Out Of The Ashes

If I’d known the cupcakes were baked by someone like you...

Rob gave himself a mental slap upside the head. What was he thinking? Four-buck cupcakes were four-buck cupcakes, and a suspect was a suspect.

Even if he knew she wasn’t.

“So what next?” Kari asked wearily.

“Next? I investigate. You say you didn’t do it, so that leaves me with no choice but to find out who actually did it.”

Rob could have sworn that Kari flinched at his words.

“I’d like to go home now,” she said quietly. “Is that okay? Can I?”

“You’re not under arrest.”

“You read me my rights,” she pointed out.

“Because I’m very careful about procedure. It would be like you—I dunno—reading a recipe before you start baking a cake.”

An even bleaker look filled her eyes. She made her way to the shop’s back door and leaned against the blackened doorjamb. “I won’t be baking anything for a long time yet. Maybe ever. The insurance—the insurance won’t pay if arson was involved.”

“Not if, Kari. It was arson. There are no ifs, ands or buts. It was definitely arson. If you tell me—”

She whirled around. Anger tightened the grim lines of her face. “I can’t. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I can’t tell you why anybody would want to hurt me like this. I hate fire. I hate it. It destroys everything.”

And with that, she pushed past him and made her way down the back alley behind the burned-out hulls of the buildings. In the shadows formed by the dawn’s gray light pushing through the gaping holes of the buildings, Kari Hendrix appeared small and frail and bowed over with pain. And she was running—running away from something? What?

Rob was determined to find out.

* * *

“SO LET ME get this straight,” Daniel said, his words laced with amusement. Rob’s brother leaned back in his squeaky desk chair and stretched out his feet on an open desk drawer.

“What’s there to get straight? And are you asking as my brother or the chief of the fire department?” Rob stretched his own feet out on the concrete floor of his brother’s office at the fire station.

Daniel shrugged. “Brother, chief, what does it matter? I’m curious. You know it’s arson, I know it’s arson, and the owner of the business where the fire originated tells you she was convicted of arson, but you believe she didn’t do it? Wait. Who are you and what have you done with my got-to-believe-the-worst-in-everybody little brother?”

“I know. It’s not like me. If there’s one rule, it’s usually that the business owner or the landlord did it. But Charlie Kirkman is too stingy to properly insure his buildings, and... Daniel, you just had to be there. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense for her to spill it all. It was a sealed juvie record, and I would have had to move heaven and earth to get it unsealed. I might not have even thought to look at it first if she hadn’t said something.”

“So maybe it’s all an elaborate ploy to make you think she’s innocent.”

“Now you sound like me, and you’re always accusing me of being cynical.” Rob chuckled. He took a sip of bad firehouse coffee and grimaced, but swallowed another gulp down. He was on his third cup just for the caffeine’s sake. The downtown fire had started way too early. “Here’s what really doesn’t make sense. If she’d wanted to burn that place down, she could have left a cake in the oven or something on the stove and walked away. Nobody could have proven it was anything but an accident. This?” Rob shook his head. “A propane tank and a safety flare? It’s too obvious. Too stupid. Too brazen. And she—she would have known she would wind up a prime suspect.”

“But you just said you would have never thought to check her out—”

“Maybe not, but it would have come up, eventually. I do my job, Daniel, you know that.”

Daniel considered him. “Yeah. You do. And you’re good at it.”

For a moment, Rob let his thoughts wander back to Kari, weighing everything she’d said, every expression on her face. She’d been such an open, honest book. Everything—the pain, the misery, the fear—had been right there, as easy to read as one of those first-grade Dick and Jane primers.

The fear.

Kari had been afraid. Of what? Of who?

It hadn’t been a mortal fear, but more of a fear of having been betrayed. What had she said when he’d first mentioned arson?

Not again. Please not again.

“So what’s next, Rob Roy?” his brother asked him.

A momentary flicker of annoyance at his family nickname distracted him from his thoughts about Kari. Rob pulled his focus together and considered Daniel’s very valid question.

“Hmm. First I have to figure out exactly what sort of hole Kari Hendrix was in. Oh, and Charlie Kirkman. You never know. Even Charlie might have decided that a little insurance was better than fixing something—and maybe if that block was leveled, he could sell it. Maybe Kari—or some of his other tenants—didn’t want to leave. Or maybe somebody had it in for Kari.”

