House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “But there was a witness on the road,” he said suddenly. “This dude stopped to ask if we were all right. He looked like a priest or something, with one of those collars, you know? The black shirt with the white patch at the neck? He must’ve seen it was Chrissy behind the wheel. When he called down to us, I was getting out of the passenger side and walking around to her door.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Shelby said as Peter gave a vigorous nod at the phone.

  “Except he never mentioned a witness before,” Leigh spoke up.

  The mark on Kip’s cheek flamed red from across the room. “’Cause before I didn’t want anyone to know Chrissy was driving.”

  “She never mentioned it either. Neither of you did, despite the fact that a witness might have helped prove it happened before midnight. That was our biggest concern that night, remember?”

  Peter stared at her across the desk, but Kip wouldn’t look at her at all. “My biggest concern that night was keeping Chrissy out of trouble.”

  “This priest,” Shelby said. “Did you get his name or his plates?” She was jumping right in with questions designed to locate the witness, as if Leigh hadn’t just established there wasn’t one.

  Kip shook his head. “He barely stopped. He sort of halfway got out and shouted were we okay. And I asked Chrissy, and she said she was fine. I told him yes, and he got back in and drove away.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sedan, coupe, SUV, what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Peter jumped in. “Four doors or two?”

  “Four, I guess. It was kinda big.”

  “What color?” Shelby asked.

  “Black, I think. Or some dark color. Green or navy.”

  Or deep purple or gunmetal gray. Leigh could understand why Peter wanted to believe him, but not Shelby. She was the most cynical person Leigh knew. She built her whole career on the principle that all of her clients were lying all of the time. “Shelby,” she said in a calm, lawyer-to-lawyer voice. “You know what the prosecutor will do with this. Kip never mentioned a witness or another vehicle the night he was arrested or for four days thereafter. It wasn’t until he spent a night in jail that he came forward with this new version. The prosecutor will rip him apart on those facts.”

  “Of course,” Shelby said. “Which is why we need a corroborating witness. So let’s get out there and find this priest. Sound like a plan?”

  “Yes,” Kip said quickly.

  “Come in to the office tomorrow, and we’ll sit down with my investigator and figure out how to locate this guy. What time’s good for you?”

  “Any time,” Pete said with a nod at Kip. “The sooner the better.”

  “Let’s say nine o’clock.”

  They were still saying their good-byes as Leigh left the room and went back to the kitchen. Their three plates sat barely touched, and the homemade ice pack was weeping across the surface of the table at the fourth place. Chrissy’s place. Leigh grabbed up the towel and ice in both hands and carried it dripping across the floor to the sink, then went back to the table with handfuls of paper towels to mop up. The water had already pooled to the edge of the table and was trickling in steady plops onto the seat of Chrissy’s chair. She wiped it down furiously and dropped to her knees to wipe the floor, too. Shep was under the table, as always during mealtime, and he licked her hands as she scrubbed the floor.

  She got up and scraped her plate into the garbage and was rinsing it off at the sink when Peter came in and sat down at the table. “Is Kip coming back to dinner?” she asked without turning.

  “No, he’s gone up to his room.”

  “He didn’t finish his sandwich.”

  “He thinks you don’t believe him.”

  She shut the faucet off. “And you do.”

  “Yeah, I think I do. I mean, it all makes sense.”

  She turned then and leaned back with the edge of the granite counter cutting into her spine. “How? Tell me.”

  “Because I taught him better than to swerve for an animal. He knows that’s dangerous. But Chrissy, she argued the point with me every time I took her out. So I can see her doing it. I can see her grabbing the keys from him, too. She was all about SADD and don’t drink and drive, remember? She wouldn’t go over there to rescue him only to have him drive home drunk.”

  “Except he wasn’t drunk, not at point-oh-five-five. She’s seen enough of her father to know what drunk really looks like. And he could have swerved reflexively no matter what you drilled into him. For a dog? I think even you might have swerved. Oh, Peter.” She reached for another dish towel and wiped her hands. “Isn’t this all just wishful thinking? You want to believe it.”

  “I want him to get off.” He studied the label on his beer bottle. “Don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. But not if it takes a lie.”

  “I guess that’s where we differ.” He got to his feet. “I want him to get off no matter what.”

  He headed into the family room with his beer, and a minute later she heard the TV switch on. Now there were two plates of almost untouched food left on the table, and she picked them up and scraped them both into the garbage.

  Chapter Ten

  Shelby Randolph’s office was on I Street a few blocks from Leigh’s office on K Street. Both law firms were big and prestigious with hundreds of lawyers representing Fortune 500 companies, and both women were partners in their respective firms. But the similarities ended there. Leigh was something called a service lawyer, which Pete understood to mean one who handled the peripheral needs of the corporate clients brought in by the powerhouse partners—drafting wills for CEOs, procuring visas for the imported talent, and in her case, handling their divorces. Whereas Shelby was the powerhouse lawyer at her firm. Her specialty was white-collar crime, and she had a long roster of government-contractor clients she defended in billion-dollar fraud cases. She didn’t represent teenagers in DUI cases even when the DUI led to a homicide charge. Pete knew she was doing this strictly as a favor for the family of her oldest friend.

