House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  The twins explained the rest. They went snorkeling a few days back and forgot to take their phones out of their pockets. They would have called her from a landline as soon as they docked in Nantucket, but they didn’t know anyone thought they were missing. Their dad said he’d do their last check-in, and they thought he had. He also said he’d have somebody look at the corroded cable connections on the marine radio, and they thought he’d done that, too. As for why he wasn’t answering his own phone now, their voices trailed off into mumbles. It had something to do with a woman or with a bar, or most likely, Leigh thought, a woman in a bar.

  She didn’t care. All she cared about was the sound of their voices, coming through loud and clear, in stereo, as she held both phones to her head. Head-phones, she thought, and she laughed even louder as the tears poured down her face. She must have sounded hysterical, but she didn’t care about that either. They were safe. Nothing else mattered.

  Pete wanted to talk to them next, and she surrendered the phones to him. “Where are you? You’re okay?” he said before his voice turned stern. “You check in with us from now on, you hear me? Not some random dockmaster. You call your mom, and I’m talking every day. And you get that radio fixed. This can’t ever happen again. You hear me?” He grinned at Leigh as their stammered assurances came through the speakers.

  She wiped her face and turned the other way to Kip, this boy genius who sleuthed out the twins’ location and saved her from hours of heart-stopping terror.

  “Kip,” she said softly. She took his face in her hands. “Thank you.” Then she flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “Thank you!”

  He let out a shaky breath in her ear as Peter reached around to squeeze his shoulder.

  There were flights to cancel and car rental reservations to relinquish and Peter got honked out of his illegal parking space at the curb and had to find another place where he could pull over to finish all his calls. By that time Leigh remembered where she’d left the car: at the Metro station in Reston.

  “Great,” Peter said. “We’ll take you there.” He let his hand drop to her thigh as he pointed the truck out of the city. She put her hand on top of it and laced her fingers through his. His thumb rubbed against her wedding band as he drove. She glanced over at his left hand, where it gripped the wheel at eleven o’clock. A band of gold glinted there, too.

  Kip had his phone back now and was busy tapping out texts. She glanced over as the bubbles lit up on his screen. How much trouble we in? Zack texted him. Always a distant second to me, bro, Kip replied.

  All her life Leigh had loved living in the country and never so much as tonight. The deeper they drove into the Virginia countryside, the lighter the traffic became and the greener the fields. All the world was at peace out here, out of the hustle and chaos of the city. She was at peace, too, here between Peter and Kip. They banded together today, the way families do in a crisis.

  But as they got closer to Reston and the end of this ride, she couldn’t help remembering that it was a crisis that drove them apart in the first place. She doubted they could forget it either. Peter spotted the Volvo in the parking lot and pulled up alongside it, and Kip jumped out and held the door for her, and her heart sank as she slid to the ground. Their happy little reunion was over. This was how it would all end. They’d deposit her here and go back to Hollow House and she’d go home alone.

  “There’s pizza in the freezer,” she said.

  “Sounds good,” Peter said. “We’ll see you at home.”

  That was all it took to settle the matter. A couple DiGiornos in the deep-freeze, and she had her family back.

  For the evening at least. Part of them, anyway.

  Shep fired out of the house like a launched torpedo when she opened the kitchen door. He streaked back and forth between Peter and Kip, yipping with joy to see them again. Kip dropped to the ground to wrestle with him, and Peter stepped around them to follow her into the kitchen. He stopped on the threshold. “I don’t like the way this door’s sticking.” He opened and closed it with a frown.

  “It’s the humidity.”

  He went to the garage for his tools, and she went ahead of him into the kitchen feeling as nervous as a bride on her in-laws’ first visit. There were dirty dishes on the counter and kibble scattered around the dog dish, and she hurried to tidy up. This was a celebration, after all—the boys were safe!—and everything should be perfect. She popped the pizzas in the oven and uncorked a bottle of wine as Peter returned with the toolbox and squatted to work on the door hinges.

  From the front window she could see Kip rolling around with Shep out on the lawn. He used to tussle with Dylan and Zack in that same spot, and she remembered how Peter used to yell at them to take it out back before the neighbors called the cops. She remembered all four of them playing in the garden or the pasture on summer nights like this one. They’d set up volleyball nets or soccer cages, every night after dinner, playing until nightfall and even later, stumbling around in the dark and blindly slamming into each other. Laughing hysterically the whole time. Chrissy’s laugh was always so easy to pick out. She could hear it now—a little light tinkling sound dancing gaily above her brothers’ snorts and guffaws.

  The oven timer dinged and she shook herself out of her reverie and slid out the pizzas. She rapped on the front window, and when Kip looked up from the lawn, she crooked a finger and beckoned him inside. Peter was still fiddling with the back door, and Kip cut around him and stopped uncertainly in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “Go wash up,” she told him. “Dinner’s ready.”

  “That’s better,” Peter said as Kip took off down the hall. He got to his feet and opened and closed the door a few times before he packed up his tools and went back to the garage to put them away.

  She set the table, three places at a table with four chairs. She stood back and surveyed it, but it looked so off-balance that she stacked up the plates again.