“I never knew cupcakes could be so deadly,” Daniel quipped.

Rob lifted his shoulders. “You got me. I’m not much for cupcakes. Give me a brownie any old day. But you know what I mean.”

“How long do you think it will take? To close the case?”

Rob rubbed at his eyes and considered whether another cup of coffee would help keep him awake. Fatigue and lack of sleep were catching up with him, and he still had the rest of the day to get through. “Probably not as long as it will take to write it up whenever I do figure it out. And definitely not as long as the grand jury and the trial will take.”

“I know. You’re always right, so why do those pesky lawmakers insist that you give the guilty party their day in court, huh?” Daniel grinned and winked at his brother. Then his smile faded. “I’m just kidding you, you know that, right? I meant what I said a while ago. You are good at what you do, Rob.”

For a long moment, Rob didn’t say anything. He looked past Daniel to the credenza behind him, loaded down with family pictures. There were Daniel and his new fiancée and her daughter, beaming at each other. There was a picture of the Monroe brothers, all around Ma—her birthday, Rob recalled. And at the far end, off to itself, almost as a shrine, stood a 5x7, a formal shot of their dad in his dress blues, back when he was chief.

Back when he was alive.

Before another arsonist had taken it upon himself to set fire to a building that had come crashing down on Rob’s dad—on all of the Monroes, come to think of it.

Rob stilled. An awareness, a memory, flickered.

He’d pulled the case file of that unsolved arson some months back and had been going through it again during his rare down times. And now he remembered.

That arson. It had been started with a propane tank, too.

CHAPTER THREE

“DID HE DO IT? Mom! You have to tell me!”

Kari’s mom didn’t answer, just protectively pulled the opening of her terrycloth robe together with a shaking hand. “I—Kari—I—it burned? Your shop burned?”

Now Chelle Hendrix tottered past Kari, a hand raking through her bottle-dye blond hair. Kari wheeled around to hear the clatter of the coffee carafe rattling as Chelle managed to pour coffee into a mug, her hand shaking.

Kari started to speak again, but Chelle held up a finger, then went back to her coffee. She poured a boatload of sugar into it, then a flood of cream. After giving it a brisk, businesslike stir, she held the mug up and took a quaff from it like a man stumbling into an oasis after being stranded in the desert for days.

Fortified, Chelle tottered back to the kitchen table and sank with a sigh into a chair. “Now tell me. Seriously? Your shop? It burned?”

“Mom... I am so sorry. The first thing that I thought about was your retirement money.”

Chelle would have wrinkled her forehead in shock and horror, but her Botoxed facial muscles wouldn’t cooperate. Her throat moved in a visible gulp. “Oh, honey. Don’t you worry about me. Sure, I borrowed against my 401(k), but it’s you who’s been putting all that hard work into making a go of it. How horrible! Now grab a cup of coffee and sit down and tell me all about it.”

Thinking about coffee made Kari think about Rob, and thinking about Rob made her think about the case he was probably busily building against her as she stood in her mother’s kitchen. “I don’t want coffee. I don’t want to sit down—”

“Well, you’re giving me a crick in the neck, honey. Sit. If you don’t want coffee, fine, but at least sit.”

Kari sat. Her mother quickly grasped Kari’s fingers in her own perfectly manicured hands. “Kari, what happened? Did you leave something turned on? No, I know you didn’t—you’re so careful. I’ll bet it was that wiring. I knew that old dump of a building was a firetrap.”

“No.” Kari swallowed, tried to get the lump in her throat to dislodge. “It was arson. Somebody—” her voice trembled over the word somebody. “Somebody took a propane tank, leaned it against the back door and stuck a lit safety flare in the top of it.”

Chelle recoiled. For a second, she just stared at Kari with rounded eyes, her hands clenched into fists against her robe. “Kari... Kari...you don’t honestly think...”

“Where’s Jake, Mom? I need to ask him—”

“No.” The word was harsh and sharp and brooked no argument. Sometimes her mother dispensed with her dithery ways and allowed an iron maiden to peek out. “No. You will not.”

