House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  The screen was scrolling too fast for him to get back to sleep. He slipped from their bed and dressed in the dark and took the back stairs down to the kitchen. This was the remodel project that first brought him here. It was a big, heart-of-the-home room with all the trendy finishes and fixtures, but lots of cozy touches, too, like the raised hearth fireplace and the window seat tucked between the bookcases. The house was originally an old Foursquare, a tenant farmhouse to a long-gone estate, but over the decades it had been extensively expanded and remodeled. Clapboard siding was changed to fieldstone and stucco, the tin roof replaced with cedar shakes, an addition built out the back and wings tacked on either side. The result was this crazy patchwork of a house. Pete made over the front facade a few years ago so the outside looked right, but inside nothing quite lined up. The vaulted ceiling in the front hall led to a couple of boxy, low-ceilinged parlors, down two steps to a vaulted family room and up two different staircases to the bedrooms. The layout was so confusing that Kip was always making the wrong turn when they first moved in. Little Lost Boy, Zack and Dylan used to tease him until Leigh made them stop.

  The most recent addition was this one, housing the new kitchen downstairs and the master suite up. The idea was Ted’s, but he took off even before the footings were poured and left Leigh to manage on her own from there, with both the financing and the design. She turned out quick rough sketches of what she wanted, and Pete did his best to build it for her. He was already falling for her by then, this beautiful brave woman getting on with her life, working hard all week and laughing and playing with her kids all weekend. He never would have guessed she was hurting if he hadn’t walked in on her crying one day. It was a mortifying moment for both of them, except it was also the moment that changed everything in their relationship.

  Shepherd jumped down off the window seat and wriggled a good morning, and Pete filled his bowls and scratched behind his ears while he gobbled and slurped his breakfast. He was a border collie they got as a pup early in their marriage—an ours to go with the yours and mine. Pete started a pot of coffee and went outside, and Shep abandoned his half-devoured breakfast to trot along after him to the little two-stall barn at the back of the property. Inside were Romeo, Chrissy’s big dark bay, and Licorice, her old black pony. Licorice was supposed to be Mia’s now, but his little girl was still too scared of horses to even venture into the barn.

  The horses nickered and sighed and buzzed their lips as he came in, and he gave them grain and water and turned them out into the pasture before he mucked out their stalls. These were Chrissy’s morning chores, but she’d had a late night last night and he wanted her to sleep in. Not that she wasn’t in trouble, too. She had no business riding her bike out on those dark, rainy roads. She could have gotten sideswiped in the dark, or snatched by some pervert. And no matter how good her intentions were, her rescue mission only made the situation worse. It turned out Kip was planning to spend the night at his friend’s house. If Chrissy hadn’t gone to warn him, there would have been no accident and no arrest. He’d still be in a shitload of trouble, but only with his father—not with the whole goddam Commonwealth of Virginia.

  Back inside, the coffee was done, and Pete poured one to go and headed out to the truck. The front bumper was dented, and he scowled at it a minute before he wrenched his door open. Shep vaulted in around him and took his seat at shotgun as usual. Anytime a vehicle left their driveway, the dog insisted on being in it. Border collies were bred to perform a single job—keep the flock together no matter what—and Shep seemed agitated when his human flock scattered every morning. Riding along was his best hope of getting everyone back together at the end of the day.

  The radio switched on with the engine. The headlines this morning were the same as last night’s: the terrorist attack in Kenya and the school shooting in Missouri. Both events were already indexed and added to Pete’s digital screen of things to worry about. You don’t have to keep watch on the whole world, Leigh liked to tease him, but he kind of felt like he did. It was his job to keep this family safe.

  That lesson had been permanently tattooed on him back when he was a new father and the Beltway Sniper was on his rampage in the Washington Metro area, picking off random targets at gas stations and parking lots from a distant hilltop perch. Karen had just miscarried their second child and was even more fearful than usual, and for the three weeks of the siege she refused to exit the house, leaving Pete to do the grocery shopping and drive Kip to and from preschool every day. He remembered peering through the windshield as he drove, scanning the surrounding summits for any glint of light that might be the reflection off a gun barrel. He remembered how careful he was to shield Kip with his own body as he lifted him in and out of the car and the tremendous relief he felt after he’d safely delivered him into school. They caught the guy, finally—two guys, as it turned out—but Pete never really got over it. That sense of danger looming in on his family—it never went away, and neither did the imperative that he be alert for it and ward it off however he could. That would always be Job One for Pete.

