A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  “Wait a minute,” Nick said, but she was already out of the car and had closed the door behind her. No way was her uncle leaving her alone in the car. He got out on his side, cursing under his breath. Annalise stood a few feet away, looking at him expectantly.

  “You follow me and let me do the talking.” Nick threw the day pack over his shoulder and started walking across the parking lot, Annalise following.

  They opened the door and entered a small waiting room furnished with overstuffed beige chairs and a scarred coffee table holding a spread of last month’s magazines. A frosted glass partition divided the waiting room from a receptionist’s desk. The partition was open, revealing a woman in a purple sweater set seated behind a desktop monitor. “Can I help you?” the woman asked.

  “I have a two o’clock appointment with Mr. Lapidus,” Nick said.

  A door to the right of the frosted glass partition opened, and a man in a gray suit and tie looked out. His hair was shorn close to his skull, and he had a long face that gave him a hangdog look. “Mr. Anthony? I’m Frank Lapidus. Come on back.” He stepped aside to let Nick walk through. Then he saw Annalise and narrowed his eyes slightly as if trying to get a bead on her. She ducked her head and followed her uncle through the doorway.

  Lapidus led them down a hallway to his office, which held two straight-backed chairs in front of a solid but battered mahogany desk. Plate glass windows behind the desk were covered by blinds which were shut. There were a few bookcases and a pair of Army green filing cabinets. A framed poster of Aruba hung incongruously on one wall, the only splash of bright color in the room.

  Lapidus gestured at the two straight-backed chairs and remained standing behind his desk until they sat, then lowered himself into his own seat. He glanced at Annalise, then returned his gaze to Nick. “May I see some identification, please?”

  Annalise stared at her uncle—what the hell?—but Nick reached into his back pocket, retrieved his wallet, slid his driver’s license out, and leaned forward to hand it to Lapidus. Lapidus took it and examined it closely, then handed it back across his desk. “You too, young lady,” he said.

  “I don’t have any,” she said. When Nick turned to look at her, she shrugged. “It’s in a sleeve on the back of my phone. I left it at your house.”

  Lapidus gazed at her, then shook his head. “If I were you,” he said to Nick, “I’d be careful driving. If a state trooper pulls you over and finds a teen girl with no ID in your car, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “She’s my niece,” Nick said. “Annalise Bashir.”

  She saw her last name register with Lapidus. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to her.

  “You said you had something for me,” Nick said.

  Lapidus nodded. “I apologize for asking for ID,” he said. “I was given specific instructions about passing this along.” He opened a desk drawer and took out a sealed envelope, then passed it across the desk to Nick. “I was to give it only to Jay Bashir, his wife, his daughter, or his brother.”

  Nick held the envelope but didn’t open it. “Who gave you instructions?”

  “Your brother,” Lapidus said, dipping his head slightly as if out of respect.

  Nick considered the envelope, then looked at Annalise. She nodded and he opened the flap, the tearing sound loud in the silent office. Nick reached into the open envelope and held up a flash drive, the kind you would plug into your laptop and save files on.

  “What’s on it?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lapidus said. “I didn’t look at it. He asked me to keep it safe, and I did.”

  Nick hesitated, then put the flash drive back into the envelope and dropped the envelope into his day pack, which was on the floor between his feet. “Why did he hire you, Mr. Lapidus?” he asked.

  Lapidus clasped his hands together on his desk. “I promise my clients complete privacy and confidentiality, Mr. Anthony.”

  “I’m sure Jay appreciates that,” Nick said coldly.

  Annalise stifled a gasp. Nick’s comment brought Lapidus up short, too, but only for a moment. “In this state, legally and ethically, it’s unclear whether the confidentiality between a private investigator and a client extends beyond death.”

  “Come on, Lapidus.”

  “As I said—”

  “What did my brother hire you to do?”

