House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  The burden of proof, she meant, but every time Pete heard her say it—the burden’s on their side—he wanted to object. It’s on us. The burden’s all on us. The expense for sure, but also the fear, the loneliness, the shame.

  “And a congenital abnormality is only one alternative possibility,” the doctor said. “The aneurysm could have resulted from any previous injury. According to the medical history, the young lady sustained other injuries over the years. Two years ago she fell from a horse.”

  “She only broke her wrist.” Pete remembered that day. He was in the garage when he heard the cry from the pasture. Everybody heard it, and they all went running outside, Leigh, all three boys, even Shep, and when Chrissy looked up from the ground at the circle of frantic faces above her, she started to laugh through her tears. Oh, no! she said, cradling her arm. Am I dead?

  “But she could have bumped her head in that fall, too. Or any other time she fell from a horse. And there was another ER visit.” The doctor flipped through his notes. “What was it? A soccer injury?”

  “That was only a sprained ankle.”

  “Ah, but she played soccer. That’s the significance. Head injuries are common in soccer. She could have developed the aneurysm from a ball to the head and no one ever knew it.”

  “Hold on.” Pete turned to Shelby. “You’re not gonna bring up these other accidents in court?” Shelby was tapping the keys on her laptop, and she answered without looking up from the screen. “We have to. Any alternative explanation.”

  “But if Leigh thinks it was soccer or riding that did it—I mean, she was the one who got Chrissy into all those activities. If she thought—I mean—it’d kill her.”

  “Pete.” Shelby looked up then, and her eyes lasered across the table. “I understand your concerns. But Kip’s the one on trial here. He’s the one we need to protect.”

  Pete scrubbed a hand over his beard. Kip was watching him closely, like he was waiting for a call from a tennis line judge. “Yeah,” Pete said finally. “Of course.”

  Next Dr. Rabin delivered a tutorial on the geography of the brain, complete with slick, interactive illustrations projected on a screen. Eight hundred dollars an hour bought all the bells and whistles. He pointed out the cerebrum, cerebellum, brainstem, the hemispheres, the lobes, then pinpointed the precise location of Chrissy’s aneurysm in the left parietal lobe.

  “The left side?” Pete leaned forward in his chair. “And that’s where this contusion was?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how does somebody sitting on the right side of a vehicle injure the left side of her brain?” He snapped his gaze between Shelby and the doctor. “The right side of her head would make sense, if she bumped against the passenger window or doorframe. Or the top of her head if she bounced up against the ceiling. But what does she hit the left side on?”

  Shelby looked intrigued. “Unless she was on the left side. In the driver’s seat.”

  “Exactly.”

  The doctor interrupted to mention something he called coup contrecoup, how an impact on one side of the head would sometimes result in injury to the opposite side of the brain. “You should hire an ergonomics expert to model this,” he said. “Set up a test.”

  “Like a crash dummy test?” Shelby said.

  “Yes, and the dummy would have a simulated brain to register the points of injury according to the different impact scenarios.”

  She nodded and typed rapidly on her keyboard. “We’d video each scenario and have you testify about the location of each resulting injury.”

  “Which could prove Chrissy was the one driving,” Pete said. “Even if we never find the priest.”

  Despite the media blitz, the witness still hadn’t come forward. Pete didn’t like to think about why that might be. If the priest was willing to stop and help on the road that night, he damn well ought to be willing to step up and help now. Unless he was off on a missionary trip to Siberia. Unless he didn’t exist.

  The doctor completed his dog-and-pony show, gathered up his materials, and after a round of departing handshakes, left the room. Another expert shortly took his place. He was the accident reconstructionist, a licensed engineer about Pete’s age named Neal Grenier. His subject was more in Pete’s wheelhouse, but he got lost when the guy starting throwing around terms like EDSMAC and delta-V and yaw-plane analysis and coefficients of static friction. Like the doctor, he came equipped with some slick visuals—computer-generated simulations showing a dozen different scenarios of a truck swerving to avoid a dog. The variables were vehicle speed and distance from first sighting of the dog, which Kip estimated at a hundred feet. Not to mention dog speed. But in the end his conclusion was that the truck would not have left the road if it had been operated at or below the speed limit by an attentive driver with normal reaction times.

  “What if it was operated by an inexperienced driver?” Pete said.

  Grenier shrugged. “Inexperienced, distracted, intoxicated. All the same.”

  Pete sat back with a nod as Shelby rose to her feet. “Thanks, Neal. We’ll be in touch.”

  The expert packed up his materials and shook hands all around before the paralegal escorted him from the conference room.

  “We can’t use him,” Shelby said as soon as the door closed.

  “What?” Pete gaped at her. Not only did he spend thousands of dollars for that dog-and-pony show, but it was the best news he’d heard yet. “This helps prove that Chrissy was driving.”

  “Only as one of the possibilities. If the jury doesn’t buy it? Then all we’ve done is establish the others: that Kip must have been speeding and/or drunk. We’d be handing the Commonwealth the nails to build our own coffin.”

  “Mine,” Kip mumbled.

