A Gala Event

by Sheila Connolly

  “So why didn’t Ken and Sharon get out? And Sharon’s mother?” Meg asked.

  “Look, Meg, I don’t have any answers,” Jacob protested. “I was just sick about it when I heard. And I did get a copy of the fire inspector’s report—had to, before I could authorize any insurance payout. The fire happened in the middle of the night, and everybody—except Aaron, it seems—was in bed, asleep. They never left their beds. Had to have been smoke inhalation that got to them.”

  “Even Virginia?” Meg said. “She was on the ground floor, in a different part of the building. She may have had trouble getting around, but she wasn’t crippled. Surely she could have climbed out a window, under the circumstances.” Ideas were beginning to swirl around in Meg’s mind, each one less pleasant than the one before. “What if . . .” she began.

  “What, Meg?” Lydia asked. Now both Lydia and Jacob were looking at her.

  “Jacob, do you believe that Ken was planning to use the water heater to start the fire? Does that fit with the fire report you saw?”

  Jacob held up both hands. “No! I had no reason to think that. It’s possible, in theory, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. I only knew what I’d read about in reports. Ken would have to have done some digging on how to rig it up, and this was before the Internet made it all so easy. If I had to guess—and this is just a guess—I would say he would have rigged it to look like an electrical fire. I mentioned all that knob and tube stuff. If you leave it alone, it’s safe enough—although a lot of insurers nowadays won’t touch a house that still has it—but when people start messing around with it, adding new lines and such, that creates problems. Plus it’s easy to access. A lot of it would have been exposed, running through the joists in the basement—easier than trying to go through plaster walls. People cut into it for new circuits, but something jiggles loose and nobody notices, so it arcs. I don’t recall what Ken’s looked like, but it was an old house, right? And a lot of people could have messed with it over time.

  “Bottom line? Ken could’ve planned to start something where he could get at it, in the basement—it’d be easy to loosen a few wires or strip off some of the old insulation. Loosen the gas feed to the water heater and set up the old wires to arc, it would all go boom.”

  “But how would he know when it would start?” Lydia asked.

  Jacob shook his head. “I don’t know. But isn’t it kind of irrelevant? That part of the basement was where Aaron started the real fire, which did the job just fine. They found his drug-making equipment there.”

  “Let’s leave Aaron aside for now,” Meg said. “Say Ken rigged it so that the wires shorted out and started the fire, and then went back up to bed to wait for the fire to start. Would it have been fast? Or maybe he decided to take a late shower, which would trigger the burner in the water heater? Could that work?”

  Lydia looked at her with dismay. “What an awful idea! But assuming that was true—which I’m not ready to do—why didn’t he get out? Why didn’t Sharon notice smoke or something?”

  “Maybe they were waiting until the fire was fully engaged,” Meg said. “If they called it in too early, the fire department might have been able to put it out too soon, and good-bye big payout.” Which didn’t explain how Sharon could have let her own mother die.

  Lydia now looked vaguely ill. “What if . . . Oh God, I hate to say this. What if he drugged his wife and his mother-in-law so they couldn’t sound the alarm, either? Sharon might not have been in on it, and I seriously doubt her mother was. Virginia was already suspicious of Ken, and maybe she shared that with Sharon. Or maybe Ken wanted them both out of the way.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “But something went very wrong, didn’t it? Because Ken didn’t get out. Was that just stupidity? I mean, he knew there was a fire, but he waited too long to leave? He didn’t count on smoke or gasses or whatever knocking him out first?”

  “That’s a good point, Lydia,” Jacob told her. “Most people don’t know that it’s inhaling the smoke and gasses that kills most people in fires. And it can act fast. Ken might have thought he had more time than he did. And worse—sometimes burning materials like fabric can create cyanide gas, which is definitely poisonous. If they had some fancy curtains in the room below, that might have been a factor.”

  “What an awful way to die,” Lydia whispered.

