Murder in Pastel (26 page)

Sprinting to the door, I found it locked tight. The wood was old but solid. I tried ramming my shoulder against it a couple of times but no go.

“Cobb, I already called the sheriffs!”

No answer. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he didn’t believe me.

Standing back, I took a couple of deep breaths, telling myself to keep calm. From outside I could hear a dragging sound, and more alarmingly, I could smell smoke. The stench of gasoline seeped beneath the door.

There was no way this was going to look like an accident to anyone who was paying attention, but I didn’t know if that was much comfort. I tried to reassure myself that someone in the colony would notice flames—fire—but would it be too late?

Stumbling and groping my way across the uneven floor, I headed for the stairs leading to the bell tower. I stepped on the first rung and it gave way.

Sweat popped out on my forehead. “Please, God…” My heart fluttered in my throat.

The second rung held.

I began to climb, coughing. Already the smoke was heavy, and the crackle of flames deafened. Crackle? This was so much louder than I could have imagined—a wall of roaring sound.

Weird to be in the center of the hearth. The church was going up like a tinderbox. I had maybe minutes. Maybe less.

The bats flew in a cloud of flapping wings around me. High and eerie, their squeaks deafened me as they swirled like a black tornado heading for the open bell tower.

The heat radiating through the walls was incredible. I scrambled up the last rungs of the ladder. As I made it to the top, the rotten floor collapsed under my foot. I grabbed for the bell rope and the old bell rang out loud and clear, booming alarm across the church yard, woods and meadow. It rang loudly enough to wake the dead.

Regaining my balance, I crawled to the side. Looked down. I had a great view of the entire colony. Mayor Cobb’s Chevy was cutting a blue streak down the highway and coming to meet it from across the other end I could see the sheriff’s black-and-white approaching.

So Rankin had received my message. That was good. It wouldn’t take him long to put two and two together.

I had an omniscient view of Cobb’s fate—and my own. No one could get to me in time now. I had one option. I could jump—I would have to—and hope I wasn’t unlucky enough to break anything vital on a three-story drop.

And then like a hallucination, I heard Adam shouting my name over and over. I looked down, got a dizzying zoom of Adam, his sweaty face streaked with black. He stood in the shadow of the steeple, gesturing to me.

The boards across the stained glass windows groaned and then shrieked. Glass shattered inside the church.

“Get a ladder,” I yelled.

I doubt if he understood me. I sure as hell couldn’t hear him. I didn’t need to hear him to know that there was no time. Already the flames were licking at my tower. The smoke billowed around us.

“Jump!” Adam gestured. “Jump and I’ll break your fall.”

Yeah, and we could have two broken necks instead of one. I looked desperately around to see if there was any way to climb down. The sloping roof looked like my best shot. If I could jump from the tower, land on the roof and not immediately slide off into the inferno, I would be forty feet closer to the ground, and my chances proportionally higher.

“Kyle, for Christ’s sake, jump!” I could hear Adam screaming. He was too close to the building now, oblivious to the flames starting up around him. Oblivious to the falling planks and glass. His eyes streamed tears from the smoke. “Now, Kyle!”

Most people would rather die than think.

I heard my father as clearly as though he stood at my elbow. That lazy, slightly sardonic voice—as familiar as my own. That was one of his favorite sayings—and what a weird time to remember…

I stared down at the rope still wrapped around my hand and a belated thought occurred to me. Edging over to the ledge, gripping the rope tight, I let myself over the side. I thought I could ease myself down, but it didn’t work like that. There was no traction for my foot and I dropped as though a scaffold had opened up beneath me, the force nearly yanking my arms from their sockets.

For a moment I dangled there while Adam yelled frantic instructions that I couldn’t understand.

I squinted through my tears, and through the smoke I could see shingles peeling up on the sloping roof beneath me, and the red ribs of the building showing through.

The heat was ferocious. My skin would start to melt soon.

If I let go I was liable to fall through the crumbling roof into a barbecue. And if I didn’t let go I would die of smoke inhalation and the heat. My arms shook with the strain; my heart punched furiously at the wall of my chest.

Hazily I thought, if my heart lasts through this I’m good for the duration.

