House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  He picked up his cup and took another sip of tea. “Was it the boy or the girl?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The one you lost in the accident. Was it the boy or the girl?”

  “Oh! The girl. My daughter.” A fresh rush of tears came to her eyes. “She was only—” She shook her head helplessly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

  “Maybe you should,” he said. “For some people it helps to put the pain in words. If you feel like talking, I definitely feel like listening.”

  After living in near silence for so long, speaking to no one and listening to nothing but Shepherd’s ceaseless whining—yes, she did feel like talking, especially here in the Snuggery with the Good Reverend Brooks Brothers. But she didn’t know where to begin, and her uncertainty must have shown on her face, because he put his hand over hers again. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me about the accident on Hollow Road?”

  She told him, even though it meant she started to cry again. She told him the whole story, starting with Kip’s first DUI last New Year’s. She told him about their anniversary getaway to Greenbrier and Kip’s partying on a suspended license and Chrissy’s pajama-clad bike ride. She told him about the accident, the night in the police station, and the morning in the hospital.

  “It was all my fault,” she said, weeping. “I insisted on a long weekend away. We left them home alone. We never did that before, not overnight. None of this would have happened—I was so selfish! If only— My ­daughter—”

  “No. Stop. Please.” He put his cup down. “Your daughter was how old? Fourteen? People hire fourteen-year-old babysitters all the time, and leave them alone in a strange house with small children to care for. You left your daughter in her own house with an eighteen-year-old. There’s no blame to be found there.”

  “But none of this would have happened—”

  “See what I mean about guilt? You’re punishing yourself for something no one else would raise an eyebrow at. Something everyone does, all the time.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

  He put his hand over hers. “There’s no best way to grieve,” he said. “But the worst way is to blame yourself. I’ve seen it too many times. I should have kept after him about his cholesterol. I never should have put her in that nursing home. I shouldn’t have let him get on that plane. That’s the worst kind of mourning. It halts the healing.”

  His hand was warm and enveloping over hers. Leigh blinked her eyes open. “Is there a best kind of mourning?”

  “As I say, it’s different for everyone. When I lost my son—”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry.” She felt a hot flush of embarrassment. Carrying on as if she were the only person in the world ever to lose a child.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “When he died, what helped me most was to talk about him. People shied away from even mentioning his name to me, but I relished the chance to talk about him. To anyone who cared to listen.”

  Leigh thought how seldom anyone had spoken to her about Chrissy these last weeks. She remembered how careful Carrie was this morning not to speak her name out loud. And Peter never mentioned her at all. To spare her feelings, probably, but maybe because he’d already moved on.

  “I care to listen,” he said. “If you’d like to tell me about Chrissy.”

  For a moment she thought about trying. But it was too raw. She shook her head.

  “Not yet, then,” he said. “Someday perhaps.”

  She gazed at him. His eyes were blue, she noticed. Not the bright welding-torch blue of Chrissy’s eyes, but three shades quieter. A still mountain lake. Even when he smiled, as he did now, there were such dark depths there.

  “Not yet,” she agreed. “But thank you.”

  By then the sun had climbed high enough to shine through the overhanging tree limbs. Suddenly the room was lit up, and all its dim corners were on display. Stephen switched off the lamp on the table between them. “It only lasts twenty or thirty minutes,” he said. “So I try to savor the sunshine while I can.”

  Leigh rose to her feet. “I’ll savor it on my drive back home. I’ve intruded on you far too long.”

  “Not at all. I’ve enjoyed meeting you.”

  “Me, too.”

  He walked her outside and down the drive to her car. At the door, she turned and held out her hand. “Reverend—”

  “Stephen.” He took her hand and held it in both of his. “And again, I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  “You have helped me. A little.”

  “May I give you a blessing?” He winced an apology. “It’s what I do. But I promise I won’t proselytize.”

  She laughed. “Go on then. If you must.”

