House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  He slammed on his brakes, and the car braked hard, too, barely in time. The two vehicles lurched to a stop with their front fenders only inches apart.

  Pete’s chest heaved, both from the near-miss and from the shock of seeing those gates open for the first time in ten months. Shelby’s process server struck out three times trying to serve a subpoena on this address, and it was everybody’s conclusion that the place was unoccupied.

  He threw the truck in park and got out. The car was a green Toyota and behind the wheel was a bald guy with a goatee. He lowered the window as Pete approached.

  “I just wanted you to know—your headlights are off.”

  “Oh, jeez.” He fumbled for the switch, and as the lights flashed on he started to close his window. “Thanks, man.”

  “While I have you.”

  “Yeah?” He stopped the window at half-mast.

  “I’m Pete Conley. I’m building the house next door?”

  The man looked blank.

  “I wanted to ask you.” The gates stood wide open behind the idling car, and Pete cut a quick glance that way. It was his first view inside the compound, but all he could make out in the dim light was an entry court paved with cobblestones and, set back a couple hundred feet, a mansion built of the same red brick as the perimeter wall. “By any chance do you know a priest who drives a big dark car?”

  “I’m just the Uber driver, man.” The man jerked a thumb over his seat back.

  Pete hadn’t noticed the woman in the backseat. She was a posh-­looking blonde in a Burberry trench coat with her hair in a stylish up-do. She lowered her own window. “Sorry?”

  He repeated the question. “A priest or some other kind of clergyman? The reason I’m asking—my son was in an accident down the road last month, and the only witness was this priest or whoever. We’re really hoping to track him down.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Maybe your security system caught something?”

  She tossed a quick look at the camera mounted by the gates. “I don’t actually live here, you see. In fact, I’m just on my way to the airport now.”

  “Oh.” He glanced again through the gates and caught a glimpse of the front door—double doors, actually, topped by a broken pediment and flanked by columnar evergreens in big concrete pots. “If you could give me the name of the owner, I’ll contact him.”

  “It’s a corporation, I think. I’m sorry. I really must be off now. International check-in, you know.”

  Her window whined shut.

  Pete moved the truck out of the way, and the gates clanged shut as the Toyota pulled out and turned down the road in the other direction. He squinted at the mirror as the taillights receded. The occupancy of that estate had been a mystery for ten months, and meeting this woman did nothing to solve it. He looked back at the security camera. It was pointed down, to the window-level height of any vehicle that might approach. Frank Nobbin was probably right. It was a waste of time pursuing the footage.

  He put the truck in gear and drove on down the road and up the drive to Hollow House. Where Drew Miller’s silver Porsche sat glowing in the dark by the garage.

  It was weeks since King Midas had been by the site, and weeks longer since he made his last payment. If he was here tonight, it would only be to look for enough problems or defects to justify his default. Pete parked and headed for the back door, bracing himself for more of Miller’s carping and demands.

  A giggle sounded from somewhere in the dark. A huskier voice said something that elicited another light, teasing giggle. Pete stopped. Both voices were coming from the woods.

  A big expanse of undeveloped property ran behind both the Hermitage and Hollow House. It was owned by a nature conservancy and preserved into perpetuity, a feature that made the Millers’ lot particularly valuable. The conservancy tract included the woods at the top of the hill and an open field down the other side. Pete had never seen anybody back there except the Dietrichs, who mowed the meadow a couple times a year in exchange for the hay. If the local teenagers were using it as a lovers’ lane, Midas was bound to throw another fit.

  Two figures emerged from the gloom of the woods, and Pete started up the hill to cut them off—to warn them off, too—when he saw that one of them was his own teenager and the other wasn’t a teenager at all. She was Yana Miller.

  “Hey,” he called. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh. Hey,” Kip said.

  “We ben inwestigating,” Yana said in a la-di-da lilt. She was wearing a fluttery white blouse over skinny white jeans and her pale hair was long and loose down her back. As always, she walked in a weird loping gait, one foot crossing over the other in exaggerated steps like she was on a fashion runway. Kip stumbled along behind her like he’d forgotten how to walk altogether.

  “Just so you know, your property ends there.” Pete pointed to the line, but Yana didn’t even bother to turn around and look. Boundaries meant nothing to her.

  A door slammed behind them, and Miller came charging out of the house. “There you are,” he said, stomping up furiously to Pete. He was practically foaming at the mouth. “What the fuck, Conley? It looks like somebody’s living in there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kip stepped up to answer before Pete could. “Me and my dad are staying here to keep an eye on the place. Make sure everything’s secure. You know.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the Hermitage. “Just in case.”

  “Huh.” Miller squinted hard, like an unexpected thought was hatching out of the smooth shell of his head. “That’s kinda going above and beyond.”

  Kip gave an eager nod. “Dad likes to look out for his customers.”

  “Oh.” Slowly Miller’s hackles went down. “Well. I appreciate that.”