“Mom—”

“He’s back, Kari. He’s back, and he’s doing fine. We’re all—we’re all doing just fine.” Kari’s mom’s eyes grew shiny and wet with tears. “What you’re saying...it just isn’t possible. He was young, Kari. It was a mistake. A stupid, stupid prank that went all wrong and his friends—oh—his friends!” A shuddering sound of disgust escaped her mother’s lips.

Kari put a palm over her eyes, which felt as raw as if they’d been sandblasted. Now was not the time to argue about Jake. It had been a mistake all right, taking the fall for his crime.

Kari still remembered standing in front of the judge that day, reciting the words she’d rehearsed for her confession. It was supposed to be simple: she was a juvenile first offender, sure to get off easy for a property crime. It was Jake who would get sent off if he were found guilty—and he was guilty.

But, her mom had explained, Jake would get sent to real prison—doing real time, since he’d turned eighteen. And her mother assured her that Kari wouldn’t—probation, that’s all, just like Jake had his first and second time before a judge.

Only the judge hadn’t given Kari probation.

He’d given her four years in juvie.

Four years of hell.

It had taken Kari a long time to even be able to speak to her mother...much less Jake. In fact, it was only in the past six months that Kari had reconciled any small bit with her brother.

Her mother spoke now in a firm voice. “Kari, Jake wouldn’t have done this. He loves you. And you know he feels awful...just awful about what happened. Why, he was telling me about how that Charlie Kirkman was treating you, how he wanted to ram that man’s words down his throat.” Kari’s mom’s eyes rounded again. “You don’t think Charlie Kirkman did it, do you?”

“No, I don’t think that.” Kari couldn’t look at her mother for another second. More for something to do than anything else, Kari stood and poured herself a cup of coffee. She’d give anything to have one of her bear claws or Danish rolls to go with this—

No point in thinking about that.

“I’m sure Jake will be just as horrified as I am,” Kari’s mother said. “Oh, Kari, grab that box of croissants there. We’ll have some breakfast.”

Kari followed her mother’s pointing finger to the top of the fridge, where a clear plastic grocery store bakery container held a few croissants. With a sigh, she yanked the things down and plopped them on the Formica tabletop. “You couldn’t have bought some from me, Mom?”

“Well, actually, these were leftover from the office brunch—I told them we should have had you cater it, but the girls at the office said that there wasn’t enough in petty cash. Besides, they’re not that bad.”

Kari bit into one. The pastry was tough and greasy, not at all flaky like the croissants she strove to make. She scanned the printed ingredients list: hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour, soy flour.

She dropped the half-eaten pastry on her napkin. It was disappointing to the taste buds, a little stale, nothing like a fresh croissant. A good one was light and flaky and loaded with real butter. So what if they took hours to make? Better to have one really good croissant than a whole bin of these.

“See?” her mother said. “Not bad at all.”

What could she expect from her mom? Kari asked herself. Her mom always tried her best, but the results never turned out well.

True, such meals had been made lovingly and had been more than enough to keep Kari fed for the fourteen years she’d lived with her mom...and when she’d been in juvie, even her mom’s cooking had seemed way better than the glop they served.

Her mother reached up and caressed Kari’s cheek. “Oh, sweetie. This is horrible for you. But—I know! You can cook here! Why, this kitchen would do, wouldn’t it? It would be much better than trying to cook in that oversized kitchenette in your apartment. And that way you could bake all your cakes and keep your orders up—you’ve got the Gottman wedding to do, right? You can bake it right here.”

Kari couldn’t help but smile. “I might have to take you up on that. It will probably be a while before I’m back on my feet again.”

Her mom brightened and waved a hand around to encompass the kitchen. “Why, you’ve got everything you need, right here—and barely used at that. Isn’t it a good thing I was such a bad cook?”

Kari squeezed her mother’s fingers. “You’re not a bad cook.”

“Nope, next to you...you make those lovely little cupcakes that everybody always raves about. Oh, honey, where did you get your cooking mojo?”

Not for the first time did Kari utter some words of thanksgiving to Alice Heaton, the cook at the youth detention center where Kari had been incarcerated. If it hadn’t been for KP duty and a birthday cake, Kari might never have found a way to survive her years behind bars...or a way to make a living.

Well, strike that. She’d had a way to make a living, but now? Not so much.

Kari flicked the croissant with a fingernail. This was not breakfast. This wasn’t even really food.

