Page 25

25

Frankie Nobles always slept soundly, even when Virgil was gone. While she didn’t believe in the mystical powers of pyramids, she and Virgil did sleep under the canted ceiling of the old farmhouse, which was like being under a pyramid. And it was nice, especially in a thunderstorm, to hear the rain drumming on the roof while they were safe and warm inside.

She was soundly asleep at three o’clock in the morning when Honus the Yellow Dog jumped off the bed and padded to the open window, looked out through the screen, and woofed. Woofed again, and then left the bedroom, running down the stairs, where he began barking frantically.

Frankie struggled toward consciousness until she heard Sam screaming from the downstairs bedroom: “Ma! Ma! The stable’s on fire. Ma! Ma!”

Frankie came out of bed as though on a catapult, ran down the stairs barefoot, found the kitchen door open, heard Honus barking frantically, now outside. She looked toward the stable and saw Sam running toward it, silhouetted against the bright light of a fire that was already climbing toward the building’s loft.

She shrieked, “Sam, come back, no, Sam! Sam!” and she went after him.

The fire was climbing the stable’s side wall, which faced her, and she ran barefoot across the farmyard, driveway stones biting into her feet, and saw Sam disappear through the stable’s front door. Honus was running in frantic circles outside the door that Sam had gone through, barking, barking, and as she got there, she could hear the two horses bawling from their stalls, crazed with fear, kicking the wooden stall walls.

She followed Sam through the door. To her left, she could see a fire crawling up a wall of hay bales, which were stored opposite the tack room. There was smoke, not as much as she’d feared, but the flames at the end of the building were ferocious, a blowtorch, a hurricane. Through it, to her right, she saw Sam running toward the opposite end of the building.

She screamed, “Sam!”

The kid turned and shouted, “The horses are crazy. We got to let them out the back.”

He disappeared through the doorway and she went after him, knowing without thinking that he was right, the horses were out of control, and they were big, and they were violent. She went out the door behind him, and he was already around the corner of the building.

Each stall had a separate, small twenty-by-thirty-foot turnout at the back of the barn, with a stable door opening into each turnout. The turnouts were contained by six-foot-tall pipe fencing. Sam slipped between pipes on the turnout fence, ran to the first stall door, turned the latch handle on the door, and yanked it open. The rescue they called Rush exploded from the stall, smashing the door back before it was fully open.

The door knocked Sam down and the panicked golden-brown horse bucked in a tight circle inside the fence as Sam rolled toward the building to get away from the horse’s iron-shod hooves. Frankie ran around to the outside of the pen and yanked the latch on the pen’s gate and dragged the gate open. Rush saw the opening and was through it in an instant, disappearing into the night.

The fire was spreading from under the roof and Frankie shouted, “Sam, get away from the wall…”

Sam was already crawling into the second turnout; sparks were firing into the sky, pieces of hay carried aloft, some the size of kitchen towels, and Frankie feared that the house might go until she realized a breeze was carrying the sparks away from the house, but toward the two of them, like flaming, falling kites.

She unlatched the second turnout gate as Sam turned the handle on the stall door, and Bruno, a big black quarter horse, pounded into the turnout and then through the open gate into the night. Frankie felt a spasm of relief as she watched the horse go, then a spasm of terror as she turned back to Sam and saw that one of his shirt sleeves was on fire and he was slapping at it while trying to pull his pajama shirt off, and she ran to him and as he turned, grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked it straight over his head.

As she did that, she stepped barefoot on a wad of burning hay and did a dance away from it, still tearing at the shirt. Flames from the shirt caught Sam’s long hair for a second, but she slapped it out and Sam shouted, “You’re on fire” and she realized she was, and she ripped her own nightshirt off as they both ran out of the pen and into the adjacent pasture.

The stable, built of wood, except for the roof, was now fully involved. “Gotta call Fire, you get Honus,” she shouted at Sam. The entire yard was lit by the inferno, and she ran to the house, ignoring the pain in her feet, and up the stairs to her cell phone and called the volunteer fire department and shouted, “We have a fire!”

“Frankie? This is Clark. We’re coming! Stay clear. Olaf called us. You need an ambulance?”

“Sam’s shirt was on fire, but we got it off him.”

“I’m sending an ambulance, but it’ll be coming from town…”

“Hurry!” At the back of her brain, she could hear the twins crying in their shared bedroom, and she headed that way.

