Glen nodded. "Of course. I'm the head accountant. It was up to me to present the financial pros and cons of a sale."
"Is the company solvent? Why was Hilton-Hill interested?"
Glen's mouth pressed. "Oh, it's solvent. They definitely have money to burn. I'm very good at my job and very good at cutting excess spending. Hilton-Hill also buys successful investments upon occasion."
"Anyone else seem like a likely suspect?" Aodhagan asked, bringing the topic back to murder.
"Just Daisy. I mean, Carl kept stealing all of her inventions. She'd make something—he'd reject it. Then he'd make basically no changes and then present it to everyone. He'd never give her credit. I mean, designing appliances isn't Daisy's job, but she's top-notch. Better than anyone in R and D. If I were her, I'd be pissed."
"Well, it's getting crazy out here, and you'd better be getting home," Aodhagan pointed out, like we weren't also getting ridiculously soaked standing in the rain shouting this conversation. "Thanks for taking the time to talk to us for a bit."
Glen nodded and said goodbye, taking Aodhagan's umbrella as he trudged back toward my house. We watched him for a long moment before running back to the house. It took nearly an hour for us to cycle through the shower and redress in warmer clothes. It was feeling way too domestic and intimate wearing the clothes Aodhagan had given me when I came out in sweatpants and a giant flannel to find him cooking dinner. And that wasn't great. Because I liked it a lot, and liking a more romantic relationship with Aodhagan would just lead to him being ruined somehow, because that seemed to be what I did to every guy I dated. I would prefer to know there was at least one really decent guy left in the world.
"I'm going to call Daisy and ask her about the inventions that Carl stole," I told Aodhagan, slipping into the banquette. "It might not be important, but we didn't know about that when we talked to her earlier."
Aodhagan set a frying pan of tomato and basil pasta with pine nut sauce on the table and joined me. "You never know. But do you have her cell number?"
That was a problem. I didn't. I wasn't familiar with any of their numbers, and I wasn't sad about that. This was not a group of people I wanted to be friends with. An idea finally came to me. "No, but I can just call my landline. Maybe someone will answer?"
I had no idea if they would, but it was worth trying in my opinion. The phone rang fifteen times at least before someone picked it up. I didn't have an answering machine, because did those even exist anymore? If they did, I wasn't sure where to get one. I only had a landline because so many elderly residents of Birdwell refused to call a number without a Birdwell prefix, and then they just showed up at my house instead. And no one wanted that. No one was me. I didn't want that.
I recognized the gruff voice as being Glen's, so I knew he'd at least made it home despite the storm. "Can I talk to Daisy?" I asked without identifying myself. I didn't want anyone wondering why I was calling. It was possible Glen would recognize my voice since I'd just talked to him, but if he didn't, I wasn't going to help him along.
He didn't seem remotely interested in who was calling or why they were calling at a random house they were staying in. "Yeah, hang on."
I waited while Aodhagan served the food. Finally, I heard Daisy's voice.
"Hello?"
"Hey, this is Helen Harding. When I spoke to you earlier, there was something we forgot to ask you." I decided to leave out the part where we hadn't even known about this earlier. It left fewer questions to answer about where we'd gotten this information.
"Okay." She sounded hesitant and a little put out. I honestly couldn't blame her. I also would have been irritated if I were in her shoes.
"We understand that Carl was in the habit of stealing appliance ideas from you and refusing to give you credit."
There was a long silence on the other end. I wished I hadn't phrased it the way I did. I'd left her the opportunity not to respond. That was an amateur mistake that, as a professional who interviewed people on a regular basis, I shouldn't have made. Finally, she spoke.
"Where did you hear that?"
I shrugged, even though she couldn't see me. "Around." I wasn't sure if it mattered that Glen was sharing that information, but I wasn't about to out him if it did. "Is it true? Do you know if he was in the habit of doing the same thing to others?"
She cleared her throat. "Carl made a habit of not asking. I was not necessarily against sharing my inventions with Carl, but he never spoke with me before taking it to production."
