House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  A shower might help, she thought, and she went up the back stairs to her room. But instead of turning into the master bath, she drifted down the hall, past the guest room and up the half-flight of stairs to the children’s wing. Chrissy’s door stood closed, and she cracked it open. It was so quiet inside, and dark, too, with the blinds drawn. Chrissy never closed them. She always liked to wake to the sunshine. Leigh closed the door behind her, and the vast and empty house shrank to this little twelve-by-twelve-foot room. The darkness was strangely inviting. It felt like crawling into a cave when she pulled back the comforter and slipped into the bed.

  Someone had changed the sheets, but when Leigh pressed her face into the comforter, she could still breathe in the sweet scent of strawberry shampoo in the fabric, and here and there the salty tang of the popcorn Chrissy liked to munch while she read in bed. During a single week when she was ten, she read the entire Harry Potter series in this bed. Mom, she wailed whenever she came up for air. I wanna go to witch school!

  Leigh lay there and watched the slatted shadows of the blinds drift across the wall and ceiling as the sun moved into the afternoon. She knew she needed to pull herself together. She mustn’t let this—development—come between her and Peter. She had to hold tight to what was left of her family. Peter and Kip and Leigh. The three of them plus Mia every other weekend. Everyone who was hers was gone.

  No, no, that kind of thinking would undo everything she’d worked for these past five years. Her children were his and his were hers. Not even that. They were all theirs.

  But Chrissy had been hers. Peter might have loved her, he did love her, but she was Leigh’s magical child, Leigh’s alone, and no one else’s grief could ever begin to rival her own.

  It was a shameful thought, and she quashed it as fast as she could.

  She should at least get up and check her office email. She’d never gone a single day before without checking in with the office, whether on vacation, on her honeymoon, even when her babies were born. Now she’d gone—how many days? She didn’t even know.

  Or care. She wished she could take back all the tens of thousands of hours she’d spent at work and spend them with Chrissy instead. The old adage came to mind: no one on his deathbed ever regrets that he didn’t spend more time at the office. The same was true when it was a loved one’s deathbed. All those years she could have been home with her child instead of out practicing family law. What irony there. Leaving her family so she could help other families. And that wasn’t even what she did. What she really did was help families to self-destruct. Her specialty: lawyer-assisted immolation.

  That was the thought she went to sleep on.

  A piercing shriek jolted her awake. She flailed out of the comforter and flung herself to her feet as the screech sounded again. It took a dazed moment to recognize the smoke alarm, and another to remember the chicken nuggets she’d left in the oven. She raced downstairs into a kitchen already thick with smoke. The nuggets had turned to charcoal briquettes, burned to cinders and still smoldering. She hurled them into the sink, and when she turned on the tap, a cloud of white steam hissed up.

  She opened the doors and windows and switched on the exhaust fan and covered her ears until the shrill whistle of the alarm finally died. No lunch for her after all, and no shower either, but she should at least do one of the things she’d planned. She sat down at her laptop at the kitchen desk. Her inbox was overflowing with emails, but her assistant Polly had gone through them and sorted them into folders. The biggest folder was labeled CONDOLENCES, and Leigh left it unopened. Another was labeled FIRM BUSINESS, and she skipped that, too. Another folder contained messages from Polly herself, summarizing the snail mail and telephone ­messages.

  Leigh scrolled through them dully. Hunter Beck’s lawyer called; he wanted Leigh to join him in requesting an accelerated briefing and argument schedule on his client’s appeal. No, thank you, she replied. Not only because she wasn’t ready to work yet, but also because Beck’s demand for access to his wife’s uterus would be moot by the time the court heard the case on a nonaccelerated schedule. None of the other messages looked urgent. Some were merely sales calls. Solicitations for journal subscriptions. A life insurance offer.

