House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Hey, nice work there,” Hooper said instead. “I’ve been watching that place go up while I drive patrol. Boy, what I wouldn’t give to live in a house like that.”

  “You and me both.” Inside the courtyard Miller was trying to thrust his phone at one of the other cops and yelling something about his lawyer. “You gonna arrest him?”

  “Nah. We’ll contact the owner through the alarm company and see if they want to press charges. But if the gate was unlocked like he says, it would only be for trespass. Worst case, he’ll get a citation in the mail.”

  Pete shook his head in disgust. Kip would have been locked up if he’d climbed over that wall. What a day to be reminded of the injustices of the justice system.

  “You have a good day, Mr. Conley.”

  “Yeah. You do the same.”

  Kip was still on the front lawn where Pete had left him, but somehow Yana Miller was with him now. She must have ninjaed her way over here while Pete was talking to Hooper. Now she was up in Kip’s face, her hands beating the air to punctuate whatever it was she was saying to him. Belated complaints about his work, Pete guessed, until she placed the flat of her palm on his hairless chest. Kip jerked away and said something with a quick shake of his head, and she turned and flounced away.

  “Hey!” Pete yelled, but too late. She ran past him too close to the edge of the drive, and there, sure enough, was the puncture wound of one slender high heel in the uncured concrete. “What was all that?” he said when he caught up with Kip.

  “She, uh, she wanted to wish me luck.”

  “Kind of handsy about it, wasn’t she?”

  “It’s a Russian thing, I guess.”

  “Let’s get back to bed. Big day tomorrow.” He winced after he said it. Like it was a soccer match or something. Kip said nothing. He turned and trudged up to the house.

  Pete looked back at the heel print in the concrete. He decided he wouldn’t bother to fix it. The Millers would just have to live with it.

  “Scream all you want,” Stoddard said as he reached for the duct tape on Jenna’s mouth.

  The rising sun poured a pale pink light over the fallow fields that surrounded the dilapidated farmhouse. It was an isolated shack miles down a lonely dirt road with not even the muted glow of a distant porch light to give hope of a neighbor nearby. Rural Virginia was strewn with these old abandoned farms. If they were even still in Virginia. The roads were dark and unfamiliar, and Leigh had lost all her bearings along the way.

  “Fuck you,” Jenna said as the gag came off, but she didn’t scream. She was all defiance now. “My name is Jenna Dietrich,” she announced loudly as he cut through the cable ties around her ankles. “My soon-to-be-ex-husband is Hunter Beck and he hired you to kidnap me. I’m nine months pregnant, and you two men kidnapped me from my apartment in Arlington and brought me to this shack down a long dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and you’re not going to get away with this. You two men in ski masks,” she said as Stoddard handed her over to Charlie. “You tall man in charge and you other man with the hillbilly accent. You are not going to get away with this.”

  Jenna had two hours—or three? Leigh had lost track of time, too—to plan what to say when her gag came off, and this was what she came up with. A bizarre speech that sounded either like a screed or a voice-over narration in a movie about her life. Stoddard was still snickering at it as he came around to cut through the bindings on Leigh’s ankles and haul her out of the car.

  He didn’t remove her duct-tape gag, not that she would have screamed anyway. She was mute with fury at him. At herself. At what an easy mark she turned out to be. She stared at him through narrowed eyes, and he stared back through the holes in his ski mask. She didn’t understand why he still wore the mask. Obviously she knew who he was. It was only Jenna he was concealing himself from, and when Leigh was finally free to call the police, she would identify him by name and every other biographic fact she could muster. So why bother to hide his face from Jenna? Charlie still wore his ski mask, too, even though rivulets of sweat ran down his muscled neck. She couldn’t work it out.

