A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  The defiant voice still spoke. He took you dress shopping when Mom was sick with a stomach bug, it said. He helped you with algebra. He taught you how to drive a car. He called you moosh.

  At that last thought, Annalise stabbed her walking stick into the ground—if there had been a snake there, she would have speared it straight through. She was not going to dissolve into tears on this muddy path.

  Soon they crested the hill. Annalise was breathing more heavily than she would have expected, her new T-shirt damp with sweat at the neck and under her arms. She leaned on her walking stick, a sturdy piece of polished hickory as tall as she was and at least an inch thick. Her uncle wasn’t even winded. At the bottom of the slope before them, she could see a river twisting its way through the trees. Overhead, white clouds moved through a sky of blue, the sun painfully bright after the rain. Annalise shaded her eyes and turned back the way they had come to see her uncle’s cabin at the foot of the lake, beyond which Whiteside spread across the near horizon like an enormous crooked horseshoe, its broken arms open and reaching toward them from the stone wall of its highest cliff face.

  Nick sat on a stump and laid his walking stick across his lap, then rubbed his knees. When Annalise turned to look at him, he gave her a little smile. “My legs take a little while to warm up,” he said.

  She did not return his smile. Dismissively she said, “Nice view.”

  Nick looked around as if he hadn’t noticed where they were until now and nodded. “It is. But that’s not why I brought you up here.”

  Annalise folded her hands on top of her walking stick. “Is this where we have a heart-to-heart talk and then hug it out?”

  “I have a confession to make,” Nick said.

  “What, are you Catholic now?”

  “Muslim. Agnostic, really. Doesn’t matter.” He paused. “It’s about your father.”

  Her heart fluttered at that, but she ignored it. “You going to tell me how he did bad things? Try to let me down gently? Trust me, I already know.”

  Nick shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have to tell you about the last time I talked to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid it might be partly my fault that he died.”

  IT WAS EARLY the previous fall, rain coming down in a steady pour, the whole world wreathed in clouds, the forest green and not yet shading to gold and flame. Not that Nick had seen any of this—the trees could literally have been on fire and he wouldn’t have noticed. In July he had buried Ellie. Two months later he sat in the darkened house, holding a glass of bourbon and gazing at it, considering whether or not to get drunk. Nothing mattered much anymore, aside from his grief, and he was already sick of that.

  His phone rang. It was an older landline and sat on the kitchen counter. Let it ring, he thought, but he put the bourbon down and got up from his chair and answered. “Hello?”

  “Nick?” a man said on the other end.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Jay.”

  Nick gripped the handset and stared unseeing out the window at the oncoming night. A gust of wind scattered rain against the panes. “Jay,” he managed.

  “It’s been a long time, brother.”

  “What do you want?”

  A pause. “Almost twenty years and that’s the first thing you ask?” Jay said.

  Nick closed his eyes. You had almost twenty years to call me, he wanted to say. Instead he waited his brother out.

  Jay sighed. “Fine. I need your help. Just a favor, really. I’m looking for someone who could connect me with the Syrian government.”

  Nick opened his eyes. “Why would you think I know anyone in the Syrian government?”

  “Come on, give me some credit. You served in the Middle East, taught there for a while. You must know some people.”

  Standing in his dark house, Nick smiled—a cruel expression that did nothing to lighten his face. “The kind of people who like to broker information? Like about arms deals with the Kurds? Or maybe the Houthi in Yemen?”

  Silence. Then his brother’s voice, low and harsh. “How the hell do you—”

  “Come on,” Nick said, still smiling in the dark. “Give me some credit.”

  “This was a mistake,” Jay said.

  “Clearly,” Nick said, and he hung up, then yanked the cord out of the wall. The next day, he had the phone disconnected.

  WHEN NICK FINISHED, Annalise shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You argued with my dad last year, you hung up on him, and that’s why somebody—” She grimaced.

