Go, Ivy, Go! (17 page)

I gave the address, dropped the phone and ran for the back door, fumbled with the lock and yanked the door open. There was a hose out back. Maybe I could save—

The deluge hit my head. A thick tide sloshed over me. It ran into my eyes, dripped down my cheeks, rolled down my neck. I froze. Something sticky had blasted out of the motorhome?

No.

I groaned. My booby trap. Meant for villainous Braxtons, but indiscriminately dumping a sticky avalanche on whoever happened to open the door.
Whoever
right now being
me
.

I stepped outside, frantically trying to see through the syrupy veil.

Black smoke, evil as a snake fattened on prey, churned toward the starlit sky. An acrid scent filled the night air. Shards of broken glass glittered on the ground. I pawed at my eyes again. The syrup was in my eyelashes. In my eyebrows. In my hair. It plastered the pajamas to my body. I blinked and my eyelids stuck together. I pried them open with sticky fingers.

Something hissed within the burning motorhome.
A crash. Sparks blasted through windows that no longer existed.

Braxtons! They’d tried to do it before, planting a dynamite bomb under my Thunderbird down in Arkansas. They hadn’t succeeded then. Now they had.

I leaned against the corner of the house as the full truth hit me. They’d been after more, of course.
Me.
Drake Braxton might be too busy to go to his mother’s birthday barbecue, but he still had plenty of time for a little arson and murder. I was supposed to be in that blazing firestorm, supposed to be dead by now.

Lord, thank you for looking out for me! Thank you for bringing me safely inside the house tonight.

I ran for the hose coiled by the faucet in the back yard. I turned the faucet on full force, blasted myself in the face to wash off syrup, then dragged the hose toward the house. Smoke curled from the siding where that 3D shot had hit it.

Someone yelled my name. Geoff ran into the yard.

“I’m over here!” I glubbed back. It’s not easy to yell with watered-down syrup still trying to glue your lips together.

Stupid hose caught on something. I dropped it and waved my arms at Geoff. Syrup ran down my raised arms and over my elbows and wrists and puddled in my underarms. I put my arms down to grab the hose again, and my elbows stuck to my body as if I were in a syrupy straightjacket.

How much syrup had I put
in
that booby trap? Oh, yeah. A full gallon, because I hadn’t used any out of the jug yet. But it felt like even more than that, like barrels of syrup spreading over my body. It ran down my legs. My knees stuck together.

“You okay?”Geoff asked when he ran up to me. Irrelevantly, I noticed that big flowers sprigged his pajamas. I love Magnolia dearly, and I know she likes to emphasize her name by displaying magnolias everywhere, but sometimes she does overdo them just a teensy bit. He touched my shoulder and yanked his hand back. He looked at his sticky fingers. “Did the explosion hit you?”

“No. I’m okay. It’s just syrup.”

More shadowy figures moved out on the street. Shouts. Sharp wail of siren in the distance.

Geoff is a get-things-done man, and, though he gave me a puzzled look, he wasn’t about to waste time asking for a syrup explanation. He ran around behind me and unkinked the hose. I didn’t bother aiming the stream of water at the motorhome. I wasn’t going to have to make some momentous decision about keeping or selling it after all. My home on wheels was a goner. I blasted the side of the house instead. Heat from the burning motorhome scorched my skin. Blessedly I hadn’t cozied the motorhome up to the house. It was on the far side of the tree and driveway, or the explosion would have blasted right through the house. And me. I offered another heartfelt
Thank you, Lord.

“We need more hose!” Geoff yelled.

“On the other side of the house.”

Something exploded on the far side of the motorhome, and the blaze sagged in that direction. A tire? Yes. Another tire blew out on this side, and the back end drooped like some wounded monster. Someone I didn’t recognize grabbed a chair from under the flaming tree and beat at flames in the dry grass.

Eric arrived in pajama bottoms and bare feet. He grabbed the hose out of my hands and arced the stream up to the eaves, to a curl of smoke I hadn’t seen. Geoff aimed the other hose at the roof.

A fire truck with siren blaring roared up. Firemen jumped out, yelling and dragging out hoses. More sirens. A police car skidded up. Another firetruck.
An ambulance.

