Cinders Read online

  The changing light in the window was what first caught Marigold’s eye. She’d been waiting for the dawn, but this was too early, and the light was too flickery to be the sun. Then, through the small opening of her window where she liked to let the breeze flow in, she heard a man’s voice, or thought she did.

  Her first thought went to Ryan, but what business did he have in the garden at that hour? By the way she sometimes caught him looking at her, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find him pulling a Romeo, but she thought he had more professional sense than that. What light through yonder window breaks? Then she parted the curtains and her whole body froze in place.

  The garden – her mother’s beautiful artwork of a garden, her pride and joy – was glowing orange and white as fire gobbled up everything in sight, growing larger by the second. Mari’s mouth dropped open and her legs might have given way if her knees weren’t locked. The tables and chairs, her pretty string lights, and most importantly, the garden itself was burning.

  And there was a man standing just beyond the light of the flames, watching.

  She saw the red gas cans at his feet first, and then the silhouette of his legs in a wide stance, his hands shoved in the pockets of a dark jacket. Recovered from her initial shock, she screamed at him from the window, but of course that only made him turn and run off toward the driveway. In a blind panic, Mari ran out of her bedroom and flew down the two flights of stairs to the garden, clutching her robe around her as she went.

  “Fire!” she yelled as she ran past the staff quarters, then dashed toward the garden.

  She paused inside for just a second, her heart thudding in her chest, and grabbed an umbrella from the stand near the door. It was the only thing within reach and she couldn’t imagine herself actually using it to defend herself, but she wasn’t about to let that man get away with this.

  When she got to the garden, though, there was no one to wave the umbrella at. The man had made his escape, leaving his gas cans and all her beautiful flowers engulfed in fire.

  “No, no, no,” she cried as a lifetime of careful tending and nurturing went up in flames, not to mention all the hard work for her father’s retirement party.

  If it all burns to the ground, I’ll be stuck with Ryan forever.

  The thought was a little out of place, a little ridiculous, but it spurred her into action. She dropped the umbrella and shrugged out of her robe. It was a thin silk one that only came down to her upper thighs, but she’d seen plenty of people in movies using their clothes to smother fires. It was all she had, and all her brain was capable of coming up with in that frantic moment.

  She threw the robe over the first flaming lily that she saw. It snuffed out the fire a lot better than she’d expected, blackening the robe and saving at least part of the flower. It was hot when she picked up the fabric, intent on doing the same thing to the next flaming plant.

  “Ouch,” she hissed, turning her face away from the heat and tossing her robe over a smoking tiger lily.

  “Oh my god! What happened?”

  Mari turned to see Emily running up the path, trying not to trip as her enormous, fuzzy slippers kicked gravel all over the place. Her eyes were as big as saucers and Mari had just enough self-awareness to know that the look of surprise wasn’t a hundred percent due to the fire. She must look crazy standing out here in nothing but a short white nightgown, fighting the flames with her robe.

  “I don’t know,” she said, moving on to the next flower. It was an exercise in futility. For every plant she saved – if half-burned and limp could even be considered saved – there were twenty more catching fire. “Call 911, Em.”

  “I already did,” she said. “Come on, this is too dangerous-”

  “I can’t stand here and do nothing,” Mari objected, stepping out of Emily’s reach as she tried to pull her away from the fire. She dropped her robe on top of another plant. The fire ate away at it a little more with every attempt she made to salvage her garden, and by now it was looking more like Swiss cheese than imported silk.

  “Okay, I’ll get the garden hose,” Emily said when she noticed the desperation in Mari’s eyes. “Was this an accident?”

  “No,” Marigold said. “It definitely wasn’t.”

  She pointed to the two gas cans at the end of the tables – what was left of them – and then she picked up her singed robe and moved on to the next plant.

  By the time the fire engines screamed their way into the gravel lot, Marigold and Emily were losing the war against the fire. Mari’s beautiful silk robe was nothing but a burnt rag, the garden hose had proved almost entirely ineffective, and they were both covered in soot. As more of the staff came outside, Mari had tried to organize a bucket brigade, but when the firefighters arrived and ushered everyone else away from the fire, Mari found herself alone in the garden.

  She refused to stand down, refused to let the fire win. Despite Emily’s objections – and those of the firefighters themselves – she needed to keep trying. This wasn’t just a collection of flowers. She knew every single plant in the garden, its origin and history. As she watched each one of them burn, it was like a funeral pyre.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  “Miss Grimm?” one of the firefighters said. “If you’ll just go stand with the others, we’ll take it from here.”

  He took her by the shoulders before she could object, leading her forcefully out of the garden and delivering her to Emily. Em put her arms around Mari, holding her in place and trying in vain to comfort her, but all Mari saw were the orange flames destroying everything she cared about.

  And then she saw the heavy hoses that the firefighters uncoiled from their trucks. They were careless, letting them drag through the remains of her garden. She watched someone turn on the water and then the high-powered spray started blowing what was left of her flowers straight off their stems.