  Pete had to marvel at this kid sometimes. One minute he was tripping over his own feet in the presence of a female. The next he was de-fanging a pit bull. Two hours ago he was hanging his head in despair. The mysteries of the teenaged brain.

  “But it’s all cool,” Kip went on. “Turns out nobody’s even living there.”

  “Huh.”

  Pete held his tongue as Miller turned to study the place next door. Another thought seemed to be hatching, but after a minute he stirred himself and clapped Pete on the back. “Place looks good.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been making good progress this week.” Pete emphasized the word progress.

  “Yeah, yeah, that reminds me. I’ll get you that payment tomorrow.”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  “Yana, you ready, babe?” Miller squeezed himself behind the wheel of the car.

  She didn’t answer him. She simply turned and walked her loopy walk to the Porsche and, with a strange twitch of her mouth that was something like a parting smile, she folded her long legs and got into the car.

  Kip’s own mouth hung open as they drove out of sight.

  “What a fruitcake,” Pete said.

  “Are you kidding? She’s the hottest girl I’ve ever seen!”

  It was King Midas that Pete was speaking of, and he almost laughed at how Kip’s mind sprang immediately to the Queen. “Hardly a girl,” he said. “She must be thirty.”

  “Do you think her magazine spreads are online?” Kip didn’t wait for Pete to answer. He was already tapping the search terms into his phone.

  “Hey, listen,” Pete said. “You should stay out of those woods.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because they back right up to the neighbors, that’s why, and I told you to steer clear of the place, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Kip walked away with his screen lit up.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Once there were elaborate rules and rituals for mourning. The bereaved wore black clothes or armbands. They pulled the curtains and stopped the clocks and draped all the household mirrors. They hung a wreath of
laurel tied with black crape on the front door. They ordered stationery with a black border. For some strictly regimented period of time, they didn’t sing or dance or attend amusements or otherwise go out in society.

  Today the public rituals of mourning were no longer observed. Today the bereaved wore whatever color they liked and after three days, maybe seven, they went back to work. Any open display of grief after that was unseemly. Self-indulgent and inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others. It was like an amputee going out in public with an empty sleeve. He should wear a prosthetic whether it helped or not. Fill that emptiness with something artificial so as not to disturb other people.

  Karen called on a Friday. It was more than a month since the funeral, so she could skip the sympathetic preliminaries and get right to the point. She wanted to stop by the next morning to pick up Mia’s things.

  “I’m sorry?” Leigh said.

  “Her toys, her clothes. Anything she left there. If you could pack it up for me, I’ll stop by tomorrow.” When Leigh’s silence went on too long, she added, “She misses her things. Is there a problem?”

  Leigh swallowed hard. “No. No problem. I’ll have it all ready for you.”

  She had the box waiting in the front hall when Karen rang the doorbell the next morning. She was a frail-looking woman, very pretty, but with a timidity that made it hard to imagine she’d ever been audacious enough to have an extramarital affair. Though as Peter told it, she was simply a movable object in the path of Gary’s irresistible force.

  “Let me carry it out for you.” Leigh hoisted the box through the door and out to the driveway. She was hoping that Mia might be waiting in the car, but Gary was alone in his big Mercedes. He gave her a mock salute from behind the wheel.

  “Did you already drop Mia off?” Leigh asked as went around to the trunk.

  Karen gave a tight-lipped nod. “I didn’t want to. It’s really not safe there, with all those tools and nails and splinters. Not to mention all those strange men.”

  “I’m sure Peter watches out for her.”

  “It’s no place for Kip to live either.”

  Her tone had never been so frosty, and Leigh knew she must blame her for Kip’s exile. She must be the wicked stepmother who banished him to the woods. “I know,” she said.

  Karen slammed the trunk lid shut. “You know, I always thought I’d get him back at the end of that first year. I thought he’d get it out of his system and want to come home and Pete wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court.” She stopped beside her door. “Then he went and married a divorce lawyer and I lost all hope.”

  Leigh blinked with surprise. This was nothing she’d ever heard before. “Karen, I never advised Peter on custody. I never got involved.”

  “You did, though. In more ways than one.”

  The narrative was changing by the moment. Now Leigh was an interloper. “I never tried to take your place with Kip.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Leigh stood speechless as a UPS truck rumbled into the driveway behind her. Behind the wheel Gary threw his hands up in disgust—he’d be blocked for the two minutes it would take the driver to complete his delivery.

  “Sorry,” Leigh said and hurried to take the package. She didn’t know what it could be. The time for flowers and fruit baskets had long since passed. The driver hefted an oversize carton off the truck, and it wasn’t until he handed her the electronic signature device that she remembered. It was Kip’s surprise graduation present.

  Every college-bound student wanted a new computer, but Kip had a wish list of special requirements, and over the course of many stealthy conversations she figured them out and ordered it custom-built to his specifications. It took many phone calls and thousands of dollars, but it was pure pleasure for Leigh as she imagined his usual smart-aleck cool dissolving into stunned joy as he unwrapped it.

  “I’ll carry it to the door,” the driver offered while Gary fumed.

