The Burning Day Read Free Page A

round to his purpose at last. “All right, Mr. Wiggins, I can do that. Not a problem.”
    “Of course, any additional operating money that you will need, I will provide.”
    “This seems pretty straight forward. I can’t imagine running into any added expenses, though if I do I’ll be in touch.” I turned to my side desk and slid the memory stick into a media slot on my computer. I opened up the folder and double-clicked one of the picture icons. After a second, a gorgeous smiling face filled the screen and radiated out at me. Mary Wiggins was a beauty, with high cheek bones, smooth ivory white skin and thick red hair with a hint of gold in it. Her smile was flawless. I resisted the urge to look backwards and forwards between the face on the screen and the odd man in my office.
    “I married up, I know.” Wiggins said, as if reading my thoughts. “Please, just do what you can.”

 
    Chapter 2
     
    After Wiggins left me, I went home. It had been a long day, and Wiggins and his strange drama had come at the very end of it. There was a light spring rain on my way to my quiet little house. I let myself in and shucked off my jacket and shoes and stretched out on the sofa. I didn’t turn on the TV or the lights, I just sat there in the dim natural fading glow of the day and thought about the mystery of Mary Wiggins.  
    Was Henry being paranoid or was his wife really wandering? I decided to put it from my mind for the moment and take a stab at it in the morning. I picked up the remote and turned on the cable. I might as well catch up with what’s going on in the rest of the world, I told myself.  
    There was nothing really new. There were the usual riots and bombings and mayhem rocking the four corners of the world, with the places and the players changing, but the basic storyline staying the same. It seemed the only thing about humankind that never changed was its gnawing hunger for self-destruction. After a few minutes, I tired of the network news and its litany of hopelessness, and started surfing the channels, looking for a quality movie.
    On one channel, Tommy Lee Jones was some sort of Law Enforcement officer, and was talking to the ghost of a confederate general in a Louisiana swamp. I watched for a few minutes, but decided that I had missed too much of the movie to make sense of what was going on. On another channel, there was Tommy Lee Jones again, dressed as some other kind of Law Enforcement officer, and now he was talking with a woman in a cafe. He was telling her a story of some sort. Once again, I decided that I had joined the movie too late to enjoy it, though it looked pretty good.  
    I figured that it must be Tommy Lee Jones’ birthday, since he was being featured on so many channels. I thought I might get lucky and catch one of the Men in Black movies on another station, but it didn’t happen. I did catch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly just in time to watch the three-way gunfight at the end. After Clint Eastwood rode away into the sun, I decided to go check the contents of the fridge.
      I opened the refrigerator door and stood there staring at the leftovers in their plastic containers. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Henry Wiggins and his beautiful wife. Something about his story bugged me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d been going over it subconsciously since I got home. It wasn’t that what he wanted me to do wasn’t ethical or plausible . . . after all, I had done the same for other people plenty of times before. But something in his story didn’t fit. A wheel was spinning in the back of my mind, stuck on just what that thing was.  
    I walked back into the living room and picked up the telephone book and flipped through to the “Accountants” section. I ran my finger down the column of advertisements. There it was. Henry Wiggins, Certified Public Accountant, serving Homewood, Mountainbrook, and Vestavia for fifteen years.
    I wondered if I might be getting a