Shaking inside, she walked into the house, grabbed a piece of paper from the notepad on the counter, then sat down and wrote down the names of her brothers, one below the other. As she did, she heard Nate and Travis walk inside, the floorboards creaking with their footsteps.
“What’s going on?” Travis asked, a hint of concern in his voice.
“Look.” She added her own name to the list, writing it below Neville’s.
Aaron
Robert
Shea
Oliver
Neville
Shannon
“Oh, God…this…this is nuts,” she whispered as she stared at the names arranged vertically. Her throat closed so tightly she could barely breathe. She remembered hearing the rumors as a child, the nasty gossip that had slunk through the halls of St. Theresa’s. That her father was a bad seed, that he had intentionally set fires, earning awards and commendations for his bravery before the truth was discovered. Always the charges had been dismissed and he’d even laughed the allegations off, calling them “sour grapes” from some of his peers.
Had they been?
Her stomach turned sour.
A memory of Mary Beth, wearing her St. Theresa’s uniform in the locker room of the school gym, sliced through her brain. Shannon had been in one of the stalls, changing. She’d looked through a crack between the edge of the curtain and the wall, which gave her a view of the mirror mounted over a row of sinks. Mary Beth had been leaning over a dripping sink, her nose nearly pressed to the mirror as she’d applied mascara to her already-thick lashes. She’d been confiding to Gina Pratt that her father, a member of the Santa Lucia Fire Department, had said that Patrick Flannery was a “firebug.” That everyone in the department knew it. Shannon had raced to get dressed and hurried after her “friend,” only to have Mary Beth insist she’d been “kidding.”
And now…She swallowed hard.
“What?” Travis said. His hand was on her shoulder, and she tried not to think about it, about the tenderness of the gesture. It was all a fake, she reminded herself. He’d gotten close to her for reasons of his own, just as Nate had. Shrugging off his hand, she slid her finger slowly down the page on the table, touching the first letter of each of her siblings’ names before stopping at her own. A-R-S-O-N-S. Coincidence? Her father had been known for his practical jokes, but this wasn’t funny. Not at all. In fact, it was downright hideous. “ARSONS.”
Travis, his expression dark, stared at her. “What are you saying?”
“I heard my brothers talking about ‘birth order’ and it being ‘Dad’s fault.’ If what Nate is saying is true, could…? Oh, God—” The thought was reprehensible. She thought she might throw up. “Could my father really have been the Stealth Torcher?”
“Possibly,” Nate said.
Travis said, “But he’s dead. And there are new fires that everyone thinks might have been set by the same arsonist.”
“That’s right.” Nate stared at Shannon. “So who would be the most likely candidate to follow in Daddy’s footsteps? Literally take up the torch?”
“No one,” she insisted, but for the first time she doubted herself.
Travis’s cell phone rang and all speculation stopped. He flipped it open, and standing next to him, Shannon recognized the out-of-state number for the Sheriff’s Department in Lewis County, Oregon.
She didn’t dare breathe.
Travis pushed the phone to his ear. “Settler.” There was a long pause as Travis stared at Shannon, all the while listening to the one-sided conversation. Eventually, he said, “Thanks,” and flipped the phone shut. Stuffing the cell into his pocket, he said, “Another piece of the puzzle. Carter says they got a judge to unseal the adoption papers for Blanche Johnson’s second child. Turns out he was adopted by a childless couple down here named Carlyle. They named him Ryan.”
Chapter 30
“Okay, okay, so what’s with the stars?” Rossi asked as Paterno, carrying pages that he’d put in front of his fellow officers, secretarial staff, and even an alleged car thief who was being booked, returned to the office. He’d asked each one of them to draw a star without lifting the pen. To a one, they’d stared at him as if he’d lost his marbles, but they did as they’d been asked, some making him the butt of jokes about his sudden need to go back to kindergarten. He hadn’t listened or cared.
“Here’s what it looks like,” he said to Rossi as he loosened his tie. Geez, it was hot in here. “Eleven out of thirteen people made the stars the same way you and I both did, starting at the left-hand corner, moving upward to a point, then drawing straight down at an angle, up again over to the left, then straight across to the right and finally down to the original starting point.”
Rossi tried to look interested and failed. “There’s a point to this?”
“I think so,” Paterno said. “Maybe more like five points. Let’s just say that if you draw a star this way, without lifting your pencil, the first point would be at the top, see”—he demonstrated—“where you start going downward after going up. So that’s number one, but as we continue down, we make the next point at the lower right-hand when we angle up sharply, so that point is number two. Got it?”
“The lower right is number two. I ge