by Meg Muldoon
But the engine wasn’t coming to the auditorium. It was headed in the opposite direction.
Toward downtown.
I saw a look in Daniel’s eye, and knew he wasn’t going to listen to the medics treating him.
“Don’t you—”
“I’ve got to go,” he said, interrupting me. “Take care of her, Warren.”
He left the covered area and I watched him take off across the parking lot.
“Daniel!” I shouted.
But it was no use.
He didn’t hear me.
Or he just pretended not to.
Chapter 48
I was back at the house, staring out the sliding glass door as rain splattered across the pane. The news on the TV blared behind me.
The reporters were saying that it had been some kind of explosion in the auditorium. There were rumors someone had rigged fireworks in the rafters.
That’s what they pieced together so far.
But the incident at the auditorium hadn’t been the only fire of the day.
Downtown, Sarah Reinhart’s tutoring office had gone up in a blaze of its own.
Despite the rains, the shop looked to be badly damaged from the news footage.
The fire department had been so preoccupied with the auditorium blaze that it took them some time to realize what was going on and to respond to the call.
Which, if I were to guess, was what the arsonist had wanted.
It was just lucky that nobody had been at the tutoring business when it caught fire.
“Holy smokes, Cinny,” Warren said from the sofa. “Can you believe any of this? In all my years living here, I’d never seen so much excitement in one day.”
Even though I’d changed out of my wet clothes and into some fresh, comfortable ones, I couldn’t stop shaking.
I couldn’t stop worrying about Daniel. He should have been in the hospital right now, not out at another crime scene.
The same line kept running over and over in my head.
He could have died.
The thought petrified me. Struck me with a fear as heavy and ruthless as an iron crowbar.
“Cinny?” Warren said, turning around after I didn’t respond.
“I have to go,” I said.
“What?” he said. “Where?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”
I grabbed my keys and pulled on my rain jacket.
Then I ran out the door, through the pouring rain to the car.
Chapter 49
I tried calling him but only got his voicemail.
Halfway on my way to what remained of Sarah’s tutoring office, my phone buzzed with a text message.
He would meet me at the pie shop when he was done. He told me to close up for the day and make sure all the doors were locked.
The pie shop.
In all the mayhem of the day, I hadn’t had a chance to think about it.
I needed to check and make sure everything was okay.
I drove over, my wipers flashing back and forth quickly across the windshield.
I hoped Daniel was okay, and that he wasn’t working himself into the ground.
He really should have been at the hospital. But he was stubborn and wouldn’t listen to me.
All the time I spent trying to go undercover in that stupid play and what was the point of any of it?
I hadn’t been able to do one damn thing.
And in the meantime, I’d jeopardized the most important relationship in my life.
And I couldn’t really say why.
Until I suddenly saw it all clearly.
It all made sense to me. Why I’d wanted to do this stupid play so badly, even though I knew it could be dangerous.
It wasn’t about getting revenge for Kara or about stopping a madman from burning down the town. Or about carrying on the tradition of the Christmas River in July festivities.
It had been about insecurity. About distraction.
About trying to avoid the issues.
About pushing Daniel away.
He’d been right.
Since he proposed to me in that meadow, all I’d been doing was running away.
Running away like a coward from him, when all he’d ever shown me was love and affection.
I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been all this time.
I pulled off Main Street into the parking space in front of my shop.
Maybe it’d been the shock of the fireworks going off in the auditorium. Or maybe it had been seeing Daniel go back into that building and not knowing if he’d come back out.
But all my excuses, everything I’d built to keep reality out, had all crumbled.
It had all gone up in smoke, same as the Sarah’s tutoring business.
And all that was left was a sick feeling of regret and fear. Fear of just how much damage those excuses had done.
I got out of the car, slamming the door hard and running through the rain.
I threw myself inside the shop. Nobody was sitting in the dining room. The fires and rain had probably scared everyone off.
“Hey, Chrissy,” I said. “It’s me.”
I took off my rain jacket and made my way to the kitchen. I walked through the swinging doors and started to hang my jacket up.
I let out a muffled shriek.
The rain jacket slid out of my hands as I stared up at the coat stand in disbelief.
There, hanging from one of the wooden pegs, was a bright red velvet jacket.
And on the peg beside it, a Santa hat.
Chapter 50
Chrissy’s eyes were large and red and frantic. Though there was no sound coming from her, those eyes were screaming.
His back was toward me as they sat across from one another at the counter.
“C’mon in Cinnamon,” he said without turning around to look at me. “There’s no need to be afraid.”
We both knew that was a lie.
My heart thundered in my chest.
I stood motionless for a moment, unsure whether I should go forward or try to escape.
My phone, still in my bag, started ringing.
“Leave that for the time being,” he said, still not turning around. “And come on in. I won’t ask you a third time.”
