Jennifer Greene - Irresistible Stranger

As if they were discussing the weather, Mary Belle looked at her haircut creation in the mirror, from one angle and then another. “I believe we’ll go just a little shorter on the left side, don’t you think?”

All Lily could think was, Griff. The one man she definitely wanted to love and live for, not die for.

The coils on the bald hair dryer started to glow…

When Griff dropped into the creaking office chair in Sheriff Conner’s office, he stretched out his long legs, calm as a spring breeze. “We need to have a little discussion,” he said lazily, and accepted the mug of battery-acid strength coffee that Herman Conner pushed toward him.

“Now, Griff. There’s no point in your getting mad over that boy.”

“I’m not mad. I never get mad,” Griff assured him. He realized Conner thought he was unhappy about Jason being returned to his mother’s house. And he was. But the dominating headlines in his mind were the images of Lily’s soot-stained cheeks and shocked eyes after yesterday’s fire.

At three in the morning, he’d still been pacing the floor, checking on her every five minutes, leaping up every time she coughed.

And since he hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep, he’d put all the information they’d gathered on the Campbell fire in his head. It was like watching puzzle pieces interlock. They knew someone had committed three or more acts of arson twenty years ago. That that someone was likely a girl. That that someone had gotten away with her crimes-and the only reason Lily’s appearance in town had started a rash of arson fires was if the guilty person then was the guilty person now.

If there was another way to put it together, Griff didn’t know how. What he’d realized, in the wee hours of the morning, was that someone else had all the puzzle pieces he and Lily had. Maybe more.

And that someone was the sheriff.

“Here’s the thing.” Conner poured himself a second mug, pulled out a drawer, propped his boot on it. “You and I know the score on kids like Jason. You’re too realistic to think there’s ever some magic answer for a troubled kid.”

“I don’t. But if Jason’s father wasn’t a relative of the judge, you know damn well he’d be in prison, instead of getting a free ride out of jail every few months.”

“True. But that’s one of the things you can’t change. So you either eat yourself up about it, or you do what you can do.” Conner tipped back his chair. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I had five kids of my own. Two of them nearly cost my sanity. That’s how I know. All you can do is what you can do, Griff.”

Griff suddenly rubbed an itch at the back of his neck. “Which two kids? What happened?”

The sheriff sighed. “I had twins. Twin girls. And when Mary Ann died in an accident, I thought my wife would sink under the weight of it. She just couldn’t recover. I had a hard enough time myself. Nothing shook us out of that grief until we finally noticed that Mary Belle…well, let’s just say, she was barreling down the wrong path.”

“How so?” Griff asked lazily.

The sheriff’s eyes shifted away from him. “What I think now is that losing her sister, her twin, just rocked Mary Belle’s foundation to the core. It’s like she was trying to believe she didn’t care about losing her sister, about herself, about anything. She turned into this wild girl, out of control every which way.”

“I take it she partied quite a bit?”

Conner took another pull on the coffee. “To say the least of it.” He sighed again. “I blame myself for not paying attention. We were too wrapped up in our own grief to see it. She was wildly in love with a new boy about every month. It’s not as if a high school boy is going to say no when something’s offered free.”

“Not in this life,” Griff affirmed, although his pulse was suddenly slamming, slamming, slamming.

“So each of the boys she took up, they took advantage. And then they’d break her heart. Then she’d get so angry. And even more wild.” Conner shook his head. “The thing is, when I see a boy like Jason, or Steve, or any of the wild-eyed ones you’ve taken on…I always remember what we been through in our own family. You can love your kids. You can try to parent them right. But sometimes problems come up that just plain take time, a lot of time, to turn around.”

Griff said quietly, softly, “So…it was Mary Belle, wasn’t it? Who set those fires twenty years ago.”

“Say what? I was talking about the nature of teenagers, kids through times of trouble, how sometimes raising a kid just isn’t a neat, tidy, straight path-”

“She set the fires, didn’t she, Conner.”

The sheriff shook his head wildly, slammed his feet flat on the floor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. “I only brought up my own family issues to share your frustration over Jason. I wasn’t trying to-”

Griff could see it in Conner’s face. The anguish. The guilt. Likely he would never have mentioned Mary Belle, his own troubles, if his daughter wasn’t such a huge, festering worry in his mind that he couldn’t always keep in.

“In high school. The arson fires that were never solved,” he said quietly. “She was in love with those boys. They took advantage, then jilted her. She was angry. She set those fires.”

“No, of course it wasn’t her!”

“Only then came the fire that killed the Campbells. Lily’s parents.” Griff eased to his feet, then crossed the room to quietly close the door. When he turned back, Conner’s ruddy complexion had gone gray, his eyes old. He lifted a hand to push it through his rumpled hair. The hand was trembling. He realized it. Griff saw it.

“It’s not like you think,” the sheriff said.

“So tell me how it was.”

“I didn’t know it was her. Not to start. It never occurred to me in a million years that it was my own daughter. “Once Conner started talking, it was as if a raw, festering boil had suddenly exploded.

“After her sister died, she just went searching for something, you know? She’d decide she loved some boy, sleep with him, probably scare the boy out of his mind with how fast and furious she was latching on. So he’d dump her. And then there’d be a fire.”

“Aw, hell.” Griff said it under his breath. He hadn’t known, not totally, not for dead sure, until the sheriff let loose.

“I didn’t associate those fires with Mary Belle. Why would I? At first I thought it was just vandalism. First one was in a school locker. I thought, probably pranks, a sports rivalry. It’s boys who set fires, almost never girls. And our Mary Belle, we were worried about her morals. But we weren’t worried about crime, certainly nothing like those fires. She’d never done anything like that, never got in any kind of trouble-”

“Why in God’s name did she pick on the Campbells?”

“She didn’t. But she was pregnant. I didn’t know. Her mother didn’t know. The house next to Campbells was empty, for sale. That’s where she and this boy were meeting at night. He had a way of getting in. Anyway she told him she was pregnant. Thought he’d marry her, they’d live happy ever after. He dumped her, called her a slut, said the only reason he was with her was for one thing…”

“And?”

“When the fire happened, when the Campbells died, I still didn’t know it was her. Nobody did. But she came crying to me, beside herself, guilty, ashamed, torn up. She never meant to hurt anyone else. She didn’t even mean to hurt him. She’d never harmed a person.”

Griff almost responded, realized every muscle in his spine was knotted tighter than barbed wire, and said nothing. Conner, he was pretty damned positive, had never told anyone about this. It had eaten him alive all this time.