  He placed a hand on her head. “Leigh. May you know the peace that passes all understanding and may it guard your heart and mind, always and everywhere.”

  Those words coiled through in her mind as she drove out the narrow lane to the road. Always and everywhere. Her I love you words to Peter and the kids. She’d forgotten they came from the Bible, if she ever even knew. It was simply a phrase inculcated in her during her childhood, the same as goodness and mercy. They were only ever words to her, a familiar phrase that made for clever names for her two barn cats. But now they seemed to have come to life, personified in that gentle man. Goodness and mercy.

  A car was parked at the end of the cottage lane, a black SUV, and she had to cut around it to reach the road. A man sat behind the wheel, and as she drove past him, she had a feeling, a little low zap like static electricity that made her eyes dart up to the mirror. But the man wasn’t looking at her at all. He had a camera to his face and was snapping pictures of the rolling countryside on this beautiful spring day.

  And it was a beautiful spring day. The sun was spilling a pale gold over the new green grass, and the roadside rhododendrons were blooming in brilliant bursts of pink and purple, and Leigh did feel some measure of peace as she drove to the highway. Not enough to pass all understanding, but something. She’d fallen out of the habit of going to church—­weekends were always so hectic in their household—but she thought she might enjoy attending one of Stephen’s sermons. It would be nice to see him again, to listen to his soothing voice and feel that little bit of peace settle into her soul. It was too bad she didn’t get the name of his church.

  Her phone burbled with an incoming text, and at the next stoplight she took a glance. It was from Peter, sent more than an hour after she stumbled on his happy family scene. Sry I miss U OK?

  This was why they never used to text each other. She couldn’t tell what he meant. I’m sorry. I miss you? Are you okay? Or only Sorry I missed you, okay? Two very different messages. She could parse through the language of a complex statute and discern the legislative intent with the best of them, but the meaning behind those five near-words eluded her.

  OK, she replied.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Put that away. Pay attention.” Pete rapped his knuckles on the table. He was spending thousands of dollars for the opinions of the doctor and lawyer across from them, and there Kip sat playing with his phone.

  Shelby and the doctor exchanged a hoo boy look, and for a second Kip’s face flashed dark with defiance, like he was ready to pick up his phone and stomp out of the conference room. But only for a second. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He slid the phone across the polished wood-grain surface of the table and let it fall into his lap. His expression when he looked up again was perfectly bland.

  Dr. Harold Rabin was a neurologist who used to specialize in brain aneurysms, and now, Pete gathered, specialized in court testimony. He had curly white hair that grew in a dense mat around his bald spot so his head resembled one of the sugar-frosted crullers laid out on the credenza. He’d reviewed all of Chrissy’s medical records and for a further fee was prepared to give expert testimony that her death could not be causally con
nected to the accident because it was equally likely that her aneurysm was congenital.

  “Isn’t that kind of a big coincidence, though?” Kip said. “If she was walking around with this thing in her head for fourteen years, and it didn’t burst until ten hours after she bumped her head in the truck?”

  “Stop.” Shelby threw up a hand like a crossing guard. She was wearing a bronze silk suit today, and it made her green eyes look almost yellow. Like a tigress. “There’s no evidence she bumped her head in the truck. Nothing beyond your own statement that she might have and what—?” She looked to the doctor. “A faint contusion on her scalp?”

  He nodded. “Which could have been sustained in any other minor injury in the previous twenty-four hours.”

  “Remember, it’s the Commonwealth’s burden. And the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. Not simply possible, or more likely than not.”

  The burden of proof, she meant, but every time Pete heard her say it—the burden’s on their side—he wanted to object. It’s on us. The burden’s all on us. The expense for sure, but also the fear, the loneliness, the shame.

  “And a congenital abnormality is only one alternative possibility,” the doctor said. “The aneurysm could have resulted from any previous injury. According to the medical history, the young lady sustained other injuries over the years. Two years ago she fell from a horse.”