  Leigh looked down at the box, then over at Karen. “I wonder if you could take this, too?” she called to her.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Leigh said. “Something Peter got for Kip’s graduation.” In truth it would be a surprise for Peter, too. He’d come up with the golf clubs for Kip’s birthday but left it to Leigh to think of a graduation present.

  “Oh, all right,” Karen said with a put-upon sigh, and as the UPS truck backed out of the drive, Leigh loaded it into the backseat of the car.

  On Tuesday Leigh returned to the office. She had no choice. Miguel Gonzalez refused to take not yet for an answer and went ahead and put a meeting on her calendar with John Stoddard, the war hero who now wanted to wage a custody battle. She wasn’t going to take the case, she hadn’t changed her mind about that. But if Gonzalez wouldn’t take no for an answer, she could see to it that Stoddard would. She’d take the meeting but make herself so discouraging, so dismally skeptical of his chances of wresting the child away from her mother, that he’d storm out after ten minutes. She’d earn herself a few black marks in the process, but she hardly cared.

  She left the house early enough to avoid the worst of the commuter crowds on the Metro and arrived at the office in time to avoid any awkward encounters in the elevator. The corridors were dark as she wended her way around the perimeter of the building past the open doors and cluttered desktops of her colleagues. Her own office door stood uncharacteristically closed, and when she pushed it open, a musty odor rose up, like a spritz of gloom diffused through the air.

  She closed the door and sat down at her desk. This was always her favorite time to work, in the still of the early morning, the quiet before the storm of phone calls and Got a minute? head-pokes around the door. A leaning tower of accumulated, nonurgent mail overflowed her inbox. She was able to make quick work of most of it, and quick work of the administrative messages piled up in her electronic inbox, too. Except for one. A request from Accounting that she account for the $100,000 wire transfer from Austria.

  Either she should open a new client file for Devra or she should refund the retainer, but she couldn’t decide which. It wouldn’t be an easy case. She’d have to establish Virginia domicile based only on a weekend getaway, then she’d have to step carefully around the thorny question of diplomatic immunity. The Vienna Convention protected foreign diplomats from any legal action in their host country. The purpose was to ward off politically motivated prosecutions, but technically the immunity extended even to private domestic relations cases between the diplomats and their spouses. In practice, the home country typically waived the immunity defense so the divorce action could proceed in a U.S. court, but the procedure for obtaining that waiver was cumbersome. And even when diplomatic immunity was waived for purposes of dissolving the marriage, it was often resurrected to shield the diplomat’s assets. In effect, the foreign sovereign told the diplomat’s spouse: yes, you may have your divorce but not a penny of settlement or support. If the government of Qatar followed the same course, it would jeopardize Devra’s entitlement to her mahr. The Virginia court might order the ambassador to pay her the agreed sum, but the order would be unenforceable against any of his assets in the United States. And the Qatari courts wouldn’t enforce the order because her American divorce wouldn’t be recognized there. The final complication was how she’d even serve the divorce complaint on the ambassador. The embassy was technically the property of the government of Qatar, and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act would render it off-limits for Leigh’s process server.

  Even apart from the legal hurdles, so many other questions remained. Why wouldn’t Devra just leave her husband when she had at least $100,000 at ready disposal? And who was Emily Whitman, and why would she concoct such an elaborate lie?

  She dug out the phony business card and punched in the young woman’s number, but as before, the call went straight to voicemail. She left a terse message and was hanging up the
phone as her office door swung open.

  She whirled in her chair. Polly teetered under an armload of files, and they both gasped their surprise.

  “Polly!”

  “Leigh! Oh, my God, I had no idea you were back!”

  “Sorry. I wanted a quiet morning.”

  Polly put the stack of files on the worktable across the room. She was a stout woman of sixty with six grandchildren and three daughters who called her every day. She was also a crack assistant-cum-paralegal who knew more about the minutiae of divorce filings than anyone in the city. If she’d had the same opportunities as Leigh growing up, she would have been Leigh’s most formidable opponent instead of her indispensable assistant.

  “Can I get you anything?” Polly asked. “Coffee?”

  They’d worked together nearly twenty years and Leigh had never once asked her to fetch coffee. Now she must have FRAGILE. HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on her forehead. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “It’s so good to see you back.”

  “It’s good to see you, too. And thanks again for everything you did while I was out.”

  “Well.” Polly shifted her weight awkwardly. “I thought you had enough on your plate.”

  “Yes.”

  “You let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”

  Leigh smiled weakly. This was more solicitousness than she could bear.

  “Shall I close the door?”

  “No, it’s fine. Leave it open.”

  She paid a price for that small vanity. The open door invited a stream of well-wishers to stop by and deliver their platitudes, and she had to nod and smile and try to remember who sent flowers and who made charitable contributions in Chrissy’s name so she could thank them again for their kindness. They were kind, all of them, and she knew they meant well, but after a dozen visitors, she couldn’t face another. She closed her door and buzzed Polly to say she was in conference and couldn’t be disturbed.