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“We didn’t get a good look.”
“He was scruffy,” Eric added. “Like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.”
“What about how he was acting? Where he went after he left the house?” Carson prodded.
“Not after, but before. He came from the house across the street,” Eric said.
“From inside that house?” Thompson asked.
“No. Like he’d been hanging around outside somewhere. But out of sight. I think he was waiting for those cleaning ladies to finish and leave.”
The perp had been watching Caroline and Gabi. I curled my hands into fists, wishing these kids could give something actually useful.
Carson leaned forward, bracing his hands on the table. “This is really important, kids. Have you seen this guy at any other point this summer?”
Eric nodded. “On the street behind the fire station. It was the day that truck got set on fire. We were wandering around town and saw him slipping out from between some buildings.”
“And how did you know it was the same guy? Maybe it was just somebody who happened to be cutting through the alley.”
“Because we could smell the gas on him. It’s not a smell you forget.”
Again, not evidence it was the same person, though it did link whoever they saw the second time to my truck.
“Did you get a better look this time?” Carson asked.
Damon squinted, thinking. “He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. Older guy. Maybe a little older than Mom and Dad. Kind of weathered around the face, like he spends a lot of time outside. He walked right by us. We pretended not to see because we recognized he was bad news.”
My brain spun. If these kids were responsible for all the smaller fires this summer, and this second perpetrator had torched the beach house and my truck, what were the chances he’d been the one behind the tavern fire, too? I considered what little they’d said about him. Dark hair. Scruffy or bearded. That narrowed it down. Troy, Marcus, and David Foley all had lighter hair and were generally clean shaven. Of the two remaining, only one actually looked older. Except, he’d had an alibi for when my truck had been torched, so the cops had stopped looking at him.
Had a coworker lied for him? Or had they simply assumed he was where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be there?
Either way, Caroline needed to know that the threat definitely wasn’t over.
I yanked out my phone, intent on calling to warn her, and spotted her text.
Caroline: I can hear you downstairs. Rios is out helping Gabi and a friend with a flat. Why don’t you come up and join me?
The message came with a shot of her feet, clearly in the bathtub.
Fear grabbed me by the throat as I hit her contact and listened to the phone ring and ring before it finally went to voicemail. I bolted out of the observation room so fast that the door banged against the wall.
Someone was in the fucking house with her, and she thought it was me.
26
Caroline
Terror chilled my skin despite the steaming bathwater. I was achingly aware of my vulnerability, naked, with no weapon and my only route of escape blocked by a man who’d made my life a misery.
I hadn’t been truly alone with him for years. Rios had seen to that.
Once, I’d put all my energy into being what he wanted. Tiptoeing around his temper, never doing anything that could set him off, because I was the one who looked most like our mother, and he hated her for leaving him. He’d used his fists on me to remind me of it often enough until Rios had gotten big enough to fight back.
I’d thought I was free. That I’d finally broken loose of his hold. But as my father watched me with glittering, hate-filled eyes, I understood that I’d only delayed the inevitable. That he was determined not to let me go. In the back of my brain, I’d known it had been too quiet. I’d known he’d accepted the situation without nearly enough fight. But I’d let myself fall into the fantasy that I could actually have this new life I was building with Hoyt. I’d deluded myself into believing he wasn’t a threat.
Now, I was going to pay for that foolishness.
But I’d be damned if I’d let him see my fear. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