  “He was asking me for help,” Nick said. “I didn’t give him what he was looking for. So he went somewhere else, maybe asked the wrong person.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell him what he wanted to know?”

  “Because I don’t know anyone in the Syrian government like that.”

  “So why did he think you did?”

  “Because I lived in the Middle East for several years. I met a lot of people there. But the kind of people your father wanted to meet … they’re dangerous.”

  “What do you mean, dangerous?” As soon as she asked the question, she knew the answer. The kind who would kill her parents and then torch her house. The kind who might be looking for her right now. Her heart was a stone in her throat; it was suddenly hard to breathe. She forced herself to take a deep breath, then another.

  “Annalise, I’m sorry,” Nick said. “Maybe I should have tried to help him.” He shrugged and held up his hands as if in offering. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  She let out a bark of a laugh that was more than half a sob. “You’re sorry,” she said, almost spitting the words, then hesitated. Her uncle sat on his stump, looked steadily at her. It would be so easy, she knew, to just unload on him, to release all her grief and rage onto him like a tsunami. And he was offering himself as a target.

  She took in a ragged breath and let it out. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t know what would happen. My father made a mistake. He makes—made a lot of mistakes.” Her eyes pricked with tears, but she gave Nick a shrug. “Life’s a bitch and all that.”

  Calmly, as if reciting a fact out of a newspaper, Nick said, “Your parents are dead, Annalise.”

  The naked words stung her, but she refused to show any reaction. “No shit,” she bit out.

  “Someone killed them.”

  “Good to know you’ve been paying attention.”

  Nick said nothing but held his gaze on Annalise, who was determined not to look away first, to not even blink. She stared into her uncle’s amber eyes, saw the pain and the pity in them. That angered her. He had no idea, no fucking clue how she felt. Goddamn him, she thought fiercely, her own fury startling her for a moment before it burned away her surprise and everything else.

  “Why are you looking at me?” she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Why the fuck are you looking at me?” she said, her voice rising to a shout.

  He blinked slowly, irrationally causing her to briefly exult in winning the staring contest, but he didn’t look away.

  “Stop looking at me!” she shouted. “What are you, a pervert? Stop it!”

  In the same calm tone he had spoken in before, Nick said, “I’m sorry they died.”

  “Shut up!”

  “But they’re gone,” he said. “And you’re not.”

  She threw her walking stick at him. It was a clumsy throw and the stick wobbled through the air like the world’s shittiest spear and missed her uncle by a mile, clattering against the trunk of a nearby pine tree. Nick didn’t even flinch. “I know what it feels like to lose someone you love,” he said. “It’s like the whole world stops, and—”

  Annalise snatched a rock off the ground and hurled it at her uncle’s head. This time her aim was true, and she knew as the rock left her hand that it would strike her uncle in the forehead, splitting the skin open. She knew it would draw blood, that it would hurt.

&
nbsp; In a single, swift motion, Nick snatched the rock out of midair with his bare hand.

  Annalise stood there, staring, not knowing what stunned her more, her uncle’s reflexes or the fact that she had thrown the rock in the first place.

  “It’s like the whole world stops,” her uncle continued. “But then the world moves on, and you can’t believe it, because don’t they know what happened? What you lost? That your heart just got ripped out of your chest and you’re bleeding to death?”

  Her eyes stung and she wanted her uncle to stop talking but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  “And then you want to build a wall around you and shut off the pain,” he said. “But it doesn’t work. Trust me. You just drive people away and end up alone. And then it’s even easier to be angry at the people who died on you.”

  She started crying—angry, frustrated sobs, like something ugly and barbed was being yanked out of her. “Fuck you!” she screamed, and she didn’t know whether she was screaming at her uncle or at herself or both. She dropped to her knees, keening with pain as if she’d been gored by some horrible animal. Mommy. Daddy. She wanted to die in the face of that pain, to be obliterated, to feel nothing.

