Fear dried Lily’s throat. It was the stress, she told herself. She wasn’t thinking clearly. Even if somehow she found out the arsonist from all those years ago, even if that same female arsonist was the one who caused her parents’ fire, it wasn’t going to be someone who’d openly talked to her from the day she arrived in Pecan Valley. It wasn’t going to be the sheriff’s daughter. How crazy was that?
Mary Belle pumped the chair higher, then tied the long plastic cape tighter around Lily’s neck. The scissors suddenly gleamed inches from her eyes.
“I saw your picture in the yearbook,” Lily blurted out.
“Yeah? I was quite a looker, wasn’t I?”
“You still are,” Lily assured her.
“There’s no point trying to be nice now, honey. It’s too late. I knew when you got into town that it could all come crashing down if I wasn’t absolutely careful. But I swear, you are the
Snip, snip, snip. Lily saw the snips of hair fall. Then hanks of it. About the same second she froze up with panic, she realized that Mary Belle hadn’t just tied the cape around her-but around the chair as well. She could move her legs. She could move her bandaged hands under the cape. But she couldn’t get out of the chair.
“Don’t be squirming around now. I don’t want these scissors to slip accidentally. Don’t worry. I’ll make you look good. You’re going to be last customer, and I want your hair cut to look just right.”
“Mary Belle-”
“The place will go up fast. Losing this place is going to kill me, like I said. But by the time the firemen get here, I’ll be out in the street, screaming for help, and you’ll be the only one inside. They’ll think you set yet another fire, Lily. And that this one finally got you, too. I never wanted it to be this way, I swear,” she said sadly. “But something I want you to know…”
“What?” Lily had stopped breathing. Her gaze tracked the movement of the scissors, her mind racing, trying to find a way out. Trying to think of a way out.
“Your parents, they were never supposed to die. I felt terrible about that. No one was ever supposed to get hurt, not physically-whoa there, bless your heart. That was silly, your trying to move. You’re not going anywhere.”
The tip of the scissors nicked Lily’s neck, right at the throat. A thin crimson line shone in the mirror.
“We’re not done with this haircut,” Mary Belle told her. “And believe me, you don’t want me to rush.” She turned the chair, so Lily had a view of the products on the counter. “See there?”
Mutely, Lily looked. The counter of products hadn’t caught her attention before, but there was nothing she wouldn’t expect to see in a hair salon. But now she realized that Mary Belle had set up an altar. The hair sprays and potions, the nail polishes and nail polish removers, all had their tops opened, and were arranged prettily with a candle in the center.
Only one other item was included in the display. A hairdryer. A plain old, standard salon hairdryer-except that the back had been removed, revealing the naked heating coils.
Mary Belle smoothly plugged in the hairdryer, at the same time she spun around and competently, swiftly, wrapped adhesive tape round and round Lily, the cape trapping her arms and upper torso. “It’ll be a little while before those coils heat up. We’re not done with the haircut. And I need a few more minutes to brace myself before losing my shop. This is the one thing I valued in the world besides my daughters and my daddy. So don’t be feeling sorry for yourself, because I’m gonna lose a lot here, too. If you’d just never come back, this never would have happened. It’s your fault. Everything’s your fault.”
As if they were discussing the weather, Mary Belle looked at her haircut creation in the mirror, from one angle and then another. “I believe we’ll go just a little shorter on the left side, don’t you think?”
All Lily could think was,
The coils on the bald hair dryer started to glow…
When Griff dropped into the creaking office chair in Sheriff Conner’s office, he stretched out his long legs, calm as a spring breeze. “We need to have a little discussion,” he said lazily, and accepted the mug of battery-acid strength coffee that Herman Conner pushed toward him.
“Now, Griff. There’s no point in your getting mad over that boy.”
“I’m not mad. I never get mad,” Griff assured him. He realized Conner thought he was unhappy about Jason being returned to his mother’s house. And he was. But the dominating headlines in his mind were the images of Lily’s soot-stained cheeks and shocked eyes after yesterday’s fire.
At three in the morning, he’d still been pacing the floor, checking on her every five minutes, leaping up every time she coughed.
And since he hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep, he’d put all the information they’d gathered on the Campbell fire in his head. It was like watching puzzle pieces interlock. They knew someone had committed three or more acts of arson twenty years ago. That that someone was likely a girl. That that someone had gotten away with her crimes- and the only reason Lily’s appearance in town had started a rash of arson fires was if the guilty person then was the guilty person now.
If there was another way to put it together, Griff didn’t know how. What he’d realized, in the wee hours of the morning, was that someone else had all the puzzle pieces he and Lily had. Maybe more.
And that someone was the sheriff.
“Here’s the thing.” Conner poured himself a second mug, pulled out a drawer, propped his boot on it. “You and I know the score on kids like Jason. You’re too realistic to think there’s ever some magic answer for a troubled kid.”
“I don’t. But if Jason’s father wasn’t a relative of the judge, you know damn well he’d be in prison, instead of getting a free ride out of jail every few months.”
“True. But that’s one of the things you can’t change. So you either eat yourself up about it, or you do what you can do.” Conner tipped back his chair. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I had five kids of my own. Two of them nearly cost my sanity. That’s how I know. All you can do is what you can do, Griff.”
Griff suddenly rubbed an itch at the back of his neck. “Which two kids? What happened?”
The sheriff sighed. “I had twins. Twin girls. And when Mary Ann died in an accident, I thought my wife would sink under the weight of it. She just couldn’t recover. I had a hard enough time myself. Nothing shook us out of that grief until we finally noticed that Mary Belle…well, let’s just say, she was barreling down the wrong path.”
“How so?” Griff asked lazily.
The sheriff’s eyes shifted away from him. “What I think now is that losing her sister, her twin, just rocked Mary Belle’s foundation to the core. It’s like she was trying to believe she didn’t care about losing her sister, about herself, about anything. She turned into this wild girl, out of control every which way.”
“I take it she partied quite a bit?”
Conner took another pull on the coffee. “To say the least of it.” He sighed again. “I blame myself for not paying attention. We were too wrapped up in our own grief to see it. She was wildly in love with a new boy about every month. It’s not as if a high school boy is going to say no when something’s offered free.”
“Not in this life,” Griff affirmed, although his pulse was suddenly slamming, slamming, slamming.
“So each of the boys she took up, they took advantage. And then they’d break her heart. Then she’d get so angry. And even more wild.” Conner shook his head. “The thing is, when I see a boy like Jason, or Steve, or any of the wild-eyed ones you’ve taken on…I always remember what we been through in our own family. You can love your kids. You can try to parent them right. But sometimes problems come up that just plain take time, a lot of time, to turn around.”
Griff said quietly, softly, “So…it was Mary Belle, wasn’t it? Who set those fires twenty years ago.”
“Say what? I was talking about the nature of teenagers, kids through times of trouble, how sometimes raising a kid just isn’t a neat, tidy, straight path-”
“She set the fires, didn’t she, Conner.”
The sheriff shook his head wildly, slammed his feet flat on the floor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. “I only brought up my own family issues to share your frustration over Jason. I wasn’t trying to-”
Griff could see it in Conner’s face. The anguish. The guilt. Likely he would never have mentioned Mary Belle, his