Inside the house, she hushed the twins, quickly—harshly, she thought later, maybe had frightened them. She ran to her bedroom, her phone still in her hand, pulled on a tee-shirt—it occurred to her only then that she was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants, not that she cared—and she snatched up a pair of jeans and carried them with her as she ran back down the stairs, into the kitchen, where she grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran back outside. Even inside the kitchen, she could hear the fire roaring.

Sam was holding Honus by the collar; the dog was barking at the fire and Frankie stumbled up and shouted over the dog’s bark, “Are you burned?”

“My hands and I think my arms, I stepped on some hot stuff,” Sam said. “You’re burned too, I could see your shirt on fire, I think you’re burned.”

“Fire is on the way, and an ambulance,” she shouted, looking at the stable. The fire had gotten to bales of bedding, which added heat and velocity to the blaze. They could see the steel roof beginning to distort in the heat. She began pulling on the jeans, felt a finger of pain along a thigh, another burn she didn’t want to think about yet.

“Got the horses out,” Sam said. “I hope they’re not burned, but they might be: it was hot outside the stalls, I don’t know about inside.”

“You stupid little shit, you should never have gone into that stable…” She hugged him and started crying and hugged him harder. “Thank you, you saved the horses…”

At that moment, a white pickup roared up the driveway, and Olaf Nilsson and his wife Jean spilled out, and jogged toward them: “At least you’re okay. I thought it was the house. I called Fire.”

“Yeah, thank you. We got the horses out, but we might have gotten a little singed,” Frankie said. She’d been too excited before, but now she felt the pain coming on, in her arms and across her back, in her feet. She turned to her son: “Are you hurting?”

“Some,” he said. And then, “Yeah.”

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Jean Nilsson said.

“One’s already coming,” she said. To her son: “When you finished the lawn, where’d you put the mower?”

“Machine shed,” Sam said. “When you went inside the stable…did you smell gas?”

“Yes! There was no gasoline in there, but I smelled it,” Frankie said.

“Did somebody set us on fire, Mom?”

“If somebody did, Virgil will kill them.”

They could hear the fire trucks coming, two of them. Frankie had worked with a volunteer fire department in another part of the state, earlier in life, and she knew what they were going to tell her: there was no saving any part of the stable. Their job was simply to keep the fire from spreading to the other buildings.

And that’s what the chief told them when the trucks arrived. A tall man with shoulder-length brown hair, his name was Lon Carpenter, and he got out of the lead truck and walked toward them and said, “Not much we can do about it, honey.”

“I know, Lonnie,” she said. “We got the horses out…”

“Thank God for that.” The other men on the two trucks were unreeling foam hoses, in case they needed to quench something other than the stable; the stable would simply be a waste of good chemicals.

“When we went inside, we smelled gasoline,” Frankie said.

Carpenter: “Gasoline? You didn’t keep…”

“Not a goddamn thing in there to start a fire,” Frankie said, staring at the blaze, which was beginning to slow. “All the wiring is inside conduits. Never a sign of trouble.”

“Virgil’s a cop,” Carpenter said.

Frankie: “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Hands hurt,” Sam said.

“We gotta get you to the hospital,” Frankie said. “We need to wait for the ambulance—my back, I couldn’t drive.”

Sam nodded and said, “Horses would be dead if it wasn’t for Honus. He woke me up barking. Must have smelled the fire.”

Frankie leaned down to give the dog a scratch: “Thank you, Honus.”

She turned back to the fire and suddenly began to cry again, hands covering her face, the dog licking her arm.

—

The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. Jean Nilsson said, “You guys go on. Me and Olaf will take care of the twins and Honus.”

The EMTs put them in the back, sitting upright, and started for the Mayo Clinic’s urgent care center in Mankato.

“It hurts, but it’s not getting worse,” Sam said, holding up reddened hands.

“I’ve seen a lot worse that turned out okay,” one of the EMTs said. “I’d put on some painkiller spray, but I’d rather wait until you’re talking to a doctor. If you can stand it.”

“I can stand it,” Sam said. “Mom?”

“I can, too,” she said. “I’m going to call Virgie.”

—

Three- and four-o’clock calls were not everyday events, but they weren’t totally uncommon, either. When Virgil’s phone rang, he was asleep, but came up quickly. A call in the small hours usually meant a murder somewhere, but when he rolled over and picked up his phone, the screen read “Frankie.”

