“Owl,” I said.
Rico muttered something under his breath about white chicks and nature specials. He was grumpy, but that was par for the course. I’d gotten used to his grumpy. It was reassuring, like the tides.
“Gabe the animal wrangler says he’s on the way,” I assured him. “He says he’ll get the donkey and the goats, if the goats cooperate. He said the chickens will have to wait until morning. That they’ve…something. Whatever chickens do at night.”
“Gone to roost?”
“Yeah. That.” I spotted the path leading to the barn and hooked a left. “Look at you, with your farm boy vocabulary.”
This got him to laugh. “I haven’t been to a farm since our mothers made us take riding lessons in middle school. Do you remember that?”
I laughed too. “Of course. They thought it would make us upright and presentable.”
“Major fail.”
We both laughed some more. Horses. In my ten-year-old opinion, they’d been mad-eyed and foam-mouthed, intent on stamping my tender girlflesh into hamburger. It had been an adventure, though, one of the first I’d shared with Rico. As we drove a modified golf cart through a faux English countryside, I was grateful to know that it hadn’t been the last.
Rico held his flashlight steady. “So what are you and Trey doing here?”
“The truth? We’re here because someone may or may not be trying to kill Nicholas Talbot, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
“What does that have to do with all the animals?”
“I don’t know. But I am going to find out.”
The club cart hummed us off the paved path onto the grassy field surrounding the barn. Out here it was even darker, the sky black behind the fat full moon.
“Do you remember the Buckhead Burglar?” I said.
“Oh, hell yes. Prime example of rich people panic. Kids getting shot to death in Bankhead, big deal. Some Betties get their heirloom spoons stolen, and the entire city loses its collective grip.” He shook his head. “And then the murder happened, and my ex’s mama acted like it was the Fall of Saigon. The rabble coming for her kind, all that. That was when I stopped dating white boys.”
It wasn’t, but I didn’t remind him of that. Trey wasn’t the only one trying to reconnect. Rico and I were too, despite our limited demographic overlap. That hadn’t bothered us in high school, where we were both outsiders. We’d bonded in the margins. But the gap between was harder to bridge now.
We reached the barn, looming against the trees. There was no lighting out here, but even from a distance, I could see the door was open wide.
Rico cursed. “Yep. We’re in a horror movie. This is where it gets horrible.”
“Wait here.”
“Like I’m gonna do anything else.”
I left him in the cart and aimed my flashlight inside the barn. The space was dark and empty, cavernous. It smelled like sweet hay and manure and…something else. I took a tentative step inside, ran a hand along the wall until I found the switch. I popped it on, and a fluorescent light sputtered to life, revealing bales of hay, a tractor, some riding tack on the wall. The pervasive chemical stench was heavy and unnerving and also strangely familiar. And then I saw it—a puddle on the floor, the candle on its side in the center. Trails of liquid stretched out in four directions, one to each corner of the barn.
I breathed down the panic. “Oh hell.”
“What?”
“Somebody tried to rig up a fire.”
Rico didn’t move. “Tried?”
“Yeah. Tried and failed.”
I dropped into a crouch. Up close, the acrid liquid was eye-watering. Not gasoline. Not kerosene. I closed my eyes and let the memories form, but all I could get was…
“Sleepovers?” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m free associating.” And then I stood up abruptly. “Sleepovers. Of course. It’s acetone. Like in nail polish remover.”
Rico sniffed. He still didn’t come inside, though. I knew I was supposed to leave everything untouched for the cops, and the cops were absolutely coming now, no way around it, no matter what the Talbots wanted. But I also knew that the candle could still have fire at the wick, and that a tiny spark could flare into an inferno at any second. So I plucked it from the acetone. Just a regular old paraffin candle, cold and crushed, the wick slightly charred.
“Looks like something heavy and hoofed stepped on it. Snuffed out the flame.”
Rico gestured for me to put it down. “Leave it alone and call Trey.”
It was good advice. As I pulled my phone out, I detected another smell at the barn door. It was so faint than only another addict like me could have noticed it. Tobacco. I looked down. Several cigarette butts lay crushed just outside the door. I bent close. The cigarettes were dark and unusual, but familiar. Nick’s brand.
My phone vibrated in my hand. Trey calling.
“Hey you,” I said, “we’ve got a very big problem here.”
“Here too.”
“My problem is attempted arson.”
There was a long exhale. “My problem is auto theft with aggravated assault and a missing person.”
“Oh fuck.”
Another exhale. “Yes. Exactly.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Rico insisted on accompanying me to the check-in station, and I did not argue with him. Puttering down the curving lanes in the dark, it was easy for Rico and me to be together. I wished that we had time to talk—about Dante, about the letter in my cash register, about life. But time was not a resource for me this night.
I eased up on the accelerator as we hit a patch of gravel. “It’s strange. You’re like some weird comet that only comes around every seventy years.”
Rico shook his head. “That is a dumb ass metaphor.”
“I don’t have literary tastes.”
“No, you got dangerous tastes.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t, not really. I was leaving behind an arson attempt, on route to even greater possible felonies. I carried a gun with me more often
