Slow Burn

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

  “Wonderful news,” Dorothy Custer said when she greeted me at her door a couple of hours later.

  “Undoubtedly,” I said.

  Karen Feinberg and Gabby Donatelli were already in the living room, sitting on the couch, as Dorothy escorted me in. She took the chair where I had sat three weeks earlier, the day she told me about Eddie Miller.

  “Here you go, Andy,” Gabby said, patting a space beside her.

  “I’ll stand,” I said.

  “It’s been all over Channel 7,” Dorothy said.

  That it had. Suzanne had pulled out all the stops, and the other stations were breathing her fumes. In addition to the exclusive interviews she’d already scored with Samantha and the family members of the students who’d been killed, she still had Samantha’s video by herself, since Columbus police had not received their own copy until an hour or so ago, and were not releasing it yet.

  Just as I’d planned.

  “So Aaron will be coming home,” Dorothy said.

  “Not right away,” I said. “Things have to happen first. Has to be a motion to set aside the conviction. Prosecutors are going to look hard at the fact he doused the house with gasoline. He could still face serious charges.”

  “But not life in prison.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “So it’s going to be all right,” she said.

  “Old Hickory and Young America,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your husband’s book.”

  “What about it?”

  “Frank altered the will. Directed the royalties to Aaron. And the movie rights.”

  A look of surprise crossed Dorothy’s face. She didn’t say anything.

  “I missed the significance of that at first,” I said.

  “There is no significance,” Dorothy said. “It is what it is.”

  “On the surface, maybe. But he did that against your wishes.”

  She said nothing.

  “Without telling you, in fact. Right after the accident.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “He did it because of what Molly had told him,” I continued. “Or Mary, as she calls herself. When she worried he might not make it.”

  I looked at Gabby again. “Most of it’s spelled out in your personal bankruptcy filing. Frank’s medical bills and home health aides drained your savings, and his retirement income wasn’t enough to restore your funds.”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “Actually, it is,” I said. “That’s because you needed the money left to Aaron. But as long as he remained in prison, it was a target for family members of the victims of the Orton Avenue fire. As soon as they found out about it. Until a couple of months ago, that was a foregone conclusion. It would have taken a court battle, but what judge would have sided against the families? But when you found out about Miller, everything changed. If Aaron’s innocent and out of prison, challenging the codicil is much easier.”

  “That’s not true,” Dorothy said.

  “You needed Aaron to be innocent to survive financially,” I said.

  “Nonsense.”

  “And that galled you, didn’t it? To have him proved innocent. Because of what he meant to you.”

  “Meant? He’s my grandson. I was the only one willing to take this on.”

  “Yes, he is,” I said. “But he wasn’t Frank’s grandson, was he?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I couldn’t figure out who Aaron reminded me of, the time I met him in prison. I knew I’d seen him before. Then I saw a picture of Mike, when I went to visit Molly. I mistook him for Aaron. They were like brothers.”

  I tried to meet her gaze. She looked away.

  “But that’s where I had it wrong, wasn’t it? They weren’t like brothers. They were brothers.”

  “No.”

  “What triggered it was looking at the dust jacket for Frank’s book. His picture on there. I didn’t realize it at the time. He’s the spitting image of Aaron.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” Dorothy said.

  “This was the truth Molly told your husband, after the accident. What made him change the will.”

  “No.” But so softly I could barely hear her.

  “The secret she’d lived with all those years.”

  Dorothy sat silently, hands in her lap.

  “Aaron was Frank’s son,” I said. “Wasn’t he? Fathered with his former student, Molly. Or should I say Mary, his name for her. An affair outside of class that lasted until she married Mike? Or was it a lapse, one last fling?”

  “Does it matter?” Dorothy said.

  “And Molly kept it hidden all those years. Until the end. When she felt Frank had to know. And that’s what finally got to Mike, wasn’t it? Because she had to tell him too. Tell him the truth about Aaron.”

  “She didn’t have to do that,” Dorothy said.

  “Learning the truth about his son, and then learning that his father had changed the will. Because Frank thought that with Aaron, he had a beneficiary he could count on. Not like his other son. The one who could never measure up.”

  Dorothy said nothing.

  “It wasn’t his business going under,” I said. “He couldn’t bear his father’s betrayal.”

  Dorothy stayed silent for a few moments longer. Then she said, “Such a Custer.”

  “What?”

  “I told him a thousand times to slow down. He never listened.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. I’d looked up Frank Custer’s driving record that morning. Multiple speeding tickets over the years.

  “He never listened,” Dorothy said. “Custers never do.”

  55

  I’d had my fill of domestic tranquility and left the house a minute later. I was leaving it to Gabby to drop the final bomb: that she had heard through Janet Crenshaw that the victims’ families were already making plans to pursue the bequest on the grounds that Aaron was still guilty, at the very least, of attempted murder. And if that didn’t work out, Crenshaw had the civil lawsuit against the realty company to keep her busy. Grudgingly, she’d admitted that the information I’d forwarded her that day in her office about the smoke alarm batteries—that they were knockoffs with a tenth of their advertised duration—might be useful to her cause.

