Chapter 35
ALEXA
When we exited, Storm was already disappearing around the corner of the house, and Jez sprinted ahead of me as we followed. Was it the winery? Say it wasn’t the winery… No, I’d have gotten an alert on my phone. Which meant… Fuck. Ari.
The cottages lay two hundred yards from the main house, beyond a grove of twisted cherry trees that provided privacy to both properties. The sky glowed orange above the foliage.
“Ari’s in there!” I screamed.
And what about the couple from Utah? They weren’t due to check out until tomorrow.
The fire had clearly started in Cottage Two, but Cottage One was only five yards away, separated by a narrow strip of dry grass and a low picket fence.
The guests had told Nolan they were going out for dinner, but they didn’t say where, and…
Fingers trembling, I fished out my phone and checked the tracking app, my heart thumping against my ribcage as I waited for the locations to update, beyond thankful when one green dot and then another appeared right over Sanguine.
The whole front of the building was ablaze, flames licking up the wooden siding and dancing at the windows. Jez paused for a second, assessing, and then sprinted around the back after Storm.
The nearest faucet was by the chickens, and would the hose even reach?
I ran that way and began unravelling it, then realised I needed to turn the water on, opened the faucet, and carried on toward the cottage.
Marcel had been calling the emergency services when we ran out of the house, and I felt so…
so helpless. The way I did when Uncle Porter used to put his hand over my mouth and whisper that it was our little secret.
I ran closer, gasping for breath, and sagged in relief when I saw Ari stagger out from behind the cottage with Storm’s arm wrapped around her waist, holding her up. She bent over, coughing.
“There’s nobody else in there,” I choked out. “The other couple, they’re in town.”
Ari fell to her knees, and Storm grabbed the hose from me. “We know—Jez already went in to check.”
“Where…where is she? Where’s Jez?”
Storm didn’t answer, too busy spraying water at the fire, although it barely made a difference.
“Jez…she’s okay,” Ari sputtered. “Not…inside.”
“What happened? What the hell happened?”
“Don’t know. Explosion.”
“A Molotov cocktail,” Storm yelled over the crackling flames. “Can’t you smell the gasoline?”
Gasoline? This wasn’t a terrible accident? But…but…the sabotage had stopped. Marielle was dead. If she hadn’t done this, then that meant…that meant either there were two saboteurs, or…or…we’d blamed the wrong person. Despite the heat, a chill rippled through me.
Jez ran up with a fire extinguisher in each hand. She threw one to me, and I ducked because what else was I supposed to do? Those things had to weigh twenty pounds each. Storm grabbed it instead, and I made a dive for the snaking hose.
Missed.
Ari stumbled past me and caught it.
Two streams of powder blasted toward the flames, knocking them back, and Ari followed up with the water.
The blaze got smaller, smaller, the smoke intensifying, swirling around and making me gag.
But then the extinguishers sputtered and died, and the flames were still there, smouldering away, just waiting for an opportunity to rise again.
The only sounds were the water and my sobs.
And then…sirens.
And Nolan running in my direction, barefoot, his face a mask of fear and horror. His gaze flicked from me to Jez to Storm to Ari, and then he scooped me up and held me tight against his chest.
“You’re okay?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Everyone’s okay?”
I nodded again.
“Thank fuck for that.”
“The…the cottage—”
“Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”
Marcel jogged up, huffing, the world’s smallest fire extinguisher cradled in his arms. “I found this and a fire blanket. I also texted my friend Roberto, who’s an excellent fire safety consultant, and asked for his first available appointment.”
Storm rolled her eyes, sooty where she’d been rubbing them. “Stable door, horse, bolted.”
“You’re right. I should call André too, tell him this is going to be more than a quick finishing job.”
A fire truck screamed up the driveway, and half a dozen firefighters leapt out. Hoses unrolled. Water gushed. Five minutes later, the fire was out properly, and the front of the cottage was a gaping black hole beneath two blackened windows, a giant face screaming into the moonlit night.
“So much for a relaxing break,” Storm muttered. “You think I can get my vacation days back?”
