something on in the oven, or maybe her old coffeepot had shorted out, or...something.
The acrid smell of drenched ashes and soot assailed her even more strongly now that they were just outside the front door of her shop. Rob drew up short, staying put. Kari was grateful for his consideration, because without a moment to collect herself, she would have surely burst into tears or succumbed to the roiling nausea in her stomach.
The plate glass window with the stenciled name of Lovin’ Oven was no more—splintered into pieces. Inside, the shop was inky-black, lit only by a few klieg lights and the sweeping beams of a firefighter’s flashlight.
Even so, Kari could see only the barest scraps of the gingham tablecloths she’d had covering the window’s deeply bayed display shelf. The window display with the four-tiered mock cake—nothing but a form made of hatboxes and decorated with frosting to showcase her skills—was no more.
A man almost as tall as Rob appeared out of the shadows. Even in his turnout gear and soot-covered face, Kari recognized him as the man who’d warned her to stay back what felt like hours earlier...the chief. Rob’s brother.
“I told him you’d said I should wait—” Kari rushed.
But the chief—Daniel Monroe, she remembered now, waved her words away. “Rob said he was going to take you through it.”
Kari gulped. Usually she was stronger than this, braver. She’d had to be braver for years now, so there was no point going all weepy over a fire. Nobody had gotten killed in it, thank goodness. And at least she’d been able to pay the insurance.
Rob cocked his head. “See? I told you I had pull.” He clicked on a huge and battered flashlight that rivaled a small baseball bat in size. “But we do need to be careful. Here—why don’t you leave your blanket and the coffee with Daniel?” He winked at his brother. “You won’t mind holding it for us while we’re in there, will you, bro?”
“Why not? You’ve left me holding far worse bags over the years, now, haven’t you?” But Daniel’s retort was devoid of malice... Kari found herself wishing she and her own brother could joke around like that. She handed him her coffee and slid off the blanket, shivering at the cool air.
Kari stepped through the door to an interior she would have never recognized as her very own shop. Black water was everywhere, walls were gone, tables reduced to ash and rubble.
The precious glass display cases she’d found online and got her brother to help her haul them home—gone. The kitschy fruit prints she’d framed on the walls—gone.
And the farther she went into the bowels of the beast, the worse it got.
The kitchen area in the back, smelling of burned sugar and flour and plastic, had taken on an apocalyptic appearance, all scorched earth and none of the cheerful, neat work space she’d left just a few hours earlier. Kari stood beside her Hobart floor mixer and slid a hand over its fire-blistered paint.
Gone. All gone.
She hadn’t even realized she was crying until Rob squeezed her shoulder. “Hey. If you want to do this later...”
He was so kind. As if he didn’t mind in the slightest standing by a squawling baker as she wept over her floor mixer. Kari swiped at her eyes and choked back her tears. “No, I’m—it’s okay.” She whirled around to escape his intense look of compassion, only to stumble and nearly fall on something in her path.
“Whoa, there!” Rob saved her from a nasty spill in the soot. He shined his light onto what had caused her to stumble: her bookshelf of cookbooks, now charred almost beyond recognition.
“Oh, no...” Kari hadn’t even thought of them—all these cookbooks, collected over the years from the first time she’d ever baked a cake, destroyed in seconds. “My recipes...all my recipes! Gone!”
“Wait—see? Not all gone.” Rob bent over and scooped up a thick book and flipped it open. Sure enough, though the edges of the pages were scalloped with an ugly carbon-black from the heat and flames, many pages were readable. “You’ll need to let them dry out, of course, because they got an extra good soaking.”
She couldn’t help it. She grabbed that cookbook and pressed it to her, giving up on holding back her tears.
“Your favorite cookbook?” he asked.
Kari managed a laugh, then sniffled. “Cookbooks are like children or dogs. You can’t have a favorite. They’re all my favorites.”
“Hmm. I had no idea.” His smile was sweet and patient. Kari realized that daylight was filtering through the front windows. “Come on.” He waved her toward the delivery door. “I want to show you something out back.”
Carefully she made her way there. Outside, a hulk of scorched metal lay in a heap near the remains of what had been a wooden door that Kari had daily battled with.
“What?” she asked as she joined Rob, who was staring at it intently.
“You don’t recognize it?”
She frowned. It had been white, maybe, or the lightest of blue, a tank of some sort...
A chill went down her spine.
A propane tank.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“What do you think it is?” Rob evaded answering her question.
She knelt down for a closer look.
Yes. A small propane tank, like the ones you’d see at a convenience store, ready to be taken home and hooked up to a grill.
But she had no grill. Her bakery ran on natural gas and electricity, not propane. She’d not had any need for a propane tank.
Jammed into the tank’s collar, next to the valve, was a scrap of metal and a heap of ashes.
She straightened up, her heart sinking to her toes. “It looks like a propane tank. For a grill.”
“Yep,” Rob agreed.
“It’s not mine.”
“That a fact?” he asked.
Now she met his eyes, and she could tell in the gray light of dawn that they were blue, a very dark blue that she hadn’t seen ever before—but she’d seen the speculation that filled them in others’ eyes—plenty of times.
“Is that what started the fire?” she asked. “This tank?”
“I couldn’t tell you yet. I’ve only just started to investigate.”
“Investigate? You?” Now it was Kari’s turn to look speculatively at her companion.
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m the fire marshal and arson investigator for Levi County.”
A renewed wave of nausea flooded through her. “Arson?” she asked and sagged against the scorched cement of the exterior wall. But she hadn’t needed to ask him to repeat it. She’d heard it the first time.
“It looks that way. That tank’s valve is open, and it appears to be the remains of a road flare stuck in there.”
Kari’s knees wouldn’t hold her up any longer. She found herself sliding to the wet ground, the masonry wall digging into her back as she descended. “Not again,” she whispered. “Oh, please, not again.”
“Again?” Rob knelt down beside her.
“You might as well know...” She stared down at the cookbook in her arms, the one thing she’d been able to salvage from the ashes of her fresh new start.
“Know what?” Rob prompted.
“You’ll find out soon enough. I was convicted of arson when I was fourteen years old.”