Child of Fire (29 page)

“You don’t care about a multimillion-dollar contract for your boss? Isn’t that why you came to town?”

“No, it isn’t. And you should know better than that.” She didn’t respond. “There are strange things happening in town, aren’t there? People being attacked by mysterious packs of dogs, for instance?”

I let her think about that for a minute. She stared at me, trying to guess how much I knew. “Why are you asking about Charles’s seizures? You think it has something to do with the people who have been mauled?”

“I won’t know until I ask.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” she said. She took another sip. “My father had them, and his father, too. Charles has them worse than Pop, but it’s a family thing.”

“Do you have them?”

“Not so far,” she said. “It’s always a possibility, though. Charles’s episodes didn’t start until two years ago. My dad never had them as a kid, either, according to Uncle Cabot. Scary thought, huh?” She didn’t look up from her coffee when she said it and she didn’t look scared.

“I’ve been having a lot of scary thoughts lately. What about the dogs?”

“It … I don’t know. I wish I did. I’d tell Emmett if I knew who was using those dogs. It’s a horrible, horrible way to go. I get shivers just thinking about it.”

I didn’t believe her. I wanted her to be on my side in this, and not only because of the help she could give me, and I certainly didn’t want to fight with her. “Are you sure you don’t know anything? Maybe there’s something about the killings that you would mention if you had a little time to think about it. Something funny about each one.”

“Like what?”

“Like, did these people have enemies in common? Did they die at the same time of day, or at the same sort of place? Anything in common? Anything unusual?”

“Stanley Koch died in the alley behind his bar. Wilma Semple ran off the road up the highway. That was just a car wreck, though, although they said a cougar got to her before the ambulance did. Henry the grocer was mauled on his loading dock along with his night custodian, a man named Johnson, I think.”

“What’s the town gossip?”

“When Wilma died, everyone thought it was Harlan. She had just divorced him and taken up with another man. And Stan had just barred him from his place for a month for bad behavior. But Harlan didn’t even know Henry. He did all his shopping at the Safeway.”

“Did Wilma own a business in town?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Then who had she taken up with?”

“Luke Dubois.”

“So you know the Dubois brothers are behind this.”

“Lots of people think so. Only a couple will say it out loud. Luke had been after Wilma for years, though. He was pretty torn up when she was killed.”

“You think she found out something that she wasn’t supposed to?”

“Like what? That the cops in this town extort protection money? The whole town knows that.”

“I mean, that the Dubois brothers are werewolves.”

She flinched. “What?” She was honestly surprised. I was relieved to see it.

“Werewolves.”

“Are you joking?”

“Phyllis Henstrick said it was obvious to anyone willing to believe.”

She stared off into space for a minute or two, holding the cup halfway to her lips. I took a sip, enjoying the warmth in my belly. It felt good to sit here with her like this. I tried to imagine myself sitting here day after day, talking to Cynthia while we shared coffee. I thought it would be a good life.

It was never going to happen. Not while Annalise was around, and not while Charles still had his “seizures.”

“Is that true?” she asked.

“I think it is.”

“What should we do about it?”

“
We
aren’t going to do a thing about it.”

“Okay, then. What are
you
going to do about it?”

“I’m going to cure them, if I can.”

It was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. As far as I knew, the only cure was the most permanent one.

“Wow.” That was all she said. “There’s so much ugliness in the world.”

I looked down at the table. Some of that ugliness came from me, and it was only going to get worse. “Tell me about the kids.”

The color drained from her face. She didn’t answer. She just gaped at me.

“Tell me about the kids in Hammer Bay who have been burning to death. Yeah, I know about it. I have the same tattoo you do. It twinges whenever Charles has a seizure, just like yours. Tell me about them.”

“I …” She wouldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t speak.

I reached out and gently took her hand. Whether that made her feel comforted, trapped, or both, I couldn’t say.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Everything,” I said. “Start wherever you have to, but I want everything.”

