Nothing Left to Burn

by Patty Blount

  “Yeah, yeah, you like her. I figured that out already. But, son, this is an arson investigation. The law comes first.”

  I didn’t hear a word he said after son. The word just kind of filled up my brain like some sort of fog, slowly surrounding me. I suddenly realized it was my turn to talk. “What should I do?”

  “You talk to Steve Conner and let him handle this.”

  “But what if I’m right? What if Amanda does know this kid and I get her kicked out or something?”

  He gave me an impatient shake of his head. “That’s not on you, Reece. It would be on her for omitting information crucial to an investigation.” He frowned at me and, to my total astonishment, reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, gave me a hard squeeze. “Reece, you signed up to do a job. That’s what you do. You do the job. Okay?”

  Suddenly, I shot back in time to a day when I was about four years old. We were at a family picnic deal. Way too many people near me and way too many sounds. Things just got too much for me to manage, and suddenly, I was scared. Not some wimpy Eep scared; this was a full-out, heart-stopping, all-the-way-to-the-bone kind of panic that used to make me want to disconnect my eardrums from my brain. I had episodes like this frequently when I was little. This one had been bad. I was batshit terrified, and the only thing that would have pulled me out of it was something—or someone—familiar, like my dad. But that didn’t happen. Maybe I scared him. Or maybe he just didn’t know what to do for me. It was Matt who helped me. When I finally calmed down enough to notice my surroundings, it was Matt’s arms holding me. He would have been no more than five. Once I was calm, I’d wanted my dad, so I ran to him, and he’d put his hand on my shoulder, bracing me.

  I searched through all my memories, and this was the first time since that day that he’d repeated that gesture. With my heart racing at warp speed, I nodded and smiled. “Okay.”

  “Attaboy.” He thumped me on the back and left to do his paperwork. Alone in Steve’s office, I fell to a chair in front of the desk, my entire system fried.

  I did it. My father was proud of me. I promised you I’d do it, Matt.I made Dad proud.

  Do the job, Dad said. And the job was to prove conclusively that my suspect was guilty of arson.

  And my suspect had some kind of connection to Amanda.

  I stared at the open door to the fire marshal’s office. I flexed the muscle that was still warm from my father’s backpat. He said he was proud of me. The date and time of this moment were now fixed permanently in my mind.

  But I wasn’t celebrating.

  Amanda was freaked out by my video. The only question left was what was I going to do about it? I glanced at the empty doorway. Dad was probably downstairs, barking at his guys. Any pride he had in my firefighting ability was because I had tons of help. Help from Amanda and everyone else on J squad.

  “What should I do, Matt? Goddamn it, what the hell should I do?”

  I rocked back and forth on the chair and waited for a sign from heaven. I had it, I had the one thing I always wanted and—and I left the fire marshal’s office.

  ***

  I found her, standing in a ray of sunlight, staring at the burned-out shell of the house. I pulled over to the curb across the street, killed the engine, and watched her. She didn’t know I was there, not yet. If I didn’t know her, I’d say she was just another curious neighbor, the kind who thanked God it wasn’t her house that burned.

  But I did know her now.

  I’d worked with her for weeks, running practice drills side by side. I knew the hands hidden inside the pockets of her station pants were clenched into tight fists. I knew she itched to pry a board off a window and get a glimpse of the destruction inside. I knew by the way she went white in the fire marshal’s office that she knew who the boy in the video was.

  Knew but said nothing.

  She lived for the department; why would she lie about this kid? A chilling thought skated up my back. Was she protecting him? Was he the reason she’d joined J squad—to stay one step ahead of the fire department?

  “What the hell are you doing here, Logan?” she demanded after she spotted me. She looked anxiously up and down the block, where a couple of kids shot hoops in a driveway across the street.

  “We need to talk.”

  “What? No. You need to leave. Right now.”

  “Amanda, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who this kid is.” I held my phone in front of her face. She didn’t even glance at it.

  “Not now.”

  “You know him, don’t you? Did you know what he was doing? Did you help him? Who is he, Mandy?”

  She raised her eyes, a funny half-smile on her lips. “I think that’s the first time you ever called me Mandy.”

  Shaking my head, I tried again. “You’re trying to change the subject. Who is he?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “Who the fuck is he?” I took two strides closer to stand over her.

  “Okay! Fine.” She shot me a glare. “He’s my foster brother.” She admitted that with so much discomfort, I dropped my guard. We stared down the quiet street for a long moment. Nice houses, green lawns. The acrid smell of smoke still filled the air.

  I nodded and looked away. “I wish you’d trust me.”

  She dropped her head and groaned. “Let it go, Reece. I’m not a good bet.”

  “I’m not either. But you still helped me.” I shifted so I could face her directly.

  “It was the look in your eyes, I guess. Same look that’s in mine.”

  “What look?”

  “I don’t know. You remind me of something from when I was little. Planting daisies.” She huffed out a laugh and shook her head. “We’re the same. Only difference is you can get back some of what you lost. I wanted to help.” Another shrug and half a laugh. “It is what it is.”

  There was something in her voice—a crack, a waver—that forced me to take a closer look at her. I figured I’d see fear or panic in her eyes, but I didn’t. All I saw was…defeat.

