House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  Her phone rang in her bag as the mixtape ended. It was after midnight, she couldn’t imagine who— She shot Peter a questioning look as she pulled out her phone, and at the same moment, his rang, too. He answered it through the radio speaker as she pressed the answer button on hers.

  “Mom!” Chrissy cried in her ear as Kip’s “Um—Dad?” came out of the dashboard speaker.

  Peter braked and pulled off to the shoulder of the highway, and they stared at each other as they received the same news in their separate calls. It seemed the kids weren’t safe at home after all. They were at the police station.

  Chapter Two

  Peter was an easygoing man. He didn’t fly off the handle or punch walls or smash furniture. Even when things went very wrong in his business—subcontractor no-shows, delivery delays, interest rate spikes—his anger was more of the slow burn variety. But slow burns could get pretty hot, and Peter’s was searing by the time they reached the St. Alban police station. “How can somebody so smart be so goddam stupid?” he yelled.

  Leigh knew how. Kip had been working so hard these last months, years really, perfecting his GPA, racking up his AP scores, acing the SATs—hours and hours cracking the books every day and somehow still expected to present the profile of a well-rounded, athletic, community-engaged young man. And he did it, he got into his dream school, and he must have felt like the top of his head was going to come off if he didn’t do something stupid tonight. But she held her tongue. She’d learned to defer to Peter where his son was concerned. He needed to be in the driver’s seat there, too.

  St. Alban was a small town, barely more than a village, and most of its government functions were handled at the county level in Arwen. But it had its own small police department, headquartered on a tree-lined road in an old brick house that had been repurposed into the town administration building. The parking lot was nearly empty. Two police cruisers were out front, three cars in employee parking, and no one at all in Visitor Parking until they pulled in.

  Chrissy was right inside the front door, hunched on a hard-slat bench in the corridor, her skin white as ash under the fluorescent ceiling panels. She jumped up and flew into her mother’s arms. “Sweetie, are you all right?” Leigh held her back and ran her eyes up and down her slight frame. She was nearly as tall as Leigh but still pipe cleaner–thin. “Did you get hurt anywhere?”

  “I’m fine. Mom, don’t be mad at Kip!”

  “I’m not—”

  “Don’t let Pete be mad, please!”

  Peter was already ahead of them down the corridor, speaking in a low, tight voice to a uniformed officer. Another uniformed officer was at a desk in the bullpen behind them, peering at a screen and pecking with two fingers on the keyboard. Somewhere a printer whined, and a faint rumble of voices came from behind a closed door. Otherwise the building appeared to be deserted.

  “Maybe you can help us out here,” the man was saying to Peter when Leigh caught up. “Your son’s not cooperating.”

  The officer was middle-aged, paunchy, with a broad, genial face. He looked like one of the dads Peter used to coach softball with, or one of his more reliable subcontractors, somebody he would have liked under different circumstances. But he was bristling at him now. “What do you mean, not cooperating?”

  “He won’t tell us where he got the alcohol.”

  “He was drunk?”

  Leigh winced. Kip hadn’t mentioned that in his phone call.

  The cop shrugged. “He measured point-oh-five-five on the blood alcohol. But remember, it’s zero tolerance under twenty-one, and he failed the field sobriety besides.”

  Peter’s jaw clenched.

  “Here’s the thing,” the cop said. “If there’s an underage beer party in progress in our town tonight, we need to know where it is.” He glanced at Chrissy, where she clung to Leigh’s side. “We haven’t questioned the young lady yet. We were waiting for a parent to arrive, since she’s a minor.” He rapped on a door and turned the knob, and the voice inside stopped rumbling.

  “Wait.” Peter’s tone was sharp. “You questioned my son without a parent present?”

  Inside the room Kip sat staring a hole into the battered laminate surface of a small conference table. Across from him was another uniformed officer, this one a young woman with a stern mouth and her hair pulled back in a tight bun like a ballerina. She looked up peevishly at the interruption.

  Kip didn’t look up. He was a handsome boy, Leigh thought—of course he was; he looked like his dad—but where Peter’s looks were a little rough around the edges, Kip’s were buffed to a fine polish. If GQ put out a high school edition, he could have been its cover boy. He didn’t look very polished now, though. His dark hair was usually gelled to perfection, but now it hung limp in a damp tangle over his narrow, flushed face. He wasn’t as tall as Peter or as beefy as the twins, and he looked even smaller now as he slouched low in his chair.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Conley are here, Officer Mateo,” the softball-coach cop said. “Why don’t you take the young lady and her mother across the hall, and I’ll continue here with the boy and his father.”

  Ballerina Bun nodded and pushed back from the table.

  “No, wait.” Peter’s voice swelled too loud in the tiny room. “What’s the idea here? You had no right to question my son before I got here. And you drew his blood, too?”

  “Okay, calm down, Mr. Conley—”

  “Dad—” Kip began.

  “Peter—”

  “He’s a minor, for God’s sake! What kind of operation are you running here?”

  “Dad—”

  “Okay, Mr. Conley, I’m asking you to lower your voice.”

  “Our lawyer’s on the way. Let’s see what she has to say about your tactics.”