She pulled her hand away, lifted her cup, and drained it.

“My best friend ever since I was six was Daphne. We went through grade school together, high school, everything. She’s divorced now. Her ex is a creep, but she had the most wonderful little girl. She was bold and adventurous—she drove Daph crazy. Daphne couldn’t keep up with her, but I loved that little girl, and I knew she’d grow up to be someone wonderful.

“One day I met Daphne for lunch, and she didn’t have her little girl with her. I asked if she’d found a sitter, and Daphne said her dogs could play in the backyard just fine. Her dogs. I asked who was looking after her daughter, and she said, ‘Who?’ Just like that. ‘Who?’ As if her little girl had never existed.

“Then she started talking about leaving Hammer Bay. What did she have to keep her here, besides a best friend? She had no roots, no family. She was gonna pursue her dreams while she was young enough to do it.

“Eventually, we got into a fight about it. Believe me, that little girl was worth more than any dream anyone has ever had. It was an ugly fight, and some of the people in the diner who knew us butted in. They kept telling me that Daphne didn’t have a daughter, that she’d never had one.”

Cynthia’s hands were trembling. She pressed them against the table. “Daphne started worrying about me. She thought I was having a psychotic break or something. She brought me to her apartment to convince me that she’d never had a kid. She walked me through the rooms, saying, ‘See? No one lives here but me.’ And all I could see were these little toys on the floor and Golden Books on the shelves.”

Her voice caught in her throat. She took a deep,
quavering breath. “Daphne left town a couple weeks later. I should have gone, too, but I couldn’t. By then, I’d seen it with my own eyes.” She stopped talking. She looked down at her empty cup. “There was a baby in a baby carriage …”

She stopped again. She had said enough.

I stood and refilled our cups. I brought the sugar to the table. She scooped and stirred but didn’t look at me. After a few minutes, I asked: “What did you do about it?”

“I hired a private investigator. I told him that something strange was happening to the children in town. He thought I was crazy, but he was happy to take my money. He searched around, interviewed people, the whole thing. Emmett scared him away after a week. All I got out of it was a bill and a useless report.”

“Why do you think you can remember and no one else can?”

“My tattoo. Isn’t that what you already said?”

“I’m just making sure we’re having the same conversation. Cabot said you got it from your grandfather.”

“Why do you think he would put it there? So that we would know when something went wrong? If that’s so, I don’t think I’ve been much use—”

“I don’t think that’s why. I think it’s there to protect you and the rest of the family from that fire. Your grandfather was playing with dangerous magic, and he took pains to protect his own in case things got out of control.”

“I …” She couldn’t finish that sentence, and she couldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t want to believe that.”

“But you do.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. I don’t have a choice anymore, do I?”

An idea occurred to me. “You’re the one who gave the boarding school scholarship to Bill Terril’s grandson, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “I started the scholarship after the private investigator flopped. Well, after the relocation assistance flopped, too.”

“Hold on. Start over for me, please.”

She sighed and sipped her coffee. “The investigator was a waste of time. I didn’t know what to do. I knew people had to get their kids out of Hammer Bay, but how was I supposed to convince them to go? The truth sure as hell wasn’t going to do it.

“I started a relocation fund. I offered ten grand to any family with kids who wanted to move out of town. Only fourteen families signed on. This was right as Charlie’s toy company was taking off, and people thought I was trying to sabotage him. I got a lot of nasty looks, not to mention gentle lectures from concerned townspeople.

“It wasn’t enough, though. The kids … it was still happening. So I started a scholarship fund for boarding schools across the country. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that one was. I wrote checks for eighty-seven kids to go to Oregon, Massachusetts, even Canada. It’s not easy to find spots for that many kids.”

I remembered the empty house just next door to this one. “That sounds expensive.”

She still wouldn’t look up at me. “Not all of my assets are liquid. I had to scramble for some of that money, sure, but I could do more, if people were willing or if I knew what to do. I wish …”

“What? Tell me.”

