“Mike,” she said. Words came out thick and hard because J Bird Café was burning, Hayley and Erica were back in a little ranch house with one cop between them and the likes of the man across the bridge, and she suddenly wanted to know where her sister was. Across the median was the man who had rammed her car, stabbed her with a syringe filled with heroin, intending to kill her. She forced the words out. “That’s the man, the one from the Phoenix House, the one who attacked me. Over there.”
Mike fixed the man across the road with his gaze, reached into the glove box for a gun. His phone was on the console between them. He put it on speaker and, never taking his eyes off the man, he said, “I need backup immediately. I’m on the bridge. I have visual contact with the suspect from Tennessee. He is headed into Portland, traffic is solid and not moving. I am approaching him on foot.”
With a huge effort, she pulled her eyes off the man. She put her hand on the door handle.
“What are you doing?” Mike said. “Stay in the car and get down!”
There was a fire and she knew exactly where she had to go. Before Mike could react, she pushed open the door and started to run. Two miles to the café.
CHAPTER 54
This was not her body pumping arms and running. This body was stiff and foreign. Her neck and spine screamed in protest as she ran the length of the bridge, dodging the cars in gridlock. Fire trucks from the Portland side blared in protest, urging cars to squeeze together tighter, to make room. She looked back once and saw police cars with their lights flashing on the Portland side. Mike wanted this guy and now he had help.
The sandals hindered her and would never make it all the way. She kicked them off and ran harder, up on her toes, trying to stay off the bandaged heels. The slight hill past downtown felt like a mountain. Storefront windows announced KNITTING CLASSES STARTING NOW and FIRST EDITION USED BOOKS in another. She flew past them.
You can do anything for two weeks, she had told kids who were desperate to get back with their parents in that appointed time. Delia could do anything for two miles, including running full out.
She crested a hill. The smoke from the fire was all that she could smell. Where was J Bird? And Baxter?
Another rise in the road that might make her lungs explode. Her heart thundered against her chest. A massive plume of smoke rose up, wide and angry. J Bird Café. Four fire trucks blocked the street, firefighters in heavy gear surrounded the café, some dragging hoses, others brandishing hatchets. Flames shot out of the bathroom window, glass exploded. And in front of the café was J Bird’s car.
Delia didn’t pause; she knew the drill. She was nineteen again. She shed her older body and ran straight for the side yard. She could get in the back and find J Bird.
Strong arms tackled her, lifting her off the ground. “What the hell are you doing? Get away from there. No one’s going in.” All she could see of the firefighter was part of his face, from his eyebrows to his chin, smoke-smudged cheeks, lips drawn tight.
The firefighter deposited her behind a barricade across the street. “That’s my bakery. My sister could be in there!” she screamed.
“Your sister? There was only one person inside and she’s right over there.” He pointed to the open back of an ambulance, half a block down the street. J Bird leaned against the back of the vehicle as an EMT pressed an oxygen mask to her face. Baxter lay at her feet. Greg stood next to her and looked up as Delia ran to them, gasping for breath.
J Bird took off the mask. “I’m okay, Delia.” Baxter sat up as soon as Delia approached. “And so is Baxter. But I don’t know what would have happened if Baxter hadn’t started barking. I was filling shelves in the supply closet when he started to bark. I had just mixed some dough and set it aside. I knew Greg was coming soon and I couldn’t understand why he’d bark at Greg, but then I knew something was wrong. It was the way he was barking.”
The woman in a deep blue uniform, EMT emblem across her shirt, big, muscled thighs pressed against tight pants, said, “Put this back on.” She meant it. She held the mask up to J Bird’s face and slid an elastic band over her head.
Greg said, “Do what the lady says.” He turned to Delia. “When I drove up, there was smoke coming out of the bathroom window, and from the back of the café, and this is weird, from the shed.” He rubbed his eyes. The smoke was black and thick. “Someone set this fire.”