  “Dad!”

  “What?!” Peter roared, wheeling on him.

  Kip ducked his head. “I’m not,” he mumbled.

  “Not what?”

  “A minor. It’s tomorrow, Dad. I’m eighteen.”

  Leigh put her hand over her mouth. In all the excitement about Duke, they’d forgotten there was also Kip’s birthday to celebrate. Despite the gift-wrapped set of golf clubs hidden in the attic, despite their Sunday night dinner reservations complete with cake and a kazoo band—despite all that, they’d forgotten that Saturday was his actual birthday. He was officially eighteen now, and the police had every right to question him on his own.

  “Listen, come on,” Softball Coach said. “Mr. Conley, have a seat and we’ll talk this over. Diane, why don’t you take the ladies—?” He pointed to the door, and Ballerina held out one stiff arm to herd Leigh and Chrissy into the corridor.

  Another woman was swinging through the front door of the building. She was an imposing figure, tall and black, wearing stilettos and a thigh-high spangled dress under a chinchilla shrug. She spotted Leigh and headed her way in long-legged strides.

  “Shelby!” Leigh reached up to embrace her. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  The taller woman turned to the ballerina cop. “Shelby Randolph, counsel for Christopher Conley.” Her voice was refined, but her tone was a rough, demanding bark. “Where is my client? In here?” She brushed past the female officer. “Hi there, doll face,” she whispered to Chrissy as she opened the door to the interview room.

  “Hi, Aunt Shelby,” Chrissy whispered back.

  “End of interview,” Shelby announced to the room. “Step outside, Sergeant.” She looked back over her shoulder at Leigh. “I assume you’re acting as counsel for your daughter?”

  “Uh, yes.” The formality of your daughter put Leigh on alert. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I suggest you advise her not to answer any questions at this time.”

  “Yes, right, of course.”

  Softball Coach came out of the interview room with his eyebrows raised at his colleague, who thr
ew up her hands and walked away.

  Leigh put her arm around her daughter and drew her back to the slatted bench in the corridor. Chrissy sat down beside her with her hands folded. She’d painted each of her nails a different color of polish. It looked like she’d emptied a bag of Skittles in her lap. Feel the rainbow, her fingertips said, but her face said something else.

  “You sure you’re all right, honey? Maybe we should go to the hospital and get you checked out.”

  “We barely hit that tree. Really, I’m fine.”

  She laid her cheek against Leigh’s shoulder, and Leigh gave her a squeeze. She cherished each of her children, and she adored her stepchildren, too, but Chrissy always shined a special light. Her little fairy child, she used to call her. There was something magical about her from the moment she burst into the world with her startling cap of red ringlets. The color had faded a bit since then and she’d probably be a pale strawberry blonde by the time she was grown. But the magic would always be there, in her lively eyes and her quick smile and her heart as big as a house. And a good solid head on her shoulders, too. Even though Kip was nominally in charge this week, it was Chrissy they counted on to be the responsible one. Kip’s lack of responsibility was in full evidence tonight.

  “Aunt Shelby is so awesome,” Chrissy said.

  “She sure is.”

  “Was she like this in law school, too?”

  “Always.”

  “I think she must have been at a party tonight.”

  “Hmm. I think so.” Leigh looked closely at her daughter. “And I think Kip was, too?”

  Chrissy looked up with a flood of tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t want him to get into trouble.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Ryan Atwood’s house.”

  “He drove there, and you—what?—rode your bike over there to warn him?”

  Chrissy nodded.

  “In your pajamas. Five miles in the rain.”

  “I know, I’m sorry! I just thought—”

  “Oh, honey.” Leigh kissed the top of her curls. “You can’t rescue people from their own bad decisions. This is Kip’s problem, not yours.”

  “But, Mom, it really wasn’t his fault! I mean, that dog ran out right in front of us. There was nothing we could do!”

  “Honey.” Leigh put a finger under Chrissy’s chin and tilted up her pale face. “He went to a party we didn’t know about. He drove the truck without permission and on a suspended license. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, he drove after drinking. It is his fault, and Peter has every right to be angry. And you should have stayed out of it.”

  Tears swam in Chrissy’s eyes. She hated there to be any kind of discord in their household. Leigh’s divorce from Ted was louder and messier than it should have been, and ever since, all Chrissy wanted in the world was for everyone to please get along. “But we’re a family, right?” she pleaded. “We look out for each other.”

  Leigh gazed at her fairy child. At home they had a pair of barn cats she’d dubbed Goodness and Mercy for the way they seemed to follow her all the days of her life. The same words came to her now. Goodness and mercy. “Yes, we do,” she said finally. “But this is between Kip and his dad, okay? We have to stay out of it.”

  Working the room, Shelby called it, whether she was trying a jury case or negotiating a plea bargain or holding a press conference on the courthouse steps. Three rooms were in play tonight, and over the next hour, she worked all of them, stalking on her stilettos between the interview room where Peter and Kip remained sequestered, the bullpen where the officers huddled over their Styrofoam coffee cups, and the lobby where she gently shook Chrissy awake to ask her two questions. The first one Chrissy answered without hesitation. The party was at Ryan Atwood’s, and she recited the address, too. Her loyalty was to Kip, not his friends, and if this was the cooperation the police were looking for, she was happy to supply it. But she couldn’t answer Shelby’s second question. She had no idea what time it was when they swerved off the road.

