House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “And yet—” The reporter’s voice changed. She spoke more softly but with a cloying timbre that made Leigh cringe at what she knew was coming. “—your own son Andrew was killed in your home by a stranger.”

  Stephen was silent, and Leigh’s heart clenched at what he must be feeling. But at the same time it swelled with admiration at what he was putting himself through, the private sacrifices he was making for the sake of public good.

  “Don’t you ever wonder,” the reporter prodded him, “whether a gun in your home might have saved your son’s life?”

  “No,” Stephen said at last. “I don’t wonder about that at all.”

  Leigh gave him a little soundless cheer.

  Devra opened the door to her hotel suite wearing a simple sleeveless shift that hung loose on her shrunken frame. She looked so gaunt that Leigh wondered if any of the new clothes she’d brought were going to fit her. The table by the window across the room was spread with the fixings of an elaborate brunch, but the food had barely been touched. The TV was on in the media room, and it sounded like it was tuned to one of the home shopping channels. Spokesmodels hawking cheap trinkets and curios Devra would never want. All she wanted was the echo of their bright chirpy voices.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said when Leigh presented the boxes and shopping bags, but Devra was listless as she led her into the bedroom to unpack them. She pulled out a peach silk camisole, a black satin nightgown, and when she picked up the silver cocktail dress, she dropped it on the bed with a weak laugh. “What was I thinking? I don’t need any of these clothes here.”

  “Devra, if you’re having second thoughts—”

  “About the divorce? Never.”

  “About your living arrangements, then.”

  With a shrug she wandered back to the living room and stood a moment, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling window. Down below a thousand summer tourists thronged the shoreline of the Tidal Basin and the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. “I confess I do feel a bit lonely sometimes. But Simone is very kind, and you’ve been wonderful, of course.” She pressed her fingers to the glass and watched her ghostly prints appear. “All my life,” she said softly, “I’ve lived behind walls. My father’s compound. My husband’s palace. The embassy. Even our country home here. When he first showed me the photos of the estate, I thought how wonderful it would be. All that open countryside all around. I imagined taking long walks down the lane or through the woods at the back of the property or just looking out the window at an unimpeded view. But before we spent even our first weekend there, my husband had walls erected around that house, too. There were no long walks. There were no views.”

  Leigh looked at her sharply. “Are you talking about your weekend home in Virginia?” She leaned forward. “In Hampshire County?”

  “Yes. Our getaway.” Devra let out a bitter laugh. “But I couldn’t get away there either.”

  “This property,” Leigh said. “Does it have steel gates and a high brick wall all around it?”

  “Like a prison?” Devra didn’t turn from the glass. “Just so.”

  Leigh stayed another hour to drink tea with Devra and sort out the rejects from her Saks order. She left with an armful of garment bags, and on her way out of the hotel, stopped at the front desk in the lobby. The manager was off today, but his assistant took her back to his office to print out the account-to-date. She slipped it in her briefcase and picked up the garment bags and headed for the door.

  “Oh, before I forget,” he called after her. “One of our room service waiters mentioned that someone asked for your client’s suite number last night. He offered him a hundred dollars.”

  She froze where she was.

  “But no harm, no foul,” the man said with a smile and a shrug. “He wasn’t your client’s waiter, and he didn’t know who the guy was talking about.”

  The garment bags slid out of Leigh’s arms and puddled on the floor. “Get security,” she shouted, already running from the room. “Send them up there. Now!”

  Somehow the sheikh had found Devra. Despite all of Leigh’s elaborate precautions and cloak-and-dagger maneuvers, he’d found her. She stabbed the call button for the elevator and rushed on when the doors opened. A security guard was already jogging down the corridor when she arrived on the tenth floor, and she stationed him outside the door of the suite while she went in to break the news to Devra.

  Thirty minutes later she was driving out of the city with Devra in the backseat weeping softly under a blanket.

  Later there would be time to track down the room service waiter and get a description of the man who tried to bribe him. For now all she could do was speculate, wildly, about how Devra’s location could have been discovered. Leigh hadn’t been followed here, she was sure of that. A breach inside the hotel, she thought next. The manager or the concierge could have guessed who Devra was and made an overture to the sheikh. But no, that couldn’t be right either, because they would have known her suite number and sold that information to him at the same time. Unless Devra herself was the breach, she couldn’t think how she was found out.

  Three hours later Devra was booked under a new alias at a golf resort near Charlottesville, with a new hotel manager and concierge sworn to service and secrecy. New security, too: three shifts of bodyguards were scheduled to maintain watch outside her door.

  Devra looked around bleakly at her new accommodations. This suite wasn’t nearly as large and luxurious as her last one. She went to the window and pushed aside the heavy curtains. The window was only four panes wide, and a parking lot comprised most of the view.

  “I’m so sorry,” Leigh said.

  Devra gazed out at the cars jockeying for spaces in the lot. “This is Virginia, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Six months is no longer enough. Here I must be separated for one year before your courts will grant me a divorce.”

  Leigh came up behind her. In the far distance was the fairway and beyond it a cluster of trees that stood like hushed spectators beyond the green. “For no-fault divorce, yes. But you could file immediately on a fault ground.”