What had the fire chief said long ago about her parents’ house? “It’s like the fire was set all over, not just one place.” Delia could smell nothing but smoke and with her most trusted sense overwhelmed, a rusty, dark door hinged open in her brain. What would her father say, who had never once shown an inclination toward fire, not even in the midst of the worst psychotic breaks? “Simple ingredients are the most important. Look for the simple answer first.”
Sirens screamed the arrival of more fire trucks traveling on any route but the bridge. Neighbors pushed their way to the barricades.
Delia fought the rattling chains that threatened to pull her back to the fire of long ago. She was never going to save her parents. J Bird was safe. But she could find who started the fire.
She looked at her sister and said, “He’s here. I know he is. He’s watching because he can’t stop himself.”
J Bird snapped off the oxygen mask, her eyes wide. A moment passed between them as they traveled back in time and then raced to the present. Would Delia ever feel as close to anyone as J Bird?
“I know what you’re thinking. Tyler. He’s handing out pain meds at the hospital to anyone who asks for them. Ben told me,” said J Bird.
“Ben? How would he know that?”
“Because our guy is sick and he tried to give them to Ben.”
J Bird tossed the mask to the EMT.
“I know what you’re going to do and you’re not going without me,” said J Bird.
Greg stood at the far corner of the ambulance, his gray hair, stiff with smoke, poking up erratically. “This is a police matter. You two aren’t going anywhere. If you know who started this fire, tell the police. . . .”
“You tell them, Greg. His name is Tyler Greene. Dr. Tyler Greene. We have history with him. Tell them to look for a car with California plates. There shouldn’t be too many of those around.”
The two sisters made their way past the neighbors, now three deep along the barricades, scanning for Tyler. Baxter hugged J Bird’s left side. He could be anywhere, but Delia knew that he’d be close, just like he’d been close once before, so close that he’d seen her run into her family home trying to save her parents.
A teenage boy with a baseball cap said, “Hey, your feet are bleeding.” She couldn’t look down at her feet, couldn’t think about anything except where he would be, what vantage point he’d take. They were a block away from the fire, moving toward the beach.
Delia grabbed J Bird’s arm. “We’re all creatures of habit. He might have parked at the Willard Beach lot. If he parked there, he won’t be able to get out now; the streets are blocked.”
Two short blocks remained between the sisters and the beach parking lot. They jogged to the entrance of the lot with Baxter leading the way. At the corner closest to the beach path was a car with California plates.
An explosion made them both jump. “The gas to the stoves! There must have been gas still in the lines,” said Delia. “One of us has got to go back. J Bird, please go back and see if anyone is hurt. I’ll keep Baxter with me.”
There it was again, the look between them, the dead serious, taking-everything-into-account look. They would never go back again to J Bird being the little sister and Delia taking the place of a parent. They were tracking down Tyler and they both knew why.
“I’ll be right back. I’ll tell them Tyler’s car is here. He can’t go anywhere,” she said.
“And he can’t take everything away from us, not our home, our parents, and our livelihood,” said Delia. “I’ll stay here where I can see his car. Go.”
Once J Bird was out of sight,
Delia walked directly to Tyler’s car. “Heel,” she said to the dog. J Bird didn’t have time to search for the dog’s leash when she escaped the fire. The car was empty and locked.
Delia knew where he was, where he’d go if he thought he couldn’t get away. She didn’t doubt that she’d find him or that J Bird would send police. What she wanted was time.
“Come on, Baxter. We’re going to the beach.”
The path to the beach went from blacktop to sand, lined with dense shrubbery along both sides. Sand, well-seasoned with salt, quickly found the open skin on her feet, grinding into her wounds. The beach was not wide, not like the massive beaches along Ogunquit. She walked past the play structures, looked left, then right.
“Hello, Delia. Are you alone?”
She turned to face him, this old lover and destroyer of dreams.
“I am alone. But not alone the way you are. Am I right? You’ve been alone for a very long time.” Delia finally understood who she was talking to.
