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“Mary Reeser,” Sicily said slowly, following the line of text with her finger. I peered over her shoulder, which she normally hated. No one likes to have someone literally breathing down their neck, even if that person is their mother.
I squinted at the black-and-white photo next to the paragraph. It depicted a bespectacled woman staring away from the camera, a smile on her face. She looked older, maybe in her late sixties or early seventies. The lines around her eyes were deep, but there was something about her face or expression that led me to believe she was probably kind.
“What about her?” I asked.
“There have been over two hundred alleged cases of spontaneous human combustion, dating all the way back to Polonus Vorstius in 1470.”
“Balonus what?”
“Polonus Vorstius… in 1470. Mary is just the most famous example of the phenomenon; she died in 1951. There have been more recent cases, but she’s the one most of these articles seem to talk about.” She continued to scan the text in front of her, her mouth moving but no words coming out. “Ah,” she started and tapped her finger against it. “The three elements normally associated with Spontaneous Human Combustion—” She looked up at me at this point. “From here on out known more simply as SHC—” Returning her gaze back to the article, she continued. “Are that only the body burns, leaving most of the area around it intact. There’s no visible source to the fire, and the rest of the body is usually okay.”
“There’s just one problem with that theory,” I said, leaning away, crossing my arms over my chest. “As far as we can tell, thereisno body. I think that can probably nip your SHC theory in the bud.”
“Skye’sSHC theory,” Sicily corrected me.
“Right—Dean’s overly friendly and chatty daughter.”
“Anyhoo…” Sicily returned her attention to the article before looking back up at me again. “I don’t think we can necessarily put the SHC theory to bed yet,” Sicily continued, chin jutting defiantly. She’d adopted the same expression as far back as I could remember, from toddlerhood to teenage hell. There was no talking to her when she got like this.
“Sicily—” I began weakly, but she plowed on, cutting me off.
“I might know more if you’d let me actuallylookat the scene, but since I only have Dean’s report and photos to go on, I’ll just have to extrapolate.”
I sighed. “Okay—extrapolate.”
She nodded. “Dean said the bedroom was the source of the fire, but there wasn’t a ton of damage in the bedroom, right? I mean—the bed was still standing and basically untouched.”
“Right.”
“And there was no accelerant in the house, which means the fire probably wasn’t the result of arson or a meth lab gone wrong. Or a crazy. They’d be after food and water…”
“Right and a crazy wouldn’t have the mental capacity to even think about lighting a fire, let alone covering their tracks by making a trail of accelerant leading up to the house just to make the scene look convincing.”
“Right.” She nodded and narrowed her eyes which meant she was onto something. “Which means that if the fire wasn’t spontaneous human combustion, then it was… murder.”
“Attemptedmurder because we haven’t found any bodies.”
“Right.” That expression again. “So, the question becomes… if someone set the fire intending to murder the occupant or occupants of the house… how did they all get out? Surely whoever was responsible would have been waiting outside—just in case they tried to escape?”
“One would assume so, yes.”
She shook her head. “And yet, there are no bodies. How else do we explain it?”
She had me there. I could think of a dozen ways that someone could start a house fire, but none that would explain the odd scene at the Thatcher homestead. I still didn’t buy the idea that someone had just burst into flames—mainly because, again, there were no bodies. And as to a more supernatural answer—the last time we’d had a fire-based monster running around, the thing had nearly burned down half of Windy Ridge before we could ambush him with extinguishers. A lot of homes still had scorch marks on their siding, and Karen was the head of a committee that was trying to make the poor man in question pay for repairs. As if he could have helped turning into a fire-breathing toad. The unlucky guy had as much say over what he’d become as the rest of us. That is to say, none. If you’d asked me what kind of movie monster I’d like to become pre-Fog, I wouldn’t have chosen a vampire. Too cliche if you asked me, and yet, here I was in all my fangy glory.
I sighed. “Let’s check these out, and then we’ll visit the P.O. box before Mason gives us a lift back to Windy Ridge.”
Currently, Mason was on a coffee run, no doubt bored to tears by all the research we were doing.
Sicily let out a bright, tinkling laugh at my tone, gathering up the books she’d been reading. She was probably thinking along the same lines as I was. We’d set up the P.O. box in Branson not long after things had gone to hell. Deliveries had been difficult before, but post-Fog, they were damn near impossible. It had been Sicily’s idea to set up a few P.O. boxes in Branson that the human-looking monsters could visit periodically in order to bring deliveries into town. We’d stressed that it should only be used for official town business or emergencies, but had anyone listened to us? No.
“If there’s another shipment of Karen’s Multi-Level-Marketing bullshit in our box, I’m going to trash it,” I muttered darkly, earning myself a sharp look from one of the librarians as we passed the front desk on our way out the door.
“Shhh,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled under my breath. “If you were dealing with Karen, you’d mutter too.”
“Bad idea to trash Karen’s mail, Mama,” Sicily said, trying and failing to hide a grin. “Tampering with the mail is a federal offense. Not to mention that it kind of defeats the purpose of this whole charade if you end up in jail.”
