Sydney tried not to cringe. She hated when middle-aged men called her a woman. “I’m actually here to see my dad,” she said. “I brought a book for him.” She held up the copy of Echo Bay’s Unsolved Mysteries that she’d thought to stick into her backpack that morning.
“Oh, that’s a shame. I’m sure he would have been happy you stopped by,” Bob told her, “but it’s his day off.”
Sydney smacked her forehead. “I forgot.” She hadn’t, of course. Her mom had mentioned it just that morning. But she wasn’t about to tell Bob Hart that. “Do you think I can leave this on his desk for him?”
The words had just left her mouth when a shrill bell rang out through the firehouse. “Twenty-one, a dwelling!” The dispatcher’s voice came through on Bob’s pager. “Neddles Island, Echo Bay Township, sixteen hundred hours.”
Bob, who acted as chief on her dad’s day off, jumped to attention. “Everyone gear up!” he called out. Instantly the firehouse exploded in a frenzy of activity: turnout gear flying and men calling out orders and a bony, redheaded woman sliding down the fire pole, landing with a soft thud next to Bob.
“Go on back, Sydney,” Bob called over his shoulder as he jogged to his locker and pulled out his gear. Sydney couldn’t resist watching him for a beat. His face had hardened into a mask of concentration, the same one she’d seen her dad wear so many times. In three seconds flat he was dressed and racing toward the door, moving so fluidly he made it look like a dance. Tearing her eyes away, she slipped into her father’s office.
As chief, her dad had the only office in the small firehouse. It was a cramped, crowded room, with a desk too large for the space and a line of filing cabinets jammed along the back wall. Sydney made a big show of placing the book on his desk, even though everyone was focused on getting out to the call. She stuck a Post-it Note on the cover. Thought this seemed up your alley! she wrote. She couldn’t make herself write love, so she just scrawled her name across the bottom. Her dad would probably be confused beyond belief when he found that book, but at least her story to Bob would check out.
Sydney took a quick glance around the office. Everything looked the same as it had years ago, when she was a frequent visitor to the firehouse. She still remembered hearing that bell ring for the first time, how everything had changed so instantaneously. It was like watching a window shatter: one second light was streaming through it, and the next second pieces were flying everywhere, sharp-edged and blinding, and you couldn’t see a thing. She’d never known something to have that kind of power—the ability to cut through everything, make only one thing matter. She’d instantly wanted it for her own.
It was during that time that she’d learned all the ins and outs of the firehouse: who read in the loft space after lunch and who was the quickest to change into his gear and, of course, where her dad hid the key to the locked files.
Sydney could hear the familiar pounding of boots in the main room as everyone jostled toward the exit, voices calling out checklists and shouting commands. Seconds later the siren began wailing, pulsing through the air. And then, just like that, it was moving: growing fainter and fainter until, finally, it was gone. An eerie silence was left in its wake. Sydney blew out a breath, hearing it amplified in her ears. It was now or never.
She hurried over to the fake hanging plant her dad kept in his office. Standing on her tiptoes, she stretched her arm up, feeling around inside the pot. Her fingers brushed up against something smooth and cold. Sydney broke into a smile as she pulled out the small metal key.
It took only a few minutes to find Kyla’s file. Her dad might be a creep, but he was an organized creep, every drawer of his filing cabinets chronologically ordered and meticulously labeled. She found it in the third cabinet, second drawer down: KERN FIRE, stamped in thick red letters.
Sydney yanked the folder out and quickly skimmed over the report. According to the notes, Kyla’s boat float had been named “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It had included a whole pyrotechnics display featuring a large, sparkling, golden star that was supposed to shoot from one end of the float to the other. But on the sea that night, something had gone wrong with the wiring. Instead of shooting, the star had exploded.
Sydney paused at the conclusion of the report, where the cause of the fire was identified. Accidental, it said. She snapped a photo of it with her phone, to show Tenley later.