  “She only broke her wrist.” Pete remembered that day. He was in the garage when he heard the cry from the pasture. Everybody heard it, and they all went running outside, Leigh, all three boys, even Shep, and when Chrissy looked up from the ground at the circle of frantic faces above her, she started to laugh through her tears. Oh, no! she said, cradling her arm. Am I dead?

  “But she could have bumped her head in that fall, too. Or any other time she fell from a horse. And there was another ER visit.” The doctor flipped through his notes. “What was it? A soccer injury?”

  “That was only a sprained ankle.”

  “Ah, but she played soccer. That’s the significance. Head injuries are common in soccer. She could have developed the aneurysm from a ball to the head and no one ever knew it.”

  “Hold on.” Pete turned to Shelby. “You’re not gonna bring up these other accidents in court?” Shelby was tapping the keys on her laptop, and she answered without looking up from the screen. “We have to. Any alternative explanation.”

  “But if Leigh thinks it was soccer or riding that did it—I mean, she was the one who got Chrissy into all those activities. If she thought—I mean—it’d kill her.”

  “Pete.” Shelby looked up then, and her eyes lasered across the table. “I understand your concerns. But Kip’s the one on trial here. He’s the one we need to protect.”

  Pete scrubbed a hand over his beard. Kip was watching him closely, like he was waiting for a call from a tennis line judge. “Yeah,” Pete said finally. “Of course.”

  Next Dr. Rabin delivered a tutorial on the geography of the brain, complete with slick, interactive illustrations projected on a screen. Eight hundred dollars an hour bought all the bells and whistles. He pointed out the cerebrum, cerebellum, brainstem, the hemispheres, the lobes, then pinpointed the precise location of Chrissy’s aneurysm in the left parietal lobe.

  “The left side?” Pete leaned forward in his chair. “And that’s where this contusion was?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how does somebody sitting on the right side of a vehicle injure the left side of her brain?” He snapped his gaze between Shelby and the doctor. “The right side of her head would make sense, if she bumped against the passenger window or doorframe. Or the top of her head if she bounced up against the ceiling. But what does she hit the left side on?”

  Shelby looked intrigued. “Unless she was on the left side. In the driver’s seat.”

  “Exactly.”

  The doctor interrupted to mention something he called coup contrecoup, how an impact on one side of the head would sometimes result in injury to the opposite side of the brain. “You should hire an ergonomics expert to model this,” he said. “Set up a test.”

  “Like a crash dummy test?” Shelby said.

  “Yes, and the dummy would have a simulated brain to register the points of injury according to the different impact scenarios.”

  She nodded and typed rapidly on her keyboard. “We’d video each scenario and have you testify about the location of each resulting injury.”

  “Which could prove Chrissy was the one driving,” Pete said. “Even if we never find the priest.”

  Despite the media blitz, the witness still hadn’t come forward. Pete didn’t like to think about why that might be. If the priest was willing to stop and help on the road that night, he damn well ought to be willing to step up and help now. Unless he was off on a missionary trip to Siberia. Unless he didn’t exist.

  The doctor completed his dog-and-pony show, gathered up his materials, and after a round of departing handshakes, left the room. Another expert shortly took his place. He was the accident reconstructionist, a licensed engineer about Pete’s age named Neal Grenier. His subject was more in Pete’s wheelhouse, but he got lost when the guy starting throwing around terms like EDSMAC and delta-V and yaw-plane analysis and coefficients of static friction. Like the doctor, he came equipped with some slick visuals—computer-generated simulations showing a dozen different scenarios of a truck swerving to avoid a dog. The variables were vehicle speed and distance from first sighting of the dog, which Kip estimated at a hundred feet. Not to mention dog speed. But in the end his conclusion was that the truck would not have left the road if it had been operated at or below the speed limit by an attentive driver with normal reaction times.

  “What if it was operated by an inexperienced driver?” Pete said.

  Grenier shrugged. “Inexperienced, distracted, intoxicated. All the same.”