  Devra’s bony shoulders sagged. “Such as cruelty.”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled the curtains shut and stood a moment, staring at the chintz roses. Then she straightened her spine and turned around. “Do it,” she said.

  There would be plenty of time later to worry about the requirements for Virginia domicile and the reach of diplomatic immunity. All that mattered now was the petition for divorce. Leigh took out her laptop and drafted it at the tea table in the suite’s sitting room. Devra read through it and approved it with a single nod, then Leigh hit a button and it was done—­electronically filed with the Hampshire County clerk and officially a matter of public record. But the action wouldn’t be joined until the sheikh was served with the petition. She emailed the packet to her process server and also ran off paper copies on the concierge’s printer before leaving.

  She’d held her anger at a low simmer until then, but it burst into full flame as she started the drive back. By the time she reached St. Alban, it was a white-hot blaze. She burned with anger at His Excellency Faheem bin Jabar, and at Commonwealth’s Attorney Boyd Harrison, and at all the faceless tyrants who wielded their power from behind the barricades of their compounds and corner offices while they sent their minions out to do their dirty work. But this tyrant at least would be faceless no more. She knew how to confront him, and now at last, she knew where.

  Dusk was falling as she turned onto Hollow Road. She drove past Golden Oldies and the traffic cones blocking the driveway of Hollow House and pulled into the entrance at the Hermitage. As always the gates stood closed. On a brick pillar beside them was a security panel fitted with a speaker and a buzzer, and she leaned out the car window and pressed the buzzer. “It’s Leigh Huyett,” she shouted. “Let me in.”

 
A flicker of movement caught her eye. A high-mounted camera was rotating her way. She turned her face up and looked straight into the lens. The speaker crackled with the sound of the intercom line opening, but no one spoke.

  “You won’t get away with this,” she said to the camera. “Not anymore. Call your lawyer if you want, but let me in now or I’ll call the police. And you won’t have immunity here.”

  The intercom crackled again and shut off.

  She sat in the idling car and waited out the silence. The camera was still fixed on her face, but the speaker remained silent. He was pacing in his lair, she imagined, peering at the monitor and barking at Hassan, at Fadi, demanding to know why this barbarian was at his gate. She grew more and more resolute as she waited. She would have it out with the sheikh once and for all. This was America, and he needed to abide by the American rule of law. If he wanted to fight, he needed to do it in court like every other American husband. No more imprisonment, no more witness intimidation, no more espionage.

  “This is the end,” she said to the camera. “It’s over. Do you understand me?”

  There was no response. The silence stretched on even longer as the night deepened around her, and a small seed of doubt began to sprout. Could she have made a mistake? Maybe this wasn’t the sheikh’s country estate. But the compound fit Devra’s description exactly, and the proximity explained so much. Lindy Carlson’s flower delivery, the prowler sent to watch her from her garden that night. All so easy to accomplish when they were practically neighbors.

  She let out a frustrated breath. It was no use. Even if the sheikh was in there, he obviously had no intention of showing himself. The great and powerful Oz would not come out from behind his curtain. She shifted the car into reverse, and that was the moment the gates slid open.

  With a start she shifted again and gunned the engine forward before the invisible hand could change its mind. The tires rumbled over the cobblestones into the entry courtyard, and as the gates clanged shut behind her, one of the double front doors of the mansion swung open.

  No one came out. The door stood ajar like a spectral invitation.

  She hooked her bag over her shoulder and went up the steps. “Hello?” she called in and rapped her knuckles on the door.

  No reply. She crossed the threshold. The center hall was the size of a ballroom, two stories tall with a sweeping curved staircase and a black-and-white marble floor like a checkerboard. A crystal chandelier sparkled darkly overhead. No lights were on, and gloom settled like dust in the corners of the cavernous space.

  “Hello?” she called again. Hello hello, the echo answered. Double doors stood open on either side of the hall, revealing a banquet-size dining room on one side and a drawing room on the other. Both were decorated sumptuously but not in the gilt finishes and heavy silk trappings she saw at the Qatari embassy. These rooms were furnished in classic antebellum style with floral chintzes and Duncan Phyfe case goods. A Virginia plantation in the Jeffersonian model.

  No one was in either room, and her annoyance was mounting. Did the sheikh—or Hassan or whoever opened those gates—honestly think he was going to yell boo and scare her away? Or worse? He wasn’t on Qatari soil now; he must know he couldn’t get away with such strong-arm tactics here. Still—“I’ve called the police,” she yelled. “They’re on their way.”

  A sound came from the back of the house. She followed it past the staircase and through a swinging door to the kitchen. It had the look of an old-time locker room, a long narrow space with plain white wooden cabinets and antique tin hardware. It was a kitchen meant for servants, but where were they? The sheikh’s dinner hour was probably approaching. There should have been a cook bustling about to prepare his meal. There should have been a guard outside and a butler at the door.

  The sound came again, from behind a door at the far end of kitchen. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. Someone was waiting—­breathing—on the other side of that door. Suddenly she was afraid she’d made a mistake of a different kind. If the sheikh didn’t respect the rule of law where his wife was concerned, why should he obey it where Leigh was concerned? She should have called in John Stoddard before she attempted this showdown. She would now, she decided, and turned to go.

