Set the Night on Fire

by Libby Fischer Hellmann

  “How about if I pick you up at the end of the day?”

  “What makes you think I want to see you again?”

  He wasn’t fooled. “Because … ” He stroked her hand, waited for her to put down the mug. Then he raised her hand to his lips. He wondered if she felt the same thrill. “ … we’re not finished.”

  As his mouth moved over her fingers, she smiled. A real smile, this time. “No.” Her voice was husky. “We’re not.”

  It took Dar a few minutes to get the feel of driving again. The car, a black, four-door Honda, was easy enough to maneuver, but the volume of traffic on the road and the speed with which it sped past was unnerving. Where had all these cars come from? Gas cost six times as much as it used to, yet many of the cars were bigger than a VW van. More powerful, too. He’d read about the ocean of debt American consumers were drowning in. These had to be one of the reasons why.

  He’d Googled Casey’s address at the library but didn’t know how to get there. The librarian helped him print out a map, which instructed him to drive north on 294 to Willow, then head east. Thirty minutes later, he entered Winnetka. As he wound through village streets, he gazed at the huge houses, the wide snow-covered lawns, the genteel affluence. This was where the establishment lived. He drove past a street with so many trees that the bare branches made a lacy brocade against the sky. Casey had lived here, in the maw of the enemy. Clearly his old friend had changed.

  He headed toward Casey’s street. Turning down the lane, he was surprised at how narrow it was. An inverse proposition, he guessed. The bigger your home, the smaller your street.

  It wasn’t hard to identify the house. The roof had collapsed, and the second story was open to the elements. The exterior walls still stood, but they were stained with soot. The windows were boarded up. He stopped the car. It was winter quiet, as if the fire had obliterated the life force of the entire block. Bits of yellow tape fluttered from the porch. The only thing that seemed untouched was the front door, blood red. It looked like it was supporting the rest of the structure. A lonely sentinel keeping out unwanted intruders.

  Dar got out and tramped over ridges of frozen mud to the back. He imagined the place without the snow cover. A broad sloping lawn, big enough for swings, picnics, even touch football. Casey’s children had grown up in protected surroundings. That was good. Maybe the only good thing to come out of it all.

  He thought he knew who was responsible for the fire. He even thought he knew why. But that didn’t make it easier to accept. In the space of a few days, the bridges to his past had been destroyed. Just when he was ready to reconnect with the people on the other side. Teddy. Rain. Casey and his son.

  The only one left was the daughter. Lila, they called her. She was out when the house caught fire. If coincidence was the reason she was still alive, would they try again? Then again, why was she in their sights at all? He supposed there was the chance Casey had told the children something unintentionally. Dar imagined how, late at night, Casey might have started to relive the past. He certainly had. Maybe, during one of those reveries, Casey’s son or daughter had seen him gazing at an article … a photo … a letter. He could imagine the child asking, “What’s that, Dad?” See Casey dismiss it, with something like, “Oh, that’s something you don’t have to concern yourself with. It happened a long time ago.” But what if one of the children persisted? When a child wants something, it’s hard to say no. Or so he’d been told.

  He stared at the shell of what had once been a fine home. A bitter wind stung his face. If he was thinking this way, the people who killed Casey and Rain were, too. At the very least they’d be following the girl, checking her movements. Which meant she was vulnerable. Unless he got to her first.

  TWELVE

  It was nearly dark by the time Lila left the Evanston library. She’d spent two hours researching Alice Monroe from Indiana. Despite all the Internet search engines and databases, she came up with nothing except the writer Alice Munro. The last name was spelled differently, but that didn’t stop Lila from wondering if God was playing a cosmic joke on her.

  The reference librarian, a chic woman with salon-styled hair, offered to print out lists of all the Monroes in a few cities in Indiana, but Lila told her not to bother. She had no idea where her mother’s family was, even if they still lived in the state.

  She trudged the few blocks back to Danny’s. Almost dark, the snow was still coming down, whitening the sidewalk and muffling her steps. She pulled up her hood. She passed a man shoveling the sidewalk, although the snow filled in as quickly as he tossed it aside. The dry and bitter cold, despite the snow, snatched her breath away. New York winters weren’t this extreme.

  As she pushed through the door of Danny’s building, she found the boxes from her father’s office in a corner of the lobby. She went upstairs and changed into jeans and a sweater, then went back down and lugged them up to Danny’s condo. Before opening them, she poured herself a glass of wine, and turned on the TV in the living room.

  After moving the boxes into Danny’s study, she opened the first one. Books and photos. She opened another. More books, but also the CDs she’d made from her father’s computer files. She turned on Danny’s computer, inserted one in the drive, and waited. She’d titled them—by number, of course—as well as the date she’d recorded them.

  This was Casey 1-011710. She clicked on the CD icon. A list of files popped up. She scanned them carefully. Some were clearly client files, with names like Catalyst, Inc, and PDT Technologies. Fledgling companies, probably. PDT sounded vaguely familiar—it must have done well. Others were articles her father had authored on wealth creation and private placement strategies. Still others included links to websites, which, when she clicked on them, dealt with entrepreneurial start-up issues.

