Broken Places by Sandra Parshall Read Free Book Online Page A

knows what’s right, he’s gotta teach the rest of us how to live. Well, good riddance to him. And them damn stinky goats and that yappin’ dog too.”
    Tom studied Wilson for a moment. “What makes you think you’re rid of Cam?”
    Wilson flung a hand toward the house. “He can’t come back here to live, can he? Look at it. Roof’s goin’ now.”
    Tom turned to see the tin roof melting, sagging. With a last whoosh the rear wall of the house collapsed in a shower of sparks. A second later the front and side walls crumpled, forcing out a gust of hot, smoky air that Tom felt on his face a hundred feet away. What remained of the roof settled over the wreckage like a twisted shroud.
    If we’d gotten here ten minutes earlier, five minutes—
    He looked at Lloyd Wilson. “You wouldn’t happen to know how this fire started, would you?”
    Wilson drew back. “What the hell you accusin’ me of?”
    “Just answer me.”
    “Don’t you go claimin’ I set that fire.”
    “I’m starting to wonder,” Tom said. “You’ve been telling me how glad you are to be rid of the Taylors.”
    “You little snot!” Wilson slashed the air with his cane, making Tom flinch to avoid a whack in the head. “I ain’t gonna stand here and let you accuse me of god knows what all.”
    With a huff, Wilson pivoted and limped off down the road to his own place on the other side of the woods.
    “What do you think, boss?” Brandon asked as they watched him go. “Would he set somebody’s house on fire?”
    “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Tom said. “When my dad was in this job, he was always after Lloyd for one thing or another.”
    “Her husband being murdered, though—you think the old man could’ve done that too?”
    “I don’t know what to think at this point,” Tom said. “It’s always possible the fire has nothing to do with Cam’s death. And it’s possible Meredith isn’t in the house.”
    But the sick knot in his gut told him he was looking at phase two of a premeditated double murder.
    “He said the Taylors have a dog,” Brandon said. “You think it was in the house?”
    “No idea,” Tom said. “If it’s still alive, it might be scared and hiding. Why don’t you walk around in the woods and see if you can find it?”
    Before the fire truck with an onboard water tank arrived, the remains of the roof had smothered most of the flames. The six volunteer firefighters climbed down from the truck and stood with Tom, watching the glowing embers. In the back yard pen the goats bleated and bawled, probably more hungry than scared now. Brandon returned, without the dog.
    “Fire’s dying out by itself,” said the crew’s captain, a middle-aged man with a day’s growth of stubble. “But we’ll douse it so you can get in there and look for a body.”
    While the firefighters emptied their water tank on the wreckage, Tom found a bag of goat feed in the shed next to their pen and fed the animals. If Lindsay had lost both parents in one day, he thought, how the hell would he find the words to tell her?
    By the time the site had cooled, the county fire chief had shown up to take charge. Tom and the chief used a couple of two-by-fours they found in the shed to lift sections of the melted roof. The nauseating odor of seared flesh grew stronger as they peeled away layers of wreckage. In the area that had been the kitchen, where charred appliances and a wood-burning iron stove still stood, they found what they were looking for.
    Her hair was gone, all of her skin and much of her flesh had burned away, and the body had contracted into a fetal position as the fire desiccated the muscles. But the overall size of the remains told Tom this was the corpse of a woman.
    Crunching debris underfoot, he moved in for a closer look. The front of the skull, the cheekbones, the jaw had been smashed to fragments.
    “The fire didn’t do this,” Tom said. “She was murdered before the fire started.”
    Chapter Five

    Tom sucked in a