“Oh shit!” He punched “answer” and asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m in an ambulance with Sam, we’re both a little burned, not too bad. We’re going to the Mayo in Mankato. Somebody burned down the stable.”

“The stable? I’m coming, I’m coming, I’ll call you on the road.”

“Wait! Wait! We got the horses out, they’re in the big pasture, somebody’s got to check and see if they’re burned…”

“I’ll check later. I’ll be there in an hour…You’re not hurt bad? Jesus Christ, are you okay, is Sam okay? Where are the twins? Where’s Honus?”

“Don’t panic on me,” Frankie said. “And don’t drive fast. Jean and Olaf are with the twins. We’re okay, Honus is okay, I think the horses looked okay, I’ll call a vet tomorrow morning. They’re taking us to the hospital, the EMTs say we’re not too bad, but we’ll need some painkiller and bandages.”

“I’m coming!” Virgil punched off, scooped his dopp kit, laptop, and pistol into his equipment bag, pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and ran out of the room, down the hotel stairs and out to the garage. He was on I-494 three minutes later, running with lights and siren, headed south.

When he got off the interstate, he called Frankie, but she didn’t pick up, and he called Sam, but he didn’t either, so he gave up and focused on the road. Fifteen minutes later, he got a call from a highway patrolman named Ezra Ely.

“Ez! I’m running south on 60,” Virgil said. “I’m driving too fast, lights and siren.” His voice sounded squeaky and panicked in his own ears.

“I figured you would be,” Ely said. “I got a call from our dispatcher who said your wife and kid are on the way to the Mayo in Mankato, that there was a fire and you were in St. Paul. Anyway, I’m coming north on 60. When you see my lights, slow down, and I’ll turn around and lead you south.”

“Thanks, man. I’m running hard. And I’m scared shitless.”

“Gotcha.”

—

Ely picked him up halfway to Mankato and took him all the way to the clinic, lights and sirens on both vehicles; they went through the college town of Saint Peter like twin rocket ships, faster than Virgil would have dared on his own. At the emergency room, Ely turned around as Virgil parked. Virgil slapped Ely’s car hood and said through the open driver’s-side window, “I owe you big,” and Ely said, “No, you don’t,” and Virgil nodded and hurried inside.

A nurse said, “Are you…?”

“Virgil Flowers, here for Florence Nobles and Sam Nobles…”

“They are being done up right now,” the nurse said. “I think the doc is through with them. Hang on here, I’ll get him.”

Virgil hung on at the counter, almost jogging in place out of anxiety, as the nurse went into the back and returned a minute later with a young doctor who was eating a sad-looking white bread sandwich.

“Mr. Flowers,” the doctor said, chewing and swallowing. “Florence and Sam will be out shortly. Florence has second-degree burns with blistering on her arms, upper back, and a spot on her left leg, as well as abrasions on her feet and small burns on one foot. I understand she ran barefooted across some sharp gravel, which is minor. For the burns, she’ll need to keep the bandages on for two weeks or so. Sam has second-degree burns on one of his arms and one side of his neck and also on both hands. His hands are somewhat more burned than his arm or neck, but he’ll be fine, there shouldn’t be any permanent scarring or disability. He also has abrasions on his feet. They’ll both be uncomfortable for a week or two. We’ll want to see them back here on Saturday, and then as needed. I’ve given Florence instructions on wound care, and she seems to understand.”

“She’s good at that. When can I go in…”

The doctor looked toward the door in the back: “They should be out in a minute or so. They’re both barefoot…why don’t you wait here, and I’ll check on the hold-up.”

“For God’s sake…”

Then Frankie walked out of the back carrying a paper sack, and when she saw Virgil, she began crying and Virgil stepped toward her and she fended him off and said, “No hugging for a while, let me hug you,” and she hugged him with her one unburnt arm and then Sam came out and said, “This sucks.”

They didn’t seem desperately injured and Virgil said, “The horses…”

“They’re in the big pasture, they might have some burns,” Frankie said. “It took us a few minutes to get them out, that’s how Sam burned his hands. If Sam hadn’t gone in the barn, they’d both be dead.”

Sam flapped his hands at Virgil: both palms were covered with bandages.

“Tell me…Honus…”

“Honus is fine, he’s in the house, now, he’s the one who got us up,” Frankie said. She handed him the sack and told him about the fire. “Fire is still there, keeping an eye on it. The stable’s gone…right down to the ground.”