Beneath me Adam was incoherent with swearing, praying and orders.

There was nothing for it.
Oh, shit,
I thought, and let go.

I landed in a half-crouch on the roof. My feet slid, stuck, and I did a kind of head-first dive off the edge, arms outstretched and mouth open in a yowl of sheer terror.

The grass rushed forward as I plummeted down.

Somehow he caught me. Sort of. We collided hard and painfully. His arms locked around me and he staggered back with a grunt, the wind knocked out of his lungs. Falling back in the shriveling grass, he sprawled there with me on top. Not moving.

After a stunned moment I rolled off him.

“Adam? Adam, are you okay?”

He nodded. I leaned over him; tears from the smoke streamed down his soot-smeared face, half concealing the black-eye I’d given him. He wheezed up at me.

“Are you okay?” I urged.

He wheezed some more, tried to get up. I grabbed his arm and we scuttled back from the intense heat of the flames now engulfing the building. Cinders blew in the air.

I watched it go in a kind of shock, starting when Adam reached to brush an ember out of my hair.

“Jesus, Kyle,” he said hoarsely. “I thought you were dead.” His face worked and he turned away. After a moment he wiped his face with the back of his arm. “Jesus.”

Another spark landed on his shoulder. I brushed at it.

“How did you know I was in there?”

He turned toward me and I was shaken by the raw emotion carving his features. “Because I waited for you,” he said. “I waited for you to come home. So that we could talk. So that we could work this out.” He wiped roughly at the tears running down his face. “I saw you come home and I saw you start out across the meadow. I followed you.”

Sirens shrieked in the distance; Steeple Hill’s fire brigade arriving better late than never.

“You saved my life.”

“No,” he said. “You saved your own life. I could never have got to you in time.”

A terrifying groaning seemed to split the sky above us.

I whispered, “What the—?”

We scrambled back as the bell tower slowly gave way, and the old bell crashed down, tolling one final time as it hit the ground. The trees shook. Red embers drifted down across the gravestones and statues like red snow. The bell’s final reverberation echoed like a death knell.

When the sound at last died away, Sheriff Rankin’s black-and-white had pulled to a stop outside the cemetery fence. The car door opened and Adam and I rose to our feet.

* * * * *

“So she did know,” I said.

It was later that evening. I’d had a couple of hours sleep and was feeling weirdly calm as Sheriff Rankin explained that he had been delayed in meeting me due to a visit from Miss Irene. She had brought him Brett’s anklet.

“She seems to blame herself.” I wasn’t sure if that was agreement or not. Rankin was smoking a pipe, the homely scent comforting in the twilight room. I glanced at Adam, who had arrived with the sheriff after giving his statement. He was staring down into his snifter of brandy.

“There are still a lot of questions,” Rankin said heavily.

Mayor Cobb had been arrested and taken to jail. A forensics team was sifting through the rubble of the church.

I said, “I guess that’s so.” For me, the main question had been answered.

As though he felt my gaze, Adam lifted his head, and the hands cradling my own snifter were suddenly not quite steady. So maybe I wasn’t quite as calm as I thought. And maybe there was still a question or two.

Rankin smoked and talked for another hour or so and then he got to his feet and offered Adam a ride back to his place.

Adam said quietly, “Kyle and I have some things to say to each other.” His blue gaze challenged mine.

I shrugged and said, “Sure,” as though my pulse hadn’t sped up.

“Okay dokey,” Rankin said in the tone of one who did not want to know. “I’ll see myself out then.”

The screen door opened and closed. His heavy footsteps sounded on the porch steps. The clock on the mantel tick-tocked out a few moments of crickets and then we heard the rumble of the police cruiser’s engine. The crunch of tires on shell and gravel.

I looked at Adam. Waited.

He said quietly, “You’ve been through enough for one day. I just wanted to say…we’ve been friends a long time. I don’t want to lose that.” He set his glass down and rose.

It was so not what I was expecting. I couldn’t seem to think of anything to say. I stared at him and stared—and then I nodded. Curtly.