"What about patents?" I asked. I didn't want to directly ask how much money she was losing through Carl's actions, but I was willing to bet it was at least enough to be annoyed.
"We never discussed patents," she said stiffly. "They became intellectual property of Crowe."
"That sucks," I told her plainly. "Did he do it to the others, too?"
Daisy sighed audibly. "I'm not aware of that. I'm sorry."
I thanked her and hung up, the smell of Aodhagan's food making my stomach grumble. "She says she isn't sure if he stole anyone else's inventions. She seemed mostly exasperated that I called and less angry about Carl's actions, for whatever that's worth."
"I wonder how many patents Carl has filed in the last, say, five years. We should have Jamie check that tomorrow."
I agreed it seemed like a good idea, but I probably would have approved of whatever it was because I just wanted to start shoveling food into my mouth hole.
It had been nearly a year since I'd slept in Aodhagan's sister Jane's old room. I didn't know Jane. I knew only that she was his younger sister by around a decade, that she was also a psychologist much like my father, and that she was a writer, also like my father, though she wrote psychological thrillers and not self-help books. I also knew that she had terrible taste in bedding and curtains. Unless this Laura Ashley catastrophe was her parents' doing. Either way, every time I slept in her old bed, I felt like I was being strangled by tea-dyed cabbage roses and mint stripes.
It took too long to fall asleep, and then as soon as I was finally down, I woke to the sound of a loud bang. I assumed it was, like the last time I stayed with him, some neighbor who thought it was okay to wake Aodhagan up in the middle of the night to ask him some question about stuff that might or might not actually matter. It was kind of just how things worked in Birdwell.
Just in case, I got out of bed and peeked into the hallway. Aodhagan was also standing in his doorway, looking vaguely confused, which told me he'd been asleep longer than I had and it probably wasn't the door. That was a sound he would recognize. Which did leave the question, if it wasn't the door, what was it in the middle of the night?
Aodhagan glanced at me and then back downstairs. The noise did seem like it had come from the front porch, but there were no repeat bangs. I could hear something out there. It sounded like something scraping maybe. It was probably some drunk man. But maybe it wasn't. As if we were both spurred on by some invisible cue, we stepped out of our rooms and crept downstairs, him in the front and me bringing up the rear.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, we paused, huddled together. Maybe I was afraid—maybe I just wanted an excuse to rub up on him without admitting I wanted to. The world would never know.
His eyebrows pulled together as we listened in silence. There was definitely a noise out there, but I couldn't figure out at all what it was. It sounded a little like a giant Rice Krispies treat with a shuffling now and then. Finally, Aodhagan moved, suddenly pushing me behind him and heading to the kitchen. He came back with his fire extinguisher and used his shirt to turn the door handle. He threw open the door, and the Rice Krispies noise got louder. The entire porch was on fire. The noise we had heard was clearly the glass vase on his porch exploding, since I could see the pieces all over the floor near the door.
"Call 9-1-1," he ordered, taking an indeterminable moment to get the extinguisher started. I did as I was told as Aodhagan sprayed the flames, which were spreading eagerly. His entire house was made
of wood, and the fire department was located at least half an hour away. I didn't need him to tell me how bad this could be if he couldn't get the flames under control with the extinguisher.
I explained the fire to the operator and then again to the fire department in Tallatahola. They wanted a lot of information that I struggled to give them between flashes of hysteria as Aodhagan moved farther out onto the porch to fight more flames. Eventually that extinguisher was going to run out of powder, and then he was going to be in trouble. And I couldn't lose the thought that it was possible someone had started the fire to draw us out of the house so they could pick us off one by one. It was always on days like this that I regretted my job as a true crime author and all the paranoia that came with it. It was possible the fire was natural or some kind of accident, but of course that wasn't where my mind went first.
