House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Because she’s an adult woman who has a constitutional right to the privacy of her own body as well as the freedom to come and go as she pleases.” She turned back to the other man. “There’s nothing to see here, Detective. And certainly no basis for a criminal investigation. I’m afraid Mr. Beck’s been wasting your time.”

  The young lawyer blustered. “He has legitimate cause to be concerned—”

  “Be honest, Rob. His only concern is that she’ll try to keep the baby from him. But like the judge said, that’s not a cognizable concern until the baby’s born. Until then he has no right to see her, to touch her, or even to know where she is.”

  “We have an appeal pending.”

  “Which you know full well you’re going to lose. Meanwhile there are some actual rights being violated here today.” She turned to Fred. “Mr. Dietrich, there’s a large number of people on your front lawn. Did you invite them here?”

  He clenched his jaw. “I did not.”

  “Did you give that helicopter permission to land on your property?”

  He snorted. “I sure as hell did not.”

  “Then I suggest you go out there and tell them they’re trespassing and they have five minutes to vacate. I’m sure Sergeant Hooper will be happy to back you up on that.”

  Fred didn’t hesitate. He stomped to the front door, and to his credit, Sergeant Hooper followed with not even a glance back for permission from the two men in suits.

  The detective picked up his notepad from the coffee table. “Mrs. Die­trich, you’ll let us know if you hear from her—”

  “She’s under no obligation to do that,” Leigh cut in, and Carrie gave a curt nod.

  “Just to close out our file—”

  “Let’s do this instead. You close it out right now as REPORT UNFOUNDED. Or we’ll make a formal complaint that you’re working as a private investigator for Hunter Beck. At taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, if the Dietrichs ever have any concerns for their daughter’s safety and welfare, they’ll call you then. How’s that?”

  The detective stared hard at her a moment before he turned and wrenched the front door open. Fred’s voice carried in from the porch. He was shouting at the reporters to get off his lawn, while Hooper’s voice underscored it with a mild, “Move along, folks. You heard the man.” Rob Canaday followed the detective outside but not before sending a parting look at Leigh—This isn’t over, he seemed to say.

  After they’d gone Leigh sank down into the sofa they’d vacated. She was trembling, not so much from emotion as from simple exertion. She felt so tired.

  “Let me get you something,” Carrie said. “Coffee, or a cup of tea or what?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Better than fine, I’d say. I can’t thank you enough. Coming out here on a minute’s notice and only three weeks after—” She stopped with a hand to her throat. “I felt sick about even calling you.”

  “No, you did the right thing.” Leigh looked up at her. “But promise me you’re really not worried about Jenna.”

  Carrie waved a dismissive arm. “She left most of her clothes, which means she’ll be back. And she took her prenatal vitamins, which means she’s taking care of herself. The only thing that ever worried us was this idea in her head that he was stalking her. So if she’s got herself somewhere that feels safe to her, what’s there to worry about?”

  “You can’t help it, though, can you?”

  “Nope.” Carrie sighed. “Not from the second you know you’re carrying them.”

  “Please tell her to call me the next time you hear from her.”

  “I will.”

  When the front door opened behind her, Leigh assumed it was Rob Canaday, returning to get in a delayed last word. But it wasn’t the lawyer, it was the client. Hunter Beck stood framed in the doorway, his face pale and his gaze penetrating behind his glasses. He looked like a man of the people in lug-soled work boots and a canvas field coat, except that the boots were Dolce & Gabbana and the jacket was Burberry and each retailed for more than a thousand dollars.

  “I’m not a bad guy.” His voice, as always, was low and restrained.

  “I never suggested otherwise,” Leigh said.

  “Maybe my marriage is irretrievably broken. I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “Mr. Beck, I can’t talk to you without your lawyer present.”

  “But here’s the thing,” he spoke over her. “No matter what happens between me and Jenna, I don’t want to lose my child. I can’t lose my child. Not after— You of all people”—he looked straight at Leigh—“should understand that.”