Tyler’s face cracked, his mask of good looks falling away. “You know I tried to help you once. I wanted to do something for you, to free you from your father. Remember how you used to cry and tell me how screwed up your family was, that your father was sucking the lifeblood from all of you?”
Anger shot up her spine. “My father was brilliant and he was sick. My mother could wither the political machines to dust with her analysis. She chose to take care of him; she would have done the same for any of us.”
The wind started to whip up as it did in the late afternoons. He took one step closer.
“Stay there. Baxter is a very obedient dog. Do you understand me?”
Tyler stopped. “But sweetheart, I remember that you said she should divorce him, that he was bringing all of you down.”
The way he said “sweetheart” made her shiver. “My mother was devoted to him. There were times when I thought life would be so much easier without Dad’s illness, but I knew she’d never leave him. And we would always love him.”
Baxter moved in front of her, head slightly down, staring at Tyler, steadying himself.
“Your house wasn’t my first fire, but it was the only one where people died. Your mother saw me come into the house after you. I might have been able to save her, but she begged me to pull you out,” he said.
A deep chill ran through her. “My mother was alive when you pulled me out of the house?”
“Oh, Delia, fires are beautiful, powerful beasts that will have their way. By the time I dragged you to the lawn, the fire had taken her,” he said, tilting his head slightly and smiling.
She thought she’d want to kill him; he had taken so much from them. But the rage that flared up in her chest was quelled by her parents’ love. Her father had been in the midst of a psychotic episode, and her mother died protecting her.
Now she only had to keep Tyler talking until the cops came. She could stop searching.
“Why J Bird Café? What did that have to do with anything?”
He took another step toward her. Baxter’s fur along his spine rose up. Tyler exhaled loudly and let his lips flutter, as if exasperated by a trifle. “There was such a chance for money, truly big money. I saw the potential when I worked in the clinic in San Jose. Who would need me more than the guys selling heroin if I supplied people with a steady flow of opioids, and then cut them off? I was the one at the starting gate of addiction. The money was intoxicating.”
Delia must have looked shocked. He continued, as if explaining to a patient. “Doctors don’t make that much money, not like I deserved after college, med school, the ridiculous monastic life of a medical student. It should have resulted in much more for me.”
This was not the time to diagnose, but the man standing in front of her was checking off a serious list of disorders.
Tyler looked around from one end of the beach to the other. “But these are very bad people, not like me. And since I couldn’t do what they asked me to do, I suspect that they are coming for me.”
“What did they ask you to do? You’ve torched J Bird Café, my sister’s dream. My dream!”
“They told me to kill you, that you had caused a terrible amount of trouble for them, disrupting a situation in Tennessee, leading drug enforcement cops closer to them. But I couldn’t do it. I could never do that to you.”
How much time had passed since J Bird ran back to the fire scene? If Tyler didn’t see a way out of this, the last tether to his humanity could snap. She looked behind her; there was a family at the far end of the beach, a father bouncing a toddler on his shoulders, a mother and child dragging driftwood from the water. They would only see a man, woman, and dog at this end of the beach.
“You could have hurt J Bird. She was in the café when you torched it.”
Tyler shrugged so minutely that another person might have missed it, someone who hadn’t lost a mother and a father to an arsonist. “But I wouldn’t hurt you, Delia.”
He would have killed J Bird. It wouldn’t have mattered to him. She no longer cared if he was sick. If she had a stick she’d have bludgeoned him. What was that on his neck? A red dot of light suddenly appeared.
“Tyler—
She heard the shot and at the same moment, saw Tyler’s neck spurt blood. He looked stunned, genuinely surprised. He put his hand on his neck and dropped to his knees. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out except for a trickle of blood. He crumpled sideways into the sand.
Delia dove to his side and pressed her hand against his neck. For a moment, he looked like a boy again. He held her gaze as blood gushed out of both sides of his neck until his muscles sagged.
She heard J Bird calling her. “I’m here,” she yelled as loudly as she could, which was little more than a whisper. Baxter barked. “You are such a good dog,” she said.
