Fire Raiser by Melanie Rawn Page A

jury.”
    The schmoozing went like that for about twenty minutes as Holly and Evan worked the room. At last she dug her fingers into his arm and whispered, “If you don’t get me ice and vodka—mainly vodka—within the next ninety seconds, I’m going to tell them all the truth about you.”
    “But there are so many truths to choose from,” he murmured.
    “Indeed there are.”
    Evan considered. “Ice,” he said. “Vodka. Got it.”
    The regular staff at Westmoreland—almost all Europeans—had been given the night off. Serving the assembled locals were other locals who had volunteered their time, for tonight was not just a political grip-and-grin, but a benefit for the churches destroyed by fire and the charity that assisted victims of trafficking. Some of the wait staff circulated with bottles and glasses of specific liquors and soft drinks; others were behind the bar. Lachlan gave up trying to find somebody with a tray of iced vodka, and approached the gorgeous thirty-foot polished oak bar.
    Along the way he heard snatches of various conversations. Only a few of them were ordinary, everyday, how’s-the-wife, enjoy-your-vacation, fine-apple-crop-this-year chats. The good citizens of Pocahontas County were by and large a politically inclined lot, relishing the opportunity to get together and discuss anything and everything. Tonight, as he nodded and smiled at his constituents, Evan made copious notes-to-self about people to keep his wife away from at this party.
    “—a big place, and most of it is sand. You don’t think there are plenty of places to hide WMDs where not even the United States Army could find them?”
    “—five deferments! Five! And as for his sidekick in the Oval Office—I don’t know about you, but I just feel so much better in retrospect that Dubya was in the National Guard, flying sorties to make sure the Viet Cong didn’t invade Boca Raton.”
    “Traditional marriage? Oh, c’mon, honey. Traditionally, marriage was between one man and as many women as he could afford.”
    “—mark my words, in 2006, the Democrats are gonna be the party nobody wants to go to!”
    “—Coulter? Oh, you mean the Paris Hilton of the neo-cons?”
    “—ask me, that man is living proof that evolution doesn’t exist and ‘intelligent design’ never got off the ground—”
    “—we can’t just cut and run—”
    “—determined on adherence to Levitcal law in the Old Testament, you might want to get rid of that bacon-wrapped shrimp on your plate. Double treyf .”
    “—beg your pardon! ‘Mormon’ and ‘archaeology’ are not mutually exclusive terms!”
    “—gettin’ sick breathin’ the formaldehyde in those FEMA trailers down in Louisiana—the Katrina victims have been gettin’ screwed for a solid year now, and—”
    “—administration isn’t muzzling scientists! Global warming was invented by Al Gore—”
    Definitely keeping Holly away from that one, Lachlan told himself. First on the list, of course, was anything to do with Iraq. Should she happen to be feeling mellow, she’d enter into a reasoned discussion. If not, she might do anything from give a ten-minute lecture on precisely why the entire Bush Administration ought to be horsewhipped by somebody who knew how, to merely singing a Vietnam-era protest song under her breath, usually “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore.”
    One might have assumed that because her husband was running for office, she would tone it down. The noteworthy thing about PoCo was that everybody knew what everybody else thought about everything, and anybody who backpedaled or prevaricated in the interests of winning votes was looked on with what had to be the prototype of the term withering contempt . They liked a good debate, these folks. They considered, rightly so, that the bizness of the USA was their bizness, and had been since the very beginning—certainly since long before independence from Great Britain was even a gleam in John