House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  Karen sniffled softly and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue while Pete gritted his teeth. Rodell was a youth himself, the beneficiary of all his own privileges, and here he was delivering the rant of an old man. You damn kids get off my lawn. These couldn’t be the words of this kid. They had to be written by, or at least for, his boss in his office upstairs. Boyd Harrison, the man who had set all this in motion and couldn’t be bothered to show his face in the courtroom.

  “On a rainy Friday night last spring,” Rodell went on, “Christopher Conley took a vehicle without the owner’s permission, on a suspended driver’s license, and drove to a party. An illegal, underage alcohol and drug party right here in our county.” Ryan Atwood’s party sounded like an orgiastic bacchanalia in his telling, packed with similarly entitled young people who drank alcohol to excess, took drugs, and engaged in sexual acts with random partners. “Christopher Conley drank beer at that party. He drank tequila. He smoked marijuana. Then he got into that vehicle, the one he had no right to drive, and he drove it so recklessly that not three miles later he swerved off the road, across a ditch, and crashed head-on into a tree.

  “Which would be bad enough,” he said. “But sitting in the passenger seat beside him was a fourteen-year-old girl. Christine Porter. A little girl not even in high school yet. A good girl. Her parents’ pride and joy. She wasn’t a guest at that illegal party. She never would have gone there on her own. She only went to get Christopher to leave. She was on an errand of mercy. And what did she get for her trouble? Christopher crashed into the tree, and an artery burst in her brain, and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. Twelve hours later she was dead. A sweet young girl at the very beginning of her life. And now, thanks to the selfishness, the thoughtlessness, the utter recklessness of one entitled, privileged, overindulged young man, that life has ended.”

  Karen followed Shelby’s instructions. She wept silently while up at the defense table, Kip hung his head so low his chin looked welded to his chest.

  Rodell allowed those last words to linger before he picked up Andrea’s note cards from the table. He previewed the Commonwealth’s witnesses and summarized their evidence as if they were housekeeping details, mere footnotes to the main text of his speech. He sat down.

  Shelby rose. “The defense waives opening statement.”

  This was the compromise they’d reached. It was her condition for allowing Kip to testify. She wouldn’t be the one to tell the jury that Kip wasn’t driving. He’d have to do that himself. If his testimony seemed to go well, if the jury seemed to buy it, then she’d make it the cornerstone of her closing argument. If it didn’t, they’d try to reopen plea negotiations. That was the deal.

  But the jurors’ faces changed as she sat down after speaking only those five words. Wariness crept into their expressions, skepticism, and Pete knew that was the moment they lost.

  The sun dimmed when they reached the woods, and the air cooled a few degrees under the ceiling of black-green leaves. Leigh slanted her eyes at Charlie, at his young, muscular body. There was no way he wouldn’t catch her if she made a run for it, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to try. She was going to die either way. So many times the hapless victim on TV went along willingly to his execution, and so many times she yelled at the screen: Run! The worst he can do to you is what he’s already planning to do!

  The worst Charlie could do was shoot her, which was exactly what he was planning to do.

  She took a breath and stumbled hard against him as if she’d tripped, and in the second he took to recover his balance, she rocketed away from him. She ran full-out, her legs pumping and the muscles in her flanks bunching up and stretching out farther than she’d ever stretched them before. She couldn’t draw in enough air through her nose alone, and after only fifty yards, her lungs were bursting, but she kept on running. She didn’t dare pause to look back, but she could hear his boots crunching over the ground behind her. She could hear his steady breathing, and the sound was coming closer. He was pacing one stride for every two of hers, and when he grabbed her it was as casual as swatting a fly. One arm around her waist, and she was in the air, her feet still churning, the last part of her to give up hope.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.

  He threw her over his shoulder, and she kicked her legs against his chest as hard as she could. “Okay now,” he said and clamped an arm around her calves.