  But slowly she came back to herself. First she realized her cries had grown softer, her throat aching with the force of her grief. She felt the dirt beneath her palms and understood that she had fallen onto all fours. She sat up, rubbing her palms across the slick front of her rain jacket and then wiping her tears from her face, even as she continued weeping. Her uncle still sat on his stump, watching her. He had made no movement toward her, offered her no hug or other sign of physical comfort. For that she felt a strange gratitude. He had allowed her a space to grieve. When their eyes met, he got to his feet and stepped closer and held out something. A wad of tissues. She laughed at that—a single hard ha!—and took the tissues from him and finished wiping her face, then blew her nose. When she was finished, she balled up the tissues and shoved them into her jacket pocket. “Crying is exhausting,” she rasped.

  Her uncle gave her a hint of a smile, nodded, and held out his hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet. “Let’s get back down to the house,” he said. “We have some plans to make.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nick made Annalise eggs and toast and sipped a mug of coffee while he watched her eat. When she devoured her breakfast, she took a sip from her glass of orange juice and then put the glass down and closed her eyes.

  “You okay?” Nick said.

  Annalise nodded, then opened her eyes. “I was thinking my legs hurt,” she said. “From the hike. They hurt the same way they do after tennis practice, kind of like a burning pain? I was thinking that Coach Dunn would make us run suicides and my shins would burn the same way, and I just …” She paused, and Nick nodded at her encouragingly. “We had this dog, Gus? And he got old and really sick, and we had to put him to sleep. It was the right thing to do, but it sucked. And for weeks afterward I’d find all these old squeaky toys and chew bones of his, all over the house. Every time I found one it would hurt, like I was reminded all over again that Gus was gone.” She took a breath, let it out. “And now I keep thinking about tennis practice, or my boyfriend Eric, or how my mom would have liked this view”—she waved a hand at the windows—“and it’s the same thing, you know? It’s like … it’s …”

  “It’s like those memories jump you at the weirdest moments,” Nick said.

  Annalise nodded. “Yep,” she said, and she gave him a halfhearted smile. Then she wiped her eyes and stood and carried her plate to the dishwasher.

  She’s strong, Ellie said.

  I hope so, Nick thought. I’m not exactly an expert on teenage girls.

  And whose fault is that? Ellie said. Her tone was teasing, but Nick set his mug down on the table hard enough to get Annalise’s attention.

  “Tell me about your dad,” he said, and Annalise’s eyes widened. “About his work,” he clarified. “About how he was acting the past few weeks.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She was standing by the kitchen sink and with her hand traced an invisible line on the counter. “Um, he was fine? Normal, I guess, whatever that is.” She stared into space, thinking. “Actually, he seemed … happy.”

  “Was he not usually happy?”

  Annalise shrugged. “He was usually stressed about something. Work, money. He traveled a lot, which was hard on Mom. Me too.”

  “Where did he travel?” Nick asked.

  “The Middle East. Europe sometimes. Singapore. He went to the Gulf states a lot. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE.” She smiled briefly, like a flash of sunlight through trees, and then it was gone. “Sent me a picture of the Burj Khalifa once when I was a kid.”

  Nick rotated his mug on the table. “Did he tell you what kind of work he did?”

  Annalise shrugged again. “He was a contractor. I don’t know the details. He told me he made business deals. Mom asked him a couple of times if maybe he would go to work for an oil company—you know, steadier paycheck. But Dad liked being his own boss. Anyway, this last trip, maybe two weeks ago, he came home from Saudi Arabia with a diamond necklace for Mom and a new iPhone for me. Talking about how he’d made a big score. Wasn’t the first time he’d said that—Dad talked a big game, you know?”

  Nick gave her a sad smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  “What happened between you and Dad?” Annalise spoke as if the words came out of her mouth before she had given herself time to consider them. She seemed embarrassed by the bluntness of her own question—and, Nick guessed, by the look of surprise on his own face—but she plowed ahead. “Why didn’t I ever know about you growing up?”

