Out of the Ashes

by Cynthia Reese

  They pushed aside the plethora of tools on one corner of the kitchen table and fell on the burgers with the enthusiasm of the famished. Chelle stared at first them and then the cake, which stood at attention on the other end of the table.

  “I thought you would have it nearly finished by now,” she told Kari. “You’ve only got the bottom two tiers done, and you haven’t even started on the cascade.”

  “I know, Mom, but it is a big cake. And I ran out of powdered sugar, plus I had to start back over on my roses, and those calla lilies didn’t transfer like I hoped they would.”

  “It’s looking good, though,” Chelle said. Rob chuckled at the brave face she was putting on. “What you’ve got done, that is. Rob, I’m so glad you were able to help her.”

  “I think I’m more in her way than anything,” he replied.

  Kari closed her hand over his. “No, no, you’re a natural. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

  Chelle shuddered. “Not me. I have a complete phobia about decorating cakes. Remember that time I tried to learn?”

  Kari’s shoulders shook as she bit into her burger. She put her hand to her mouth and swallowed, got choked and had to have Rob pound her on her back. “Mom, that was awful—I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t let you lay a pinky finger on Mattie Gottman’s cake.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of trying. I just—oh, give me numbers. I can definitely do numbers, but anything with a pastry bag?” Chelle scoffed and then asked, “Is there anything else I can do?”

  He and Kari soon started back on the intricate scrollwork and the infernal Swiss dots that made Rob’s hands cramp and his shoulders ache. He hoped Mattie Gottman was planning on having lots of champagne with her wedding—otherwise she might look a wee bit too close and see that the scrollwork wasn’t completely up to Kari’s usual exacting standards.

  As the clock hit 11:00 p.m. and they were only starting the fourth tier, Chelle yawned. “I’m leaving it with y’all. Kari, I’ve cleaned out the fridge like you asked—took the shelves out, too, so it ought to be tall enough for the cake to slide in. But I’ve got to go to bed.”

  By midnight, they were beginning on the cascade. Rob was so bleary-eyed he was seeing double. “Have to admit my hands haven’t hurt this badly since my first days training with a fire hose—or maybe even when I was little and had to shell bucket after bucket of butter beans for Ma.”

  Kari looked up from transferring all his less-than-perfect roses to the side of the cake. She’d pluck them up with a pair of scissors, glue them on with a walloping amount of buttercream, and adjust them to her liking. “Somebody told me that all the Monroe boys were firefighters—that it was a family tradition. Did you actually want to be a firefighter? Or was it something that your family expected?”

  The question took him aback. “Well, yeah, of course I wanted to be a firefighter. Ma’s got pictures of me when I was little, parading around in a firefighter hat and a toy fire truck.”

  Suddenly the white monolith of a cake was starting to look like...well, a wedding cake. Even his ugly roses didn’t look so bad interspersed with her much prettier orchids and hydrangeas and lilies.

  “Yeah? It must be comforting to have known what you’ve always wanted to do with your life.”

  He rubbed at his mouth, considering. “It wasn’t comforting to Ma, not after our dad died. She’s proud of us, don’t get me wrong. But I could have clobbered Daniel when he gave up his shot at the majors to join the department.”

  “Why was that?” She glanced over at him. “Man, you’ve got more frosting on you than the cake does!”

  It was true. He found himself inspecting his knuckles and licking the sweet sticky stuff off them. “Just taste-testing, that’s all. Don’t worry, I’ll wash up before I come near your cake.”

  Kari shook a finger at him, but she sported a smile. “You’d better. You were telling me about Daniel. What did it matter that he became a firefighter, too?”

  “We’d just lost Dad, see? And Daniel had never wanted to be a firefighter—it was all baseball, all the time. But then Dad was killed, and Daniel seemed to believe he needed to take up Dad’s place. And all I could think was that Ma, as nervous and anxious as she was over Daniel’s move, would never stand for me becoming a firefighter, too.”

