Out Of The Ashes

“I’ll be back,” she whispered. “Maybe not here, but some place like this. Some place better, even. It’s not forever. It’s for now.”

And maybe she’d even believe that eventually. But at the moment, Kari would have to pretend that she did.

She tightened her hand on the handle of the big shopping bag with the toiletry items she’d waited to pack last, then turned for the door.

It was as she was locking the door for the last time that she spotted what Rob was doing.

The box was on the sidewalk. The doors to the van were open—all of them.

And Rob was very carefully, very thoroughly, searching her vehicle.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_5400f325-0795-5f7a-bfa6-0d1498b795bf)

“HEY!”

Kari Hendrix’s outrage was near palpable as she closed the gap between the two of them in a quick jog. “What are you doing?”

Rob laid the blanket he had in his hand down on the floor of the mini-van. “Shifting some things around. You did say anywhere.”

“No! You were searching my van! You were—you used me! You were looking for evidence—”

Rob squashed the guilty feeling that was worming its way onto his face. “I was doing what you asked. But should I, in my official capacity as an investigative officer, ask if there’s anything in this vehicle you mind me seeing?”

Okay, so he had taken advantage of the opportunity to do a quick toss of the vehicle. He was law enforcement, and she knew it—or she ought to. He’d found nothing in the vehicle the least bit suspicious. The only evidence he’d found pointed toward a careful and frugal lifestyle—that and a predilection for toffee bars, if the little trashcan’s cache of candy wrappers belonged to her.

“Well—no—it’s just—” Her expression was still full of wounded betrayal. “You could have told me that was why you came. And then I would have been prepared for you pawing through my things. That’s—that’s one of the things I hated most about juvie. They were always hunting and searching and—nothing was ever mine.”

The words rang true, even to his cynical self. Or maybe it was because he had searched the van and come up empty.

“I’m sorry. I was here. You had given me permission to go into your van—and my nosiness got the better of me.”

“It’s your job. I guess I just allowed myself to forget that.” This last she said with a baleful resignation. “So was that the reason? That you came?”

“Er—no.” Rob busied himself with putting the box in the van. “I really did have some more questions.”

She pushed past him and dropped the bag in her hand into the seat. When she saw his eyes trail the path of the bag, she gave an exasperated sigh and upturned the bag, emptying its contents. Shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant and other toiletries fell out.

“See any matches?” she snapped.

For the first time ever, he regretted his devious cleverness when it came to his job. He had a reputation for being able to charm confessions out of arsonists—he’d even been called into neighboring counties to help out with the odd case. And this, today, had been something of the same. She’d offered, and he’d taken the opportunity to dig around.

“Look, I said I was sorry,” Rob told her. “Maybe I wasn’t completely on the up-and-up with you, but if you’ve got nothing to hide, then no harm, no foul.”

“Just because I’ve got nothing to hide doesn’t mean I don’t value my privacy—or a little trust. You really are cynical, aren’t you?”

“Hey, you should look at it from the bright side—at least now I know you’re not hiding anything in your van,” he countered.

Kari rolled her eyes. “Oh, wow. A cynic who’s a closet Pollyanna. How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t burn my bakery.”

“So who did? Give me one solid lead, one good suspect.” Rob heard the near pleading in his voice, and it scared him. He wanted her to be innocent. He wanted her to have nothing at all to do with the downtown fire. “Tell me who hates you enough to destroy your business and do a decent job framing you.”

Her anger faded to misery. “I can’t do this, Rob. I didn’t do it when I was in juvie, and I won’t do it now. I won’t get myself out of hot water by pushing someone else in.”

Rob shook his head in frustration. Looking at Kari Hendrix’s earnest face was only serving to confuse him. He kicked at pebbles strewn across the pavement by Kari’s beat-up van and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“And besides,” he said in a sour tone that he hated, “you don’t know anything to tell.”

She jumped—just a little jump, but one that he saw out of the corner of his eyes. Oh, yeah, Kari Hendrix had at least one suspect in mind. So who was she protecting?

“That’s right.” She nodded her head a little too vigorously. “I don’t know anything at all to tell.”

“Well, then. I guess it’s a good thing that I am a real, bona fide investigative officer, because...” He leaned forward, close enough to inhale the sweet flowery scent of her hair. “I will find this person, Kari. I will. With your help, or without it. It’s only a matter of time.”

* * *

ROB WENT BACK to the basics the next morning in his cramped windowless office. First he wiped the whiteboard clean of his previous scrawls and notes held up by magnets. And then he began again with what he knew.

The fire was arson.

The MO was a propane tank and a highway flare.

The motive—just looking at the MO—was probably revenge.

He swore as he looked at the vast amount of white space left on the board. In the past week, he’d found nothing—absolutely nothing— to point him in any direction except Kari.

And yet, conversely, he’d found nothing to tie Kari to the fire. In fact, he’d found direct evidence giving her a fairly solid alibi: a surveillance video from a business across the street from her house had shown her working in her yard the afternoon of the fire, going into the apartment and not coming out until after the fire engines had been paged.

And the apartment didn’t have a back door. He’d verified that today, though he’d already spoken to Kari’s landlord earlier in the week.

True, there were windows on the back, but they were high off the ground with no good access point for a woman as petite as Kari. She would have caused an almighty racket if she’d come down on the bank of metal trashcans along the rear of her apartment. He’d canvassed her neighbors—nobody had heard anything or seen anything. And one of those neighbors was a nosy Ned with a telescope on his deck and a roaming sort of eye.

Plus, Rob kept coming back to what he’d told Daniel that very first day: if Kari Hendrix had wanted to burn down her bakery, she could have figured out a way to make it look like an accident. The setup that had been used to start the fire, that MO so clear-cut a case of arson, was a clear threat or warning if he’d ever seen one.

Somewhere, somehow, in this entire week of digging, he’d missed something. He knew it.

So it was time to get off his backside and apply some elbow grease and shoe leather to the problem. He would go back and recanvass the business owners and employees downtown. Surely, someone had seen something.

Maybe it was the fresh air or not being cooped up in the office, but Rob instantly felt more cheerful as he strolled down the sidewalk in the direction of downtown Waverly.

The walk from his office was just long enough to lift his spirits—to Rob, Waverly was the right size, not too big, not too small, and the downtown part with its wealth of locally owned businesses had always been his favorite. He passed the carefully tended planters the Waverly-Levi County Garden Club kept overflowing with cheerful red geraniums and nodded to a rail-thin septuagenarian sporting a dapper fedora who was propped up against them.

As he waved away an inquisitive bee, he spotted a group of toddlers cooling off under the interactive fountain in the pocket park just at the edge of downtown proper. Their moms sat nearby, laughing as the kids opened their mouths and drank in the cool water. Something about the kids’ exuberance, their innocence, made Rob chuckle, too.

The burned-out remains of the buildings loomed ahead, but not even they could dampen his suddenly ebullient mood.

What did poke the air out of his bubble was the big zero that he turned up with his recanvassing. Besides Charlie Kirkman, the landlord, no one had ever seen anybody give Kari Hendrix so much as a hard stare.

For his last stop, Rob ducked into a jewelry store across the street, one with a good vantage point of the Lovin’ Oven’s front door. It was owned and run by the Sullivans, the same couple who’d been there since the 1960s.