Hell Fire

anything interesting. I’ll call you back tomorrow to check in.”

Before he answered, I heard keys clicking. I guessed he must be wearing a headset or an earpiece. “Huh.” He sounded puzzled. “How do you spell the name of the town?”

I enunciated each letter, and then more keys clacked on his end. His keyboarding sounded very impressive. And how much of a dork was I for noticing?

“What’s the problem?” I asked when the silence became extended.

“Well . . . there’s nothing about Kilmer, Georgia,” he told me at last. “Nothing. I’ve checked six different search engines to be sure. They offer me Kilmer as a last name . . . and ask if I mean Kildare, and finally suggest a swine farm in Monticello, Indiana. According to the Internet, Kilmer doesn’t exist.”

“But I’m standing here in the public library,” I protested. “I grew up here.”

How was that even possible in this day and age?

“I can’t address that. If you can give me latitude and longitude, I can try to scout the place. I’ll proceed as if it’s dangerous and get back to you.”

“Jesus,” I said, shaken. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

Booke sounded worried. “Be careful, Corine. I don’t like the feel of this.”

“You and me both.”

Once I promised to call him in the morning, I rang off. He said he’d contact us if he learned anything we needed to know before then. I stared at the microfiche machine with equal blankness until Chance brought me out of it with a tap on the shoulder. I had to fight the urge to lean into his arms. I knew he wanted me to. Instead, I filled him in.

“Weirder and weirder.” Chance touched my cheek lightly, drawing my face up. “I suspect we’ve got a hell of a mess here.”

“No kidding.” I couldn’t imagine the scope of whatever had scrubbed all traces of Kilmer from the outside world. Maybe we should talk to Sandra Cheney and find out how she’d ended up here. She might be the last new blood the town had seen.

His fingers trailed down my jaw and curled around the nape of my neck, as if he meant to lean down and kiss me. Instead, his gaze fixed on mine, steady and reassuring. “I just want you to know I’m in, just like you were in Laredo, no matter how bad this gets.”

I smelled something burning.

Familiar Strangers

The light had shorted out in the microfiche machine, as if somebody didn’t want us reading the article written about my mother’s death. As discouragement went, the dead dog offered more punch. But I was probably reading more into a minor mechanical failure than it warranted. After all, it had probably been years since anyone had used this station at all.

So I wrote it off as an odd coincidence, though the librarian made such a big fuss about calling the maintenance man, you’d have thought he was flying in from New York instead of coming up the basement stairs. When Mr. McGee finally presented himself, I understood her concern a little better. With his long white handlebar mustache and unruly head of hair, he looked like a Civil War relic himself.

This repair could take a while. The librarian frowned at us and returned to her post at the front desk. Thank God she hadn’t noticed Butch napping in the chair beside me; that would have gotten us tossed out on our collective ears. I tried to block him with my body, but Mr. McGee said, without glancing up from his work, “I don’t care a bit about that little dog. He ain’t harmed nothin’.”

So he wasn’t quite as blind as he seemed. “Are there archives downstairs?”

“If you wanna call it that. We got some boxes of junk that don’t go nowhere else. Don’t let Edna see if you’re fixing to sneak down there. You’ll get her blood pressure up.”

I took that as tacit permission, and tucked Butch beneath my arm. He whined a little but had the sense not to make a big fuss. Chance followed me as we wove through the shelves, angling toward the door Mr. McGee had emerged from. In a small town like this, it wasn’t locked, so we headed downstairs unnoticed.

The basement smelled of dust and mildew. I wrinkled my nose; Butch sneezed. Old brown boxes sat piled on green industrial shelving. Numerical codes had been scribbled on the front, but I had no idea what they meant. I felt sure Dewey wouldn’t approve.

We each opened a box at random and prowled through the contents. It was worse than it appeared. Old deeds, marriage licenses, letters and diaries had all been tossed together without rhyme or reason. As far as I could tell, the numbers on the outside of the boxes seemed to indicate a range of years for the junk contained therein. If I cared about quantities of cotton ordered by the general store in 1887, I’d be in heaven.

The air felt heavy and still, not even a hint of ventilation. Noticing that made me pause and look at the walls. “Chance, how many feet of rock would you say lie between us and the street?”

He shrugged. “A lot. Why?”

“Seems to me it would take an awful lot of power to block you in here. Why don’t you try your luck again and see if there’s anything we can use?”

“Worth a shot.”

Chance focused. The room came alive with that raw static feel, as if we were mere moments away from a thunder-storm bursting to life around us. When his eyes opened, I saw tiny sparks of lightning. There was something deliciously elemental about him when he used his talent. I shivered a little, following him over to a metal filing cabinet shoved up against a wall.

He pulled out a manila folder with the initials J.M. scrawled on the front in red ink. “This is it.”

“Whatever it is,” I muttered.

Chance flipped it open, looking dubious. Score. He’d found a bunch of random newspaper clippings. Most of the articles had yellowed with age, and they didn’t relate to any one subject, either.

I plucked out the top one and read aloud. “‘Highway Built Ten Miles West of Proposed Route; Town Council Irate.’” The next one was even less interesting: “ ‘No Cable for Kilmer.’” If we’d found someone’s secret research, I had no idea what they were doing, except maybe documenting how sad and boring this town was.

Huh. Maybe Chance’s gift just wasn’t working right.

He closed the folder with a snap. “We should just take the lot and read them later. We don’t want Edna to catch us down here.”

That seemed like a good idea, so I slipped the file into my bag. Butch went in on top of it, and then we headed back up the narrow, spiderweb-clogged stairs. My heart almost stopped when I ran into Mr. McGee. He steadied me with strong, gnarled hands, but his eyes looked weird and filmy in the half-light.

“She’s gone to the lavatory, young ’uns. Thinks y’all already left.” He sounded oddly urgent. “Don’t let her catch you messin’ around down here.”

His fervor took root in the form of dread. I had no idea what a withered old librarian could do to us, but if I’d learned anything over the years, appearances could be deceiving. We quick-stepped to the front door and out into a dismal, drizzling rain.

To my consternation, a woman I recognized met us on the way out. Miss Minnie had offered me a home after my mother died. I’d been happy there for a time. She respected my need to grieve, but she drew me back into daily life with irresistible requests for me to do this or that because she wasn’t as spry as she used to be.

Together, we baked pies and cookies, cleaned out her attic, and refinished an old wooden dresser—pretty much anything she could think of to keep my mind off my loss. And I got better in her company, crying less in the night and talking more during the day.

But the respite didn’t last long—just a few months. In the evenings, Miss Minnie would let me look through her jewelry box and tell me stories about the people they used to belong to—and I liked that. It made me feel rooted, part of something for the first time since my mama died.

And it was good until my gift sparked to life. I was handling a jeweled hair clip, a pretty piece that I’d long