  “Ladies,” Jacob said firmly, “these are all guesses. You can’t prove any of this. Yes, Ken upped his policy on the house not long before the fire, and on himself and his wife. The investigators knew that; I didn’t cover up anything. But I don’t think he planned to die. From what I remember of the guy, he was too sure of himself, and he thought he could find a way out of the fix he was in. He probably believed that with the insurance settlement he could make everything right—it’s like a gambling addiction, you know? But the point is, we’ll never know. I mean, who the heck would’ve done an autopsy on any of them to see if there were drugs in their system? Or looked through the rubble for an old wire? They had their suspect: Aaron Eastman set the fire, then sat on the lawn and watched the place burn down with his family in it. He was a sick kid.”

  “But what if he didn’t?” Meg protested.

  “Is that why you’re here? Aaron Eastman comes back from jail claiming that he was innocent?” Now Jacob looked angry. “He was a punk and a druggie. And he loved rubbing his dad’s nose in it.”

  “He was a kid, and he was acting out!” Meg threw back at him. “That doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “Okay, so maybe it was an accident. Maybe he lit up something or was cooking something in the basement and it got out of hand. But that fire happened, and he was the only one who got out, and he wasn’t touched by the fire. What else can you think?”

  Meg had to admit that what Jacob said made sense. Even if Ken had rigged up some way to start a fire in the basement, no one had seen evidence of it at the time, and obviously there was no way to look now. Likewise, even if he had drugged the two women to keep them quiet, it was kind of late to do an autopsy on either of them. “Did the insurer pay out?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah, after the fire marshal cleared things. Funny thing is, Eastman was so deep in debt that just paying off the bills ate up most of the money. The kids kind of scraped by on a separate policy that the grandmother left to them, rather than to Ken or Sharon. Of course, the investors, like me, never saw a penny, because Ken had long since cleared out those accounts, and besides, he hadn’t left any official records for his fund, or if he did, they went up in flames. It was one big Ponzi scheme, you know? The new money coming in went right back out to pay those great dividends to new investors, and once he had us hooked, he didn’t even pay those, except on paper. You’d think we would have known better, but Bernie Madoff got away with it a long time after that. People who are making good money from a fund don’t look too hard at it. We were greedy. And most of us never talked about it with one another—we didn’t even know who else was taken in. Anyway, it made us look stupid, and there was nothing to be done about it once Ken was dead. Why do you two care? What’s it to you?”

  Meg and Lydia exchanged a glance. “Jacob, to be honest, Aaron still doesn’t remember what happened,” Meg said. “He’s not looking to blame anyone, and he’s done his time. He just wants to know whether he really did what everyone keeps telling him he did.”

  “Good luck with that!” Jacob said bitterly. “Why can’t you just accept the simplest solution? The kid was high on something, and he set a fire, either deliberately or accidentally, and he got out and saved his own skin, without even considering the rest of his family. That’s cold. He should pay for that, and he did. And there’s no way to prove anything different happened. Sure, his dad was a con artist and cheated a bunch of people out of some money, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die. And his mom and grandmother?”

  “But that’s the point, Jacob. Aaron can’t believe he could have done so
mething like that, or let it happen, and frankly, after spending time with him, I can’t, either.”

  “Prison changes people,” Jacob countered.

  “Yes, but not usually for the better. He doesn’t claim to have found God, but he’s clean and sober, and he still doesn’t remember. He’s just looking for answers.” And if he doesn’t find any, what will he do? Meg wondered, not for the first time.

  Jacob stood up. “Ladies, I’ve said all I have to say. I think you’re on a wild-goose chase, but I guess your hearts are in the right place. Now, if you’re not looking for insurance, I have work to do.”

  Lydia and Meg stood up as well. “Thank you for speaking frankly, Jacob,” Lydia said. “We’ll be on our way now.”

  Once outside, they went back to the car and sat inside it, but Lydia didn’t start the engine. “What have we learned?” she asked Meg.