  But Kip was treated the same as any other client when they arrived at her office in the morning. Shelby’s assistant met them in reception and led them through corridors of steel and glass and abstract art to a corner conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lafayette Square and offering a glimpse of the White House through the trees. Soon another woman came in, pushing a cart laden with minipastries and a full coffee service. And finally Shelby swept into the room in a strangely dramatic black dress with one white sleeve.

  A retinue of three other people funneled in behind her. She made the introductions. Frank Nobbin was her chief investigator, a retired police detective from Baltimore. Elliott Sousa was something she called a social media coordinator. And finally her paralegal Britta, a young woman who silently took notes for the duration of their meeting.

  There were some papers to sign first, a retainer agreement, a revocable waiver of confidentiality so Pete could be present. Then Frank Nobbin took over. He was a crusty old black guy with a gray brush mustache that gave him a permanent frown. He questioned Kip about every detail of last Friday night while Shelby sat back and watched Kip stammer through his answers. It was like pulling teeth, but Nobbin finally got him to give up the names of a dozen kids at the party, including a girl Pete never heard of who was more or less Kip’s date for the night. He also got him to identify every variety of refreshment on offer. Kip remembered a couple bottles of tequila and vodka circulating through the party but was adamant that he had only two beers.

  “What d’you weigh?” Nobbin eyeballed. “One-forty, fifty?”

  Kip flushed. He hadn’t filled out yet, and he was self-conscious about it. “About that.”

  “Still. Oughta take more than two beers to register point-oh-five-five.”

&nbs
p; He shrugged. “So the lab made a mistake.”

  Shelby said, “We’ll look into that,” but Pete could tell from the look she exchanged with her investigator that there was no realistic hope of beating the machine.

  Nobbin homed in on the roadside witness next, and Kip repeated what he had said last night. A man stopped to ask if they were all right and drove on when Kip answered that they were. He remembered that he was dressed all in black except for that patch of white at his collar, which made him think he was a priest.

  “Age?”

  “I don’t know. Middle?”

  “Tall, short, skinny, fat?”

  “Tall, I think. Not fat.”

  “His hair. Was it dark or light, long or short?”

  Kip looked by turns helpless and pissed off at Nobbin’s interrogation. “I don’t know. I mean, it was dark and I only saw him for a second. I was more focused on getting the truck out of there, you know?”

  Pete felt by turns frustrated and reassured by Kip’s response. If he were lying about the witness, surely he’d do better than this?

  Nobbin moved on. He opened a folder stuffed full of photos of what looked like every make and model of big, four-door vehicles available across the country. “Thumb through these,” he said, “and pick out whatever looks like what the priest was driving.”

  “I’m not really a car guy,” Kip said with a hangdog glance at his father. Pete would have been able to identify the make of every vehicle in the folder and come pretty close on the model year and equipment package, too. But Kip didn’t get that gene. Anything between a Volkswagen and a Cadillac Escalade was the same generic car to him, and after only a few minutes he gave up looking.

  “It’s only a four- or five-mile stretch of road,” Pete said. “There can’t be more than a hundred cars traveling it a day and practically none at night. This priest has to be somebody who lives on Hollow Road or was visiting somebody who lives there. Can’t we just put a notice in the local paper or something?”

  “We’re doing that,” Shelby said. “And Frank and his team are going to do door-to-doors at every house along that road.”

  “Hey, I can do that. I’m there every day.”

  “No.” Shelby and Frank said it nearly in unison and with a surprising forcefulness. “You mustn’t talk to any potential witness,” she said. “It could taint their testimony.”

  “What, like I’m gonna bribe somebody or something?”

  “Avoid the appearance. It’s best practice. Meanwhile.” She turned to the other man in the room. “Elliott?”

  He was a young guy wearing glasses and a skinny tie who handled social media for the firm’s marketing department and occasionally provided investigative services, too. He’d already launched a search for the priest on three different internet platforms. First he set up a Facebook page with photos of the truck and the scene of the accident along with photos of Chrissy and Kip, and put out a call for anyone who witnessed the event to contact Shelby Randolph. He told Kip to share the page and get all his friends and family to share it, too. He also created a few different twitter hashtags and sent out tweets every twelve hours with the same call, and he posted the same photos on Instagram. Some of Chrissy’s classmates had already created a Facebook page in her honor, and he basically hijacked it and posted the photos there, too, along with an emotional plea for the witness to honor Chrissy’s memory by coming forward and reporting what he saw. Kip should share and retweet all of it, Elliott said, and Pete and Leigh should signal-boost, too.

  Pete nodded and made a note to ask Kip later what that meant.

  Back to Frank Nobbin. It was likely that the priest had a church in the vicinity, he said. He’d run them all down and get photos of every clergyman and put together an array. He’d shoot the file to Kip in a day or two, and he should study each photo and see if he could pick out the witness he saw on the road that night.

  That was it. Meeting over.

  St. Alban High School was a flat-roofed sprawl of brick buildings surrounded by the bright green turf of five different playing fields. Pete parked in front of the main lobby entrance and went in with Kip to tender his excuse to the attendance office. But before he could get away, the principal tapped on the glass partition and beckoned for them to come in his office.

