Free The Ice Cradle by Mary Ann Winkowski, Maureen Foley Page A

your clothes dryer running, say you turned it on before you went to bed, and you had a big backup of lint in there …”
    “I’m good about lint,” I answered reflexively and immediately wondered why in the world I had said it. And just as quickly I realized that Frank reminded me a lot of my dad, who’d always been a bear about dryer lint.
    “You’ve got to clean the screen off
every
time,” Frank said, before a crash and some shouts drew our attention back to the barn. Something had happened inside. Something had fallenor broken. Nevertheless, the men and two women handling the hoses seemed to be getting the fire under control.
    “You smell anything?” asked Frank.
    Mina shook her head. I mostly smelled smoke, but I took another deep breath.
    “Gasoline?” I asked.
    Frank nodded and set off along the line of bushes. He motioned for us to follow and we did, moving deeper into the lot until Frank paused under one of the pear trees. From our new position, we had a clear view into the barn.
    “See how orange those flames are?” he asked. “See that black, black smoke?”
    He was right. The flames were the color of tangerines, not the washed-out yellow of fireplace blazes. And the smoke was pluming up and out in big black clouds.
    “What would cause that?” I asked.
    “Accelerants,” he replied. “No question.”
    “You think the fire was set?” Mina whispered.
    “Not a doubt in my mind,” said Frank.

    It was nearly three in the morning. Henry was still asleep, and since the trucks and the neighbors had all departed, and the lapping of the waves was the only sound in the air, it seemed likely that he would slumber on until daybreak.
    I had finally gotten Lauren to come inside, and now she sat wrapped in an afghan at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of chamomile tea. Mark had cracked open a beer, not undeserved under the circumstances, I thought, but after taking one sip, he left it sitting untouched on the table. One of Mark’s closestfriends, the fisherman who’d caught the bass we’d had for dinner, had arrived in his pickup just as the hoses were being drained and the bystanders were dispersing. The wife of one of the volunteer firefighters had alerted him to the alarm, knowing that he was close to Lauren and Mark. Alberto Azevedo, who went by Bert, had now joined us in the kitchen for the gloomy postmortem.
    Bert asked for tea rather than beer, which surprised me, given that he was all decked out in bulky sweaters and heavyweight canvas. He definitely struck me as a beer guy. With his curly black hair and sunburned good looks, he could have walked right out of one of those offensive high-fashion spreads in which a supermodel is posed in a far-flung location among exotic “natives” in their actual clothes, or lack of them.
    How do they get away with those ads?
I wondered as I plopped a peppermint tea bag into a stoneware mug and poured in boiling water. What were we supposed to make of a woman dressed, or semi-undressed, for the red carpet, mugging for the camera before a council of Zulu warriors or from the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat?
    “Thanks,” said Bert.
    I nodded and sat back down. Why in the world was I thinking of Bert on the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat with a woman in a state of elegant undress? This was in such poor taste. Lauren and Mark’s barn had practically burned down.
    “At least no one was hurt,” said Mark.
    “That’s all that really matters,” said Lauren.
    It was one of those bland, soothing things that people always say, and it was true, of course. But it wasn’t completely true. Other things did matter. They mattered a lot. Like howmuch the repairs would cost and how much damage the old structure had sustained. Precious objects were now soaked and sooty, and no one had a clue as to where Frances had gone. They hadn’t found the remains of the portly old feline, thank goodness, but who knew what daylight would reveal?
    Then there was that little