House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Where, exactly?”

  “In Hampshire County.”

  Leigh blinked. “That’s where I live.”

  “Oh?” Devra didn’t seem to register the unlikelihood of that coincidence. “During our last meeting,” she went on, “you told me I couldn’t seek a divorce in the District of Columbia unless I was first separated from my husband. But in Virginia, separation is not required if certain fault grounds exist. Is that correct?”

  “That’s all correct.” And cogently summarized, too, Leigh had to ­admit.

  “So would I be permitted to file for divorce in Virginia rather than Washington?”

  Leigh didn’t know how to answer. Devra seemed perfectly rational, but if she wasn’t deranged, it meant that Emily Whitman had lied, which made no sense. But if Leigh didn’t know how to answer, at least she knew what. “Only if you’ve been a domiciliary of Virginia for at least six months. Domicile means your fixed, permanent home. You can reside in several places, but you’re only domiciled in one.” She ticked off the factors the Virginia courts would examine: where she voted, was employed, banked, participated in community activities, and insured her automobiles, as well as the state that issued her driver’s license and car registration.

  Devra looked helpless when Leigh finished the litany. “I’ve never done any of those things,” she said. “Anywhere.”

  Of course she hadn’t, Leigh realized. The test for domicile wasn’t designed with cloistered wives in mind. “We might persuade the court to make a more subjective examination, in your case. To determine which residence is more truly your home.”

  “As between Washington and Virginia? Virginia. Clearly. The embassy is an office building full of functionaries on computers and strangers standing in line. We do not own it and it is not our home. Or at least not mine. My husband seems content enough there.”

  “Your husband”—Leigh read from the business card—“the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.” It sounded as grandiose and mythical as the Great and Powerful Oz.

  “That is his title, yes.” Devra pushed the buzzer beside her chair, the signal, Leigh now recognized, that their meeting was over. “If you would please give some consideration to the domicile question, perhaps at our next meeting I will be prepared to go forward. Meanwhile, I have arranged for the sum of a hundred thousand dollars to be wired to your firm’s bank account. I hope this will suffice for your initial retainer.”

  A knock sounded on the door, and Ashley Gregg came through with another rolling rack of dresses, and the three women went through the same routine as before, pretending Leigh was a fashion consultant for the sake of the brooding bodyguard posted outside.

  “Until next time,” Devra said, clasping her hand warmly.

  The charade was so elaborate, pretending a marriage to the Qatari ambassador, setting up clandestine meetings, carefully parsing out the venue requirements for her divorce from a dead man. As soon as Leigh got home, she sat down at the computer in the kitchen and pulled up the website for the Qatari embassy. There he was, Faheem bin Jabar, a gray-bearded man with an unsmiling face, wearing a dark business suit and a starched white ghutra on his head held in place by a corded black agal. He was indeed the ambassador from Qatar, having formally presented his credentials to the president at a White House ceremony last year. But nothing on the embassy website mentioned his wife or any other information about his family.

  She telephoned her office for the first time in weeks and asked for Miguel Gonzalez. He was the head of the firm’s government relations ­department—their euphemism for lobbyist—and he had a vast network of contacts in virtually every branch of the federal government. She announced herself to his secretary, and to her surprise, Gonzalez himself came on the line. Ordinarily he wouldn’t take her unscheduled call, but her bereavement must have stirred enough sympathy for him to overlook the difference in their places within the firm’s hierarchy.

  “Leigh,” he said in a pained whisper. “I can’t tell you how sorry Gina and I are. We just can’t imagine.”

  Leigh had never even met Gina, but men like Gonzalez seemed to shy away from expressing any emotion as their own; they always thrust their wives out front and center in conveying the sentiment.

  “Mike, who do you know at State?” she asked without preamble.

  “Why, quite a few people.” It took him a second to recover his footing. “What do you need?”

  “I’m looking for some information on the ambassador from Qatar.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “The name of his wife. Or wives.”

  “Hmm. You probably want to talk to the Office of Protocol. They liaise with all the foreign diplomats and organize the various ceremonial affairs. I’ll switch you back to Shirley and she’ll get you the number of my best contact there.”

  “Thank you, Mike.”

  “Oh, and while I have you. I have a new matter for you. A custody case.”

  Leigh was too startled to respond. Gonzalez had never referred a case to her before, and she couldn’t believe he’d choose this time to begin.

  “He’s a very impressive young man. An honest-to-God war hero. Special Forces. John Stoddard’s his name. He was awarded the Silver Star last week, and Congressman Breating held a little dinner for him afterward. We got to talking, and he mentioned his domestic situation, and I told him we have the perfect lawyer for him.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m really not ready—”

  “Of course. I understand. You need time. Let me set something up for, let’s see. I’ll get him in here in a week or so. Until then, take it easy. Take care of yourself. And again, Leigh, our deepest condolences.”

  Leigh stared at the phone in disbelief. There was no way she was going to represent a man who wanted to take a child away from her mother. War hero or not.