  The world was upside down. She watched the heels of his boots tramp over the roots and leaves as he made a slow inexorable march deeper and deeper into the forest until at last he bent forward and deposited her in a heap amid the deadfall. Six feet away the ground dropped off steeply. It was the edge of the ravine. He would shoot her here, in a place so remote the shot couldn’t be heard, and roll her down there, in a trench so deep her body wouldn’t be found for months, maybe years.

  A bird shrieked overhead, and she looked up to see a hawk skimming the treetops before it soared out of sight. Like a lark ascending. Unbound from this earth. Free. Stephen pictured his dead son when he heard that music, and if she tried, she might see Chrissy, too. Was it actually possible, she wondered, that they would be reunited in death? Was there really a heaven where they could be together again? The idea was so breathtaking it made her close her eyes against the beauty of it. To be with her child again.

  Charlie unsnapped the holster flap on his hip and drew out the gun and took a step back. “On your knees,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. Between her and the sky was an old oak with wide spreading branches. A climbing tree, the twins would have called it. She closed her eyes and saw them next. Twenty years old now, big strapping men, but still her children. How could she think of leaving them? Even to be with Chrissy. Chrissy wasn’t her only child. Dylan and Zack were her children, too, and she couldn’t leave them yet. And Peter. Always and everywhere, she’d promised him. She couldn’t leave him either, or Kip or Mia. She couldn’t leave any of them to be only with Chrissy. But she knew that was what she’d already done. She let her love for Chrissy get in the way of her love for the living. She let her love for Chrissy get in the way of her own living.

  “On your knees,” he said again.

  She stayed where she was. This was something else she used to shout at the hapless victim on TV: Why are you obeying this guy who’s about to kill you? Why are you doing anything he says?

  He circled behind her, and she moved with him, twisting around on the ground, her eyes tracking his. “Stop,” he said. “Turn away.” But she didn’t. He was going to have to watch her face as he killed her. That was her price for this murder.

  He saw what she was doing. “Okay. Have it your way.” He jammed the heel of his hand against the clip and gripped the gun with both hands and took aim.

  His phone rang.

  They both jerked at the sound. The electronic burble was so unexpected in the deep forest that it took a second to register what it could be. He kept the gun pointed at her, but he took his left hand off the butt to pull out his phone. She rose up on her knees as he squinted at the screen. “Sarge?”

  Stoddard’s voice came through so loudly she could hear it, too. “Regroup! Get the girl and get out of there!”

  Then she heard something else. It sounded like the descant in a hymn, a higher-pitched countermelody coming in above Stoddard’s voice, faint but shrill. It was a siren in the far distance. Charlie’s head whipped around in search of it. “What? Where?”

  She got one foot under her as Stoddard rattled off a series of numbers—numbers in degrees and minutes; they must be coordinates.

  “What about the lady?”

  The siren sounded again, and she gathered up both legs and took off.

  The gun was already in Charlie’s hand. He’d shoot before she cleared ten feet. She could hear him tearing through the brush behind her, and she waited for the shot and kept on running.

  The siren screeched closer, and she heard him shouting behind her. Ten feet turned to fift
y turned to a hundred. Her legs had to do the work of her arms, too, and she could feel the acid burn of the strain deep down in her muscles.

  A shot cracked and a projectile whizzed through the air, and suddenly her flight became effortless. It wasn’t a struggle anymore. She was flying higher and faster, her toes barely skimming the ground. She soared through the woods, so weightless and free she could only be dead, she was sure of it—until her foot caught on a root and she landed in a sprawl on a bed of broken twigs.

  She lifted her head cautiously. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her face. If she was bleeding she must be alive. She risked a glance back. He wasn’t behind her. He wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Ahead of her the sirens swelled louder and closer, and from the sky, a new sound: high-pitched choppy whirring. She got up and started running again toward the sound of the sirens. They were racing to the right—was that the direction of the farm? She wasn’t sure, but she tacked with them and kept on running until abruptly they went silent. All she could hear now was that whop-whop-whop overhead. The rotors of a helicopter. She followed that sound to the edge of the woods and burst out into the clearing.