  She jumped when the doorbell rang. It was a sound that was always followed by pounding footsteps and a holler of I’ll get it. A hundred pounds soaking wet and Chrissy thundered like a herd of elephants on the stairs. Don’t run, Leigh would scold. You’ll slip and break your neck.

  You’ll bounce and break your brain.

  She got up and looked out the kitchen window. A little red car was in the driveway. A Mini Cooper, she thought, though she didn’t know anyone who drove one. The bell rang again, and quickly she finger-combed her hair and went down the hall to answer it.

  A young woman stood on the front porch smartly turned out in a belted trench dress and holding a designer attaché case. “Mrs. Leigh ­Huyett?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?” The visitor was too well dressed to be a political canvasser or a Jehovah’s Witness.

  “My name is Emily Whitman. I’m sorry to disturb you.” Her wheat-blond ponytail swung through the air like a scimitar as she stooped to lift a package wrapped in a shroud of green tissue paper. “The sheikha asked me to deliver this to you.”

  “The sheikha—? Devra?” Leigh said, stupidly, as if she knew more than one.

  “Yes, ma’am. May I?” She swept around Leigh and carefully placed the package on the hall table before she stripped away the tissue paper to reveal an enormous floral arrangement.

  “Oh.” Leigh stood stunned. It wasn’t the usual white lilies and pink roses that had flooded the house this week. This was a mix of exotic blossoms in rich, saturated shades of fuchsia, coral, and crimson. “They’re lovely,” she said. “She shouldn’t have.”

  “She only wishes she could do more.” The young woman stepped back and clasped her hands together at waist level like a finishing school graduate. “The sheikha was devastated when she learned of your terrible loss. Coming so soon after her own, it hit her particularly hard.”

  “Her own—?”

  “It’s been only three months since the sheikh passed away.”

  Leigh stared at her. The sheikh—? “I’m sorry—you’re saying Devra’s husband is dead?”

  “She didn’t tell you.” The young woman sighed. “I’m afraid she’s still so distraught that sometimes she denies the fact of his death even to herself. It was so sudden. A heart attack,” she added in a confidential whisper.

  Leigh could understand denial, but seeking divorce from a dead man seemed more like derangement. She couldn’t believe it. “Ms.—Whitman, is it?”

  “Please. Call me Emily. I was the sheikh’s personal assistant, and I’m staying on to help the sheikha adjust to her new life.”

  “Emily. I’d like to call and thank her in person. Is there a number where I can reach her?”

  “Of course. It’s on the card.” She turned to the door. “Again I apologize for disturbing you. You have my deepest condolences as well.”

  Shepherd squeezed in the front door as the young woman stepped out. Leigh watched her swing gracefully into her little red car and back out of the driveway before she shut the door and turned back to the flowers. They were exquisite, and it was such a kind gesture, considering they’d met only once. But it was all so bizarre, Devra’s detailed probing about the procedure for divorcing a husband who was already dead.

  A card was stapled to the tissue wrapping. A business card. EMILY WHITMAN, it read, ASSISTANT TO SHEIKH MAZIN AL-KHAZRATI, followed by two lines of Arabic characters. Below that was a phone number with a 202 area code. Washington. On the back was a note written in an elegant script: I cannot begin to fathom the depth and breadth of your pain. I beg of you, do not hasten your mourning, least of all on my account. My sorrows are but dust compared to yours.

  I’m sor
ry, no rush, take your time seemed to be the distilled message, but the Old World turn of phrase made it so much more moving. It reminded her of the archaic language of the Bible verses she learned as a child. The cadence of those old refrains. Verily I say unto thee and He restoreth my soul. Language that had long since passed from everyday speech and seemed to carry so much more meaning for it. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. World without end. Amen.

  World without Chrissy.

