“You think he might've had something to do with this?” she asked me in private. “Maybe he paid somebody to go burn the boat.”
“Paid them with what?”
“How about with the thousand bucks he got from the sanctuary?”
“No way, Abbey,” I said. “Absolutely impossible.”
But she'd gotten me worried. What if Dad had flipped out again? Blown another gasket. Flown off the handle.
So when we were alone, I asked him.
“I won't tell a soul if you were involved,” I said. It was a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.
“Noah, it wasn't me. I swear on a stack of Bibles.” He solemnly raised his right arm, cast and all. He was so intense that it startled me.
“I had nothing to do with torching the Coral Queen,” he said. “Please believe me-and please tell Abbey to believe me, too.”
And, in the end, we did.
Because my father had never lied to us about something serious. Whenever he screwed up, he admitted it right away. He always took the blame, the responsibility-and the punishment. Why would he change now?
Mr. Shine, our lawyer, was at the house when the detective and two deputies returned that afternoon with a search warrant. They snooped around for a long time, but they couldn't find anything that connected Dad to the boat arson.
Lieutenant Shucker was visibly disappointed. “I ought to lock you up anyhow,” he said to Dad. “It's crystal clear what happened-you had the motive, you had the opportunity…”
“Without evidence you've got no case,” said Mr. Shine, looking less mopey than usual. “I would kindly advise you to stop bothering my client.”
“Evidence?” the detective scoffed. “You want evidence? Just look at the brand-new casts on his hands-obviously he burned himself while he was lighting the fire.”
Dad angrily clacked his plaster paws together. “What a load of bull!”
“We'll see about that. I'll be back tomorrow with another warrant, Mr. Underwood, and a doctor to saw off those casts. If your fingers are barbecued, you're goin' straight to the slammer.”
“But what about the fist holes in our doors?” Abbey protested. “That proves he's telling the truth.”
“Nice try,” Lieutenant Shucker said sarcastically, “but you could do the same thing with a tire iron.” Then he stood up to leave.
My mother had been sitting on the sofa, not saying a word. I figured she was just depressed, thinking about Dad returning to jail and how he might never get his captain's license and how our quiet, seminormal life was a total mess again. That's what I was thinking anyway.
But it turned out that Mom wasn't depressed at all. She was merely waiting for the right moment to drop a little stink bomb on the snotty detective.
“Here, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly, “you might want to take a look at this.”
She handed a computerized printout to Lieutenant Shucker, who studied it suspiciously.
“It's the bill from the emergency room,” Mom said.
“Yeah, Mrs. Underwood, I can read.”
“From when my husband was admitted for severe injuries to both his hands.”
The detective frowned impatiently. “So? What's your point?”
My mother is truly awesome in situations like that. Nothing fazes her. She stood beside Lieutenant Shucker and calmly pointed to a line of type on the computer receipt.
“He was treated for fractures, not burns. It says so right here, Lieutenant.” Mom smiled. “That's my first point.”
The detective grunted.
“My second point,” Mom went on, “concerns the precise time my husband arrived at the hospital. See? It was 11:33 in the morning. Yesterday morning, Lieutenant.”
“Oh.”
“Approximately sixteen hours before Mr. Muleman's boat was set on fire.”
“Yeah, I can do the math,” the detective grumbled.
“Which means my husband couldn't possibly have been the arsonist,” Mom said, “unless you'd care to demonstrate how a person with all ten fingers sealed in hard plaster would go about striking a match.”
Lieutenant Shucker's big round chest seemed to deflate. Mom led him to the front door, the two deputies skulking close behind. “Goodbye now,” she called after them, “and good luck solving your case.”
We waited at the window until they drove away. Then Abbey started whooping, and we all slapped high fives-me, my sister, Mom, Mr. Shine, even Dad with his lumpy five-pound casts.
“Donna, that was amazing,” he said. “Truly amazing.”
“Better than amazing!” Abbey crowed. “It was outrageous!”
“No, incredible!” I hollered. “Amazingly, outrageously incredible!”
Mom blushed. “We'll see,” she said. “We'll just have to wait and see.”
But Lieutenant Shucker never came back.
And later, when we learned who actually burned down the Coral Queen, we congratulated my mother all over again. Dusty Muleman had gotten exactly what he'd deserved, just as she had predicted.
Luckily, Dad's anger-control counselor took pity on him and didn't mention his broken hands in her letter to the judge. Instead, the counselor stated that Mr. Paine Underwood had made “significant though sometimes painful progress” in managing his temper, and that he presented “no immediate threat to himself, his family, or the innocent public.”
Whether he's still a threat to innocent doors remains to be seen.
By coincidence the Coast Guard sent Dad his captain's license on the same day that the fire investigators released their findings about the Coral Queen.
The story took up the entire front page of the Island Examiner, including photographs of Dusty Muleman and the burned boat. There was no photo of Jasper Jr., which was a shame since he was the star of the arson report.
Dusty's first mistake had been allowing Jasper Jr. and Bull to hang out aboard the Coral Queen on the night of the grand reopening. Dusty's second mistake had been losing track of those two nitwits while he celebrated.
By the time the party had ended, Dusty wasn't thinking too clearly. He staggered from the boat, assuming that his son had already gone home.
He was wrong. Jasper Jr. and Bull had decided to throw a party of their own in one of the storage holds. They had snuck off with a handful of Dusty's prized Cuban cigars and a twelve-pack of beer that they'd swiped from behind Shelly's bar.
Unfortunately for them, the place they'd chosen for their smoking experiment was the same one where Dusty Muleman had stored several surplus boxes of fireworks. Being the leader in all things stupid, it was Jasper Jr. who lit the first cigar, inhaled deeply, gagged violently, and spit the thing twenty feet across the room… where it landed in an open crate of bottle rockets, which soon began to ignite, one after the other.
Before long, flames were shooting all over the place. The two party boys were lucky to get out alive.
Jasper Jr. was coughing so hard from the cigar that he was useless, so Bull threw him over his shoulder and ran through the smoke and sparks toward an open deck. They landed in the water at the same instant the Coral Queen's fuel tank blew up.
When questioned a few days later, Jasper Jr. and Bull denied knowing how the fire started. However, arson investigators couldn't help but notice that both kids had scorched eyebrows and singed earlobes. Jasper Jr. wasted no time blaming the boat disaster on his best buddy, the guy who'd saved his life. At that point Bull wisely terminated the friendship and offered a detailed statement to the fire department.
The fact that his own son had burned down the Coral Queen was not the worst news that Dusty Muleman would receive. The worst news was that the crime-scene technicians had found something unusual in the charred rubble of the casino boat-a fireproof, waterproof lockbox that was packed with cash.