“Your mama is a smart lady,” Hattie said. “How about the other guys? Did they meet her at the library too?”
“You’d have to ask them,” André said. “Tommy was okay, but I never was tight with Little Holl.”
“Any reason you two weren’t friends?” Hattie asked.
There was a prolonged silence from the other end of the phone. “Little Holl was trouble. The kind I didn’t need. You know, he’d have these parties at that beach house. Girls, booze, weed. I needed to keep my nose clean if I was gonna get a scholarship. Different rules for guys like me. You know?”
“I get it,” Hattie said. “Okay, well, thanks. You take care, André.”
“Always!”
Hattie yawned. Ribsy was already curled up on the rug at her feet. She called Makarowicz to tell him what she’d learned from the night’s sleuthing.
35
In the Still of the Night
Mo found a rusted aluminum beach lounger in the old boat shed at the edge of the property and dragged it onto the front porch of the beach house, positioning it in the darkest corner, under the roof overhang. He doused himself with mosquito repellant, stretched out, and waited.
It was his second, and, he’d already decided, last night on sentry duty.
The night was quiet, with the background thrum of cicadas, and the occasional sound of cars passing by on Chatham Avenue, and he was already beginning to regret this fool’s errand.
Mo had been too embarrassed to admit his late-night mission to Leetha or Hattie or Cass, who would have ridiculed the notion that he might catch their arsonist on a return visit. He wasn’t a cop, didn’t have a weapon, except for a prybar he’d borrowed from one of the carpenters, and didn’t think of himself as a vigilante. But the notion of someone deliberately setting fire to the place, and in the process risking someone’s life, had been gnawing on him since the fire trucks departed.
The other thing that gnawed on him was Hattie’s reaction to the fire. He kept seeing the tears streaming down her soot-smudged face as he watched her dreams going up in smoke. She hadn’t really discussed her finances since buying the house, but he felt pretty sure that she’d staked every dime she had on the place, and it enraged him that some malevolent shitbag could take all of that away with the strike of a match.
* * *
As the soft, humid night settled over him like a cloak, Mo wrestled with his growing attraction to Hattie. She was nothing like any woman he’d ever known before; funny and fearless, prickly and pugnacious, but with a tender, vulnerable core that she rarely revealed.
He yawned and looked down at his phone. Just past midnight, and he was already feeling drowsy, despite the concentrated caffeine in the Red Bull he’d chugged.
Suddenly, he heard the crunch of tires on the driveway. He slid out of the chair and crawled over to the edge of the porch, where he peeked up over the porch railing, and spied a dark sedan, its headlights dimmed, rolling slowly toward the house.
Mo’s pulse quickened. He had a small flashlight stuffed into his back pocket, and felt for it now.
The car continued past him, toward the rear of the house, and when it was out of sight he grabbed the prybar, opened the front door, and sprinted through the darkened house toward the back porch.
In his haste he banged his knee, hard, on one of the kitchen cabinets, and he whispered a curse. He opened the back door and crept onto the back porch. The sedan was parked a few yards away, under the shade of a live oak tree, its motor running. He heard the car door open and a slender, dark shape slowly emerged from the shadows. The stranger carried some kind of thick club in his right hand.
He inched toward the porch, shoulders hunched over, eyes focused on the uneven ground. Mo was moving now too; tiptoeing forward, he hid behind a huge, overgrown azalea and waited. He heard twigs breaking underfoot and ragged, uneven breaths as the stranger drew closer.
Mo felt sweat trickling down his back. Gnats swarmed around his face, and his heart thumped wildly in his chest. He peeked out from his shelter and saw that the intruder was within reach.
He took a deep breath and leapt out from his hiding place, knocking the stranger to the ground.
“Aiiieeeeyyyyyy.”
The high-pitched shriek echoed in the darkness. He grabbed his flashlight from his back pocket and shone it down on the intruder’s face, shocked by what he saw.
It was an elderly woman, her face a mask of wrinkles and rage, with a black knit cap pulled low over her hair and forehead. “Get offa me!” she screamed, ineffectively flailing her arms and legs. “Owwwww, get offa me.”