  She went back to the kitchen and closed the door and windows and lingered a moment at the window overlooking the garden. Finches swooped into the feeder and pecked futilely before they took flight again. The tube was empty. It was Leigh’s job to refill it, the songbirds fed heavily this time of year, she should go out and do it now. But she didn’t. She looked out at the spring bulbs pushing up through the earth, and the late afternoon sunshine sparkling on the new green leaves of the trees. She could see Licorice in the pasture rubbing his flank against a fencepost like he was scratching an itch. He was still shedding his heavy winter coat. Both horses were. Chrissy had planned to clip them over the weekend.

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt paralyzed, her limbs frozen, as the oxygen wisped from her brain, and she thought: This must be how it feels to die. But it lasted only a few seconds before she choked on a sob and the air rushed back in, wet and ragged. She needed to turn it off, shut it down, all these springtime images of new life and rebirth outside the window. She needed to flee upstairs and dive deep into the burrow of Chrissy’s bed.

  But as she spun from the window, something caught her eye. The top fence rail beside Licorice was down, and Romeo was nowhere in sight.

  This happened every few months. Romeo got loose and went wandering in search of the neighbors’ garden delicacies. The pasture had a good fence, but with the top rail down he could easily jump the bottom two. Chrissy had a theory that Licorice was the culprit: he head-butted the rail to knock it free from its slot in the post, then stood back and egged Romeo on like a little boy trying to get his brother in trouble. Every time Romeo got loose, it was Licorice she scolded.

  Leigh ran to the kitchen and slid her feet into her shoes and burst outside. Romeo wasn’t in the pasture or the barn, and she grabbed a lead line and went hunting for him. The Markhams’ house on the corner was Romeo’s most likely destination. Their apple trees weren’t in fruit now, but he probably had fond memories of gorging himself there last fall. She jogged down the road past swaths of sunny yellow daffodils, and when she rounded the corner, there stood Romeo with all four feet braced. There stood Kip, too, hanging on Romeo’s halter with his own feet braced, tugging hard as he tried and failed to get him to move.

  Leigh gave a sharp whistle and Romeo’s head came up. So did Kip’s. He dropped the halter and backed away, and she ran down the road and snapped the lead line on Romeo’s halter. Kip bent to pick up his backpack from the ground. “He wouldn’t budge.”

  “So I noticed.” She clucked her tongue and started back, and Romeo followed in an easy amble beside her. Kip trailed behind, and Leigh stopped and waited for him to fall into step on the other side of Romeo. She glanced at him over the horse’s withers. Seventy degrees and sunny and he wore the hood up on his sweatshirt like some kind of ghetto gangster. “You took the bus home?” He hadn’t ridden the school bus for years; he always managed to finagle a ride from someone.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did it go in school today?”

  “Fine.”

  He wasn’t normally a monosyllabic grunter like most teenaged boys. Normally he would spin out at least five minutes of entertaining conversation about the day’s headlines. She glanced at him again. The bruise on his cheekbone was green going to purple.

  “Good,” she said. Normally she would have followed up with questions about last week’s calculus exam, and was Ryan’s father back from Tokyo, and how were things going with Ava? But today none of those questions would come to her.

  Romeo’s head dipped up and down between them as they walked toward home. “Kip,” she began. “I know this is a terrible situation for you. I know you must be scared.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he pretended to study the blossoms on the Markhams’ trees.

  “But you’ve got one of the finest criminal defense lawyers in the country, and we’re all going to help you get through this. You know that, right? We’re going to do everything we can for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I need you to do something for me.”

  His eyes shifted to her.

  “I need you to take back what you said. About Chrissy driving.”

  He looked away.

  “Recant is the word lawyers use. Which tells you right there how commonly it comes up. That there’s even a word for it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just say you made a mistake. It’s not like you signed a sworn statement or anything. There’s no question of perjury. Just tell your dad and Shelby the truth.”

  “I did. I am.”

  She sighed. “You know what I do when I cross-examine a witness who’s changed his story? It’s what every lawyer does. You confront them with their prior statement, then get them to admit they’re telling a different story today. Then you hit them with the zinger. So were you lying then or are you lying now?”