  In any case, I had one more thing to do. And believe it or not, it was going to be the hardest conversation of the day.

  Suzanne answered on the second ring.

  “I’m a little busy right now,” she said. “You won’t believe how crazy it is. I just got off the phone with 60 Minutes. But what’s up?”

  “I need one more favor,” I said.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “It’s a big one.”

  “Forget it. Shoot.”

  I told her what I wanted.

  There was a long pause.

  “No,” she said at last. “Anything but that.”

  “You can do it,” I said.

  “No. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “You have to,” I said. “We have to. It’s the only way. I’ve thought it out.”

  “You’ve thought it out? You?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “No.”

  “Pretty please?” I said.

  The phone went quiet, and for a moment I thought that, once again, she’d hung up on me. Then I heard a sound and realized she was crying.

  It’s a gift, this way I have with women.

  56

  I groaned when John Mellencamp’s voice awakened me from a dead sleep the next morning. I rolled over, looked at the phone. Five a.m. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. My kidneys and ribs and groin ached from Peirce’s beating. My throat hurt from the smoke I’d inhaled. My heart was pinched from the look on Dorothy Custer’s face as I’d left her house, and my stomach was roiled in anticipation of what I’d told Suzanne
. So why in the world was I awake so early? I lay back and collected my thoughts. Then sat up quickly. I remembered what day it was.

  And then I remembered something else. I’d been dreaming, just before I woke up. Dreaming about Anne.

  I made it to her parents’ house by 6:15. She was waiting just inside the front door and came out as soon as the lights of the rental hit the garage. She was wearing a dark training suit and carrying a bag of supplies.

  “Good day for a run,” I said.

  “Chilly,” she said nervously.

  I dropped her off as close to the start of the half marathon at Broad and Front as I could get before the cops turned me away. Start almost exactly by the Neil House Inn. I kissed her on the cheek and wished her good luck. She returned the gesture with a real kiss, put her hand on my own cheek, and said, “Nice job not getting killed.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Because I would have killed you myself if you hadn’t been around to cheer me on today.”

  “Comforting,” I said.

  I parked in a surface lot south of Main, unloaded my bike, rode back to Front for the start, then began riding north as fast as I could. I was still out of shape and my aforementioned aches and pains weren’t helping, but, mindful of Anne’s chipper farewell, I knew it was not a day for excuses. Pedaling furiously around town for the next ninety minutes or so, I was able to see her at three different points of the race, including the loop around Schiller Park in German Village, where I cheered hardest of all. A few minutes later, as I watched her charge up High toward the finish at Columbus Commons, a look of determination on her face I recalled from my own past, I allowed myself a quick, hopeful thought about our future together. She finished in well under two hours. Top ten in her age group. We toasted her effort with cups of Gatorade in the park, where we met up with her parents and Amelia.

  “Bravo,” I said.

  “I can hardly wait to run it next year,” she said.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Because next year,” she said, wrapping her arm around my waist, “we’re doing it together.”

  57

  You wouldn’t think politics would come into play with a cause as noble as housing the homeless. Yet divisions in philosophies regarding the best way to approach the problem, coupled with splits in strategies over funding, had plagued local efforts for years. The whole enterprise seemed destined for disaster until a decade earlier, when the warring parties came together over the creation of a separate development wing for fundraising. Even that wasn’t problem-free, with heated arguments over the name of the thing. But though the title that was proposed was a mouthful, no one came up with anything better, and so Raising Optional Opportunities Foundation, or ROOF, came into being. Soon its annual May gala was a must-attend event on central Ohio’s social calendar.

  By noon Saturday Suzanne had called twice to back out. Both times I talked her down. I never directly said she owed me, although I could have gone that route in fairly good conscience. 60 Minutes was the tip of the iceberg of the attention she was getting, starting with appearances on all the major cable news stations, a trip to New York the following week for Good Morning America, talk of a made-for-TV movie and a book deal. Not to mention rumblings of another Emmy.

  There was also the other little matter pertaining to D. B. Chambers, which had come out in the hours after his death hit the news. People had started talking. The Happy Meals he’d been selling at McDonald’s had contained more than toys. If customers knew the code words, they got a baggie of heroin along with their McNuggets. Chambers may have graduated from the Fourth Street Posse, but trying to take care of his daughter, he hadn’t gotten very far. Suzanne broke that story too, in time for the 11 p.m. Friday newscast.

  At 3:30 Saturday afternoon I picked up my rental tux. At 4:00 I walked into Zettler’s Hardware on Main to run an overdue errand. I picked up Anne at her parents’ at 5:00 and at 5:30 sharp arrived at the Columbus Athenaeum, an old Masonic lodge pulling duty these days as wedding and banquet reception central downtown. I got out, handed my keys to the red-shirted college kid on valet duty, walked around to the other side, and opened the door for Anne. She exited nimbly, scarcely showing the effects of the race, wearing a purple dress with a black belt and silver earrings. I was moving not so nimbly and promised myself for the umpteenth time that day that injured dog or not, I was turning over a new exercise leaf on Monday.