  “If it was before midnight?” Leigh said. “Would that help? If he was still a juvenile?”

  Shelby gave a noncommittal shrug and returned to the interview room. Soon after the third officer rose out of the bullpen, squared his hat on his head, and left the building, stopping only to confirm the Atwoods’ address with Leigh.

  Another thirty minutes passed before Shelby emerged again, but this time she had Peter and Kip in tow. Leigh caught Kip as he passed and pulled him into a hug. He was stiff in her arms, but he dropped his head briefly to her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Leigh,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “It’ll be all right.”

  “Let’s talk outside, shall we?” Shelby said and strode ahead of them through the door.

  The rain had stopped, and the night air smelled of wet grass and crushed forsythia blossoms. Peter clicked the Volvo open, and Kip dove into the backseat. So did Chrissy. Only one other car remained in Visitor Parking, a red Corvette with a handsome young man lounging behind the wheel. Shelby flashed a hand at him—five more minutes—before she turned to Leigh. “Here’s the deal. They got him on the BAC, so he’s going to plead to baby DUI.”

  Baby DUI was the colloquial term for the zero tolerance law, the same one Kip broke last January. Adult DUI required a blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent, but for drivers under twenty-one, 0.02 percent was enough.

  “But,” she continued, “he won’t be charged with reckless driving or driving impaired with a juvenile passenger or any of the other dozen add-ons they could have charged him with if he were an adult.”

  Leigh let out her breath. “So it did happen before midnight.”

  “Who knows? The neighbor’s nine-one-one call came in at 12:06 a.m. How long did it take him to stumble out of bed and turn on the lights and pick up the phone? Could have been five minutes, could have been ten. But it’s close enough that they’re not going to bother piling on charges only to see them end up in juvenile court. Subject to the prosecutor’s review on Monday.” Shelby smirked at Leigh. “You remember him? Commonwealth’s Attorney Boyd Harrison?”

  “Oh.” Leigh remembered him only too well. He was a little martinet of a man, a stickler for rules and schedules who tried to impose the same military-style discipline on his family as he did on his office staff.

  “Don’t worry,” Shelby said. “He won’t have any clue that defendant Christopher Conley and passenger Christine Porter have any connection to Attorney Leigh Huyett.”

  “What’s this?” Peter’s gaze snapped between them. “Who’s Harrison to you?”

  “Didn’t she ever tell you?” Shelby said. “Leigh represented his wife in their divorce. And really took him to the cleaners.”

  Leigh pursed her lips. “It was a fair and equitable settlement.”

  “And he’s holding a grudge?”

  She shrugged. They always seemed to, no matter how fair the settlement.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Shelby said. “The name Huyett doesn’t appear anywhere in the police report. Unless you think Harrison’s been keeping tabs on you all these years—”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about. He’ll rubber-stamp the cop’s recommendation, and your boy’ll get another one-year suspension of his driver’s license plus a five-hundred-dollar fine.”

  “As opposed to—?”

  “Same suspension, bigger fine, plus up to a year in jail.”

  “Oh, God,” Leigh said as Peter clenched his jaw and looked away.

  “Try not to worry.” Shelby opened the passenger door of the Corvette. “Even Hardass Harrison isn’t going to throw the book at a nice white boy. But I’ll touch base on Monday and let you know for sure.” She swung her long legs into the car and leaned over to receive the young man’s kiss before she pulled the door s
hut.

  Peter didn’t speak for a full five minutes. No one did, and the tension was so tight inside the car it was almost a relief when he finally lit into Kip. How could he be so stupid. There goes his summer internship, and what if this gets back to Duke, he could lose his place, his scholarship for sure. And after the last time, he promised, he promised.

  Chrissy sniffled through his tirade from her corner of the backseat, but when Peter yelled that Kip couldn’t ever be trusted again, her sob finally broke out. “Stop! Stop it!” she cried. “Don’t yell at him! It wasn’t his fault!”

  “Shut up! You idiot!” Kip hissed.

  “Hey!” Leigh snapped. Her soft spot for Kip only went so deep. She wouldn’t allow him to take this out on Chrissy.

  “Sorry,” Kip muttered, and that was the last word anyone spoke as they drove on over the dark and empty roads.

  Hampshire County was technically part of the Washington metro area, but there was still a lot of open country in this part of Northern Virginia. Patches of woods lined the narrow roads, and acres of rolling pastures lay behind post-and-board fences. These were the vestiges of old plantations and gentleman farms where rich people used to dress up in nineteenth-century clothes and ride to the hounds and pretend it was a sport instead of a costume party. Some of those old estates still blanketed these hillsides; the rest had been carved up into subdivisions where more ordinary people slept between their long commutes in and out of the District. Leigh grew up in one of the earliest of those subdivisions and later became one of those commuters, willing to endure two hours in the car every day, and sometimes even more, all for the sake of a little taste of country life at either end of it.