“Carissa, what are you doing out of bed?” As her daughter stared back at her with wide eyes over her sharp tone, she tried again in a softer voice. “Did something scare you, honey?”
Instead of answering, the child padded over, wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and buried her face in her belly.
“Is it in the closet?”
Carissa turned her head from side to side against the front of her robe.
“Under the bed,” she mumbled.
“We’d better go find it.” As a parent, Rachel could at least handle imaginary nighttime monsters. She wasn’t sure any more about the real ones.
After flipping off the light above the table, she hoisted Carissa on her hip, though both girls were getting too heavy for that. They passed the first twin bed where Carly slept soundly. Then she lowered Carissa to her own mattress, the covers wadded into a ball at its center.
“Mommy, can you stay with me?”
“Okay, but just until you go to sleep.”
Neither mentioned the creature under the bed again, but she knew from experience that monsters vanished once Mom was there for protection. Rachel shook out the blankets and settled in next to her daughter, covering them both with the comforter. Her throat thickened as Carissa rested a tiny hand in her palm. If only all the problems the girls would face could be solved with an extra cuddle.
She stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the bedroom ceiling, those she’d put there herself two years before when dreams and a normal life seemed within her little family’s grasp. When her father was still with them. And Riley was happy and two years sober. Everything had changed. Now her brother needed her, and she couldn’t choose between him and her children. She had to protect them all.
Just as Carissa’s breathing settled in sleep, and Rachel let her own eyes close, a sound as familiar as her own heartbeat blared in the distance. A firehouse siren. Another one? Her heart thudding, she unfolded herself from the tangle of her daughter’s limbs. She slid from beneath the covers and tiptoed out of the room.
The siren didn’t necessarily signal a fire, she reminded herself, as she stepped past her bedroom doorway. Even if it was, that didn’t automatically connect it to the string of arsons.
When the racket stopped just as she reached the top of the stairs, she sighed. Only the absence of that noise continued to vibrate in her ears, the words from Riley’s emails clinging to those pulsating sounds like lyrics set to a chorus of chaos. That message, originally meant for her brother, offered a warning to her as well.
I shall be as secret as the grave.
Her shiver began before she reached the faulty window at the landing. It followed her back to the dining room table. She shot a look at the front windows, the closed blinds no longer offering a cocoon of security.
She slid the laptop to the far end of the table and settled in that seat, careful to keep both the staircase and the windows in view. Avoiding the emails, she logged into the private network for her job, slid on her earphones and clicked the arrow for the first medical recording. She might as well get some work done since there was no way she would be sleeping tonight.
* * *
The fire couldn’t have been a bigger disappointment. No delicious flames that stretched toward the canopy of leafless trees, threatening to spread through narrow limbs and sprawling branches. No promise of a heap of smoldering ash before those obnoxious red engines could race from one of the stations.
This looked more like a cartoon campfire from soggy wood, the billowing smoke barely seeping out the abandoned house’s chimney, let alone lapping through its walls. It made no statement at all. Certainly not the message he’d planned to deliver.
“I should have waited.”
Grinding his teeth, he crouched lower in the ditch. He didn’t know why he bothered trying to hide. The heavy container of gasoline. Those rags. The matches that had refused to light. All of it useless. No one would even notice what should have been a major blaze until morning.
Then he heard it. The sound came from far away like a squeal captured in a tunnel. Someone must have seen the smoke. Or maybe there were a few good flames, only on the opposite side of the house. His heart pounded louder as the sound filled the atmosphere, pregnant with possibility and blossoming.
While relocating to his planned position behind the row of trees, he made sure to cover his boot tracks. When the first big rig barreled over the county road, its lights flashing but its siren muted now because of the hour, he settled in for the big show.
And he smiled.
Chapter 4
“That was your welcome to Mount Isabel, Chief.”
The words from behind Mick came with a friendly slap on the back of his turnout jacket with still an hour to go before the sun would sneak peeks through the line of trees across the field. He jerked to turn back, catching Noah Carlson in the beam of his helmet lamp and feeling a twinge in his neck at the same time. He made his wince look like a smile behind his mask.
From the ache between his shoulder blades, he could have sworn he’d bench-pressed the pumper truck instead of just helping to check for trapped victims and assisting with one of the hoses. He’d never felt so old. To rub it in, Noah, one of the youngest crew members at twenty-two, nearly bounced at his side, his mask hanging at his chest, his white-teeth grin contrasting with the sooty smears on his face.
“Just another shift around here.” Noah pushed his Nomex protective hood back, his helmet under his arm and the full mask of his Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus dangling from his gloved hand. “But we wrestled this one into submission in no time. Practically ripped the matches right out of the arsonist’s hands with our response. Maybe with the next one we can stop the dude before he gets the chance to light it.”
