The Wife They Burned novel · Chapter 25 of 32
Chapter 25: Marshal
Abel drove to Highmoor with the lights on his dashboard flashing.
I'd never seen him use them.
"He's sixty-six," Abel said, at a red light he ran. "Bad heart. He keeps nitro pills in the glove box."
"Did you look up to him?"
He didn't answer for a mile.
"He taught me to read a burn pattern," he said. "On my first day. He said the fire always tells you where it started, if nobody's moved the furniture."
The detective was waiting at the main gate, and the new guard let us through on her word.
The marshal's sedan was parked on the grass by the chapel, exactly as the groundskeeper had found it.
Driver's door open.
The family plot was twenty yards past the chapel, behind its low iron fence.
I went there first.
The white roses were gone from Junie's stone.
Somebody had pulled them out and laid them on the grass outside the fence, carefully, stems together.
In their place was a plastic bucket of orange carnations.
The cheap kind, from a gas station, with the price sticker still on the bucket.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of The Wife They Burned are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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