Firefly Rain Read online

  “In a bit. Right now I’m not thirsty.” I looked back over at the fridge. “Had myself a vanilla cola at Hilliard’s today, and I’m still hanging onto that for flavor.”

  Adrienne grinned and took another sip. “I can understand that.” A ring of condensation marked the table in front of her, and she reached out with one finger to trace designs in it. “Look,” she said, “I do want you to know that I don’t give all of the patrons rides home. You just seemed like, well, like you needed someone to talk to.”

  I nodded and watched her draw lines in the water. “I might, at that, though I’m not sure you want to hear some of the things I’d need to discuss. It’s been a little awkward around here since I moved back, you understand.”

  “I think I do.” She put the glass down and reached out, taking my hand in hers. Her fingertips were cold from the ice and wet from the condensation. They felt good against my skin. “This is a small town. It’s tight-knit. It took me a while to fit in when I first came here, and I’m sure it’s worse for you. Everything’s almost the way you remember it, but not quite, so every step feels like the wrong one. Plus, you’re all alone out here, when your memory tells you it ought to have other voices. You never were by yourself much in this house as a child, were you?”

  I shook my head. “No, I wasn’t. Father traveled for business sometimes—he was an investor, mostly, though I never got a straight answer as to what he actually did for a living—but Mother was always here. When we traveled, we did it as a family, and then eventually I left. So I guess you’re right on that, though sometimes I almost think I still hear them.”

  She stopped sketching on the tabletop and put her other hand atop mine. “That’s not surprising, really. My parents died when I was about fifteen, and I still miss them terribly. For a while, when I went to bed, I’d listen real hard, and sometimes I thought I could hear them telling me that everything was okay, and that I could close my eyes.”

  “That’s terrible. I’m very sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago, and it was nobody’s fault, really. It was a car accident where someone’s brakes failed and, well, everybody told me that it was over very quickly. I was taken in by an aunt, a sweet lady who was still waiting for her beau to come back from Vietnam. She decided that a librarian was an appropriate thing for me to be, and there you have my life story.” Those gray eyes blinked twice, a little brightness at the corners, and she looked up at me. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually tell people about that sort of thing.”

  I shushed her and fought the urge to clasp my other hand on top of hers. “It’s okay. Thank you for trusting me with that.”

  Adrienne made a sound that was half sniffle, half cough. “You’re welcome. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s all right to miss them, but you do have to live your life.”

  “I thought I had been,” I told her. “Moving up to Boston and all that. I’m back here because that stopped working out, and I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I’m not sure if being here is helping or hurting.”

  She patted my hand. “It’s helping, I’m sure. Besides, you’re brushing up on your library research skills. That can’t be a bad thing.”

  Despite myself, I smiled. “True. It’s just…” I hesitated.

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Not yet, anyway. There are a few things I need to figure out how to explain, that’s all.”

  “Well,” she said, leaning forward, “when you do, I’ll be here.”

  “Will you now,” I murmured, and I found myself being drawn toward her. Somehow, her glasses had found their way onto the table, and her eyes filled my view. They were mesmerizing, gorgeous; the sort to drive a man to clichés and acts of moonstruck stupidity. Drowning happy, Father had called it once when I’d asked him how he and Mother had met. You get pulled in and never want to come out.

  Her lips parted, ever so slightly. I could hear her breathing—a soft counterpoint to the loud noises my heart was making. I half rose up out of my chair and leaned in farther toward her. She closed her eyes as we paused, a hairbreadth between us and a first kiss.

  In the back of the house, something heavy came crashing down.

  We both jerked back into our seats like we were on too-short leashes. Her hands pulled back from mine, accidentally backhanding the half-full water glass and sending it spinning into air. I reached for it, but it tumbled just out of my reach and shattered on the floor. Ice and water spattered everywhere, hiding shards of glass as they flew.

  “Oh!” Adrienne looked so horrified that I would have laughed if I hadn’t been about to cry. “I’m so sorry!”

  I bit back a couple of inappropriate responses. “Don’t be,” I finally said. “It happens. Probably a squirrel getting in back there that made the noise. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

  “But your glass…”

  “Its time had come,” I said simply. “It did have Charlie Brown on it, so it was bound to be unlucky.” She made a move for the counter where the paper towels were kept, and I waved her off. “No, no, no. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll clean it up.”

  “Are you sure?” She looked about sixteen and unsure of herself—surprised and scared all at once.

  I nodded and got up out of my chair. “I am. Just sit tight for a minute, and I will do just that.”

  She swept herself up out of her seat as well. “Actually, I should really be going. It’s starting to get late, and I left some chicken out to defrost. If I don’t get home soon, it won’t be fit to use.”

  “All right,” I said, and I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Careful where you step there.”

  “I will be,” she promised, and she tiptoed through the mess with as much delicacy as she could manage. As she reached the door, she stopped and turned. “I don’t know if this is too forward of me, but why don’t you give me your phone number? That way, I can call and check up on you.”

  My voice as neutral as I could make it, I said, “Sounds good” and scribbled it down on a napkin. She folded it in quarters neatly in a way I’d never been able to manage and tucked it away inside a pocket. “I’ll put this in my address book when I get home.”

