House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

Kip didn’t answer. Shelby had drilled that into him. Wait for the question.

  “The night of the accident, you told Officer Mateo you were driving, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Later, at the station, you also told Sergeant Hooper you were driving, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told your father you were driving. You told your stepmother you were driving. I expect you even told your attorney you were driving.”

  “Objection,” Shelby said mildly without rising from her chair. “Privilege.” Garcia went on without skipping a beat. “Today you told this jury you weren’t driving.”

  Kip waited.

  “So please help us all understand. Are you lying now or were you lying then?”

  “Then,” Kip said. “I was lying then.”

  “To protect your stepsister.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re blaming her now, but you were supposedly protecting her then.”

  “I’m not blaming her. I’m just telling the truth about who was driving.”

  “Your fourteen-year-old stepsister.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who didn’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Right.”

  “The one who never before drove on a public road at any time in her short life.”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “The one who’s dead.”

  Kip sat silent, and Garcia fixed his gaze on him and waited.

  It was a drill, Pete reminded himself from his seat in the first row of spectator benches. This was only a drill. Kip needed to be prepared for the torture of cross-examination, and Shelby had trotted out one of her firm’s best and brightest to play the role of torturer. “It’ll be expensive,” she warned when she called to set this up. “I’ll have to charge you for my partners’ time, too. But I think you’ll find it a valuable exercise. It’ll help expose any weakness in our case.”

  She already knew what the weakness was. Kip’s credibility. The only point of the exercise was to make them see it, too.

  “Is there a question,” Kip said finally, and Shelby sat up and made a jagged note on the legal pad in front of her.

  “Yes, there’s a question. Do you expect this jury to believe you lied to protect your dead stepsister who can’t even be here to defend herself?”

  “Yes. I do.” Kip looked at the empty jury box. “ ’Cause if they thought a dead person could be here to defend herself, they’d be crazy.”

  “Your Honor,” Garcia said, pained, while Shelby made another angry note.

  Shelby’s other partner stirred in his perch on the moot court bench. He was obviously working on his own files while he sat up there and pretended to preside. “Answer the question, young man.”

  The AC was pumped up too high in the practice courtroom. It was fine for Shelby and her partners in their suit coats and judge’s robe, but Pete was wearing a golf shirt, and Kip looked like he was shivering in his T-shirt and shorts.

  “Okay, yes. They should believe it,” he said. “ ’Cause it’s the truth.”

  “You don’t have a very close relationship with the truth, though, do you, Christopher?”

  “I don’t think it’s a spatial thing.”

  The fake judge didn’t need to be prompted to scold this time. “Mr. Conley, answer the question. Without the sarcastic commentary.”

  Kip looked up at him, then back at Garcia. He shrugged. “I think I have the same relationship with the truth as anyone else.”

  “Yet at school you lied repeatedly to your teachers and principal, didn’t you?”

  “If repeatedly means more than once, then probably. The same as any other kid.”

  “They amassed quite a file on you at St. Alban High, didn’t they, Christopher?”

  “I wouldn’t know. They never let me see it.”

  Garcia walked to counsel table and picked up a thick sheaf of papers. “Would you like to see it now?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because you know what’s in it, don’t you? Cutting classes, smoking on campus, an incident when you stole a farmer’s goat and put it on the roof of the gymnasium?”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Shelby put in. “High school disciplinary infractions are hardly relevant to the charges before the court.”

  “Goes to credibility, Your Honor. Because in every single incident, the defendant lied to the administration about his involvement.”

  “Objection overruled. Answer the question.”

  Kip set his jaw as he looked back to Garcia. “There was never any—what d’you call it?—adjudication. So who can say whether I was lying or not?”

  “Oh, is that your definition? It’s only a lie if you get caught?”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “Then let’s talk about a time or two when you did get caught. When you lied to Officer Mateo and Sergeant Hooper on the night of your arrest, that wasn’t the first time you lied to the police, was it?”

  Shelby had prepared him thoroughly for that question, but Kip still flinched a little as he answered. “No.”

  “Let’s go back to last year. July eighteenth. You lied to the police then, too, didn’t you?”

  Pete sat up suddenly. He’d never heard about anything happening last July.

  When Kip didn’t answer, Garcia gave a prompt. “You and your friend Brad Farrell?”

  Kip squirmed a little in the witness stand. “Yes.”

  “Tell the jury what happened that night.”

  Kip looked at the empty jury box. “I, uh, I told the officer I didn’t know anything about some missing lacrosse sticks.”

  “But you did know, didn’t you? Because you’re the one who broke into the sporting goods store and stole them!”

  Pete felt dazed. How did he not know about this?

  “I did it on a dare,” Kip said mulishly. “I didn’t really steal them. I didn’t have any, what d’you call it, intent to keep them. I mean, they were girls’ lacrosse sticks.”

  “Which you tossed in a Dumpster before leading the officer on a ten-block foot race?”

  “He let us go. He knew it was only a prank.”

  “You weren’t let go the next time, though, were you?”

  “Objection,” Shelby said.

