House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  Stephen stared at the woman through the windshield. He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I’ll have to say good-bye here.”

  It had never occurred to Leigh that he counseled other bereaved people. “Of course.”

  Her car was wedged in the drive beside the station wagon, but with a little maneuvering she could back out without everyone having to shuffle places. She circled around to her driver’s door as Stephen approached the distraught woman. He said something in a low voice and put a hand on her elbow to guide her to the house.

  Halfway there the woman stopped and wrenched a look back at Leigh. “I know you!”

  Leigh stopped. “I don’t think so—”

  “Let’s get inside.” Stephen put his hands on the woman’s shoulders.

  “I know you. Don’t I? You’re their mother, yes? That sweet girl. And that poor boy.” Her hand fluttered to her mouth as her face twisted with a sob. “That beautiful, beautiful boy—”

  “Claire. Come inside. Now.”

  Claire? Leigh’s mouth dropped open. She shot a look at Stephen, but he didn’t look back. He steered the weeping woman to the front door. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” she wailed as he shut it firmly behind them.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Pete didn’t bother driving by the house that week. What was the point? Leigh had her new friend now. Her esteemed scholar. Even Shelby was taken with the guy. A lovely man, she called him. He kept turning over the way Leigh spoke his name—Stephen—like he was too good for plain old Steve. Okay, so she also called him Peter, but still. Stephen was the reason for the lipstick and the dressy dress. He was the reason she was out night after goddam night. Pete wasn’t even going to try to compete. He missed the warning signs seven years ago when Karen was suddenly so taken with her new dentist; he wasn’t going to suffer that humiliation again.

  Saturday night he picked up some takeout and headed home with the windows open and the summer breeze blowing through the cab of the truck. He passed a park where a Little League game was in progress, and it brought back a wave of memories, of other summer nights like this, when Kip was little and life was easy. Stretched out in a lawn chair behind the backstop, cheering him on, wincing a little when he struck out or missed an easy fly ball but always covering it up before he turned around to see. Giving him a big thumbs-up that made the boy duck his head in embarrassment but not before Pete saw him smile.

  He wasn’t any good at covering up his reactions these days. The government’s plea offer had knocked him on his ass, and after two more strikeouts this week—Kip’s lousy performance on the stand and the busted lead on the priest—the dread had to be showing in everything he said and did. Two years or ten. In prison. He couldn’t even wrap his head around it.

  Back at Hollow House, he let himself in the kitchen and hollered for Kip to come and eat. He hollered again as he got out the paper plates and unwrapped the burgers, and when Kip didn’t answer the third holler, he went looking for him.

  He was probably sacked out on his cot, Pete thought as he trotted upstairs. But he wasn’t in his room or anywhere on the second floor, or on the third floor or even in the basement. He wasn’t anywhere in the house.

  Pete called Kip’s phone as he climbed up the basement stairs, and from the kitchen came the answering ring tones. “Where’ve you been?” he yelled. But Kip didn’t answer, on his phone or otherwise, and Pete followed the rings all the way to the island, where Kip’s phone lay quivering on the glazed lava stone.

  He stared at it. Kip never went anywhere without his phone. He took it with him to the john. He’d take it in the shower with him, too, if he could figure out how to waterproof it.

  He went outside and yelled for him, but the whole place was quiet, inside and out. He headed up to the conservancy land behind the Millers’ property and hiked into the woods at the top of the hill. The trees were in full leaf and so dense it was like the sun switched off as soon as he passed under them. He called Kip’s name again as he walked through the gloom.

  Still no answer. He stopped and turned a slow revolution, then leaned his head back and looked up. The trees in this stand of woods were old hardwoods, oaks mostly, thick-trunked and tall, with good strong horizontal limbs. The thought of those horizontal limbs made his heart clutch, and he broke into a run.

  He wouldn’t—of course he wouldn’t. It was one thing to be kind of bummed out and a totally different thing to be— No, he wasn’t going to say the word, not even in his head. He kept running and yelling Kip’s name, squinting through the forest murk, his head spinning as he scanned every limb on every tree. What would he even use? There wasn’t any rope on the job site he could recall. Nothing but a few leftover coils of electrical cable in the tool trailer, and that was when he remembered the nail guns.

  Oh, Jesus. He stopped dead with his chest heaving. He should have checked the trailer first. He wheeled around and tore back down the hill the way he came. There might still be time. He might still get there in time.

  Something creaked as he burst out of the woods. A metallic sound like a hinge or a rusty chain. His feet stuttered to a stop and his head snapped around, and there he was. Not dangling from the end of a rope but at the wall of the place next door, halfway up an extension ladder propped against the bricks.

  “What—what the hell?”

  Kip froze, one foot suspended in the air above the next rung.

  Pete’s relief was displaced by a red-hot boil of anger. “What are you—? After I told you to— Get your ass down here! Now!”

  Kip scrambled down. It was an aluminum ladder pilfered from the tool trailer, and draped over the electrified wire on top of the wall was the rubber bed mat from the back of the truck. Pete felt the steam building so hot it could have blown out his ears. He didn’t wait for him to reach the ground. He pulled him off the ladder and flung him around and pinned him against the wall. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing. I was just—I don’t know—curious.”

