Serpents Rising by David A. Poulsen

turned the corner that led to my apartment building, Cobb took a breath, exhaled, and said, “Interesting day.”
    â€œIt was,” I agreed.
    â€œListen … thanks.”
    â€œI hope we get a little closer to the kid tomorrow.”
    Cobb pulled to a stop in front of my building. Reached across, shook my hand. “See you in the morning. How about eight?”
    â€œI’ll try to be a little more ready for action then I was this morning.”
    Cobb smiled and I stepped out into the street. The Jeep had turned the corner and disappeared before I had the front door of my building open.

Five
    T he shower felt as good as I thought it would and I stayed in it until the hot water heater’s supply was exhausted and the stream turned cool, then cold. My body was exhausted but my mind was on full alert. Thinking the whole time I was in the shower.
    But I hadn’t been thinking about Jay Blevins and the race to find him. Instead my mind was occupied with the conversation Cobb and I had had over lunch, when he’d suggested that maybe there was something in Donna’s past that had led to the setting of the fire that killed her. That maybe she had been the target.
    I stepped out of the shower, towelled off, and climbed into sweats and a University of Calgary Dinosaurs hoodie. I poured myself a stout portion of Crown Royal mixed with a lesser portion of Diet Coke, put Del Barber’s Love Songs for the Last 20 and The Tragically Hip’s We Are the Same on the CD player and sat down to think about what Cobb had said.
    What about before she knew you? Something or someone in her past?
    I had thought and rethought about that possibility in the weeks and months after the fire, trying to make sense of the senseless. And I’d rejected the notion every time.
    It simply made sense to me that someone in my line of work — work that involved offending, sometimes attacking people in print that thousands of other people might read — was the target.
    Me. It had to be me.
    The note had confirmed that, hadn’t it? Why would someone send that note to me if Donna had been the target? The arsonist would have already accomplished his goal — Donna was dead. That certainty coupled with my absolute belief that no one could possibly have hated Donna enough to want her dead had been the basis for my rejecting the idea that she was the killer’s target that night. And I was just as sure now, all these years after her death.
    Or was I?
    Weirder shit than that — a lot weirder — has happened.
    I sipped on my drink, stared at a couple of flecks on the ceiling. Something or someone in her past.
    A nut job from when she was a teenager, some guy who felt slighted because she wouldn’t go to the prom with him or got the scholarship he thought he should have got or …
    But would a nut job wait years to exact his revenge? That’s why the whole thing seemed so far-fetched, so impossible. Because it was impossible.
    Weirder shit than that …
    I glanced at the clock. 12:42 a.m. I set the drink down and walked to the main closet near the door. In it, below the clothes, footwear, and Christmas decorations I’d need in just a few weeks were some boxes. Including a couple containing Donna’s stuff, things that had previously been in the garage and in a storage locker downtown — stuff that neither of us had done anything with in all the time we were married. Most of it I’d never even looked at.
    I wanted to look at it now. Between the shower and the drink and the thinking, I was wide awake.
    I set the boxes, there were three, in the centre of the room, sat cross-legged on a scatter rug at the end of the bed, and went through Donna’s stuff for two and a half hours, feeling like a voyeur, like I was invading her privacy, the only thing that was left of her.
    Two and a half hours of fifteen-year-old bank statements, Day-Timers loaded with to-do lists and appointment