House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Okay, first things first,” she said. “Kip, you understand everything you tell me is confidential, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Including from your father. If you don’t wish him to be included in our communications, we can talk later.”

  “Now’s fine.”

  “I need a verbal waiver of confidentiality.”

  “Yeah, I waive it.” Kip cut a quick glance sideways. “But not for my mom, okay?”

  Pete shot him a look. “Hey—”

  “She’ll only fall to pieces and repeat everything to Gary. I can’t deal with that, okay?”

  All true, but Pete knew how he’d feel if Kip cut him out this way. “She’s your mother.”

  Kip set his jaw. “It’s my decision, though, right?”

  “That’s right,” Shelby said. “The privilege is yours to invoke. And you can change your mind anytime, about your mom or your dad. Just let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  “On that subject, have you spoken to anyone about your case? The cops in the car, the guards in the jail, and the other detainees in the cells?”

  “No. None of them.”

  “You’re sure? If anyone’s going to claim a jailhouse confession, I need to know now.”

  Kip stared out the window at the passing countryside, where white board fences dipped and rose with the roll of the hills. “I didn’t open my mouth once.”

  “Good. Now let’s talk about what happens next.”

  It played like a canned speech from there, Criminal Procedure for Dummies. The first appearance would come in a week or two—­apparently today didn’t count—and the charges would be formally read and Kip would enter his plea. Next up was the preliminary hearing, where the government had to lay out enough of its case for the judge to agree that there was probable cause for the arrest and bind it over to the grand jury. The grand jury would then deliver the formal indictment and a trial date would be set.

  “How long will all this take?” Pete asked, thinking, How much will all this cost?

  “Many months, which is why I wanted to talk to you right away. We could try to fast-track this by waiving the preliminaries and ask for a trial date this summer so Kip can get this behind him before he leaves for college. So let’s all think about that option soonish, okay?”

  They reached the highway, and Pete had to turn up the volume to hear her over the whipping of the wind and the whining roar of the tires on the asphalt. Winter wheat stood in bright green swaths on either side of the roadway, and the limbs of weeping cherries hung heavy under their bloom.

  “Even without a preliminary hearing, we can guess what the government’s case consists of. The DUI is probably unassailable, but causation is wide open. It’s the Commonwealth’s burden, remember, so they have to present evidence that the accident was the direct proximate cause of the death.”

  The death. Pete wondered if that was the way all criminal lawyers talked. Like the death in question hadn’t happened to any person in particular. It was just some abstract concept floating in space. The image came to him, of Chrissy, weightless and whirling in the void, and he had to close his eyes for a second, it hurt so bad.

  “There’re two prongs to causation in this case,” Shelby was saying. “First, it had to be your intoxication and/or reckless driving that caused the truck to leave the road.”

  “It was a dog,” Kip said. “A dog and a wet road.”

  “Exactly. If a sober and safe driver would have ended up in that ditch, too, then Chrissy’s death wasn’t causally connected to the alcohol you consumed. Pete, we may want to hire an accident reconstructionist on that point. Bookmark that, okay? The second prong of causation is that the accident had to cause the injury. I recommend we hire a neurologist to testify that the aneurysm could have been congenital or brought on by some previous injury.”

  “Wait, back up a minute,” Pete shouted at the dash. “How’d the hospital even know there was an accident?” That was something else that had bounced around his brain all night.

  Static buzzed through the silence over the line. There was silence in the car, too, until Kip said, “I told them.”

  “What?” Pete turned to stare at him. “Why?”

  “They asked me about any head injuries she might’ve had. So I told them.”

  “You never told us,” he said as Shelby said, “Told them what, exactly?”

  “She said she was fine. I didn’t think—”

  Shelby spoke over him. “Kip, what did you tell them?”

  He sucked in a breath to answer. “When we went off the road, we were airborne for a second. The truck kind of bounced across the ditch before we hit the tree. She might have hit her head then.”

