Cinders

by Cara Malone

  Mari carried the hostas and bulbs to the greenhouse at the back of the estate for storage until she was ready for them. Then she retrieved a pair of gardening gloves, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow.

  It hurt her soul to be carrying such blunt instruments into the garden – it was like she was preparing to dig a grave, not make something beautiful. But the damage had been done, and now it was necessary to dig out the poison so she could move on.

  She spent the afternoon uprooting charred and withered plants, dumping them into the wheelbarrow and hauling them to a compost heap tucked discretely away in the back of the garden.

  Mari kept her phone in her pocket with the ringer turned up, waiting for Cyn’s call and wondering how the conversation with Detective Holt was going. When she heard footsteps crunching on the gravel behind her, she wondered if Cyn decided to just come back without calling first and her heart skipped a beat at the prospect of seeing her again.

  When she turned around, she saw her father instead.

  He was grinning at her as he asked, “Are you aware that you’re covered head to toe in dirt?”

  Marigold looked down and saw that she was, in fact, filthy. Her white t-shirt was now anything but, and dirt stuck to the sweat on her forearms. She smiled back and said, “I guess I got a little lost in my work. To be fair, most of this is soot from the fire, not dirt.”

  “I haven’t seen you get this dirty since you were a little girl,” her father pointed out. It was true – normally, Marigold worked meticulously and even her gardening gloves remained clean. “What inspired this?”

  “I just wanted to get all the burned-up plants out of the way as quickly as possible,” Mari said. “I don’t want to see the garden torn up like this any longer than I have to.”

  She took off her gloves and brushed the dirt from her arms and shirt as best she could, then she explained her plans for the garden and the impending wedding that she’d need to get it into shape for. “I’d like to watch someone get married here as soon as possible to lay down a happy memory on top of the bad one.”

  “That will be nice, princess,” her father said. “Do you have a moment to talk? I came with some news.”

  “Of course,” Marigold said. She set down her shovel and suggested that they go over to the meditation labyrinth.

  As she guided her father through the garden, he looked around with wonder in his eyes and said, “I’m realizing now that I haven’t spent any considerable time in the garden for some years. I remember when your mother started it, the garden was nothing more than a simple plot of vegetables about twelve feet square. You’ve done a lot to expand it.”

  “I try to add one new feature every year,” Mari said as they came to the large, circular path of paving stones that she’d used to form her meditation labyrinth. “I built this with the help of the landscapers in my senior year of college. It’s supposed to help you think.”

  “Does it work?” her father asked.

  “I think so,” Mari said.

  They began to trace the path at a meandering pace and finally, her father came to the point. “I’ve set a date for my retirement.”

  Marigold's ears perked up, but she kept her eyes on the path in front of her. “Oh?”

  “I’m ready now, and more importantly, I think you’re ready now,” he said. “I’m handing over the reins to you, effective at the beginning of the next financial quarter. The estate is yours, as are the staff. Choose a co-conservator or manage the place on your own – I’m sure you’ll do great either way.”

  Marigold couldn’t hide her feelings any longer. She jumped up and threw her arms around her father’s neck like a teenage girl instead of the twenty-five-year-old, newly appointed estate conservator that she was. "Thank you. I won't disappoint you."

  “I know you won’t, princess,” he said.

  They kept walking, and then she said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said regarding work-life balance, and I think you’re right. I spoke to Emily this morning and asked her to work beside me. Ryan’s a great marketing director and if he wants to stay on in that capacity, I’ll be happy to work with him, but Emily will be a dedicated conservator and a good partner.”

  “I think that’s a wonderful solution,” her father said. He rested his hand approvingly on her shoulder, then directed his attention to the labyrinth path and asked, “So what’s the point of this thing, anyway? To go in circles?”

  “To find inner peace,” Marigold said, laughing at his incredulous tone.

  Twenty-Five

  Cyn

  Going to the police station to tell Detective Holt about Drew was one of the most terrifying and shameful moments of Cyn's life. She knew that everything Marigold told her the night before was true. None of this was her fault… so why did it feel like such an unforgivable betrayal of her family?

  To go inside was to ruin Drew’s life, but to turn around and run was to ruin any chance she might have of making a life with Marigold. She wanted to be someone Marigold deserved, not someone who protected a criminal family member who didn’t care about her anyway.

  Drew got himself into this, she reminded herself as she walked into the station. She was trying to turn it into a mantra that would get her through the meeting with Holt. It’s not my fault.

  Her stomach was tying itself in knots when she walked up to Marcy at the front desk and asked, “Is Detective Holt here? I have some information about the arson case that he's working on."

  "Yeah, he's in his office. You’re from the fire department, right?” Marcy asked. Cyn nodded, so she told Cyn to go on back, then buzzed her through the secured door that led to the rest of the station.

  She saw Gus sitting at his desk in the bullpen, along with a few other officers getting caught up on their paperwork. He had his head down and she walked briskly past him. She’d just got done begging him to pull strings and get her stepbrother an interview – if she had to dodge questions from him, she might not have the courage to keep going to the fire investigator’s office.

