House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  Hollow Road was the five-mile stretch of blacktop where Peter’s truck would still be foundering in the ditch. It wasn’t a through road to anywhere: it cut in off the highway at one end and cut back in again a few miles later, so there was no reason for anyone to drive it unless they lived there, or like Peter and his crew, worked there. Or unless, like Kip, they were hoping to avoid the police patrols out on the highway. It ran along a twisting creek, and all the houses on that side of the road had a little bridge at the end of the driveway, like moat crossings to a castle. On the other side of the road sprawled some old farms and estates, including the site of Peter’s current construction project—a custom home three stories tall perched at the top of a hill. Hollow House, Leigh had dubbed it, and its empty frame loomed darkly as they drove past.

  Peter drove silently through another mile of darkness until Kip mumbled from the backseat, “Up there on the left.”

  As the truck took shape in the shine of the headlights, Leigh felt a rush of relief. It wasn’t overturned or smashed up or wrapped around the proverbial tree. It was upright on all four wheels in the ditch and only nosing up against the tree trunk, like a horse nuzzling for a sugar cube. Fifty feet away was a driveway that ran over one of those little moat bridges. The house was dark now, but it was probably where the neighbor lived who had called 911.

  Peter parked and jabbed a finger at Kip over the seat back. “You. With me.”

  Their doors swung open at the same time, and Leigh got out, too, to circle around to the driver’s side of the car. Peter caught her as they passed in the headlights. “Sorry about this,” he muttered.

  She pressed her cheek against his chest. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “You go on home and go to bed. This may take a while.”

  “I should wait here. What if you get stuck?”

  “Hey, if there’s anything a builder knows, it’s how to drive through mud. Go on home. Chrissy needs to get to bed. You, too. You have that meeting tomorrow.”

  She nodded and stretched up to kiss him. His lips were tight against hers, and when she tilted her head back, his eyes were still grim in the glare of the headlights. “Peter. It’ll be okay. This is only a bump in the road, right?”

  He chuffed a laugh and kissed her again, harder, even though the kids were watching, Chrissy from the backseat of the car, and Kip from the cab of the truck. “I love you,” he said.

  She smiled. “Always and everywhere.”

  They headed their separate ways, she to the car and he to the truck, she to her child and he to his.

  Chapter Three

  Pete Conley kept a file open and running in his head, like lines of computer text scrolling through the background screen of his thoughts. All his worries, digitized. A punch list of everything he needed to take care of and everything that would go wrong if he didn’t. Deadlines to meet, bills to pay, permits to get, inspections to pass.

  Early Saturday morning he woke to some new entries lighting up the screen. How much was Leigh’s friend going to charge for her services last night? What if Duke found out about this? Did they do criminal background checks after the acceptance letters went out? For sure the state would, which probably meant Kip would lose his summer internship with the governor’s office.

  Other, deeper worries scrolled on the back screen. Was this just teenaged hijinks, or did his son really have a drinking problem? This was twice now, and those were only the times he got caught. Pete’s father was an alcoholic—at least that was the term they used to explain away the years of unemployment and abuse before he finally took off. Some people thought there was a gene for that, and while Pete was never more than a beer-a-day kind of guy, it could have skipped a generation and landed on Kip.

  But as tempting as it was to blame the old man for this, what if it was more nurture than nature? Because then it would be Pete’s fault.

  Like most divorced fathers, he carried a lot of guilt for moving out on his kids. Not that he had much choice—Gary was practically waiting in the driveway with his suitcases to move in—but it was hard on them. Both of them, but especially a boy on the edge of puberty. The bad behavior started immediately—he was acting out at school, talking back at home, and waging enough open warfare against Gary that Karen finally gave up and let Pete have primary custody. For the next year it was only the two of them in a two-room apartment, eating pizza and watching sports and playing video games. Not a bad life for a twelve-year-old, but at the end of the year, Pete moved him again, into Leigh’s house. He had to change schools twice in two years, and this time he even had to change his name. It was too confusing to have both a Chris and a Chrissy under one roof, so his little-boy nickname was resurrected and he was Kip again.

