House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  She pushed SEND the way she would have said Over on a walkie-talkie. It was his turn now. She sat down to wait for his reply on the edge of their bed. It was still unmade, and she could smell him in the sheets. She could smell the musk of their last failed lovemaking.

  It was twenty minutes before the phone burbled with an incoming message. OK. That was all.

  Over and out.

  A week passed, and nobody came to visit. All her old friends seemed to have drifted away. She must have been too wrapped up in Peter these last five years to tend to her friendship fires. She’d missed too many book group meetings and coffee dates and wine-and-cheese gatherings. She’d been too content in her little circle of two and her bigger circle of seven. Or perhaps nobody came or called because they didn’t think she needed them to. That was the trouble with a lifetime spent always striving to pro­ject an image of competence and self-sufficiency. Oh, don’t be silly, no need, I’ve got it covered. Eventually people took her at her word.

  Though maybe the reason nobody came or called was because nobody knew what to say to the crazy bitter bereaved lady. There wasn’t even a name for what Leigh was now. If she lost her husband, she’d be a widow. Her parents, an orphan. But what did you call a mother who lost her child? There was no word for what she was. It was unthinkable and thus unnameable.

  Shelby checked in now and then, but those calls were brief and unhelpful. They used to tell each other everything, no topic was ever off-limits, but now Shelby cut her short. You know I can’t talk to you about that, she said whenever Leigh asked about the case or the quest for the mythical priest. Shelby was supposed to be her best friend, but apparently she changed her loyalties as often as her Agent Provocateur lingerie. Kip was her client now, and Peter was paying her hefty fees.

  Leigh couldn’t steel herself to call her office, but she stayed in touch with Polly by email, enough to juggle her calendar and postpone hearings or palm her work off on colleagues. Enough to track her phone messages and persuade herself nothing was so urgent that she’d have to poke her head out of her shell and pick up the phone. One day Polly flagged a message with a question mark: Someone named Ashley Gregg called. She said you’d know what it’s about. But she didn’t, she didn’t even recognize the name, and she didn’t call back.

  The twins called every day, separately, in actual, live-voice telephone calls that would have thrilled her once. She would have pressed them for every detail of their classes and hoped for a few sanitized details of their social lives or just free-floated on the husky boy-man timbre of their voices. But now their conversations were full of false starts and awkward silences. They were trying hard to be dutiful sons to her, she knew that, but they were swimming in their own grief, and she couldn’t make it worse by confiding how much pain she was in, or God forbid, by crying. It was her job to buck them up, though her attempts were feeble. Their calls inevitably trailed off into wisps of words. “So . . . ,” and “I guess I should . . . ,” and “Yeah, I guess.”

  One day she answered the phone and heard both their voices on a rare three-way call that obviously took some coordination. Their tones were different, too, with none of the meandering somnolence of their earlier calls. “We just heard,” Zack said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Everything,” Dylan said.

  “Is it true?”

  “What?”

  “Any of it.”

  She took the phone into Chrissy’s room and stretched out on the bed as they explained. It seemed they’d been having actual, live-voice conversations with Peter, too, and today it came out that he and Kip were living at Hollow House and they badgered him until he explained why.

  “What did he say?”

  They didn’t answer. They had other things on their minds. “Is it true, what Kip’s saying?”

  “Well—” She pulled the comforter up to her chest. “It’s true that he’s saying it.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s lying,” Zack said.

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said.

  Zack was always the more impetuous of the two. He went with gut instincts while Dylan liked to think things through more carefully. The difference made them a good duo. They acted as a check on each other and usually ended up someplace in the middle. Leigh waited to hear where they’d end up this time.

  “Pete believes him,” Dylan said.

  Zack snorted. “What choice does he have?”

  “But think about it. If Kip was wasted, there’s no way she’d let him drive.”

  “He wasn’t wasted,” Leigh put in.

  “But if she thought he was. You know what that party must have looked like to Chrissy.”

  “Like Animal House or something.” Zack’s tone was grudging.

  “Right.”

  The two of them fell silent, and Leigh held her breath as she waited for them to complete their silent deliberations and render their verdict. But when Zack spoke again, he had a grin in his voice. “Hey, remember spring break, how she took the course over by that church?”

  Leigh was caught off guard by this turn in the conversation. Did Chrissy ride a steeplechase in March? Maybe, but she couldn’t recall that the course ran anywhere near a church, and she certainly didn’t remember that the twins were among the spectators.

  “Oh, man, she was something. Tearing around those cones like Mario Andretti.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We were just fooling around,” Dylan said.

  “She wanted a turn. It was an empty parking lot. Nobody was going to get hurt.”

  “She was good at it, though. Real good.”

  Chrissy had been driving, they were telling her. Leigh pulled the comforter up to her chin.

  “But here’s the thing,” Dylan said next. “I can see her driving, but I can’t see her lying about it to the cops. She wouldn’t let Kip take the fall for something she did.”

  “Right!” Zack said, like Bingo!

