House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  “What new charges?” Pete said.

  Mateo scowled at the glass in her hand. “Manslaughter.”

  “What!”

  “Vehicular,” Shelby said, flipping through the pages.

  “A Class Five felony.” Mateo put the glass down on the hall table, clumsily, and it tipped over and spilled out a pool of red wine.

  “We had a deal.” Shelby looked up accusingly. “You agreed he was a juvenile.”

  “Subject to the prosecutor’s review. And that was before somebody died.”

  “Let me guess. Harrison? And I guess the timing was his idea, too, to cause the most possible pain to the family. It’s not bad enough they lost their daughter.”

  Pete wasn’t following. “Wait. Are you talking about Chrissy? She had an aneurysm.”

  Mateo thrust out her chin. “Sustained in the accident that night, the doctors say.”

  “No. That can’t be—”

  “Mr. Conley.” Hooper spoke in a low voice. “Is your son on the premises?”

  “Here,” Gary called, and he came into the foyer pushing Kip ahead of him.

  The low buzz of the crowd swelled louder. Someone must have overheard what was happening and spread the word. A nervous clamor filled the house, and Pete could feel the heat of a couple dozen bodies pressing in behind him.

  Kip stood blinking in the glare of the hall chandelier, his suit coat splotched with rain and his hair plastered to his skull. The cops each took him by an arm. “Christopher Conley, you are under arrest—” Mateo began.

  “No, wait,” Pete said. “This is a mistake.”

  They pulled Kip’s arms behind his back. “—for driving under the influence of alcohol—”

  “Dad?” Kip’s voice cracked on the word.

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry. We’ll get this straightened out.” Pete reached for him, but the cops pushed him aside as they snapped the handcuffs over the boy’s wrists.

  “—for driving recklessly or in a manner so as to endanger the life of another—”

  “Kip, don’t say a word,” Shelby said as the cops pushed him to the door. “Not one word.”

  “—causing the death of Christine Victoria Porter.”

  A sudden silence sliced through the hum and hiss of the funeral guests. The crowd parted in two waves as Leigh wobbled into the foyer. She stood swaying, with her fingers twisted in her pearls and her eyes unfocused behind the veil of the sedatives. Her gaze wandered around the room and skittered past Kip where he stood with his head bowed. The only sound in the house was the rhythmic drip of the spilled wine from the hall table onto the floor.

  “Peter?” she said, blinking hard.

  “Leigh.” He reached for her while one hand still stretched back toward Kip. His child was being arrested for killing hers, and he didn’t know where to go or what to do. “It’s a mistake. I’ll take care of this.”

  “You have the right to remain silent—” Mateo pushed Kip out the door.

  “Which he invokes. Right now,” Shelby said.

  Leigh’s fingers wound tighter in her necklace.

  “Anything you say can and will be used against you—”

  Pete followed as far as the porch. Kip stumbled on the front walk, and the cops hoisted him upright and held him between them as they strode to the patrol car. “Hold on a minute,” Pete yelled. “You’re making a mistake!”

  From behind him came a sound like artillery fire. He whipped around. Leigh’s necklace had snapped, and a hundred pearls were spraying out from her throat. They hit the stone tiles like shotgun pellets and scattered through the pool of red wine still seeping across the floor.

  Chapter Seven

  That afternoon Kip was transported to the Hampshire County Adult Detention Center in Arwen to be held overnight pending a bond hearing before the magistrate in the morning.

  That night Pete lay awake with the deadweight of Leigh in his arms and those strange words boomeranging through his head. Transported sounded like Kip was in chains on a ship bound for Australia. Detention was innocuous enough on its own—an hour after-school writing I will not disrupt class again a hundred times on the board. Nothing Kip hadn’t experienced before. But put the word Adult in front of it and it turned into Pete’s worst nightmare. His kid was in an adult jail, full of actual adult criminals.

