Page 17 of Up In Smoke

Luke threw his head back and his arms out to his side. This was frustrating as fuck. “That's the problem! I don't know. I don’t know any of it. My brother, Tiago, is a fucking mess. He's been in and out of prison—”

“For arson?”

“No. And that's the problem. If it was for arson, I would have put the chief on him in a hot second. But my mother swears Tiago is cleaning up his act. She's sworn this before, but Tiago went right back to prison, because he hadn't cleaned up his act at all. But if he has this time, and I'm the one who sends him back …”

The words trailed off as he paced his irritation out. There was no explaining the cluster that was his family. Ivy nodded, somehow understanding the subtle and deep damage that brothers could do to each other.

“I don't know if one of my brothers is doing this. Or if somebody is targeting me, or one of my brothers, or if one of my brothers is targeting one of my other brothers just because he's mad.” He sucked in a breath. “But you saw Mario. Mario has got problems. If he goes to prison, he's never going to get the treatment he needs!”

Ivy stared at him for a moment before Luke asked, “What?”

Her expression didn’t change. “If Mario has drug problems, that's one thing. But if he's been setting fires, he goes to prison. Fuck his drug problems.”

Not quite the expletive he'd been expecting.

She noticed. “I'm sorry. Did you think I don't know how to swear?”

He kinda had thought that.

“Somebody burned down my house Luke, or they tried to and they mostly accomplished it. And they tried to do itwith me inside.So if this is your brother, I’m sending him to prison. If it’s something else, but it’s because of you, I need to know.”

She did need to know. He just didn’t have any answers for her.

Once again, Luke held his hands out to his side. The pressure in his head obscuring anything he could have said. But then Ivy looked at him again, and he knew she wasn't going to let it go.

Chapter Fourteen

“Can you help me? I don't want you following anyone or getting in any danger, but maybe you can look some things up.”

“Oh my God.” Ivy rolled her eyes at Luke. He didn’t want her getting in the way was what he meant.

Luke had been explaining all the complicated possibilities that he had wondered about the arsonist. But to ask her that as though she should or could just tuck herself into her books and stay safe was ridiculous.

She knew that being a librarian was her job. But it was different when the fire was on her doorstep—it had been an inescapable ring around her home. Had the RFD not shown up when they did, she wouldn’t have survived. That was a sobering thought. But she was already up to her neck in it.

She was getting ready to tell him in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t just set her aside on her own case when her phone had buzzed. Pulling it out of her pocket, she huffed out a breath. “You have got to be shitting me.”

She was swearing too much these days. Life number two was bleeding into life number three.

Luke backpedaled. “I just can't have you telling people what I just told you. Fine, if it’s Mario, you’re right, he should go to prison.” He barely took a breath. “I mean, I guess you can tell whoever you want, but if you do, it will destroy my family, which is why I haven't said anything before. My mother spent too many years working too many jobs for me to destroy it all now.”

Ivy was barely even listening. She looked up at him and sighed. “It's not you. It's the siding guys.”

“Oh.” She watched as all of the tension left his body and turned to irritation on her behalf. “What about them?”

She held up her phone as though he could read the tiny email message on the screen. “They've postponed me …again!”

She watched as his frown disappeared, and he turned and looked out the front window. She’d had the large window re-installed at a very hefty price. While the insurance had covered most of it, everything it covered was incomplete. So another chunk had come out of her savings. That meant no fridge yet and no TV.

Now, Luke looked across the street, a frown pulling at his brows as though he were watching a dust storm rolling in, or tornado touching down on the neighbor's house. “They can't postpone.”

“Oh, they can. They just did.” Her irritation bled through her tone. Sometimes, the old ingrained ways of always being nice and polite tried to force their way through. And sometimes, like it always had, her own more forceful personality showed. Now, she was at full scale irritation. This was too much and if she didn’t get mad she’d crack and lose it.

“No, Ivy, they have to show up and do it. The weather's about to change. They have maybe two more days, and it has to be finished.”

She didn’t understand. The siding company seemed to not care. There wasn’t one in Redemption, and they kept saying they couldn’t come all the way out for the day without having other jobs finished first.

But Luke was still talking. “We’re due for our first big snow.”

---