  Annalise wanted to scream at both of them to stop measuring their dicks, but she was distracted by a wastebasket in her line of sight. It sat on the floor at one end of Lapidus’s desk, and it was empty save for a single leaflet. Her eyes were drawn to the one word she could see at the top of the leaflet: HALLIWELL. She glanced at the two men, who were facing each other and clearly growing irritated. Neither paid her any attention. She leaned forward and fished out the leaflet, which was folded in thirds. Now she saw the full title: HALLIWELL—Securing the Future of Energy.

  “It’s not a person,” Annalise said aloud, still looking at the leaflet. Both men stopped arguing and looked at her. “Halliwell’s not a person,” she said, looking at her uncle. She held up the leaflet. He took it from her hand and scanned the front, then unfolded it, holding it so Annalise could see it as well. Inside were color photographs of a sunset sky behind the black outline of an oil derrick, a group of smiling men and women around a conference table, a field of wind turbines under a dazzling blue sky.

  “It’s an energy company,” Nick said, reading the text. “Here in Charlotte.”

  Lapidus tried to hide his annoyance and failed. He sighed and shook his head, then spread his hands across the top of his desk, like a dealer acknowledging the end of a card game.

  And a memory dropped into Annalise’s mind, bright and shiny as a new coin. “Did you talk to my dad on the phone last Friday, Mr. Lapidus?” she asked.

  Her uncle glanced up from the leaflet, but she ignored him, her eyes fixed on Lapidus. Her dad had been grilling chicken in the backyard, she remembered. She had gone outside to ask him when dinner would be ready, and Dad had been on his phone, pacing across the patio. “Yes, Hollywood,” she thought her dad had said into the phone. “That’s the one. Is the package safe?” Then Dad had spotted Annalise and smiled, pointed at the phone, and rolled his eyes. Just a minute, he had mouthed, and Annalise had nodded and gone back inside to watch TikTok videos and forgotten all about it. But now she realized her father had not said Yes, Hollywood. What he had actually said was Yes, Halliwell.

  Lapidus looked like he was sucking on a sour tooth. Then he smiled thinly at Annalise. She wasn’t sure whether or not the smile was an improvement. “I did, yes,” he said. “I had flown into Tampa and picked up something from him earlier that afternoon at the airport. By the time I got back to Charlotte, he’d left a voice mail asking me to do some digging into a particular company. I called him back to double-check the name of the company he wanted me to investigate.”

  “Why did he want you to look into Halliwell?” Nick said.

  “I don’t know,” Lapidus said. “He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. All I knew was he wanted me to look into Halliwell’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia.”

  “Did you find anything?” Nick asked.

  “Halliwell has contracts with Saudi Arabia to upgrade their oil and natural gas production systems,” Lapidus said. “They’re not alone. Lots of energy companies from the States and around the world do this kind of business with the Saudis.”

  “How much are Halliwell’s contracts worth?”

  “About a billion dollars.” Lapidus shrugged and gave a little smile, as if he found the amount ludicrous. “This isn’t top-secret information. Just some good old-fashioned research.”

  Nick nodded. “But it’s not readily apparent information either,” he said. “Probably mentioned in trade magazines or buried in a business prospectus.”

  Lapidus shrugged again but gave Nick a nod, conceding the point. “That’s the nature of my business,” he said. “I do mostly corporate investigation. No
divorce cases for me.” He glanced at his wristwatch, then stood up. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I have to share with you. I never even had a chance to tell Mr. Bashir any of this. I was going to send him a preliminary report on Monday.” Lapidus pursed his lips and shook his head. “Again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “What package?” Annalise said, and when Lapidus blinked slowly at her, she said, “What my father asked you about. The package. What was that?”

  “It’s what your father handed to me in the Tampa airport,” Lapidus said. “He told me to keep it locked away for him.” He nodded toward Nick. “It’s what I just gave your uncle.”

  THEY WERE BACK in the car but had not yet left the parking lot. Nick sat behind the steering wheel, brooding, while Annalise waited for him to say something.

  “I don’t like him,” Annalise said finally.

  Nick blinked, his thoughts interrupted. “What?”

  “Do you think he’s in on it or something?”

  “Who? Lapidus?” Nick shook his head. “He just wanted to show us he was the boss. You ever have a teacher who liked making sure everyone knew they were in charge?”

