Jennifer Greene: Irresistible Stranger

“I’m sorry to be such a pain,” she said, real apology in her voice, but not moving until she’d heard an answer. He sighed and eventually got around to responding.

“You know, it’s been twenty years, but if I recall correctly, there’d been a rash of vandalism fires, stretching maybe a year or so, before the one at your place. But there was no relationship, like I wrote. There was no one killed in the other fires, no property damage that remotely compared.”

“Still, was there any similarity with my family’s fire? Like…was the same accelerant used? Or were those fires set in the same time of day? Any connection at all?”

“The similarity you need to know, sunshine, is that the arsons stopped after your daddy died. For a whole three years, there was no other fire except for old Samuel Wilson’s trying to cook after his wife died. So this is probably not an avenue you want to pursue. It only points to your daddy all over again.”

That hurt. She admitted it. Still, she said softly, “So you’re sure…there was no similarity in the other fires?”

“To be honest with you, sweetheart, I don’t remember now. I just remember studying the thing at the time, concluding there was nothing in common with the other prank-type fires. If you’re doubting I know how to do my job-”

“No, no.” She hurried to look penitent…and to push the other cinnamon muffin his way. Being a teacher, she had a half-dozen ways of locally researching the past fire, all of which she still intended to pursue-but there’d be no real way to get closure without Sheriff Conner on her side. If she had to grovel, she was more than willing to grovel. “I’m just trying to understand, sheriff. It was so devastating to my family-”

“And to everyone in this town. Now-you got any more questions?”

“Just one teensy one.” She motioned to the partial sentence on the second page. “The report says the fire started outside our back door. Actually, it says, west of the back door.”

“Okay. And you think that means what? ” the sheriff asked with a look of fatherly patience.

“Well, I’m not sure. But I remember our house. We shared a garage wall with the house next to us. And that my dad had a shop on that side of the garage. He liked working with wood, so he had stuff out there, like lacquer and varnish and mineral spirits and all that.”

“I’m still listening.”

“Well…I had no concept when I was a little kid, but now, it seems pretty obvious why the whole downstairs exploded. Why the fire was so fast and awful. Because of the chemicals my dad had in the garage.”

Herman Conner took the last bite of muffin. “Okay.”

“But my dad would never have deliberately started a fire near those products, would he? That wouldn’t have made any sense at all. The belief was that he wanted the insurance money. But he loved us. I can’t imagine in a million years why he would have started a fire where all those accelerants were around. It would have been asking for an explosion. And he’d never have done anything to deliberately harm my sisters or my mom-”

“Lily. Honey. We’ve been over this. He was despondent. He’d lost his job. He wasn’t thinking rationally.”

“But isn’t it possible…that the fire might have started in the house next to ours? But that ours went up so fast because of the stuff my dad had in the garage? I mean, do you know who lived next door? What happened to them? I don’t remember at all-if that house burned down, too, or if anyone was hurt there, or anything else. If there could have been a connection…” Lily could have sworn she caught a flash of alarm in the sheriff’s eyes, yet his voice was as calm and patient as before.

“Aw, sweetheart. You got eyes full of hope. But there was no one in that house. It’d been for sale for several months. There was fire damage there, too, a course, but nothing like what happened to your place, where the downstairs fire took off like hell in a fury. Pardon my French. You were all trapped on the second floor. There was no one on the other side of the garage wall to be hurt.”

“So. You think that’s a dead end,” she said carefully.

Something had changed in his expression. His posture was a little stiffer, his eyes more guarded. Or maybe it was her imagination, because his tone of voice never changed. “I think, if you want to come back here every single day you’re here, ask more questions, pursue anything on your mind, honey, then that’s what you should do. Let’s get this off your mind so it’ll never come up again. I admit, if I were your daddy, I’d be advising you to let it go, that it’s not good for you to dwell on something you can never make right. A tragedy is a tragedy, honey. You already went through it. No point that I can see in reliving it yet again. But you do whatever you need to do. I won’t get mad. That’s a promise.” He added, “Particularly if you keep bringing me Louella’s cinnamon muffins.”

When Lily left the station, the temperature had risen to one hundred and thirty-at least . Virginia had hot summers, but nothing like this. She battled the humidity straight to the ice-cream store-which, she told herself, had nothing to do with seeing Griff. It was about saving her life.

The place was wallpapered with kids, some slurping ice cream, but not all. Lily recognized the phenomenon. With school out for the summer, the kids too young for a job needed a hang-out place. Griff’s was clearly it.

Two boys were manning the counter, with a third visible in the back, doing washup. Griff seemed to choose employees who looked as if they’d recently been let out of juvenile detention-lots of tattoos, lots of metal on their faces, lots of attitude. The one Lily had come to know-Jason-seemed to half-live there.

“You looking for Griff?” he asked when she made it up to the counter.

“Well. It doesn’t look as if he’s here-”

“He’s here. He’s just locked up.”

“Locked up?”

Jason nodded his head toward a far steel door. “He’s in the vault. It’s where he makes the ice cream. Nobody’s ever allowed in the vault, but I can let him know you’re here-”

Before Jason finished the comment, Griff appeared from beyond the locked steel door. As if expecting her, he turned and located her in two seconds flat. That slick, wild kiss on the dark veranda was suddenly between them as if it just happened.

Possibly, she’d have had the good sense to run out the door, if he hadn’t crossed the room too quickly for her to take that option.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said immediately.

“You won’t if you come back with me. I’m right in the middle of something.”

“Jason just said no one’s allowed back there?”

“No one is,” he agreed, and motioned for her to follow him.

All right, all right, so she had more curiosity than could kill any cat. After a word with his kids, Griff led her into the so-called vault. “You can test one of the new flavors I’m experimenting with,” he said.

She tasted. Then tasted again. The flavor had some peach, some pecan, some vanilla bean, some unique and tantalizing other flavor. She took another spoonful, thinking that when she left this darned town, she was going to be fatter than a pig.

Which didn’t stop her from more taste testing, even as she turned in a slow circle, examining his “vault.” The room was long, clean as a new penny, all stainless steel and bright light. A one-way window supervised the shop-so that was how Griff knew exactly what was going on with the customers and kids-and inside were counters and a bunch of futuristic appliances she couldn’t identify. Ice-cream making equipment, obviously. She would have asked a dozen questions, except that Griff clearly was in the middle of something, had put on gloves, had some kind of quietly vibrating blender that he was supervising-so he got in his grilling first. “How’d your visit with the sheriff go?”