Her shoulders lifted and her jaw flexed as she recalled his placating comments about her brother’s “situation.” His words were almost as infuriating as the pity in those deceptively warm brown eyes. Who did he think he was? Her therapist? If that were true, then the way he’d stared at her would have gotten his license revoked. Like a starving man drooling over a double cheeseburger and extra fries.
Rachel’s eyes popped open as a sizzle like the one she’d experienced under the fire chief’s inappropriate gaze swept over her from collarbones to fingertips and hips to pinkie toes. Just like then, the scrambling sensation left every bit of skin in its path not just awake butabuzz. What was that about?
She leaped up from the couch, rubbed her upper arms over her sweater to brush away the gooseflesh beneath the knit and stomped into the kitchen. Maybe she could blame grogginess for those ridiculous tingles when she’d caught him watching her earlier, but she had no excuse for them now. Nor for her inability to get the guy in the lumberjack getup out of her head. He must have worn his flannel shirt two sizes too small to get the sleeves to cling to his arms that way. Same for the darn near indecent T-shirt that had hugged his chest beneath it.
“He’s the enemy,” she hissed, then shot a look at the thin wall that separated her kitchen sink from her neighbor’s faucet. The last thing she needed was to be overheard and make her fellow tenants more curious about her than they already were. Continual front-page news coverage of the fires had made the Mount Isabel gossip mill grind faster than usual these days. And there was no way to separate the Hoffman family from the MIFD.
Enemy. She considered the word again. Though it was premature to declare Prentiss a true adversary, she couldn’t call him an ally, either. Whichever he was, she shouldn’t have been ogling him, though the short dark hair that probably had never met a comb and the five-o’clock shadow—closer to seven thirty—made him impossible to ignore. Not to mention the cleft in his chin that a different woman might have been tempted to dab with the tip of her tongue.
Stop it.She lunged for the bottle of merlot on her countertop, wiped off the dust and dug into the drawer for a corkscrew. What was the matter with her? Even if an internet search for “sexy, late-thirties firefighter” would have produced Mick’s photo—in turnout pants, shirtless, with or without suspenders and wielding an ax—what kind of sister swooned over her brother’sreplacement? Apparently, one who was semi-famous for her lousy taste in men and had a record of bailing on her family.
She slid the bottle back to its spot on the counter, its cork unpierced. Flipping on the electric teakettle instead, she pulled a packet of chamomile from a ceramic container. It was just as well. Though she rarely drank, and never in front of Riley, tonight wasn’t the time to start. She needed to keep a clear head, unlike the new fire chief. He’d been breathing in too many diesel fumes if he believed the investigators really wanted the truth. She refused to consider the possibility that those answers wouldn’t clear her brother’s name.
Rachel frowned at her reflection in the mug of boiling water and then shattered the image by dunking the tea bag. After two unsupervised hours in the fire chief’s office, plus the nail file, paper clip and bobby pin she’d smuggled into the station, she should have produced some helpful information. She hadn’t even been able to pick the filing cabinet lock. Burglars’ tools probably worked only in movies. She should have brought a sledgehammer.
No matter what her excuses, she’d failed Riley. Again. Just as she had their father.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the mustard-and-white-colored tiles of the backsplash, her throat thickening, heat building at the back of her eyes.
Riley hadn’t comprehended her apology any better during their mostly silent drive to the Forward Path Rehabilitation Center than that ugly wall did now. But even if he hadn’t been too defeated, too terrified and desperate to hear anything she’d said to him, her older brother still would have had no reason to forgive her. His relapse was her fault as surely as if she’d cracked a seal and handed him a bottle.
As the memory of his stifled sobs ripped through her chest and pounded in her ears, she swiped at the tears escaping down her cheeks. Why had she assumed that just because Riley had been a champion youth swimmer—while she broke into a sweat jumping into the kiddie pool—he was better equipped to handle all the tragedies they’d faced? Selfish people believed whatever necessary to help them sleep soundly while the rest of the world paced in the dark.
