House on Fire

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House on Fire Page 18

by Bonnie Kistler


  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Good news,” Shelby shouted through the speaker on Kip’s phone, and for two seconds Pete let himself hope. The priest came forward, Kip’s statement was corroborated, the Commonwealth’s Attorney was dropping all charges. He threw a quick glance beside him in the truck. Kip was staring at his phone with the same hope. His breath sounded in rapid little pants.

  “We got a trial date,” she said. “August tenth.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s exactly what we asked for,” she reminded him.

  “Right.” He glanced over again. Kip’s face had turned to stone.

  “So it’s all hands on deck,” Shelby said. “I’m setting up interviews with the ER doc and the neurosurgeon and the neighbor who called 911, and Frank’s circling back to the kids at the party. We’ll get all the witnesses nailed down.”

  Kip mumbled something. He was staring out the window, and Pete couldn’t hear him above the roar of the tires on the asphalt. Shelby didn’t hear him at all. She continued, “And we need to green light the ergonomics guy if we’re going to.”

  “The crash dummy test,” Pete remembered. This would be the simulation to determine whether Chrissy’s brain would have been injured in the left parietal lobe if she were riding in the passenger seat.

  “Right. Is it yea or nay?”

  It was yea if they believed Kip’s story, nay if they didn’t want to waste any more time and money on it. “Yea,” Pete said.

  “I’ll need a check.”

  “I’ll get it to you.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  The call disconnected, and for a mile there was no sound in the cab but the whoosh of the wind passing them by.

  “This is good news,” Pete said finally. “It means it’ll all be over in time for you to report to first-year orientation on the eighteenth.”

  “Yeah.” Kip didn’t turn his face from the window. “I wonder what kind of orientation program they have in prison.”

  “Hey! None of that, now.” Pete swung out his arm to swat him on the chest. It was the same way he always threw an arm out in front of the kids when he had to brake suddenly. Despite air bags, the instinct was still there. “Remember what Shelby said. Even if we lose, there’s no real chance you’ll do jail time.”

  “Right.”

  “We have two months of hard work ahead. You gotta keep your spirits up.”

  “Right,” Kip said again, and slumped so low in the seat he couldn’t even see out of the window he pretended to be staring through.

  Pete thought back to an article Leigh had shown him a couple years ago about the physiology of the teenaged brain. This explains everything, she said. Everything meaning the often mystifying behaviors of their assorted children. Until about age twenty, the article claimed, the neural connections between the prefrontal lobes weren’t fully developed. This supposedly led to wild mood swings, poor impulse control, the inability to foresee consequences, and easy distractibility. It read like a case history of his own son. He could never understand how someone so smart could do so many stupid things. It’s like you don’t think! he’d railed at him more than once. But if this research was correct, Kip was thinking, all right. It was just that the thoughts weren’t connecting from one side of his brain to the other.

  The boy’s silence lasted all the way back to the job site, and when he got out of the truck, he dropped his backpack by the door and headed up the hill to the woods.

  “Where are you going?” Pete called after him.

  “For a walk.”

  “Don’t forget. You’ve got that history paper to write.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.”

  A hundred pages in and only a week before the due date, Kip had ditched his original idea of examining what started the Crusades to focus instead on what ended them. That was the more interesting question, he told Pete. How did the imperative to wage war for the glory of God disappear? What made the Christians decide they didn’t need to bother anymore? What made the command of Deus Vult! become Yeah, whatever? But Pete didn’t see any reason to assume such fatalism. Maybe they simply found more productive things to do with their lives.

  “I’m heading out to do some errands,” he called as Kip trudged up the hill. “What d’you want for dinner tonight?”

  Kip kept walking. “Whatever.”

  Pete didn’t actually have any errands to run. What he did instead was drive home. Or rather, drive past home. It was what he did almost every night on his food run, just drive by and eyeball the place. Make sure no shutters were hanging loose or rain gutters overflowing. A quick glance to see if the car was in the garage or the lights were on in the house.

  It was yes to both today. It was more than a month since the funeral, and as far as he could tell, Leigh hadn’t gone back to work or anywhere else. He knew from their joint bank account records that she was keeping up with the bills, and either she’d hired a lawn service to fill in for Kip or she was cutting the grass herself. So it seemed she was functioning okay. She simply never left the house.

  There were things he wanted to get—some summer-weight clothes, now that warm weather was here, a spare coffeemaker, the TV from Kip’s room. But Leigh was always there, and he couldn’t bring himself even to pull in the driveway. He didn’t know how to go about it anymore. Would he use his key like he had a right to, or ring the bell like he didn’t? Obviously he couldn’t call ahead, not since she refused to answer his calls and the sum of their marital relations was reduced to text messages. OK? he asked. Fine. U? she answered. They’d have clearer communication with a string and two tin cans.

  He drove on. But fifty yards down the road, he slammed on his brakes. Romeo was out of his pasture again and stretching his neck to tear the leaves off the Markhams’ red maple tree. “Aw, dammit,” he muttered.