  Her face froze. He knew? He knew, and he was using it as a weapon against her. She stared up at him, too stunned to speak.

  If she was speechless, Carrie wasn’t. “How dare you!” She lunged at him with pointed finger. “Barging in here and bringing up her—her tragedy! You get out of my house this minute, you—you—”

  He turned and left before she could muster up an adequate insult.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Leigh left soon after. The porch and the lawn were clear by then and the helicopter had lifted off with a deafening blast of air that made the geriatric horses kick up their heels and scatter like mustangs across the pasture. But the cars and TV vans were still out on the road. She felt too exhausted to run that gauntlet, and she stopped on the back steps with a weary sigh.

  “Take the tractor road,” Carrie said.

  “Good idea,” she said and gave Carrie a quick hug good-bye.

  She drove around the paddock and past the second barn to a dirt track that ran between the fencerows past pastures of horses who seemed to know the best part of their lives was over. They were all good horses once, champions some of them, but no one needed or wanted them anymore. They’d outlived their usefulness, and there was nothing to do but stand and snooze in the sunshine and wait for their time to run out.

  She drove through the meadows and up over the ridge to the woods. She hadn’t realized how close this road came to the site of Peter’s project, but as she reached the top of the hill, she could see the back of Hollow House less than a hundred yards away. Her foot eased off the gas and she stopped and stared at it through the trees.

  Construction was further along than when she last saw the place, but it was still only a shell of a house. The gaping doors and windows looked like open wounds, and the fluttering white sheets of Tyvek were like bandages coming unwrapped. It was obviously uninhabitable. It was absurd for Peter to live here when he could be in his own comfortable home. So what did it say about her that he would choose this instead?

  The crew was on-site. She could hear the sound of hammering ringing out over the hillside. It was the best sound in the world, Peter always said. It was the sound of something being built.

  A ruddy-faced man came around the corner of the house and stopped to squint into the woods. Leigh froze. It was Kevin, Peter’s foreman, and he recognized her at the same moment. He gave a grin and a wave. “Hey, Pete,” he shouted. “The missus is here!”

  Leigh jerked and fumbled for the shifter, but before she could put the car in gear, Shep scrambled into her lap and thrust his head out her window. She tried to shove him back into his own seat, but his tail was wagging so hard it slapped her in the face.

  Peter came jogging around the corner of the house. His stubble was now a beard, and he had a hitch in his gait that made her wonder if he’d injured himself. Then she saw the black hair streaming out behind him and realized he was carrying Mia piggyback.

  She started at the sight of the little girl. She’d forgotten that this was their visitation weekend. Every other Saturday he picked her up at Karen’s and dropped her off with Leigh before he went to work. That was always their routine. But today he brought her here instead. She shouldn’t have been so shocked. He was the one with the visitation rights, after all
. Mia was his daughter, not hers.

  Shepherd spotted them, or sniffed them, and he bunched up his legs and leaped through the window like a circus dog. Mia squealed with delight as he streaked through the woods toward her. She slid off Peter’s back to hug him, and a moment later Kip was there, too, dropping to the ground to wrestle with him. The dog barked and wriggled in delirium as he darted from Mia to Kip to Peter. It was one big joyous family reunion, and the pressure of tears started to build behind Leigh’s face like a steam engine. “Shepherd! Come!” she called.

  The dog ignored her, but Peter spun, searching for her through the dappled sunlight. He couldn’t see her, but she could see him, clearly. He looked like a stranger with his thick black beard.

  Kip stood up beside him and looked for her, too. The tears flooded her eyes and his face blurred out of focus, and the light around him started to bend and shimmer. A flash set his hair ablaze and a smile lit up like a thousand suns, and it was Chrissy again, in the place where Kip stood. In the place where she should have been.

  Peter saw her then and started toward her, and she took off so fast that dust clouds detonated from her tires.