Rachel jerked the mug up from the counter, causing steaming liquid to slosh over her hand. She winced. Served her right for letting the new chief distract her when she needed to focus all her attention on clearing Riley’s name. When she wasn’t doing the medical transcription work that helped keep milk, eggs and grape jelly in her refrigerator, anyway.
After sopping up the spill, she carried the mug to the dining table that doubled as her desk. Rather than listen to her first audio recording of the night, she opened her browser and tried again to hack into her brother’s email. She’d already tried out familiar possibilities like their long-buried cat, “Elliot,” and also “Engine5,” their dad’s equally dead pickup that still hogged space in their garage, so she had to come up with something new.
“Come on, Riley,” she whispered to the screen. “What did you use?”
After squinting at the blank square for several seconds, she typed, “SealsTeam,” the name of his youth club swim team. When she received that same credentials-mismatch message, she banged the keyboard with her forehead. If she’d taken the time to really know her brother, she wouldn’t be forced to rely on details about him like the club’s name. He’d quit that group abruptly, anyway, right after—
Rachel pushed up from the keys, the top of her head prickling. It was just a guess. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if the number eleven, Riley’s age when they’d lost their mother, had split his life’s timeline intobeforeandafter, just as nine had severed hers. She added two ones to the end of the team’s name and clicked Enter.
A list of her brother’s recent emails appeared on the screen. She sat up straighter as shivers skipped up both arms. After a few seconds of scrolling, though, she was certain she’d wasted time hacking into a useless account, filled with spam emails. “Ever heard of ‘Unsubscribe’?”
Instead of continuing from the top of the feed, she paged back to early December when she’d begged Riley to ask more questions about their dad’s suicide. She’d been convinced it was an accident. Maybe he’d reached out to some local officials, who’d responded. At a web-based email address with only a few lines appearing in the preview panel, she paused.
“Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, CURIOSITY, freckles, and doubt.”—Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
She reread the words. Maybe she didn’t know Riley that well, but she didn’t picture him as the daily-quote-subscription type. She continued to scroll until another quote appeared in the panel. Only the email address didn’t match the first one.
“I shall be as secret as the grave.”—Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
As Rachel’s throat tightened, she closed her lips and forced a deep breath through her nose. She had to be reading too much into the quotes, but “curiosity” put in uppercase letters, “secret,”and“grave”? When taken together, the message could sound threatening, even to someone who didn’t need to explain away a sibling’s potential wrongdoing. And maybe to a new fire chief, who hadn’t offered to help her find answers.
She laid her left hand flat on the desk for the firm security of it and pressed the up arrow with her right. A dozen entries higher, a more recent quote appeared from yet another email address. Only this one was an idiom, not a quotation, and it offered a direct threat.
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
Rachel slammed the laptop closed as a disconcerting sensation settled over her. Like an aquarium, only she was the one swimming in circles inside the glass. She turned in her chair to face her unit’s narrow, triple-hung windows. As usual, she’d forgotten to close the blinds. A sinister night sky stared back at her, faraway streetlights and television screens straining to cast their eerie yellow glow over piles of shoveled snow.
Could someone have been out there watching her all this time? She shook her head but still rushed over to close all three sets of blinds. Even with the emails and the possible warnings addressed to her brother, no one had a reason to threaten her. No one else even knew she’d been asking questions.
But didn’t they? She blinked, her chest tightening. Now the statement she’d made by her refusal to leave Station 1 earlier returned to haunt her. She’d practically announced to the whole crew that she was looking into matters connected with Riley’s dismissal. Until today, she would have sworn she knew every firefighter working one of the three shifts in that building, but did she really?
You shouldn’t take that kind of risk.She’d tried not to absorb Mick’s words when he’d said it was dangerous for her to get involved. Now they pelted her from all directions. Was the outsider right? Had she put herself and her girls in danger?
She shot a look at the staircase, her heart racing as for the first time she noticed the child sitting on the bottom step in flannel pajamas and lion slippers. Rachel leaped up from her seat.