  “We figured out that Ken Eastman was fleecing his neighbors, which might be a motive for someone to kill him. We now know that he took out a whole lot of insurance not long before the fire—that can’t have been cheap, and he was already living on the edge. He may or may not have had a hand in starting the fire, but it’s unlikely that he planned to die in it. And we have no proof of anything at all. I hate to tell Aaron that we’ve failed, but I can’t think of anything else to ask.”

  Lydia sighed. “We can look at all the documents again. Maybe we missed something the first time through. Or maybe something will look different, given what we know now. Or maybe we could check out who the executor for the estate was—Lori was old enough, but I can’t imagine anyone trusting her to handle it. But I want to go visit Rachel and the baby first. You sure you don’t want to come?”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Meg said.

  “Margaret Corey, you’re family! Rachel will be happy to see you. Come on, don’t you want to meet your new niece by almost-marriage?”

  “Oh, all right,” Meg replied, smiling. “But we have to wait until school lets out, right? Why don’t we have lunch first? And I’d better check in with Seth and make sure the house is still standing.”

  “That works for me,” Lydia said.

  Back at the house, when Meg and Lydia walked into the kitchen, Meg was relieved that the pounding had stopped. She picked her way across the floor—which Seth had thoughtfully covered with a drop cloth to protect it from dust and chunks of old plaster—and peered into the space he had assigned to the powder room, which at the moment consisted of a lot of mismatched old boards and yet more holes, both old and new. “Hello in there?” she said loudly.

  “Down here,” Seth called out from the basement below. “What do you think?”

  “I’ll reserve judgment for now. Your mom’s here. We were going to get some lunch before she has to pick up the kids. You want anything?”

  “I ate early. I want to push through on this and at least get the room framed in and the pipes in place. You go ahead.”

  Lydia was already poking around in the refrigerator, looking for something edible. “I vote for grilled cheese, because it’s the only thing you have all the ingredients for.”

  “Sorry—the pickings are kind of slim for lunch, but I’ve been feeding the hordes all week. Tomorrow’s grocery day. You want to make them, or shall I?”

  “I can do it. Why don’t you take another look at the fire report, now that we’ve heard what Jacob had to say?”

  “Good idea.” As Lydia set a pan on the stove and started slicing cheese, Meg retrieved the file and brought it back to the kitchen table, wiping the dust away first. It seemed so slim. She read through it once, twice, and studied the simple diagrams. Then she decided she needed to consult with someone who knew something about building construction, since she had one on hand.

  “Seth?” she called out through the gaps in the floor.

  “Yo. You want something?” he replied.

  “Yes. I need your construction expertise. It’ll only take a minute.”

  In response, Seth came tromping up the cellar stairs. “What’s up? Hi, Mom.”

  “We talked with the Eastmans’ insurance agent this morning,” Meg told him. “I’ll fill you in later, but one thing we discussed was how the fire might have started. He thinks—very unofficially—that Ken Eastman might have somehow set the fire himself for the insurance money. I know you don’t know the house, but if you were going to set a destructive fire in a colonial house that had had electricity added a century or more later, not to mention a couple of changes in heating and plumbing systems, how would you do it?” She handed him the diagram from the fire report.

  “Did Jacob talk about the wiring?”

  “Yes—still a lot of old knob and tube. Probably a real mishmash with a lot of alterations.”

  “So that’s an obvious choice. Just short it out somewhere and wait.”

  “But Ken Eastman waited too long. If he knew the fire was going to happen, why didn’t he get out?”

  “You told me the fire started in the basement, right?” Seth asked.

  “Yes, in the furnace room, apparently, or near it. That’s where Aaron had his little den, because nobody else ever went down there. If Dad had been there that night tinkering with the wiring, Aaron would have noticed, or Dad would have backed off and waited for another day. Aaron seemed to think that his father didn’t know he hung out there.”

  “Where was the water heater?” Seth asked.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” Meg told him. “Wouldn’t it be near the furnace?”

