“Okay.” For a few moments, Lily actually thought she had a real lead. She tried not to feel disappointed as she aimed firmly for the door. “Well, thanks for sharing all that, Louella-”
“A course, he’s here now.”
Lily whirled back. “Say what? You mean here? In Pecan Valley?”
“Well, yes, for a couple more days. He’s visiting his wife’s cousin, Barbara Marr, it’s an annual thing they do in the summer, bring him here for a week, take him back. You know the Marr house, the red-tile roof at the far end of Magnolia Drive? He was here last week at least. Remember seeing him at Debbie’s Diner. Not like he can’t do some things on his own. He just tends to be unpredictable, bless his heart. And when he’s home here, people look after him, not like anything was his fault. Right after…”
A minute later, Lily was gunning the engine of her rental Ford. If this Webster Renbarker was shortly leaving town, she had to try to reach him before the chance was gone. Griff was going to wonder where she was. She wanted to be with him, not gallivanting all over town on what was probably going to be a wild-goose chase.
But if there was even a small chance the long-ago fire had a connection to the immediate fires, she had to try.
She knew where the house with the red-tile roof was. It couldn’t take ten minutes to drive there-even less if she speeded, which she most certainly intended to do.
Chapter 6
Okay, Lily thought as she charged up the steps to the library, nothing was going to go smoothly today. She’d found Barbara Marr’s house, but not Webster Renbarcker. “Web” was at the library, his cousin claimed. She often dropped him off to spend a couple hours there. If Lily wanted to find Mr. Renbarcker, she needed to go there.
So she had.
She swung open the heavy library door, fretting that this was going to be a whole wasted morning, when she could have been with Griff. What she’d risked that morning-what she wanted to risk with him again-made her wonder if she was losing her mind.
Chasing an old man who might not even talk with her seemed another symptom of insanity-yet she only took a few steps into the old, cool library to feel bombarded by a flush of great memories. Her dad had often brought the girls here-likely to give their mom a break, Lily thought now-but as a child she’d only known those mornings as a special treat. The smell of books, the tall windows letting in the long, yellow ribbons of light, the quiet, the big chairs that a little girl could curl up in…she’d loved it all when she was a child.
Still did. The old blue rug looked the same, so did the giant, oak library desk. It was impossible not to feel safe here. She ambled through aisles in the adult section, not certain what Webster Renbarcker looked like-but for sure, he had to be a senior.
There was no one over fifty in adult fiction, or in the reference room in back. Disappointed, she just glanced in the childrens’ room, even as she was aiming for the back door…and there he was. An older man with longish white hair and scratchy white whiskers was sitting on a cushioned stool, leafing through a child’s picture book.
A couple kids huddled in the corner with an older sister; a mom and toddler had claimed the sunny spot under a window. Lily quietly approached the older man, said gently, “Mr. Renbarcker?”
He immediately looked up with faded blue eyes.
“My name is Lily Campbell. I used to live here. My dad used to work at your mill.”
He brightened up as if she’d given him a present. Once he started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. He tended to fade out now and then, but the past seemed clearer to him than the present.
“Never thought I’d see any of you Campbells again. Your daddy never set that fire, honey. He loved the mill. He loved me. He’d been watching out for me from before I got sick, watched out for my wife the same way.”
It was as if the old man’s heart hurt. Words just poured out of him.
“He knew I was sick, your daddy, because he found me on the floor one day. I’d had some kind of seizure. He was just a boy then, almost fresh out of college. Had a young wife-your mama, prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, she was. I didn’t have a son. Didn’t have any children. Couldn’t. Maybe my body knew I was going to get sick, you think?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“The thing was…your daddy, he covered for me, every which way from Sunday. I made mistakes. He tried to catch them. I’d be fine one day, selling the farm the next, sending shipments to Canada instead of Louisiana, I could get that goofy. I couldn’t face it. Couldn’t believe it. Hid it from my wife as long as I could. I thought I was crazy.”
“It sounds so frightening, Mr. Renbarcker.”
“It was. It was. That was just the thing. I didn’t know it was an illness in the beginning, or for a long while. I just thought I was losing my mind. Your dad was better than a son to me. I loved him. I loved your mama, too.”
Lily felt tears well. Good tears. Loved tears.
“When it got real bad…well, I’m sure you know. I lost the mill. It had to be closed. I’d mucked up far more than your father could fix. But when they said he was despondent over losing his job-honey, it wasn’t like that at all. He knew I was sick. He knew what was coming. There was no shock to him, no sudden surprise. He knew we were going down.”
Lily suddenly couldn’t breathe. For the first time, she was talking to someone who knew her dad back then. Who was describing her dad as a good man-a hero, not a coward. A man who’d never had a “depressed” reason to set that fire-or any other fire.
“We’d talked about it many times, Lily. I urged him to quit and leave me with my own problems. He had you three girls by then-and nothing he adored more than his daughters. He had to be worried about finances, yet when I told him to leave me, find another job, he said that you girls loved mac and cheese, and none of you needed a fancy car. He’d saved. Enough to knuckle down and find himself another job when that had to be, but he was sticking by me to the end. You know what bothered me most, young lady?”
“Tell me,” Lily urged him.
But the old man suddenly leaned forward with a wheezing cough, and when he finally straightened again, there seemed a hazy fog over his eyes. “Danielle, did you make me some of your famous huckleberry pie for dinner tonight?” He winked. “You look so pretty today, my dear. I love that color of blue on you.”
“I…thank you.” She’d learned so much. She wanted to get to her cell phone, call her sisters. Wanted to figure out what all this information meant-if her dad had never set that long-ago fire, then who had? And did that have anything to do with the two fires since she’d come back to town?
And then there was Griff. She wanted to get back with him, to see what was happening to his store, to dig into whatever she could help him with. And yeah, to dig into whatever crazy place they were going personally together, too.
But she couldn’t just up and leave the older man. Mr. Renbarcker wasn’t thinking straight. She didn’t know if or when his cousin would come looking for him. The mom and her toddler had wandered off; the clutch of other kids had been picked up by their father. Another group of kids popped in. Mr. Renbarcker kept talking to “Danielle” as if Lily were the one and only love of his life.
A boisterous group of tweeners piled in the doors, girls, giggling loud enough to raise the dead, finally arousing the librarian to stand in the doorway with a frown. It was the first thing that had distracted Mr. Renbarcker, who finally looked at her and said, “I know you, don’t I?”
Putting a solution in motion seemed to take forever. The librarian, Sarah-Leigh Jenkins, was enlisted to track down Barbara Marr’s phone number, but Sarah seemed to think it was suspicious for Lily to take an interest in the old man. Lily managed to reach Barbara Marr; but really, it was easiest just to drive the older man back home, since he was willing to get in the car with her-even if the librarian was scandalized all over again. Driving him was just faster than waiting for his cousin to get there, and Lily couldn’t fathom why anyone would think anything was hokey about a young woman being kind to someone elderly.