“Anything?” she asked.
“Possibly,” I said. I described how the car salesman had urged me, possibly double entendre, to come ‘see a car.’ The bride-to-be, who’d been the last person to use the loo following the previous class, had dropped a crumpled wad of mascara-streaked tissues as she hurried away. And I wondered if ‘Ginger Rogers’ had clung a bit too closely to her suave instructor. There was much afoot at Harrison’s, but none of it instantly shed any light on Ms. Moran.
“So we know nothing more than when we started.” Watson frowned, tilting her beret in the bathroom’s lighted mirror. “Arthur Daley is freaking out, and couldn’t even make it through our whole dance without texting and emailing. But Penelope didn’t answer.”
I twisted my dress into place at the hips, wishing I could trade this unforgiving fabric for the comfort of my usual black trousers.
“So a once social and enthusiastic woman decides to forgo her beloved dance class,” I said. I leaned against the white wall, slick tile chilling my bare shoulders. “A once-gregarious heiress decides to keep secrets from her sweetheart.”
“Bum bum,” Watson intoned.
“Beg pardon?” I said.
“Law and order,” Watson said.
“Not much of either, I fear.” Watson is the only person in the world who baffles me.
My phone buzzed, again. A text. I read the tiny screen.
“It’s Daley,” I said, my mind fairly racing with possibilities. “We must drive to Stoke Moran at once.”
The local firefighters had doused what must have been an infernal conflagration in record time, for by the time Watson and I arrived, some of the smoke that curled from the once-shingled roof of Stoke Moran and puffed into the darkening sky was white. Steam, I knew, not the angry black smoke that signaled the irreparable consumption of whatever the flames touched.
We’d first glimpsed only clouds of black as my Jeep crunched over the last half mile of narrow gravel road leading toward Stoke Moran, the global positioning voice bleating directions that clarified the frantic and misspelled ones Arthur Daley had hastily texted to my cell. The choke of acrid smoke had seeped into our car even before we cleared the final bend, red lights from the local fire department sweeping that now-recognizable stand of poplars bracketing Penelope Moran’s two-century-old family estate.
Apple, smiley-face, I thought. Police officer, police officer, police officer. The email emoticons referred to nothing about fire. No houses, no flames, no candles or matches. The moon was out, though, and stars, cobwebbed by the last of the smoke.
Stoke Moran was now a study in chiaroscuro—one half, a stout white wood structure, carefully shuttered and landscaped with gracefully healthy bushes and evergreens. The other half, as dark as its counterpart was white, a charred and blackened crumble that I knew from Arthur Daley’s photos had once been the columned front porch, the main entry door, and a pair of slender triple-tall windows.
In the front yard, almost exactly on the line demarking the black and white, a figure I recognized as Arthur Daley. Alone. Firefighters wearing heavy tan turnout gear snaked their hoses into position, one man on his knees aiming his spray of water toward where the front door used to be. Two others stood, stalwart in a wide stance, dowsing the remaining licks of orange flame on the side of the house. The fingers of soot already marked the white walls, like the murky signature of the danger that had come calling.
Water covered us instantly, spray and blowback, and we stood, for a brief moment transfixed, amidst the hiss of the steam and the roar of the pumper, determined voices calling directions to each other as they struggled to beat back the last of the blaze.
The firefighters had won, it appeared. But at what cost? Where was Ms. Moran? How had the fire started? And why?
Was this blaze the threat the emails had so mysteriously contained?
My mother had taught me to prepare for emergency by identifying, in advance, my most precious item, so I could be assured of saving it. Had our Ms. Moran escaped? And if so, had she chosen something to save?
Watson and I ran across the water-soaked grass toward Arthur Daley. I was relieved I’d thrown a sweater over my dress, and allowed one fleeting thought for the delicate patent pumps I still wore. Then I focused on our client.
“Ms. Moran?” I asked him without preface. Watson caught up, a step behind me, and grabbed my arm, almost slipping on the drenched lawn.
“No cars here,” Watson said.
Perhaps what Miss Moran saved was herself.