  A gnarled old sycamore overhung the ramshackle house, and the path to the side door was knobby with twisted tree roots. Weeds choked the skirting of the porch, and the floorboards sagged with rot. The men herded them up the splintered steps and inside. The kitchen had been stripped of all its appliances and most of the copper pipes in its shredded walls. It was a strange place to choose for the rendezvous with Hunter. Leigh would have expected them to meet at a helipad where Hunter would be standing by with a team of obstetric doctors and nurses ready to whisk Jenna off to a private suite at New York–Presbyterian. But she supposed Hunter chose this place to avoid the paparazzi and other prying eyes. There’d be no one but Leigh to witness the handoff at a derelict farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

  Stoddard opened a door in the wall beside the grimy outline of where a refrigerator once stood. “In you go.”

  He herded them into a tiny windowless room, an old pantry, Leigh guessed, though there was nothing in it now but cracked-lathe walls and peeling linoleum on the floor. There was no light in the room either, and it went dark as soon as the door closed behind them. It smelled of mice and mildew.

  “You’re fired,” Jenna said to Leigh. “I hope you know that.”

  Metal squeaked against metal as locks slid shut on the door, one at the bottom, one at the top. “Maintain position,” Stoddard said on the other side of the door. “I’m gonna recon the perimeter.”

  “Roger that.”

  Slivers of light cut around the edges of the door, enough for Leigh to make out Jenna’s bulky silhouette as she bent one knee, then the other, and awkwardly lowered herself to the floor. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?” Jenna grunted as she landed. “But nobody ever listens to me.”

  Leigh tried to make a noise of apology behind her gag. It came out like a whimper.

  “Oh, give it a rest,” the girl said. “It’s not like we’re in any real danger here. In fact, I’ve been doing some thinking. This little stunt of his ought to be good for another fifty million or so on my settlement, don’t you think? Not that you’ll be handling it.”

  Leigh’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light. She could see Jenna sitting with her back against the wall and her legs spread wide. She could see the sullen scowl on her pretty young face. She tried again to make a noise of regret.

  “Listen”—the girl lowered her voice—“help’s on the way.”

  Leigh looked at her with the question. What?

  “Remember my panic button?” Jenna pointed her chin at the hump of her belly. “When you all barged in, I pushed the button. It automatically dialed nine-one-one and started recording and GPS tracking.”

  Leigh peered through the dark, and when she saw the glint of the silver pendant moving up and down with each of Jenna’s breaths, she let out her own breath against the duct tape. The 911 operator was on the line and listening in. That was the reason for Jenna’s wacky speech outside. The police were on their way. Stoddard and Charlie would be arrested, and Hunter, too, if they named him, and even if they didn’t, one way or the other she’d see to it that he was held accountable for this in the courts.

  “It automatically rang my parents, too, so I’m sure they’re on their way, too.” With a snort Jenna added, “I even put your cell on the call list, God knows why.”

  Leigh stared at her. Her phone was in her bag. She didn’t know where it was now, but she had it with her in Jenna’s apartment, and the phone never made a sound. It would have rung if the panic-button call had been received. The power was on, she was sure of that, because she remembered trying to call Carrie when she first got in Stoddard’s car. She remembered that she couldn’t get a signal.

  Her heart plummeted as she realized why. She couldn’t get a signal because the signal was jammed. Stoddard had a cell phone jammer in
his car or his rucksack. He made sure she couldn’t call Carrie or anyone else on the drive to Arlington, and he made sure Jenna couldn’t call for help either.

  The panic button didn’t work. The police weren’t on their way. She lowered herself to the floor beside Jenna. There was nothing to do but wait this out.

  Karen and Gary were waiting on the courthouse steps, and Kip gave a dutiful peck to his mother’s cheek. “You look nice,” she said, running her eyes over his graduation-funeral-trial suit. “You shaved your beard,” she said next, to Pete, and Kip shot him a look. He hadn’t noticed until that moment. Other things on his mind.

  Inside they had to wait in line at a metal detector and place the contents of their pockets on the conveyor belt. The guard held out a bin for them to deposit their phones into. No electronic devices allowed in the courtroom.

  Shelby was outside the courtroom door with Frank Nobbin and her paralegal, Britta. Today she wore a navy-blue suit with a white blouse and heels no more than two inches high. Pete almost didn’t recognize her. She looked past him down the corridor and frowned before she turned to give cursory handshakes all around. Gary was so far on his best behavior. “Good to meet you,” he said, pumping Shelby’s hand. “Heard good things.” He must have googled her, Pete thought, and wanted to impress this woman who so impressed him.