* * *
For the second night in a row, we got little sleep. The fire department packed up and left, promising the arson investigator would be along in the morning, but the fire chief agreed with Storm’s assessment that the damage had been caused by a Molotov cocktail.
“You can tell that from the burn pattern,” he said to Nolan, pointing. “See where the gasoline dripped down? You upset anyone lately?”
Yes, but ghosts couldn’t light matches. Could they?
Nolan turned pale and stuttered out an answer. “I…I don’t think so?”
Great. He absolutely sounded guilty of something, and we didn’t want anyone looking too closely at the Marielle situation.
“He ran the Hayes boys off the hill on Sunday,” I said, throwing in a red herring. Or was it? Whoever did this, it wasn’t Marielle, so I’d put the Hayes family at the top of the list. “They didn’t seem too happy.”
“Saw Bo Hayes in the Doodlebug earlier today. Two o’clock in the afternoon, and he was already slurring his words. Not sure he’d have had the wherewithal to put together a Molotov cocktail without burning off his own face.”
“Pipe bombs, is what I heard,” another firefighter said. “Bo Hayes likes a good pipe bomb.”
The fire chief looked up at the cottage. “That weren’t no pipe bomb, Bobby.”
“So maybe he’s branchin’ out?”
“Heard his wife left him again,” a third guy chimed in. “Might explain the day drinking.”
“Naw, Bo Hayes always drinks mornin’ till night, given the chance.”
A deputy had shown up, looking slightly dishevelled, as if he hadn’t expected to do any actual work this evening. He hitched up his belt and glanced in the direction of his patrol car. Yeah, yeah, we all wanted tonight to be over.
“I’ll talk with Bo in the morning, if he’s sober,” the deputy said. “Those boys of his too. Don’t you be going over there—Bo’s mean as a rattlesnake on a good day, and the last time Donna went off, he was pickin’ fights with everyone. Put Donna’s brother-in-law in the hospital.”
“I won’t go over there,” Nolan said.
“Nor me,” I told him. Jez, Storm, and Ari made no such promises.
But, it turned out, they wouldn’t be going to the Hayeses’ cabin either, not tomorrow at any rate.
We watched the fire truck trundle off down the driveway, followed by the patrol car, and Nolan sank onto a scorched Adirondack chair outside the cottage.
Marcel was in the house doing what Marcel did best—rearranging furniture, preparing snacks, and organising alternate accommodation for the couple who should have been staying in Cottage Number One.
Luckily, they’d been understanding after he offered to comp their entire stay and pay for a hotel room for the rest of the trip.
“Who wants to shake up a hungover asshole tomorrow?” Jez asked, and Ari raised her hand.
Usually, she wasn’t quite so eager when it came to confrontation, but I imagined that nearly being chargrilled would stoke a little anger.
The windows at the back of the cottage were locked, and she’d had to smash her way out with a chair.
But Storm shook her head. “It wasn’t him.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I was the first to reach the cottage, and as I ran around the back, I saw someone disappearing into the trees beyond.”
“And you recognised them?”
“No, but I’m ninety percent sure it was a woman.”
“A woman?” Nolan asked. “But…but Marielle is gone.”
“Well, either she got reincarnated, or she has an evil twin.”
“You said ninety percent…?” Ari queried.
“I guess it could have been a slender man. Do we have a picture of this Bo Hayes?”
“Only his DMV picture,” I said. “He doesn’t have much of an online presence. But I’ve seen him in person, and he isn’t slender—he’s kinda pudgy with the beginnings of a beer belly.”
“Both of his boys are slender,” Nolan pointed out. “Wyatt’s only fourteen, but he’s almost as tall as his dad.”
“Then Wyatt’s a possibility,” Storm admitted. “But women move differently, you know?”
I wanted it to be Wyatt, I did, because that would be the easiest solution. But I trusted Storm, and since she lived half her life at Mach 1, she had to be able to process information and observations in a split second. If she said the firebug was a woman, then it was a woman. But who?
I didn’t believe in ghosts.
I believed in data.
And also in retribution.