James was awakened some time in the night by the sound of sirens. Sheriff’s department patrol SUVs and several fire trucks sped down Main Street and kept going until the sirens died away. He’d rolled over and gone back to sleep until his cell phone rang just after 7:00 a.m.
“Did you hear about the fire?” his friend Ryan asked. “That old busybody crossed the wrong person this time. Cora says someone set her house on fire, but I heard the sheriff’s trying to pin it on her. Arson.”
“You’ve heard all this already this morning?”
“The men’s coffee clutch down at the cafe. You should join us. It’s a lot of the old gang along with some of the old men in town. Pretty interesting stuff most mornings.”
James shook his head and told himself he wouldn’t be staying in town that long. His leg was better, and his ribs didn’t hurt with every breath. It was progress. “Thanks for the invite,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“How is the investigation going?”
He was saved from answering as he got another call. “Sorry, I’m getting another call. Talk to you later?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he accepted the call. At first all he heard was coughing, an awful hack that he didn’t recognize. “Hello?” he repeated.
“I want to hire you.” The words came out strained between coughs. “Someone tried to burn me alive in my own house last night.”
“Cora?” The last time she’d said more than a few words to him, she’d been chasing him and his brothers away from her apple trees with a shotgun.
In between coughs, she said, “You’re a private detective, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t the sheriff investigating?” he asked, sitting up to rub a hand over his face. It was too early in the morning for this.
“Carl? That old reprobate!” He waited through a coughing fit. “He thinks I set the fire, that’s how good an investigator he is. I put myself in the hospital and burned down my own house? Idiot.” More coughing. “You owe me, James Colt, for all the times you and your brothers trespassed in my yard and stole my apples.”
He wanted to point out that she’d had more apples than she could ever use and let them waste every year. But they were her apples.
“The least you can do is prove that I didn’t start the fire. Otherwise, the sheriff is talking putting me behind bars.”
“I’ll look into it,” he said, all the time mentally kicking himself.
“Good. Don’t overcharge me.”
James disconnected. He lay down again, but he knew there was no chance he could get back to sleep. After Connie Matthews had left last night, he’d hoped Lori was still around. She wasn’t so he’d gone out and gotten himself some fast food and then driven to Billy Sherman’s neighborhood.
From there, he’d walked toward the spot where the boy had died. He’d tried to imagine doing the same thing in a violent thunderstorm at the age of seven. Whoever Billy had seen couldn’t have been some random person like anyone he and Todd normally followed. The boy must have recognized the person. But then why hadn’t he mentioned a name to Todd? Or maybe there was something about the person that had lured him out into the storm. James couldn’t imagine what it could have been.
An image from a movie during his own childhood popped into his head of a clown holding a string with a bright-colored balloon floating overhead. It had given him nightmares for weeks. A kid afraid of the dark and storms wouldn’t go after a clown—especially one with a balloon.
LORELEI HAD DRIVEN past her stepmother’s house last night only to see all the lights were out and her car wasn’t in the garage. She’d been tempted to drive out to the senator’s house to see if she was there. Earlier this evening on the news she’d heard that the senator and his wife were officially divorcing.
“They reported that they’ve been separated for some time now and believe it is best if they end the marriage,” the newscaster had said. “Senator Bayard said the divorce is amicable and that he wishes only the best for Mary.”
It had sounded as if Mary was the one who’d wanted the separation and divorce. Maybe she had. Maybe Lorelei had been too hard on her stepmother.
The news had ended with a mention of Bayard being called back to Washington on some subcommittee work he was doing. She wondered how true that was. Maybe Fred and her stepmother had flown off somewhere together to celebrate the divorce.
What bothered Lorelei was that her stepmother felt the need to lie to her. Or at the very least not to be honest with her. Like providing the loan for the sandwich shop. Like falling in love without telling her. While Lorelei didn’t approve of her stepmother’s affair, she wanted her to be happy. She hated the strain in their relationship and promised herself that she would do what she could to fix it when she saw Karen again.
After a restless night, she’d gotten up and gone to work as usual. As she pulled in behind the shop to park, James was standing by the back door of his office grinning.
“My license came today. It’s official—I’m a private investigator.”
“Congratulations. You’ll have to frame it and put it up on your wall.”
“I know it seems silly being excited about it, but I am. It makes me feel legit. I also have a new client.” She raised a brow. “I’ll tell you all about it over dinner. I thought we’d go out and celebrate. I owe you a steak.” She started to argue, but he stopped her with a warm hand on her bare arm. “Please? You wouldn’t make me celebrate alone, would you?”
She knew he could make a call to any number of women who would jump at a steak dinner date with him. When she’d awakened this morning, she’d promised herself that she would see her stepmother tonight—if her stepmother was in town.
James waved the license in the air and grinned. “How can a Montana girl like you say no to a slab of grain-fed beef grilled over a hot fire?”