  A burst of cheering on the TV distracted her. The news was on, and the cheers came from a story about the upcoming presidential election. Something about a candidate who was making people excited about voting. As usual, the media were rushing the process, trying to crown the victor before anyone voted. Elections were like a boxing match, her father used to say, except they lasted fifteen months, not fifteen rounds.

  She forced herself back to the CDs. She tried to convince herself she didn’t know what she was looking for, but that was a lie. She was looking for something, anything that would unlock the secrets of her mother’s family. Her family of origin, as the shrinks liked to put it.

  It wasn’t until an hour later, after she took a break to scramble some eggs and toast a bagel, that she loaded the third CD. As with the others, most of the documents looked work-related: balance sheets and P&Ls. She sighed. There were only a couple of files left. One was a Word document titled Tutorial. She opened it and read: How to Hide Images In Files. It was a primer on something called steganography. Lila Googled the word. Steganography was the “science of hiding messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message.”

  Hiding messages? Why would her father want to know about something like that? She read on. A series of steps had to be performed in order to retrieve a coded message, and the only way to do that was by using special software. She went back to the tutorial file. Whoever created it obviously assumed that her father already had the software—the directions referred to folders he needed to open, links he had to click on. She hunted around for the software on the CD, but it either wasn’t there, or it was hidden too, because she didn’t find anything.

  She rose and went to the window. Apparently, her father’s secrets hadn’t stopped with his death. She lifted the sheet covering the glass and peered down onto the street. Only a couple of cars were moving, the beam of their headlights illuminating the steadily falling snow. There had to be five or six inches now, and the ground was covered by a mantle that cast a pale glow over everything. The faux daylight was eerie but better than darkness.

  She went back to the computer and tried the last file. It didn’t have a nam
e, just a number: 082768. She smiled. That was something she would do. Still, before opening it, she right-clicked on Properties. The file was a JPEG. An image. It had been created on April 17, 2003. Five years ago.

  When Lila opened the file, her pulse quickened. It was a photo of a group of young people, and one of them was her mother. Her mother was smiling at the camera the same way she had in the only photo Lila had ever seen of her. She examined the shot more closely—it was the same photo. Her father must have cropped the other people out when he added the photo to their family album.

  It was in color, but the colors were harsh and lacked subtlety, like snapshots from a long time ago. There were five other people in the shot: another woman and four men. Her mother and the other woman were in front. The other woman was small, with long, ash-blond hair. She wore a tank top and jeans. A pair of rimless glasses perched on her nose. One shoulder was higher than the other, and it looked like her arm was draped around Lila’s mother.

  Behind the ash hair was a young man with curly brown hair. His hands rested on the blonde’s shoulders. He was wearing a sleeveless brown vest, and a string of beads hung around his neck. Lila stared. Something about this man was familiar. Very familiar. Holy shit! It was her father!

  Yes. Now she could see it. The same eyes, the same features, so different from her own. The same challenging expression he took on when he had a strong opinion and wanted you to know it. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, but he looked confident, Lila thought. Even brave.

  Behind her mother stood another man. He was a good head taller than her father, and had straight dark hair down to his shoulders. Thin and rangy, he wore a t-shirt with the words MOBE MOVES in block letters. In contrast to her father, his arms hung straight at his sides.

  Two more young men completed the group, one on each end. The man on the left, small and sinewy, wore jeans and a T-shirt with the peace symbol on it. A red bandana was tied around his blond hair, which reached to his shoulders. The other man, handsome with dark hair and eyes, wore a white, short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem on the pocket. Aside from long sideburns, his hair was relatively short. Alligator man was the only one not looking directly at the camera. He was turned toward her father, as if he was talking to him when the photo was snapped.

  A canopy of trees formed a leafy backdrop. They were in a park, the breeze making her mother’s blond hair float around her head like a halo. Her mother and the other girl were smiling; the men weren’t.

  Lila checked the file again: 082768. She labeled files by date; if her father did too, the number meant August 27, 1968. Forty years ago. Was that when the picture was taken? Her father would have been in college. At Michigan. No. Not in August. Plus, Val said her father had dropped out at the end of his freshman year. He would have been back in Chicago.

  She returned to Properties. The photo might have been taken forty years ago, but the file had been created only five years ago. Which meant that was when he’d scanned it into his computer. Or received it from someone else. Or found it on the Internet. She tapped a finger on the mouse. No. That couldn’t be. The picture of her mother had been in the family photo album for years. He must have had the photo for a long time and only decided to scan it five years ago. She understood—if this was the only photo of her mother, her father would have wanted to make a digital backup for safekeeping.

  Then her eyes caught on something else—the file had been accessed on December 22nd at 10:07 p.m. The night before the fire. Her father had opened this file the night before he died. Did he do that often, to remind himself of his youth and his long-lost love?

  Lila gazed at her mother one more time. She was the center of the shot, in more than a physical way. The others surrounded her like the spokes of a wheel, but her mother was at the core. She smiled shyly out at Lila, wisps of hair framing her face, loving her through time. She’d never really missed her mother—how could you miss someone you’d never really known? Still, Lila felt her throat get hot.