  “You know what?” she said when Peter came back in from the garage. “Let’s eat in front of the TV tonight.”

  “Great,” he said and headed there.

  The family room was always his favorite place to unwind, and he was already on the sofa with the remote in hand when she set the pizza on the coffee table. She came back with a Snapple for Kip and poured out two glasses of wine as she sat down next to Peter. Kip flopped on the floor and sat cross-legged at the coffee table to eat. He peeled the olives off his slice and tossed them to Shepherd, who leaped in the air and caught each one between his snapping jaws.

  It used to be Chrissy who snagged the olives off Kip’s slice. He hated them, and he used to accuse her of ordering their pizzas with olives just to provoke him. She always looked up at the ceiling and airily said, Who, me?

  Leigh heard the ring of her laughter again, as clear and true as if her ghost were there in the room with them. She felt her flopping between them on the sofa. Isn’t there anything else on? Diving for olives off Kip’s pizza. Feet pounding on the stairs. I’ll get it! The sparkle of her laugh amid the flash and wink of the fireflies in the garden. Her ghost wisping through every room of the house.

  No. She reached for her glass and took a gulp of wine. She mustn’t think about Chrissy tonight, not now that everything else was right with the world. Dylan and Zack were safe, Peter and Kip were back. She mustn’t ask about the case either, that other elephant in their room. This reunion was too fragile; it could disintegrate with talk of witness statements and plea negotiations.

  She made herself concentrate on the news instead, but it was awful, as always. Another terrorist attack in Europe today. Another mass shooting in America last night. Events that used to be so shocking that time seemed to stand still until it could finally sink in they had actually happened. Now the networks could broadcast the same clips in a loop and no one would notice that the news hadn’t changed.

  Kip polished off
his pizza and got to his feet. “I’m going up to my room. I mean”—he caught himself and looked at Leigh—“is it all right if I go up to my room?”

  Was it still his room? he was asking. Peter pulled his eyes from the news and watched her like he was taking the temperature of her reply. “Of course,” she said.

  His footsteps pounded up the stairs, and she got up and cleared the plates to the kitchen. It was such a precarious truce, she thought as she rinsed them off and loaded them in the dishwasher. One wrong move, one careless word, and it could all be over in an instant.

  She returned to the sofa, and Peter put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, and when the news cut to a commercial, he put a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to his and kissed her.

  His beard felt strange against her skin. Not scratchy. Just different. Different enough to underscore how long they’d been apart. They kissed like teenagers, nervously, as if their parents might switch on the lights at any moment. But also like teenagers in another respect. They’d been chaste too long, and their kisses soon took on a backseat-of-the-car urgency. She slipped her hands under his shirt and tried to remember if he still had a toothbrush here. If he had to go back to Hollow House for anything, this spell might be broken. It would be so much easier if they could climb the stairs at the end of the evening and fall into bed without a second’s thought or discussion. Their bodies would remember what to do. It was the thinking and discussing that might bring trouble.

  Kip thundered down the stairs again, and they scrambled apart, panting a little, but laughing a little, too. “Hey, Leigh, could I use your laptop?” he called on his way to the kitchen.

  “Help yourself,” she called back.

  Peter returned his attention to the news. This was when Chrissy usually came running downstairs after her bath, and the sweet fragrance of strawberry shampoo would scent the room as she pulled up the stool at Leigh’s feet. She could smell it now. She could feel the slide of the comb and the spring of each corkscrew curl around her fingers. She could see her hair shimmer into a halo as she let go.

  “Dessert?” She started to get up. “I could thaw something.”

  “Relax,” Peter said and pulled her down, her head in his lap. She stretched out her legs, and he stroked her hair through the market report, the sports wrap-up, the week ahead in weather. Her eyes fell closed, the voices droned, and she drifted slowly off to sleep.

  She dreamed of Chrissy. She often did, but this dream was different from the rest. She was all grown up in this one. Leigh was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea while she watched Chrissy unload the dishwasher. Her back was to the room, and her strawberry-blond hair fell like a veil over her face as she bent to pull out the dishes. She sorted the flatware and slid the plates in the rack and put the glasses on the shelves one by one. “There. All done,” she said, and she was just starting to turn around, her grown-up face was almost in view—when suddenly Stephen Kendall was there in the room, too. He was saying something to her, but—Wait. Just a moment, she said and leaned to look past him. It was too late, though. Chrissy had already flickered out of sight.

  Her eyes flashed open. The dream was over, but somehow Stephen was still there. She sat up and sent a confused look around the room. She could hear his voice so clearly. “Oh!” she said when her gaze reached the TV screen. “Look—it’s my friend Stephen.”

  Peter cocked his head. “Who?”

  “A new friend. Stephen Kendall.”

  He clicked the volume up. Stephen was at a news desk with a mic wired to his tie. He was being interviewed about gun violence. No, I wouldn’t call it an epidemic, he was saying. Pandemic’s the better word.

  “Hey, is there any ice cream?” Kip hollered from the kitchen.

  “Only one way to find out,” she hollered back.

