Out of the Ashes

by Cynthia Reese

  But he came back. To help. I didn’t even have to ask him. He magically appeared...so where is he now?

  Kari didn’t want to want Rob this much. She’d learned—the hard way—that the minute you let yourself want something this badly, life had a way of kicking the stuffing out of you. Her bakery was only the latest example of that.

  What did she want from Rob, anyway? Someone to talk to? Someone to keep her company? To help her decorate cakes? Eventually she could hire someone part-time again to help out. Unlike Rob, that person wouldn’t tempt her to spill all her family secrets. They didn’t even have to know about her criminal past.

  Kari used a bread knife to cut a couple of pieces of fresh sourdough bread that she’d baked just that morning, slapped some ham and tomato and lettuce between them for lunch. As she bit down into the tangy flavor of the bread, she found herself wishing she could share it with Rob.

  At which point she remembered that she really didn’t need to be sharing anything with Rob, lest one thing lead to another.

  A brisk knock sounded, and for a minute Kari was sure it was Rob. The surge of joy deflated like a punctured soufflé, though, when she realized the knocking was coming from the front door.

  Funny how Rob had quickly become back-door company.

  She laid aside her sandwich, wiped her hands and went to answer the door.

  A man dressed in a short-sleeve dress shirt and a clip-on tie stood on the front porch, waiting patiently. “Is this—” he glanced down at an aluminum clipboard “—Kari Hendrix’s residence?”

  She pulled the door close to her body, instinctively narrowing the gap. “Why do you need to know?” Kari asked.

  The man peered over half-lenses. “Name’s Victor Miller,” he replied. He extended a hand that, despite his innocuous appearance, Kari hadn’t much desire to accept. “I’m from your insurance company. You filed a claim for fire damage and work interruption?”

  “Yes, I did. I’d tried to get in touch with you—”

  “I got your messages.” He broke in. “All two dozen of them. Pretty anxious to get your check, aren’t you?”

  Behind him, her mother’s car turned into the drive a little too fast and nearly took out the sego palm in its clay pot. Kari managed to reply to Miller’s last question with, “I have a business to run, Mr. Miller, of course I’d like my claim settled,” as her mom squeezed her car by Miller’s four-door sedan.

  Miller turned at the sound of the car in the drive. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “My mom. I guess she came home for lunch.” Kari tried to cover her surprise—her mom usually ate a sandwich at her desk. She couldn’t remember a time since she’d moved back home that her mom had done this for lunch.

  “That would be Chelle Hendrix? Figures. I just talked to her on the phone. Guess she’s coming home to give you a heads-up.” Miller clasped the aluminum clipboard to his chest.

  “Uh, no. I think it’s probably just for lunch. Won’t you come in, Mr. Miller? I’m sure you have some questions you need to ask.” Kari stepped back from the door and gestured for him to come inside.

  He strode across the threshold, stopping in the entry hall to take in his surroundings. There was nothing particularly fancy about the room—a small accent table and settee her mom had picked up at an estate sale, a reproduction tall case clock, and a coat tree, along with some garden prints her mom had liked. Still, Victor Miller took his time inspecting each item, as if he were assigning a cash value to every stick of furniture in the room.

  The delay gave her mom time enough to rush in the kitchen door. “Kari!”

  Even to Kari’s ears, Mom sounded alarmed. Again Miller gave sharp-eyed attention to the discomfiture he’d caused.

  “I’m in here with Mr. Miller, Mom. There’s fresh bread on the table for your sandwich.”

  “For my—” Mom seemed a bit slow on the uptake when it came to decoding Kari’s hint. But a beat later, she trilled back, “Right, yes, lunch. The sourdough?”

  Miller had by now decided to follow Kari through the living room into the kitchen, where Mom was hacking away at the bread with a butter knife.