“Fuck the stable, we can get another stable,” Virgil said. “I can’t get more people like you guys. What in the hell were you doing running into…”

Frankie, crying again, “What? You wanted our horses to burn to death?”

“No, no! I didn’t want you to burn to death, though. I mean…never mind,” and he reached out to hug Frankie again and she evaded him again and said, “Don’t touch anything with bandages,” and he managed to wrap one arm around her shoulder and down her back and squeeze.

Sam said, “We both smelled gas. In the stable. I mean, gasoline, when we went in the stable.”

“Gasoline…” Virgil groped around the word for a few seconds, then: “In the stable?”

“There wasn’t any gas in the stable,” Frankie said. “Sam mowed the yard, but he put the mower and the gas can in the machine shed where they’re supposed to go, and they’re still there. But we both smelled gas.”

Virgil looked at the doctor, who was still hovering, and said, “Motherfucker…”

“What?”

“Not you. Somebody else,” Virgil said.

—

They stood talking for two or three more minutes, and Frankie told him that the sack contained pain-killing spray, and that they had prescriptions for pain-killing pills should they need them, then Virgil said to the doctor, “I’m going to put them in my truck, but I’d like to come back and talk for just a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Frankie and Sam could walk easily enough—they were wearing hospital slippers—and Virgil put them in the truck, and then went back inside where he said to the doctor, “I need to know how bad, and what’s next.”

“What I already told you—they hurt, but they’re not hurt bad. The biggest problem is avoiding infection, and we’ve given both Florence and Sam instructions on that. They’ve got what amounts to very severe sunburns, but on parts of their bodies that don’t usually get sunburned. They both have some blistering, and skin will be peeling off, but they’re not in any danger if we can avoid infection…”

Virgil thanked him, went back outside, and in the truck, Frankie said, “We’ll have to move the big chair up the stairs into the bedroom for a while. I won’t be able to sleep on my back or side, and I’ll have to have my burned arm across my stomach in a sling or something…So I need something where I can sit upright and sleep.”

“We can do that. As soon as we get home. You need to rest. Sam, too.”

—

The sun was up when they got back to the house. A different fire truck was on the scene, the first two had gone; this one a tanker, the two firemen spraying water on the smoldering remains of the stable.

Virgil led Frankie and Sam inside, where they were met by a relieved Honus, as well as the Nilssons.

“The twins are still asleep,” Jean Nilsson said. “I gave them cookies.”

“Two each, and two for me,” Olaf said. “A shame about the stable. That was a beauty.”

Sam wanted to eat, Frankie wanted to sit down, and both of them wanted Virgil to check on the whereabouts of the horses. Virgil and Olaf went back outside and walked over to the firemen, who said they were about done. “Don’t think it’ll reignite, there’s not much left to burn,” one told him.

Looking out across the still-standing turnouts that the day before had been attached to the back of the stable, and well out into the green grass of the big pasture, Virgil could see the horses looking back at him. What he could do about them, he didn’t know; they seemed best left where they were, until they could get a veterinarian to the farm.

He and Olaf went back inside. Sam was eating cereal, Frankie perched on a kitchen chair, talking with him.

“Tell me about the gasoline again,” he said.

And when they had, he had no doubt that the fire had been deliberately set. The Nilssons had not seen anybody on the road. After another cookie, Olaf Nilsson said he needed a nap, and the couple left.

Virgil went back outside, Honus tracking behind him, where the firemen were finishing their work. He saw no sign of a gas can in the smoldering wreckage, or any kind of bottle or other vessel that might have held gasoline, so the arsonist had taken it away. All he could smell was wet burnt wood, wet burnt hay, and the stink of burned corrugated steel from the roof, now collapsed in the middle of the cinders.

He walked around the mess for a bit, looked across a field where an arsonist might have come in. There was no track that he could see.

He called Lucas, who was still soundly asleep. Lucas came up and without preamble asked, “Who’s dead?”

“Nobody, thank God. I’m down in Mankato. Somebody tried to burn us out last night. Burned my stable to the ground…”

“Oh, Jesus! Is everybody okay?”

Virgil said, “Frankie and Sam got second-degree burns getting the horses out, but they’re okay. I can see the horses in the pasture and they look all right, but I haven’t been able to get a close look yet. The twins are fine. Honus is fine. Both Sam and Frankie smelled gasoline in the barn, and we’ve never had gas in there.”