  More than two hundred mass shootings so far this year alone, Stephen said on screen. His name appeared below his super-size face. Rev. Dr. Stephen H. Kendall.

  “He’s a priest?” Peter said.

  “Yes, and a professor, and he’s the director of a research center on gun violence.”

  “Mint chocolate chip,” Kip groaned in the kitchen. Ice cream shouldn’t be green, he always griped, but it was Chrissy’s favorite. It’s cool and refreshing. Like me! she used to say.

  “But he’s also a priest.”

  “Yes. He has a church in Chevy Chase.”

  Suicides, accidental shootings, domestic violence. All deaths resulting from guns kept in the home for self-defense. But the numbers make it clear: We’re not defending ourselves with these guns. We’re killing our loved ones and ourselves.

  “You’ve been going to church in Chevy Chase?”

  She shook her head. “We met—elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere where?”

  “He was driving past the Hermitage one day. We stopped and introduced ourselves.” Not the whole truth, but she couldn’t admit that she followed him home.

  “On Hollow Road?” Peter suddenly muted the volume on Stephen’s voice. “You know a priest who was driving on Hollow Road and you never mentioned it?”

  Kip appeared in the doorway with his hand plunged deep in a bag of potato chips.

  “He’s not—”

  Peter got to his feet. “Do you know how hard we’ve been looking—? Hey.” He snapped his fingers at Kip and pointed at the TV. “Take a look at this guy.”

  “He’s not that priest.” Leigh got up, too. “He wasn’t on Hollow Road that night.”

  Kip squinted at the screen and went closer.

  “How do you know?” Peter said.

  “Because I asked him. And he said no.”

  Peter pressed the remote and Stephen’s voice filled the room again. You’ve heard the saying, Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. That’s perfectly true. Mentally ill people kill people. Toddlers kill people. Careless shooters kill people. Depressives kill themselves. But what’s the common denominator? Guns. Easy access to guns.

  Kip’s brow furrowed as he listened. “I don’t know. He could be the guy.”

  Leigh threw up her hands. “He’s not the guy. I told you—I already asked him. What possible reason would he have to lie?”

  Kip studied the face on the screen. “Maybe he was doing something he didn’t want anybody to find out. Like, I don’t know, maybe he had a girl in the car. Or I know—a little boy!”

  “Stop it,” she said tightly. “He’s an esteemed scholar. He’s the kindest man I’ve ever—”

  “You knew about him this whole time,” Peter said. “And you never bothered to mention he might be the guy we’ve been beating the bushes to find?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Peter,” she burst out. “Face facts: there was no guy!”

  He took a step back, away from her.

  “There was,” Kip said. “I swear I’m telling the truth.”

  She wheeled on him. “What does that even mean to you, Kip? Seriously. Do you even understand the concept?”

  She put her hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Kip flinched, and Peter stared at her like she’d slapped the boy.

  No one spoke for a long time. They stood in the middle of the kitchen like three sides of a triangle, watching one another across the empty space in the middle. The image of a triangle took hold in Leigh’s mind, and Chrissy’s ghost was back in the room, kneeling at the coffee table, working through one of her geometry lessons. But this triangle wasn’t equilateral, it was isosceles, and Leigh was the odd one out. Peter and Kip formed a right angle and she was the hypotenuse opposing them. She could hear Chrissy reciting the formula: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares— But her voice faded away, and Leigh couldn’t remember the rest of it. All she knew was that nothing was ever going to square up right again.

  Kip broke formation first. He edged for the
door. “I’m gonna go call Shelby.”

  “Hold up,” Peter said with a last look at Leigh. “We’ll call her together from the road.”

  Shepherd jumped down from the window seat and trotted after them out the back door and hopped up in the truck to ride with them as they drove away.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  It was everything they’d been hoping and praying for. It was worth every gamble. It would solve all of their problems. Right up until the moment it didn’t.

  He wasn’t the guy.

  Shelby called from the road to deliver the news on her way back to the city. She and Frank Nobbin drove out to Kendall’s house that morning to question him, and they both came away convinced he was nowhere near Hollow Road that night.

  The trackhoe was on-site excavating for the swimming pool and it made such a racket that Pete waved Kip down to the basement to take the call. They put the phone on speaker and crouched over it like they were peering into a crystal ball. Kip’s face was white with a layer of fine plaster dust. Ever since his job ended at the Millers’, he’d been pitching in with whatever work was under way. Today it was the finish plaster crew.

  Kendall was a lovely man, Shelby told them. He couldn’t have been more gracious. He invited them into his study and offered them tea and answered every one of their questions. He knew about the accident, of course, from Leigh, and he was truly sorry he couldn’t help. As for where he was that night, he couldn’t remember after all this time, but he gave Frank his day-planner to peruse while he poured their tea, and there it was—he was in New York at a fund-raiser for the Andrew Kendall Research Center on Gun Violence. It came back to him then, and he went to his computer and printed out the guest list for the event, complete with email addresses and telephone numbers. And he seemed to recall there might be a video—yes, there it was, posted on the foundation website, a video of the speech he gave that night, time-stamped 9:30 p.m.