  He parked on the shoulder of the road and jumped out. Romeo flicked his ears in recognition and trotted his way, and he snagged him by the halter and led him back to the pasture and gave him a slap on the hindquarters to shoo him through the gate. Then he walked the entire perimeter of the fence. If there was a rail down, he couldn’t see where it was. Maybe Romeo could jump over all three rails now, in which case he should run a strand of electrified wire along the top. That was the remedy, if it was even still his right.

  The weeping cherry was dripping its pale petals onto the lawn, the azaleas were blooming along the back of the border, and the feathery sprays of astilbe added their own intense shades of hot pink and purple to the mix. But the serpentine curves of the flowerbeds were empty. Leigh always got the annuals in the ground by this date in May, but not this year. Pete hadn’t done his usual winter cleanup or spread any mulch either. Their garden wasn’t going to be much to look at this summer. The bird feeder was empty, too, though the birds were swooping in for a look anyway. Hope and habit died hard.

  A light flashed on in the kitchen, and he shrank back into the tree line like some kind of stalker. A Peeping Tom spying on his own wife.

  There she was, gliding past the big bay window. She was dressed in jeans and that green T-shirt he liked so much, the one that lit up the reddish gold in her hair and clung so nicely to the underside of her breasts. And great, now he was having sexual fantasies like a real Peeping Tom. Except his didn’t lead to a happy ending. His ended with their last night together and the shame of remembering how he pumped to climax while his wife lay sobbing beneath him. No wonder she woke up the next morning with a burning desire to live apart.

  He watched her another moment as she moved about the kitchen, and for a second he fantasized about joining her there. Sitting down together. Talking. But about what? The only subjects that mattered were Chrissy and the trial, and they were both minefields. One wrong step and everything would blow up.

  He crouched down out of sight and stole back to the truck.

  Dusk had fallen by the time he returned to Hollow Road. He switched on his headlights and they bored two cones of bright li
ght straight ahead but cast the roadsides into darkness. Which was why he almost missed the car pulling out of the Hermitage with its headlights off.

  He slammed on his brakes, and the car braked hard, too, barely in time. The two vehicles lurched to a stop with their front fenders only inches apart.

  Pete’s chest heaved, both from the near-miss and from the shock of seeing those gates open for the first time in ten months. Shelby’s process server struck out three times trying to serve a subpoena on this address, and it was everybody’s conclusion that the place was unoccupied.

  He threw the truck in park and got out. The car was a green Toyota and behind the wheel was a bald guy with a goatee. He lowered the window as Pete approached.

  “I just wanted you to know—your headlights are off.”

  “Oh, jeez.” He fumbled for the switch, and as the lights flashed on he started to close his window. “Thanks, man.”

  “While I have you.”

  “Yeah?” He stopped the window at half-mast.

  “I’m Pete Conley. I’m building the house next door?”

  The man looked blank.

  “I wanted to ask you.” The gates stood wide open behind the idling car, and Pete cut a quick glance that way. It was his first view inside the compound, but all he could make out in the dim light was an entry court paved with cobblestones and, set back a couple hundred feet, a mansion built of the same red brick as the perimeter wall. “By any chance do you know a priest who drives a big dark car?”

  “I’m just the Uber driver, man.” The man jerked a thumb over his seat back.

  Pete hadn’t noticed the woman in the backseat. She was a posh-looking blonde in a Burberry trench coat with her hair in a stylish up-do. She lowered her own window. “Sorry?”

  He repeated the question. “A priest or some other kind of clergyman? The reason I’m asking—my son was in an accident down the road last month, and the only witness was this priest or whoever. We’re really hoping to track him down.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Maybe your security system caught something?”

  She tossed a quick look at the camera mounted by the gates. “I don’t actually live here, you see. In fact, I’m just on my way to the airport now.”

  “Oh.” He glanced again through the gates and caught a glimpse of the front door—double doors, actually, topped by a broken pediment and flanked by columnar evergreens in big concrete pots. “If you could give me the name of the owner, I’ll contact him.”

  “It’s a corporation, I think. I’m sorry. I really must be off now. International check-in, you know.”

  Her window whined shut.

  Pete moved the truck out of the way, and the gates clanged shut as the Toyota pulled out and turned down the road in the other direction. He squinted at the mirror as the taillights receded. The occupancy of that estate had been a mystery for ten months, and meeting this woman did nothing to solve it. He looked back at the security camera. It was pointed down, to the window-level height of any vehicle that might approach. Frank Nobbin was probably right. It was a waste of time pursuing the footage.

  He put the truck in gear and drove on down the road and up the drive to Hollow House. Where Drew Miller’s silver Porsche sat glowing in the dark by the garage.

  It was weeks since King Midas had been by the site, and weeks longer since he made his last payment. If he was here tonight, it would only be to look for enough problems or defects to justify his default. Pete parked and headed for the back door, bracing himself for more of Miller’s carping and demands.

  A giggle sounded from somewhere in the dark. A huskier voice said something that elicited another light, teasing giggle. Pete stopped. Both voices were coming from the woods.