“I think I’ll take you up on that offer to cook. I can make something better than this,” Kari said. She sprang from her chair and busied herself with rummaging through her mother’s cabinets.

“Oh, sweetie, you don’t have to cook—” her mother protested. “You’ve been through so much.”

Kari shrugged. “It helps me, Mom, the cooking. Cheap therapy, you know?” she tried to joke.

“Except for my hips,” her mother said. “If you really want to, I have some blueberries in the freezer. They’ve been there since the first of the summer, though.”

“Perfect. I’ll make us some blueberry muffins.”

What Kari really wanted was to tackle a brioche or a croissant or even a Danish, something that would require thought and energy and concentration. She’d welcome anything that would distract her from her worries.

But her stomach was rumbling in protest from the Franken-croissant, and muffins would be quick at least. Kari began dumping the ingredients into a bowl.

“Where’s Jake, Mom?” she asked again.

Her mother set her coffee mug down with a thud. “Out. Out with friends.”

Kari tried to suppress the predictable irritation that flared up within her. Jake acted as though he were still seventeen, not almost thirty. He was three years older than her...but she felt eons older than twenty-six.

“I tried his cell phone, but he didn’t answer,” Kari said.

“Oh, well, you know Jake...maybe he ran out of minutes.”

Kari stirred the batter a little more energetically than she normally would have. It sloshed onto the counter, and Kari made sure to wipe up the spill. “He’ll never grow up, Mom, if you don’t let him.”

“Let him! Kari, my goodness, of course he’s grown up. He’s older than you—what, twenty-seven?”

Kari leveled a gaze at her mom. “Try twenty-nine, Mom. And he still hasn’t figured out what he’s going to do with his life.”

“Oh, now, that’s not true. He’s registered for classes at the college.”

Despite Kari’s best attempts to level it, hope rose within her. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Jake had nothing to do with this fire. Between that and the magic of baking, some of her pent-up tension began to melt away.

“Of course... I don’t like that boy he’s hanging out with these days,” her mother added in a murmur, completely destroying the peace that had begun to settle over Kari.

“Mom—” Kari bit her tongue and forestalled any additional reminders that Jake was way past requiring—or even wanting—assistance on the playdate front.

“Don’t say it, Kari. You’ve made it perfectly clear that I need to be tougher on Jake. But I don’t want to break his spirit...you know how sensitive he is.”

“He’s a guy, not a horse,” Kari protested. She began to pour the batter into one of her mother’s muffin tins.

As she slid the muffin tin into the oven, the back door swung open. She straightened to see Jake framed in the morning light of the open door.

He stood there, stock-still, all muscular legs and bare arms in his cargo shorts and rumpled T-shirt. He looked as though he’d just rolled off somebody’s couch.

Even so, with his hair all ruffled and his clothes a wrinkled mess, he had that angelic-choirboy look that made girls his age flock to him and old ladies beam at him with trusting adoration.

Jake was beautiful, her beautiful, gorgeous brother. If he’d wanted and had lived in a larger city, he was so arrestingly attractive that he could have landed a male modeling gig.

Next to him, Kari had always felt a little...dull. Not so shiny. Not so pretty. And yet, just like everybody else, when she’d been fourteen, she’d wanted to be in his orbit, soaking up the glamour-by-association cachet having such a good-looking brother had afforded her.

“Hey, Kare, what are you doing here? I figured you’d be downtown.” He did a double take, his eyes rounding. “Oh, wait, man, you don’t know? It was a fire—wicked bad. One of my buddies told me—we went down there. Sick, man.”

Relief flooded through Kari. Jake hadn’t set the fire. How could she have so instantly blamed him?

Because he set one years ago.

“I know. I came to tell Mom.”

“Somebody said it was arson.” Jake’s words came easily. Unlike their mother, he didn’t stumble over the word arson. “What? Old Charlie decide the insurance money was better than the rent money?”

Kari set the timer on the oven and waited to compose herself before she turned back to face him. “I don’t think it was Charlie. Why would he burn a perfectly good building?”

Jake snorted and flopped down into a chair beside their mom. “You cooking? Righteous. I’m about to starve. And I can’t believe you’re calling that dump a perfectly good building. Just yesterday you and he were in a screaming match about everything that was wrong with it.”