I bit my lip.
Somehow, having his back toward me like that was worse than seeing his face.
I took several heavy steps across the tile floor toward him as my phone let out its last muffled ring. I could see Chrissy’s face better now. She had streaks of mascara running down her cheeks.
“I don’t know what you’re planning on doing, but you should get out of here while you still can, Carson.”
“You take away the ‘C’ and what do you get?” he said in a pleased tone.
Arson, I thought.
What a sick bastard.
I slowly lowered myself onto one of the stools, seeing his face clearly for the first time.
His blond Mohawk was wet and drooping off to one side. His face was red. But his eyes… his eyes were cold and sharp and grey. Like stone.
The unassuming guy that I had hired had never existed at all.
Carson was Ronald Reinhart’s estranged son, Nick.
This whole time, the arsonist had been right under my nose.
He rested his arms on the table, flicking a lighter back and forth, watching the flame catch and then die as he killed it.
He didn’t say anything for a while.
My phone rang again. I looked over at my purse, but he caught my eyes and shook his head.
“You’ve had a busy day,” I said.
He smiled.
“Did you like what I did to the auditorium?” he asked. “I ask because I didn’t get to see it myself. I was long gone by then.”
I didn’t know how he wanted me to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t personal. I wouldn’t say I like your town much, but I don’t have anything against you or your friends.
”
“Just against your dad?” I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Oh? You’ve been talking with Ronald about me?”
“I’ve been talking to your sister mostly,” I said. “She’s here looking for you. She’s worried sick.”
He flicked the lighter again and stared at the pale yellow flame.
“You know what I like about fire?” he said, smiling. “How it purifies. It cleanses everything it touches. And it’s intelligent too. You tell it to go somewhere, and it goes.”
A tear slid down Chrissy’s face.
Carson didn’t notice or care.
“So why take it out on Kara or Valley? Why not just burn your dad’s house down and leave them out of it?” I said.
He shrugged.
“I wanted him to know I was around. I wanted him to be scared for once in his life, to know that he couldn’t just leave us to rot and not expect to smell something.”
“You don’t care that your sister’s been out here looking for you?” I asked.
He grinned.
“Big sis always worries so much,” he said. “She never even knew half the things that I did.”
He went back to flicking the lighter.
“You know, I came out here the first time three years ago to see him,” he said. “I guess I thought… well. It doesn’t matter anymore what I thought. Him and that bitch he shacked up with didn’t care that I came all the way out here. They wanted to go on pretending like I didn’t exist.”
“How could you lie to me all this time?” Chrissy suddenly blurted out, finding her voice. “How could you do this to me?”
He acted like she wasn’t there.
“But I do exist. I do. And after that visit three years ago, I wanted to make sure that he knew it. I wanted him to never forget it. I wanted all of you to know Ronald’s ugly secret. He’s got a skeleton hiding in his closet. And that skeleton wants to come out and play.”
Chrissy stood up.
He was on her in a second, pushing her shoulders down back into the seat. The quickness of his reaction scared me.
“Where you going in such a hurry, sweetheart?” he said.
She didn’t try to fight him a second time.
“I know what you’re going through, Nick,” I said, using his real name for the first time. “I know what it’s like to have your father abandon you.”
He looked at me with those steely, unfeeling eyes.
“You don’t have to lower yourself to lying,” he said. “It’s not going to stop me from doing what I’m going to do.”
A chill passed through me, but I kept on, buying time.
“It’s not a lie,” I said. “He left when I was just a kid. He abandoned my mom and me. I only heard from him a couple of times a year.”
“Well, if that’s true, it seems like I shouldn’t have to explain myself anymore,” he said in a lifeless tone. “You should understand what I’m doing.”
“You’ve let him ruin your life, Nick,” I said. “And he’s not worth it. But you still have a chance to make the right decision here. You can still let him know he didn’t get the better of you.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” he said.
The way he said it made my skin crawl.
He turned his back to us for a second, walking over to the corner.
I took advantage of the moment.
I reached over and grabbed a knife that was lying out on the counter, and silently sat back down just before he turned around to look at us. I rested the knife on my lap, waiting for the right moment to strike.
I suddenly saw what he was holding in his hands, and it made my stomach turn.
It was a can of gasoline.
“This is the final act,” he said
“You’re a psychopath,” Chrissy said, sobbing.
He looked at her, expressionless.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
He unscrewed the lid of the gas can. Soon, I could smell the fumes.
He started pouring it in a pool on my kitchen floor.
It was now or never.
I gripped the wooden handle of the knife and prepared to lunge at him.
But something outside caught my eye first.
It was just a blur in the pounding rain.
Something was moving through the trees. Moving toward the window.
I heard pounding up the wooden steps.