  “Mr. Montgomery,” Annalise said promptly. “Always tried to bust kids for dress code violations. He was practically a Nazi.”

  Nick gave a little smile. “Lapidus is no Nazi, but he’s an officious bastard.”

  Annalise smiled back. “Totally.” Then the smile slid off her face. “What did my dad do?” she asked, her voice sounding small in her own ears. “Why did he want this Lapidus guy to investigate some energy company?”

  “Your dad was a contractor,” Nick said. “Maybe he was thinking of working for Halliwell and wanted to check them out. Or maybe he’d worked for them before and learned something, something he wanted to know more about.”

  “Or maybe a lot of things,” Annalise said. “We don’t know anything.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Nick said. “We know what Halliwell is. We know your father hired Lapidus to investigate Halliwell’s ties to Saudi Arabia. And we know your father sent the flash drive to Lapidus for safekeeping and wanted one of us to have it.”

  “Yeah, but why?” Annalise said. “And what do you think is on that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “But I plan to find out.” He turned the key in the ignition, starting the car. “First, we try to beat five o’clock traffic and get back home.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Getting out of Charlotte proved harder that driving in, and Nick spent the better part of an hour grinding through ten miles of interstate before the logjam of traffic finally broke. After a short time of asking questions and wanting to know what Nick thought, especially about the flash drive, Annalise fell asleep, her Bass Pro Shop cap pulled down over her face.

  Nick drove west into the setting sun, squinting behind his sunglasses. Occasionally he would glance at Annalise, this teenager who had dropped into his life. She was growing to trust him, but she didn’t accept everything he said at face value. Grudgingly, he admired her for it. She would need that kind of wariness. His brother had never had that sense of caution. Nick signaled a lane switch and passed a pair of trucks, then smoothly returned to the right-hand lane.

  It grew darker, the sun behind the hills and the road rising to meet them, and Nick drove past the signs of gas stations and fast-food restaurants glowing in the dusk. He had ditched his sunglasses and paid attention to the road, but in his mind he was traveling a well-worn path through his memory, a path that paradoxically led to him right now in the present, driving his sleeping niece into the dark foothills as he brooded on the past.

  HE HAD MADE his brother take care of getting their mother to a doctor, made Jay be the responsible one for once. In a just world, they would have done it together. But in a just world, their mother wouldn’t need to be taken care of, wouldn’t be crazy.

  And to be fair, Jay had tried. He’d found a psychiatrist willing to see their mother, called their father to tell him about the appointment, arranged to show up unannounced at their parents’ home on the day of the appointment to convince their mother to go. He called Nick the night before to ask if he would come with him. No, Nick told him; if they both showed up, their mother would feel they were ganging up on her. This needed a soft touch. You can do this, Nick assured him—“You could sell cookies to Girl Scouts.” Jay laughed at that and said he would call Nick from the psychiatrist’s office.

  The next day Nick was in a senior seminar on the Crusades when a knock on the open classroom door interrupted the professor, and Nick along with his classmates turned to see the dean of studies in the doorway, along with a uniformed campus security officer. “Nick Anthony?” the dean said, wearing the expression of a man who did not want to find the person he was looking for.

  Nick ran every red light and stop sign on his drive to the hospital, which almost finished off his decrepit VW Bug—it shuddered to a stop in the UC San Diego hospital parking lot, wreathed in an oily, burning fume of exhaust. He found Jay standing in the cardiac intensive care unit, staring at their father in a hospital bed, tubed and wired to various machines. Their father looked gray and shrunken, like he wasn’t even a person but a fake prop in a movie. As Nick watched, a nurse turned off one machine, then another, the screens going blank.

  A doctor in blue scrubs told them their father had suffered a heart attack. He had been in the parking lot outside the psychiatrist’s office, trying with Jay to get their mother to go inside, when his heart had shut tight as a stone fist, dropping him to the ground. The doctor said they had done their best, but there was significant plaque buildup in their father’s arteries, and his heart had been too weak to continue.