  “Not necessarily. Plus they probably were installed at different times. Could have been somewhere else in the basement. You have the plans for the rest of the house?”

  “Here.” Meg handed him some additional sheets of paper, copies taken from the police and fire reports.

  Seth spread them out on the table. “Okay, here’s the furnace room in the basement.” He pointed. “The parents’ bodies were found in their second-floor bedroom. Which happens to be directly above the furnace room.”

  “Yes, but two stories away. So what?”

  “The house had an oil furnace, which had replaced a coal furnace, which wasn’t original to the house, which was built with fireplaces only, remember? Like yours. Which means that the heating ducts were added after the fact, probably in the later nineteenth century.”

  “What’s your point?” Lydia said, flipping sandwiches in a skillet.

  “Any smoke or gas from a fire in the furnace room or that end of the basement—which was a small, enclosed space—would have risen right up the badly sealed flues to the bedroom. And the parents might not have noticed. Or if they were planning to torch the place, they might have smelled smoke but were going to wait until the building was fully engulfed before exiting. Which only makes sense if the furnace room was not where they set the fire, because that would reach them too quickly right above. They hadn’t counted on the fumes, which would have knocked them out.”

  “Jacob mentioned that the fumes could be deadly. So that gives us a new theory. Aaron started the fire by accident and got himself out, then passed out. We assume he wasn’t thinking straight, if he was thinking at all. The parents were either asleep and were overcome by the smoke, or they thought they had more time because Ken thought he knew when the fire was going to start. Only we’ll never know because all the evidence was destroyed, except for some bits and pieces of Aaron’s meth lab or whatever scattered around.”

  “You know you’ve just claimed that there were two separate fires—Ken’s and Aaron’s—in the same part of the house, at the same time?” Seth said, his voice skeptical. “Isn’t that a pretty huge coincidence?”

  Lydia set a plate with the grilled sandwiches cut into halves on the table and sat down. “What if Aaron’s fire was small and he thought he’d put it out, so he went outside to get some air? But the fire wasn’t out, so it triggered Dad’s little booby trap, an
d Dad wasn’t expecting it then? He really was asleep, and then the fumes got to him?”

  Seth sighed. “Ladies, I know you mean well and you’re trying to help Aaron, but you’re spinning this out well past ridiculous. I’ll buy that Kenneth Eastman may have wanted to destroy his house, but I find it hard to believe that he would have wanted anyone to die, including himself. He could have rigged it for a time when no one was home. Well, maybe his mother-in-law, because it sounds like there was no love lost there.”

  Meg slumped in her chair. “I know, you’re right. But Dad wasn’t an arson expert or even an electrician. Maybe he messed up on the timing. Or maybe something Aaron did set it off too soon, when Dad wasn’t expecting it. And there’s no way to prove any of this.”

  “Exactly,” Seth said. “Sorry, Meg.”

  Lydia added, “At least we’ve increased the probability that the fire was an accident, and Aaron didn’t mean to kill anyone. We can’t fault the fire investigators, because if the fire started in the basement, there would have been nothing left to look at, apart from some fragments of Aaron’s glassware or whatever. This fire happened in October, right?” When Meg nodded, she said, “So Dad would have known that the two older children were safely off at school, and he probably assumed Aaron would be in his room. Maybe he even checked, and Aaron sneaked out later. But Ken had no reason to think that Aaron was in the basement. And if Ken had reacted normally to the fire, he would have roused his wife and son and his mother-in-law and tried to get everyone out, wouldn’t he? So we can deduce that he didn’t react because he was already incapacitated by the fumes. Aaron was arrested and tried, the insurance company paid out, and that was the end of the story.”

  “So why was Aaron convicted on such inconclusive evidence?” Seth demanded.

  “Mainly because he got himself out,” Meg said quickly. “And he never showed any emotion during the trial. If he’d acted devastated, maybe the jury would have been more sympathetic. Plus the judge might have been biased, because she’d been part of Ken’s investment scheme—something that never came out.”