  The helicopter was circling the field. Beyond it a police car was parked before the front porch of the farmhouse and a second one at the side. The rotors spun dizzily as the helicopter touched down, the back of its skids first, then the front, until it landed with a hard bump in a flurry of whipping weeds.

  A door popped open on the helicopter, and Hunter Beck jumped to the ground. He jogged in a crouch until he cleared the range of the blades, then he straightened and ran like wildfire through the stubbled fields to the farmhouse.

  Leigh took a few faltering steps after him before she gave up and sat down hard on the ground. Her face and wrists were bleeding, her calves burned from running, and her arms were numb from being wrenched behind her back. But the panic button had worked. It had summoned the police, and they must have contacted Hunter, already in the air on his way to the ransom drop. Stoddard and Charlie couldn’t have gotten far. They’d be apprehended soon if they weren’t already in the back of those police cars. Jenna was safe, and as for Leigh—she was alive. Incredibly, she was alive. She closed her eyes and let out a long tremulous breath.

  An engine started up. She barely heard it above the helicopter roar, and by the time she opened her eyes, one of the police cars was streaking past her with its lights on. The other one followed close behind. She couldn’t flag them down, not with her arms pinned behind her, and she couldn’t shout either, not with the duct tape over her mouth. She scrambled up on her knees as the cars whipped past her.

  Out in the field Hunter lurched to a stop to watch them go. His head swiveled to the empty house, then back to the swirling lights of the police cars as they disappeared into the dust. Then he clapped both hands on top of his head and fell to his knees.

  The pilot cut the engine, and the blades beat a slow circuit until they came to a stop, and the only sounds were Hunter Beck’s howls echoing across the field and rippling into the woods.

  The front door cracked open on the farmhouse. A uniformed officer came out and stood on the porch. He looked at the man in the grass and went back inside.

  When the door opened again, Jenna came out with her hands on her belly and a puzzled frown on her face. Hunter was doubled over on the ground with his arms over his head, like he was warding off an air attack. She shuffled to the edge of the porch, taking one ungainly step, then another. “Hunter,” she called.

  He couldn’t hear her through his own anguished cries. She raised her voice. “Hunter. I’m all right.”

  His head jerked up at the sound of her voice, and at the sight of her, he started to sob, unashamed, in great heaving gulps that racked his shoulders. “Oh, baby,” she said as tears started to roll down her cheeks. She crossed the field and dropped to her knees beside him, and they held each other and rocked together in the tall grass.

  That was when the officer finally spotted Leigh at the edge of the woods.

  “Please,” she cried hoarsely, gasping to fill her lungs as he removed the duct tape from her mouth. “I need to be in court.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Over the course of her career Leigh had traveled to court by many different modes of transportation: on foot and by planes, trains, and automobiles. Traveling by helicopter was a first. “Take the chopper,” Hunter had said, and the West Virginia State Police—they were in West Virginia, it turned out—called ahead to someone in Arwen to clear the landing, and at three o’clock that afternoon, she touched down in a daisy-strewn meadow a mile outside town where a patrol car was standing by to drive her to the courthouse.

  Her ID was in her bag somewhere in parts unknown, so she went through courthouse security like a civilian. Her phone was in her bag, too, so she had nothing to deposit in the bin the guard held out to her. She didn’t have anything at all. “Could I borrow a pen and paper?” she asked the man. She wrote out the note where she stood and returned the pen, kept the paper. She hoped to find a deputy to pass it to, but no one was stationed outside the courtroom.

  A young woman sat on the corridor bench nearby. She wore a poor-fitting black suit and was reading with her head down. It took a minute for Leigh to recognize her. “Officer Mateo?”