  “They were shouting,” Jay said. He was still gazing at their father in the hospital bed. “Mom refused to go inside. She got in the car to go, but on the ride there she changed her mind. She was screaming at Dad in the parking lot and he shouted back at her, and then he just—dropped.”

  Nick was too stunned to cry, although he could feel his grief biding its time, waiting to overwhelm him. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.

  Jay raised his eyes to Nick’s, and his look of pain and fury made Nick take half a step back. Jay spoke as if every word were being ripped out of his throat. “She ran out into the street. I tried to stop her, but she was too fast. There was a bus—” Jay gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

  Horrified, Nick looked at the doctor, who held up a hand and shook his head. “Your mother wasn’t hit,” he said. “She ran in front of a bus, but it swerved and missed her. She fell down in the street and hit her head. We admitted her, and she’s under observation upstairs.”

  Nick looked from the doctor to his father in the bed, then to his brother, who stood with his eyes closed and jaw clenched as if trying very hard to keep some powerful emotion from erupting. Their mother was alive and their father was dead. How had this happened? Hesitantly, Nick raised a hand to put on Jay’s shoulder. “Jay, I’m—”

  Jay flung Nick’s hand away, his eyes open and burning. “Don’t you fucking say you’re sorry,” he said. “You left me there with them. You told me it was better if I did it alone. I needed your help, and you weren’t there.”

  The words were a knife sawing at his heart. “I’m sorry,” Nick said. He had never realized how feeble those words could be. “We … we decided it would be better if you—”

  “You decided,” Jay spit at him. “You told me to do it alone because you didn’t want to be bothered.”

  The doctor spread his hands. “I am so sorry for your loss,” he said, “but please, there are other patients, other families here. I can find you a room to talk.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Jay said. “There’s nothing left to talk about.”

  “Jay,” Nick said.

  “Don’t say another word. I’m done.”

  Anger kindled in Nick’s chest, burning through the shock. “This isn’t just about you. What about Mom? Don’t be d
ramatic and walk—”

  “Dramatic? Our father is dead, and you think I’m being dramatic?”

  “Hey,” the doctor said, raising his voice and his hands, and Jay turned away in disgust and stalked out, pushing past Nick to the door.

  Nick stood in the aftermath of Jay’s departure, head bowed, fists clenched. Slowly he realized the doctor was still talking to him, trying to usher him out of the unit. He turned back to what remained of his father, bent over the hospital bed, and kissed his cold brow. “Where is my mother?” he asked.

  The doctor hesitated, and Nick turned from his father to look at the man. “You said she was upstairs for observation,” Nick said. “Where?”

  The doctor rode with Nick in the elevator up one floor and walked with him down a long white corridor. A pair of closed doors barred their way. A sign on one door read PSYCHIATRIC WARD. Nick stared at the doctor.

  “We placed her on a seventy-two-hour hold,” the doctor said. “The admitting physician said she presented a clear threat to herself.”

  On the ward, Nick was led to a room where he found his mother in a hospital bed just like the one his father lay on one floor below, but his mother was restrained to her bed by her wrists and ankles. “Nick,” she said, so softly Nick almost didn’t hear her. “Nick, where is Bâbâ? Where is Jay?”

  Nick sat on a stool next to the bed and stroked his mother’s hair. “Shh, Mâmân,” he said, watching tears well up in his mother’s eyes. His own eyes were dry, his heart cold. He made himself smile gently. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  IT WAS FULLY dark by the time they got to Cashiers, the lights of the town center briefly illuminating the interior of the car and then swallowed by the black trees as they passed. By the time he turned onto the gravel drive and trundled down the hill to his house, Whiteside rose like a pale ghost of a mountain above them.

  Annalise was muttering in her sleep when Nick pulled into his carport. In the overhead light when he opened the car door, she looked flushed, and her forehead was warm beneath Nick’s wrist. She was disoriented for a moment when he woke her up, her features bleary with sleep, and he half carried her inside and to the bedroom. He helped her take her sneakers off as she lay on the bed, then got her to swallow two Advil before she turned onto her side and fell asleep. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, watching her breath evenly, then turned off the light and closed the door.