  “But she had her seat belt on,” Pete said. The boys sometimes neglected to buckle up, but never Chrissy.

  Kip shrugged. “So did I, but I still bounced.”

  “What did you tell the doctors?” Shelby said again. “She did hit her head, or she might have?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you see her hit her head?” Pete asked

  “The only thing that matters is what he told the doctors,” Shelby said.

  But Pete repeated, “Kip, did you see her hit her head?”

  “No. But she was kind of rubbing it afterward, and I asked if she was all right, and she said she was fine.” He turned a desperate look on Pete. “I swear she said she was fine.”

  “We’ll interview the ER docs and find out what they think you told them. My guess is they won’t remember anything. So, okay, I’ve got some experts in mind. I’ll shoot you their CVs and we’ll discuss.”

  They drove past the intersection with Rose Lane. A new brick Colonial stood on the corner behind eighty thousand dollars’ worth of landscaping. It was one of the few spec houses Pete had ever built, and it represented more than a year of his life from start to finish. Typically he built custom houses, but this location was so prime he took a chance and bought the lot and built the house on his own dime—or the bank’s, at least. It took longer to sell than he’d calculated, but it was under contract now and scheduled to close in a couple weeks. He’d been expecting to clear more than a hundred thousand at closing. Except now he wouldn’t, because he’d just put up the property as collateral for the bail bond. Now the cash would go to the bondsman at closing, and Pete wouldn’t see a penny of it until this was all over.

  Shelby was still talking strategy. She wanted to send her investigator out to interview some of the other kids from the party, witnesses who might testify to Kip’s sober demeanor that night. He probably couldn’t beat the DUI, but they should try to head off any implication he was behaving in a wanton or reckless manner. She wanted names.

  “They won’t help,” Kip said.

  “Why not?”

  “The party got raided that night. Everybody’s in trouble now. Because of me.”

  “Shoot me their names anyway. My investigator can be very persuasive. I’ll send him out to talk to the neighbor, too, the one who called nine-one-one. And, Pete, I’m going to need some up-front money for the experts. I can wait for my fee, but they won’t. So factor that into your budget.”

  His budget. Like this was something he knew was coming and tucked a little money aside for. A rainy day fund, in case his son was ever arrested for killing his stepdaughter.

  “Any questions?”

  “Yeah.” Pete cleared his throat. “These charges—they’re all adult crimes, right? But what if it happened before midnight? What if he was still seventeen?”

  “Right. Well, here’s the thing. Where the offense is a felony, anyone fourteen or older can be transferred out of juvenile court. The fact that Kip was only minutes away from adulthood, if not there already, would almost certainly get him kicked upstairs to circuit court.”

  Pete stopped
a minute to take that in. “Okay, but if they’re calling him an adult, shouldn’t he have to be adult-level drunk? His blood alcohol was only point-oh-five-five.”

  “Good question. But vehicular homicide has two alternative prongs. The first one is BAC of point oh eight or higher. The second is simply driving while under the influence of alcohol. That one’s not as scientific. All competent evidence can be considered. Erratic driving. Boisterous behavior. Failing the field sobriety test, which is what the arresting officer will say.”

  “I didn’t!” Kip said. “I passed her stupid tests just fine.”

  Pete shot him a glare. It was probably that attitude right there that made the cop haul him in for the blood test.

  “With no other witnesses,” Shelby said, “it’ll be pretty hard to dispute what she says.”

  No other witnesses, Pete thought with a stab. Because the only one who could back him up was the one he stood accused of killing. “What if he’s convicted? What then?”

  “Worst case? Ten years. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most prosecutors don’t pursue vehicular homicide cases when they’re intrafamily. Maybe Harrison only wanted the headline in today’s paper and tomorrow he’ll settle for probation and a fine. We have to wait and see how it all shakes out. Let’s circle back tomorrow, okay? Meanwhile, get some sleep and don’t talk to anybody about the case.”