  Luckily, he was absorbed in his work and didn’t notice her. She continued down the hall and with a heavy heart, she knocked on the door frame of Detective Holt's office.

  He looked up from a mountain of paperwork and smiled. “Robinson. What can I do for you?”

  “Sir, I have some information about the arson case,” she said. “May I come in?”

  “Sure, have a seat,” Holt said. She took one more glance down the hall and her heart skipped a beat as she locked eyes with Gus. He’d heard her name and now he was giving her a goofball look – he had no idea why she was here.

  Cyn stepped into the office and closed the door behind her.

  As she sank into a chair across from Holt’s desk, he reached for a thin folder and opened it on top of all the rest of his paperwork. He scanned through it – all the information they had so far about the three incidents – and said with a frown, “Looks like we don’t have much. Braden Fox turned out to be a dead end, and nobody’s recognized the man in our police sketch yet.”

  Cyn swallowed hard and said what she came for. “That’s why I’m here - I recognize him.”

  Detective Holt gave her a surprised look. “Oh yeah?”

  She wanted to fix her eyes on the corner of Holt’s desk – anywhere other than his face. But she was here in a professional capacity as well as a family member of the perpetrator. She forced herself to look Detective Holt in the eyes as she said, “It’s my stepbrother, Drew. Uh, that’s Andrew Zeller.”

  Holt narrowed his eyes at her, leaning across the desk as he asked, “Why do you think that?”

  Cyn sighed and pulled her phone out of her pocket, flipping through her photos until she found one of Drew – before he shaved the fuzz from his chin. She held it up for Detective Holt and he compared it to the police sketch, looking curious but unconvinced. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “He works as a security guard and he was at the museum on the day the Rosen painting was torche
d,” she said. “He had a bad experience at the barn that was set on fire, and he’s resented Marigold Grimm for the last ten years because he perceives that she chose me over him.”

  Cyn tried not to elaborate too much on that last point. She didn’t want to drag Mari into this, and she should be allowed to come out to the community when she was ready - hopefully with Cyn on her arm.

  Holt sat back in his chair. She was losing him. He folded his arms over his chest and said, “I know you’re fire, not police, but there’s such a thing as circumstantial evidence-”

  “I went to his apartment last week,” Cyn hurried onward. “There was a distinct smell of gasoline with no explanation for the source, and he had cigarettes that matched the brand we found in the Grimm House garden.”

  Holt shook his head. “You really haven’t given me anything concrete, and arsonists are notoriously difficult to nail down. Did he confess to anything?”

  “No,” Cyn admitted.

  “And do you two happen to have a beef with each other?”

  Now, she did look away. “Yes. We’ve always had a fair amount of tension in our relationship. Our parents got married while my father and I were still grieving the loss of my mother, and I don’t think Drew ever got a chance to properly mourn his own father’s death.”

  “I’ll look into it, but I have to be honest with you,” Holt said. “The feud doesn’t help, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do much with this information.”

  Cyn felt herself deflating like a balloon. That was absolutely not the result she’d expected. “Search his apartment. He’s not that smart – I’m willing to bet you’ll find something that will link him to the crimes.”

  Holt shook his head again, looking apologetic. “I can’t get a warrant without probable cause. Do you know why he’s setting the fires? Our best bet at this point is to anticipate his moves and catch him in the act.”

  “Another fire?” Cyn asked, her heart sinking.

  “Better one more fire than five,” Holt said.

  “He’s upset about how his life’s turning out, I guess,” Cyn said with a shrug. All of the fires so far had something to do with her – the ways Drew believed she’d messed up his trajectory – but that didn’t help her to predict the future. “He’s mad at me because he thinks I’m stealing what belongs to him. Maybe he’ll target me, or Grimm House again? If you can’t arrest him now, then can you please put some protection on Marigold Grimm?”

  “Trust me, Robinson,” Holt said. “I’ll do everything I can. I don’t want any more fires, either.”

  Cyn nodded, satisfied. She stood up to go, then turned back to Detective Holt. “I know this is going to sound bad, but I may have gone a little vigilante.”

  He gave her a stern look – it reminded her exactly of the way that Frank looked at her when she got a little too eager at the scene of a fire and started thinking she was Wonder Woman, running in to put it out all on her own.

  “What did you do?”

  “I thought I could get him to stop if I gave him a shot at something he wants,” she said. “I worked with Gus to pull some strings and get Drew an interview for a dispatcher position here. He’s supposed to come in tomorrow – maybe you could sit in on the interview and get a little information out of him?”

  “I doubt he’s going to confess anything in the middle of a job interview,” Holt said, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. “I’ll ask the chief if he minds having a second interviewer in the room. That all?”

  “Yeah, that’s all,” Cyn said.