  “But that didn’t happen? Hand me that spatula over there, please.”

  He obeyed. “No. I underestimated the stuff Ma’s made of. She may not like it, but she’s never going to stand in the way of what any of her kids want to be.”

  “I like her. She’s called me several times, you know, to cheer me on. It’s really helped me to have folks like Ma and Alice in my corner.”

  “And me, of course,” Rob said grandly, tapping his chest. “You like having me in your corner.”

  Kari stared at him, unspoken words clearly on her lips. She averted her gaze. “Yeah. Yeah, you most of all. I just hope you’ll stay there,” she murmured cryptically.

  By 1:00 a.m., he was uncapping the last of the pearlescent spray—who knew you could spray paint a cake?—and watching her as she turned the long four-tier cascade of closely bunched flowers into something that looked straight out of Hollywood.

  “I’d kill for my paint gun right now,” she said as she shook the aerosol can and finished up the last section. “It’s so much easier to control than these spray cans. But until I can afford to replace it, I’ve got to make do.”

  “Paint gun?” he asked. “Like you’d paint, what, cars with?”

  “Yeah. Great for airbrushing cakes. So much better. You hook it up to a compressed air tank and spray away.”

  “Whodathunkit,” Rob muttered. He filed it away, along with all the other unguarded moments she’d moaned over not having exactly the right tool for the job. No, unlike that lady two towns over who’d most likely torched her own house, she hadn’t emptied out her shop of her most cherished possessions.

  But he had to admire her tenacity— despite not having the right tools, despite how it made the job ten times harder, Kari had stuck with it, made it work with what she had.

  She frowned, now, took a paintbrush with a teeny-tiny tip and began tinkering with spots that didn’t meet her satisfaction.

  Rob endured it for another half hour. But when Kari’s fiddling and twiddling seemed never ending, he gently pulled her back against him.

  “Relax. It’s done. You did it. And it looks...even if I do say so myself, that cake looks fabulous.”

  She craned her head up to stare at him. “Will it do? You know Mattie...will she like it?”

  “She’d be crazy not to. This town has never seen a cake that glamorous. The thing could be on TV, the way it looks.”

  “Oh, good.” Kari turned in his grasp until she was fully facing him. “Now I can start on the groom’s cake.”

  Rob’s jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? We’ve got another cake to do?”

  Kari reached up and tapped an index finger against his nose. “Gotcha! Oh, if I could have taken a picture of that face of yours. It was priceless. No, the groom’s cake is done—he’s a huge Georgia Bulldogs fan, so all I had to do was decorate a chocolate cake with the Georgia emblem. Easy-peasy.”

  Rob sagged against her with relief. “That’s cruel and unusual punishment, ma’am. Geneva conventions have distinct prohibitions about teasing poor exhausted assistants in the wee hours of the morning.”

  “What about poor exhausted cake decorators?” She giggled. “I’m so tired I don’t dare let go of you because I might fall. You’re the only thing still keeping me upright.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re the only thing keeping me upright.” Kari roared with laughter as Rob swung her wide, lifting her off the floor and twirling her. “No, wait, maybe that’s my second wind kicking in. Got another cake that needs decorating?”
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  “That’s the sugar high talking—I think you may have licked one too many bowls of buttercream,” Kari said. But her eyes were sparkling, and Rob knew it wasn’t the buttercream that made his heart do a triple beat.

  “There’s sugar, and then...well, there’s sugar,” he whispered. He bent down to kiss her and was gratified to realize she was on tiptoe, stretching up to her full height to meet his lips.

  She tasted of sugar—vanilla buttercream, to be exact. She smelled of the stuff, which suited him just fine, because for that moment all he wanted to do was drink in the scent of her, the taste and the feel of her. If he’d had to decorate a thousand more cakes, give him a kiss like this, and he was game.

  Because it was plain and simple. He was addicted to the sugar high that was Kari Hendrix.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  KARI HAD LOST her fool mind.