  Shelby sent another glance down the corridor and whispered something to Frank before she led them through the double doors into the courtroom. It was a stately, old-fashioned room with twenty-foot ceilings and an elevated bench clad in the kind of intricate carved wood paneling nobody knew how to do anymore. A woman was already there, on her feet at one of the lawyer tables on the other side of the rail. Pete recognized her as the harried-looking woman from the bail hearing. Andrea Briggs. She was laying out file folders in an orderly line across the table. She paused briefly to shake Shelby’s hand and resumed work. Color-coded file tabs fluttered along the edge of each folder.

  Britta got busy doing the same on their side of the courtroom while Shelby pointed the rest of them to their seats. “Kip, up here beside me. Pete, sit here please.” She pointed to the first row behind Kip, behind the rail. “And Dr. and Mrs. March, right here.” Seating arrangements were followed by a two-minute tutorial on how to conduct themselves. No eye rolling during the Commonwealth’s opening, no gasps or guffaws or other outcry. Tears were all right, she said with a glance at Karen, but only if they were silent. They should show love and support for Kip. All other emotions were banished.

  An oversize wall clock hung over the jury box, the kind with mechanical gears that made an audible tick-tock with every advancing second. Pete checked it against his watch.

  At nine fifteen, the front doors opened and the courtroom functionaries came out. Pete watched them set up at their stations in the shadow of the bench. Six feet in front of him was the rigid plane of Kip’s back. He’d never seen him sit up so straight in his life. For the first time he noticed that he’d filled out some over the summer. The fabric of his suit coat stretched taut across his shoulder blades.

  The rear doors crashed open, and a different kid in a suit came swaggering down the center aisle with a briefcase swinging at his side. He was thirty, tops, but he wore his hair in the elaborate blow-dried style of a fifty-year-old TV evangelist. Shelby got to her feet, and so did Andrea Briggs, but only long enough to shift over to second-chair position at the government’s table. This had to be the trial attorney the Commonwealth put on the case. Seth Rodell.

  He shook Shelby’s hand, briefly and with no smile. He didn’t look at Kip at all. He slammed his briefcase on the table and swept aside all of the carefully ordered and annotated files Briggs had laid out for him. Pete watched her face and saw the resentment flicker over it before her eyes hooded. She had at least ten years on him.

  The clock ticked and everyone waited, the lawyers at their tables, the parents in their pews, the functionaries staring straight ahead at nothing, like they were audience volunteers in a hypnotist’s show. Five minutes stretched to ten then twenty. Frank Nobbin came in and shook his head at Shelby. She sighed as he took his seat behind her.

  At last the bailiff came out. “Be upstanding,” he shouted, and as everyone lurched to their feet, the judge’s black robes flapped into view and he took the bench.

  “Be seated.”

  He was younger than Pete expected, early forties, a shrewd-looking guy with a narrow nose and chin, wire-rimmed glasses, and a brush of brown hair over a high forehead. “Good morning,” he said in a reedy tenor. His gaze swept out over the courtroom and landed at the prosecutor’s table. “Mr. Rodell. Ms. Briggs.”

  “Good morning, Your Honor.” Rodell spoke for both of them.

  The judge looked to the defense table next. “Ms. Randolph, is it?”

  “Good morning, Your Honor.” Shelby rose to her feet. “May we approach?”

  The three lawyers went up and huddled with the judge, and for a few minutes there were no sounds in the courtroom but the tick-tock of time and the rasp of indecipherable whispers. Pete watched their body language instead. Rodell leaned forward as he spoke, punctuating his remarks with a fist against his palm, Briggs fidgeted and swayed, and Shelby stood tall and erect, a woman so supremely self-confident that nothing that happened here in Podunk, Virginia, could possibly rattle her.

  The lawyers returned to their respective corners. The judge eyed Kip at the defense table, then lifted his gaze to the spectator benches. “Which ones are the parents?”