  “You could’ve gotten electrocuted! Or—God!—shot!”

  “I grounded the electricity, okay? And there’s nobody there to shoot at me.”

  “You don’t know that.” Pete grabbed him hard by the shoulders. “I told you to stay away from that place!”

  “Okay.” Kip squirmed in his grip. “All right!”

  “You would’ve set off the alarms. The cops would’ve been here in three minutes.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Pete gave him a shake. “They’d arrest you for trespassing. No, for breaking and entering!”

  “Big deal. So I get another three months. On top of two years.”

  His hands fell from the boy’s shoulders. He lurched back a step. “Nobody said we’re taking that deal.”

  “On top of ten years, then.” Kip slid down the wall until his butt smacked the ground. “’Cause if we don’t take the deal, that’s what I’m gonna get.”

  “Aw, jeez.” Pete turned away with his hands on top of his head and walked two laps of a tight circle before he rounded back on Kip. “You’re not doing ten years or two or even a week. You hear me? I’m not letting you go to prison!”

  Kip looked up at him, his eyes defiant through the shine of tears. “How do you think you’re gonna stop it?”

  “You let me worry about that.” Pete grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. “You just keep your head down and do as you’re told.” With a shove toward the house, he added, “And you stay the hell away from that place!”

  The temperature hit a hundred that day, and it was midnight before it dropped back below ninety. The AC wasn’t hooked up yet, and Pete lay sweating on his cot, watching his phone for the degrees to drop, watching the minutes crawl by. He thought he heard a wobble in the ceiling fan ­overhead—that bolt might need tightening—and he tried to move that to the front of his digital wo
rry screen. But it was no use. There was only one thing on his screen, and it didn’t scroll, it strobed in hot stabbing flashes of light. The memory of how his heart seized up at the thought of ropes and nail guns.

  They were locked up now and so were the saw blades and everything else he could think of. No harm in taking precautions, even if Kip’s self-destructiveness was taking a different bent.

  Two years versus ten. Jesus Christ.

  There was no hope of sleep. He got up and crept across the hall and cracked open the door to Kip’s room. He could just make out the sprawl of his body in the moonlight. Softly he closed the door again. It was years since he’d felt the need to do bed checks on his son, but if that was what it took now, that was what he was going to do.

  He padded down the staircase. He’d spent eighteen years protecting his family, peering through windshields, scanning hilltops, always on the lookout for danger—and after all that he was supposed to sit by and let them haul his kid off to jail? Nobody ever went to prison and came out the better for it. No matter what happened inside, he’d come out a different boy—man—than he went in. He’d be scarred in a hundred ways, and there was no way Pete could let that happen.

  He opened up his laptop on the lava stone counter and did a search for countries that didn’t have extradition treaties with America. The list came up: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia. He added in countries with no diplomatic relations: North Korea, Iran, Bhutan.

  That was the universe of choices. War zones and totalitarian states where Kip would be safe from extradition but not much else. And they’d stand out like two sore thumbs in any of those countries. They wouldn’t speak the language, they wouldn’t know the customs, they wouldn’t have the right skin tone.

  Canada was the only place he could think of where they’d blend in. But Canada did have an extradition treaty with the States. He clicked through the Google results in search of a loophole. There were none, legally speaking, but the statistics were promising. It looked like the United States seldom made an extradition request to Canada for anyone other than murderers and drug dealers. Manslaughter cases made up only about one percent of the total. Another click told him that only about a hundred people a year were extradited from Canada. Which meant at most one person a year was extradited for manslaughter. Not much comfort if that one person happened to be Kip, but odds of a hundred to one sounded a hell of a lot better to Pete than the odds they were facing now.

  He closed the lid of his laptop. That was it, then. They’d head for Canada. Find work in construction or the oil fields. Assimilate and keep their fingers crossed.

  So okay. He had a backup plan. Maybe now he could get some sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Leigh thought she’d hear from Stephen that weekend. He’d want to confide in her, now that she knew a little about his ex-wife and her situation. Or maybe confess that Leigh had served as a kind of proxy for Claire, that he was helping her work through her grief because he couldn’t help his own wife. It would be a difficult conversation, she thought, and when the phone finally rang Sunday afternoon, she steeled herself as she answered. “Hello?”

  “Sorry to disturb you at home, ma’am.”

  “John?” She was startled, not only because it wasn’t Stephen, but also because she’d never given Stoddard this number. Though that shouldn’t have surprised her. His intelligence gathering skills had been amply demonstrated by then.

  “I’ve completed that assignment you gave me. I didn’t know whether you wanted to wait until office hours or—”

  “You mean—on Emily Whitman?” It was only two days since they last spoke.

  “Yes, ma’am. Or I should say Lindy Carlson.”

  He’d found her. Her pulse quickened. “Can you come over right now?” She gave him her address, though she probably didn’t need to bother with that either.

  An hour later he pulled in the driveway in a decidedly unmilitary-looking minivan. He was dressed casually today, in camo pants and a tight black athletic shirt with the familiar Nike swoosh at the middle of the neckline. “Come on in,” she called from the breezeway.