  She drove blindly, and she had to stop behind the Hermitage and wipe her streaming eyes before she could see to go on. She looked up in the mirror, but no one was following her, not Peter, not even Shepherd. She looped around the far side of the Hermitage and down the hill, and she was starting to pull out on Hollow Road when another car suddenly rounded the bend in front of her. She slammed on the brakes as a dusty old Saab rolled past with a priest behind the wheel.

  Blink and she almost missed it. The driver wore a black coat and a clerical collar, and she stomped on the gas and took off after him.

  It was ridiculous. She didn’t even believe Kip’s story about the priest, and here she was chasing a man down Hollow Road for no reason other than he wore a Roman collar. But still she followed him. She had to know. If he did happen to be on the road that night, if he did happen to see anything, she had to find out.

  The Saab reached the end of Hollow Road and turned onto Providence, and Leigh merged into the traffic and followed from two cars behind. She’d never tried to tail a car in her life, but in a law practice that sometimes required proof of adultery, she’d often hired investigators to follow the wayward spouse, and she had a general sense of how they did it. Hang back a few car lengths but keep him in sight. If the target glanced in the mirror too much, if he seemed to get suspicious, speed up and pass and follow from ahead for a while.

  The Saab looked like it must be twenty years old. There were pits of rust around its undercarriage, and the trunk lid bounced with every bump in the road. The priest drove five miles below the speed limit and so did Leigh as the cars behind her zipped around to pass. After a few miles, she pulled out and stole a glance inside as she passed him. He had thick hair going to silver and he sat up very erect with both hands firmly on the wheel. His lips were moving, and she thought he must be talking on a Bluetooth until he threw his head back with his mouth wide open and she realized he was belting out a song.

  She dropped back. After a few more miles, he took a turn west, deeper into the countryside, and she followed past horse farms and vineyards until he turned onto a narrow rural road. No other cars turned with him, so Leigh had to follow right behind as he turned again through a pair of stone pillars that opened onto a long curving drive. A quarter mile ahead on the top of a hill she could see a gleaming white manor house with a columned portico, but the Saab turned before it got there, onto a gravel road through a patch of deep woods. The road twisted around a bend and arrived at a little stone house that was probably once the caretaker’s cottage for the estate up on the hill.

  Leigh pulled in behind the Saab as the driver got out and looked back at her with a quizzical smile. “Can I help you?”

  She hadn’t mistaken his priest garb. Under his suit coat, he wore a black clerical shirtfront and a crisp white Roman collar. He was tall, and handsome in a patrician sort of way, like an English gentleman in tweeds and wellies on his weekend farm, or one of the older male models in a Brooks Brothers catalog, the ones who wore a golf shirt on one page and a white dinner jacket on the other.

  Leigh stood behind the shield of her car door. “I’m sorry to intrude,” she said. “But I wonder—could I ask you something?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Three weeks ago,” she began. Was that right? It seemed like yesterday, but it also seemed like it was something she’d been living with forever. “Three weeks ago last night, there was an accident on Hollow Road. I saw you driving there just now, so it occurred to me— I mean, it wasn’t an accident exactly. A truck went off the road into the ditch and hit a tree. There were two teenagers inside, a boy and a girl?” She paused. Her throat was closing up again.

  “Yes?” he said, still smiling his encouraging smile.

  “And I was wondering—if you were driving past—? If you saw it ­happen?”

  His smile faded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could help you.”

  She put a hand to her shaking mouth. Of course he couldn’t. She was such a fool to follow him here. She was such a fool to hope.

  He started toward her. “Did something happen—?” He stopped, and his face went suddenly still. “You’ve lost someone.”

  She put her hands over her face and started to cry.

  He came up and touched his hand to her elbow. “Please. Come inside. Have a cup of tea.”