  The broadcast had more on the shooter in Missouri. A disaffected youth, they called him. Pete had his own disaffected youth to worry about today. He had no idea how to punish an eighteen-year-old. Theoretically the kid was an adult now, though what a joke that was. He had no more sense than a twelve-year-old. A good talking-to wasn’t going to do the job. They’d talked and talked after he was arrested on New Year’s, and Kip promised it would never happen again. Yet here they were. Grounding wouldn’t work either. He’d been de facto grounded ever since his license was lifted in January, and look how well that went. If there was anything else on the menu of disciplinary measures for so-called adults, Pete didn’t know what it was.

  He turned onto Hollow Road, and as he drove past the scene of last night’s crime, a yellow dog came streaking down the driveway to warn him off. It yapped furiously until Pete was past the property line, then it barked a final self-satisfied woof—showed you!—and trotted back to the house. He wondered if that was the same dog that made Kip drive off the road last night. Which was another thing that made him fume. Kip knew he shouldn’t swerve to avoid anything smaller than a deer. Pete drummed that lesson into all three boys when he taught them to drive. They might feel sad if the squirrel died, he told them, but their parents would feel a hell of a lot worse if they ended up in a wheelchair. The boys all understood and accepted the rule. Chrissy was the only one who ever argued the point. There must be some way where nobody gets hurts, she insisted during their off-road lessons. It was lucky they had two more years before he had to worry about her softhearted driving on real roads. Kip, though—he said he got it, but it looked like he lied about that, too. He took a swerve on a dark, rain-slick road and ended up in that ditch, and it was a miracle neither of them got hurt.

  It was five miles from home to the job site, and another two minutes brought him there. Hollow House, Leigh called it, but it wasn’t going to be hollow much longer. The roofing was nearly complete, and as soon as the place was dried in, the electrical and HVAC subs could get in there and run the wiring and ductwork. Finally. The winter weather had put them a month behind schedule, which meant the Millers’ progress payments were also a month behind. Money was always tight in this business; lately it was starting to squeeze hard.

  Pete was paying the crew overtime to work on Saturdays, but they weren’t due until eight, so he was surprised to see a car in the driveway, and even more surprised when he saw it was Drew Miller’s silver Porsche. He pulled alongside. The driveway wasn’t a driveway yet, only a rough-graded road spread with a little gravel to keep the mud down. None too successfully after last night’s rain. The Porsche was mud-splattered up to its door handles.

  Drew was nowhere in sight, but Yana was there, perched on the hood of the car and wearing her perpetually unfocused gaze. “Morning,” Pete called as he swung out of the truck and Shepherd jumped out after him. “What brings you here today?”

/>   Yana shrugged her bony shoulders. She was a strange-looking woman, tall and too thin and with eyes so far apart he was reminded of a rabbit or some other creature of prey. A “swanling,” Leigh called her, because with one turn of her head, one trick of the light, Yana went from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. She was Drew Miller’s Russian bride, but not of the mail-order variety. She was a famous fashion model, which Drew never missed an opportunity to mention. My wife, she used to be a supermodel, was the way he introduced her. Or I stole her off the runway. She was twenty years younger and acquired only recently. Miller ran a hedge fund, and according to the newspapers he was having a run of incredible good fortune. Midas Miller, Leigh called him, or sometimes simply King.

  “Drew inside?”

  Yana lifted her narrow chin, and he followed her line of sight all the way up the three stories of the house. There was Miller, a chubby fifty-year-old balancing himself on the highest peak of the roof.

  “Jesus!” Pete sprinted around to the back of the building with Shep at his heels. An extension ladder rested against the eave of the lower roof, and another reached from there to the upper roof. “Drew!” he hollered. “Come on down. It’s not safe up there.” He scrambled up the ladder with his digital screen lighting up with new alarms over liability and insurance coverage. Miller was sitting with his legs splayed over the peak and a pair of binoculars at his face. “Drew, you need to get down. The roofers wear spikes when they’re up there.” Miller was wearing a pair of slick-soled Italian loafers.

