Page 59 of Love Again

Andy freezes. His gaze drops to the floor as he hands up the hand towel. “Fires?”

I nod.

“You need to come with me,” he says. “Let’s do this fast.”

We move quickly through the kitchen, down the front entryway hall, past beautiful original art—mostly seascapes and landscapes—to the front door. Once outside, he takes me hurriedly down another garden path to the big red barn just beyond a fire pond.

The inside is neat as a pin. To the right is a workshop that’s a little messy, the pegboard with the outlines for the tools a touch dusty. Everything else is meticulous. I follow him to the back of the barn through where the heavy equipment is parked.

There are at least eight chords of wood stacked against the far wall. In the center are bicycles, and lawn equipment hangs on the walls. He takes me through a small door to some old goat pens along the other side of the barn. Here, things are not so neat and tidy.

Andy leans into one of the stalls and starts shifting junk around. There’s an old oil barrel that looks as though it’s been half cut to make a compost bin, cardboard boxes filled with whatever, a couple of rock-hard cement bags that must have gotten wet at some point, paint cans, and a host of odds and ends. The whole time he’s fishing around looking for something, he’s talking.

“I came home one day and found Kevin rummaging around in my desk. He had our will out and was taking a picture, and I caught him red-handed. He slipped the phone back into his pocket, and I demanded he take it out and remove the photographs. Audrey thinks that’s why I fired him. But I was already on my way to fire him that day.”

He pulls back a tarp, and an old, broken wheelbarrow lists hard to the right and nearly crashes into him. I step forward fast to help him right it. “That’s how I surprised him. He thought I was out here working in the barn. But I had found this under one of the house windows along the outside of the side yard where he was working, and I didn’t like it. We never talked about it since, and I never showed Audrey.”

Andy lifts up a black box with some wires attached and sets it on the flat newel post of a stall. “I thought maybe it was a bomb or a listening device.”

I reach for it and pick it up. It’s got some weight to it. “And you never discussed this with him?”

“No. Frankly, I was so angry about the wills that I dropped it. I was so furious this idiot was taking pictures of our wills, I wanted him out of the house. I didn’t really think about it much until you brought up this thing about fires.”

I turn the contraption over in my hands. On the back of the box is an ignition switch. Everything seems to be here except a timer or a radio control. Whoever made this would need one or the other.

Regardless, it’s clearly an incendiary device.

“Is it what I think it is?” asks Andy.

“Yes.”

“Do you think he was going to use it on us?”

I shook my head. “Kevin Barr was connected with you at the time, and he wouldn’t have put himself in the limelight that way. This was probably built for another fire. You’re definitely going to have to go talk to Detective Jack Carlson.”

“Who’s Detective Carlson?”

“He’s with the Rockland PD. He’s the one who hired me, Devon, and Mateus—basically Colton Security—to look into all this for him. He’s also the one who helped with Laurel’s case.”

Andy nods. “Isn’t he also the detective who had his houseboat set on fire?”

“Yep.”

He looks visibly shaken.

“I don’t want you to worry about this.” I lay a hand on his shoulder. “I know it’s hard to believe, but Kevin Barr isn’t going to do anything to implicate himself at this point. In fact, we’re not even sure he has anything to do with these. A friend could have met him here and dropped this off.”

“You mean Jimmy Whitehead. He was here a lot.” Andy’s face is pale, and his trim, silver beard glints in the sunlight. Wiping his face, he continues. “I didn’t find it in the barn. It was on the east side of the house, up against the foundation, the only part where the clapboards reach almost to the ground. It was directly in line under a window. That’s why I thought maybe it was a listening device.”

That’s a perfect placement for an incendiary device, close to the ground near highly flammable material—in this case, wood clapboards. Three of these set off at the same time, and the house would go up in minutes.

But I can’t leap to conclusions. Whitehead could have met him here or could have come here for the timer. It would still implicate Barr and the fact that it was left with him.

“May I take this?”

“Yes, please, get out of here. I don’t even know why I kept it. I thought . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought it might be of interest to someone at some point.”

“Let’s keep it out here. When I go hiking back down the hill, I’ll get my car, and on my way home, I’ll stop by and pick it up.”