Mike, breathing heavily, followed by J Bird and Greg, found her. Mike squatted down next to her. “You are a terrible listener,” he said, looking over her body quickly. “Are you hurt?”
Delia pointed and said only, “Tyler. Did you shoot him?”
Mike urged her up. “No, but I saw the direction of the flash.” He pointed to the ridge where the lighthouse pulsed out its unmanned, automatic beacon.
She looked down at her hands, covered with Tyler’s blood. A tiny sound came from J Bird, high-pitched, carried off quickly by the growing wind. Mike pulled off his shirt and let Delia wipe her hands.
“We’ve got the guy from Tennessee. He’s already ready to talk. He said he knew Tyler was targeted.”
“And Hayley?”
Mike smiled. “Back at Erica’s watching Clifford the Big Red Dog with Louie.”
CHAPTER 55
May
May in Maine is an unpredictable month, filled with sleet and freezing rain or spring flowers, usually both. Delia and Juniper picked Mother’s Day for their grand opening and the weather cooperated. They had been up since four a.m., preparing for the eight a.m. opening. The sunrise greeted them with a vibrant peach color, moody with fog. Now the sky was blue with a soft breeze waving the daffodils in the window boxes. Next year the daffodils would be in the ground, but they couldn’t do everything the first year.
The only things that remained after the fire were the foundation and some hardy root stock from the lilac bushes. They started rebuilding even before the insurance money arrived. Greg said, “I always wanted to be a silent partner. IBM was generous with me. What good is money doing in mutual funds when I could be earning muffin credits with you two? I promise not to interfere with your expertise. Let’s get the café framed in by December and we’ll spend the winter finishing the inside.” Today, he wore a white apron, and he cleared dishes from the tables and ran the dishwasher. He was also the dog watcher of the day. Baxter lay on the deck and Greg checked on him constantly.
The new J Bird Café was like the old one on the outside, but the windows were triple glazed and the south-facing roof had solar panels. The building extended twenty feet farther in the b
ack and the new deck had an awning for hardy customers who liked the rain.
Ben had been waiting at the doorstep as soon as the café opened. He was back at work half time. “You know they won’t let me work today unless I come back loaded with several cardboard bakery boxes from J Bird Café,” he said. “My staff can forgive my former addiction, but they’ll lock me out if I deny them the scone of the day.”
They had not lost Ben, and every time Delia saw him she was grateful.
It was almost noon, and the glass cases that had been filled to capacity with breads, muffins, scones, and croissants were now alarmingly sparse.
“Maybe they’re not coming,” said Delia.
“Erica said they were going to stop at her house first. That might have taken longer than expected. And you know how traffic can be on the turnpike,” said J Bird. She wore her favorite blue scarf around her head, holding back her hair and adding a burst of contrast to the fuchsia and coral walls.
* * *
The café had ten tables, and every one of them was filled with patrons. “Can you manage the counter for a few minutes?” asked Delia. She ducked into the bathroom, locked the door, and leaned against the wall. New plumbing was a blessing. Everything worked better; toilets didn’t clog, sinks drained, and the café was designed exactly to their specifications.
Was this what had drawn Tyler to fire? Was it a desire to cleanse and start anew? His father had tried to hide Tyler’s addiction to fire. The move to the West Coast was a last-ditch effort to save his son. Delia would never know how many other fires Tyler started, and how much his dual life as doctor and arsonist had cost him. He was dead by the time the EMT raced to the beach. He had nearly cost her everyone that she loved.
Knock, knock. Someone needed to use the bathroom. “Just a minute,” she said. There were moments when she felt like this was a dream, prepping dough, chopping ginger for J Bird, that any moment she’d wake up and see Tyler on the beach again, his blood soaking into the sand.
Delia took a big breath and then exhaled. She opened the door. Mike filled the doorway. He smiled and pushed into the small room, pulling the door closed behind him, and kissed her. It was one of the things that she loved most about him; he was a champion kisser.
The Tiger in the House Page 28