When I'd managed to convey all the necessary information to the fire department, I hesitantly looked out the door and found the fire on the porch was halfway out. Unfortunately, so was the fire extinguisher foam. It was sputtering, but Aodhagan was clearly determined to get every drop. The porch was definitely still alight. I bit my bottom lip, staring around and desperately looking for something that I could use to help. I remembered suddenly that the hose was attached to the side of the house immediately on the other side of the wall. If I was very stretchy, I could probably reach it. I stared around wildly. I couldn't see any shoes. Mine or Aodhagan's. I picked my way across the foam-covered porch as fast as I could, considering the situation. It was hot, slimy, and there was glass on the porch because of course there was.
I ignored the fact I was cutting my feet and hung over the side of the porch, reaching for the hose. I heard Aodhagan yelp, and I decided to pretend I wasn't freaking out and just keep my eyes on the goal. It took a couple of tries leaning against a porch railing I wasn't at all certain was going to hold to get my fingers around the tip. Luckily, Aodhagan was the type who kept his hose neatly rolled on one of those gears attached to the siding. It slid easily while I stumbled backward and fell on my butt on the wet, slick, smoking wood. I scrambled back to my feet. I realized Aodhagan was behind me. He grabbed the hose and thanked me briefly before returning to the other side of the porch. I climbed partially onto the railing, praying it held, and used the chain from the porch swing to stabilize myself. Of course, it didn't stabilize particularly well.
Hanging like some kind of trapeze artist off the side of the porch, I was finally able to get my fingers around the handle for the hose. The handle was rusted. I gritted my teeth, spewing an unladylike stream of obscenities, while I struggled to get enough leverage to turn the handle. Finally it turned. I slumped in relief as much as I could, considering I was dangling off a now structurally unsound porch and hanging off a swing chain like a demented sloth.
Aodhagan's shout of relief when the water came was worth it. It was still raining ridiculously hard, and I could only hope that it was helping to stay the flames, given that it had clearly been raging for some time before the vase had exploded and alerted us. The hose didn't work as well as the extinguisher had, and Aodhagan was still struggling to get the fire under control. It was on top of us now, burning the bottom of the porch ceiling, but hopefully it would fail to completely take, given how wet the wood was. But it was enough that even the bottom of the ceiling was flaming. We were in trouble, and I knew it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Suddenly, another yelp from Aodhagan alerted me that he wasn't okay. My heart shot into my throat when I saw that his sleeve was alight and he was trying to continue to run the hose while slapping at his shoulder to try to put it out. It was spreading to his back. He'd never be able to reach that. I scrambled across the porch, slipping multiple times. The foam burned the cuts in my feet. I landed on my butt three times. It took me probably six seconds to get across the porch, but it felt like years. Aodhagan gave up on trying to get the flames out on his back, spraying his shoulder with water before aiming the hose at the area where the flames were reaching over the porch and toward the siding.
His clothes weren't even completely out, which I was fairly sure he hadn't noticed. Or he didn't think it was important enough to stop what he was doing. Frankly, either was an option. I grabbed the hose from his hand, fully cognizant of the fact that every second I spent doing this was a second that the flames spread. But I wasn't letting him burn, even if he was willing to ignore just a little bit of pain. When he was out, I shoved the hose back into his hand and promptly flopped onto my butt and back again. I struggled to get back up, and when I was back on my feet, he dropped the hose, exhaling in relief.
I looked around and saw no flames. We were ridiculously fortunate that it was raining so hard. It stopped old wood's natural inclination to burn as quickly as possible. Even then, I could see blackened fingers creeping around the porch and up the house. Aodhagan only had one door because his parents hadn't built another one in, choosing instead to window all of the back of the house. By the time the fire alarm would have alerted us, we would have been screwed.
I slumped into his arms, and he held me tightly without a word. He seemed relaxed, but I could feel the frantic beat of his heart.
"Was it an accident?" I asked hesitantly.
He shrugged. "Probably not. Why are people constantly trying to kill us inside my personal possessions? Why not somewhere else where my insurance people don't have to hear about it?"
