Fire Raiser Read Online Free Page A

Susannah until mid-August of 2004—what would have been Susannah Wingfield’s thirty-eighth birthday. That night, Evan had found Holly standing beside the crib, tears on her cheeks. He’d read about the hormones thing, and the postpartum thing, and all the other pregnancy-labor-delivery things, so he wasn’t all that surprised that she was crying.
    Until she said, “I can’t call her that. I just can’t. It was a mistake.”
    Brilliantly, he asked, “Huh?”
    “Naming her ‘Susannah.’ Every time I say it—Evan, I just can’t. It’s more than two months, but it just doesn’t feel right. We have to think of something else.”
    Slipping his arms around her, he ventured, “Middle name?”
    “Maybe.”
    “We could tack on another one,” he said.
    Holly nodded against his shoulder. “It’s just—she deserves a name of her own, you know? Not have to share it. And we have to remember Susannah as herself, not replace her, not even with our own child. Am I making any sense at all?”
    “Shockingly, yes,” he teased. “We’ll think of something, lady love. Until we come up with a nickname or whatever, we can just call her Hey You. It’s not like she’ll know the difference.”
    They’d tried variations for a while, but it turned out she wasn’t a Susan, Suzy, Anne, Anna, or any of the usual variations thereof. They experimented with Rowan, shook their heads, then went with Ro for about five minutes—until Lulah started singing, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” and that was the end of that.
    “This is ludicrous,” Holly had announced. “I’ve named hundreds of characters, and I can’t come up with a name for my own daughter?”
    “It’ll come to you,” Lulah said serenely.
    It did. A couple of evenings later the four of them were sprawled on the nursery carpet, bedtime being a frangible thing at Woodhush, when Holly suddenly announced, “Bella.”
    “What?”
    “Bella.” She scooped their daughter up from the floor and held her out for examination. “That’s her name.”
    He looked the baby in the eyes and thought it over. “Bella?”
    Holly nodded. “Susannah’s middle name was ‘Dolcebella’—for which she had as many reasons as you have stories about those damned cowboy boots.”
    Evan tried it out. “Bella.” And damned if the pudgy little arms didn’t wave at him. Complete coincidence, of course. “Hey,” he said to his wife. “Five bucks.”
    Both of them were rather unlikely children—and this was clear to Evan even though he was their father. It never failed to amuse him that his genes and Holly’s had combined in two such radically different ways—as if their DNA had undergone nothing so organized and stately as the regular process of reproduction, and had instead been tossed into a blender, all the traits of coloring and character whirling around in total chaos until things spliced together and produced these small, amazing persons. He recognized himself and Holly in both kids, plus a lot of stuff uniquely their own. Elias Bradshaw had summed it up neatly during his June visit this year for the twins’ birthday party—to which he had brought enough paint to supply an art college, half a library of books, and a closetful of clothing they would grow out of by October. Watching them play with their new goodies, Elias had said, “They’re timeless. Practically archetypal. Can’t you see them in the ancestral caves? He’s happily painting away, creating Lascaux, and she’s pacing outside, trying to invent grammar.”
    Lachlan had to admit that at times it was unsettling to look into his son’s eyes. Kirby was completely self-possessed, uncannily self-aware, yet not at all self-absorbed. His smiles were rare and sudden, enchanted with the discovery of some new sight or sound or flavor in his world—or with the rediscovery of his father’s arms holding him safe as he was carried up to bed, or his mother’s voice singing him to sleep. That the carrying and