“I’ll watch my mouth,” I said.

  Detective Brookes handed me a business card and told me to expect a call. As we watched him dip back under the yellow caution tape, I felt the weariness and loneliness pulling me back down. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be there anymore, but I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t think of anywhere to go, so I was about to drop down onto the curb again when I heard my name.

  “Miami.”

  I turned to see Lizzy striding toward me along the sidewalk. She looked like she’d seen a ghost, even paler than usual. Perhaps she had no time to apply all her makeup, having gone home to bed. She hit me with a hug that almost knocked me backward onto the street. I didn’t wrap my arms around her in return. Not because I didn’t want to, but because we didn’t really operate that way. Physical contact was not something she ever seemed to enjoy. When she was done, she pulled back and held my arms.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Ron called me,” she said, turning her head.

  Over her shoulder I saw Ron approaching. Lizzy stepped aside. Ron embraced me, then punched my back with his fist, the way men do, and pulled back with an expression that suggested he might have gone a step too far.

  I didn’t get the chance to speak. Ron moved to the other side, and Muriel appeared. Despite the coolness of early morning, she was, as always, wearing a tank top, the only noticeable feature of which was it didn’t have a Longboard Kelly’s logo. She launched into the biggest bear hug of them all and buried her face in my neck as if she might cry. After a while, I wondered if she’d ever let go. And I kind of hoped she wouldn’t. When she finally released me, she ran her hands across my face, like my mother used to do when I had been crying. But neither of us had shed a tear.

  Muriel turned slightly so I could see past her, to where Mick was standing with his hands in his pockets. Mick didn’t come in for a hug. He just nodded.

  “All right?” he said.

  “Alive,” I replied.

  Mick nodded again. “Good start.”

  “What are you all doing here?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Danielle called me,” said Ron.

  “And Ron called me,” said Lizzy.

  “Danielle called me too,” said Muriel.

  I glanced at Mick. He nodded at Muriel, as if that’s where all his useful information came from.

  I surveyed each of them: my business partner, my office manager, the guy who owned the local bar, and his bartender. Plus a detective who was up too late and out of his jurisdiction. It was a motley and eclectic crew.

  I took in a long, slow, calming breath, the way I had a thousand times on the pitcher’s mound, because all of a sudden every emotion I could possibly feel flooded into my body. I realized as I exhaled that when folks jumped on the phone tree and rushed to be with you in your time of need—especially at one in the morning—they weren’t just people; they weren’t even friends. This was family. Not the one I had been born into, but the one I had chosen, and had seemingly chosen me.

  Ron stepped in and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll come home with me,” he said. “Then we’ll all get into this in a few hours.”

  I nodded, and the six of us looked for a moment at the charred remains of my house. Then we each turned our backs and walked away.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I woke with a start and the sense that I was still lying on City Beach. I pawed around myself, clawing at the sheets, and it took me longer than was necessary to realize I was in one of the spare bedrooms in Ron and Cassandra’s apartment.

  I lay back for a while and let my heart rate come down as the images from the previous evening replayed in my mind like a movie trailer from a show I saw years ago. I had no possessions in that house, so I had lost nothing personal. I still had joyful memories planted in my brain, but something made me feel as if they, too, had been burned to a crisp.

  When we had gotten back to the apartment, Ron told me we would figure it all out, that he would contact the insurance company in the morning. But his tone suggested that he knew we were talking about something more than bricks and mortar.

  I lay in the darkness of the bedroom thinking about two inconvenient truths: one, that I was likely suspect number one in the death of the tenant, and two, that the suspicions that it was arson told me somebody had deliberately set my house on fire. It wasn’t drawing a longbow to conclude that I was the intended target, and that someone probably wanted me dead.

  Cassandra had one of those apartments where the kitchen was tucked away in a separate room, typical for Palm Beach, where dinner was often prepared by a catering company, so kitchens were best closed off.

  I stumbled out of the bedroom and into the dining room, where Ron and Cassandra sat at the table with coffee cups in their hands. They looked up at me, but my eyes were on Danielle. She stood, letting me come to her, and we embraced. I felt my breathing fall into sync with hers, and we stood there for a long time, until she stepped back and looked me up and down, the way law-enforcement types often do.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “You look a mess. I brought you some clothes.”

  Ron fixed me a cup of coffee while I washed up in the en suite bathroom. I stared in the mirror. I looked more than a mess, like someone in a war movie, the guy who lost. I was still bruised and puffy from the beating, but that was now complemented by ash and sweat that had run down my face like a topographical map.

  I stood under the shower and watched the dirty water sliding down the drain, thinking about who it was that had taken a match to my house. The power company crew was one possibility, given their previous willingness to engage in physical violence. But this felt like a considerable escalation, and I had to ask myself if they had the resources to do it or to even find out the address.

  I was fairly certain a state senator had such information at his fingertips. Clearly he already knew that I lived—or was supposed to be living—on Singer Island. Which left John Trainor. I had no idea what he knew, what his resources were, or what he was capable of.