  “I’ll rephrase. January first of this year. At two a.m. You lied to the police then, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Different officer, same question. Have you consumed any alcohol tonight? And what did you tell him?”

  “I said no.”

  “That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

  “I was scared.”

  “I understand. You were scared, so you lied. Tell me, were you scared the day you were arrested for manslaughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you scared when you had to spend that night in jail?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess. Tell the truth. It was the scariest night of your life, wasn’t it?”

  Kip looked down at his lap as he answered. “Yes.”

  “So the very next day, the day after the scariest night of your life, that was the first time you came forward with this story that it was your stepsister who was driving. You were scared, so you lied, isn’t that right?”

  “It’s not a story. It’s the truth.”

  “You made it up, didn’t you? You even made up a witness who wasn’t there.”

  “I didn’t make him up. The priest was there.”

  “The priest was there,” Garcia mocked him. He stepped back from the lectern and spread his arms wide. “Then where is he now?”

  It was too cold in this room. Pete couldn’t take it anymore. He passed a note to Shelby as he left the room. Tell Kip to call me when he’s done here. Because Pete already was.

  He rode the elevator to the lobby and stepped outside into the scorching afternoon sun. It was too cold inside and too hot out. Welcome to summer in the city. Hot town, isn�
��t it a pity. The brim on his ball cap did little to block the glare of the sun, and even after he crossed over to the shady side of the street, he felt no relief.

  Leigh called it from the start. You want to believe it, so you do. It was like believing in God. There was more hope for the world if you believed in a higher power, so you made yourself buy into it. There was more hope for Kip if he wasn’t the one driving, so Pete made himself buy into that, too. Worse than that, he committed to it—with Shelby and her team of investigators, with the high school principal, and worst of all, with Leigh. He’d staked their marriage on the word of a kid he didn’t believe half the time himself.

  He needed to see her. That was the only thing he could be sure of. There were things he should do, phone calls to make, a truckload of home electronics to track down, but all he wanted was to see Leigh. Her office was only a few blocks away, and it was almost five o’clock. If she would come down out of her tower, they could meet for a drink someplace. He took out his phone and pressed her office number before he got cold feet on the blistering sidewalk.

  “Ms. Huyett’s office.”

  “Hey, Polly.”

  “Pete! Well, hello, stranger! Where you been keeping yourself?”

  So—she didn’t know they were separated. Leigh hadn’t told her. He tried not to read too much into that.

  “I guess you’ve been busy, huh?” she said when he didn’t immediately answer. “Building some big fancy house.”

  “Next one’s for you, Polly.”

  “Ha! Don’t I wish. Listen, Leigh’s been in a deposition all day over at One Franklin. It’s probably breaking up about now if you want to try her on her cell.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  “And don’t be a stranger, you hear me?”

  “You bet.”

  One Franklin Square. He knew that building—it was one of the few high-rises in Washington—and he knew the route she’d take from there back to her own office. He remembered a sidewalk café along that route. She’d have to go right past it.

  He jogged across the street and up another block to the café. All the tables were empty on the pavement; it was too hot to sit outside even under the big yellow market umbrellas. He went in and ordered two iced teas and carried them out to a table in the deepest shade he could find. He ought to call her or text her to meet him here so she wouldn’t see it as an ambush. But if she knew he was here, she might take a detour to avoid him. He left his phone in his pocket.

  The glasses sweated and so did he. It was after five by then, and every building up and down the street was spitting out its hourly workers in staccato bursts of their revolving doors. The people wilted as they walked, but they all kept moving in a steady stream to the Metro station on the corner or the bus stop down the street or the parking garages all over town.

  Twenty minutes later, the ice was melted and the tea was warm when his phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out. Kip’s name was on the screen. “Yeah.”

  “I’m done. Where are you?”

  That was the moment he spotted her. She was walking down the pavement toward him in her rhythmic high-heeled stride with her phone to her ear and her briefcase swinging at her side. “Wait out front,” he said to Kip. “I’ll get there when I can.”

  “It’s ninety-five frigging degrees—”

  He disconnected and stood up at the table. She’d gotten her hair cut since he last saw her, and it fell in two smooth curtains sweeping the shoulders of her black suit jacket. He usually thought black was too severe for her, but he had to admire the way it lit up the gold in her hair. He used to joke about the day all that gold would turn to silver, the same way she used to joke about the inevitable retreat of his hairline. Aging wasn’t so bad if you could face it together.

  She saw him then. He could tell by the instant deceleration of her footsteps. “May I call you back?” he heard her say into the phone. “Yes. Yes, I’ll take care of it.” Her hand fell to her side. “Peter,” she said. “What brings you to town?”

  That was the subject he’d hoped to avoid. “Um, we had a meeting with Shelby.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “Can you sit for a minute?” He waved a hand at the glasses. “Have some iced tea?”

  She looked at her watch. “For a minute.” Before he could pull out the chair beside his, she took the far seat and dropped her briefcase into the one between them. She placed her phone directly in front of her on the table.

  “You look good,” he said, meaning wonderful, gorgeous, I miss you.