  Nick met her eyes, but what he saw was a memory from the past, he and Jay in a hospital room, arguing. “We both made mistakes when we were younger,” he said. “And we were both stubborn.”

  Annalise stood there, thinking. She looked older that she should, Nick thought, like an adult considering grave issues rather than a teenager who should be worrying about a history test or what to wear to prom. He needed to buy her some clothes.

  Annalise reached into her back pocket and pulled something out and held it out over the kitchen counter to Nick. It was a piece of paper, folded down to the size of a credit card. “Dad wanted you to have this,” she said.

  Nick stared at her. “What is it?”

  Annalise shrugged. “I don’t know. But Dad said I had to give it to you. I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you earlier, but I … I wanted to make sure.”

  Nick felt a strange quiver in his chest, not unlike the thrumming of the water pipes earlier. He reached out and took the paper. “Thank you,” he said. Carefully he unfolded the piece of paper. It had been unfolded and refolded more than once, but it wasn’t soft and furred yet—the creases were still sharp. It was a single sheet of paper and Nick flattened it on the table. He glanced at Annalise, who was still standing by the sink. “You can look at this too,” he said, and he shifted over to make room for her. Annalise came out from behind the counter and stood next to Nick, peering down at the paper.

  He guessed they were looking at a photograph that had been printed on a laser printer. It looked like a plat survey, dark-blue lines drawn on a grayish-white background. An arrow with an N pointed to the top of the page. There were a few blue lines packed closely together in concentric curves or arcs, like a topographic map showing elevations. Tiny numerical notations appeared at intervals next to the blue lines. Scattered across the page at differing intervals were what looked like tiny triangles with the bases extending beyond the other two arms, like capital As drawn by a young child. The word ANTICLINE was written against a straight blue line that stretched vertically across the page. The letters GH appeared at the extreme right-hand side of the page, as if they were the beginning of a word or phrase that had been cut off. Below that, in the bottom right-hand corner, was some sort of box or grid that had been cut off as well, but he could make out the letter
s CALIFO typed in the box. In the top right-hand corner was a handwritten word: ABQAIQ.

  He had no idea what he was looking at. Abqaiq rang a very distant bell, though. He sat still and waited, but whatever faint associations he had with the word faded and then were gone. He held the paper close to his eyes to make sense of the numbers and to see if he could make out any other details, but the resolution of the photo wasn’t high enough.

  He turned the paper over and his pulse skipped a beat. Something was written in pencil. He held the paper up to the light and read the word Halliwell. Underneath it were the letters FL, followed by a ten-digit number.

  “Is that a phone number?” Annalise said.

  “Maybe. Does it look familiar?”

  She shook her head. Nick read the writing again. FL might stand for Florida, but Halliwell meant nothing to him. Nick carefully scanned both sides of the paper, but there was nothing else written on it.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked Annalise.

  She shook her head again. “No clue.” She looked at him, her whole face a question. “Now what?”

  He folded the paper back up. “Now I go get you some clothes,” he said. “And make a phone call or two. I’m just going into town, won’t be gone long. You stay here. Don’t go outside, and stay away from the windows.”

  She nodded, and when she spoke, her voice was small but steady. “Do you think those men who killed my parents are looking for me?”

  Nick stood and put the folded paper in his pocket. “That’s one of the things I want to find out.”

  NICK DROVE OUT of the valley below Whiteside Mountain to Highway 107, the road cutting away from the Chattooga River which flowed through the valley. Farther south the Chattooga formed part of the border between South Carolina and Georgia and then dropped down from the hills into what eventually became Lake Hartwell, and then the Savannah River, and then the Atlantic. Everything connected in one long chain. Nick needed to find a different kind of chain, discover how events and facts lined up and connected to create a comprehensible story about his brother Jay and his death. But first he needed to buy Annalise some clothes.