  Ten years. Pete felt a whiteout of panic as the call ended. Almost four thousand nights to spend the way he spent last night, with terror gnawing a hole through his gut. The light turned red at the shopping center intersection ahead, and as he braked to a stop, he peered up through the tinted glass of the windshield, scanning the rooftops of the stores and the hilltops beyond them. He almost longed for the days when a sniper was the only threat to his family. When he could protect his kid simply by shielding him with his own body. He had no idea how to shield him from this.

  Chapter Eight

  Waking was when it was worst. The little white pills wore off during the night, and Leigh rose up out of sleep on a buoyant senselessness. Feeling normal. Facing an ordinary day in her ordinary, happy life. For thirty seconds she floated there on a raft of contentment before the Oh no crashed over her. The realization that Chrissy was dead. It was like a tsunami, the way it knocked the breath from her body and left her drowning in grief again.

  It was unnatural for a parent to lose a child, people said. Unthinkable. But when she was awake it was all she could think about. Her magic child was gone. She’d never see her face again or hear her tinkling laugh or feel her skinny arms in a hug. The last time she saw her was at her bedroom door Friday night. The last thing she said to her was We’ll talk about this in the morning. But she never talked to her again. She never saw her again. Not in the hospital and not in the funeral home either. She wasn’t Chrissy anymore, they told her. Her head was shaved. Her scalp was stitched. You don’t want to see, they said, but they were wrong. How could she not want to see her own child? When she tried to push past them, they told her not to torture herself this way. As if this pain were something she was inflicting on herself.

  It was too much, to have to lose her over and over again, every time she stirred from sleep, to have her heart gouged out again every single time. It would be better never to sleep, and better still never to wake.

  The mattress dipped during the night, and for one foggy moment she thought it was Ted come back to her bed, and she kicked off and cast herself away from his touch. It was only later in the night when the currents of sleep bumped her up against him that she realized it was Peter, and she grabbed on and clung to him like a lifeboat. He wrapped his arms around her and whispered words to her, but, no, she couldn’t listen. She couldn’t wake to that pain again, and so she pushed herself back down, deep into the numbing waters of sleep.

  She didn’t feel the mattress rise again in the morning. She never heard him leave her.

  It was afternoon before sunlight slipped through the cracks of her eyelids, and there was the pain, lurking in the corner of her consciousness with its glowing red eyes, waiting for her to wake so it could lunge at her again. She barely had time to cower before its great yawing jaws opened wide to swallow her whole. Blindly she groped along the nightstand, knocked her knuckles against the lamp and a half-empty glass of water and scrabbled her fingers through a snowdrift of used tissues, but she couldn’t feel the prescription bottle.

  She forced her eyes open. Bright afternoon light stabbed her retinas; her mouth tasted of cotton; her throat felt like steel wool. Noises reverberated through the house and in her head. A car door slamming in the driveway, Shep barking in the kitchen, drawers sliding open and crashing shut in the twins’ room, footsteps pounding on the stairs. Shouts in fragmented conversations. Zack’s flight, Dylan’s train schedule, did you see my phone, is there anything to eat.

  The last sound she ever heard from her daughter: the soft snuffles of her sleep-breathing. Through a closed door. While an artery was bursting in her brain. While Leigh hurried off to meet a new client.

  The pain crashed over her again, and again she reached for the prescription bottle and when her fingers met only air, she raised up on an elbow to look. There it was, rolling on the floor. She slid off the bed and landed on hands and knees on the rug and peered through the amber plastic. The ­bottle was empty. She flattened on her belly to search for any spilled pills under the bed. It was dark there, and so alluring. Like a cave or a cocoon. How nice it would be to crawl in under there. Like a return to the womb, she thought.

  A tap on the door. Her mother’s voice. “Darling, the airport limo’s here. We have to go now.” Another tap. “Leigh, darling?”