  “You do that,” I agreed. “Could I get your number as well? Just in case.”

  She smiled back at me. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe next time, Mr. Jacob Logan. Thank you for showing me around.” She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Then she was gone. Out the door and down the steps and into her car in the blink of an eye. I stood there and watched as she started it up and backed out, all in one fluid motion. An instant later, she was on the road and disappearing behind a thin cloud of dust.

  I could hear Nickel Creek faintly for a good twenty seconds after she was gone. I recognized the song, too. It was the one about the lighthouse missing its keeper, the one she’d said she hated.

  “Goddamn. I don’t know anything about women,” I said, and I eventually shut the door. I’d been half-hoping she’d change her mind and come back, or maybe I’d taken her words too seriously and didn’t want to be alone in that house at that moment.

  It didn’t matter. The door closed smooth and easy, like it was supposed to. I turned my back on it and stared at the mess on the kitchen floor. Bits of Charlie Brown were everywhere, and the ice cubes were slowly melting away. That was good, as it would make the unpainted glass bits easier to pick out when I got around to it.

  Better to let the process continue, I decided, and maybe some of the water would evaporate as well. Besides, in the mood I was in I was bound and certain to slice my finger open if I tried cleaning up now, so it was in everyone’s best interest if I just let it be.

  Instead, I stepped over it, heading to see what had come crashing down. I didn’t believe it was animals, not for a minute. Most of me was tired, irritated, and unhappy with the turn of events. That part of me figured it was just something old in an old house p
icking a real bad time to make its peace with gravity.

  The rest of me was crazy and thought maybe, just maybe, it had been someone who shouldn’t have been able to move things around.

  The sound, I recalled, had come from the back of the house. I made my way down there, looking in each room for evidence of catastrophe. There was none. None of Mother’s figurines were disturbed. None of the fireplace dogs had been knocked over. No chairs were on their sides, no books were on the floor. And with each room that passed muster, my nervousness grew.

  Finally, all that was left was the mudroom. The door was mostly closed—I hadn’t exactly wanted to show off a washing machine full of soggy laundry to Adrienne—so I gently pushed it open with my right hand.

  It moved half an inch, then bumped into something on the floor. I shoved a little harder, and for my trouble I got resistance and the sound of metal sliding across floorboard. The door moved, at least, and I got maybe another forty-five degrees out of it before a clang and a thunk told me that whatever that mystery object might be, it was jammed in good and proper.

  That was all right, though. The door was cracked far enough for me to slide past and get myself in there. I was curious, I confess, as to what the hell that thing could be. I’d no recollection of anything in that room but the washer and the dryer, and a couple of bottles of detergent. None of that would have made the noises I’d heard. Hell, besides the washer and dryer, nothing in there was metal except the shelves up top, and those were bolted in.

  I stuck my head around the door and reached up for the overhead light’s pull cord. It took three tugs, but the thing finally came on, sputtering up and flickering like it was letting me know I’d better have a replacement ready to go soon.

  I made a mental note and looked around. The shelf over the equipment was still there, still sturdily bolted where it ought to have been. There wasn’t even any plaster dust in the air, the sure sign of falling shelving.

  On the floor, though, was the shotgun. The same shotgun I’d tucked under my bed. It lay there, natural as can be, except that there was no way in hell it could have gotten there on its own.

  It was there, though. No argument about that. I bent down and touched it. The barrel was cool, as if it had been sitting there a while. Carefully, I pulled it to me. In the light from above, I didn’t see any prints on the steel. Whoever had moved it, if anyone, had been careful.

  A sudden thought struck me, so I picked it up and cracked it. I’d fired both barrels near Carl (All right, at Carl, my conscience insisted) and I hadn’t reloaded, so the chambers should be empty.

  They weren’t.

  Very carefully, I closed it up and put the gun back down. Judging from its final resting position, the gun had been pointing straight at the outside door when I had come in looking for it, and that’s exactly how I left it. Without a word, I yanked the light cord and shut the door, then backed away.

  Five steps back I sat down on the floor, staring at the mudroom door. There were two possibilities here. One was that someone had come into the house, found the shotgun I’d hidden under the bed, found the shells (which were in no kind of obvious place), loaded the gun, then tucked it in the back room, propping it up so that it would fall at an advantageous moment to keep me from doing something ungentlemanly with my new favorite librarian.

  The related scenario, wherein someone had been waiting back there with the gun but had lost their nerve, didn’t stand up to any kind of eyeballing. After all, I hadn’t heard the mudroom door open or close, and besides, why would anyone back there have wanted to run? After all, they had the loaded gun.

  No, either it had been carefully set up in back by an unknown intruder, or it had been done by someone in the house.

  I was the only living person in the house. Adrienne hadn’t been out of my sight the whole time she’d been here. The gun had been under my bed when I’d left.

  “Mother?” I breathed, and then I dismissed the idea from my mind as impossibility.

  She’d never touched the gun when she’d been alive. I could still recall fights she’d had with Father about keeping it in the bedroom. She’d wanted to keep the bedroom safe, it seemed, and had been worried about an accident. Father had replied that keeping the gun there was the best way to keep it safe, and around and around they’d gone.

