Читать книгу The Ladies Killing Circle Anthology 4-Book Bundle - Barbara Fradkin - Страница 30

Cecilia Kennedy

Who set fire to Glen Wylie’s barn? That question brought my boss, Sergeant Carr, to the hospital the night my son was born. He tracked me down at the display case of healthy newborns, where I looked past to the glass room marked INTENSIVE CARE: NO ADMITTANCE. No infant visible, just four white uniforms pulling lights and tubes and equipment toward a tiny hidden table.

Though I’d been on duty that night, I didn’t see the big timbers of Wylie’s barn collapse. Didn’t even hear about it for hours, because I was holding April’s hand in the nightmare light of the delivery room. This baby had showed up weeks ahead of schedule, a frantic arrival nothing like the gentle fiction we’d been prepared for in that birthing class. And then Intensive Care had kidnapped the baby.

So my mind was elsewhere when Carr fired off a rapid, “Hey, Tony, congratulations,” and scanned the lineup for a baby with the Aardehuis label. When he didn’t see one, he skipped straight to quizzing me about Glen Wylie and the likelihood that he might have torched his own barn.

“Fire guys say it was arson. Nothing clever about it: good old gasoline. You think he might a done it? Place is insured to the max.”