  The next morning Shelby Randolph met him on the courthouse steps and strode inside ahead of him in slender high heels and a suit as crisp as new money. There was a security checkpoint to navigate like at the airport, and down the corridor beyond it, two heavy wooden doors to the magistrate’s courtroom. Other lawyers and family members were milling around in the pew-like rows of spectator benches.

  “Sit here,” Shelby said, steering Pete to a spot in the first row behind the railing. She swung through the gate and crossed the aisle to speak to a harried-looking woman who stood shuffling files at one of the two lawyer tables. The woman didn’t look up from her files, only listened for a minute and shook her head.

  A girl in flip-flops barreled into Pete’s row with three small children in tow. The children wore flip-flops, too, and their feet looked red and raw with cold. The court reporter was setting up his equipment at the foot of the magistrate’s throne-like bench, and another functionary was beside him, flipping through her own towering stack of files. Two of the children next to Pete started to scrap with each other. “Cut that out,” their mother hissed. “Or I swear to God, I’m leaving your asses here.”

  Shelby slipped into the seat beside Pete as a door opened at the front of the courtroom. The magistrate emerged to take the bench, and the first case was called. A lawyer popped up from his pew like a jack-in-a-box and hip-checked through the swinging gate to take his place at the defense table. Pete dug his nails in his palms at the sight of the first prisoner to be led out in manacles—a young tough with a fat lip and a shiner starting over his right eye who still managed to look like the other guy got the worst of it. Assault was the charge, bail was set, and he was led out again, all in the space of two or three minutes.

  The next prisoner was led out. “Daddy, daddy!” the children cried. The charge was unpaid child support, and the man didn’t glance at his family on his way in or out of the courtroom.

  Finally Kip’s case was called. “Christopher Conley,” the functionary mumbled, and Pete leaned forward on the bench as Shelby rose to the defense table. The door opened and Kip was steered into the courtroom with his wrists manacled in front of him. His head came up as he cleared the door, and his eyes darted wildly until they landed on Shelby first then on to Pete behind her. He walked in a strange shuffling gait that made Pete wonder if his legs were shackled, too. But when he came closer, he saw why: His shoelaces were gone and his shoes were flapping loose on his feet. His belt must have been taken, too. His pants sagged low on his narrow hips.

  Pete tried to muster an encouraging smile, but before he could pull it off, Kip turned his back to stand at attention beside Shelby. His suit coat was striped with deep vertical creases. He must have wadded it up for a pillow in his cell last night. It was his first real suit. Leigh had taken him shopping for it last fall to wear for his interview with the governor and next for his graduation. Now he’d worn it twice in between: for his sister’s funeral, and for his own bond hearing.

  The clerk read the charges in a flat voice. Operating a motor vehicle after illegally consuming alcohol. Operating a motor vehicle after his license was revoked. Driving recklessly or at a speed or in a manner so as to endanger the life, limb, or property of any person. Driving recklessly and without a valid operator’s license resulting in the death of another. Driving under the influence of alcohol and causing the death of another. Involuntary manslaughter.

  Manslaughter. That was another word that boomeranged senselessly inside Pete’s head. Chrissy wasn’t a man, she was a girl. Girlslaughter, they should call it, except that Kip hadn’t slaughtered her. He hadn’t done anything to her. She’d died of a ruptured aneurysm that c
ould have been sleeping inside her brain her whole life.

  The magistrate wasn’t there to hear about any of that. He wasn’t there to consider evidence or decide guilt. He had only one function, and that was to set the terms of Kip’s release. The female prosecutor rattled off some buzzwords. Second offense. Very serious charges. Potentially facing a long period of incarceration. Extreme flight risk. Shelby had a swift return for every lob. Christopher was a straight-A student. He’d been selected for a very prestigious internship with the governor’s office this summer. His father was a custom builder with projects throughout the county. His stepmother was an attorney who’d lived her whole life in Hampshire County. It was an upstanding family with deep roots in the community.