  The mudroom, I recalled, was Mother’s proposed alternative location for the shotgun. And if any man alive besides me knew that, it was Carl.

  “Bloody hell.” I stood back up very deliberately, then made my way to Mother and Father’s bedroom door. It was still closed, as it had been when I’d tried to show the place to Adrienne.

  As I watched, something within the doorknob made a little, happy click.

  All by itself, the door swung open.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Not this time.”

  Hinges whined. The door swung wider.

  “No, Mother,” I said. “If you’re there, and I don’t think you are, you’ve made your point. Not in your house? Fine. I’d think you’d like her, though. She liked your things.”

  The door hung there for a moment, half-open, and then it swung shut with authority. The sound echoed through the house.

  “All right. Be that way.”

  Nothing else happened, so I walked back into the kitchen and cast an eye on the mess on the floor. The ice had mostly finished melting, giving me less of a reason to put off cleaning the damn thing up. Less than thrilled at the prospect, I skittered my way around to the paper towel dispenser and tore myself off a few. Carefully, I dropped them on the puddle in the middle of the floor, then went hunting for the broom.

  I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the cleanup, and mighty proud of myself for having mostly avoided jabbing myself with slivers of glass, when the phone rang. The timing was perfect: I’d just about closed in on a particularly tricky little shard, and the shock of the noise startled me in just the wrong way. My fingers closed at exactly the wrong angle, and I cursed mightily for a good ten seconds before I yanked the glass out of my thumb. A big red button of blood welled up where it had been, so I hoisted myself up and over to the paper towels, grabbed one, and pressed down to stop the bleeding.

  The phone was unimpressed. It kept ringing.

  “All right already,” I snarled, snatching it off its cradle. “Yeah?”

  “Easy, tiger,” Jenna said. “What, did you think I was a telemarketer?”

  “No, I…” My voice trailed off. “I just jabbed myself with some glass cleaning up something that broke, that’s all.”

  “Whoops. You put Neosporin on it?”

  “Not yet. It just happened five seconds ago, when the phone rang.”

  Oblivious to my sarcasm, Jenna pressed on. “No time to lose, then. Go on and take care of it. I’ll wait.”

  Knowing this was an argument I had no chance of winning, I put the phone down on the counter and walked around the kitchen for what I figured was an appropriate amount of time. I counted ten seconds past that, then picked up again.

  “Is it taken care of?” she asked.

  I nodded, then abruptly remembered I was talking on the phone. “All bandaged nicely, I promise. Now, what gives me the pleasure of your conversation?”

  “Honestly,” she sounded a bit surprised herself, “I wanted to see how you were doing. You sounded a little freaky last time we talked.”

  “I’m fine,” I reassured her. “Went into town today with a man who has a mean dog, then explored my childhood a bit further.”

  “Do tell.” Jenna sounded relieved and amused, all at the same time. “Did you go to the soda fountain and put on a paper hat?”

  “Hat, no. Fountain, yes. I’ll take you when you get here. You’ll love it.”

  “Oh, good.” The words whooshed out of her. “I was afraid you were going to try to talk me out of it again.”

  “I know better,” I said ruefully. “You’d show up anyway, and you’d be pissed off. So, do you want to hear about the rest of my day, or
have your selfish purposes been realized?”

  “Tell me all about it. The short version, though. The gory details can wait until Friday. Be warned, I’m going to interrogate you at length when I get there. You’re leaving stuff out. I can tell.”

  “Oh can you, now?”

  “Yes, I can,” she replied. “Remember, I’ve seen you try to talk about financials. I know when you’re lying.”

  Despite myself, I laughed. “That’s why you got the job.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of them. Now, hush and let me tell you a story.”

  Jenna snickered, a nasty sound. “You make it sound so dirty when you put it that way. But never mind, start talking.”

  I sighed. “If you’re sure you’re done with the stand-up comedy routine.” There was heavy silence on the line for a minute, and a sense that those words had cut a bit deeper than I’d intended. “All right then. I hitched a ride into town with a friendly neighbor who turned out not to be so friendly. His dog got particularly unpleasant, and we parted ways when I got into town. I wandered around a bit and had a soda at the old pharmacy, then went to talk to the reverend at my old church about what’s been happening here. He was less surprised to hear about it than you’d think, and told me to come back to church. Then I went off to the library to look up this Officer Hanratty. I figured it was worth finding out a little about her before I started claiming police sarcasm.”

  “And what did you find out?” Jenna was all business now. That was one of the things I truly liked about her. When the time came to get down to brass tacks, she was as good as they got. The rest of the time, she was just brassy.

  As opposed to, say, the sort of gentle courtesy you’d get out of a small-town librarian.

  I forced that thought off to the side and made myself concentrate on Hanratty—the sort of exercise that could sprain a man’s brain permanently. “She’s an ex-Durham cop. Her husband, or ex-husband, was sheriff’s office and got nailed by Internal Affairs. He cut a deal and they moved out here to ‘revitalize’ the local police force. A couple of years later, he left. She stayed, and if my source can be believed, started mainlining sweet tea.”