She found Noah in the passenger seat of the fire engine offering a running commentary that Gray appeared to be enduring with long-suffering patience of a minor saint.Cassidy was sitting by the station door with a clipboard, marking on it each time a cone went down.
Walter Meeks and two of the other pinochle regulars were arrayed along the sidewalk with the attentive posture of spectators at a sporting event.She overheard Ruth’s voice from somewhere behind her: “That’s twenty-nine.I’ve got thirty in the pool for the week.Come on, Grayson.”
Bonnie leaned against her car and watched.
Gray pulled the engine forward onto the apron, stopped, and shifted into reverse.She could see his face through the windshield—focused, jaw set, eyes tracking between the mirrors.He eased the truck backward.The angle looked good this time.It looked, in fact, very good.
The rear bumper cleared the right door track by what looked like three inches.The left side tracked true.The engine slid backward into the bay with the cones untouched.
Then the left front wheel caught the edge of the concrete pad, the whole truck jolted sideways, and the last cone went down with a soft plastic crunch.
She laughed.
She didn’t mean to.She pressed her hand over her mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway, bright and involuntary, because he had been so close, and the cone had died so peacefully, and the expression on his face through the windshield—half fury, half bewilderment—was the funniest thing she’d seen in months.
He heard her.
He looked at her through the open driver’s window, and his frustration was still there, but something startled and warm and unguarded flashed in his eyes as if catching her laughing at his expense was the most disarming thing that had happened to him all week.
She held his gaze for one beat too long.Her hand dropped from her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said, not very convincingly.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m really not,” she admitted.
The corner of his mouth twitched.It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was close, and the warmth in it reached all the way to where she was standing.
Cassidy looked up from her clipboard.“Thirty,” she announced.
That night, Gray sat at the table in the bunkhouse and opened the folder of Tucker’s photographs.
He’d photographed the Shoemacher barn foundation from every angle and had even snapped a few of the area around the well house.
Gray had already been through these images dozens of times.But now he was looking for something specific.
He unrolled his copy of the blueprints that he’d picked up in Apple Pie Creek this morning and placed it beside the printed enlargements of Tucker’s photos.The mechanical systems page showed the sprinkler supply line entering the building at the center of the north wall, running the length of the structure with branch lines left and right to feed sprinkler heads.If that system had been installed, there would be pipe stubs at the north foundation wall where the supply line had entered the building.
He picked up his magnifying glass and started with the north wall photographs.
Nothing.
No pipe stubs, no circular holes in the foundation where a water line could have entered the building, no hardware of any kind protruding from or embedded in the concrete.
The blueprints showed a thirty-thousand-gallon pressurized water tank buried adjacent to the well house.A tank that size required a pressure gauge assembly, a pressure relief valve that would’ve been mounted on a pipe sticking out of the ground above where the tank was buried, likely a fill gauge indicating how much water was in the tank, and a hatch into the tank itself for cleaning and repairs.
There was no pressure relief valve.No pressure or fill gauges.No hatch.No evidence whatsoever of a water tank, let alone a pressurized one.
He set down the magnifying glass and leaned back in his chair.
The fire suppression system on the approved blueprints had never been installed.And the building inspector had either not noticed or been paid not to notice.
He still needed one more piece of independent confirmation.A witness.Someone who could tell him whether there had been sprinkler heads in the ceiling.He’d completely struck out at finding anyone local who would talk to him.
But he knew someone everyone in town would talk to.
Bonnie picked up on the second ring.“Hey.”Her voice was soft, relaxed.The voice of a woman who had shed the day’s armor and was being herself.