  Marigold let out a high-pitched yelp and Emily held her tighter as she watched her last hopes of salvaging the retirement party get washed away. Everything that wasn’t ruined in the fire or withered from the gasoline was drowning in a torrent of water. Mari felt tears welling in the back of her throat. She knew how unhinged she must look in her soot-covered nightgown, but she refused to sacrifice the last shreds of her dignity by crying.

  “We’ll rebuild,” Emily said, patting Mari’s arm. “Don’t worry.”

  “Rebuild in twelve hours?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Emily sighed and put her head on Marigold’s shoulder, then suggested gently, “We’ll postpone the party to another night. That’s all.”

  That’s all. Marigold took a deep breath, still valiantly fighting the urge to cry as her hopes and dreams died quietly inside her. Emily was right – of course she was. As the firefighters did their job and the fire slowly waned, Mari could see the true destruction that horrible man had wrought. Everything she and the staff had worked so hard to set up was ruined, and even if they managed to replace it all before this evening, the garden was all but unsalvageable.

  “Oh my god,” she said, breaking free of Emily’s grasp and running back into the garden. She put her hand on the arm of the nearest firefighter and begged, “Can you please be careful? That’s a Cinderella milkweed and you have no idea what I had to go through to get it.”

  She had the urge to dive in front of the flower, but luckily, she didn’t have to. The firefighter – a woman whose steely eyes stood out from her bulky, soot-covered uniform – lowered her hose and sprayed the flower indirectly until the flames died with a hiss.

  “Thank you,” Marigold said. “I really appreciate your help – I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but your crew is devastating my garden.”

  The woman looked at her. It was more than a simple appraisal – her gray eyes sparkled with a curiosity that made Marigold very self-conscious of her outfit, or lack thereof. And was there recognition there as well? Mari narrowed her eyes at the woman – she looked famil
iar, but couldn’t place her. Mari didn’t know her in a professional capacity, and she didn’t have much of a social life to speak of. A childhood acquaintance, then?

  “Guys!” the woman said, cupping her hand around her mouth to shout at the rest of her crew, scattered throughout the garden. “Let’s have a little finesse, okay? Try not to kill the plants any more than necessary!”

  Marigold’s heart melted at the gesture and she watched with relief as the rest of the crew pointed their hoses higher instead of blasting the water straight at her flowers.

  “Thank you so much,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” the woman answered. A little smile touched the corner of her lips, and then she nodded to where Emily and the rest of the staff was standing. “You should go back over there until the fire’s out. Wouldn’t want you to get wet.”

  Was that a little smirk Mari saw? And did her eyes flick ever so briefly down to Marigold’s nightgown? She felt naked and embarrassed, and just a little bit excited. It must have been a stress reaction, her body’s way of taking her mind off the fact that this was the worst night of her life.

  She walked back over to Emily, at the very least relieved that she’d been able to stop the death-by-water of her remaining plants. And then it hit her – the woman was Cynthia Robinson, who moved to Grimm Falls when Marigold was fifteen, captured her attention at an ice cream parlor, and had been giving Mari the cold shoulder ever since.

  Nine

  Cyn

  Cyn couldn’t get Marigold Grimm out of her head ever since she responded to the Grimm House fire, and it wasn’t just because of that scandalously tiny nightgown she’d been wearing. Granted, if she’d been a betting woman, Cyn wouldn’t have put money on Marigold owning a piece of clothing like that, but what most intrigued her was the new side to Marigold that she’d seen this morning.

  She’d never been anything but perfectly poised and meticulously made up - never a hair out of place or an uncalculated response. But when Cyn’s fire truck pulled into the gravel lot, there was Marigold, swatting frantically at the flames with the tattered remnants of what must have been a very expensive robe. Her ordinarily perfect blonde curls were frizzy and wild, there were smudges of soot on her arms and legs, and even a streak of it on the tip of her nose.

  Frankly, she’d been a hot mess, and Cyn had never seen her so emotional about anything. It scared her, lifting Marigold’s carefully constructed mask and seeing fragility beneath it. That was why Cyn barked at her crew to take more pride in their work, and it was what stuck with Cyn long after they’d returned to the firehouse.

  "I'm serious,” she was saying to her crew while they sat around the break room table and wrote up their reports for the fire inspector. “Have you ever seen her lose her cool before? Nothing shakes her."

  Well, nothing until this morning.

  James rolled his eyes at her. “You know you haven’t shut up about Marigold Grimm since four a.m.?”

  “Yes I have,” Cyn said defensively, but the rest of the guys shook their heads.

  “No, Cinders, you haven’t,” James said. “Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to figure out what a painting, a barn, and Grimm House have in common.”

  “You think all the fires are related?” she asked. It was mostly a rhetorical question – it was statistically unlikely that so many intentional fires could be set by different people in a city of this size at such short intervals.

  “It’s looking like we’ve got a serial arsonist on our hands,” he said with a nod. “Now it’s up to Holt to put the pieces together.”

  Cyn tapped her pencil against her paper. She’d been working on her report for the last hour and having trouble concentrating. The juxtaposition of innocent white silk and a scandalously short hem caressing Marigold Grimm’s thighs just kept popping into her head, and she had to chase the image away again and again.