But I must have looked as stricken as I felt because he hesitated. “I don’t know what you want, Kyle. I don’t know why love doesn’t seem to be enough. I don’t know how to reach you.”

Love. There it was, out in the open. But was that what I had been waiting for: the word?

A little desperately, I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t accept what you’re offering. What you seem to be offering me.”

Instead of answering he asked curiously, “Are you afraid of me?”

“No.” Not of him. Of what he could do to me—of how badly he could hurt me without ever meaning to. Still, I could see why the thought crossed his mind; my voice was breathless and shaky at this moment of truth. My mouth was dry; the words came out thick and gummy. “I’m at risk for developing heart failure.”

“But you’ve known you were at risk since you were sixteen,” he said very gently.

I blinked. It was like staring at the tiny wrecked galleon in a fish bowl. Gigantic moss-covered tragedy through the glass—and nothing but painted plastic bits from above. It’s all in the perspective. Adam was right. I had always known this. What had changed? I had always accepted the odds.

Now I have something to lose…

He waited for me to speak, and when I said nothing he sat down across from me again. Something eased inside me. He wasn’t going to walk out the door. Not yet anyway.

His eyes were very blue in the lamplight. Very grave. I thought he was going to ask about what my tests indicated. Instead he said, “That first time I saw Brett, he was staring at one of Cosmo’s paintings. And because of the shadows—because of the way the light fell—for a moment I thought he was you.” His smile was derisive, but the mockery was for himself, not me. “And I had a sense of recognition. Of certainty. I thought to myself, I always knew—and then he turned. And he wasn’t you.”

“And the rest, as they say, is history,” I said in a brittle voice that didn’t sound like me at all.

“When I saw you again—when you opened the door to me this past June—it hit me all over again. That feeling of certainty. Of knowing.”

I couldn’t speak.

“It’s not easy telling you this. It feels like a betrayal of Brett. And I did love Brett.”

“But you wouldn’t have left him.”

“No. Brett had too many people abandon him; I couldn’t have done that to him.” He finished compassionately, “Because I know what it did to you.”

My laugh sounded like something else. I stood up and walked to the fireplace where
Virgin in Pastel
had once hung. I could see Adam watching me in the mirror.

He said softly, “But Brett would have left me.”

I turned and he was there.

* * * * *

A few days after being charged with attempted murder, Mayor Cobb made a full confession. Miss Irene was granted immunity for cooperating with the police. Cosmo’s fate was a nine-day wonder, and the prices on his paintings skyrocketed once again.

A week after we buried my grandfather, we held a private memorial service for my father in the old cemetery. Wild flowers were already beginning to poke up through the blackened ruins.

I stood there holding Adam’s hand, feeling surprisingly little. Joel cried. Even Micky cried. I could sense Adam watching me, waiting for it to hit me. I, too, had expected to feel more.

On the night following Cobb’s attempt to kill me, Adam and I had continued to talk until dawn, and in the end we agreed on one thing: we loved each other. How far that would take us, neither of us knew. If I learned one thing that summer, it was to appreciate each day. Life is fragile and fleeting as a bubble blown on a child’s plastic pipe. A walk in the woods can be the last walk you take, with words left unsaid, questions left unanswered. Not many people check out with the loose ends neatly tied up. There were enough question marks in my future to make me value the certainties.

“There’s a major meteor shower going on,” Adam said at breakfast a few days after we had laid Cosmo to rest. “The Perseids.” He folded up the newspaper. “What do you say we zip our sleeping bags together and camp out under the stars tonight?”

He was smiling, his eyes kind and attentive, tilting up at the corners in the old way. For the first time in a long time I felt my heart lighten.

“Sure, let’s give the owls something to hoot about,” I agreed.

“I’ll bring the hot chocolate.”

“What do I bring? Marshmallows?”

He raised an exaggeratedly lustful eyebrow. “No need to get fancy. Just the standard equipment, sonny boy.”

I pushed back from the table and checked. “I think it’s all still here.”

“It seemed to be last night.”

“Maybe we should check to make sure…”

At last Adam took off to finish the final painting of his fall exhibit: a portrait of Brett and me which he was completing from sketches he had done that summer. I thought it was one of the best things he’d ever done.