  A big expanse of undeveloped property ran behind both the Hermitage and Hollow House. It was owned by a nature conservancy and preserved into perpetuity, a feature that made the Millers’ lot particularly valuable. The conservancy tract included the woods at the top of the hill and an open field down the other side. Pete had never seen anybody back there except the Dietrichs, who mowed the meadow a couple times a year in exchange for the hay. If the local teenagers were using it as a lovers’ lane, Midas was bound to throw another fit.

  Two figures emerged from the gloom of the woods, and Pete started up the hill to cut them off—to warn them off, too—when he saw that one of them was his own teenager and the other wasn’t a teenager at all. She was Yana Miller.

  “Hey,” he called. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh. Hey,” Kip said.

  “We ben inwestigating,” Yana said in a la-di-da lilt. She was wearing a fluttery white blouse over skinny white jeans and her pale hair was long and loose down her back. As always, she walked in a weird loping gait, one foot crossing over the other in exaggerated steps like she was on a fashion runway. Kip stumbled along behind her like he’d forgotten how to walk altogether.

  “Just so you know, your property ends there.” Pete pointed to the line, but Yana didn’t even bother to turn around and look. Boundaries meant nothing to her.

  A door slammed behind them, and Miller came charging out of the house. “There you are,” he said, stomping up furiously to Pete. He was practically foaming at the mouth. “What the fuck, Conley? It looks like somebody’s living in there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kip stepped up to answer before Pete could. “Me and my dad are staying here to keep an eye on the place. Make sure everything’s secure. You know.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the Hermitage. “Just in case.”

  “Huh.” Miller squinted hard, like an unexpected thought was hatching out of the smooth shell of his head. “That’s kinda going above and beyond.”

  Kip gave an eager nod. “Dad likes to look out for his customers.”

  “Oh.” Slowly Miller’s hackles went down. “Well. I appreciate that.”

  Pete had to marvel at this kid sometimes. One minute he was tripping over his own feet in the presence of a female. The next he was de-fanging a pit bull. Two hours ago he was hanging his head in despair. The mysteries of the teenaged brain.

  “But it’s all cool,” Kip went on. “Turns out nobody’s even living there.”

  “Huh.”

  Pete held his tongue as Miller turned to study the place next door. Another thought seemed to be hatching, but after a minute he stirred himself and clapped Pete on the back. “Place looks good.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been making good progress this week.” Pete emphasized the word progress.

  “Yeah, yeah, that reminds me. I’ll get you that payment tomorrow.”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  “Yana, you ready, babe?” Miller squeezed himself behind the wheel of the car.

  She didn’t answer him. She simply turned and walked her loopy walk to the Porsche and, with a strange twitch of her mouth that was something like a parting smile, she folded her long legs and got into the car.

  Kip’s own mouth hung open as they drove out of sight.

  “What a fruitcake,” Pete said.

  “Are you kidding? She’s the hottest girl I’ve ever seen!”

  It was King Midas that Pete was speaking of, and he almost laughed at how Kip’s mind sprang immediately to the Queen. “Hardly a girl,” he said. “She must be thirty.”

  “Do you think her magazine spreads are online?” Kip didn’t wait for Pete to answer. He was already tapping the search terms into his phone.

  “Hey, listen,” Pete said. “You should stay out of those woods.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because they back right up to the neighbors, that’s why, and I told you to steer clear of the place, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Kip walked away with his screen lit up.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Once there were elaborate rules and rituals for mourning. The bereaved wore black clothes or armbands. They pulled the curtains and stopped the clocks and draped all the household mirrors. They hung a wreath of laurel tied
with black crape on the front door. They ordered stationery with a black border. For some strictly regimented period of time, they didn’t sing or dance or attend amusements or otherwise go out in society.

  Today the public rituals of mourning were no longer observed. Today the bereaved wore whatever color they liked and after three days, maybe seven, they went back to work. Any open display of grief after that was unseemly. Self-indulgent and inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others. It was like an amputee going out in public with an empty sleeve. He should wear a prosthetic whether it helped or not. Fill that emptiness with something artificial so as not to disturb other people.

  Karen called on a Friday. It was more than a month since the funeral, so she could skip the sympathetic preliminaries and get right to the point. She wanted to stop by the next morning to pick up Mia’s things.

  “I’m sorry?” Leigh said.

  “Her toys, her clothes. Anything she left there. If you could pack it up for me, I’ll stop by tomorrow.” When Leigh’s silence went on too long, she added, “She misses her things. Is there a problem?”

  Leigh swallowed hard. “No. No problem. I’ll have it all ready for you.”

  She had the box waiting in the front hall when Karen rang the doorbell the next morning. She was a frail-looking woman, very pretty, but with a timidity that made it hard to imagine she’d ever been audacious enough to have an extramarital affair. Though as Peter told it, she was simply a movable object in the path of Gary’s irresistible force.

  “Let me carry it out for you.” Leigh hoisted the box through the door and out to the driveway. She was hoping that Mia might be waiting in the car, but Gary was alone in his big Mercedes. He gave her a mock salute from behind the wheel.

  “Did you already drop Mia off?” Leigh asked as went around to the trunk.

  Karen gave a tight-lipped nod. “I didn’t want to. It’s really not safe there, with all those tools and nails and splinters. Not to mention all those strange men.”

 

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