  The same reaction rang inside Leigh’s head. If Chrissy was driving—if—she would have owned up to it.

  “So he’s gotta be lying,” Zack said, coming full circle.

  “I guess,” Dylan said.

  “But still. It’s not Pete’s fault. Right, Mom?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why won’t you let him come home?”

  “Why won’t—I?” Now she’d come full circle. “What did Peter tell you?”

  “He said you need some space.”

  That was the opposite of what she needed. She had too much space. There was nothing but space and emptiness here in this hollow house. Even this long stretch of silence over the telephone line held too much empty space.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just—he needs to be with Kip right now.”

  Their silence told her she hadn’t quite answered their question. She sank deeper under the comforter. Negotiating the rapids of this conversation had sapped all her energy.

  “Well, what should we do? About Pete, I mean.”

  She never had to tell them before. She never even gave them the standard lecture about respecting and obeying their new stepparent just as they would a parent. They took to Peter from the start and got there all on their own.

  “That’s up to you,” she said.

  “Oh,” they said, nearly in unison, and they sounded so dejected that she knew she must have said the wrong thing again.

  “Well.” After a moment Dylan cleared his throat. “I know this much. It’s the last thing Chrissy would want.”

  “For this to tear us apart,” Zach said. “Right?”

  Tears burned in Leigh’s eyes. No, the last thing Chrissy would want was to be dead. “Right,” she said thickly.

  “So . . .”

>   “I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then it was good-bye.

  She spent hours in the family room loading the old home videos in the DVD player and watching Chrissy de-age from teenager to infant. Ted was a sloppy cameraman and he never seemed to get the audio on right, so the early videos were jerky and soundless, like old-time silent films, except in color. Vivid color. Chrissy’s persimmon curls and cornflower eyes lit up the screen and left Leigh convulsing with sobs. It was supposed to be cathartic to cry. Let it out, people always said, you’ll feel better afterward. But she only ever felt worse. Chrissy was still dead, and no amount of crying could change that.

  She wished she could rewind life as easily as she did the family videos. She’d go back to that Friday night, only this time she wouldn’t call home on their way back from the Greenbrier. They’d arrive unannounced. Chrissy would be in bed and Kip wouldn’t be, and Peter would pace and worry and yell at him when he finally stumbled home in the morning, and that was the worst thing that would have happened.

  But no, she needed to rewind further than that, back to the day she decided they had to take an anniversary trip. What was she thinking? Leaving two teenagers home alone, one of them a notorious troublemaker and the other only fourteen years old. They’d never done it before, not even when the twins were still home. It wasn’t even a good time for Peter to leave his project, but she’d insisted on it. They needed a getaway, she told him, a little romantic jaunt, but it was only herself she was thinking of.

  These thoughts were the worst torture of all, for she couldn’t escape the mutilating realization that Chrissy’s death may have been Kip’s crime, but it was her fault.

  Peter had always resisted texting before. It was for kids, he said, and besides, he’d rather hear her voice. She wanted to hear his, too, but she still couldn’t pick up when he called. So it wasn’t long before he stopped calling and took to texting instead. Every evening after dinner. OK 2day? he’d ask, and she’d reply, Fine. U? Like idiotic mutes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When the phone rang Saturday morning, Leigh ran for it as usual, and froze as usual until the caller’s name appeared on the display and she saw that it wasn’t Peter. It was Carrie Dietrich.

  “Leigh, I am so sorry,” Carrie said. “I hate to be bothering you like this, but I don’t know if there’s someone else in your office I should call, and all hell’s breaking out over here—”

  “What is it? Is Jenna all right?”

  “She took off, that’s what. She said she was going to disappear and now she’s gone and done it. But Hunter’s not having it. He called the cops, and they’re here and he’s here with his lawyer, and there’s a TV van out front, and we don’t know what—”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  The Dietrichs’ farm was on Hollow Road, not half a mile from Peter’s job site. They operated it as a nonprofit retirement facility for aging horses that were literally put out to pasture. Chrissy had volunteered there twice a week, mucking out stalls and hauling hay bales, hard labor for a young girl, but she considered it the price of admission for the chance to stroke the graying muzzles of the old horses and whisper fondly in their ears. Golden Oldies was the name of the farm, but Kip always called it The Glue Factory, just to get a rise out of Chrissy, which always worked. He’d volunteered there, too, in the office, only long enough to get the semester’s credit.

  Three TV vans were in the drive when Leigh arrived, and ten or so other cars were parked haphazardly along the shoulder of Hollow Road. She slalomed a course around the vans and looped to the left to park by the barn. An unexpected sight stood in the meadow beyond it: a helicopter in a circle of flattened grass, its pilot leaning against the landing skid with his arms folded and his laconic gaze on the crowd by the house.

  “Stay,” she said, and Shep whined pitifully as he plopped his rear down in the seat and thrust his head out the window to track her path to the house.

  It was an old-fashioned country farmhouse with a wide front porch and white-railed stairs lined with pots of red geraniums. A couple dozen people thronged across the lawn at the foot of the stairs, some with microphones and others with shoulder-mounted cameras aimed like grenade launchers at the porch. Three steps above them stood Hunter Beck.

