“He came twice.Once during framing and once for the final inspection.I remember because my father made a point of being home for both visits, which was odd.Dad never came home during the day.He and the inspector walked through the barn together.My father had a bottle of something—whiskey, I think—and they shared it on the porch after the second visit.”
Gray’s pen stopped moving.
Bonnie closed her eyes briefly.An inspector who shared whiskey with the man whose building he was certifying.An inspector who signed off on a fire suppression system that was never installed.An inspector who was later paid a substantial sum through an anonymous email account.
“Ellie,” she said.“Thank you.I know this isn’t easy.”
“I knew the name of every horse that died.I loved every one of them,” Ellie said, her voice raw.“I still have nightmares where I hear their screams.I’ll never get that sound out of my head ...”She broke off.The phone went silent while she collected herself.Eventually, she said, “I didn’t know any of the men who died.I can’t even imagine how painful it was to their families to lose them.“I’m so,sosorry for your loss, Bonnie.”
Bonnie felt the kinship of that sentence in her bones.Two women, both carrying impossible weights.Both damaged by the same man.
“And I’m sorry for yours,” Bonnie said quietly.
After they hung up, Gray looked at his notes.Bonnie looked at the wall of evidence.
“The inspector saw the barn without sprinklers and signed off anyway,” Gray said.“And the whiskey on the porch tells us the relationship was personal, not just professional.It’s consistent with the payoff emails.Lucas paid the inspector when the barn was built to ignore the missing sprinklers, and he paid Jansick after the fire to bury the investigation.”
“He was systematic about it,” Bonnie observed.
“A court of law would call that premeditated,” Gray commented.
She stood up and walked to the evidence wall.Looked at the photographs of the foundation, the blueprints with their thin red sprinkler lines, the timeline Gray had drawn on the long sheet of paper.All the pieces of a terrible puzzle, assembled by a man who read fire the way other people read books, and a woman who’d finally stopped being loyal to the wrong person.
She turned back to him.“Gray?”
“Yeah?”
“How did the meeting go with your dad?Rose and Molly have both mentioned in the past that Cooper and Tucker have a lot of anger toward him.”
He was quiet for a moment.“Cooper prosecuted him and sliced him into tiny ribbons.Tucker burned him at the stake.I asked him a question.”
“What question?”
“Whether he thought about us after he left.”
She came back to the table and sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.“What did he say?”
“He said he thought about us every day but was too much of a coward to come back.”
She was quiet for a while.Then she said, “He came back now.”
“He did.”
“That’s not nothing, Gray.”
“No,” he said.“It’s not.”
They sat together in companionable silence as darkness fell outside the window.They’d spent the last hour handing each other the worst burdens they carried in their hearts and finding out that the other person could hold them without breaking.
Bonnie’s phone buzzed.It was a photograph from Cassidy of Noah asleep on Jenna’s couch with a calf-shaped pillow clutched to his chest and his question notebook open on his stomach.
Bonnie showed it to Gray.He smiled the warm unguarded smile that still surprised her every time she saw it because it transformed his face from analytical to something approaching beautiful.
“He’s going to be an interesting adult,” Gray said.
Bonnie retorted, “I can’t imagine what he’ll be at fourteen let alone thirty.”
“Probably a geneticist who studies fire,” Gray said.“Or a firefighter who studies genetics.Either way, he’ll have a notebook.”