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t answer. “So that’s it?” he said instead. “We’re not going there? We can’t find the priest so we’re not gonna say Chrissy was driving?”

  “No, come on.” Pete turned to Shelby. “We’re not abandoning that.” He didn’t mean it as a question, and he was chagrined that it came out sounding that way.

  “We’ll cross that bridge later,” she said.

  It wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. He was hoping there wasn’t even a bridge to cross. Kip Wasn’t Driving. The End. Why wasn’t that the Commonwealth’s burden? he’d asked her earlier. Oh, it was, she explained, but they already met it when Kip told the officer he was driving. Now the burden had shifted to Kip to refute his own statement. The burden of proof, the burden of persuasion, the burden of fear and accusation. It was a good thing Karen wasn’t being included in these meetings, Pete thought, not for the first time. She would have collapsed under the weight of all those burdens.

  “Frank has some more ideas on that front,” Shelby said. “Let’s get him in here.”

  Her paralegal picked up the phone to summon him, and Frank Nobbin came in the room and set a laptop down on the table. Last week, he told them, he led a squad of investigators on a door-to-door canvass of the residents of Hollow Road, asking if anyone had been visited by a clergyman the night of the accident. None had, even though they hit every house along all five miles of Hollow Road. “Except that fortress next to your construction site,” he said to Pete. “Nobody answered the buzzer at the gate. I can’t find a telephone listing for that location either.”

  Pete wasn’t surprised. “I don’t think anyone’s living there.”

  “Remember I saw lights, though, that one time,” Kip said.

  “On a timer, I bet,” Pete said. “Same as the cameras.”

  “Cameras?” Shelby looked up. “Like CCTV?”

  Nobbin shook his head. “It’s a dead end. The cameras don’t rotate to the road.”

  “Besides,” Pete said, “wouldn’t the tape be erased by now?”

  Kip rolled his eyes. “It’d be digital, not tape, and if nobody’s living there, it’d be saved to the cloud. Like, forever.”

  “Let’s get a subpoena out.”
Shelby nodded at her paralegal. “Maybe the cameras caught something.”

  Nobbin obviously thought that was a waste of time. He was already moving on to his next agenda item. He turned to Kip. “Since you struck out trying to pick out the guy on that first photo array, I expanded the geographic perimeter of the churches. I also added in all the ordained clergy I could find who don’t have a church. They teach or do counseling or play golf, whatever.” He opened his laptop and slid it across the table to Kip. “Close to five hundred faces here. You need to go through them all.”

  Kip groaned as he opened the slide show on the screen.

  “I have to be in court.” Shelby glanced at her watch. “Take all the time you need.”

  Pete had a meeting with his own lawyer that afternoon, to review the closing documents for Rose Lane and to discuss the payment terms of the Millers’ contract and get a fix on his rights and remedies. Five hundred dollars later, the answer was exactly what he suspected. Yes, he had the right to the progress payment, but no real remedy. What was he going to do, sue the guy and guarantee that the next progress payment wouldn’t come either? He could stop work and lay off his crew, but even if he was willing to do that, most of the men would find other work and he’d lose them forever. Those who didn’t would collect unemployment, and he couldn’t afford the hit to his premiums.

  He called Kip on his way to the parking garage. He was ready to leave, too, so Pete arranged to pick him up on the corner in front of Shelby’s building. A couple of emails had come in while his phone was off, and before he started the engine, he scrolled through them. Scheduling matters. Money matters. Scheduling the money matters.

  But here was a surprise: emails from Zack and Dylan. They’d been staying in touch, but always by phone, not email. Now they’d both emailed, within minutes of each other.

  He opened Dylan’s first. He’d been thinking a lot about summer break. He had a great time working for Pete last summer, but he was thinking about something different this year. He had a line on a cater-waiter gig doing summer weddings and parties. Free leftovers! he wrote and tacked on a smiley face. He hoped this wouldn’t leave Pete in a lurch.

  Zack’s email was almost word-for-word the same. They must have called each other to coordinate their messages and synchronized their watches for the moment to push SEND.

  It would leave him in a lurch, but that wasn’t what stung. Those boys were like his own, and he’d been looking forward to having them around this summer. The plan was that they’d live at home with Leigh but spend all day with Pete on the job, and he’d harbored some hope that they’d bridge the two households. Give him an excuse to drop by now and then.

  He was supposed to drop by every day, that was what he thought they’d agreed on, but he hadn’t been back since that first day. He’d brought Kip along, thinking for sure she’d go out and coax him inside and they’d all have a nice dinner together. But the plan backfired on him, big-time. She stiffened up when she realized Kip was out there, thrust some fast-food coupons at Pete, and even turned away from his kiss. He made allowances at the time—he’d caught her off guard, she didn’t mean to be so frosty—but when she wouldn’t take his calls after that or answer his texts with anything more than OK, it became pretty clear that he needed to keep his distance for a while. The standoff would end, he thought, once the twins were home and working for him. He’d pick them up in the morning and drop them off at night and maybe bring along a pizza, and one of those nights, she’d tell him to come in and help them eat it. That was what he’d been counting on.

