“She says she’d have saved herself.”
“Ha.” But if that was what she needed to believe, Grit didn’t care. “It’d help if we knew who set the fire. You know my theory. Myrtle was onto Whittaker’s network. He ordered her house torched but he didn’t strike the match himself.”
“It was an electrical fire. No match.”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
Elijah grinned. “‘Metaphorically’?”
Grit nodded out the window. “Look, pansies. See them? They must have reseeded. We didn’t plant them. I like pansies. They’re like little smiling faces.”
“Grit, you worry me.”
“Projection. You worry yourself. What’s on your mind? Jo?”
“Jo’s fine. She won’t stay here and won’t let me stay with her until she gets herself straightened out with her job.”
“You two—”
“She’s at work now. What about you? You going in?”
“The Pentagon and Admiral Jenkins await. You want me to corral some general, get you a job?”
Elijah dropped his feet to the floor. “No need. I’ve been called in to do some intel work and analysis.”
“Ah. Involve toting a gun?”
“A.J.’s talked about having me back at the lodge.”
It wasn’t a direct answer, but Elijah would know that. Grit let it go. “With Jo down here working for the Secret Service?”
“She doesn’t have to stay in Washington.” A twitch of a smile from Elijah. “She and Myrtle could open a quilt shop in Black Falls.”
It was a ray of humor from Elijah, anyway. Grit wasn’t a contemplative sort. “The dead guy in Vermont’s on your mind. He would be even if your sister and this Nick Martini hadn’t found him. It was a kerosene lamp fire. Do those happen much up there?”
“We have electricity in Vermont, Grit.”
“Was it Lowell Whittaker’s lamp?”
“I don’t know.” That thought clearly didn’t sit well with Elijah. “Lowell might not be stupid, but I can see him putting the wrong fuel in the lamp. This guy sees it and figures he doesn’t need to waste his flashlight batteries.”
“Strike a match, and
Elijah stood up. He was tall, but Jo Harper liked to say she could take him in a fair fight. Grit wasn’t sure how she defined fair. She was another native Vermonter, in love with Elijah since high school—but he was the bad boy and she was the police chief’s daughter. Grit had spent enough time in Vermont in recent months to work out who was who in little Black Falls.
“At least it wasn’t the woodstove,” Grit said. “I hate woodstoves.”
“What’s to hate?”
“Wood boxes, smoke, ashes. Every time I ran out of wood in my cabin up there, it was icy and snowy out.”
“It’s winter, Grit. What did you expect?” Elijah walked over to the sink and rinsed out his mug. “Rose didn’t need this.”
Grit turned from the pansies and bird feeders. “She picks through rubble for survivors of disasters. She finds lost little kids. She can handle herself.”
Elijah gave Grit a hard-assed Cameron look. “You aren’t thinking about asking her out, are you?”
“No. She’s like a sister to me.”
“She
“That’s why you don’t see her as one of you.”
Elijah frowned. “Grit, that makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. What’s with this Nick Martini character?”
“I’ve met him a few times out in California, but I don’t know him well. Sean trusts him.”
“Vivian Whittaker trusted her husband, and turned out he was running a network of paid assassins out of their study for fun and profit. You’ll talk to Sean between coats of paint?”
“Yeah.”
Grit started for the utility room, which led to Myrtle’s tidy garage. “Say hi to Jo for me. You know, three’s a crowd. If I stayed at her apartment in Georgetown and she stayed here—”
“Won’t work that way.”
Grit didn’t pursue the subject, because he had a feeling if he did, Elijah would shoot him—not to kill, just to wing him and shut him up.
Or maybe to kill him, after all. Elijah and Jo had reunited under stressful conditions, and fast. They had stuff to work out. Not the big stuff. The little stuff that could eat away at a relationship.
Not, Grit thought, that he knew from experience. He’d never found anyone he’d been tempted to marry. He wasn’t sure now he ever would, not specifically because he was missing his lower left leg—it had more to do with the ambush, watching a friend die. He’d watched himself become more and more distanced from everyone he knew. He realized what was happening, but as can-do as he was, he couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
He went out to the garage and got into Myrtle’s second car, a 1989 Buick that she’d inherited from some dead uncle in South Carolina. The interior smelled faintly of cigars.
Grit was almost at Massachusetts Avenue when his cell phone jingled next to him on the passenger’s seat. He picked up.
“Where are you?”
He recognized the voice of Charlie Neal, the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. “Stop sign,” Grit said. “I’m driving. I threw caution to the wind and answered the phone. Aren’t you in school?”
“On my way. I have a calculus test today. So boring.”
“You aren’t taking one for your coconspirator cousin Conor, are you?”
“Conor took a test for me. I didn’t take one for him. He did terrible.”
The two look-alike cousins had done prince-and-the-pauper switches so that Charlie could get out from under his Secret Service detail. They both were in trouble with their parents, the Secret Service, Elijah Cameron and Grit Taylor.
Grit pulled over into the shade. He wasn’t that used to driving again, and he’d learned to give any conversation with Charlie and his 180-IQ his full attention. “What do you want, Charlie?”
“Our arsonist is back.”
Grit wasn’t that surprised by Charlie’s comment. Cars zipped past him on the residential street that ran perpendicular to the one he was on. The Buick was warm, the morning temperature almost springlike, but he didn’t roll down his window. The car wasn’t bugged—he’d checked. The Secret Service was onto his friendship with Charlie Neal. Jo Harper didn’t like it, but Charlie’s dad, the vice president, had decided Grit was someone the incorrigible teenager would listen to.
A positive influence, Grit thought. Him.
Preston Neal probably hadn’t thought Grit and Charlie would be talking pyromaniacs again. Charlie had figured out a network of paid killers was at work back in November, before anyone else. He didn’t need such nice-ties as evidence. He remained convinced a serial arsonist had been one of Lowell Whittaker’s contract killers and was still on the loose.
“Whose phone are you on?” Grit asked him.
“A friend’s.”
Defensive, vague. Grit knew better than to try to get specifics out of him. Charlie would be ten questions ahead by now. Being direct with the kid was his only chance. “The Secret Service know?”
“I have to be in class in one minute forty-eight seconds.”
“Any candidates for who this firebug is?” Grit asked.
“I have a list of names.”
Charlie would. Grit regretted his question. “‘Firebug’ can mean anything.”