  “So you weren’t playing me?”

  Her eyes shot to mine, and she made a choking sound. “Playing you? You think I’ve been, what? Covering up a string of arsons on the off chance you’d wander into the LVFD one day?”

  “Okay.” I waved my hand impatiently. “Not me. Us. Did you join squad so you could cover up these crimes? Jesus, Amanda.” I grabbed her shoulders. “What if this kid kills somebody next time? We have to know.”

  “No! No, you don’t understand.” She jerked free. “It doesn’t matter if he did this or not. They’ll kick him out, send him back into the system. Foster kids like us, we’re throwaways, and this house”—she pointed in the direction of the Beckett house—“is the best one he’s had, that either of us have had. I can’t mess this up. It’s good here. Nobody steals our stuff, nobody hurts us—”

  My blood froze when those words penetrated. “Hurts you?”

  The defeat in Amanda’s eyes turned flat and hard. “Yeah, Reece. Hurts.”

  I couldn’t speak, couldn’t wrap my mind around that. Before I could figure out my next move, Amanda flung her arms up in the air and paced away. “Stop looking at me like that! I’m still who I am.”

  I raised my hands. “I know. I know. I…I kind of just want to kill whoever hurt you.”

  Amanda snorted. That snort became a laugh, and then she was laughing so hard, she sat down on the curb, an arm wrapped around her middle. “You get points for that,” she said when she could breathe again. “Nobody’s ever offered to commit murder for me.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a giver like that.”

  She laughed again, then quickly grew serious. “Reece, show me the video again. Are you sure about this?”

  I tugged my phone out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?” Amanda asked, scoopin
g up the folded-up square of paper that fell from my pocket.

  My skin iced over, and my stomach knotted. I lunged for it, snatched the paper out of her hand, and shoved it deep back into my pocket before she could read a word.

  “Okay. Jeez, Reece. If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.” She held up her hands.

  Shame started a slow spread inside me, and I looked away. I was the biggest kind of hypocrite—ah, hell. I drew the paper back out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  Cautiously, she unfolded it. I sat on the curb next to her and waited while she read the lines I’d scrawled so far.

  “It’s a letter to my dad.” My heart thudded behind my ribs.

  Her eyes shot up to mine. “It’s…angry. And so final. Like you’re saying good-bye.”

  I am.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, avoiding her gaze. “I’m…not gonna stick around.”

  “So you lied to us when you told us J squad mattered to you.” Her eyes filled, and she quickly lowered them.

  I had no answer for that. What really sucked was that it wasn’t true, not now. Now, J squad did matter. And she’d never believe that.

  “Where would you go?”she asked a long moment later.

  “Military,” I lied.

  “We’ve got some time then.” She sighed, relieved. “Can’t enlist until you’re legal. Which branch?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe Marines.” It didn’t matter.

  “First in,” she murmured. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure anything could scare me now. The worst had already happened.

  “When are you giving this to your dad?”

  “When it’s done. I have a lot left to say, but I don’t know—” I didn’t bother to finish the statement. None of this mattered anymore. Not the note, not even my promise to Matt. All that mattered was J squad. I shoved the paper back in my pocket while Amanda tapped the video play button on my phone.

  “So what does that line mean—‘I’ll be at his altar’?” she asked while we watched the guy in his underwear clear the space in front of the hydrant again.

  “Oh, um.” Fuck. The knot in my gut jerked, tightened, and half my body went numb. “It’s just something Matt used to say.”

  She frowned and finally nodded. I let out a slow breath, and the video finished playing.

  “Amanda, nobody knows about this note. Nobody but you.”

  A bright-red bird stopped to rest on the porch rail of the house across the street. Amanda watched him for a moment. I just watched her. I still couldn’t figure out what color her eyes were. Not blue, not green, not brown. I didn’t know why I was so hung up on what the hell color her eyes were, because all I saw in them at that moment was pain, and suddenly, I knew exactly what I had to do, had to say.

  I cleared my throat. “Um, Amanda, I know what you said about being a foster kid and the no-boys thing. But you need to know you can trust me. With anything.”

  Slowly, she shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t know how.” But she leaned in to me, put her head on my shoulder, and handed me back my phone. “Can you please not show anybody this? Don’t report it, not until I’m sure.”

  “Of what?”

  She watched the red bird spread his wings and take off. “Sure of Larry. If there’s the tiniest chance he’s not involved, I have to know. I can’t get him in trouble just because you have video of him playing with his phone.”

  “Amanda, this is arson. We have to—”

  She jumped away from me. “Oh, come on, Logan! A minute ago, you wanted to kill somebody for me. You said you’d do anything to make me happy. Were those just words, or did you really mean any of that?”

  I blew out a long breath. I was here, wasn’t I? I’d sat in the fire marshal’s office for ten minutes wrestling with this after my dad said he was proud of me. But here I was. “I really meant it. So what do you want to do?”

  “I need more. I want to follow him around, see where he goes, who he goes with, and what he does.”