  He hesitated by his car. “I don’t want to intrude on your family.” He hitched a rucksack over his shoulder.

  “It’s fine. No one’s home.” She led him into the kitchen. “Something to drink?”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  He opened the rucksack and pulled out a file and placed it on the table. She meant to show him into the living room, but his body language made it clear that the kitchen was as far as he would go. She sat down at the table and waved for him to sit, too. “How did you ever manage it?” she asked as she flipped the file open.

  “I surveilled the Qatari embassy yesterday, and at fourteen hundred a blonde in a red Mini Cooper went through the gates. I didn’t think there could be two of them. So I followed her when she came out, and the rest of the pieces fell into place after that.”

  He made it sound so simple, but there was nothing simple about the contents of the file he’d assembled. It was practically a dossier on Lindy Carlson, aka Emily Whitman. A copy of her driver’s license was clipped to the left side of the folder, and on the right were photos of the front and back of her car displaying Virginia license plates. It was parked in front of a suburban town house with a yellow front door and a basket of pink and purple fuchsia hanging from a hook beside the house number plaque. A Post-it on the photo showed an address in Fairfax.

  “This is where she lives?”

  “She owns it with her boyfriend. Copies of the deed and mortgage are in there.”

  So was a photo of the boyfriend, an intense-looking young man in glasses. “Joshua Landrum,” John said. “He’s a legislative aide to Senator Brockhurst.” The file included screenshots of Landrum’s LinkedIn profile and the staff directory on the senator’s website. Lindy’s profile was there, too, showing her current position in the Office of Protocol of the State Department. Below that was her college transcript from Wellesley, and below that her grad school transcript from Harvard.

  “I got some long-lens shots.” John shuffled through time-stamped photos of Lindy getting in her car, standing at her mailbox, with her boyfriend at a restaurant, and driving in and out of the gates of the Qatari embassy. One of the photos showed her passing an envelope to the man in the guardhouse.

  The final document was a copy of the incident report of Leigh’s 911 call and the standoff at the embassy gates. It contained a capsule summary of Leigh’s accusations against the ambassador and the attaché’s cross-­accusations against Leigh, then noted that a State Department official named Lindy Carlson confirmed that diplomatic immunity prevented any entry onto or search of the embassy premises. The attaché agreed not to press charges against Leigh, and the matter was closed.

  “She’s not assigned to the Near Eastern desk,” John said. “There’s no official reason for her to have this kind of relationship with the embassy.”

  “Off-book, she called it.”

  “Unauthorized, I’d call it, and maybe illegal. Depends on what’s in those envelopes.”

  Leigh looked up from the file. “This is amazing work, John. I can’t thank you enough. When you send me your bill, be sure to give yourself a bonus.”

  He leaned back in the chair. “Can I ask—what are you planning to do with this intel?”

  “I’ll take it to the police and force them to reopen the investigation.”

  He nodded. “Then best case—what?—they go to some other State Department official for clarification? Is that your end game?”

  She saw where he was going. The ruling on diplomatic immunity would be the same, even if it came from a legitimate source inside the State Department. “Then I’ll take this to Justice.”

  “Okay, but what then? Best case, they charge Lindy with something and the ambassador gets expelled.”

>   That was the last thing she wanted. If bin Jabar was sent back to Qatar, he’d take Devra with him, and she’d be under sharia law again with no ability to ever divorce him. “Then I’ll go to Emily—Lindy—and threaten to expose her if she doesn’t—” Leigh broke off. No matter how cozy Lindy’s relationship was with the embassy, she couldn’t possibly have enough influence to secure Devra’s freedom. “I don’t know,” she said finally, helplessly. “I have to do something.”

  “Could I suggest something else?”

  She eyed him. “Such as?”

  “Extraction.”

  She let out an astonished laugh. “What?”

  “Go in and pull your client out of there.”

  “This isn’t Syria, John. We can’t breach the gates with a dozen armed men.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, sometimes we went in loud,” he admitted. “But sometimes we went in real quiet.”

  She cocked her head. “How?”

  “With a Trojan horse.” He tapped a finger on the file. She looked down. He was pointing at a photo of Lindy Carlson.

  Early Monday morning Lindy Carlson emerged from her cheery yellow door looking chic in a white peplum blouse over a turquoise pencil skirt. She came down the stairs and crossed the parking lot in the brisk, purposeful stride of a smart young professional. She was halfway to her car when she stopped, stared, and did an abrupt about-face back to her house.

  “Oh, would you rather do this inside?” Leigh called from where she leaned against the bumper of the Mini Cooper. “In front of Josh? In which case, perhaps we should invite the senator to sit in, too.”

  Lindy tried and failed to form a smirk as she turned around. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to trade in your currency, Ms. Carlson. Favors, right? You do a favor for me, and in return, I won’t ruin your life.” Leigh plucked the car keys from the girl’s hand and pointed her toward the sliding door of the van parked beside the Mini Cooper. “Please. After you,” she said as John Stoddard reached out and jerked the girl inside.