Eight

Hank Coolidge

Nice, Illinois

“Hank, maybe we should call it quits for a while.” Dakota stretches in the computer chair and rubs the small of her back.

I’m not sure how long we’ve been sitting at the computer, but I don’t care. “Look, you said you wanted to stay home from school and work on this with me. If you didn’t mean it, you should have let me do this on my own.”

“I didn’t know we were going to sit in front of the computer all day and try to find people who hate us. I could have gone to school for that.” She glances at the kitchen clock. “School’s getting out about now. Man, I thought my high school teachers were slave drivers, but you beat them all.” She stands. “How about we take a break? We could ride Blackfire and Starlight before Kat and Wes get home. I’ll bet our horses could use the company.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

“Well, let’s go see Cleo. Maybe she’s calmer now.”

Something catches in my throat, and I feel the burning there. It makes me cough. Our house still smells like smoke. So do our clothes. So does the world.

“Look, Dakota, this is what I need to do. I have to find out who burned down our barn. I don’t have time to play with the horses. But don’t let me stop you. Do what you want.” She’s twice as fast as I am at typing. And she can find anything on the Internet, when it takes me forever. But I’ll do this all by myself if I have to.

She sighs and drops back into the chair. “You win. But we’re going in circles. You’ve got notes on barn fires in Illinois. A stack of printouts from news archives. There haven’t been any suspicious fires in this whole county for six years, right?”

“That we know about,” I admit.

“And even if it was arson, we’ll never prove who did it.” She reads from one of the sites she printed out. “About 90 percent of all arson cases go unsolved. No convictions.”

“Doesn’t mean they didn’t know who did it,” I tell her. “They couldn’t prove it because all the evidence burned up. But they knew. I want to know.”

“Okay.” Dakota lifts her long hair off her neck, then lets it fall. “Fine. But you’re all over the place with your whodunit suspects. Like these.” She taps a pile of printouts I ran off. “Your mom’s patients? Make that your mom’s dead patients—which, quite frankly, is grossing me out.”

“So? Maybe somebody blames her.”

Dakota tilts her head at me, letting me know she doesn’t buy it. “They blame her and then burn down your barn? Not very logical, Sherlock.”

“Who said fires are logical?” She’s making me mad, but I rein it in. I need Dakota’s help, no matter how crazy she makes me. “Besides, I have other ideas.”

“Like the fires your dad’s fought?”

“What’s wrong with that? If Dad’s department took a long time getting to a fire, maybe somebody blames the fire department,” I explain. “You know, we should work on getting response times on those fires.”

Dakota isn’t paying attention to a word I’m saying. She stares up at the ceiling. “Then we’ve got the places you’ve turned in for abusing horses.”

“That’s a strong lead, Dakota. Even you have to see that. Like that last trail ride place we got closed down. Those guys were pretty angry. You were there. You saw it. Tell me you don’t think that guy with the red beard would love to get even with us for taking in their horses.”

“Then why did they wait so long to do something about it?” Dakota asks. “We’ve already found homes for most of their horses. And you still think they did it?”

“I didn’t say they did it. I’m just coming up with possibles. You think I like listing people who hate us?”

“Now there you go. Finally. That’s what we need here,” Dakota says. “We need lists.”

I groan. Dakota is the queen of list making. She’s got journals all over the place, and she’s always making her lists.

She starts to get up again. “Fine. If you don’t want to take advantage of my list-making skills . . .”

“No.” I put my hand on her head and press her back down in the chair. “No. You’re right.”

“Excuse me?” Dakota has the most infuriating, smug look on her face. “I’m what? I don’t think I heard that correctly. Did you actually say I was right about something?”

I ignore her and her sarcasm. “Lists of possible suspects—people with grudges against any of us—could help the sheriff take us seriously. That fire inspector who came out this morning wouldn’t even talk to me. He didn’t want me anywhere near the barn.”

“He’s got to do his job,” Dakota says. “Fire inspector, huh? Who knew this podunk county even had a fire inspector?”

Dakota’s from Chicago, and every other town in Illinois is “podunk” to her. I let it go. I don’t feel like getting into it with her. I’ve got more important things on my mind.

“Anyway, I can start listing the places we’ve reported for animal abuse since I’ve lived here.” She types four names.

I give her three more, but my mind’s not working. I can picture every horrible scene at every farm, ranch, pasture, or stable where we reported animal abuse, but the names aren’t coming back to me. “I’ll have to check my records to get the names of the other places I reported—” I stop.

Dakota turns and gives me a sad smile. She gets it. I don’t have records anymore.

“I should have kept copies on the computer,” I mutter. Every record I had was in the wooden file cabinet in my barn office. They’re not there now. This must be the 10th thing I’ve started to get, then remembered it wasn’t there. It doesn’t exist any longer because of the fire.

“Never mind,” Dakota says. “The names will come to you.”

“Yeah.”

She shrinks the document she started and googles fire investigations. She gets 79,202 hits. “Too many,” she says. She goes back to her list. “What about Popeye?”

“What?”

“Popeye,” she repeats. “Your dad? You remember him—short, no hair.” She opens a new document. “Does Popeye think it’s arson?”

I shrug. I haven’t been able to talk to Dad much since the fire. This morning he was already out with the fire inspector when I got up. I listened to the two of them talk, and it didn’t take long to figure out that neither one of them sees what I do in this fire. I know it’s arson.

Dakota stops typing and stares at me, silently demanding an answer to her question. Does he think it’s arson?

“You know Dad,” I finally answer. “He’d never believe anything bad about anybody.”

“So that would be a no?” Dakota says. “He doesn’t think somebody set the fire on purpose?”

“I don’t know what he thinks. Besides, he’s a fireman, not an inspector.” I shove my chair back from the computer desk and walk to the window. It’s a dreary day with a heavy gray sky. The fire inspector is still there, standing in the middle of the rubble. He’s wearing his hard hat, even though there’s nothing left to fall on him. I watch as he writes something in his notebook. He squats down. Then he writes again.

“What could he be doing out there all day?” I mutter.

“The fire inspector?” Dakota asks. “Inspecting, I suppose.” She joins me at the window.

We watch the man move around what used to be our barn.

“Look on the bright side,” Dakota says, which is pretty funny coming from the all-time pro of looking on the dark side. “Maybe the investigator will find out who did it—if anybody did it. Then we can go ride our horses.”

I wheel on her. “What do you mean ‘if anybody did it’?”

Dakota starts to answer, but I don’t let her.

“Somebody did it. The barn didn’t just burn itself.”

“Well . . . they do sometimes, Hank,” she says, like she’s talking me off a ledge.

I shake my head. “No. I don’t know about other barns. But I do know about our barn. It didn’t go up in flames by itself.”

“Think about it,” she pleads. “Sometimes things happen, and there’s nobody to blame. Barns burn, and it’s nobody’s fault.”

“You’re wrong! This is somebody’s fault.”

Dakota reaches for my arm, but I shake her off and storm outside. She is so wrong. This whole nightmare is somebody’s fault. And if it isn’t an arsonist’s fault, then whose fault is it?

Whose fault is it?