  Pete sat back with a nod as Shelby rose to her feet. “Thanks, Neal. We’ll be in touch.”

  The expert packed up his materials and shook hands all around before the paralegal escorted him from the conference room.

  “We can’t use him,” Shelby said as soon as the door closed.

  “What?” Pete gaped at her. Not only did he spend thousands of dollars for that dog-and-pony show, but it was the best news he’d heard yet. “This helps prove that Chrissy was driving.”

  “Only as one of the possibilities. If the jury doesn’t buy it? Then all we’ve done is establish the others: that Kip must have been speeding and/or drunk. We’d be handing the Commonwealth the nails to build our own coffin.”

  “Mine,” Kip mumbled.

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t answer. “So that’s it?” he said instead. “We’re not going there? We can’t find the priest so we’re not gonna say Chrissy was driving?”

  “No, come on.” Pete turned to Shelby. “We’re not abandoning that.” He didn’t mean it as a question, and he was chagrined that it came out sounding that way.

  “We’ll cross that bridge later,” she said.

  It wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. He was hoping there wasn’t even a bridge to cross. Kip Wasn’t Driving. The End. Why wasn’t that the Commonwealth’s burden? he’d asked her earlier. Oh, it was, she explained, but they already met it when Kip told the officer he was driving. Now the burden had shifted to Kip to refute his own statement. The burden of proof, the burden of persuasion, the burden of fear and accusation. It was a good thing Karen wasn’t being included in these meetings, Pete thought, not for the first time. She would have collapsed under the weight of all those burdens.

  “Frank has some more ideas on that front,” Shelby said. “Let’s get him in here.”

  Her paralegal picked up the phone to summon him, and Frank Nobbin came in the room and set a laptop down on the table. Last week, he told them, he led a squad of investigators
on a door-to-door canvass of the residents of Hollow Road, asking if anyone had been visited by a clergyman the night of the accident. None had, even though they hit every house along all five miles of Hollow Road. “Except that fortress next to your construction site,” he said to Pete. “Nobody answered the buzzer at the gate. I can’t find a telephone listing for that location either.”

  Pete wasn’t surprised. “I don’t think anyone’s living there.”

  “Remember I saw lights, though, that one time,” Kip said.

  “On a timer, I bet,” Pete said. “Same as the cameras.”

  “Cameras?” Shelby looked up. “Like CCTV?”

  Nobbin shook his head. “It’s a dead end. The cameras don’t rotate to the road.”

  “Besides,” Pete said, “wouldn’t the tape be erased by now?”

  Kip rolled his eyes. “It’d be digital, not tape, and if nobody’s living there, it’d be saved to the cloud. Like, forever.”

  “Let’s get a subpoena out.” Shelby nodded at her paralegal. “Maybe the cameras caught something.”

  Nobbin obviously thought that was a waste of time. He was already moving on to his next agenda item. He turned to Kip. “Since you struck out trying to pick out the guy on that first photo array, I expanded the geographic perimeter of the churches. I also added in all the ordained clergy I could find who don’t have a church. They teach or do counseling or play golf, whatever.” He opened his laptop and slid it across the table to Kip. “Close to five hundred faces here. You need to go through them all.”

  Kip groaned as he opened the slide show on the screen.

  “I have to be in court.” Shelby glanced at her watch. “Take all the time you need.”

  Pete had a meeting with his own lawyer that afternoon, to review the closing documents for Rose Lane and to discuss the payment terms of the Millers’ contract and get a fix on his rights and remedies. Five hundred dollars later, the answer was exactly what he suspected. Yes, he had the right to the progress payment, but no real remedy. What was he going to do, sue the guy and guarantee that the next progress payment wouldn’t come either? He could stop work and lay off his crew, but even if he was willing to do that, most of the men would find other work and he’d lose them forever. Those who didn’t would collect unemployment, and he couldn’t afford the hit to his premiums.