They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Fire at the Warehouse

We could see the smoke from the Tobin Bridge.

Dermot drove with both hands on the wheel and did not say a single funny thing.

Pier Nine was a mile of black water and a block of roaring orange.

Four fire trucks had pulled up along the quay, and their hoses made white arcs against the dark.

The Kilbride warehouse, the one I had kept the books for, was falling in on itself a floor at a time.

Heat rolled across the pavement and stung my face from a hundred yards back.

"That's the office," I said. "The back corner, on the second floor. That's my office."

"Deirdre," Donovan said.

"The whole company lived in that room."

He took my elbow, because I had begun to walk toward it.

Police tape ran along the quay, and behind it stood a cluster of men in work jackets, and in front of them, with a TV camera in his face, stood my father.

He wore his navy coat and no hat, and he had picked his spot so that the fire was behind him.

"This is the second attack on my family in a season," he said. "First the safe. Now the pier. We know exactly who has wanted us ruined for twenty years."

He turned his head.

He was looking at Donovan.

The camera turned too.

"Mr. Mulcahy," my father said. "Have you come to watch it burn?"

Donovan let go of my elbow.

"I came because I heard it was on fire," he said. "I've never set a fire in my life, Desmond."

"Your cousin was seen in the neighborhood."

"My cousin was in a hospital lobby with forty witnesses and a news crew."

That caused a small stir among the reporters.

My father didn't blink.

"A man who admits to cleaning out my safe is not a man whose word I take," he said.

He had been told, then, in the hour since the corridor, what Donovan had said.

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