  Or maybe she was the one who’d been hopped up on buttercream frosting.

  Why else was she kissing an arson investigator whose job it was to put her away?

  And why couldn’t she seem to stop kissing him now that she’d started?

  For one thing, he was really, really good at this kissing business...much better than he’d been at making roses.

  For another thing, she felt...safe.

  Her heart, her lying, lying heart, promised with every thrum against her ribs that she could trust Rob Monroe not to hurt her.

  And maybe he wouldn’t mean to. But in the end...

  In the end, he’d remember who she was, who she’d said she was, anyway, in a court of law, in front of a judge.

  An arsonist.

  Regretfully she let logic and reason and bitter experience kick back in. She pulled away from him, but couldn’t quite bring herself to let her hands slide from his strong, finely sculpted forearms.

  “Wow... I don’t quite—I guess I let the sugar get to me, too,” she whispered.

  Rob seemed unsure of what to say. Was he regretting kissing her? Was he thinking of all the reasons he shouldn’t have?

  The image of Sam Franklin and his smarmy expression earlier that evening in the checkout line came crashing back in on her. Of course Rob didn’t need to be kissing her, any more than she needed to be kissing him.

  Unless... Was all of this some elaborate trick? Some game?

  She dismissed it as paranoid. No investigator would go to that much trouble to win her trust.

  Again, it was like their brains were working in tandem.

  “Kari, I know we said we wouldn’t talk about the fire.”

  She yanked away as if he had become as hot as an overheated oven. “Yes, we did.”

  “The cake’s done, so I feel like I’ve held up my end of the bargain. I’ve been thinking— I’ve had a lot of time to think tonight. Watching you while you worked. If you didn’t set that fire—okay, okay, you didn’t set that fire.” He held up his hands to ward off the protest bubbling up to her lips. “Logic dictates that somebody did, and that somebody knew you. Knew your past. Knew that you would be an easy suspect. They even knew to use a propane tank. How?”

  Her mind instantly went back to Jake. But Jake couldn’t have meant for her to take the blame for this. If he’d done this—and that was still a big if, even for her—he’d done it to seek vengeance. He hadn’t wanted to get her into hot water.

  “I don’t know.” She slid to the floor of the kitchen, against the cabinets. “I keep telling you, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

  He knelt down beside her, close, too close to ignore how his proximity always made her feel. “No. You’re involved in two fires that had a propane tank? That’s not a coincidence. People don’t use propane tanks. Amateurs pour gas or kerosene or lighter fluid and light it—or try to, anyway. A pro will wrap cotton gauze around a cigarette and leave it near something flammable—in between couch cushions, in a drawer full of clothes. But a propane tank? That scares the amateur, and it’s too obvious for the pro. So why did you use a propane tank?”

  She’d been right. Even after that kiss, he was still thinking of her as an arsonist. No matter what, this would always be there, hanging between them. And she couldn’t tell him and put Jake in harm’s way.

  Maybe she didn’t owe her brother anything...but she could at least spare her mom pain.

  “I can’t tell you,” Kari got out. She twisted away from him and put her face in her hands. It was the honest truth—she couldn’t tell him why Jake had used that propane tank. Just as she hadn’t been able to answer the question when the other investigator had asked her all those years ago. “It was there, okay. It was...there. Please. I was fourteen, Rob. Fourteen and foolish and I didn’t think things through. If I had, you can believe I would have never...” She couldn’t bear to say she was an arsonist, not again. Not when, if only in her heart, she could still think of herself as innocent. “And I learned my lesson, okay? Do you know how hard it was for me? How much I paid? Those four years weren’t merely any four years. They were my high school years, Rob. While my friends were all thinking about learning how to drive and passing Spanish and hoping someone would ask them to the prom, I was just hoping to survive, to get the time over and done with, so that I could move on.”

  She hadn’t told anybody this, not Alice, not even her mom. Alice would have told her not to feel sorry for herself—good advice—and her mom would have felt guilty.