  She needed to get up. She needed to go to her parents. If it was unthinkable to lose a child, it was even more unthinkable to lose a grandchild, and they loved Chrissy beyond all measure. I look at that precious girl, her mother once confided, and I know my time on earth has counted for something. They were facing their own mortality in these last years of their lives—this was a loss they might never recover from. They needed Leigh now more than they ever had. She had to get up right now and hug them good-bye and tell them how much she loved them. Her boys needed her, too, and poor little Mia. They were all grieving, too. And Peter—Peter!—whose heart must be aching. The heart that he’d pledged to her care. She needed to get up and take care of them. All of them.

  She didn’t move. She lay silent and still on the floor until her mother’s heavy sigh sounded through the door. “We’ll call you tonight, dear.”

  Leigh closed her eyes and escaped into sleep again.

  Another set of noises bombarded her ears. Shouts, ugly words, a slamming door. She reached for a pillow to clamp over her head, but she was on the floor and the pillows were up on the bed. She hooked a hand on the edge of the mattress and hauled herself up. More shouts, strangled cries that ricocheted like bullets from the children’s wing. Some kind of argument was going on, she understood that much. Over the years she’d broken up a lot of tussles and scrapes among the children, and she had a routine. Pull them apart, send them to neutral corners, deliver a quick scolding about respect and communication, Now, calm down and apologize. She wouldn’t listen to accusations or assign blame. She didn’t care who started it. All that mattered was that the fight end, now. She made them say the words. I’m sorry. Then, I forgive you. She must have done it a thousand times over the last twenty years. She needed to stand up and do it now.

  Something caught her eye. There, on the nightstand, another bottle of pills. She grabbed it like a lifeline and downed two and fell headlong into bed.

  Later. Peter was in the room, and she tried to wake for him but the drugs were holding on too tight. Her eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each, and her ears were submerged in an underwater tank. He was telling her something, but the words came to her in aquatic garbles. He moved through the room in starts and stutters like a poorly spliced vide
otape, quick jerky cuts from the closet, to the bath, to the chest of drawers. The volume faded in and out as he spoke. Something about the bail hearing. Expert witnesses. The words tripped an alarm. This was important. She needed to wake up and listen. But the alarm was in another room, on another floor, and it grew fainter and fainter until it faded into silence.

  She couldn’t wake even when the twins tiptoed in to say good-bye. She felt their kisses on her cheek, and her eyelids fluttered and her fingers twitched with the effort to pull herself awake. But it was no use. They were already gone.

  Pete hollered for the twins to get a move on, and they galloped out to the driveway and wrestled over the shotgun seat but ended up losing to Shepherd, who darted between them to claim it. They grumbled into the backseat, and Pete headed out like the family chauffeur.

  An unfamiliar silence descended, and they were halfway to Dulles before there was anything but the sound of four males breathing a little too heavily inside the car. It was Zack who finally spoke and only after a dry round of throat clearing. “Um, we talked to Mia this morning.”

  Pete gave a guilty start. “Yeah?” He’d been putting that off. He didn’t know how to tell her about this, any of this, especially over the phone.

  “Skyped,” Dylan clarified.

  “How’d she look?” He’d been meaning to go and see her, every day he meant to, but there was never any time.

  “Scared,” Zack said.

  “Lost.”

  Pete glanced up at the mirror. They were big burly college men but looked just as scared and lost as his ten-year-old. “Yeah,” he said.

  “We wanted her to know the schedule doesn’t change. Every other Sunday at two, same as always.”

  The twins started it when they first went away to school. During Mia’s visitation weekends—Pete had her every other weekend plus dinner every Wednesday night—they’d set up a three-way Skype call. Chrissy logged on, with Mia squeezed in the chair beside her and Kip’s head looming in and out of camera range over theirs, while in split screens on the monitor, the twins grinned and mugged from two different time zones. For twenty or thirty minutes twice a month, the five of them bantered about nothing while their parents eavesdropped with big stupid smiles on their faces.