“So it’s arson.”

“Yes.”

“You got insurance?” Lucas asked.

“Not for arson.”

“Ah, shit. This is Doris Grandfelt,” Lucas said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Virgil said. “There are a couple of other possibilities.”

“No. It’s Grandfelt. I can feel it in my bones,” Lucas said. “Somebody wants you off the case. Call Duncan, tell him you’re gone until Tuesday. I’ll be back and we’ll kick some serious ass. Until then, take care of your people.”

“I called because I was thinking you might want to take care of your own.”

“Ah…yeah. You’re right, though I don’t expect they’d try to burn both of us,” Lucas said. “That’d be too obvious. Probably hoping your stable would look like an accident.”

“It’s a fucking disaster, is what it is,” Virgil said.

“Virgil, I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” Virgil said. “And I’m gonna hang somebody for it.”

—

Virgil called Duncan, who was horrified: “Take all the time you need. We need to get an arson guy down there…”

“Nah. There’s nothing left to investigate,” Virgil said.

The veterinarian made an emergency visit before her office hours, and Virgil, Frankie, Sam, and the vet chased down the horses, which was harder than it looked in cowboy movies. Virgil wanted Frankie and Sam to stay inside, but they told him to stuff it, and both agreed that they didn’t hurt much with the application of a topical painkiller and a couple of pills.

The horses were okay, though their manes and tails were curled with heat, and they were still spooked. The vet recommended that they be put in separate pastures in case they had invisible burns that made them cranky. “You really don’t need to have a horse fight at this point,” she said.

The vet left and as Virgil was watching her truck turn into the road, he took a call from Dahlia Blair. “We’re trying to look up the marriage date, you know, Carlson and Fisk, but there’s some kind of computer hang-up. We won’t be able to get it until Monday.”

“That’s okay. I’ve had a major problem here. Somebody tried to burn us out last night…” He kept thinking he shouldn’t do it, but he babbled out the story of the stable fire, the smell of gasoline, and after a while, Blair said, “This is good stuff. No, wait, this is great stuff. I’ll see you down there.”

She hung up before Virgil could tell her not to come, and when he tried to call her back, she didn’t pick up. He knew why: because this was great stuff.

Off the phone, he walked back to the house where Frankie and Sam and Alex and Willa were sitting at the kitchen table, with Honus under it. Frankie had a yellow legal pad and a pen: “All right, what are we going to do about a stable?” she asked.

“I’ll talk to the bank on Monday, get a loan for a Morton building or something like it. A stable kit,” Virgil said. “Probably get it up before snowfall if we get started. Don’t really need a mortgage, just a short-term loan and I’ll pay it off with the new contract.”

“I liked the one you built,” Frankie said. “It was like old-fashioned; it fit the farm.”

“Yeah, until the goddamned thing went up like a nuclear weapon,” Virgil said. “Wouldn’t have happened with a metal building. Might have burned the hay and bedding, but the whole building wouldn’t have come down…If it weren’t for Honus…” He gave the dog a scratch. “Anyway, we’ve got the weekend, we can figure out what we can do, and you can call some of the stable-kit companies on Monday. Probably ought to get something bigger anyway. Maybe eight stalls.”

“You think?” Frankie said. Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling, already calculating.

A pickup roared into the driveway, they could hear it but not see it, and Sam got up and looked out and said, “Moses.”

Moses was Frankie’s hotheaded third son, a big man, dark hair, broad shoulders; a minute later standing in the doorway. “I saw Olaf in town and he said somebody torched the place. Who do I kill?”

Frankie said, “Not funny, Mose,” and when Moses stepped toward her with an arm out, she shrank away and said, “No hugs, you big lug. I’m burned, for Christ’s sakes.”

Moses: “Not funny? Did I sound like I was joking?”

—

They talked about a stable replacement, and any possible further danger they thought the farm might be in. “I doubt whoever it is will try again,” Virgil said. “I think this was to pull me off that damn true crime case up in the Cities.”

Frankie: “But why?”

“Because we’re getting close.”

“When I find out who it is, I’m going to kill ’em,” Moses said again.

Virgil: “A little pro tip, here, Mose. When you plan to kill somebody, don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell your mother, don’t even whisper it to one of your cats.”

Moses nodded. “I see where you’re going with that.”

