-cheekboned way, and seemed genuinely charmed by rural America.

The grand opening of Westmoreland in November 2004 was the third time Lachlan had encountered him. Holly and Lulah were introduced, hands were shaken, and that was it—except that Lachlan felt like he needed a shower.

The fourth time had been in the Sheriff’s Office again, the day after the fire at the Lutheran church—which was, in fact, the church Weiss himself attended. After a reasonably subtle but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to learn what Evan knew about the arson, Weiss had issued a personal invitation to the Lachlans to be his guests at the Westmoreland luncheon buffet the following Saturday. Evan declined with a polite smile; they were already engaged, but thanks very much, and so forth. Weiss accepted defeat on all counts and left.

Before Evan could find his host this evening, he caught sight of Holly. She had paused in the ballroom doorway, scanning the crowd. He was the one she was looking for, no doubt of it. He smiled as she found him, both smug and grateful, because he was the only one who could put this look onto her face. To use an old-fashioned phrase, she prided him. She did him honor.

As she approached, he took in the latest version of her Candidate’s Wife look. Denim skirt, sort of a dark butterscotch color, off-white silk shirt, and dark green corduroy jacket: sleek, classic, and modest, until your eyes got to the hem of her skirt and followed the legs down to the Fuck Me shoes. As he dragged his gaze back up—was it okay to ogle one’s own wife in public?—he noted the usual ensemble of jewelry: engagement and wedding rings, signet ring, and Susannah’s diamond bracelet, augmented tonight with small hoop earrings and the
Fortis et Fidus
castle-and-crown brooch at her lapel. As she took his arm and leaned up for a kiss he murmured, “The Lachlan crest on your hand, the Lachlan badge on your jacket—what, the Lachlan hunting tartan’s in the laundry?”

Her tongue flicked out to lick his upper lip before she drew back and smiled her sweetest. “I’m making sure everybody knows who I belong to, O Light of My Life.”

“Remind me to have your clan badge tattooed on my—Evening, Judge Schaefer,” he said hastily.

“Nice to see you, Evan. Holly, you’re looking as stunning as ever. How are the twins?”

“Rambunctious,” she said. “And don’t think you can sweet-talk me into believing you really want to hear about the rug rats, Your Honor—I know very well you’re hiding from Dulcie Whittaker.”

The judge pulled a mournful face. “I see the good counselor quite often enough in my courtroom, thanks. I swear to you, Holly, two minutes into that woman’s opening statements, I expect the CSI crew to come in and lay down the chalk outline around the whole jury.”

The schmoozing went like that for about twenty minutes as Holly and Evan worked the room. At last she dug her fingers into his arm and whispered, “If you don’t get me ice and vodka—mainly vodka—within the next ninety seconds, I’m going to tell them all the truth about you.”

“But there are so many truths to choose from,” he murmured.

“Indeed there are.”

Evan considered. “Ice,” he said. “Vodka. Got it.”

The regular staff at Westmoreland—almost all Europeans—had been given the night off. Serving the assembled locals were other locals who had volunteered their time, for tonight was not just a political grip-and-grin, but a benefit for the churches destroyed by fire and the charity that assisted victims of trafficking. Some of the wait staff circulated with bottles and glasses of specific liquors and soft drinks; others were behind the bar. Lachlan gave up trying to find somebody with a tray of iced vodka, and approached the gorgeous thirty-foot polished oak bar.

Along the way he heard snatches of various conversations. Only a few of them were ordinary, everyday, how’s-the-wife, enjoy-your-vacation, fine-apple-crop-this-year chats. The good citizens of Pocahontas County were by and large a politically inclined lot, relishing the opportunity to get together and discuss anything and everything. Tonight, as he nodded and smiled at his constituents, Evan made copious notes-to-self about people to keep his wife away from at this party.

“—a big place, and most of it is sand. You don’t think there are plenty of places to hide WMDs where not even the United States Army could find them?”

“—five deferments! Five! And as for his sidekick in the Oval Office—I don’t know about you, but I just feel so much better in retrospect that Dubya was in the National Guard, flying sorties to make sure the Viet Cong didn’t invade Boca Raton.”

“Traditional marriage? Oh, c’mon, honey. Traditionally, marriage was between one man and as many women as he could afford.”

“—mark my words, in 2006, the Democrats are gonna be the party nobody wants to go to!”

“—Coulter? Oh, you mean the Paris Hilton of the neo-cons?”

“—ask me, that man is living proof that evolution doesn’t exist and ‘intelligent design’ never got off the ground—”

“—we can’t just cut and run—”

“—determined on adherence to Levitcal law in the Old Testament, you might want to get rid of that bacon-wrapped shrimp on your plate. Double
treyf
.”

“—beg your pardon! ‘Mormon’ and ‘archaeology’ are
not
mutually exclusive terms!”

“—gettin’ sick breathin’ the formaldehyde in those FEMA trailers down in Louisiana—the Katrina victims have been gettin’ screwed for a solid year now, and—”

“—administration isn’t muzzling scientists! Global warming was invented by Al Gore—”

Definitely keeping Holly away from that one, Lachlan told himself. First on the list, of course, was anything to do with Iraq. Should she happen to be feeling mellow, she’d enter into a reasoned discussion. If not, she might do anything from give a ten-minute lecture on precisely why the entire Bush Administration ought to be horsewhipped by somebody who knew how, to merely singing a Vietnam-era protest song under her breath, usually “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore.”