  In the space of only two years the boy went from a basic nuclear family of two parents/two kids, to bachelor life with a single dad, to this current chaotic mash-up of two stepparents and two different sets of stepsiblings, not to mention the step-grandparents and step-aunts and -uncles and -cousins. And somehow he was expected to get along with all of them. Which was kind of unfair, Pete had to admit, considering what started this whole thing was that none of the original parents could get along with each other.

  Another worry glowed on his digital screen, and it was the one lying beside him with her auburn hair fanned out on the pillow. Nothing like this had ever happened to Leigh or anyone in her family. She was an Ivy League–educated lawyer, well brought up by good and loving parents who took her to church and bought her a horse and taught her to write thank-you notes. While Pete worked construction, paid room and board to his mother from the time he was sixteen, and ended six years of night school four credits shy of a degree in architecture. There was no question he was punching above his weight when he married her, even if she refused to acknowledge it. That’s what blended means, she insisted. We’re all the same now. He didn’t believe that for a minute, but at least he hoped she might raise him up. Not that he’d drag her down.

  The screen was scrolling too fast for him to get back to sleep. He slipped from their bed and dressed in the dark and took the back stairs down to the kitchen. This was the remodel project that first brought him here. It was a big, heart-of-the-home room with all the trendy finishes and fixtures, but lots of cozy touches, too, like the raised hearth fireplace and the window seat tucked between the bookcases. The house was originally an old Foursquare, a tenant farmhouse to a long-gone estate, but over the decades it had been extensively expanded and remodeled. Clapboard siding was changed to fieldstone and stucco, the tin roof replaced with cedar shakes, an addition built out the back and wings tacked on either side. The result was this crazy patchwork of a house. Pete made over the front facade a few years ago so the outside looked right, but inside nothing quite lined up. The vaulted ceiling in the front hall led to a couple of boxy, low-ceilinged parlors, down two steps to a vaulted family room and up two different staircases to the bedrooms. The layout was so confusing that Kip was always making the wrong turn when they first moved in. Little Lost Boy, Zack and Dylan used to tease him until Leigh made them stop.

  The most recent addition was this one, housing the new kitchen downstairs and the master suite up. The idea was Ted’s, but he took off even before the footings were poured and left Leigh to manage on her own from there, with both the financing and the design. She turned out quick rough sketches of what she wanted, and Pete did his best to build it for her. He was already falling for her by then, this beautiful brave woman getting on with her life, working hard all week and laughing and playing with her kids all weekend. He never would have guessed she was hurting if he hadn’t walked in on her crying one day. It was a mortifying moment for both of them, except it was also the moment that changed everything in their relationship.

  Shepherd jumped down off the window seat and wriggled a good morning, and Pete filled his bowls and scratched behind his ears while he gobbled and
slurped his breakfast. He was a border collie they got as a pup early in their marriage—an ours to go with the yours and mine. Pete started a pot of coffee and went outside, and Shep abandoned his half-devoured breakfast to trot along after him to the little two-stall barn at the back of the property. Inside were Romeo, Chrissy’s big dark bay, and Licorice, her old black pony. Licorice was supposed to be Mia’s now, but his little girl was still too scared of horses to even venture into the barn.

  The horses nickered and sighed and buzzed their lips as he came in, and he gave them grain and water and turned them out into the pasture before he mucked out their stalls. These were Chrissy’s morning chores, but she’d had a late night last night and he wanted her to sleep in. Not that she wasn’t in trouble, too. She had no business riding her bike out on those dark, rainy roads. She could have gotten sideswiped in the dark, or snatched by some pervert. And no matter how good her intentions were, her rescue mission only made the situation worse. It turned out Kip was planning to spend the night at his friend’s house. If Chrissy hadn’t gone to warn him, there would have been no accident and no arrest. He’d still be in a shitload of trouble, but only with his father—not with the whole goddamn Commonwealth of Virginia.