  “’Two gas cans, empty, left at scene,’” she read from her report. “’Homeowner spotted a man in all black fleeing the premises.’ Is that all we’ve got to go on?”

  “And the cigarette butt,” Gleeson added. “A partially smoked Winston that may or may not have belonged to the perp.”

  “Grimm House is always immaculate,” James said. “There’s no way it was dropped by a guest or staff member, especially with an event coming up.”

  Cyn nodded. She nibbled the eraser end of her pencil for a minute, then stood up and said, “Everybody done with your reports? I’ll walk them over to the police station before I go on my lunch break.”

  She left the reports on Detective Holt’s desk, then went down the street to The Magic Bean café, which kept her loaded with caffeine through many a long shift at the firehouse and which happened to have a pretty good food menu, too.

  While she was standing in line to order, her mind went once again back to Marigold and Grimm House, and she had a sudden urge to head back over there. Just to make sure I didn’t miss any pertinent details in my report, she thought. It was crazy to think that her quiet, friendly city was under attack, and she was determined to do everything in her power to nail the criminal before he could do any more damage.

  If she found an opportunity to say a few more words to Marigold Grimm in the process, so much the better.

  Cyn ordered two coffees instead of one, and after a moment’s deliberation, she got a turkey sandwich and a ham sandwich – if Marigold’s state this morning was any indication, she probably hadn’t taken time to eat yet, and Cyn would give her dibs on the lunchmeat of her choosing.

  Cyn was feeling anxious and second-guessing herself by the time she drove up the gravel drive to Grimm House, tucked away behind a large, wooded property. Coming back to double-check her work would seem insecure, or even incompetent. Coming back with a lunch for two when Marigold barely knew she existed – was she nuts?

  But Cyn couldn’t stop thinking about how devastated Marigold had been that morning, and more importantly, how their eyes had locked when she ran over to Cyn and begged her to be more careful with the water. It had made her heart stop, and when it started again, she was sure there had been a spark.

  As unlikely as it seemed, Cyn just couldn’t get the idea out of her head that Marigold Grimm had checked her out.

  So she mustered every ounce of courage in her body – more than she’d ever needed to run into a burning building – and she got out of her truck with coffee and sandwiches in hand.

  “Whoa.”

  The garden was in a surprising state of activity. There were at least a dozen people sorting through the burned and waterlogged mess outside and carrying what they could salvage into the house. Now that she saw it, Cyn realized she’d been imagining Marigold sitting there by herself, but she was Grimm Falls royalty. Of course she would have droves of people leaping to help her.

  Cyn was there now, though, and she’d feel even more foolish if she just climbed back into her truck and left. So she carried her woefully insufficient two cups of coffee and her sandwich bag into the garden and asked the first person she saw, “Do you know where I can find Marigold Grimm?”

  The woman glanced at Cyn’s navy blue fire department t-shirt, then asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh yeah,” Cyn said, then decided to stick with her original excuse for coming here. “I wanted to take another look at the grounds to make sure I didn’t miss any clues about the fire this morning.”

  “Help yourself,” the woman said. “Mari’s in the flower garden trying to save what she can.”

  Cyn thanked her, then found her way to a more secluded part of the garden where Marigold was crouched over a partially-burned bed of her namesake flowers, her back to Cyn. There was police tape strung across the entrance to the burned area, but Marigold had ignored it, and so did Cyn.

  As she approached, she noticed that Marigold had changed into a pair of jeans, dirty and wet around the hems, and a plain white t-shirt that clung to her back with the sweat of exertion. It betrayed the sinewy curves of her back, an
d Cyn cleared her throat to get her attention before she had a chance to stare too long.

  “Marigold?”

  “Yes?” she asked over her shoulder, then turned around. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Cyn cast her eyes down to the gravel. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “Are you serious?” Marigold asked. “You’re my hero.”

  She stood and looked at her dirty hands for a moment before giving up and wiping them on the thighs of her jeans. Cyn didn’t expect that, nor did she expect the fact that Marigold’s hair was still just as wild now as it had been at three in the morning. She’d tied it back with a ribbon, but she certainly wasn’t her normal, impeccably groomed self.

  Marigold extended her hand with a very disarming smile, and Cyn was feeling very uncertain about this whole misguided visit.

  She clumsily juggled the coffees and sandwich bag in her hands, and after a moment of awkwardness that went on for a couple of beats too long, she gave up on shaking Marigold’s hand and instead pressed one of the coffee cups into it. “I brought you coffee. And a sandwich. I figured you’d be hungry and exhausted, but it looks like you’ve got plenty of energy.”

  Stop talking. You’re blathering.

  She shut her mouth and smiled, waiting. Then Marigold returned the smile.

  “That’s really sweet of you. You came all the way here to bring me some coffee?”

  “And a sandwich,” Cyn said. “I got both turkey and ham so you could choose, but I didn’t realize you’d have such a big staff. I should have brought more.” There you go again… She changed the subject. Gesturing at the staff working around them, she asked, “Is the event still on for tonight?”