Five Fires Read online

  There’s a $125 penalty if you stay one minute past 11 a.m. on the last day of your rental, even on a Tuesday. Jani wanted one more morning at the beach, but Gregg can’t get them packed up and have the place clean enough to get his deposit back if they do that. Jani whines every second of the morning and shows a real talent for creating a mess wherever he has just cleaned—stepping in dust piles, leaving sticky prints on appliances, tables, walls. They get away with only minutes to spare, 10:57 on the dashboard clock.

  When he turns to check his sights as he backs the car out of the driveway, he sees Jani in her car seat, clutching that damn note to her cheek. Those dark curls, olive skin, light eyes—she looks nothing like her mother. If he hadn’t been at the hospital when Jani was born, if he hadn’t been there for the pregnancy, he’d wonder if a woman could somehow fake having a kid. Jani has looked exactly like him since Day One. “That’s evolution at work,” Pauline told him. “If babies didn’t look like their fathers, they’d reject them. She’ll look more like both of us as time goes on.” Well, it’s three years later and the little girl in the car seat still looks like a female version of him. Put their childhood photos next to each other and you’d think they were fraternal twins. There’s not a trace of her mother in her face.

  Pauline’s not going to dump this kid on him. He’ll find her, make her do right. He’s the one who’s supposed to be moving out, moving on.

  “Whore,” he mutters.

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Nothing.”

  Two miles up the highway, he takes the left turn onto State Highway 26 too fast and the boogie board he roped to the roof goes sliding off. Horns honk around him, as if he planned this fiasco. He’d leave the board on the roadside if he could, but that would make him no better than her. He pulls over and puts everything to rights, then fights for his way back into the westbound traffic, surprisingly thick for a Tuesday in June. Oh God, there’s a funeral, apparently for the most popular guy in Bethany Beach, the line of cars twenty, thirty deep. He adds this mishap to the growing list of everything that’s her fault. She has ruined his life. Or tried to. He’ll find her, make her fulfill her obligations, make her pay.

  He remembers the first slap, after he gave her permission, so hard it almost brought tears to his eyes. It was as if she had been waiting to hit him for a very long time.

  About the Author

  Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has won multiple awards and critical acclaim for provocative, timely crime novels set in her beloved hometown of Baltimore. Laura has been nominated for more than fifty awards for crime fiction and won almost twenty, including the Edgar. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Now a perennial New York Times bestselling author, she lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

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  Also by Laura Lippman

  Sunburn

  Wilde Lake

  Hush Hush

  After I’m Gone

  And When She Was Good

  The Most Dangerous Thing

  I’d Know You Anywhere

  Life Sentences

  Hardly Knew Her

  Another Thing to Fall

  What the Dead Know

  No Good Deeds

  To the Power of Three

  By a Spider’s Thread

  Every Secret Thing

  The Last Place

  In a Strange City

  The Sugar House

  In Big Trouble

  Butchers Hill

  Charm City

  Baltimore Blues

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  five fires. Copyright © 2014 by Laura Lippman. Excerpt from sunburn copyright © 2018 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

  Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-286412-3

  Cover design by Elsie Lyons

  Cover photographs © Andrew Angelov/Shutterstock (sunglasses); © Ratana21/Shutterstock (texture)

  William Morrow Impulse is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  William Morrow and HarperCollins are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

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