Third Page

The fire report is three pages, and only two of them are in the file. The one that is missing is the page that says where the fire started and what was poured on the floor to make it run. The fire was in February of 2004, in a hardware store on Main Street, and the man who owned it did not come out of the back office.The report says the wiring was old and the fire was an accident. It says nobody was inside. Both of those things are in the record, in ink, on a form signed by a seventeen-year-old volunteer who came in on the second engine and who has taken one day off every February eleventh for twenty-three years running.Wren Harper runs a two-person investigation office above the hardware store with Nate Cole, who used to be a deputy and who reads paper better than anybody she has ever met. When the county digitizes the old fire files, the missing page turns up in the wrong drawer, stapled into the report of a trash-can fire from the same winter. Somebody put it there. Somebody has been keeping it there.What the page proves is small and absolute. The fire was set. The accelerant was there. The girl who carried the store's ledger out the back door was sixteen years old that night, and she is thirty-nine now, and she works at the county assessor's office two buildings from the courthouse, and she has been waiting twenty-three years for somebody to knock.The tape is the worst of it. On the recording from that night, on the volunteer channel at twenty-three forty-one, a boy's voice says: one out of the back door. He told the truth into a microphone and then wrote the other thing on the form, and the form is what people believe.The Third Page is the fifth Harper & Cole Investigations novel: a small-town cold case about a page pulled out of a file, a town that let a record stand for twenty-three years, and two people who are very good at other people's records and very bad at saying the thing that is right in front of them.