  When he held his press conference on the courthouse steps last month, reporters from all the major outlets attended, in numbers never before seen in Hampshire County. Today he was at a private house on a rural road that most GPS systems had trouble finding, and still he’d drawn a huge media presence. Not many private citizens could command that kind of attention, maybe not even many billionaires, but this one was a special breed. Not yet forty, Beck was widely regarded as a visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs. His Intellocity internet utility program had made him a hero to everyone for whom web pages could never load fast enough. Her own boys spoke of him with the kind of awe they usually reserved for sports figures and rock stars.

  But it was something else that drew this many reporters. The story was heartbreaking. Five years ago, Hunter’s first wife had just learned the gender of their baby, and she was so excited to share the news with him that she dashed across the street to the sidewalk café where he was waiting for her—right into the path of an oncoming cab. Her body landed ten feet from where he sat, and a hundred cell phones recorded the moment as he fell to his knees beside her howling his shock and anguish. The videos went viral on YouTube until someone finally had the decency to take them down.

  The idea that Hunter might now be losing his second family, too, had to be more than the reporters could resist. They lobbed their questions at him in a frenzy as he stood before the bouquet of microphones. He was an unsmiling man with an intense gaze behind black-rimmed glasses, and he was dressed for a day in the country, in a canvas jacket over a T-shirt and blue jeans.

  Leigh was still dressed in the yoga pants and baggy shirt she’d slept in. She gave a wide berth to the crowd and headed for the back porch as Carrie beckoned to her from the door. “Welcome to the madhouse,” she said.

  Leigh ducked inside. “Where is she?” she whispered. The vestibule was draped with barn coats and rain slickers on hooks, and lined up below them were two dog bowls and a dozen pairs of boots in various sizes—paddock boots and muck boots and knee-high riding boots made of hand-tooled leather polished to a high gleam. The mudroom of a working horse farm.

  “She won’t say.” Carrie raked her fingers through her short blond hair. She looked more frazzled than worried. “She doesn’t trust us not to let it slip to Hunter, and I can’t say I blame her after this.” She pointed Leigh through to the kitchen. “We woke up this morning and she was gone but her car was still here. So we figured either Hunter took her or she went back to him. The way her mood’s been swinging? Nothing would surprise us. So that was our first call.” She held up the coffeepot and poured herself a cup when Leigh shook her head no. “Big mistake,” Carrie said. “Jenna called five minutes later. Turns out she’s been planning this for weeks. Lining up a place to live, leasing a new car. He never cut off the money, you know. She’s been squirreling it away for a while.”

  “Did you tell Hunter that?”

  “Yep. Didn’t make a bit of difference. He called the cops anyway and reported her as a missing person and flew straight down here in his chopper. So now the cops are searching her room and taking our statements like we’re some kind of criminals.”

  Even in the kitchen the reporters’ voices could be heard shouting out their questions at the front porch. “And he alerted the media,” Leigh said.

  Carrie rolled her eyes.

  Leigh followed another set of voices coming from the living room. Fred Dietrich was at the front window, on his feet with his fists clutching the casing as he stared through the glass. Three other men were seated around the coffee table. She recognized two of them. “Sergeant Hooper,” she said as the unif
ormed officer shot to his feet.

  “Mrs. Conley?” He was clearly confused by her arrival on the scene.

  “It’s Ms. Huyett today, Sergeant. Attorney for the Dietrichs.” She looked down at the two men in suits still seated on the sofa. “Rob,” she said to Hunter Beck’s attorney.

  “Leigh.” Rob Canaday was an excellent lawyer notwithstanding his embarrassing defeat in this case. She didn’t beat him because she was the better lawyer. She beat him because he was young and eager. It made him too malleable in the hands of a demanding client.

  The third man got to his feet and flashed an ID from his inside coat pocket. “Detective Jim Denton. Investigating a missing persons report concerning Jenna Beck.”

  “She’s not missing. Her parents spoke to her this morning.”

  “But they don’t know where she is.”

  “She’s twenty-five years old, Detective. Do your parents know where you are?”

  The detective’s expression remained stony. “An investigation is called for whenever there are serious concerns for the safety and welfare of a person whose whereabouts are unknown.”

  “What concerns?” Leigh looked to Carrie where she leaned in the kitchen doorway. “Mrs. Dietrich, do you have any concerns for Jenna’s safety and welfare?”

  Carrie folded her arms. “Nope.”

  “Mr. Dietrich? Do you?”

  Fred turned from the window. “Not so long as that son of a bitch stays away from her.”

  “Her husband has concerns,” the detective said.

  “You mean the husband who hasn’t resided with her for more than two months? Who’s had no communication with her for more than two months. And who therefore knows nothing about the state of her safety and welfare.”

  “He knows that she’s pregnant,” Canaday said.

  “Believe it or not, Rob, that’s not a disability.”

  “She’s shutting him out and now she’s taken off—”