Lorelei laughed in spite of her sometime resolve to keep James Colt at arm’s length. “Fine. What time?”
JAMES COULDN’T HELP smiling as he drove out to Cora’s. Lori had agreed to have dinner with him. He hadn’t been this excited about a date in... Heck, he wasn’t sure he ever had been. That should have worried him, he realized.
Cora’s house had sat on a hill. Smoke was still rising up through the pine trees and into the blue summer sky as he pulled in.
After parking, he got out of his truck and walked over to the firefighters still putting out the last of the embers. One of the fears of living in the pine trees was always fire. But the firefighters had been able to contain the blaze from spreading into the pines. The small old house though seemed to be a total loss.
“I’m looking for the arson investigator,” James said and was pointed to a man wearing a mask and gloves and a Montana State University Bobcats baseball cap digging around in the ashes.
“I’m Private Detective James Colt,” he said introducing himself.
The man gave him a glance and continued digging. “Colt? That your property next door?”
“Yep.”
“A lot of recent fires out here.” He rose to his feet and extended a gloved hand before drawing it back to wipe soot onto his pants. “Sorry about that. Gil Sanders.”
James couldn’t help his surprise. “Gilbert Sanders?” he asked, remembering seeing the name on his father’s list. But why would his father be interested in talking to an arson investigator as part of Billy Sherman’s hit-and-run?
“Have we met before?” Gil asked, studying him. “You look familiar.”
“My father, PI Del Colt, might have contacted you about another investigation.”
The man frowned. “Sorry. Can you be more specific?”
“He was investigating the hit-and-run death of a local boy about nine years ago.”
Gil shook his head. “You’re sure it was me he spoke with?”
“Maybe not.” Now that James thought about it, there hadn’t been any notes from the interview in his father’s file. “I’m here about another matter. Cora Brooks called me this morning. Anything new on the fire?”
“It was definitely arson. The blaze was started in the basement. The accelerant was gasoline. It burned hot and fast. She was lucky to get out alive.”
James nodded. “The sheriff seemed to think Cora started the fire herself.”
The investigator shook his head. “I’ve already reviewed the statements from the first responders. The property owner was in a robe and slippers carrying a shotgun and a pair of binoculars. That’s all she apparently managed to save. She couldn’t have outrun that fire if she started it. Not in those slippers. I’m told she is in her right mind.”
“Sharp and lethal as a new filet knife.”
Gil chuckled. “She told first responders that she’d heard someone breaking into her basement. That’s why she had her shotgun. Not sure why the binoculars were so important to her, but I don’t see any way a woman her age could have started the fire in the basement and hightailed it upstairs to an outside deck. Not with as much gas as was used downstairs. I’m not even sure she can lift the size gas can that was found.”
Cora was apparently in the clear. “Thank you. If I figure out why I saw your name in my father’s case file...”
“Just give me a call. But unless it pertains to a fire, I can’t imagine why he had wanted to talk to me.”
James shook the man’s hand and nodded at Gil’s cap. “Go Bobcats,” he said and headed back to his pickup. Too bad all his PI cases weren’t this easy, he thought. He headed for the hospital to give Cora the good news. This one was on him, no charge. He knew she’d like the sound of that.
OTIS STUMBLED TO his cabin door hungover, half-asleep and ticked off. Whoever was pounding on his door was going to regret it.
“What the hell did you do?” his brother Carl demanded, pushing past him and into the cabin. The sheriff turned to look at him and swore. “On second thought, I don’t want to know.”
“If this is about that fire out at Cora’s—”
“What else? I saw you yesterday. You were going on about the woman and last night her house burns down.” Carl raised a hand. “There’s an arson investigator out there. I told him that I think Cora did it for the insurance money, but he sure as the devil isn’t going to take my word for it.”
“I didn’t do it.” Otis stepped past him to open the refrigerator. He needed the hair of the dog that bit him last night. Pulling out a can of beer he popped the top, took a long drink and looked at his brother.
“How deep are you in all this?” Carl demanded.
“I did something stupid.”
His brother groaned. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t suspect that was the case.”
“I took something out to the Colt place. I was going to make an anonymous call and let you find it. I know you’d like to get that arrogant little turd behind bars as much as I would.”
The sheriff swore. “Tell me it isn’t anything explosive. You get anyone killed—”
“No, just some illegal stuff. Doesn’t matter now. I’ll get it hauled away. It was stupid. Then Cora saw me, said she made a video of me dumping it...” He hung his head again.
“Otis, swear to me you didn’t burn down Cora’s house.”
The former sheriff looked up, his expression one of disbelief and hurt. “I was at the bar. You can check. I was there until closing. Even better about the time it was catching fire, I called Cora from the bar. See I have an alibi so I’m gold.”
His brother swore.
“What’s wrong? There will be a record of the call—just before I heard the sirens. So it couldn’t have been me.”