“Nobody’s hurt,” I called when the EMTs jumped out. “No one was in the motorhome.”

The EMTs and a police officer ran over anyway. They wanted to check me out, but I said I was fine, no injuries, just a little sticky. The police officer wanted to question me, but I asked if it could wait a few minutes. My brain felt sticky too.

“Okay, but don’t walk around out here in your bare feet,” the officer warned. “There’s a lot of broken glass.”

I definitely didn’t want to get cut and bleed. What we didn’t need here was a fainting Eric. Though at the moment he looked like one of those superhero figures, muscled shoulders and chest glinting copper in flame-light as he hit the burning chunk of motorhome roof on the ground with a blast from the hose.

Huge streams of water from the fire hoses dwarfed the sprays from my garden hoses as they blasted the motorhome and burning tree. Smoke and steam hissed and billowed. The skeleton of the motorhome, like some metal zombie walking through fire, began to emerge through the flames and smoke.

Tasha ran up to me. She was in ragged jeans and sweatshirt, flip-flops on her feet. She grabbed my shoulders and bent over to peer in my face. “Ivy, are you okay? What happened?”

“Braxtons.”

“Braxtons?” she repeated.

I hadn’t told her about the Braxtons and how I’d been running from them for almost three years and how they’d killed the dead woman in my bathtub thinking she was me. I gave her a ragged version of that now.

“They rigged my car so it would blow up when I started the engine down in Arkansas. It didn’t work then, but this time they got it right.”

“We heard the blast, but I never thought. . . You really think someone did this
deliberately
?”

“They thought I was there in the motorhome. So they blew it up.”

Tasha’s wrinkled forehead suggested she didn’t fully believe me, but I’d been right about a dead body in the bathtub, so she didn’t want to
dismiss my wild story now. She tried to pat my back, but her hand stuck.

“Ivy, are you bleeding? Is that
blood
?” She yanked her hand free and looked at it in horror.

“No, it’s just syrup,” I said. “I didn’t get it all hosed off.”
      

“Syrup?”

“Imitation maple.”

She licked a fingertip and nodded agreement.

“I put it in my booby trap. In case the Braxtons tried to get in the house,” I explained. “But then I forgot about the booby trap and opened the door myself.”

She didn’t question my setting a booby trap. Apparently she figured booby traps were within my normal range of activity. Instead she asked, “Ivy, have you told the police about these Braxtons?”

“I told Officer DeLora earlier, but the police apparently think Lillian Hunnicutt was hiding from someone in her past, and that person found and killed her. She had kind of a . . . troubled past.” That seemed an inoffensive way to put it.

As it turned out I had a chance to tell my version of Lillian’s death to another officer. I was sitting on the back steps by then. Stuck to the steps, actually, watered-down syrup puddled around me. I could go inside and clean up . . . if I could get myself unstuck . . . but there’s something morbidly hypnotizing about watching three years of your life go up in flames and smoke.

But
I
didn’t go up in flames. Once more you were looking out for me, weren’t you Lord?
Thanks!
Koop and I were okay. I’d earlier gotten quite a few important items out of the motorhome, and belongings are mostly expendable anyway.

The smoke wasn’t black now, nor was it billowing. It drifted lazily from the motorhome in an almost gentle, white-ish cloud. Some of the tree branches made skeletal silhouettes against the night sky, but the tree no longer blazed. Only an occasional flame flared within the metal skeleton of the motorhome, and it was quickly zapped by the firemen. Kitchen stove and refrigerator had morphed into blobs now.

The police officer approached. “You’re the owner?”
      

I swiped the pajama sleeve across my mouth. My hair seemed to have trapped a vast reservoir of syrup and was releasing it in measured dribbles. Putting a whole new spin on
having a bad hair day.

“Yes. Ivy Malone.”

Tasha was still with me, but the officer said he’d like to speak to me alone, and she said she’d go make sure Eric was okay. I didn’t rush into the full story of what this was all about, figuring that would only make the officer suspect I was in shock and suffering paranoid delusions about Braxton thugs planting bombs. Although, after we got through the basic information, I brought up the fact that the police were right now investigating the murder of a woman I’d found dead in the bathtub of my house.