Kari felt her stomach churn. That very public argument was one more nail in her coffin. It was her motive. She could hear the DA’s opening argument already— revenge because her landlord wouldn’t repair the building.

She met Jake’s eyes. They were coolly speculative. “Jake...”

“You didn’t light it up yourself, did you, sis?” her brother asked.

“No!” She began dumping the dirty dishes in the sink, rinsing them out and loading them in the dishwasher. “Of course I didn’t.”

“So, was it? Arson?” Jake pressed.

“Yes, Jake, it was, but don’t badger your sister. She’s got a lot on her shoulders.”

“So do you, Mom. I mean, she burned up your retirement money, didn’t she?”

Kari slammed the dishwasher door shut a little too hard. “I did not burn—”

“Relax, sis. It’s too easy to get your goat.” Jake gave her that crooked little grin that worked on so many people—for at least a while until they realized that he had no interest in actually following through on any of his promises. “I was just joking.”

“Jakey!” her mom scolded. “Don’t even think about joking about this. Kari could get in real trouble—and think what she did for you. You should be grateful. If the police knew...”

Jake fixed Kari with a level stare. “But they don’t know. And they wouldn’t believe her now anyway. And, Mom,” he added, not moving his gaze from Kari, “I swear, scout’s honor, it wasn’t me. You can’t keep blaming me for every fire in a fifty-mile radius.”

Kari wanted to believe Jake. And she understood well enough how badly it felt to be the usual suspect in whatever trouble that surfaced.

His mom rushed to smooth things over. “Of course it wasn’t you, nobody said it was you—”

“Sure sounded like that to me,” Jake grumbled.

“I tried to call you—” Kari began.

“See? You’re still trying to pin it on me!” he snapped.

“No, that’s not what I—”

The doorbell rang—the front door bell. Jake was apparently ready to snatch at any excuse to end the conversation, because he leapt out of the chair and said, “I’ll get it.”

As he went down the hall to answer the living room door, Kari’s mom hissed, “Now, see? You’ve hurt his feelings.”

“Mom, I didn’t—”

But Jake’s voice rose and fell in counterpoint to whoever was at the door. Something about the timber of that other voice—male, deep, the barest hint of amusement in it, caused Kari to stiffen.

She heard Jake say, “Sure, she’s in the kitchen. You’re just in time for whatever she’s cooking. C’mon.”

Footsteps sounded closer and closer as Jake approached the kitchen with his companion.

She froze and watched.

“Hey, Kare...somebody here to see you. Didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

Jake strolled back into the kitchen. Kari looked past his shoulder to see none other than Rob Monroe in his wake.

“Pardon me for tracking you down,” the arson investigator told her. “But I have just a few more questions for you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ROB TOOK ADVANTAGE of Kari’s flustered silence to let his gaze slide around the kitchen. It was straight-up middle class suburbia, updated sometime in the past few years with granite counters and stainless steel appliances, but Rob knew a working kitchen when he saw one. And this kitchen? It wasn’t a working kitchen.

This one wasn’t like Ma’s—it showed none of the telltale wear that a kitchen offers when it’s used every day. No, Chelle Hendrix’s kitchen looked fresh out of a home improvement store brochure. And there was something about it that made him think that the whole thing was a wannabe setup. The appliances didn’t look substantial enough for the industrial look they aspired to. The floor and the cabinets and the hardware were all too...shiny, perfect, basically unused. There were no scuffmarks, no scratches, no worn finish around the doorknobs. Ma’s kitchen was scrupulously clean and cared for, but worn around the edges. This kitchen? It was too pretty to be a working kitchen.

But it sure smelled like a working kitchen. Something golden brown and delicious assailed Rob’s nostrils—blueberry muffins, if he knew his baked goods, and thanks to Ma and a family of good cooks, he did.

The guy who’d let Rob in—there was enough resemblance in the face to peg him as Kari’s brother—lounged against the too-pretty stainless steel fridge. “So, cool, you’re with the police, huh? I thought you were Kari’s main squeeze.”

Kari coughed in embarrassment. “Jake, Mom, this is Rob Monroe. He’s—what did you tell me? Fire marshal and arson investigator? He’s determining the cause of the fire at the bakery.”