  Murphy pulled up a minute later, and we stood on the sidewalk while he performed the same routine with Suzanne. She was wearing pearls, black pumps, and a sleeveless red dress that fit her like a smile on a wedding day and that I hadn’t seen her in for a long, long time. Since the last time we’d been at the Athenaeum together, as a matter of fact.

  “In for an inch,” she said, reading the look on my face.

  We walked up the front steps together, Suzanne and I, her arm in mine, as I’d suggested. Anne and Murphy were right behind us. Once inside, through the oak-paneled lobby, down the hall, then upstairs to the big theater space, round tables filling the room, jazz combo on stage. Room got a little quiet as we entered. Phones rose in some of the braver hands to capture the moment. Flashes from a real camera went off. I moved us farther inside, making sure everyone saw us. Then I turned and walked us to the bar, a long, slow, deliberate stroll. It seemed to last my whole life up to that point. I could feel Suzanne trembling beside me. I got us both a glass of white wine. Murphy and Anne did the same. About that time Roy and Lucy approached, and each got a beer. Then we all clinked glasses as a ballroom full of people gawked.

  “Appetizer?” I said.

  “Love one,” Suzanne said.

  She moved toward the tables where the food was laid out. I put my hand out gently.

  “Why don’t you let me bring you something?” I said.

  “Why?”

  I nodded in the direction of the crowd beginning to surge toward her.

  It had been a few years back when everything went to hell between Suzanne and me. At that other ROOF ball.

  And for the record, I don’t really blame the kid who filmed it all.

  We’d been at Lindey’s, as a matter of fact, when I proposed. Before heading to that year’s gala. The rock was big, three carats, and it sparkled the way big rocks do. Suzanne looked fantastic that night. I was happy, very happy, as I slipped the ring on her finger, but in the old, entitled way. Happiness with a dash of swagger. People in the restaurant greeted my proposal and Suzanne’s acceptance with light applause.

  After arriving at the ball we’d had more drinks. The people who knew who I was treated me the way they always did at such events, polite with an undercurrent of disdain. The ones who didn’t just ignored me. Neither category of people could get enough of Suzanne. The combination of her looks, her charm, her growing celebrity as a reporter—and that night, the ring on her finger—drew small, excited crowds. I was pleased for her. Pleased with a dash of swagger.

  After a while, I found myself on the edge of the chattering circles. Understanding, at first. But then a little resentful. Soon, more than a little peeved. And then I was alone by the bar.

  That’s when I saw her. Blonde, curvy in an athletic way, wearing a smashing little black dress. I bought her a drink. Why not? It’s not like I was needed at the moment. She was chatty. Didn’t seem to know who I was. One of the Columbus Crewzers, the dance squad that cheered on the city’s professional soccer team at halftime. Cheering a bit of a euphemism for their dance moves. Since disbanded, but still around in those days. Yes, they were. She was there with a player, a Brazilian midfielder in the twilight of his career but still rich enough and good-looking enough to keep girls like that on his arm. Like Suzanne, he’d been corralled by well-wishers. Now his date, like me, was alone by the bar. Except we were together.

  Somehow we ended up stepping outside the hall. Toward the cloakroom. Then into the cloakroom. And suddenly we were doing more than chatting. I told myself it was wrong, but the enti
tlement trumped all. How dare I be relegated to the periphery? After what I spent on that ring? And of course, the dress. That little black dress.

  Like I said, I don’t blame the kid. He had his instructions. Film mini-interviews with all the celebrities. Which I guess I still was at that point. Saw me leave, followed me out, didn’t put two and two together. Camera running, captured Suzanne stalking out of the ballroom. Beelining for the cloakroom. Had someone tipped her off? Or did she just know me too well? Doesn’t really matter. He got it all. Suzanne shouting at me. At the Crewzer. The Crewzer shouting back. The Brazilian’s arrival. More shouting, on all sides. Then the ring comes off Suzanne’s finger and flies through the air and bounces off my chest and the camera follows Suzanne in tears as she runs from the lobby. Wearing the same red dress she’s wearing tonight.

  And then the long, slow pan back to me.

  It’s gotten 4.2 million views to date. Apparently some kind of record.

  Suzanne took a small step back. People were flocking toward her. Toward the woman who broke the story, the real story, about the Orton Avenue fire.

  “I’m not sure I can handle this,” she said.

  I leaned a little closer, smelled the fragrance I still remembered from all those years ago, thought about something from our time together, then kissed her on the cheek.

  “You were born to handle this,” I said. I turned and guided her by her elbow toward Murphy. They took a few steps forward and soon were enveloped by fans. I took a last look at Suzanne. Then I felt an arm through mine and turned and smiled at Anne.

  “Wouldn’t mind an appetizer myself,” Anne said. “Half marathon and all, you know.”

  “Top ten in your age group,” I said. “You deserve something special.”

  “Darn straight.”

  “Reminds me.”

  “Yes?”

  I reached into the left inside pocket of my tux. Anne’s eyes widened in what might have been alarm but might have been something else, too. The opposite of alarm. Tucking that thought away for the moment, I pulled out the house key I’d had copied at Zettler’s that afternoon, now residing on an Ohio State keychain.