The Good, the Bad, and the Pugly by Celia Kinsey

Author:Celia Kinsey [Kinsey, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

We stood around soberly, looking at the smoke-blackened ceiling above the fry vat until Marco announced that he had to finish the dishes. Chamomile excused herself to finish tidying the dining room, and Oliver went back to working on the steps.

I remained standing beside Juanita staring at the mess.

“What if someone ends up getting hurt?” I said. “The broken water pipe was a pain, but it put no one in danger. This is different—somebody could have died. You could have gotten severely burned if you hadn’t known how to put it out. We could have all gone up in a flash of propane if the fire had spread too far.”

“It wasn’t that serious,” Juanita tried to sound reassuring but missed by a mile. It’s hard to sound really reassuring when your voice is trembling.

“I’ll call the police,” I said.

It’s funny how once you’ve had dead bodies discovered on your property—never mind they’ve probably been dead for decades—the police become extremely attentive to your concerns.

Officer Reyes showed up in less than an hour to take photographs of our blackened ceiling.

“You’re very lucky it wasn’t worse,” he told Juanita and me. “You’ve already confirmed with all your staff that no one accidentally turned on the fryer and forgot about it?”

“I only have two people who work for me,” Juanita told the officer. “My waitress, Chamomile, helps out in the kitchen when things are slow in the dining room, but she swears she hasn’t touched the fry vat in days. My dishwasher, Marco, rarely comes into the kitchen at all. He’d have no reason to touch it.

“Are you sure it couldn’t have been turned on by accident? Couldn’t someone have inadvertently bumped the knobs?” Officer Reyes asked Juanita. “Is it possible that you turned it on yourself and then forgot about it?”

“It has to be lit by hand with an open flame,” Juanita said frostily. She looked like she wanted to sock the officer. She’d reached the age where people start to get sensitive about anyone more than twenty years younger than they are questioning their memory. “The fryer isn’t something that could get turned on by accident,” Juanita told Officer Reyes. “Even if it had somehow been on for hours, that doesn’t begin to explain why it suddenly went up in flames.”

“What do you think might have happened?” Officer Reyes asked.

“Fires like this one are sometimes caused by a thermostat malfunctioning so that the oil gets too hot and eventually combusts, but that’s very rare,” Juanita told Officer Reyes. “I’ve worked in restaurants for almost fifty years, and I’ve only known a fryer to spontaneously catch on fire once.”

“There’s something else that strongly suggests this could be arson,” I told Officer Reyes. “Look at these.”

I handed the officer the two threat notes I’d received.

“I reported the first note to the Sheriff’s office already,” I told him. “But the second one threatening me with fire was discovered yesterday taped to the door of the apartment I’m staying in.”

The officer had me drop the cut-and-pasted note into an evidence bag and said he’d take it back to the station with him.

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