She was just about to move on to the photos when her eyes landed on the signature line at the very bottom of the page. She was surprised to see it wasn’t her dad’s signature there, but Gerry Hackensack’s, the chief before him. Sydney thought back. Her dad had been promoted to chief the summer after she finished sixth grade, which would have been the summer after eleventh for Kyla and Guinness. So the Kyla Kern case must have been one of Hackensack’s last. Curious, she peeked into the next oldest file, a beach bonfire mishap that took place only a week after Kyla’s death. Her dad’s familiar signature was at the bottom of the report. Apparently, Kyla’s case hadn’t been one of Hackensack’s last; it had been the last.
She glanced up at the clock as she returned to Kyla’s file. It wouldn’t be long before the firemen discovered the whole thing was a false alarm and came filing back in, grumbling loudly about the waste of time and resources. She had to get moving. Quickly, she removed the photos from Kyla’s file. The first one was a fuzzy “before” shot that had probably been taken by one of Kyla’s friends. The quality was terrible, but Sydney could see why their float was favored to win that year. In person, it must have been amazing. It was a midnight blue, so dark it would have blended in with the waves—if it weren’t for all the stars. There must have been hundreds of them: tiny lights embedded in its surface and strung through the air, glowing and winking, like a starry night floating in the ocean. And at the back of the float, hanging high above them all, was a huge, sparkling, golden star. The one that had exploded.
Sydney flipped to the next image. It was clearly an “after.” The explosion had caused a fire, and the once-beautiful float was destroyed. Planks were scalded and torn out, holes were burned right down to the base. The large, gold star was gone, and the glass lights that had twinkled so prettily in the last photo were now shattered everywhere, fracturing the camera’s flash into tiny diamonds of light. In the front of the boat, the sleeve of someone’s shirt was tangled in one of the piles of broken glass, blackened and dripping with blood.
Sydney’s stomach seized. She used to find fire beautiful, even its aftermath: the way it ate through everything in its path and left a blank slate behind, like a sand castle swept away by the waves. But on the Justice, she’d finally seen how ugly it could be, how it sucked the life out of everything, leaving behind not blankness, but remains—wilted, charred, dead.
She steeled herself as she went through the rest of the images, photographing each of them with her phone. She’d just finished going through the stack when she noticed it. “That’s strange,” she murmured. She flipped back to the second to last photo in the pile. The number stamped on the bottom was twenty-one. She turned to the next photo, the final one. Twenty-three was stamped on the bottom.
Quickly, she rifled through the whole pile again. There was no twenty-two. She leaned back against her dad’s desk, staring blindly at the folder.
A photograph was missing from the records.
Out in the main room, a staticky radio burst to life. Bob’s voice filtered into the firehouse. “Twenty-one was a false alarm. Returning to coop.”
Coop. It was what the firemen called the firehouse: their very own chicken coop. She had to get out of there.
She quickly shoved the folder back into the filing cabinet and returned the key to its hiding spot. On her way out, she paused, taking one last look at her dad’s office. She imagined his returning to work tomorrow to find that book waiting on his desk. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d smile, or if he’d just toss it aside.
It didn’t matter either way. Turning on her heels, she hurried out to the parking lot. She could already see the fire truck in the distance, a red bullet, shooting toward its coop. She floored the gas, driving off just in time—away from the truck and the files and Bob, and any last thoughts of her dad.
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday, 5:18 PM
“We’ll growl! We’ll roar! We’ll beat you then we’ll wipe the floor!” as the line of cheerleaders behind her launched into their best impersonations of lions, Emerson stepped forward with Jessie, unfurling a Winslow Lions banner.
“Ready?” Jessie asked.
Emerson nodded. They were practicing their big halftime show for the homecoming game, and Emerson and Jessie’s performance was supposed to be the grand finale. “One,” Jessie murmured. “Two. Three!” In unison, they tossed the banner up into the air behind them, for two juniors to catch. As Emerson launched into a series of cartwheels next to Jessie, she tried to keep her attention focused on the routine. But she just couldn’t shake the thought that had been trailing her all day.