  I clenched my teeth together. That wasn’t our job or our responsibility. That was for the arson investigators to do. All we had to do was show them the video of Larry. That was it. Why was this so difficult for her? He was just some kid who happened to be staying in the same foster house as she was, and now she wanted to put herself in danger for him. I didn’t get it. And I sure as hell didn’t like it.

  “Amanda, if anything happens to you, I’ll—”

  She jerked like I’d just shot her. She took my hand and squeezed it for a second. “Don’t do that.”

  “What, care about you, about what happens to you?”

  “Yes! I told you—”

  “No boys. I know. But I can’t change how I feel. I won’t.”

  She shut her eyes tightly, shaking her head. “This is impossible, Reece. We can’t.”

  A car turned up the street, and she almost jumped behind a shrub. I shoved my hands in my pockets, tracking the car until it disappeared around a curve. The note singed my fingertips, forcing me to remember my plan.

  And show me exactly how to make her trust me.

  “Oh fuck it.”

  When Amanda’s eyebrows shot up, I raked both hands through my hair. “This note…the truth is I’ve been writing it for weeks. It started out as a promise I made to Matt. Amanda, he knew he was dying, and he knew my dad was going to flip the fuck out. He made me promise not to…give up, you know? So I made this plan. I was going to leave—just disappear the day I got my dad to finally show me a little love. The military was a lie. It doesn’t matter where I go. I just had to be away from here.”

  She took a step toward me, her eyes a storm of emotion. Encouraged, I kept going.

  “I never expected it to work, Amanda. I figured I’d just give it a shot, do whatever it took so I could tell myself I kept my promise to my brother and then just get the hell out. But when I joined J squad and all of you decided to help me, things changed. My whole plan changed, because for the first time in my entire fucking life, I had a shot! I had a chance to really make my dad proud. It became this legend, you know? The day John Logan compliments his son!” I waved a hand over an imaginary theater marquee.

  “For weeks, that day was nothing more than a daydream. Some nebulous gray point in the future. And it just hit me. Amanda, today’s that day.” I grabbed her arms and made her look directly at me. “He told me not even an hour ago that he was proud of me. Which means I did it.” I smiled broadly. “Holy shit, Amanda. I did it. I can go now.” I flung my arms up in the air. “Right now. Leave, fade away like I planned. There’s nothing holding me to this life anymore.”

  Yes, there was.

  “Except one thing.” I crumpled up the note and pressed it into her hands. “Take it.”

  She looked at the paper with wide eyes. “Why?”

  “I don’t need it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here until the no-boys rule is null and void.”

  Amanda’s eyes filled, and a sad smile lifted her lips for a second, but then she shook her head. “Reece, it’ll be years before that happens.”

  “I don’t care. I’m in this, Amanda. I’m all in.”

  Her lips curled a little. “You told me that the other day. After the alarm.”

  “I meant it then, and I mean it even more now.” I took a deep breath and blurted out the words she needed to hear. “I love you, Amanda.” She only stared at me, dumbstruck. “Did you hear me? I said I’m in love with you. So whatever’s up with Larry, I’ll back off and let you do what you need to until you ask me for help.”

  Chapter 24

  Amanda

  I made it back to the Becketts’ house in a fog.

  I love you, he’d said. Someone loved me. The concept was freakin’ impossible to understand. No one loved me, including my mother.


  Maybe that’s why I didn’t say the words back.

  No.

  No, I didn’t say the words back because I was a friggin’ coward.

  I opened the front door and found Larry watching TV in the family room. I took the opportunity to sneak upstairs into his room. His closet looked like the after shot for a one-day-only sale. The rod held only three hangers—a winter jacket in a hideous shade of green, a suit with worn elbows to go to court in, and a fleece hoodie in boring gray. I took the fleece from the closet and buried my nose in it, but all I smelled was fabric softener.

  I tried the garage-sale dresser next. Larry had a few pairs of underwear—white briefs, shoved in the drawer, a few pairs of socks, and a—oh God—a condom. I closed the drawer with a grimace. I moved to the desk next. Its single center drawer held some crumpled-up notes that he’d used for math homework, I guessed. Handheld pencil sharpener, ruler, erasers, some expired book order forms.

  I blew hair out of my eyes and scanned the room. His bed was perfectly made—Mrs. Beckett insisted on it. I sat on it, gave it a little bounce, shoved my hand between the mattress and box spring to see if he had a secret stash of anything, but came up empty. I stood up and sighed in frustration. This was ridiculous—a total waste of—

  My foot sent something skittering across the floor. I bent down and examined it, but it was just a piece of mulch, probably something Larry tracked in. I tossed it in the waste basket next to his desk and left his room.

  Back downstairs, I decided to confront him directly. “What the hell is up with you?” I demanded, whispering.

  He blinked at me. “Nothing.”

  “You need to tell me what happened at that fire. I know you were there. Jesus, Larry, they have you on video.”

  The remote fell to the floor. “Go away.”

  “Larry—”

  The Becketts’ car pulled into the driveway.

  “Go away or I’ll tell them you broke a rule.”

  I gasped. He wouldn’t. That would end things for both of us, and he damn well knew it. “You won’t.” I took a step closer.

  Car doors slammed. Feet climbed the porch steps.