One might have assumed that because her husband was running for office, she would tone it down. The noteworthy thing about PoCo was that everybody knew what everybody else thought about everything, and anybody who backpedaled or prevaricated in the interests of winning votes was looked on with what had to be the prototype of the term
withering contempt
. They liked a good debate, these folks. They considered, rightly so, that the bizness of the USA was their bizness, and had been since the very beginning—certainly since long before independence from Great Britain was even a gleam in John Adams’s eye. And they’d kept on arguing through all the issues of war, society, law, politics, ethics, and religion that had come up ever since.

Only in matters of race had violence occurred. In this, the county was truly Southern. There had been murders before the Civil War, and lynchings during Reconstruction, and the resurgence of the Klan in the ’20s had intensified the nightmare. The last act of race-related violence had been almost forty years ago: the murder of Holly’s parents on their way back from an NAACP meeting. This had shocked the entire community so profoundly that when the Klan abandoned Pocahontas County, nobody mentioned how odd it was that some of the families had been residents for generations. As for how many people knew the departure had been prompted by magic . . . who could say?

“It was Holly’s Aunt Lizza,” Lulah had explained. “She was that good—and that heartbroke over her sister’s death. She didn’t care if Mr. Scott took her Measure and then shredded it to bits right in front of her. We couldn’t any of us figure out what was goin’ on, until one day Griff found her collapsed on the kitchen floor. When she came to, first thing she did was start reweaving—Clary Sage had to knock her out with things you don’t want to know about. We all got together and discussed it, and decided if somebody wanted to punish us for usin’ magic against these people, so be it. And we finished off what Lizza had started. Hexes, spells, blights and blastings, all sorts of things nobody suspected the girl had in her. She nearly wrecked her health, physical and magical. But one by one the Klan members sold up and left. There was an investigation, of course, but we had precedent—I ever tell you about what a McNichol did to a slavecatcher way back when? Anyhow, Mr. Scott came in to have a look—he was short on deputies like Alec and Nicholas at the time, so he investigated us himself. He wrote the whole thing off as not quite kosher, but none of us had profited materially or magically, so he let us be. Lizza was sick for almost a year after—and much as she wanted to, there wasn’t any chance of her bein’ able to take care of her sister’s child. So Griff took her to California, and I took Holly to raise. And we never from that day had another whisper of trouble. We had equal justice, and we had peace. My brother and Marget bought it with their lives.”

Forty years later, the Westmoreland Inn was hosting a county gathering that featured every possible shade of human skin. If anybody had a problem with it, they kept it to themselves. But Lachlan was pretty sure nobody had problems. It reminded him of something he’d sensed when Holly had taken him to a couple of Civil War battlefields during their first spring at Woodhush: it was as if all the violence and hatred and bitterness that could possibly exist in that particular piece of land had simply exhausted itself. Nothing was left but quiet, and a certain weariness—and the grass, doing its work, just as Sandburg had written. Evan had tried to explain what he’d felt on the drive home; Holly had given him an odd look, then patted the growing curve of her belly and said, “Daddy is a very wise man, did you know that?”

Lachlan considered that Elizabeth Amarantha Flynn Griffen had been the general on that particular battlefield, with her rage and her grief as artillery. And after she’d won, Pocahontas County had been left in peace.

At the bar, he smiled at the blonde who usually worked the counter at her family’s restaurant over in Prince Rupert, and asked for, “One large glass, two ice cubes, and the rest vodka.”

“—Jerusalem artichokes are perfect. Has to be a hundred and ninety proof or it won’t do the job. Then—”

Evan turned his head and smiled. “Jerusalem artichokes, huh, Rocky? Quite a change from corn mash.”

There was a saying about the various nationalities that had settled Appalachia: the English came and built a house, the Germans came and built a barn, but the first thing the Irish did was build a still. Rocky Mc-Dermid and Jordy Conleth were just doing what came natural.

Rocky’s big hand wrapped itself around a brown bottle of beer. “How ya doin’, Sheriff? Me and Jordy were just talkin’ about convertin’.”

Jordy nodded. “With gas prices what they are . . .”

Evan nodded thoughtfully. When Bush took office, gas had been about a buck-fifty a gallon. “There’s more money in selling something to pour in your car, instead of down your throat?”

“That’s the long and the short of it, Sheriff.”

If two of the most notorious moonshiners in the county—now that the Widow Farnsworth had gone to her reward—were teaming up to produce ethanol, three hundred years of family tradition had just keeled over with a thud, dead in the dust. Evan said, “Let me know how it works out. Maybe the county would be interested in switching its vehicles over. Thanks, Laura,” he said as the bartender slid the very full glass over to him. So full, in fact, that he had to lean down and slurp a little before picking it up.

“I thought that was for Holly,” Laura asked innocently.

“Which is why you filled it to the brim,” he countered. “She tips pretty good when she’s had a few—” Whatever else he might have said was muffled by the pimentoed olive she stuffed into his mouth. “Smartass kid,” he mumbled around it, and went to find his wife.

Along the way, he kept hearing bits of conversation and hoped everybody was getting all their squabbles out of the way before the liquor had a chance to soak in.

“Cheney can hold a meeting so secret even
he
doesn’t know about it—”

“—Clinton handed Bush a healthy economy. The way things are heading, Bush is gonna hand over a pawn ticket written in Chinese.”

“—kidding me? Hubbard was the most successful con artist since Joseph Smith with the golden plates!”

Well, soak into everybody but the Mormons, the teetotal variety of Baptists, and the recovering alcoholics in the crowd, anyway. A surfeit of juleps, martinis, or beer was the only thing in his experience that could turn the stately dance of Southern manners into a lurching verbal free-for-all. But it wasn’t entirely his problem tonight; Bernhardt Weiss had security guys. Lachlan had met them when they registered their guns. He hadn’t much liked them, either.