  Back inside, the coffee was done, and Pete poured one to go and headed out to the truck. The front bumper was dented, and he scowled at it a minute before he wrenched his door open. Shep vaulted in around him and took his seat at shotgun as usual. Anytime a vehicle left their driveway, the dog insisted on being in it. Border collies were bred to perform a single job—keep the flock together no matter what—and Shep seemed agitated when his human flock scattered every morning. Riding along was his best hope of getting everyone back together at the end of the day.

  The radio switched on with the engine. The headlines this morning were the same as last night’s: the terrorist attack in Kenya and the school shooting in Missouri. Both events were already indexed and added to Pete’s digital screen of things to worry about. You don’t have to keep watch on the whole world, Leigh liked to tease him, but he kind of felt like he did. It was his job to keep this family safe.

  That lesson had been permanently tattooed on him back when he was a new father and the Beltway Sniper was on his rampage in the Washington Metro area, picking off random targets at gas stations and parking lots from a distant hilltop perch. Karen had just miscarried their second child and was even more fearful than usual, and for the three weeks of the siege she refused to exit the house, leaving Pete to do the grocery shopping and drive Kip to and from preschool every day. He remembered peering through the windshield as he drove, scanning the surrounding summits for any glint of light that might be the reflection off a gun barrel. He remembered how careful he was to shield Kip with his own body as he lifted him in and out of the car and the tremendous relief he felt after he’d safely delivered him into school. They caught the guy, finally—two guys, as it turned out—but Pete never really got over it. That sense of danger looming in on his ­family—it never went away, and neither did the imperative that he be alert for it and ward it off however he could. That would always be Job One for Pete.

  The broadcast had more on the shooter in Missouri. A disaffected youth, they called him. Pete had his own disaffected youth to worry about today. He had no idea how to punish an eighteen-year-old. Theoretically the kid was an adult now, though what a joke that was. He had no more sense than a twelve-year-old. A good talking-to wasn’t going to do the job. They’d talked and talked after he was arrested on New Year’s, and Kip promised it would never happen again. Yet here they were. Grounding wouldn’t work either. He’d been de facto grounded ever since his license was lifted in January, and look how well that went. If there was anything else on the menu of disciplinary measures for so-called adults, Pete didn’t know what it was.

  He turned onto Hollow Road, and as he drove past the scene of last night’s crime, a yellow dog came streaking down the driveway to warn him off. It yapped furiously until Pete was past the property line, then it barked a final self-satisfied woof—showed you!—and trotted back to the house. He wondered if that was the same dog that made Kip drive off the road last night. Which was another thing that made him fume. Kip knew he shouldn’t swerve to avoid anything smaller than a deer. Pete drummed that lesson into all three boys when he taught them to drive. They might feel sad if the squirrel died, he told them, but their parents would feel a hell of a lot worse if they ended up in a wheelchair. The boys all understood and accepted the rule. Chrissy was the only one who ever argued the point. There must be some way where nobody gets hurts, she insisted during their off-road lessons. It was lucky they had two more years before he had to worry about her softhearted driving on real roads. Kip, though—he said he got it, but it looked like he lied about that, too. He took a swerve on a dark, rain-slick road and ended up in that ditch, and it was a miracle neither of them got hurt.

  It was five miles from home to the job site, and another two minutes brought him there. Hollow House, Leigh called it, but it wasn’t going to be hollow much longer. The roofing was nearly complete, and as soon as the place was dried in, the electrical and HVAC subs could get in there and run the wiring and ductwork. Finally. The winter weather had put them a month behind schedule, which meant the Millers’ progress payments were also a month behind. Money was always tight in this business; lately it was starting to squeeze hard.