  THIRTEEN

  By morning Lila knew what her next step would be, and the knowledge focused her in a way that had eluded her for weeks. She even hummed as she brewed a pot of coffee. She filled her mug and checked the time. Only 7:30. She drank her coffee, showered and dressed, checked the clock again—8:05. But it was an hour later in Michigan. She turned on the computer and waited impatiently for it to boot up. She Googled the number, then reached for the phone.

  “Alumni Office.”

  A female voice with an expressionless, businesslike tone. Probably not a student on work-study. Which would make things trickier. “Hello. My name is Lila Hilliard, and my father went to the University of Michigan.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Unfortunately, my father passed away a few weeks ago, and … ”

  “My sympathies.”

  “Thank you. That’s why I’m calling. I’m planning a memorial service for him in Chicago, and I wanted to invite some of his fellow alumni. But I’m not sure who or how many to include.” She hesitated. “I was hoping you might be able to give me some names and addresses of alumni in the Chicago area.”

  “What was your father’s name and what year did he graduate?”

  “Casey Hilliard. Class of … er … 1971.”

  “Hold on.”

  A tinny instrumental rendition of Benny and the Jets came on the line. Lila waited. She heard a click, and the voice came back.

  “I’m sorry, but we have no record of Casey Hilliard attending the university.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I checked the Class of ’71 as well as two years on either side. He’s not in our database.”

  “I don’t understand. I have pictures of him on campus. In fact, I’m looking at one now.” Lila was surprised how easily the lie came.

  “We only have records of every student who graduated. Is it possible your father … er … didn’t?”

  “You mean dropped out?”

  “That’s one possibility. Or perhaps he transferred to another school.”

  “I … I would be surprised if that was the case. I’m sure his diploma is here. I think he even showed it to me at some point.”

  “Well …, ” the woman let the word hang, as if she couldn’t be responsible for inaccurate records or faulty memories, “I’m sorry, but if I can’t find a record, there’s nothing I can do.”

  Lila got to the point. “Please. He … he died in a fire. Right before Christmas. It was sudden. I need to do something. I was counting—I don’t know where else to turn. I really want to find people who knew him.”

  There was a pause, then a sigh. “I understand how distraught you must feel. I’ll give you the number of the Chicago alumni club president. Maybe he can help.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lila disconnected and called the number she’d been given. A hearty voice-mail welcomed her back to the Maize and Blue at the University of Michigan Club of Greater Chicago. She should listen to the following four options. Lila ignored the suggestions and punched “0” several times, harder than she needed to. She reached another recording, a woman this time, telling her to call back between noon and 4:00 p.m. Perhaps she could find the answer to her question on their website, the voice added helpfully, and cited the Alumni Club’s URL.

  Lila hung up in the middle of the recitation and took her coffee to the window. The streets had been plowed, leaving neat banks of snow at the curb. The snow was still white, unsullied by exhaust fumes, and a bright sun made it glint and sparkle. Why did the morning after a storm always seem so perfect? As if Nature were apologizing for its wrath the night before?

  She turned back to the room. Over the past few weeks she’d learned grief was in the little things: scanning her father’s files, making her brother’s bed, catching a whiff of his aftershave. But so, too, was joy. Looking outside at a perfect winter day, some of her darkness fell away, and she felt a kernel of hope.

  Early that evening, she drove Danny�
��s Jeep down to Chicago’s Gold Coast, an affluent neighborhood of million-dollar condos and even more expensive brownstones. She parked in a lot on State Street and walked around the corner to Astor Place. Purple twilight was dismantling the day, but faint streaks of light in the western sky signaled the onset of later sunsets. Still, it was January cold, and people scurried past, thinking, no doubt, about hot meals and cozy evenings at home.

  She’d called the Alumni Club back that afternoon, and, through a combination of persuasion and desperation, wangled the name of a Michigan alumnus who graduated in 1971. With a little work on the Internet, she found his address and phone number. She considered calling, then decided just to show up. It was riskier—he might not be home, and if he was, he might slam the door in her face. Still, it would be harder to turn her down in person.

  She stopped in front of a three-story brownstone and checked the address. A large bay window extended from the second floor, and light blazed through the drapes. A good sign. A wrought-iron fence surrounded a tiny front lawn, but the gate was unlocked. Another good sign.

  As Lila stepped through, a ferocious barking erupted inside. She waited. The racket stopped. She went to the front door and tentatively rang the bell. This time the barking rose to a frantic pitch. She heard a shuffling noise.

  The petite Asian woman who opened the door had short black hair threaded with gray. She wore a green silk kimono with a matching obi and bustle in back. On her tiny feet were sandals with two-inch platforms. With her size eight boots, Lila felt like a giant. The woman clutched the collar of a small white Maltese, who was still barking. Lila was ready to talk slowly and use lots of sign language, when the woman held up her palm. She dragged the dog into another room and closed the door. The barking stopped. Returning to Lila, the woman straightened up and spoke in perfect English with a Midwestern twang.