  “I already admitted I was lying before.”

  “And so was Chrissy, you’re saying. You want us to believe she was lying, too.”

  “No. I mean, she didn’t want to. I had to—”

  He broke off. They’d reached the driveway, and he peeled off to the back door as Romeo picked up his pace to the barn. “Kip, wait a minute.” She struggled to hold the horse back. “Could you help me fix the fence?”

  He turned around, and maybe it was a trick of the light, or the shadow cast by his hoodie, but suddenly his straight dark hair turned to copper curls and his scowl became a grin and it was Chrissy standing there, shimmering in the sun like a desert mirage. She glowed, she sparkled, she was as three-dimensional as a holograph, and as real as a dream.

  “I have homework,” he muttered.

  The image dissolved into ash. It was only Kip standing there in ­Chrissy’s place.

  Chapter Twelve

  Pete met with the loan committee on Monday and wrenched a three-month extension out of them on his upcoming balloon payment. But nothing ever came free, especially where banks were concerned, and it was going to cost him an extra point. A steep price to pay, but three months meant he could push this worry onto the back burner and leave the front one open for more pressing concerns.

  Like Hollow Road. Drew Miller was withholding this month’s progress payment on the house, and Pete didn’t have much ground for arguing otherwise given their lack of progress. He needed to hire more men, but he couldn’t afford it. In six weeks the twins would be home from school, and they’d provide some good cheap labor, but until then he had to run a pretty lean crew. The only thing he could do was light a fire under his guys, get as much work out of them as he could.

  But he felt like lighting a bomb under them when he pulled up the drive and found half of them not working at all. They were standing in a circle staring at a stack of lumber. Miller’s Porsche was there, too, and that was another distraction they didn’t need. His wife, the swanling, was perched on the hood as usual, filing her nails. “What’s going on?” Pete asked her as he swung out of the truck.

  Yana rolled her gamine eyes. “Drew ees show off new toy. Go and zee.”

  King Midas was in the center of the circle of men. Some kind of game console was on the stack of lumber, and he had his phone in one hand and was working the joystick with the other. All the men were craning their necks to watch the screen on his phone.

  “Hey,” Pete said as he came up.

  The guys gave a guilty start and scattered, leav
ing Miller alone with his toy and a shit-eating grin on his face. “Check it out,” he said.

  Pete leaned over for a look at his phone. It didn’t look like any video game he’d ever seen. Instead of a battle scene, an image of leafy green foliage covered the screen. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a vision quadcopter. Cost me fourteen hundred dollars. But look at that image. GPS-stabilized, baby.”

  Pete looked at the screen again, then the joystick. “Wait a minute.” He could hear a buzzing overhead, like the sound of a hummingbird hovering by his ear. He looked up. “Are you telling me you launched a camera drone? You sent a camera drone over the neighbor’s wall?”

  “Free airspace, my friend. I got every right.”

  “Helluva wrong foot to get off on with your new neighbors.”

  “Yeah? Well, they started it when they put up that fucking wall. Hold on.” Miller bobbled the phone in his right hand as he tried to maneuver the joystick with his left. “Let me fly in under those trees there and see what they’re hiding.”

  Pete walked away, shaking his head in disgust. He started this business because he wanted to build exceptional homes with quality craftsmanship. He never set out to work for assholes, but that was where he ended up. Leigh, too. Some people might think they were rich, Leigh with her big-time law practice and Pete with his own business, but the truth was they were both servants to the real rich. He built their houses, she got them their divorces. The same was true of Ted, who drove their boats, and Gary, who whitened their teeth.

  Kip was supposed to be the one who broke out of the family mold. He was going to be his own man. People were going to bow and scrape to him. That was the dream, right?

  Still could happen, Pete tried to tell himself as he headed inside. In fact this ordeal could be the thing that kept him from turning into one of those rich assholes. If he got past it.