  But if the twins didn’t want to work for him, there was nothing he could do about it. They weren’t his own, Kip was, and the battle lines were drawn. Ours is the most perfectly blended family I’ve ever seen, Leigh used to boast, but they were completely separated now. Oil on top, vinegar down below.

  He exited the garage, paid the ransom at the booth, and cut across town to Shelby’s building. Kip was on the corner out front. It looked like he was being hassled by a panhandler. A white guy with dreads was up in his face, and the kid was shying away like a skittish horse. His big-time felon son.

  Pete tooted the horn, and Kip broke away from the panhandler and jumped in the passenger seat.

  “Any luck with the photos?” Pete asked as he eased back into traffic.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.” He tried not to show his disappointment. Or was that even the right word for it? Royally pissed off might be more like it, and scared shitless might come even closer. Because they couldn’t identify the priest, Pete was going to have spend more money he didn’t have hiring another expert and making a crash dummy video.

  “It gets worse,” Kip said. “I got an email from the governor’s office.”

  “Saying what?”

  He affected a pompous politician tone. “In light of recent developments, we regret that we no longer have a place for you in our summer internship program. Good luck with all your future endeavors. Fuck you very much.”

  “Hey,” Pete said, but the rebuke was mild. He knew the disappointment must be hitting him hard. The internship would have been a major résumé-builder for Kip, and the icing on top was that he would have spent the summer on his own in Richmond, in an apartment with the other interns. “I got an email today, too,” he said. “Two of them, in fact.” He handed over his phone.

  Kip’s face flushed as he skimmed the twins’ parallel messages. “So they’d rather wear a bow tie and pass canapés than spend any time with me.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just—they’re in a tricky situation.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Join the club.”

  They were rolling past the Washington Monument, the reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial, the most glorious sights in the country, but Kip’s eyes were firmly fixed the other way, looking out at nothing. Pete wondered what was hitting him hardest—losing the internship or losing the twins. Despite their spats and scuffles, they got along as well as most biological brothers did, and in any case they were the only brothers he’d ever have.

  “Anyway, it all works out,” he said as they reached the end of the Mall. “You don’t have a summer job, and I don’t have any summer help. But now we both do.”

  Kip groaned. Construction gofer work didn’t quite compare to hobnobbing with politicians. “But where are we—? Are we gonna live at the site all summer?”

  “Bathroom fixtures’ll be in soon. We’ll be in the lap of luxury.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Call your mom,” Pete reminded him, and he groaned again as he scrolled through his phone for her number.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was no right way to grieve, the Good Reverend Brooks Brothers told Leigh. But there must be a wrong way, she thought, and this had to be it. Sleeping all day, wandering the empty house all night, setting foot outside only to turn the horses out in the morning and to bring them back in at night. Speaking to almost no one.

  She’d managed to live in the world without Chrissy for more than thirty years. She’d managed for more than twenty years without Shelby, and more than forty without Peter. There was no reason why it should be so crippling to live without them now. She was her own person, an educated woman, strong and independent. She had to be more than the sum of her relationships with other people. There had to be something left of her on her own.

  She remembered spouting off once at a book group meeting, protesting that all their selected works seemed to have titles like The Watchmaker’s Daughter, The Photographer’s Wife, The Dry Cleaner’s Fiancée. Doesn’t the woman ever get to be something in her own right? she’d railed at her friends, who rolled their eyes at one another with a Here she goes again look. But it was a serious question. A woman shouldn’t be defined solely by who she was to somebody else.

  Leigh was a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. At the bottom of that list she would have added lawyer. But when everything else fell away, the bottom was what was left.

  So
, that was the answer. She had to work.

  Those words were her constant refrain in the weeks after Ted took off. She had to work because she had three children to feed and clothe and educate. She had a mortgage plus a construction loan plus a building contract already signed and sealed. She had to work to pay the bills.

  This time she had to work because she didn’t know what else was left of her.

  She couldn’t face the office, not yet, but every morning she forced herself to sit down at Mission Control in the kitchen and face the daily deluge of emails. She began to respond directly to clients and opposing counsel. She became more attentive to Polly’s summaries of phone messages and was able to dispatch most of them with a written reply. She put together a property settlement proposal, conducted all the negotiations in writing, and wrapped it up in the space of a week. She even managed to field a few phone calls, including one from Jenna Dietrich that Polly transferred from the office. It was placed, Polly told her, from a number marked WITHHELD.

  “Jenna!” Leigh said when the call connected.

  “Mom said to call you.” The girl sounded as sullen as a teenager caught out after curfew.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not telling. Anyone.”

  “Jenna. You know I won’t tell Hunter.”

  “He could make you tell.”

  “How? By waterboarding? Come on. I need to be able to reach you in case there’re any developments in the appeal.”

  “What developments?” the girl scoffed. “They file some papers, you file some papers, then a bunch of old men read them and decide what happens to my body. Right?”

  Leigh winced a little. That assessment wasn’t far off. “We’re going to win the appeal,” she said. “You don’t need to be afraid of that.”

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of.” Now the sullen teenager voice was dark with portent. She sounded like an actress in a movie melodrama.