  She shrugged off the compliment. “I got my hair cut. And I see you grew a beard.”

  “Yeah. For the duration.” He remembered his ball cap then and jerked it off. His hair was sweaty under it and plastered to his head. He didn’t know how she managed to look so cool in this heat. “I’ve been hoping to see you.”

  “You know where I live.”

  “You never seem to be home. Working late nights, I guess?”

  She nodded and took a sip from her glass.

  “Saturdays, too, seems like.”

  “I’m always home on Sundays.”

  “That’s my day with Mia now.”

  “Oh.” Her expression softened. “How is she?”

  “She’s fine. She misses you.” It was Chrissy she really missed, but he didn’t dare speak her name to Leigh. This was the closest thing they’d had to a conversation in two months. He wasn’t going to rock the boat, not when it was already riding so low in the water.

  “I miss her, too. Maybe you could bring her by some Sunday?”

  “Sure.” That could work. Kip was used to spending Sundays alone now. They could have a nice peaceful day together, he and Leigh and Mia. Kip would only be the invisible elephant in the room, instead of the visible, audible, palpable, unavoidable one he otherwise was. He forced a smile. “Hey, what do you hear from the old sea dogs? They having a good summer?”

  “I’m not sure. They called last week from Newport and went on a big rant about the one-percenters and their mansions and their fancy cars. I think their rich clients are getting to them.”

  Pete snorted. “Tell me about it.”

  “Speaking of—how’s the Millers’ house coming along?”

  “We’re in the home stretch now. It’s looking good. You should come by.” But he remembered what happened the last time she came by. One look at Kip and she went roaring off so fast she made dust clouds fly. He’d always be between them. He was there now, as solid a barrier as her briefcase on the empty chair. It was time to stop pretending he wasn’t. “Listen, Leigh. I wanted you to know— This business about who was driving? That’s off the table. It won’t be part of the defense.”

  She looked down. With the tip of her straw she submerged the lemon wedge in her glass and watched closely as it bobbed to the surface again. “He’s recanted?” she said finally, her eyes still on her tea.

  “Well, no. But the thing is—he’s not going to testify, and there’s no other proof, so that’s just—gone.”

  She looked up with a puzzled squint. “Why wouldn’t he testify?”

  “This thing with Shelby today? It was like a mock trial to see how he’d do on the stand. And he totally blew it.”

  “Oh.” Slowly her face changed. He’d watched it happen many times before, this transformation, when her everyday face of wife and mom dissolved and she reorganized her thinking and put on the face of a lawyer. “Let me guess,” she said. “The prosecutor was played by Shelby’s partner, Jonathan Garcia?”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s a superstar. He teaches master classes in cross-examination all over the country. The actual prosecutor won’t perform anything like Jonathan.”

  “It was Kip’s performance that was the problem.”

  “But remember drama club? He always flubbed his lines in dress rehearsal and absolutely shone on opening night. He needs the pressure of the real thing to do his best.”

  “Maybe.”

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nbsp; “Come on. That boy can charm the birds out of the trees. He’s his own best witness.”

  But he wasn’t the boy Leigh remembered. Whatever charm he once had was gone, along with all of his self-confidence. “Shelby thinks it would be a mistake.”

  “Well. I shouldn’t second-guess her.” Her gaze shifted to the pavement and the commuters rushing past them to get home to their families. “She may have her own reason to keep him off the stand.”

  “If he’s lying, you mean.”

  “And if she knows he is. It’s called suborning perjury. She could be disbarred.”

  “Right.” It was what he’d guessed.

  “But that’s assuming this even goes to trial. I assume there’s a plea offer on the table?”

  He nodded. She watched him, waiting for the rest of it, but there was no way he was going to put that on her. The silence stretched out like a filament between them until she dropped her gaze to the phone on the table. She stared at it like she was willing it to ring and reprieve her.

  Incredibly, at that moment it did. She let out a huff of relief like it was a bell ending a boxing round. She answered without even bothering to look at the display. “Leigh Huyett.”

  Her face changed again. A slight frown of confusion came first. “Yes?” Then she blinked, and it was like a mask slipped off. Her tight lawyer face was gone, but so was her everyday face. Her eyes seemed to sink into her skull, and her mouth hung so slack that for a second Pete was afraid she’d stroked. “Yes.” Her voice was faint. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  She didn’t hear him. “No,” she whispered. Her eyes fell shut. “I haven’t heard from them since—since last Thursday.”

  “Leigh—what?”

  She didn’t answer, either him or the caller whose agitated voice was shouting, “Hello? Hello?” Pete took the phone out of her limp fingers. “This is Pete Conley. Who’s this?”

  “Conley? Hey, you’re my next call. Number two on the contact list.”

  “What list?” He reached for Leigh’s hand. Her skin was ice-cold. “Who is this?”

  “Harvey Brodsky. I’m dockmaster up here at the Camden Yacht Club. The Porter boys left their float plan with me, and it says if I can’t raise them on the marine radio, I’m to call Leigh Huyett first and Pete Conley second.”