  The little stone cottage had a glass sunroom on one side, curiously, since the surrounding woods crept in too close for any sunshine to penetrate. The sunroom had its own entrance, and the priest steered her there, carefully, as if she’d suffered a bad fall and might have broken something. Leigh hid her face as he guided her through the door and into a deep-­cushioned chair. She was humiliated by her tears in front of this stranger. Humiliated by the way she’d followed him like some kind of psycho stalker. This is not who I am, she wanted to tell him, I haven’t been who I really am for a while now. But she couldn’t speak through her tears, and anyway, he was doing all the talking, telling her in a soothing voice to sit back, relax, here’s a stool, put your feet up, I’ll go and pop the kettle on.

  He ducked through a doorway into the main house, and she took her hands from her face and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Her chair was covered in a plush burgundy fabric worn shiny with age. The stool was a faded needlepoint, and the stone floor was crisscrossed in overlapping layers of Oriental rugs. The wall the priest disappeared through was crammed full of books on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and hundreds more were stacked on the floor, the coffee table, the desk, and every other dusty dark wood surface. The room had the look of an old-time study except that the ceiling and the other three walls were made entirely of glass. The trees overhead and the greenery all around made her feel like she was in an inside-out terrarium.

  He returned with two teacups rattling in their saucers and set hers on top of a stack of books on an end table. Leigh murmured her thanks as he settled into the chair beside her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “For breaking down like this.”

  “No, don’t. We should never apologize for grief. It doesn’t mean we’re weak. It’s simply the price we pay for love.”

  It was too high a price. It was costing her everything. “This room,” she began. She looked up and around the space. The light filtering through the foliage overhead was soft and tinged with green, like sunshine through a wisteria arbor. “It reminds me of a fairy tale.”

  He smiled. “I often wonder if the woods sprang up after the sunroom was added, or if they planned to cut down the woods but lost heart. I’m only renting here, but I foolishly brought my whole library with me, and this was the only space that would accommodate it. So into the sunroom I moved it. It looks odd, I know, but I’ve come to think of it as a metaphor for the civilized mind. Educated”—he waved towar
d the wall of bookshelves—“but open to new and different ideas.” He swept an arm to take in the three walls of glass. Then his eyes twinkled. “If you’ll forgive the self-aggrandizement.”

  “No, I love it. This room, I mean.”

  “My Snuggery I call it, at home or wherever I go.” He took a sip of his tea. “Though my ex-wife liked to call it the Growlery when she thought I was being grumpy.”

  “You were married? But—I thought—”

  “That I was a Catholic priest? No, I’m the Episcopal variation. Catholicism without celibacy as they say.”

  “Oh, I should have realized. I was raised as an Episcopal. Though we always called it Catholicism without the guilt.”

  His laugh was a little rueful. “We’ve done a fair job of minimizing shame, but I’m afraid the guilt’s still with us.”

  “I’m not sure I know the distinction.”

  “I like to frame it this way. Shame is what you feel when society is judging you. Guilt is what you feel when you judge yourself.”

  “Ah.” She nodded and took a tentative sip of tea. It was nothing fancy, just a strong brew of good hot tea. “Which is worse, I wonder?”

  “Oh, I’d have to go with guilt. Nobody can punish you like you can punish yourself. But the question is, do we want to eliminate it? Yes, it hurts, but it serves a purpose. Where would the conscience be without it?” He held out his hand. “I’m Stephen Kendall, by the way.”

  “Leigh Huyett. And I’m so sorry for barging in on you this way.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No, really. This isn’t like me. I hardly recognize myself these days. I’m driving everyone away from me. And now chasing after strangers on the road. I’ve turned into a crazy woman. A bitter, ugly, old crazy woman.”

  “Not old, surely,” he said. “And not ugly by a long shot. As for the rest—” He spread his hands. “I don’t know you well enough yet to say.”

  It wasn’t the flattery that made her relax, because she didn’t believe it, not with her rumpled clothes and uncombed hair. It was the yet. As if it wouldn’t necessarily be awful to get to know her better. She settled a little deeper in her chair. It was so comfortable here, in this room full of books and greenery.