  The woman looked up with reflexive suspicion at Leigh in her disheveled clothes with her hair pulled back in an untidy bun. It was a moment before she recognized her, too. “Oh. Mrs. Porter.” She put a hand on the back of the bench and levered to her feet. Hugely pregnant now, she wore a long, loose blouse under a suit jacket that couldn’t come close to buttoning. “I mean—Mrs. Conley.”

  “Have you testified yet?”

  “I’m up next. Should be any minute now.”

  Leigh held out the folded slip of paper. “Could you hand this to Andrea Briggs when you go in? Before you take the stand.”

  Mateo eyed it doubtfully. It was an unusual request and it came from an adverse party.

  “Did you get your wish?” Leigh nodded at her abdomen.

  “Hmm? Oh!” Mateo let out a little laugh. “No. Turns out it’s a boy. But you’re happy with what you get, right?”

  “You’re thrilled with what you get.”

  The courtroom door cracked open and a deputy stuck his head out and beckoned to Mateo. “Showtime,” she said as she turned to follow. At the door Mateo turned back and took the note from Leigh’s hand before she went inside.

  Leigh waited where she was. Two minutes later Mateo was back. “Looks like you’re up next instead,” she said as she levered herself back to the bench.

  Leigh went through the double doors. Courtrooms like this one had been her playing fields for more than twenty years. She always arrived thoroughly prepared and eager to get going. Today she felt neither of those things. She stood uneasily at the back of the courtroom and waited for her cue.

  Andrea Briggs looked back with a smile. She whispered to the man seated beside her at counsel table and he rose to the lectern. “Your Honor, for its next witness, the Commonwealth calls Leigh Huyett.”

  Peter whipped around in his seat. His beard was gone, Leigh registered as she started down the aisle. She recognized the tie he was wearing—Chrissy had given it to him last Christmas. But she didn’t recognize the expression on his face. He stared at her with a look of raw betrayal.

  Shelby shot to her feet. “Your Honor, this is an unfair surprise. We had no notice—”

  “She’s on our witness list,” said the man at the lectern.

  “But you gave us no indication—”

  “Who is she, Mr. Rodell?” the judge interrupted.

  “The mother of Christine Porter,” Rodell said. “The deceased.”

  “Well.” The judge looked at Shelby. “I don’t see how you can be surprised by that. And I certainly think the jury would like to hear from her. Proceed.”

  Leigh looked straight ahead as she crossed the well of the court to the witness box. She p
ut her left hand on the Bible and raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. When she sat down and looked out over the courtroom, the perspective was strangely unsettling. A trial lawyer never saw it from this vantage. The whole courtroom seemed off-balance. All the regular watchers and curiosity seekers were clustered in the rows behind Briggs. The only spectators on the other side were Peter and Karen. She couldn’t look at Peter. The hurt and hostility were like an open wound on his face. She couldn’t look at Kip in front of him either, and he couldn’t look at her. His head was down, his eyes on the table.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Huyett,” said the man at the lectern.

  Leigh glanced at Andrea Briggs, still seated at counsel table. This was supposed to be her case. She felt even more uneasy as she pulled the microphone to her mouth. “Good afternoon.”

  He was a nice-looking young man with the same brash self-confidence of many of the new lawyers in her firm. Smart young men—always men—who used bluster to cover up the gaps in their experience. He started his examination with the preliminaries. Her name and address. Her marital status and family situation. From the corner of her eye she could see the jurors’ interest sharpen as it was established that she was both the mother of the victim and the stepmother of the defendant. They leaned forward in their seats. Now, this might be interesting, their posture seemed to say.

  The judge’s interest sharpened when Rodell asked her what she did for a living. “Ah, Ms. Huyett,” he said. “Now I recognize you. You’ve appeared in my courtroom before. As counsel, not witness, am I right?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Well. I’m sorry to see you again under these circumstances.”

  “Thank you.” She was grateful, not for the condolences, but for the reminder. She was a trial lawyer. She knew how to conduct herself in a courtroom. She had more than twenty years’ experience to draw upon to get her through the next thirty minutes. She could do this.