“Before Daphne left town, I convinced her … actually, I paid her to get one of these.” She pointed to the iron gate on her shoulder. “I paid extra to have it copied exactly.
Exactly
. Daph didn’t like it, but she had already enrolled at the University of Washington and needed money. She was already leaving me.”

I knew where this was heading. “But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

There was more to casting a spell than tracing a couple of lines. If she didn’t know that, she didn’t have the spell book Annalise and I wanted to find. Hell, she might not even know it existed.

I was glad of that.

“What else could I do?” she asked. “I stay here because my family built this town. I own a good chunk of it. These families only stay because the toy factory gives them jobs. I’d firebomb the factory—hell, the whole town, if I had to—but Charlie …” She let her voice trail off.

“What? What did Charlie do?”

“He said he could fix it.”

That gave me goose bumps. “What do you mean?”

“He said he could turn the kids back into kids. He said he could cure them. He told me not to worry, that he was going to take care of it and that I didn’t need to give everything away to stop … He said a lot of things about this town and our family. But he told me to leave it to him, that he could undo it. I believe him. Do you think he can do it?”

I suddenly felt sick. Could Charlie Three undo the transformations that had struck the town’s children? If so, I’d made sure the little girl on the basketball court could never come back. If so, I’d killed her. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you can cure the Dubois brothers, can’t you? Maybe Charlie can cure all those kids.”

My fear and nausea turned into a hard little knot. I’d once tried to cure people of the predators inside them. I’d failed in the ugliest way I could imagine.

I looked into her eyes. Her face was full of hope that her problems were going to be fixed by someone else—someone with the power and authority to set things right. Mingled with that hope was the fear that she was
passing the buck. I wished there was something I could do for her. “Maybe.”

“You don’t believe it, do you?”

“I won’t know what to believe until I talk to your brother.” She glanced at the phone on the wall. I shook my head. “Face-to-face.

“Do you think this is his fault? I know you do. You’re not that good a liar. But it’s not his fault. It can’t be. He would never do something like this.”

“Cynthia, his company logo has fire on it.”

“That’s not … when he was a kid, he had nightmares all the time about a burning wheel, and it … he’d wake up screaming from them.” She stopped talking and looked all over the table as if she expected to find a persuasive argument lying on it. “Can I tell you another story? About Charles?”

Hammer Bay seemed to be made of stories. “Go ahead.”

“Charles wasn’t the kind of kid to have a lot of friends, okay? He was a good kid, mostly, but it just didn’t work out for him. He did have the latest, most expensive toys, though, so a lot of kids wanted to play with him. See what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“So he had these dreams, okay? And he and a couple of the kids who played with him got the idea to roll these old car tires down the hill behind our house so they’d bounce into the trees. Being a kid and kinda dumb, Charles tried to impress everyone. He put something flammable on them—I never found out what—and set a couple on fire before he rolled it down into the woods.

“I don’t know if it was because of his dreams or if he was just being a dumb kid like every dumb kid, but he started a huge fire. Three families lost their homes, and Charles cried and cried. After that night, he became very
sensitive to his place in this family. He understands what it means to be a Hammer in Hammer Bay. He put that burning wheel into the company logo to remind himself of his responsibilities. He would never do something to hurt the people in this town again. It just isn’t in him.”

“What if he thought he was doing more good than harm?”

She opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out. Her expression went far away for a moment, as if she was remembering something. When she looked at me again, she seemed less sure of herself. “He would never do something like this.”

“Cynthia, what if you’re wrong?”

She laid her hand over her mouth and her eyes brimmed with tears. I did not offer kind words or a gentle touch. There’s no way to comfort a person who suspects someone they love is a killer. Her secret fear had been spoken aloud, and she needed to face the naked truth of it. Or maybe I’m just a bastard.

“Is that really what’s happened?” she asked.

“I’m not sure yet. But I want you to help me put a stop to this.”