Page 36 of Crash and Burn

“There’s a lot of it, and you need sleep.”

“I do,” he agreed, then added, “and I've got to go back later and check out an arson.”

“Well, if you're staying here …” she hoped he was. He’d said he’d be back and then he’d shown up. But they hadn’t explicitly stated that he was sleeping at her place now. “You can go to sleep in your room.”

She could call ithis room. It should be his after two straight nights of him sleeping in that bed.

“You look relatively tired, too.”

Maggie had never dated a man willing to tell her she didn’t look her very best. But then again, she and Sebastian weren’t dating, to her disappointment. Though she'd managed to snag a few hours before he got off work at eight, her dreams had been wild and crazy, from running from faceless menaces in the dark, to finding bones in the water, or getting tangled in gold chains.

It didn't take any kind of therapist to figure out what they meant.

“I did my best. I got some sleep,” she told him, then switched topics. “Will you be back before dark?”

“Absolutely.” He looked her in the eye to let her know she wouldn’t be alone another night and her anxiety settled. “Arson investigations work best in daylight. Trying to find evidence in the dark is a bitch.”

“Then go sleep now.”

“What about you?” He was already standing, taking his plate to the sink, rinsing it and putting it in the dishwasher, yawning as he did it.

“I want to sleep tonight. So I’m going to check out the backyard.”

She could see him pause. With one hand on the counter, he frowned at her from the kitchen to where she still sat at the table, finishing the last of her eggs.

“The feds checked out the yard.”

“I know,” she said. “But it's not their yard. They haven't been visiting and digging up the flowers here since they were eight. They might not notice if something was amiss.”

“It's a good point,” he conceded. For a moment, he looked like he would offer to join her. Then he yawned again though she could see he was trying to fight it.

“You go to sleep.”

With a nod, he walked past and her eyes followed as he made his way slowly up the stairs, looking more exhausted with each step he climbed.

Maggie finished her last few bites of hash browns, put her own dishes into the dishwasher, and headed straight through the kitchen and out the back door. She hadn't been out here since the FBI had come through. The grass had mostly sprung back. When they’d left, she'd been able to see footprints everywhere.

Now it looked as if the yard was righting itself. Maggie checked everything she could think of. She gazed down into the flower beds around the house. Abbie had ringed the whole place with three feet of mulch and a variety of plants that bloomed at different seasons. It was a bitch to weed all of it, but Maggie loved that it looked somewhere between manicured and wild.

The open space of the yard was plain grass and Maggie had hired someone to mow it. She was getting ready to pay the fee for them to weed the gardens, too. Turning away from the cultivated beds, she peered along the fence where her wildflowers bloomed. Some of them were several feet high.

Now, she examined it with a different eye. She headed to the fence and pushed some of the unruly plants aside, as though she might find jewelry and evidence littering the dirt. The only other thing she could think was to dig holes and see if she could turn anything up. A metal detector would be better, and she didn’t have any tools on her.

Heading toward the back, she looked to the blackberry bushes that lined the back wall. She walked along that border too, though nothing jumped out at her as being out of place.

As much as Aunt Abbie loved her gardens, she hated change. These bushes were the same ones Maggie remembered from when she was little. The newest things in the yard were the flowers she herself had added as a child, and that had been quite some time ago. Even inside, Abbie hadn't replaced any of the old wallpapers. The best she would do was refinish a floor now and then. From the looks of it, that hadn't happened in a long time either.

The old gate was exactly as she remembered it, though when she was a kid, the latch was almost at her eye level. Now, it barely passed her waist. Lifting it, Maggie swung the gate open. The creak and whine of the hinges indicated it too hadn’t been maintained. She closed it behind her and re-latched it though she didn't know why.

The back gate opened to one of the stretches of woods that ran through the town. There were walking trails back here and houses on the other side of the trees.

The other neighborhood wasn't quite so far away that Maggie couldn't see through to the other side if she looked. But if she wasn't looking, it would be easy to pretend she was lost in the woods, as she had when she was little.

Now, knowing what had been found in her home, it was easy to imagine that someone had come out the back of Aunt Abbie's boarding house and cut through the yard. As long as they'd made it across the grass undetected, they could have cut through the trails and wound up almost anywhere in town.

Though it was late morning and the sun was shining brightly, casting little diamonds of light along the ground, Maggie suddenly felt as though she knew thatthiswas what the killer had done.

Her prowler had gone out the back door—and not the front—then disappeared …just like this. Maggie was becoming more and more convinced she was right.

---