Still Not Over You(58)

And Landon. Standing in the door helplessly, this darkness and confusion hovering over his brow, the first shadow of that dark seed waiting to take root. His father yelled something back at him. It had to be something like “stay!”

I hadn’t realized it then, but I was looking into the future then. Head-on at the man Landon would become.

I don’t feel right.

Something sticks with me, and it's making me sick. Just like something else, the story about the fire at the beach house doesn’t add up.

This mysterious pile of brush that shouldn’t have been there...but it’s somehow just an accidental fire.

The men who were with Micah Strauss, but who mysteriously were never mentioned anywhere.

Something vile chews away inside me, and I'm trying to find just the right place to click the edges together and make this little logic puzzle make sense.

I’m not sure what I’m thinking, but it’s ugly. Scary. Suspicious.

And I’m not sure what drives me outside into the fading sunlight, but I want to have another look at the beach house.

Obviously, I’m no forensics investigator. I don’t even write crime fiction.

But I’m learning to trust my instincts, and my instincts say we missed something about that fire.

My heart drums too loudly in my chest as I cross the grass to the beach house. My palms are tingling and sweaty. I think some part of me expects another shadowy figure to come crashing out of the trees, and this time there’ll be no Dallas here to sweep out of nowhere and save me.

My entire body hums, adrenaline drunk, on high alert.

The beach house is the same, with large tarps strung over the burned-out areas of the roof. I circle the house slowly, taking in the scorch marks up the sides, the bubbled and blistered paint. Where the worst of the damage is, an entire black-edged section of the house has been chewed away.

There’s a pile of ash near the wall, the remnants of a few twigs in it. Obviously poked and raked through by the firefighters.

It looks almost like the remnants of a bonfire, almost too perfectly placed.

Like it was set intentionally.

I can’t breathe. Every time I try, it kind of bounces off my lungs. My chest is tight, my pulse frantic, and I rub at my chest as I lift my head, looking around, wide-eyed and throwing sharp looks everywhere.

The beach house is almost fully surrounded by open space. So, how could someone get up here to set a fire without being seen? There’s only a small wall of bushes leading out into the trees and –

Wait. The bushes.

The bushes with their branches broken out in one place, as if someone had forced through them on a path from the trees to the house.

Don’t go back there, a voice screams in the back of my head.

This isn’t a horror novel. I already tempted fate by being That Heroine once, and got a face full of Milah Holly’s crotch for my troubles. I won’t be so 'lucky' a second time.

I push forward into the bushes.

Don’t. Go. Back. There.

Branches scratch at my arms. Cool, waxy leaves slide against my skin.

I squeeze through the bushes. The shadows of the trees fall over me. When I break out of the hedge, my feet sink into soft, squelching mud. I freeze, looking down.

The earth under the shade of the trees looks damp and muddy, without the sun to dry away the dew and occasional light summer shower. I’m in up to the soles of my feet, the flats of my sandals disappearing into the mud, cold slickness clinging to my skin. It feels just like the dread-film clinging to my heart.

Because my footprints aren’t the only ones here.

Clear prints mark a path through the mud, leading across a clearing half encircled by trees, the rest by the hedge, except for a break that leads across a little slope of scrub brush down to the service road near the house.

Even as I stare, wide-eyed and frozen, a truck goes trundling along the dusty road, its low engine whine reaching up to me. It’s only maybe a hundred feet down the slope from the break in the trees to the road.

And there’s a cigarette stub stuck in the mud, half-crushed in one of those footsteps.

Holy shit. Holy shit.

My brain’s on panic overdrive, stumbling over itself wildly.

I finally see it.

I can see it in my mind’s eye, a car parked on the edge of the unlit service road, probably black to blend into the shadows. There’d be no one to notice so late at night.

It's almost too easy. Just creep up the slope, gathering scrub and twigs along the way, dry sere grass and fallen branches perfect to start a fire in this heat. Slip through the hedges. Light the blaze.

Then vanish, no one the wiser.

It’s so clear it’s almost real.

Gasping, I stumble forward, slogging through the mud, then breaking free onto the grass, ducking through the trees, tumbling down the slope. I don’t know what I’m thinking I’m going to find. Tire tracks, maybe, peeling out at high speed and leaving a stain of black rubber. A dropped wallet, like it would be that easy.

What I find, instead, is a discarded gas can, tossed to one side behind the guard rail on the road.

I stop, staring down at it. It’s new. Not dusty or faded or old, so it can’t have been out here for long. A little battered, but that’s it.

I nudge it carefully with my toe, not wanting to contaminate evidence with my fingerprints, and something sloshes inside. A few last drops of gasoline.