  She left Holt’s office feeling let down. She hadn’t actually accomplished anything, and she didn’t want to call Marigold just to tell her that she would shortly have a security detail. Luckily, there was Gus to distract her. He popped up from his desk as she walked through the bullpen, a huge grin on his face.

  “What?” Cyn asked.

  “What were you talking to Holt about?” he asked, looking entirely too pleased about it.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth – not right now, where the whole precinct would be able to hear it. “I’ll tell you later, okay?”

  Gus winked and Cyn gave him a side-long look. She wanted to ask him if there was something wrong with his eye, but then he said, “I think I know.”

  “You look pretty happy about it,” she snapped.

  Gus frowned. “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” Cyn said. She leaned in close and whispered so no one else could hear, “Why would I be happy about turning in my own stepbrother? Or trying to, since Holt didn’t seem to think he could act on it.”

  “Turning Drew in?” Gus asked. He had no idea what she was talking about, but the cat was out of the bag.

  “Come here,” she said, pulling him into the empty break room and shutting the door behind them. “It’s bad enough I had to rat him out – I don’t want the whole police department to know.”

  “Know what?” Gus asked, getting just as exasperated as Cyn felt.

  “Drew’s the arsonist,” she whispered, and Gus’s eyes went wide.

  “Seriously?” he asked. “I knew the guy was a weirdo, but I would never have guessed that. Wait, that phone call about the job – was he blackmailing you or something?”

  “No,” Cyn said. “It was sort of the other way around. I thought if I got him a job at the station, I could force him to stop. Who in their right mind would keep lighting fires while they worked for the police? But then I told Marigold and she convinced me that I had to tell Holt before anyone got hurt.”

  She let out a long breath. There. Everything’s out in the open and there are no more secrets. So why did she still feel so crummy?

  “So, this is why you asked me to pull the work logs for Drew’s security company,” Gus said. “And Holt’s not going to do anything? Why?”

  “He said it was all circumstantial,” Cyn said. “He’s going to keep an eye on Drew and just wait until somebody catches him in the act.”

  “Wow,” Gus said, running his hands through his sandy blond hair as if his mind had been blown. Couldn’t possibly be worse than how I feel, Cyn thought. Then he asked, “Does Samantha know?”

  “God, no,” Cyn said. “And she’d kill me if she knew I was here. You have to keep this information under wraps until Holt can make a move, okay?”

  “Okay,” Gus said. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Cyn said. She reached for the door, then paused with her hand on the knob. She turned back to Gus and said, “Wait a minute. What did you think you knew?”

  “Huh?” he asked, looking shiftily at the ground.

  “At the beginning of our conversation,” Cyn said. “You thought we were talking about something else. What was it?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it was nothing,” Gus said. “I already forgot.”

  “Bullshit,” Cyn said. “Tell me.”

  They’d been friends since the seventh grade, when Cyn was a loner and Gus was a slightly porky, awkward kid. He’d never been able to keep secrets from her and she blocked the break room door with her body. It didn’t take long before he tossed up his hands.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll tell you, but you’re ruining your own surprise.”

  “What surprise?” Cyn asked.

  “The service award winners are always announced on the night of the event, but I may have gotten some inside information,” he said. “They picked you for Firefighter of the Year. I was flirting with Marcy at the front desk while she was stuffing the envelopes and I saw your name. I must have had a brain fart because when I saw you going into Holt’s office, I thought he was letting you know that you won.”

  “Gus, you are a brain fart,” Cyn said with a laugh.

  “Just try to act surprised when they call your name,” he said.

  She was grinning like a mad woman, wondering how the hell this had happened, and then her momentary elation fell away and she said, “Shit. How am I supposed to accept that award while my own stepbrother is running a
round lighting fires all over Grimm Falls?”

  Twenty-Six

  Marigold

  On the night of the service awards, Marigold handed the final preparations over to Emily and instead focused her attention on Cyn. It felt strange, being in her living quarters instead of down in the fray as the first guests were beginning to arrive, but Emily would be officially promoted to co-conservator in a month when Mari’s father retired and she had to loosen her grip on the estate sometime.

  Tonight seemed like as good a night as any because Cyn was worked up about her award.

  “I don’t deserve this,” she said as Marigold led her into the bedroom to get dressed. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, her dress uniform hanging in a garment bag over her shoulder. “I’ve only been in the department four years, and I don’t think I did anything good enough to earn an award.”

  Mari positioned Cyn in front of a full-length mirror, then took the garment bag and hung it from a hook on the wall. She took Cyn’s head in her hands and looked into her steely eyes, then said, “Just breathe. You do deserve this – you’re incredible.”

  “Then why do I feel like such an imposter?” Cyn asked.

  “Because your stepmom and brother have been treating you like garbage for years,” Marigold said. “And that has more to do with their own insecurities than it has to do with you. Everyone else loves you… including me.”

  Cyn’s expression softened and her lip twitched into a smile. “You do?”

  “Yes,” Marigold said. “It’s crazy, I know, because it’s been happening so fast-”

  “Fast?” Cyn asked. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve.”