  Gonzalez’s assistant came on the line with the name and number of his contact at the Office of Protocol. Leigh dialed the number and waved the magic wand of Miguel Gonzalez’s name to get through to the chief, who promptly transferred the call to a subordinate responsible for maintaining the Diplomatic List. The List was a State Department publication detailing the names of everyone having diplomatic rank in every foreign mission in the country, along with their spouses. The subordinate located Faheem bin Jabar’s name on the list but told Leigh there was no spouse name below it.

  “So that means he’s unmarried?”

  “Or he left her behind in Qatar. Or he elected not to publish her name.”

  “But there’d have to be a record of any diplomatic passport issued to a spouse.”

  “That would be classified.”

  She made one more attempt. If Devra and her husband had purchased a country house in Hampshire County last year, there’d be a record of the property transfer. She called a paralegal in the real estate department and asked her to do a record search under the name bin Jabar, and also, just in case, under the name Al-Khazrati.

  The answer came back in thirty minutes. There were no recorded property transfers in Hampshire County under either name in the past year or, in fact, ever.

  She was ready to give up. Devra didn’t exist in the real estate records, or on a driver’s license, a car registration, the voter rolls, or the Diplomatic List. It was as if she left no footprints in the world. She might as well be a ghost.

  But at that moment her computer pinged with an incoming email. A notification from the Accounting Department that the sum of $100,000 had been wired into her client trust account that day. From an anonymous, numbered account in Vienna.

  Ghosts didn’t wire money.

  She leaned back and thought for a while before it came to her. There was an easy way to find out if Devra was the ambassador’s wife, and she was an idiot not to have done it sooner. She reached for her phone.

  “Hello,” she said when the embassy operator answered. “
Could I speak to Devra please?”

  She could hear a whispered exchange before the operator returned to the line. “The sheikha is not receiving calls. You may leave a message.”

  “No, no message.”

  So. Devra was who she said she was. It was Emily Whitman who wasn’t. She located the young woman’s phony business card and dialed the number. The call went directly to voicemail with no override option to an operator. “This is Leigh Huyett,” she said. “And I’d like to know why you lied to me. Call me back. At once.”

  The phone didn’t ring until that evening, and it wasn’t Emily Whitman. It was Jenna Dietrich, two days later than promised and twice as surly. Leigh asked about her health, her safety, her finances, until the girl snapped, “God! I already went through all this shit with my mother. Why don’t you two coordinate and save me the hassle of saying it twice?”

  For a moment Leigh was stung silent. “You’re right,” she said finally. “I’m only your lawyer. But all these questions are pertinent to your divorce case. You’ll have to answer them before custody and visitation are decided.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that.”

  “Meanwhile, I have Canady’s brief and a draft of our response I’d like to send you.”

  “What for?”

  “You’re the client, Jenna. You have the right to see their arguments and sign off on ours.”

  “Oh, like suddenly I have rights?”

  Leigh sighed. “You’ve always had rights. The lower court said so, and the appellate court will, too, as soon as we get this brief filed.”

  “Then file it already. Jeez.” Jenna snapped and hung up.

  Such a difficult girl, Leigh thought as she put down the phone. She did not envy Carrie her daughter.

  But no, she thought an instant later. No, she did.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Good news,” Shelby shouted through the speaker on Kip’s phone, and for two seconds Pete let himself hope. The priest came forward, Kip’s statement was corroborated, the Commonwealth’s Attorney was dropping all charges. He threw a quick glance beside him in the truck. Kip was staring at his phone with the same hope. His breath sounded in rapid little pants.

  “We got a trial date,” she said. “August tenth.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s exactly what we asked for,” she reminded him.

  “Right.” He glanced over again. Kip’s face had turned to stone.

  “So it’s all hands on deck,” Shelby said. “I’m setting up interviews with the ER doc and the neurosurgeon and the neighbor who called 911, and Frank’s circling back to the kids at the party. We’ll get all the witnesses nailed down.”

  Kip mumbled something. He was staring out the window, and Pete couldn’t hear him above the roar of the tires on the asphalt. Shelby didn’t hear him at all. She continued, “And we need to green light the ergonomics guy if we’re going to.”

  “The crash dummy test,” Pete remembered. This would be the simulation to determine whether Chrissy’s brain would have been injured in the left parietal lobe if she were riding in the passenger seat.

  “Right. Is it yea or nay?”

  It was yea if they believed Kip’s story, nay if they didn’t want to waste any more time and money on it. “Yea,” Pete said.

  “I’ll need a check.”

  “I’ll get it to you.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  The call disconnected, and for a mile there was no sound in the cab but the whoosh of the wind passing them by.

  “This is good news,” Pete said finally. “It means it’ll all be over in time for you to report to first-year orientation on the eighteenth.”

  “Yeah.” Kip didn’t turn his face from the window. “I wonder what kind of orientation program they have in prison.”

  “Hey! None of that, now.” Pete swung out his arm to swat him on the chest. It was the same way he always threw an arm out in front of the kids when he had to brake suddenly. Despite air bags, the instinct was still there. “Remember what Shelby said. Even if we lose, there’s no real chance you’ll do jail time.”

