Chapter 9 of 9. See previous chapters beginning on Friday, July 26. Or check link to author archive – https://www.evesun.com/authors/31

After my younger self ended our conversation … first by recommending that I make myself available to Fire Marshal Hughes if ever he should re-enter my life, and then by hanging up on me, I crossed my arms behind my head, leaned back in my chair, and stared up at the ceiling.

I smiled.

“Oh, my dear girl,” I said aloud, as if twenty-eight-year-old me was still listening, “I have kept track of former Fire Marshal Macmillan Hughes.”

And I had.

From a discreet distance.

Less than a month after the trial, Mac left the New York City Fire Department and started his own fire investigation business. Most of his clients were major corporations or law firms needing him to determine whether or not their products had caused fires. But prosecuting attorneys hired him on criminal cases, too.

He also did work for insurance companies like mine.

Only in his own city had Mac been considered a pariah, and that stopped when Edward Nygh was arrested for molesting a seven-year-old girl. The details of the charge were ever disclosed, but after a plea deal (the details of that also were not disclosed), the weasel disappeared. Literally.

But that’s beside the point.

The point is that Macmillan Hughes had already been a private sector fire investigator for seven years before a friend called and told me that his wife had left him for a plastic surgeon, and … well, I guess that was all I needed to know to get me to thinking again about Mac’s square jaw, broken nose, and impossibly blue eyes

So, I called him up, reintroduced myself, and asked if he would be willing to investigate a fire for Precaution Property and Liability at a Queen Anne house in the Bronx.

Mac asked me a few questions about the case.

I gave him a few answers.

Then he said that sure, even though the last time he’d seen me, I had been a water-carrier for the enemy, he would be happy to investigate my fire.

I suggested we meet at the occupancy in the Bronx, so that he could explain the burn patterns to me as we went through the house.

We did and he did.

We went out to lunch afterwards.

Initially we just talked about the fire. Then we got to talking about everything from my job to his job to my ex-boss to Levon Williams.

Levon’s conviction, Mac told me, was being appealed.

“But this time,” he said, “I’ll be testifying for the defense.”

Then, he reiterated what he had said so loud and so often during his deposition all those years before, “Levon Willliams may be an arsonist and he’s definitely a scumbag, but he isn’t a scumbag who killed three firemen.”

Before we retreated to our respective cars, Mac stopped me, and he took my hand. He didn’t shake it. He engulfed it. Then he looked down at me.

Oh, boy.

“That was fun,” he said. “Let’s do it again.”

I didn’t answer.

“Dinner?” He asked.

I didn’t answer.

I still haven’t answered. That was three weeks ago. Three weeks of apprehension and indecision.

Macmillan Hughes is the real thing. The original what-you-see-is-what-you-get guy. An unsullied soul, with eyes that could drill through thirty-five years of defense mechanisms to unclench a soul as tightly clasped as a fist. He was probably – it’s a cliché, but aren’t clichés just truths made mundane by repetition? – the man I had been waiting for my entire life.

The mere thought of it scared me half to death.

Or rather. It had scared me.

Until I called someone younger, braver, and more clear-sighted than I. Someone who knew what I needed better than I did myself.

I leaned across my desk and picked up my old address book. I looked one last time at the page headed “Me,” murmured, “Thanks, Kid,” and threw it back in the drawer. Then I dropped my eyes to the business card Mac had given me. The one that, for the past three weeks, had been staring at me so insistently from the center of my desk. On the back of the card, he had scrawled his home phone number. Underneath the number, he’d written in big block letters the words: CALL ME.

My hand was reaching for the telephone to do exactly that when a loud abrasive trill shook me out of my womb of self-absorption and, frankly, pissed me off.

I reached for the phone and snapped it up.

“What?” I barked into the receiver.

“And hello to you, too!” An instantly recognizable voice good-naturedly answered back.

My irritation disappeared. My fingernails unconsciously began to tap against the tabletop.

I relaxed in my chair.

“Oh,” I said. I smiled. “It’s you.”

The End

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com.