  “Here, Mom, let me get that.” Kari laid her fingers over her mother’s fidgety ones and stilled them. They locked eyes and Kari willed calm into her mother. It would not do for Miller to get the idea they were hiding anything. Maybe he didn’t have a clear agenda going on—maybe that was all on Kari. She shouldn’t always be so negative.

  Her mom took a visible deep breath, and beamed brightly at the dour looking man behind Kari. “So you did find the house, then. My directions are just so hopeless sometimes.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It would have helped if you’d told me to take a left at the stop sign instead of a right.”

  “Oh, my, did I do that?” Mom asked with such feigned innocence that Kari was tempted to kick her on the ankle. “I am hopeless.”

  “That’s all right, ma’am,” Miller told her. “We investigators know how to track down people.”

  Kari pictured the man fielding a pair of bloodhounds and couldn’t suppress a shudder. Quickly she sliced the bread with the proper knife and placed it and the rest of the sandwich fixings on a plate. She forced herself to smile and ask, “Mr. Miller, can I get you something? It’s fresh sourdough bread, baked from scratch this morning.”

  His gaze fixed on the bread, and she could swear she heard his stomach growl. But he shook his head decisively. “I’m sorry. I don’t accept any offers of goods or services.”

  She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  He inclined his head toward the hump of golden brown artisan bread remaining on the cutting board. “You are a baker, right? And you sell that bread? Well, if I take that bread, it could be you trying to bribe me or otherwise influence my disposition of the case. I make it a practice to never accept any offers of goods or services from claimants.”

  For a moment, Kari was speechless. “Sir, if you thought I was trying to bribe you with a sandwich, let me clear up the confusion. I wasn’t. I was simply trying to be hospitable.”

  “She was,” Mom rushed to add. “Kari’s like that—always trying to feed people. You should try the bread—just pretend I was the one who offered it, why don’t you?” She made the whole thing worse by actually winking at the man.

  “No, ma’am.” His face now took on an impassive poker face except the odd flicker of an anxious smile every once in a while. “I also make it a practice never to accept offers of food or drink in a claimant’s house.”

  “That must get awfully...tiresome,” Mom trailed off. At a loss for anything else to do, she took an enthusiastic bite of the sandwich, chewed it and swallowed it. “You don’t know what you’re missing. My Kari is an excellent baker.”

  He didn’t bother to reply. “If we could get these questions answered,” Miller said. It wasn’t a question, more of a weary, resigned suggestion, as if this was an intellectual exercise, not the possible key to her future. Was that what it was? Had the people at the insurance company already made up their minds?

  “Certainly. How can I be of assistance?” Kari indicated a chair, half-afraid the man would insist on not accepting even that level of hospitality from her.

  This must not have been out of bounds, because he perched on the edge of the chair and let his glance slide over the clipboard. He had the twitchy air of a crow on a fence, on the lookout for the next shiny object to snatch between its beak.

  When his questions came, they were delivered in his machine gun staccato, straight off the form. He allowed her no latitude in answering them. When she tried to elaborate, he cut her off.

  “Yes or no, please, just like a court deposition,” Miller told her. “I don’t have a lot of room on these forms to put long-winded explanations.”

  “I’m trying, sir, but you don’t understand�
��I want to answer your questions as accurately as I can.”

  Miller treated her to another stale expression. “All the explaining in the world isn’t really going to make much difference in the end, Ms. Hendrix.”

  “Sir?” She blinked. Had he just said what she thought he had? “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean this is a complete and total waste of both of our time, isn’t it?” He jammed his ballpoint pen into the pocket protector of his shirt. “Do you honestly think my company is going to approve the payout of a claim on a case that is clearly arson, when you were deep in the hole? And to top it off, you didn’t even pay a year’s worth of premiums?”

  It was as if he’d snatched the breath right out of her. She could do nothing but gasp like a beached fish.

