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Dean closed the suitcase and shook his head. “Not a thing. Everything inside the house was either ash, charred wood, or untouched.”
“And the owner of the house was off the grid,” I added. “So, the fire wasn’t an electric one, we know that.”
Skye hummed. “So, no candles or oil lanterns?”
Dean shook his head. “No. Or if it was a candle fire, the evidence burned away to nothing.”
Skye nodded. “Those are the main causes of accidental housefires. Which makes this averyodd case.”
“It gets odder. I did find traces of an accelerant outside the house.” Dean showed her the photo, and I took care not to mention how I still couldn’t see what he was talking about. The minute she had the photo, though, I saw Skye’s face darken. She sat forward, bent over the table as she spread more and more pictures out before her. Her eyes darted back and forth, scanning over the grass on the lawn, the char marks on the wooden walls—several times she held up the pictures towards the light, muttering ferociously under her breath. Dean and I exchanged glances of discomfort, but neither one of us seemed to be willing to stop her or question what she’d found.
After a good few minutes, Skye finally set the evidence down and looked up at us, her expression tight but undoubtedly triumphant.
“However odd you thought this was, I think it just became ten times stranger.” She pushed all the photos back inside their envelope and crossed her arms.
“Why is that?” Dean asked.
“Because the accelerant trail doesn’t leadintothe house.”
Dean froze and then frowned at her. Then he grabbed the envelope and looked through the photos, frowning even more obviously. “How’s that possible?”
“Look at the accelerant trail,” she said with a shrug. “It stops right before it reaches the house. Which means whoever set the house on firewantedit to look like arson, even though itwasn’t.”
“Can you tell whatdidstart the fire?” I asked.
“Not from those photos.” Skye twisted her mouth, and that told me she was just as frustrated about that fact as we were. “With no candles or any other item that might hint to a fire, no electrical wiring, no alcohol that could have lit the blaze—I couldn’t tell you. The fire started in the bedroom, I agree with you on that point, but nothing I can see would have been able to start it. Did you look at the bed?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“All I could see on it was a scorch mark. It’s practically untouched, which doesn’t makeanykind of sense.”
I looked at Dean, and he stared right back at me, the disbelief clear on both our faces. The restaurant’s humming noise in the background became little more than a buzz in my ears as the full realization hit.
Honestly, I felt a bit silly. After the last year of my life, thinking anything in Damnation County would be simple was a foolish thing to think.
Dean cleared his throat as if he’d just reached the same conclusion—that whatever had happened to the Thatcher house, logic wasn’t going to help us answer it. He waved over the waiter and asked for our check, then turned back to his daughter, trying hard to appear far less alarmed than he was.
“Skye,” he said slowly, “this might be a weird thing to ask, but do you have…anyidea of what could cause something like this to happen?”
Skye sighed, casting us another snide grin. “I don’t know, Dean.” She answered, and of course I found it strange that she called her dad by his first name. These two were definitely estranged and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
“Have you ever considered the possibility of human combustion?”
Chapter Ten
“I mean,technicallyit’s all pseudoscience, but I figured we’re past the point of doubting anything.”
Sicily handed me another book, and I struggled to keep the pile from falling. The Branson library was blissfully big, which meant we could walk around undisturbed for as long as we needed to. That was a good thing, because one more article, textbook, or magazine depicting people ablaze, and I was going to lose my mind.
It was bad enough that I was back in the city but owing to the fact that Sicily and I had a ton of research to do and there weren’t any libraries in Damnation County, here we were.
“That’s my thought process, too,” I sighed as I walked over to the table we’d reserved. There were about a dozen articles sprawled out on its surface, and Sicily had pulled up a few websites discussing the phenomena of spontaneous human combustion, as well. None of the websites had been very helpful, so far, and as the hours ticked by, I couldn’t help but feel my hope starting to dwindle.
Sicily, however, hadn’t lost an ounce of enthusiasm. She jabbed a finger at the text she’d been reading with a sound of triumph. “Now this one seems promising!”
I lifted the cover of the text she was reading and sighed.Unsolved Mysteries of the Supernatural Worldby Andrew Burke looked like the sort of schlock you’d find at a dollar store, right next to one of the Fabio-inspired bodice rippers that women seemed to devour like popcorn. In my opinion, this was just a step above theNational Enquirer.If there was a chapter on ‘Nazi UFOs to Attack USA’ I was going to make sure it disappeared, even if I had to pay the library for ‘losing’ it.
Actually, scratch that, I didn’t have the money to pay the library for losing it.