Carl told himself that his brother had been at the bar to establish that alibi, which meant Otis had hired someone to set fire to the place. He wished he didn’t know his brother so well. “If it wasn’t you, any idea who might have wanted Cora dead?”
Otis chuckled. “Anyone who’s ever crossed her path.”
“Let’s just hope Gil Sanders doesn’t find any evidence out there that would make him think you had anything to do with this.”
CORA TOOK THE news as would be expected. She nodded, told James he’d better not send her a bill and ordered him out of her room.
A near-death experience didn’t change everyone apparently, he thought as he left chuckling.
He was still wondering if the Gilbert Sanders on his father’s list was the arson investigator and if so what Del thought the man could offer on the hit-and-run case.
Meanwhile, he tracked down Sean Sherman. His call went straight to voice mail. He left a message asking Sean to call him and hung up. Sherman lived in a town not far from Lonesome. If he had to, James would drive over and pay the man a visit.
With that done, he considered his father’s list again. Connie Matthews had said something in her original interview with his father that kept bothering him. Lyle Harris had been operating the front-end loader the morning Connie had seen the body and stopped him from covering it up.
James knew it was a long shot. His father had already talked to the man and there wasn’t anything in his notes that sent up a red flag. But he was running out of people to interview and getting worried that he’d missed something important.
At forty-five, Lyle Harris had quit his job with the local contractor after a work comp accident that had put him in a wheelchair. As James pulled up out front of his place deep in the woods, he noticed the ramp from the house through the carport to the garage. He recalled Ryan telling him that he’d donated the lumber and the men Lyle used to work with had donated their time to make the house more wheelchair accessible.
After parking, he got out and walked toward the house, changing directions as he heard the whine of an electric saw coming from the garage.
“Lyle!” he called. “Lyle, it’s James Colt!” The sound of the saw stopped abruptly. He heard what sounded like a cry of pain and quickly stepped through the door into the large garage.
The first thing he saw was the wheelchair lying on its side. Past it, he caught movement as someone ran out the back door and into the pines. He charged into the garage thinking it had been Lyle who’d run out.
But he hadn’t gone far when he saw that Lyle had left a bloody trail on the concrete floor where he’d crawled away from the wheelchair, away from the electric saw lying on the floor next to it, the blade dripping blood.
“What the hell?” he said, rushing to the man on the floor. He was already digging out his phone to call 911.
“No, don’t. Please. Don’t call. I’m okay,” Lyle cried as he pressed a rag against the wound that had torn through his jeans to the flesh of his lower leg. “It’s not fatal.”
James stared at the man, then slowly disconnected before the 911 operator answered. “I just saw someone running out of here. What’s going on?”
Lyle shook his head. “Could you get my chair?”
He walked over, picked it up and rolled the wheelchair over to the man, holding it steady as Lyle lifted himself into it.
“It looks worse than it is,” Lyle said as he rolled over to a low workbench. He grabbed a first aid kit. “But thanks for showing up when you did.”
“That blade could have taken off your leg,” James said.
“Naw, it wouldn’t have gone that far.”
Lyle winced as he poured rubbing alcohol on the wound then began to bandage it with shaking fingers. From what James could tell, the man was right. The wound wasn’t deep. “You want help with that?”
“No. I’m fine,” he said, turning his back to him.
“You’re in trouble.” Lyle said nothing. “And whatever it is, it’s serious.” James took a guess on how many times he’d seen Lyle’s rig parked in front of the casino since he’d been back in town. “Gambling?”
Lyle finished and spun the wheelchair around to face him. “I appreciate you stopping by when you did. Now what can I do for you?”
He sighed. His father used to say that you couldn’t help people who didn’t want to be helped. He knew that to be true. He chewed at his cheek for a moment, thinking. “Were you gambling nine years ago when Billy Sherman died?”
The question took the man by surprise.
James saw the answer in Lyle’s face and swore. “Connie Matthews said that if she hadn’t seen Billy Sherman’s body lying in that ditch when she did, you would have dumped dirt on him with your front-end loader and he would never have been found. She also told my father that she’d been surprised that you were already working that morning since you usually didn’t start that early. In fact, she’d been afraid you were going to get fired since she’d heard Edgar Appleton, your boss, warning you before that day about coming to work late so often. She thought that’s why you were there so early that morning and that still half-asleep, you didn’t see the boy and would have buried him in that ditch. You would have known that the concrete had been ordered for the driveway. It was going to be delivered that day. Had you covered Billy’s body with dirt, it would have never been found.”
Lyle stared him down for a full minute. “Like I said, thanks for stopping by.”
“I don’t believe you ran that boy down, but I do wonder if you weren’t hired to get rid of his body. Maybe hired is the wrong word. Coerced into making Billy Sherman disappear?”
“You can see your way out,” Lyle said, wheeling around and heading toward his house.