  “All of them.” Shelby pointed. “This is the defendant’s father, Mr. Conley.” Pete wondered if he was supposed to stand, then did, awkwardly, and ducked back to his seat when Shelby moved on to Karen and Gary.

  “Good morning to all of you.” The judge spoke with a stiff cordiality that reminded Pete of the principal at St. Alban High. Your kid’s in real trouble, but no reason why we can’t be civil about it.

  “Let’s proceed. Mr. Bailiff, bring the panel in. Counsel, if you’d turn your chairs around. And the rest of you, please clear the courtroom.”

  He banged the gavel for a ten-minute recess.

  Shelby ushered them out to the corridor. “What now?” Pete asked her.

  “Now we pick the jury. And you wait.” She pointed them to the bench along the wall. “After the jury’s seated, you’ll be allowed back in.”

  Gary took off to retrieve his phone from Security to check his messages. Shelby had a quick whispered huddle with Frank Nobbin, who then headed for the exit, too. His frown looked deeper than usual to Pete, and Shelby had an anxious crease in her forehead as she watched him go.

  “Anything wrong?” Pete asked her. Besides the obvious.

  “Not at all.” She turned abruptly and swung through the courtroom doors.

  Jenna couldn’t stop talking. Her vitriol seemed bottomless. “He’s gonna pretend like this was some big grand romantic gesture. You know?”

  Leigh couldn’t speak and didn’t nod, but Jenna wasn’t looking to her for encouragement. She wasn’t looking at her at all as they sat side by side on the floor in the tiny dark room. “He rescued his silly little wife and made her realize the error of her ways. He’ll probably hold a press conference to declare his undying love.” She made a noise like pah!, full of bitterness and contempt. “Yeah, it’s undying love, all right. For her. The undead. That’s what I call her. He refuses to let her fucking die already.”

  The undead. That had to mean Hunter’s first wife. Leigh leaned her head back against the wall. So that was his infidelity. He was still in love with his dead wife, or so Jenna believed. That explained the message he had asked Carrie to pass on: Jenna was the only one who mattered.

  “She looked like me, did you know that? Or I look like her, I guess. It was so obvious. Even our names. Jenna. Gemma. Get it? He said it to me once during sex. Her name. Just like that. Oh, God, Gemma. Then he refused to admit it!
He said I misheard him. But that’s all part of why he picked me to replace her, you know what I mean? He must have thought I was, like, made to order in one of his robot factories.”

  This was why Jenna fled her marriage. The reason she wouldn’t confide to anyone: Hunter was carrying a torch for his dear, departed Gemma. Maybe she thought it was too melodramatic or that no one would believe her. But Leigh would have. She’d seen people do that, let their love for the dead get in the way of their love for the living.

  “It was his idea to get pregnant right away. I was like, God, what’s the rush? I’ve barely lived, you know? By the time I figured it out, it was too late. I was already knocked up. He was trying to replace that dead baby the same way he tried to replace Gemma. But I don’t come in second to anybody, you know what I’m saying? And neither does my baby.”

  Leigh was starting to wish they’d left Jenna’s mouth duct-taped as they had hers. But they probably didn’t want her face to look bruised or swollen when Hunter came to claim her, and if she complained too bitterly about the strong-arm tactics of his henchmen, he might not pay them what he’d promised.

  None of that explained why they kept Leigh gagged, though. Stoddard didn’t want her to talk, and she didn’t understand why. Was he afraid to hear the things she’d say to him if she could? She wondered if he felt some particle of guilt at how he’d lied to her, then wondered if she was giving him too much credit. But he was still the hero of Al-Bab. Surely a man who risked his life to save forty anonymous hostages couldn’t be completely devoid of conscience.

  “I know I got that prenup,” Jenna was saying. “But after something like this? That’s gotta go right out the window, don’t you think? Not that you’ll be handling the divorce. I’m gonna get somebody better than my mom’s girlfriend this time.”

  Leigh gave a weary nod and slumped lower against the wall.