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We climbed back out and cleared our lungs with some fresh air. Briefly, we split so I could look for tracks and he could take pictures, but the surrounding grass that led down the mountain wasn’t giving away any secrets, and it was pretty clear that whoever was inside the house was long gone. Neither one of us had found any bodies, thank God.
Dean watched me plod back around the property, but when I shrugged at him, he sighed, smoothing his sleek black hair back in frustration.
“Do you have any idea what this could be?” he asked me. I took a moment to think but shook my head pretty soon after. “Or why?”
“Fires are rare, especially this far out of town. Anyone who chooses to live in the mountains is usually smart enough to avoid things that would set a place ablaze. Though, I guess mistakes can happen.” I doubted it, though. Maybe it was the eeriness of it all, or the fact that this fire didn’t seem to be caused the way other fires are caused, but something about this didn’t scream “accident” to me.
By Dean’s expression, he seemed to agree. “Then it’s more likely it was intentional. If the owner isn’t in the wreckage—which, thank God they aren’t—they might have been the one to set it.”
I raised a brow. “Why would you want to burn your own house down?”
“Insurance money,” Dean said simply.
I barked out a laugh and rolled my eyes. “Oh, that’s cute.”
“Cute?” From his tone, he didn’t seem to think it was in any way cute.
I only laughed a little harder. “Dean, people don’t have money forinsurancearound here.”
Dean opened his mouth to argue, paused, then closed it. “Fair enough. What about the people that run around the woods? The ones you haven’t been able to rehabilitate? Could they have started this?”
“Eh, I doubt it. The crazies are just that—crazy. As in, they aren’t sentient. They wouldn’t have the attention span to burn down a whole house, let alone the motive. I guess it could be one of the druggies, but still, that’s kind of a long shot—if it had been a meth fire, for example, it would have looked like one.”
“Right.”
I nodded. “I think as far as theories go, we’re kind of out of luck right now.”
Dean nodded with a disgruntled look. He gazed out toward the path that had led us here and took out a small notebook, and I watched him jot down something in shorthand. “I’ll get some research done when I get back to the precinct, but I think we might have to call it for tonight. It’s probably close to sun up at this point.” He looked up at the sky and the dark midnight blue was steadily receding into a lighter deep blue. Yep, dawn was on her way and that meant I needed to get home pronto.
“Right,” I said and started back down the path with Dean at my side. We walked about a foot apart, hands to our sides, neither of us saying a word. Despite the small respite we had to search the house, I still felt a stiffness between us that had everything to do with that earlier conversation and, more pointedly, the fact that Dean knew a hell of a lot more about me than I did about him. Something I was decidedly not comfortable with.
Then you just keep him at arm’s length,I told myself, figuring that was the answer. But there was just one little problem with that.
I took a breath and glanced at him as we reached the bottom of the hill again, reaching to brush my hand against his shoulder.
“Hey.” He jumped but tried to cover it quickly. “Are we still on for dinner tomorrow?”
For a minute, Dean just stared through me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. His eyes flicked to mine and, finally, he let himself smile, pressing his hands into his pants pockets.
“Of course. We’ll have a lot to talk about.”
I smiled as well and nodded, keeping silent for the rest of the walk back home as I reminded myself it would be aworkdinner—work and nothing else. Yes, because there was no way I was willingly going to allow myself to develop feelings for a man who obviously had no intentions of letting me in. Whatever had happened to Dean after he’d left Damnation County must have been a doozy because, as far as I could tell, he was no longer the trusting sort.
But back to what remained of the Thatcher house, it took me until I got home to realize how jarring the situation was. I never would have described Windy Ridge as peaceful even before the Fog, but after seeing a burning heap that used to be someone’s home, it was nice coming back to a bustling nighttime community—even if that community was a bunch of trailers, owned by a bunch of hillbillies.
After an awkward goodbye, Dean and I parted ways and I took my time walking back home to my trailer. I couldn’t stop thinking about whoever Thatcher was and where he might have been when the fire broke out—and where he was now. Even though we’d had our fair share of accidents, nothing like an abandoned, burnt-down house with no explanation had ever happened around here. And with no sign of the owner, the whole situation just put a whole pile of rocks in my stomach.
Most of the rest of the evening and into dawn saw me working on my sewing projects. I had a pile of sewing to catch up on—mostly items requested by folks in Windy Ridge and I’d let that pile slip in order to work on Sicily’s census project.
Now the sewing turned out to be the perfect distraction from the clump of feelings leftover in my head. Before I knew it, the sun was up. Because I no longer slept much, I didn’t feel the urge to crawl into bed. Instead, I just sat in my darkened corner of the living room and sewed while my thoughts continued to run rampant all over one another.
Every so often I’d get a knock on the door and one of the boys would pop in to give me updates on their part of the investigation. They were all shocked to hear about what Dean and I had found, but it didn’t seem any of them knew much about Ethan Thatcher or the house. Not even Slim Jim, who had way more knowledge about the crazies in the woods than we did (probably because he’d lived among them). Thankfully, the boys weren’t interested enough to try and take over our trail; they still had the bat-man to hunt down, and their sections of the county weren’t any more finished than ours was.
Chapter Seven
The next evening, Dean met me at the diner after my shift and we walked to my trailer together.
Thankfully, whatever tension was between us seemed to have softened for now, and we were able to talk somewhat normally without that odd standoffishness blocking the way. It felt a little silly, but it was immensely relieving to be able to just talk to him again. There were still eggshells to walk on (namely that he didn’t want to discuss anything pertaining to his past)—I could practically feel said eggshells crunching under my feet—but the conversation flowed smoothly, and soon enough we were laughing as we stepped up to my porch and creaked the old trailer door open.
