Death Night

“Jesus,” she said. “I thought this town was done with all that.”

“Me, too.”

“How are you holding up? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kat said. “Just tired. And busy.”

She briefly told Lou about the rest of her night. Fire. Corpse. Skeleton. She left out the fact that Henry Goll was back in town. That was information too juicy for Lou not to share.

“I need to head back to the museum soon,” Kat finally said. “There’s still a lot of stuff to do there. So I was wondering—”

“If I could watch James the rest of the day?”

Kat nodded slowly. She had asked this favor of Lou on dozens of occasions. She knew that one of these days, Louella van Sickle was going to tell her no. She hoped today wasn’t that day.

“Of course I will,” Lou replied. “Although Al will be disappointed. He wanted to drive up to the Sands in Bethlehem today. Said he was in the mood for some blackjack.”

Lou’s husband had been bitten by the blackjack bug as soon as state law was changed to allow legalized gambling. He had plenty of places to choose from. Each year, it seemed, a new casino was popping up somewhere in Pennsylvania. From the way Lou talked, all Al van Sickle wanted to do on the weekends was head to the tables.

“I owe you one,” Kat said, knowing full well she still owed Lou for previous babysitting favors. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Hopefully just until the afternoon.”

“I hope so, too, for your sake. You look like the walking dead.”

“I probably smell like it, too.” Kat sniffed her uniform, which was the same one she had worn the day before. It reeked of smoke. And sweat. And desperation, which, while technically odorless, was something Kat had smelled on suspects and first dates alike. “I’m going to take a quick shower. Go check on James.”

“Aye, aye, captain. Any other orders?”

“He has a science project due on Monday,” Kat said, hedging and hopeful. “You could help him with that?”

Lou shooed her out of the kitchen with a flap of her hands. “Now you’re just pushing it.”

Kat hurried upstairs. The shower—cold and quick—perked her up a bit. So did a clean uniform that didn’t reek. Then it was back downstairs, where James and Lou had pushed aside their empty breakfast plates for a glass jar and a book of matches. The sight caused her to halt at the bottom of the stairs.

“What are you two doing?”

James didn’t take his eyes off the jar. “My science project.”

“We’re learning about oxygen,” Lou said, picking up the book of matches.

She lit one before tilting the jar, laying the match at the bottom.

“Now what do you think will happen once you put the lid on the jar?” she asked James.

“I don’t know.” James stared at the flame, a triangle of orange and yellow that danced just beyond the glass. “The jar will fill with smoke?”

“Put the lid on and find out.”

James began to twist the lid onto the top of the jar. He didn’t even make it a full rotation before the lit match blinked out.

“What happened?”

“You cut off the flow of oxygen,” Lou said. “Fire needs air to burn. When it doesn’t get it, it goes out.”

Because he was eleven—and because he was a boy—James found this trick fascinating. Kat could see the astonished gleam in his eyes from across the room as he asked, “Can I try it again?”

“Not so fast.” Kat at last moved from the stairs to the coffee table, where she pocketed the matchbook. “I think you should come up with a different science project.”

“But, Mom—”

Kat cut him off with one of those sharp glances only attained through years of motherhood. “Educational or not, I don’t like the idea of you playing with matches. Especially today. Now give me a good-bye hug. I need to go back to work.”

After James gave her a halfhearted embrace and Lou assured her everything would be fine, Kat trudged back to her Crown Vic and headed to the police station. As usual, she took the long way, rolling down the streets to make sure things were mostly in order. They appeared to be, although it was still early. Once townsfolk woke up to the news that Constance Bishop was dead, Kat had a feeling Perry Hollow would be buzzing with activity. Tragedies did that to small towns.

She pulled into the police station parking lot at the same time Carl did. They got out of their cars simultaneously and walked to the station’s front door.

“Oak Knoll Cemetery is all clear,” Carl said. “No disturbed graves. Nothing suspicious. Just a bunch of souls now with the Lord.”

That was both good and bad news. While Kat was pleased to hear that no one had defiled the graveyard, it meant Constance had found the skeleton somewhere else. Somewhere a lot harder to pinpoint.

“You feeling up for some overtime today?”

Carl, who was thirty but didn’t look a day over fifteen, made up in eagerness what he lacked in skill. “I’m on this case for as long as you are, Chief.”

“Good,” Kat said, nodding her approval. “While I’m over at the museum, I want you to search our records and see if any of the town’s firefighters have a rap sheet. Arson. Property destruction. Things like that.”

Carl paused at the door, holding it halfway open. “Every firefighter?”

He was referring to Boyd Jansen, one of the most decent and dependable men Kat had the pleasure of knowing. There was little to no chance Dutch would ever torch a building. But Larry Sheldon was an expert on arson. If he said firefighters were the prime suspects, then there had to be a good reason for it.

“Yes,” Kat said. “Even Dutch.”

It took Henry an hour and a half to reach his destination. He could have made it there in thirty minutes, but he meandered—half out of trepidation, half out of curiosity. He hadn’t roamed these streets in a year, and he wondered how much had changed. So as the sun rose higher over Perry Hollow, Henry traversed Main Street. He passed his old apartment over the used-book shop he had frequented almost daily. He paused in front of the vacant headquarters of the Perry Hollow Gazette, his workplace for five years. Other than the for rent sign plastered on the front door, the place looked exactly the same.

When he veered off Main Street, his path took him directly past the burned-out history museum. Seeing its charred façade made him think of Valhalla from the Ring cycle and its spectacular destruction by flames. Although Wagner’s epic was too bombastic for his taste, Henry at least respected the opera tetralogy’s boldness. And as he moved farther up the street, he found himself humming the cycle’s “Magic Fire” leitmotif.

The humming continued as he passed the Sleepy Hollow Inn. At that point, he could have stopped walking, stepped inside, and gone up to his room. Henry knew it’s what he should have done. He had people to interview, an article to research, a job to do.

Yet he kept walking, moving through the town’s still-empty streets. The few people he did come into contact with were strangers who stole glances at his scars before suddenly looking away. That was no surprise. Henry hadn’t been very sociable during his time in Perry Hollow. He really only knew Kat.

And Deana Swan, of course. The first woman he had been with since the death of his wife. The only other woman he had grown to love.

The woman whose home he now stood in front of.

If someone had asked Henry what he expected to get out of visiting Deana’s house, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Closure, he supposed. Not that such a thing was possible. Henry believed that most people wore their pain for the rest of their lives. Like scars, only invisible.

He certainly didn’t want to see Deana again, let alone talk to her. That would be too much to bear. Henry knew he wouldn’t be able to exchange quick greetings and a few minutes of chitchat. What had happened to their relationship was too dramatic—even operatic—for something as mundane as small talk.

In truth, Henry just wanted to linger outside a place he had once known very well. He wanted to gaze up at the window of Deana’s bedroom and get a glimpse of the lilac walls beyond it. He wanted to find out if any of the good memories created there still existed or if they had all been eclipsed by the bad ones.