And then, a thunderous crack.
The back door burst open. Someone came flying into the kitchen, wind and rain following close behind him.
Our eyes met for a split second.
Then he pulled a gun and pointed it at Carson.
I jumped up and grabbed Chrissy, pulling her out of the way.
Carson was unmoved by any of it. He calmly pulled the lighter from his pocket.
The sickening smell of the fumes whispered of terrifying potential.
“Put that on the table,” Daniel said in a low growl.
“Don’t ruin it,” Carson said, his fingers flipping the silver cap back.
The bell on the front door jingled, and I heard the heavy thud of boots out in the dining room.
“This is my ending,” Carson said. “He’ll always remember it now.”
“Don’t you—”
Carson just smiled crookedly.
He didn’t care anymore. He’d done everything he set out to do.
And this was how he wanted to go out.
Chrissy started screaming.
His thumb flicked the small metal wheel.
And then there was an explosion.
Chapter 51
I sat in the front of the shop at one of the booths, sipping a cup of strong black coffee as I flipped through a King Arthur baking catalogue.
It was early morning, and it was cool in the shop. The heat wave had broken, and the mornings were now back to the way they usually were. Fresh and airy with just a slight chill in them that someone who wasn’t familiar with this area might have mistaken for the beginning of autumn.
I still had an hour before I officially opened the shop, and I was taking a break from manning the ovens in the back.
I looked out the window at the silent street, washed in the golden light of a late July morning.
Between the Bundt cake pans and cake enhancers and bread pudding recipes in the catalogue, I was thinking about how easy, how ridiculously easy it was sometimes to take everything you have for granted.
Like this shop. It always meant everything to me, but sometimes between the day-to-day grind of rolling dough and pulling pans out of the oven, I lost sight of that. But after nearly seeing it go up in flames, it hit home just how important it was to me. And just how lucky I was to have it and to be among the few who loved doing what they did for a living.
The flame never hit the gasoline that day in the kitchen. I’d been more than lucky that Daniel had figured out who Carson was before he committed his final act and burned himself and my shop up.
Daniel had figured it all out just in time.
The police had pulled footage from the alleyway behind Sarah Reinhart’s tutoring office, which had showed the arsonist, dressed in his trademark Santa costume, waving at the camera like he was a beauty queen on a float.
And then, he took off and disappeared out of frame.
Daniel was able to tell the general direction that he’d gone, though. He followed the arsonist’s trail, even though he had hardly anything to go on.
He followed his gut.
Until he found something in one of the parking lots near the burned-out tutoring office.
Something that shouldn’t have been there.
The cowgirl apron, muddied and crumpled and soaked by the rains. The one that had Cinnamon’s Pies stitched on the front.
The one that Carson had been so fond of.
Daniel had no way of knowing that, though. He’d never met Carson in person being that he only washed dishes two days a week at the shop. He’d only heard me t
alk about him.
But Daniel said he had a gut feeling when he saw the apron. He knew, he said, he just knew that something was wrong at the shop.
That the arsonist was there. And that I was there with him.
He said a kind of fear overcame him when the realization struck him that he might be too late.
But he hadn’t been.
Daniel shot Nick Calder in the shoulder before he could complete his final act.
There was blood and gasoline all over my kitchen floor that day. The arsonist was taken away by an ambulance, screaming and shouting until they finally subdued him.
And that was the last I had seen of him. I’d heard he was in the hospital and would be transferred to the county jail soon. I’m sure the news station was all over it, but I didn’t want to watch the news. I already knew the story.
I took a sip of my coffee, enjoying the smooth, velvety texture of my favorite dark roast.
I got to the end of the baking catalogue, closed it shut, and then stared out the window at the awakening street.
Even though Nick had burned down Kara’s shop and had tried to destroy my own, I couldn’t find it in me to hate him.
People around town were calling him a psycho, a mental case, a maniac with no conscience. And some of that was probably true.
But what was also true was that all that insanity and mayhem had stemmed from the pain felt by a kid who just wanted to be accepted by his father. To just be noticed and acknowledged.
To just be loved.
And as destructive and ruthless as he’d been, I didn’t feel hate when I thought about him.
I felt sorrow.
Sorrow that he’d thrown his life away for a cause that just wasn’t worth it.
Ronald Reinhart had recovered from smoke inhalation. I didn’t know what he was doing now, but there were rumors that the Reinharts were picking up and leaving town. It was possible, though unlikely, that they would face charges related to the fires, since it seemed clear that they knew who was behind it from the beginning and they didn’t report it. But Daniel had said it would be a hard case to prove.
That was one thing, at least. Everyone now knew about Ronald. They knew he wasn’t the innocuous high school principal that he’d pretended to be. Everyone knew about the skeletons in his closet now.