  “You headed to college this fall, young man?” the magistrate cut in. He was ancient, with deep hanging jowls like one of those dogs with the smashed-in faces.

  Kip cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Out of state?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Barely, Pete thought. Duke was only five hours away. He could drive there and back, overnight if necessary, to deliver Kip to his court appearances.

  “Then we’d better give you some incentive to come back and grace us with your presence. Bail set at one hundred thousand dollars. Cash or bond.”

  Those words boomeranged even more wildly. Pete had to put the figure up on his digital screen before he could believe he had the right number of zeroes. Kip whipped around with a look of pure panic in his eyes, and Pete tried to give him another encouraging smile, but he could feel his lips stretch into a rictal grimace as the boy was led away again. Who had one hundred thousand dollars cash?

  Nobody, Shelby explained as she led him out of the courthouse. Hence, the bail bondsman. She had to get back to her office for a meeting, so Pete was left on his own to stumble his way through the bonding process. It was late morning by the time it was done and another hour after that before Kip was released.

  Pete grabbed him by the arm as he came through the metal door. “Are you okay?” He looked him over, up and down. His shoelaces were tied, his pants were belted, but there was something wrong with his eyes. They couldn’t meet Pete’s.

  “I’m fine. Dad, the bail—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But how—”

  “You’re sure you’re okay? I mean, you want to see a doctor or anything?”

  Kip flushed. “Nobody touched me, all right?”

  Pete realized his thumb was digging into the boy’s bicep, and he let go and gave the spot an apologetic rub. “You want to get something to eat?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  The rain had finally ended, and the sun was sparkling on the bright white blossoms of the Bradford pears that flanked the walkway to the parking lot. Kip usually called shotgun and sprinted ahead to claim his prize, but today there were no other contenders. He trudged to the Volvo and slumped down low in the passenger seat.

  “Shelby said to call as soon as you got out.” Pete punched her office number into his phone, and he was pulling out of the lot as her voice came over the dashboard speaker.

  “Okay, first things first,” she said. “Kip, you understand everything you tell me is confidential, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Including from your father. If you don’t wish him to be included in our communications, we can talk later.”

  “Now’s fine.”

  “I need a verbal waiver of confidentiality.”

  “Yeah, I waive it.” Kip cut a quick glance sideways. “But not for my mom, okay?”

  Pete shot him a look. “Hey—”

  “She’ll only fall to pieces and repeat everything to Gary. I can’t deal with that, okay?”

  All true, but Pete knew how he’d feel if Kip cut him out this way. “She’s your mother.”

  Kip set his jaw. “It’s my decision, though, right?”

  “That’s right,” Shelby said. “The privilege is yours to invoke. And you can change your mind anytime, about your mom or your dad. Just let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  “On that subject, have you spoken to anyone about your case? The cops in the car, the guards in the jail, and the other detainees in the cells?”

  “No. None of them.”

  “You’re sure? If anyone’s going to claim a jailhouse confession, I need to know now.”

  Kip stared out the window at the passing countryside, where white board fences dipped and rose with the roll of the hills. “I didn’t open my mouth once.”

  “Good. Now let’s talk about what happens next.”

  It played like a canned speech from there, Criminal Procedure for Dummies. The first appearance would come in a week or two—apparently today didn’t count—and the charges would be formally read and Kip would enter his plea. Next up was the preliminary hearing, where the government had to lay out enough of its case for the judge to agree that there was probable cause for the arrest and bind it over to the grand jury. The grand jury would then deliver the formal indictment and a trial date would be set.

  “How long will all this take?” Pete asked, thinking, How much will all this cost?

  “Many months, which is why I wanted to talk to you right away. We could try to fast-track this by waiving the preliminaries and ask for a trial date this summer so Kip can get this behind him before he leaves for college. So let’s all think about that option soonish, okay?”