  If she couldn’t speak, her mother wasn’t so similarly stricken. “So I guess no company should expect a favorable resolution of their claim unless they’ve paid at least a year’s premiums and if they were clearly not the victim of arson? What about negligence? Does your company have similar policies regarding accidental fires? Is what you’re saying, Mr. Miller, that your company wants to treat a client’s money as if it were more of a savings account? You don’t collect until you’ve paid in everything you’re claiming as a loss?”

  “The timing is an important aspect of any claim investigation,” he said primly.

  “That’s fascinating.” Mom inspected her fingernails, perfect little pink ovals that she’d had done earlier in the week. “I’m the comptroller for Levi County Health and Wellness. We have our property insurance through your company, and it’s just about up for renewal. I believe our board will be extremely interested to know your company’s policy on claims payout. I’m sure they’ll want to look into any recommendations I could make about alternate property coverage.”

  The investigator went a shade pastier than he’d been already, sliding toward a sickly gray-green. He began coughing, clearly alarmed at losing a major client. “Well, now—just hang on a minute—” he sputtered again, still not recovered. “Uh, can I have a glass of water?”

  Mom treated the man to an oh-so-innocent bat of her eyelashes. “Oh, my. Certainly. That is, if you aren’t afraid that we were trying to, how did you put it? Bribe you or otherwise influence your disposition of the case?”

  Kari silenced an inward groan as the man’s face went from gray to puce with anger. She rose from her chair and got him a glass of water. He took a swallow of the ice water as if it were laced with battery acid, thumped the tumbler down on the table and stood.

  “If I weren’t convinced before, I am now. Regardless of your not so subtle threat,” he said, directing a sneer at Kari’s mom, “you might as well know I’ll be filing my recommendation to reject your claim. And I’ll be forwarding a record of this to the local authorities. I’m sure they’ll find my report—what you’d say? Extremely interesting.” He treated them to another contemptuous look before he murmured, “I’ll see myself out.”

  * * *

  ROB LEANED ON the front counter of the auto parts store and waited for the manager to get through with his current customer. He listened to a complicated litany of carburetor cleaning do’s and don’ts the manager was showering on two kids barely old enough to drive. If the car they were working on had a carburetor instead of fuel injection, it was probably a decade older than they were.

  Finally the pair shuffled out, bemused expressions on their faces. Rob would have bet anything that they’d be back sooner rather than later with the contraption in a bucket, begging for the guy to help them.

  The manager strolled over to greet him. Now that the man was closer, Rob could read the name Ellis on his name patch. “Help you?” Ellis asked.

  Rob flashed his badge, only to have the man hold up both hands. “Hey, we sell only brand-new parts here—none of that chop-shop crap,” he protested. “We’re legit.”

  “No, no, I’m not with the police. I work with the fire department,” Rob told him. “I’m finishing up my investigation of the downtown fire, and, well, you know how it is. Paperwork.” He treated Ellis to his best aw-shucks grin. Over the years, he’d found that it worked out better if people thought he was just going through the motions. They were less likely to warn the target of his investigation.

  Ellis relaxed. “Boy, do I know about paperwork. Weren’t computers supposed to do away with it? I think it just made it worse. So how can I help? We’re not even close to the downtown section.”

  “I’ve got to show my boss that I asked some questions about a guy.” Rob shrugged, trying to communicate with his body language that this was completely routine. “Bosses, right?”

  “Got me a district manager...” Ellis rolled his eyes. “Thinks I can deliver parts, keep the store ordered and do all that paperwork without any decent help. I’d like to see him do it.”

  “Good help is hard to find these days. Funny, that’s why I had to bug you. To ask about some of your help.”

  “Shucks, you ain’t bugging me. Right now it’s slow. Only people coming in here are gals picking up oil for their hubbies and kids after school. And you see they ain’t exactly banging the front door down. Who you need to ask about?” Now Ellis stood at the counter in an exact mirror image of Rob’s posture.

  Rob dug a photo out of his pocket and put it in front of Ellis. “Jake Hendrix?”