  When I came out, a cup of coffee was sitting on the table next to Danielle. I took a long drink. It was hot and acidic, nothing like the Cuban coffee Francisco Monaro had prepared for us, but the bitterness suited my mood.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” asked Cassandra. “We have croissants.”

  “No, thank you. But the coffee is hitting the spot.”

  “Where were you when I called you last night?” Danielle asked.

  “Just sitting on the beach,” I said. “Clearing out the cobwebs, I guess.”

  She nodded and questioned me no further. She knew I had a tendency to contemplate the universe in the bleachers of empty baseball stadiums, and, short of a stadium, an empty beach was always an excellent substitute.

  “Unfortunately that means I don’t have much of an alibi for the time between leaving the hockey stadium and the fire starting.”

  “I spoke to the Riviera Beach PD this morning,” said Danielle. “They’ve done a sweep of the street, canvassing all your neighbors, but they say they found nothing helpful. No useful witnesses.”

  “How did they know there was even a fire if there were no witnesses?” asked Ron.

  “A neighbor called it in. An old guy out walking his dog. Apparently he doesn’t sleep too well and takes to the streets in the wee hours. He saw the flames and ran home to call the fire department. But according to Riviera Beach PD, he didn’t see anyone unfamiliar, no strange vehicles, just the dark-colored SUV burning in the driveway.”

  “Dark colored?” I asked.

  “According to the witness,” said Danielle. “The old guy who made the call told the police he didn’t recognize the car, but he also said so many cars appeared in that driveway over the years that it wasn’t so unusual not to recognize one.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a comment on how many vehicles I’d managed to work my way through or whether the tenant rented a great variety. But I also noted that I drove a dark-colored SUV.

  “They get any kind of security video?” asked Ron.

  “They didn’t mention anything. They would have asked about it, especially where they saw cameras.”

  “Well, someone was there,” I said, “and they didn’t toss a Molotov cocktail from the intracoastal. They drove in.”

  “No doubt,” said Danielle. “But they’ll keep at it. Maybe somebody will come forward with something.”

  “I’m not sure how at it they will keep,” I said. “The guy I spoke to last night seemed pretty gun shy about upsetting anyone important.”

  “They won’t go off half-cocked, MJ,” said Danielle. “But they’ll get to the bottom of it. I won’t give them any other choice.”

  I thought about old men wandering the streets at midnight, and quiet neighborhoods where people preferred the calm to the hubbub of West Palm. I wondered if anyone really had seen anything, or like me, they had all been asleep. Then I had an idea.

  “Mrs. W.,” I said.

  “What?” said Danielle.

  “Mrs. W.,” I repeated. “She lives down the street, about halfway out to the main road. Anyone coming in from that direction to our place would have to drive right past her house.”

  “They have to drive past quite a few houses, MJ, but it was after midnight.”

  “I know. But last year her son asked me to install one of those video doorbells for her. He lives in New Jersey, remember? He ordered the thing off the internet and asked if I’d connect it for her.”

  “I remember,” said Danielle. “But I’m not sure it’ll be helpful; doesn’t someone have to ring the doorbell for it to shoot video?”

  “Yes and no. It has a motion sensor, so if someone walked up but they didn’t ring the doorbell, it could alert her and start the video. It’s supposed to be a deterrent to those morons who steal people’s packages off front doorsteps—let’s face it, robbers don’t ring the doorbell. But there was a problem with it. I couldn’t get the motion range to work properly, so it either picked up everything all the way out to the street, including passing cars, or it didn’t work at all. And she didn’t want to get an alert on her phone every time a car drove by, so we left the motion sensors on but turned off the alerts. Mrs. W. may well have video of the arsonist driving past and not even know it.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  After we finished breakfast, Danielle drove us back over to Singer Island. We headed north along Blue Heron Boulevard, past the stores and bars, and cut left onto one of the streets that headed west out to the intracoastal. Our house was on the bend where the street reached the waterfront houses and turned north. Our next-door neighbor got the glare of all the headlights coming down the street and had erected a large concrete wall as a remedy.

  Mrs. W.’s house was one of the postwar originals halfway back toward the main road from the water. Danielle parked on the street in front of her house. For a moment we stood on the sidewalk to take in the neighborhood in a way we had never done before. Not so much home as crime scene. I didn’t see anything out of order, except for the charred bones of the house at the end of the road.

  I rang the doorbell and waited for Mrs. W. to answer. I was about to ring a second time when I heard the first of the locks turn on the front door. About thirty seconds later, she finished the entire process and opened up, peering through a screen door as if I was a mile away, or she had left her glasses on the kitchen table. Eventually she placed me, because a smile spread across her face.

  “Oh, Mr. Jones,” she said. “So nice to see you. Won’t you come in?”