  They reached the highway, and Pete had to turn up the volume to hear her over the whipping of the wind and the whining roar of the tires on the asphalt. Winter wheat stood in bright green swaths on either side of the roadway, and the limbs of weeping cherries hung heavy under their bloom.

  “Even without a preliminary hearing, we can guess what the government’s case consists of. The DUI is probably unassailable, but causation is wide open. It’s the Commonwealth’s burden, remember, so they have to present evidence that the accident was the direct proximate cause of the death.”

  The death. Pete wondered if that was the way all criminal lawyers talked. Like the death in question hadn’t happened to any person in particular. It was just some abstract concept floating in space. The image came to him, of Chrissy, weightless and whirling in the void, and he had to close his eyes for a second, it hurt so bad.

  “There’re two prongs to causation in this case,” Shelby was saying. “First, it had to be your intoxication and/or reckless driving that caused the truck to leave the road.”

  “It was a dog,” Kip said. “A dog and a wet road.”

  “Exactly. If a sober and safe driver would have ended up in that ditch, too, then Chrissy’s death wasn’t causally connected to the alcohol you consumed. Pete, we may want to hire an accident reconstructionist on that point. Bookmark that, okay? The second prong of causation is that the accident had to cause the injury. I recommend we hire a neurologist to testify that the aneurysm could have been congenital or brought on by some previous injury.”

  “Wait, back up a minute,” Pete shouted at the dash. “How’d the hospital even know there was an accident?” That was something else that had bounced around his brain all night.

  Static buzzed through the silence over the line. There was silence in the car, too, until Kip said, “I told them.”

  “What?” Pete turned to stare at him. “Why?”

  “They asked me about any head injuries she might’ve had. So I told them.”

  “You never told us,” he said as Shelby said, “Told them what, exactly?”

  “She said she was fine. I didn’t think—”

  Shelby spoke over him. “Kip, what did you tell them?”

  He sucked in a breath to answer. “When we went off the road, we were airborne for a second. The truck kind of bounced across the ditch before we hit the tree. She might have hit her head then.”

  “But she had her seat belt on,” Pete said. The boys sometimes neglected to buckle up, but never Chrissy.

  Kip shr
ugged. “So did I, but I still bounced.”

  “What did you tell the doctors?” Shelby said again. “She did hit her head, or she might have?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you see her hit her head?” Pete asked

  “The only thing that matters is what he told the doctors,” Shelby said.

  But Pete repeated, “Kip, did you see her hit her head?”

  “No. But she was kind of rubbing it afterward, and I asked if she was all right, and she said she was fine.” He turned a desperate look on Pete. “I swear she said she was fine.”

  “We’ll interview the ER docs and find out what they think you told them. My guess is they won’t remember anything. So, okay, I’ve got some experts in mind. I’ll shoot you their CVs and we’ll discuss.”

  They drove past the intersection with Rose Lane. A new brick Colonial stood on the corner behind eighty thousand dollars’ worth of landscaping. It was one of the few spec houses Pete had ever built, and it represented more than a year of his life from start to finish. Typically he built custom houses, but this location was so prime he took a chance and bought the lot and built the house on his own dime—or the bank’s, at least. It took longer to sell than he’d calculated, but it was under contract now and scheduled to close in a couple weeks. He’d been expecting to clear more than a hundred thousand at closing. Except now he wouldn’t, because he’d just put up the property as collateral for the bail bond. Now the cash would go to the bondsman at closing, and Pete wouldn’t see a penny of it until this was all over.

  Shelby was still talking strategy. She wanted to send her investigator out to interview some of the other kids from the party, witnesses who might testify to Kip’s sober demeanor that night. He probably couldn’t beat the DUI, but they should try to head off any implication he was behaving in a wanton or reckless manner. She wanted names.

  “They won’t help,” Kip said.

  “Why not?”

  “The party got raided that night. Everybody’s in trouble now. Because of me.”