  “Jake? That guy hasn’t worked here in...sheesh. Months. And I wouldn’t exactly call what he did while he was here ‘work,’ anyway. Mouthy, you ask me, but then everybody younger than me seems that way. Jake here...” Ellis tapped the photo with a fingernail. “He delivered for me. Said he wanted to do outside sales, but how can you do outside sales if you never get around to making any sales calls?”

  “You run a criminal background check on him?” Rob asked.

  “Naw, not at first. No reason to. See, he’d checked no on the question that asked if he’d ever been arrested. And he had pretty good references. Plus at the time he had a driver’s license. I needed somebody pretty quick, and he looked good for the job—you know, smart, said all the right things, said he really needed the job. I was kinda hoping he’d work out, because, well, he had a wicked sense of humor.

  “But...” Ellis flipped his hands palms up. “Then he fails a random pee-in-a-cup test. What can I do? Company policy says I got to let him go. Man, was he ticked about that.”

  “Yeah? What’d you test him for?”

  “Marijuana. Funny thing, after I let him go, my insurance guy called me up and said that Jake’s license was suspended. He’d apparently gotten charged with a gas drive-off after he started working here, and boom, they suspended his license. So it was just as well.”

  Rob wasn’t hearing anything new. He’d pulled Jake’s criminal check when he’d got in that morning and found it littered with two-bit misdemeanors: drug charges, a public drunkenness or two, several disorderly conducts, plus the gas drive-off Ellis had referred to.

  The gas drive-off had actually been Jake’s second petty theft—he’d already had one on his record. He’d kept the county busy—and somebody, Chelle, maybe, broke from all the fines and fees he’d been charged.

  But he’d always managed to skate on anything more serious. Rob had to hand it to the guy—he might not see his charm, but apparently Jake made a good first impression when he put his mind to it.

  At least that’s what all his former employers had agreed on. The golden boy would come in, smile his little smile, do his little song and dance, and land himself a job. Pretty soon, though, keeping up with the daily grind of actually showing up to work on time every day apparently grew old.

  “So why you looking at Jake? He do something? He start that fire?” Ellis leaned closer. “You can tell me. I won’t tell a soul.”

  Rob seriously doubted that. Ellis struck him as the type that wouldn’t wait until the d
oor shut behind Rob to start spreading the news. “Oh, he’s just the brother of one of the shop owners. He was hanging around and I had to verify...you know...his employment habits.”

  “Habits?” Ellis haw-hawed. “He’s got a serious lack of work ethic, that’s his employment habits.”

  “So have you heard where he’s working now? Anybody asked you for a reference?”

  “Beats me, man. Kind like Jake, they always seem to land on their feet. Now, me? If I got fired? Shoot, I’d be out of a job for months.”

  Rob was disappointed. That was another constant...nobody seemed to know what Jake was doing to make money. He’d tumbled onto Jake’s work trail by checking on a loan application for in-store credit that had shown up on his financials. One employer had been listed, and he’d backtracked over Jake’s checkered past.

  “Well, thanks. I appreciate your time—”

  “Hey, wait a minute. I said I didn’t know. Maybe Jill in the back knows. Jill! You remember that guy Jake who worked for us?”

  A bored-looking woman in the same sort of uniform Ellis wore peered out from around the shelves. “Jake Hendrix?”

  “Sure. You know. He failed the drug test, remember?”

  “How could I forget? Now I’m stuck doing all the deliveries,” she muttered. “What about him?”

  “You know where he’s working now?”

  She furrowed her brow in concentration. “Maybe Jefferson’s Parts? Uh-huh. Last I heard, he had a job there, but just part time.”

  “That’s the one on Milton?” Rob asked.

  “Yeah, but you need parts, you come here.” Ellis pounded the laminate countertop. “Unlike my competition, I get it right the first time, never send you out with something wrong.”

  Rob thanked him and headed out for the sidewalk. It had been a long, grinding day interviewing all of Jake’s past employers. Jake had apparently possessed the staying power of a dandelion, letting life take him wherever it wanted.