  Danielle and I stepped into her small living room, and she immediately offered us coffee and Bundt cake. I glanced at Danielle, my look suggesting that we’d already had coffee and we didn’t have time for any kind of cake, but the look I got in return said I should mind my manners and let a lonely old lady entertain us for a while.

  Mrs. W. puttered around in the kitchen. Danielle went to go help, so I just looked out the window at the quiet street. I could hear them chattering away and the clinking of china.

  Danielle reappeared with a tray of coffee and cake. Mrs. W. followed behind and waved us both to a sofa. Danielle served as Mrs. W. eased herself back into a recliner that looked like it might swallow her whole.

  “Did you see any of the hubbub last night?” I asked her.

  She picked up a pair of reading glasses off the table next to her and slipped them into a green case. “Oh, I heard all the ruckus, and I saw the flashing lights. But I didn’t go out. I don’t like to go out on the street in my nightgown. But I saw the debris this morning. I’m so sorry, Mr. Jones. But thank goodness you weren’t hurt. And it’s only a building, after all.”

  She was right and wrong. Not about the building just being a building. But wrong about someone getting hurt.

  We sipped some coffee and I ate three pieces of delicious Bundt cake while Mrs. W. told us about the latest adventures her son was having in New Jersey. Apparently heating oil costs had gone through the roof, and the fall had been bitterly cold. It didn’t sound like any kind of fun to me.

  Once we had gotten the latest gossip out of the way, I asked Mrs. W. if she recalled the video doorbell that I had installed for her.

  “Oh, yes. It’s simply amazing. When the postman brings a package from my Henry, and he rings the doorbell, I can talk to him even when I’m at the bingo. He’s a lovely man, Luis. He always hides my packages behind the chrysanthemums on the patio. You know, just in case.”

  “Good thinking,” said Danielle.

  “Mrs. W.,” I began, “would you mind if I took a look to see if there was any video from last night?”

  “I don’t think the camera points toward your house, dear.”

  “No, you’re right, it doesn’t. But we thought it might show if anyone came in or out. You know, along the street.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, of course. You’re the only one who knows how it works, anyway, so help yourself.”

  Mrs. W. went to pour another round of coffee, her hands shaking as she picked up the large carafe, but she didn’t spill a drop. As she was working on it, I stepped over to a table with an ancient computer and a monitor the size of a small car. It took several minutes to boot up the clunky machine. Danielle brought me another coffee as I opened up the software to check the surveillance video.

  “Do you know what time the call was made to the fire department?” I asked.

  “No dear,” said Mrs. W. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Danielle smiled. “Twelve twenty-four a.m.”

  I checked the endless list of videos. The motion sensor seemed to pick up a leaf blowing as readily as it did a dump truck. Each activity was captured in thirty seconds of video, stored on the company’s servers for thirty days, and then automatically deleted. I found the timestamp before 12:24. There were a number of videos between 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. The sensor would’ve gone ballistic with all the fire trucks and police vehicles, so I began checking in about an hour prior.

  The first video I opened showed Mrs. W.’s porch, her front yard, and the street. There was no movement and nothing happening. A false positive. Probably the wind. The next video was a hit.

  From Mrs. W.’s porch I saw a dark sedan drive through the picture at 11:55. The camera worked on some kind of infrared technology, so despite the dark street the picture was reasonably clear, although different colors were difficult to discern. I rewound the video and played it again, pausing the instant it started, with the car just leaving the frame. It was definitely a sedan, a large one. Maybe a Town Car or something similar. The kind of thing that had a trunk designed for a family of six carrying all their luggage on a ski vacation to Aspen. I let the video play through then checked the list and found another video, three minutes later. This was like the previous one but in reverse: the same car, driving in the opposite direction as if it had turned around at the end of the street and come back out. Typically a car would continue along the street and loop back out to the main road further to the north, so this was odd.

  I sipped my coffee and emailed copies of the videos to myself. Mrs. W. and Danielle had dropped back into conversation about plans for the holidays or some such, so as I worked, I pondered the car. I wondered who it belonged to and how they had gotten onto the island. Coming down this street suggested they had come across on Blue Heron. And because they did a U-turn and drove out the same way, they probably wanted to leave via Blue Heron as well. That said they either intended to head south once they got back on the mainland, or they were unfamiliar with the area and were simply retracing their steps. Or both.

  I looked at the time stamp on the first video. I hadn’t been paying attention to the time while I was driving the previous evening, but it had to have been roughly the same time that I drove onto the island myself. Which took my thinking in another direction. Perhaps I had been followed. But I hadn’t driven by my old house. As I recalled it, I had made the last-second decision to not be a creepy stalker, and I had pulled around the block of shops at the last moment to head over toward the beach. Was it possible that the sedan was following me and had simply lost me? Had they done a drive-by, knowing my address and, having seen the SUV in the driveway, just assumed I was home? Had they then set my house on fire?

  There were a lot of questions without a lot of answers. But there was one thing I did know: if they followed me in off Blue Heron, then before they even got this far, they had passed a lot of eyes. Eyes that didn’t sleep.