  Pete was paying the crew overtime to work on Saturdays, but they weren’t due until eight, so he was surprised to see a car in the driveway, and even more surprised when he saw it was Drew Miller’s silver Porsche. He pulled alongside. The driveway wasn’t a driveway yet, only a rough-graded road spread with a little gravel to keep the mud down. None too successfully after last night’s rain. The Porsche was mud-splattered up to its door handles.

  Drew was nowhere in sight, but Yana was there, perched on the hood of the car and wearing her perpetually unfocused gaze. “Morning,” Pete called as he swung out of the truck and Shepherd jumped out after him. “What brings you here today?”

  Yana shrugged her bony shoulders. She was a strange-looking woman, tall and too thin and with eyes so far apart he was reminded of a rabbit or some other creature of prey. A “swanling,” Leigh called her, because with one turn of her head, one trick of the light, Yana went from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. She was Drew Miller’s Russian bride, but not of the mail-order variety. She was a famous fashion model, which Drew never missed an opportunity to mention. My wife, she used to be a supermodel, was the way he introduced her. Or I stole her off the runway. She was twenty years younger and acquired only recently. Miller ran a hedge fund, and according to the newspapers he was having a run of incredible good fortune. Midas Miller, Leigh called him, or sometimes simply King.

  “Drew inside?”

  Yana lifted her narrow chin, and he followed her line of sight all the way up the three stories of the house. There was Miller, a chubby fifty-year-old balancing himself on the highest peak of the roof.

  “Jesus!” Pete sprinted around to the back of the building with Shep at his heels. An extension ladder rested against the eave of the lower roof, and another reached from there to the upper roof. “Drew!” he hollered. “Come on down. It’s not safe up there.” He scrambled up the ladder with his digital screen lighting up with new alarms over liability and insurance coverage. Miller was sitting with his legs splayed over the peak and a pair of binoculars at his face. “Drew, you need to get down. The roofers wear spikes when they’re up there.” Miller was wearing a pair of slick-soled Italian loafers.

  “Hold on a minute. Lemme get some focus here.”

  He was aiming the binoculars at the neighboring property, a grand old estate that changed hands shortly after he bought this lot. The new owner promptly erected a ten-foot wall around the entire property and a pair of enormous steel gates at the entrance. The Hermitage was the snarky name Kip coined for the place, which Leigh found so clever
that she’d adopted the term, too, and with the same pretentious pronunciation. Hermit-taaj. But Pete didn’t do snark. Nothing wrong with a man enjoying his privacy, he said.

  “Who are these fuckers?” Miller snarled. “Where do they get off building that wall?”

  Lately he was obsessed with trying to learn the identity of his neighbor-to-be. He paid his lawyer to dig through the property records, but all they showed was a chain of holding companies, the final one chartered in the Caymans. He stopped repeatedly at the gates, but no one ever answered the buzzer on the security panel. Pete was on-site seven days a week, but he had no better intelligence. The place was pretty well secluded even from this rooftop vantage, especially now that the trees were in leaf and formed a dense green canopy over the property.

  Miller lowered the binoculars with a scowl. “Well, if I can’t see into their place, they sure as hell won’t see into mine. I want a ten-foot wall, too. Or, no, make it twelve, all the way around.”

  “Can’t do it, Drew. The zoning doesn’t allow anything higher than six.”

  “Then how the fuck did they get theirs?”

  Pete explained that there’d been a temporary lapse in the zoning code, and the owners must have hurried in and gotten their permit before the code was reinstated.

  “What, like they got a team of lawyers standing by, waiting for loopholes to open? Who the fuck are these people?”

  “They like their privacy, that’s all. Which means they won’t disturb yours.”

  Miller wasn’t placated. He cursed and snapped the whole time Pete was steering him down the ladders, and when he landed with a wobble at the bottom, he let out a string of obscenities. “This isn’t over,” he vowed.

  One more line of text scrolled down Pete’s screen of worries: Miller might try to back out of the contract altogether. He didn’t know if he could get away with it, but one thing he knew for sure. His business would be ruined if he did.