I knew he was kidding, and it was a good sign that he was still in a position to joke about this. He was right though. His poor house had lost doors to bullets, a car to being run off the road, and now a whole porch to fire. It was possible it was an accident, but he was right. It was probably not. Likely, it said something about the way that we were living our lives that people kept trying to kill us. I just wasn't sure whether what it said was negative or positive.
"Does it make it better or worse that I have glass in my feet again?" I asked, referencing the last time someone had shot out his windows in an attempt to scare us off investigating a murder.
He laughed softly. "I'd say it's just part of a theme."
I buried my face in the crook of his neck, suddenly completely overwhelmed. It could have been bad. Really, really bad.
While we waited for the fire trucks to arrive for no real reason now, Aodhagan solicitously picked the glass out of my feet, and I offered him the same courtesy, though his were mostly minor, as he'd gone a different way than I had on the porch. He took off his shirt so I could see his back, noting it was red and irritated on his shoulder but nothing major at all. I'd gotten worse burns from dinner, thank goodness. I ran my fingers around the angry area softly, shaking with fear and rage. If I could safely guess who had done this, I would have killed them myself at the moment.
I cleared my throat. "Looks okay. Just a little irritated."
He cocked his head. "Thanks, Helen. I know I can always depend on you for help when it matters."
The words tried to bring tears to my eyes, and I blinked them away aggressively. I didn't believe in crying. It wasn't how I rolled. But I wanted to. I was angry, upset, overwhelmed, and sick with gratitude that it wasn't worse. Knowing that anyone, but most especially Aodhagan, felt he could depend on me was deeply moving at the moment. I swallowed hard and nodded.
We heard the wailing sirens of the fire trucks as they got closer. I was sure the neighbors would appreciate that, given it was now around two AM and there was no reason for the sirens. But there was no way to convey that at the moment. They came careening into the yard, pebbles flinging in their wake. Aodhagan went onto the porch and shouted at them to turn the sirens off. It took a minute, but they did. Maybe it would save one or two of the people in town from being awakened anyway. My mouth tightened when I saw the string of cars behind the first vehicle. I recognized one as belonging to Dwight. The other I couldn't identify until I saw Connie B. get out. Her two thugs followed.
I heard Aodhagan grumble, "Perfect."
We spoke to the f
iremen while the cops watched on. I felt Connie's eyes on us the entire time. The tallest of the three firemen helpfully pointed out that the fire was already out. Then he suggested that it was likely arson because of the area by the door where the scorch marks were the most intense. It wasn't like I hadn't expected it. Only approximately a hundred thousand fires are deliberately set out of a million and a half or so a year. The odds supported that the fire was an accident, but the circumstances just didn't. The firemen ultimately decided everything was fine and drove away, thankfully not running their sirens this time. They said they would try to find a fire investigator to send our way, but they didn't sound too sure about their chances.
Connie, her thugs, and Dwight followed us inside. I was exhausted and angry and was in no mood to have a conversation about Aodhagan's guilt, or lack thereof, at the moment. It was three AM, I was in pain, Aodhagan had a burn, and I was still shaking slightly from our little adventure. If it had been my house, I would have told them to get lost, except maybe Dwight Dooley. He was almost a welcome sight in his big white cowboy hat, Boss Hog uniform, and jowly scowl. But it wasn't my house. So instead I just sat in a chair with my arms crossed, eying Connie and the Things with open animosity.
Not surprisingly, they did what everyone did when I turned my wrath on them, which was ignore me.
"How did you realize the house was even on fire?" she asked pleasantly, making me think she suspected us of starting the fire. It was that way she had of talking. Like she was just making conversation while asking deliberately leading questions.
"We heard something. It sounded like a small explosion. We both came out of our rooms and headed downstairs, and we could hear something outside. I eventually figured out it was a fire, so I went for the extinguisher in the kitchen. It ran out of the foam, but Helen had crawled over the side of the porch and gotten the hose. Combined with the storm, we managed to get it out, but it wouldn't have been that way if it had gotten any farther. It was only the vase breaking that even let us know. By the time the smoke alarms inside would have gone off, we would have been completely screwed."
All My Exes Live in Texas Page 15