  “Uh.” Kip shifted from foot to foot. “I got physics.”

  “Go on,” Pete said. “I’ll take this. Hey,” he added as Kip started down the hall. “You’ll catch a ride home?”

  “Yeah, with Brad. Like always.”

  Pete pushed through the door of the administrative suite as the elderly secretary rose from behind her desk. “Oh, Pete.” She held her hands out to him. “We’re all so sorry for your loss. What a terrible tragedy.”

  “Thank you, Patty. I appreciate it.” That he was on a first-name basis with the principal’s secretary was testament to the fact that he’d been summoned here way too often. Mostly for disciplinary infractions of the backfired prank variety, but Kip had been caught cutting classes, too, and the only thing that saved him from more serious penalties was that he was acing all those classes.

  “Please give my condolences to Leigh.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  The principal was waiting at his office door to usher him inside. He had a florid face and a belly that oozed over his belt like soft-serve ice cream over the rim of the cone. Dr. Dairy Queen, Kip called him. Pete hoped there wasn’t a gay slur buried in the nickname.

  “Mr. Conley.”

  “Dr. Fulton.” No first-name basis in here.

  Another round of condolences followed before the principal got down to business. He’d read about Kip’s arrest in yesterday’s newspaper and wanted a status update on the proceedings.

  “Sorry,” Pete said. “Our lawyer said not to discuss the case with ­anyone.”

  “Oh, of course. But you can understand that not only are we concerned for Christopher, but we also need to plan for certain eventualities.”

  Pete didn’t understand at all. “What eventualities?”

  “Well, for one thing, Christopher’s on track to finish second in his class, which would ordinarily make him salutatorian at commencement. But under the circumstances.”

  For one surprised second Pete let himself bask. His son, going to Duke and speaking at his graduation. Who would have guessed the Conleys could come this far? Except they hadn’t, yet. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If he earned it.”

  “Oh, of course, but we have to consider the reception he might receive. We wouldn’t want him to be made to feel uncomfortable. With these charges hanging over him.”

  Pete tried to picture it. A stadium full of friends and family falling suddenly silent as Kip took the lectern. Probably waiting for him to deliver some kind of cautionary tale—don’t drink and drive, kids; look what happened to me—like the man with no jaw who came around once a year to talk to them about the dangers of smoking. Except that Kip wasn’t drunk and maybe he wasn’t even driving. “We expect the charges to be dismissed long before graduation,” Pete said. “He has a complete defense.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Fulton raised an eyebrow.

  “He wasn’t the one driving,” Pete heard himself say. He wasn’t sure where that came from. He wanted to believe it, and now it looked like he’d gone and committed himself to it.

  “Well.” The principal’s belly shifted as he settled back in surprise. “That would change things, wouldn’t it? In that case suppose we table this for a few weeks?”

  “Yeah.” Pete got up to go. “Let’s do that.”

  His phone rang as he headed for his truck. It was Kip, speaking in a whisper that told Pete he was probably ducking under his desk to make the call. “Can you pick me up after school?”

  “What happened to your ride with Brad?”

  “Fell through. Can you pick me up at thr
ee?”

  It was already close to noon. Pete needed to get some work done before the entire day was gone. He swung into the cab and started the engine. “Sorry, champ. You’ll have to take the bus.”

  Kip groaned, as if he couldn’t imagine a worse fate. A kid who’d already spent a night in adult jail.

  “Suck it up,” Pete said and backed out of the lot.

  Chapter Eleven

  Peter was gone by the time Leigh woke that morning—Kip, too—and the house was eerily quiet. She couldn’t remember a time when she was ever in the house alone. When the kids were at school, she was at work, and when they were out playing sports or performing in musicals or competing in horse shows, she was there with them, cheering them on. When they were at home, they were all together. It was why the house had always felt too small and why she’d agreed to Ted’s elaborate expansion plans—because it was always bursting at the seams with the children and their friends galloping up and down the stairs and slamming in and out of doors. It was a house full of music and laughter and TVs blaring. Now, though, it seemed vast and empty. And quiet. As quiet as a tomb.

  Even Shepherd was quiet when he jumped down from the window seat in the kitchen and wagged a greeting. “At least you’re still here,” she said, but he’d already had his breakfast and wanted only to go outside.

  She let him out and wandered alone through the labyrinth of rooms, from the kitchen, where Kip dropped his bombshell last night, all the way to the den, where Shelby declined to defuse it. The three of them were together now, plotting a strategy. The truth would come out eventually, when Kip’s manufactured witness failed to materialize, but meanwhile Peter was spending all his money and hope on a lie, and there was nothing she could do to spare him either one.

  The house was so quiet she could almost hear her thoughts ricochet through the empty rooms. She should try to eat something, she knew. There was nothing in the refrigerator but funeral leftovers, but in the freezer was a bag of the chicken nuggets Chrissy liked to snack on. Don’t forget the barbecue sauce, she’d holler whenever anyone left on a grocery run. Leigh shook a few nuggets out on a baking pan and put them in the oven.