  “Right.”

  “We have two months of hard work ahead. You gotta keep your spirits up.”

  “Right,” Kip said again, and slumped so low in the seat he couldn’t even see out of the window he pretended to be staring through.

  Pete thought back to an article Leigh had shown him a couple years ago about the physiology of the teenaged brain. This explains everything, she said. Everything meaning the often mystifying behaviors of their assorted children. Until about age twenty, the article claimed, the neural connections between the prefrontal lobes weren’t fully developed. This supposedly led to wild mood swings, poor impulse control, the inability to foresee consequences, and easy distractibility. It read like a case history of his own son. He could never understand how someone so smart could do so many stupid things. It’s like you don’t think! he’d railed at him more than once. But if this research was correct, Kip was thinking, all right. It was just that the thoughts weren’t connecting from one side of his brain to the other.

  The boy’s silence lasted all the way back to the job site, and when he got out of the truck, he dropped his backpack by the door and headed up the hill to the woods.

  “Where are you going?” Pete called after him.

  “For a walk.”

  “Don’t forget. You’ve got that history paper to write.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.”

  A hundred pages in and only a week before the due date, Kip had ditched his original idea of examining what started the Crusades to focus instead on what ended them. That was the more interesting question, he told Pete. How did the imperative to wage war for the glory of God disappear? What made the Christians decide they didn’t need to bother anymore? What made the command of Deus Vult! become Yeah, whatever? But Pete didn’t see any reason to assume such fatalism. Maybe they simply found more productive things to do with their lives.

  “I’m heading out to do some errands,” he called as Kip trudged up the hill. “What d’you want for dinner tonight?”

  Kip kept walking. “Whatever.”

  Pete didn’t actually have any errands to run. What he did instead was drive home. Or rather, drive past home. It was what he did almost every night on his food run, just drive by and eyeball the place. Make sure no shutters were hanging loose or rain gutters overflowing. A quick glance to see if the car was in the garage or the lights were on in the house.

  It was yes to both today. It was more than a month since the funeral, and as far as he could tell, Leigh hadn’t gone back to work or anywhere else. He knew from their joint bank account records that she was keeping up with the bills, and either she’d hired a lawn service to fill in for Kip or she was cutting the grass herself. So it seemed she was functioning okay. She simply never left the house.

  There were things he wanted to get—some summer-weight clothes, now that warm weather was here, a spare coffeemaker, the TV from Kip’s room. But Leigh was always there, and he couldn’t bring himself even to pull in the driveway. He didn’t know how to go about it anymore. Would he use his key like he had a right to, or ring the bell like he didn’t? Obviously he couldn’t call ahead, not since she refused to answer his calls and the sum of their marital relations was reduced to text messages. OK? he asked. Fine. U? she answered. They’d have clearer communication with a string and two tin cans.

  He drove on. But fifty yards down the road, he slammed on his brakes. Romeo was out of his pasture again and stretching his neck to tear the leaves off the Markhams’ red maple tree. “Aw, dammit,” he muttered.

  He parked on the shoulder of the road and jumped out. Romeo flicked his ears in recognition and trotted his way, and he snagged him by the halter and led him back to the pasture and gave him a slap on the hindquarters to sho
o him through the gate. Then he walked the entire perimeter of the fence. If there was a rail down, he couldn’t see where it was. Maybe Romeo could jump over all three rails now, in which case he should run a strand of electrified wire along the top. That was the remedy, if it was even still his right.

  The weeping cherry was dripping its pale petals onto the lawn, the azaleas were blooming along the back of the border, and the feathery sprays of astilbe added their own intense shades of hot pink and purple to the mix. But the serpentine curves of the flowerbeds were empty. Leigh always got the annuals in the ground by this date in May, but not this year. Pete hadn’t done his usual winter cleanup or spread any mulch either. Their garden wasn’t going to be much to look at this summer. The bird feeder was empty, too, though the birds were swooping in for a look anyway. Hope and habit died hard.

  A light flashed on in the kitchen, and he shrank back into the tree line like some kind of stalker. A Peeping Tom spying on his own wife.

  There she was, gliding past the big bay window. She was dressed in jeans and that green T-shirt he liked so much, the one that lit up the reddish gold in her hair and clung so nicely to the underside of her breasts. And great, now he was having sexual fantasies like a real Peeping Tom. Except his didn’t lead to a happy ending. His ended with their last night together and the shame of remembering how he pumped to climax while his wife lay sobbing beneath him. No wonder she woke up the next morning with a burning desire to live apart.

  He watched her another moment as she moved about the kitchen, and for a second he fantasized about joining her there. Sitting down together. Talking. But about what? The only subjects that mattered were Chrissy and the trial, and they were both minefields. One wrong step and everything would blow up.

  He crouched down out of sight and stole back to the truck.

  Dusk had fallen by the time he returned to Hollow Road. He switched on his headlights and they bored two cones of bright light straight ahead but cast the roadsides into darkness. Which was why he almost missed the car pulling out of the Hermitage with its headlights off.