  She stopped as a long shuddering breath sounded from behind that door. “Who’s there?” she cried.

  No one answered. She walked slowly down the row of cupboards. The door at the end of the room was unlatched, and when she knocked on it, it swung open. Inside was a small windowless space; it might have once been a storeroom or walk-in pantry, but now it served as the security control room. Six video monitors glowed through the dim light, and hunched on a stool watching them was Stephen’s wife. Claire Kendall.

  Leigh teetered back. “Mrs. Kendall?”

  The woman let out another long shaky breath. “He warned me about you. He said you were too clever. That if you ever met me, you would figure out the rest.”

  “This is—this is your home?”

  “My sister’s. She lives in England.” Her fingers were on the keyboard, and with each dispirited tap of a key, the images on the security monitors flickered and changed. “She invited me to live here after Andy died. She had that wall built and those cameras installed. She said I’d feel safe here. But I don’t. I don’t think I ever will.”

  Leigh’s eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom. A narrow cot was pushed against one wall, and a table and chair against another. It looked like Claire Kendall was living in this single room.

  “He told me to keep away from you, he said I’d give it away, but he was the one, wasn’t he? He was never a good liar. I knew someone would hear the truth in his voice one day. And you heard it today, didn’t you?”

  Leigh’s fingers tingled with cold as the realization began to creep through her veins. Claire was talking about Stephen’s radio interview. His comments about home invasion and self-defense.

  “You wouldn’t understand. A strong, independent woman like you. You’ve probably never been afraid of anything in your life. But I was alone so much after the children were gone. All day and so many nights, too, when he was off on one of his crusades. And you don’t know the kind of people he worked with. Thieves and addicts and prostitutes and drug dealers. The kind of people who kill each other over pocket change. He brought that into our lives and then he dragged Andy into it, too. What was I supposed to do, alone in the house with those elements threatening to follow them home?”

  Leigh felt sick as she spoke the words. “So you got a gun.”

  Claire didn’t look at her as she slowly nodded. “We had one of our quarrels about it that very night. That’s why I was sleeping in the downstairs guest room. You have no idea how terrifying it is to wake in a strange bed in a strange room and have absolutely no idea where you are or what that sound is outside your door.”

  “It was Andy.”

  She started to nod again. Her head bowed, but it was as if she didn’t have the strength to lift it again to complete the nod. Her chin dropped to her chest.

  “It was Stephen’s idea to get rid of the gun.” Leigh felt numb as she said it. “To tell the police it was a burglary.”

  The images blipped on the security monitors like a fast-forward montage. Green and grainy shots of Leigh’s car in the courtyard. Hollow House up on the hill. The tractor road on the other side of the estate. The entrance by the gates. “Where are the police?” Claire cried as silent tears streamed down her face. She tapped furiously on the keyboard. “Why aren’t they here yet?”

  “I didn’t actually call them. You need to consult with counsel first.” Leigh pulled a pen and notepad from her bag and scribbled out a name. “Here.” She held out the page. “Here’s a Maryland lawyer you should call. He can advise you and liaise with the police there.”

  Claire didn’t reach for it. Both her hands were fixed to the keyboard, her eyes darting from one screen to
the next. Leigh placed the paper gently on the counter beside her.

  “There!” Claire hit a key and froze the images. “There he is!”

  “Who?” Leigh leaned over her shoulder and scanned all six monitors. A figure appeared on one of them, a grainy image of a man. He had something in his hands. A rifle, she thought for a heart-stopping second until she blinked and the image came into focus. It was a broom. It was Kip, sweeping the front walk of Hollow House.

  “That poor poor boy.”

  Leigh backed away. “Is there anyone I can call for you, Mrs. Kendall?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at the screen, moaning. “That poor, beautiful boy.”

  Stephen gave her too much credit. He thought she’d figured it out, and maybe she would have, once, before these last cobwebbed months dulled her faculties. As it was, all she did was stumble on the truth. She was so blind to the facts. Imagining that the Hermitage was Sheikh bin Jabar’s country estate when she should have remembered that on the day she first met Stephen, he wasn’t driving past the Hermitage—he was driving out of the Hermitage. Imagining that when Claire Kendall recognized her as the mother of that sweet girl and that beautiful boy, it was only because Stephen had told her about them or she had seen something on the news. It never occurred to her that she’d actually seen them, had watched them for months on the security monitors every time they visited Peter’s building site.

  Or maybe she never put it together because she didn’t want to believe it. Even now she tried to talk herself out of it. In her line of work she dealt in hard facts. She didn’t rely on the whispers of intuition. Claire never precisely confessed to anything other than her fearfulness. And Stephen’s hesitancy at the final question in his radio interview—Don’t you ever wonder whether a gun in your home might have saved your son’s life?—hardly constituted a confession either.

  She went online and reread the newspaper accounts of Andy’s death and Stephen’s speeches on gun violence and the long-form articles about the foundation. The facts all fit, but they fit with Stephen’s proffered explanation, too.