They were still talking when a three-car convoy pulled into the yard. They all stood up to look as the cars rolled right past the house to the clump of ashes where the stable used to be, and five women piled out and began making movies. Cash, Blair, and Weitz, along with a couple of women Virgil didn’t know.

Virgil said, “Ah, shit,” and when he hustled outside, they began taking pictures of him. “Listen, you guys…”

“We know what you’re gonna say,” Cash said. “That’s why we went straight through the yard. And you can forget it. You’re gonna be a movie star.”

Moses came out: “Can I be in the movie?”

The cameras swiveled to him: “If you got anything good to tell us,” Cash said.

Virgil said, “Mose…”

Moses said, “It was arson. They’re trying to pull Virgil off the case. My mom and brother smelled gasoline when they went in the stable to rescue the horses, and we never keep gas in there.”

Virgil: “Moses, Jesus Christ.”

Moses: “Tellin’ like it is.”

Cash had to smile, but Virgil said, “Ah, God.”

After a while, and a lot of movies, that included Virgil, Frankie, Moses and Sam, Alex and Willa, and Honus, the women packed up and left.

“Talk about clickbait,” Frankie said, as the last of them rolled out onto the road.

Later, every true crime site they looked at had the movies. “This is like a fuckin’ carnival,” Virgil said.

Frankie said, “You know, if we were burned out by the Grandfelt killer, an attack on you by a criminal you were hunting, I bet the state would pay for a new stable.”

“Keep dreamin’, babe,” Virgil said. But he thought about it.

—

The farm had a Kubota front-end loader. Virgil and Moses spent the weekend pushing the debris from the fire into a pile. Moses now ran the architectural salvage business that Frankie had started years earlier, and he owned a heavy-duty thirty-foot trailer. They loaded the debris into it, and on Monday made two trips to the landfill.

When they got back after the second trip, another of Frankie’s grown boys, Tall Bear, was wandering around the yard. They answered some of his questions, and saw Frankie coming down the road in her pickup. When she was out of the truck, she told Virgil that she’d gone over to the salvage yard to get the drag magnet.

“There’ll be a thousand nails and screws laying around and we need to pick them up, or we’ll be picking them up with our tires every time we drive around there,” she said.

She was correct. Virgil and Tall Bear spent most of the afternoon dragging the magnet and picked up a half-bucket of nails and screws.

At dinner that night, Frankie asked, “You’ve got to go back tomorrow?”

“I should, but I could probably get another day. I need to get down to the bank tomorrow.”

“Call Lucas: see what he thinks.”

He did that, and Lucas told him that he’d finished with the deposition that afternoon, and that he was catching a very early flight out of Albuquerque. “So early that I’ve checked in to an airport hotel. I talked to Duncan, and he said we now won’t have any DNA results until at least Wednesday, so…I don’t see why you couldn’t take another day. Or two.”

“If we get a match with Carlson, I want to be there when we talk to Amanda Fisk again,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking we get a match.”

On Tuesday, Virgil went to the credit union in Mankato and found that he could get a loan big enough to cover any of the stable kits that Frankie had been researching, but only if they mortgaged the farm as part of the deal. He could get the loan with a fifteen-year pay period, but with a short-term-payoff option, if he wanted it.

He and Frankie talked about it, stressed about it, and decided to go with it—and to contract for one of the bigger kits.

“Now I’ve got to finish the book,” Virgil told her. “And it’s gotta be good.”

Frankie was most interested in what was called a Belkin Building, which had a local rep; the rep could make it to the farm on Wednesday, and Virgil called Duncan and begged for another day off and got it.

“We’ve got more of the guys in the photos, six of them now, they’re all doing gum scrubs,” Duncan said. “Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but we dinged up a couple of long-term marriages.”

The Belkin Building rep showed up at midmorning, and they spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon with him, looking at the site, talking about what had to be done, getting a timeline, and making a tentative deal.

“You’re going to have to handle this,” Virgil told Frankie. “I’m going to get whoever did this to us, and I gotta focus on that. And the book. When I deliver the book, I’ll pay off the mortgage.”

“I got that.”

“And listen,” Virgil said. “This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier both in terms of getting the mortgage and paying it off with book money, you know, tax-wise, if we were married.”

Frankie scratched her forehead, said, “Yeah, probably.”

“Let’s get it done,” Virgil said. “Next week, maybe. See if you can nail down a judge.”

“That’s so romantic.”

“It is what it is,” Virgil said. “Gimme a kiss.”