The officer stood with one foot braced on the bottom step, notebook on his thigh as he scribbled in it. He looked up. He’d obviously heard about that case, although he apparently hadn’t yet connected it with this location. “That was here?”

“They thought they were killing me then. When they realized they’d gotten the wrong person, they tried again tonight. Except I’d moved into the house.”

“I see. And ‘they’ are—?

“Braxtons. Drake Braxton, specifically. The same people who planted a dynamite bomb under my car a few years ago down in Arkansas. It seems to be a favored technique with them.”

“You think they planted dynamite under your motorhome and that’s what caused the explosion and fire?” He sounded as skeptical as if I’d just claimed little green aliens had nuked the motorhome with some outer-space weapon.

I wasn’t about to back down even if he was skeptical. “Yes. They’ve tried other ways to kill me too.”

“But you just happened to move into the house tonight.”

“I’ve been planning to move into the house ever since I got here, but I didn’t have any furniture until today,” I explained.

“And these Braxtons that you think did this. They’re—what?
A gang or organization?”

“A family. It was Drake Braxton who originally threatened me. But the whole family is in on it.” I gave him other names and how they’d been trying ever since the trial to find and eliminate me.

More skepticism. The fact that I was a barefoot LOL, covered with remnants of a gallon of syrup plastering me to a step, probably didn’t enhance my credibility. But I determinedly went on to tell him how I’d personally encountered a young Braxton at Braxton Furniture yesterday and then Drake Braxton at the horse farm today, and that those encounters may have precipitated tonight’s raid.

“I see. And did either of these Braxtons threaten you at these encounters?”

“No. But Drake Braxton may have recognized me. Your crime scene investigators will be able to tell what caused the explosion, won’t they?”

“Yes, I’m sure they will.” No skepticism there, although the statement seemed to suggest something that wasn’t necessarily reassuring. He finally commented on my sticky state. “You seem to be covered in some sort of . . . viscid substance.”

“It was in my booby trap,” I explained once more. “I was afraid the Braxtons might try to get in the house, so I set this booby trap with a bucket of syrup above the door. But I accidentally tripped the trap myself.”

“Ah. I see. A booby trap.” He gave me
a get-out-the-nets-guys, we’ve-got-a-live-one-on-the-loose-here
look. “Did you hear anything or see anyone running away from the scene either before or after the explosion?”

“No. I was asleep. The bomb they set under my Thunderbird was rigged to explode when the ignition was turned on, but they must have done it differently here.” I thought about Beth Braxton mentioning Cousin Sam’s expertise with electronic gadgets and software. “One member of the family is an electronics expert, so they may have set an electronic timing device that would go off after they were away from the scene.”

“Was the motorhome unlocked?”

“I don’t think so. Although. . .” It could have been, I had to admit. I’d been in and out of the motorhome numerous times, moving stuff over to the house, and that last time, with my arms full of sheets and pillows, I could have forgotten to lock it. “But they didn’t have to get inside to put dynamite underneath.”

“I’m sure our experts will figure it all out.”

He thanked me and then went on to question Tasha, Eric, and Geoff. Tasha came back to the steps after he was finished with her. I invited her to sit down beside me, but she said she’d stand. The puddle of watery syrup on the step around me may have been a deterrent.

“I’m not sure he believed me,” I added. “What did he ask you?”

“About what I observed when I got here. If we’d seen anyone suspicious looking.” She hesitated momentarily. “He also asked a lot of questions about what we’d observed of your daily activities and, umm, mental state. If we’d observed incidents of confusion or forgetfulness.”

“What do you tell him?”

“That I’d never seen any confusion or forgetfulness. And if you say these Braxtons did this because they’re out to get you,
I
believe it,” she declared almost fiercely. Which suggested she also thought the officer didn’t believe me.

Magnolia rushed up then, her body covered in a voluminous bathrobe, her usually highly styled hair blowing loose around her face. The mask she always wore over her eyes at night dangled on a cord around her neck.

“Are you all right?” she gasped, hand on her chest. Magnolia is not a running person, but she’d run from the house over here. “What in the world happened?”

I explained once more.