  Now that Kari had begun to pour out her bottled-up feelings to Rob, she couldn’t seem to stop. “But it’s never been over—do you know how it is to apply for job after job and no one will hire you? Before I got hired at the bakery, I had nothing. At least in juvie, I had a roof over my head. There were times when I missed that place, and in a weird sort of way, it made sense, Rob—how screwed up is that?”

  Rob’s features softened. His voice was almost a whisper when he spoke. “You were only a kid, Kari. I look at Taylor and I think about how you were practically the same age as her when you got sent away and I say to myself, ‘How could any girl survive and come out as whole as Kari has?’ But as much as I respect that, as much as I want to leave you to your privacy, this case dictates that I can’t. So tell me how someone else would know to use that method. Maybe you told some of the girls you were with?”

  She shook her head. “No, I made it a point not to talk about why I was there. I just kept hoping that I could lock it all away, forget it, never think about it again. And I’m still hoping that. Please, Rob. Don’t make me re-live the worst mistake I ever made. None of the girls at juvie could possibly know about that fire.”

  “Well, somebody thinks it’s your signature. Or maybe...maybe just maybe they got the idea from you. Later that summer somebody used a propane tank to start another fire. A bigger one.”

  Her heart rat-a-tatted in her chest. “Not the one that...that killed your dad?” she whispered. “Are you sure? A propane tank?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t use a roadside flare—in fact, I’ve taken a closer look at that case. I’ve resubmitted some of the evidence for more testing, and I’m waiting on the results to come back in. But whoever set that fire definitely used a tank—a tank almost exactly like the other two. And that stretches credulity, Kari. Propane tanks? In three major arsons in the same town?” Rob scoffed. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Someone got an idea from that first fire. From your fire. The one you said you started.”

  She couldn’t process what he was saying. Had that second fire been another one of Jake’s? Had, after all her sacrifice, he repeated his crime?

  Or was Rob right, and it was a copycat?

  That didn’t make it any less horrific. If that was the case, Jake’s original crime had, directly or indirectly, still led to Rob’s father’s death.

  She managed to drag her focus back to what he was saying, even if she couldn’t meet his eyes.
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  “Kari, It’s too pat, this last fire. Too in your face. Too personal, somehow. This is revenge. Somewhere, somehow, you’ve ticked somebody off, and they’re out for revenge. They’re using your past against you, and they know too many details for it to be a coincidence.”

  She shook her head, not bothering to lift it. The only people who knew even part of the details of the case were Jake and the buddies he’d hung out with back then...and her mom.

  And the buddies were long gone. Some had actually wound up in the system, others had straightened up and finished the business of growing up—at least according to her mom.

  So the only one who could possibly know about that old crime—every last detail, anyway—was Jake. And Jake, flaky as he could be, didn’t want to hurt her like this. It was just as her mom had said. He’d wanted to help her. That’s why he’d done it.

  “I can’t believe that,” Kari insisted. “I can’t. You’re just being paranoid.”

  “You’d better hope I am. Because...think of it like this, Kari.” Rob took her chin in his fingers, gently drawing her face to meet his. They were as close they had been earlier when he’d kissed her, but now a different intensity fired Rob’s dark blue eyes. “How many times have you worked just this late at your shop? Completely by yourself? With, let me guess, the front door locked with the key?”

  “A lot. When I needed to, whenever I had a big order. You see how long it takes. You work until you get it finished, no matter how late that is.”

  Rob’s mouth twisted bleakly. He sat back on his heels, and she was left bereft without his touch. “Somebody could have just as easily blocked that back door with that tank, stuck that flare in it and left you to die. If we’d found you—what with your past—we would have figured you set the fire and it got out of control before you could make it out the front door. And, Kari, if I don’t catch them? Well...” His voice was almost tender. He stood up, towering over her. “Next time, they might succeed.”

  * * *