  “Hold on a minute. Lemme get some focus here.”

  He was aiming the binoculars at the neighboring property, a grand old estate that changed hands shortly after he bought this lot. The new owner promptly erected a ten-foot wall around the entire property and a pair of enormous steel gates at the entrance. The Hermitage was the snarky name Kip coined for the place, which Leigh found so clever that she’d adopted the term, too, and with the same pretentious pronunciation. Hermit-taaj. But Pete didn’t do snark. Nothing wrong with a man enjoying his privacy, he said.

  “Who are these fuckers?” Miller snarled. “Where do they get off building that wall?”

  Lately he was obsessed with trying to learn the identity of his neighbor-to-be. He paid his lawyer to dig through the property records, but all they showed was a chain of holding companies, the final one chartered in the Caymans. He stopped repeatedly at the gates, but no one ever answered the buzzer on the security panel. Pete was on-site seven days a week, but he had no better intelligence. The place was pretty well secluded even from this rooftop vantage, especially now that the trees were in leaf and formed a dense green canopy over the property.

  Miller lowered the binoculars with a scowl. “Well, if I can’t see into their place, they sure as hell won’t see into mine. I want a ten-foot wall, too. Or, no, make it twelve, all the way around.”

  “Can’t do it, Drew. The zoning doesn’t allow anything higher than six.”

  “Then how the fuck did they get theirs?”

  Pete explained that there’d been a temporary lapse in the zoning code, and the owners must have hurried in and gotten their permit before the code was reinstated.

  “What, like they got a team of lawyers standing by, waiting for loopholes to open? Who the fuck are these people?”

  “They like their privacy, that’s all. Which means they won’t disturb yours.”

  Miller wasn’t placated. He cursed and snapped the whole time Pete was steering him down the ladders, and when he landed with a wobble at the bottom, he let out a string of obscenities. “This isn’t over,” he vowed.

  One more line of text scrolled down Pete’s screen of worries: Miller might try to back out of the contract altogether. He didn’t know if he could get away with it, but one thing he knew for sure. His business would be ruined if he did.

  Yana was still perched on the hood of the car, and as Drew stomped to the driver’s side and slammed his door she unfolded her flamingo legs and got into the passenger seat without a word.

  Chapter Four

  Leigh dressed that morning in her standard first-meeting-with-a-client ensemble—dark suit and pearls—and started down to the kitchen with her heels clicking sharply on the back stairs. But halfway down she slipped out of the heels and turned back and crept down the hall to the children’s rooms. It was silly, of course they’d be in their beds, but still she pressed an ear against Chrissy’s door until she heard the slow, steady rhythm of her sleep-breathing. Then she stole across the hall and did the same at Kip’s door. No sleep-breathing there, but she could hear the quick, steady rhythm of his fingers tapping on a keypad. Not asleep, but at least where he was supposed to be. Both of them, safe in their own rooms.

  Downstairs in the kitchen she found a fresh pot of coffee and a note from Peter. Gone to the site. Obviously there would be no big breakfast celebration today. But he signed it with a string of x’s and o’s that gave her hope that his good mood would return. Maybe she could switch their dinner reservations to tonight. A noisy restaurant, a sparkly cake, a kazoo band—surely that would help ease the tension. On Monday they’d hear from Shelby that baby DUI would be the only charge and the tension would be gone for good.

  She left her own note, reminding the kids of her meeting, and headed for the garage. The radio came on with the engine, still tuned to one of Peter’s news channels. She switched to a music station and backed out into the morning sunshine.

  And instantly slammed on the brakes as a girl sprang up behind the car.

  Leigh’s heart clutched. “Jenna!” Recognizing the girl only barely tempered her fright. She jumped out of the car. “Jenna! What are you doing? I could’ve run over you!”

  The girl’s hands went defiantly to her hips. Her own car was behind her in the driveway, and like Leigh’s, the engine was running and the door flung open. She was barely dressed, wearing only a jacket over her pajamas. The jacket didn’t close and the pajama top didn’t meet up with the pajama bottom, exposing six inches of swollen belly. “You need to get me a restraining order,” she shouted. “Like, today!”

  “Okay, now let’s calm down.” Leigh put an arm around her shoulders—not her standard behavior with clients, but this one was the daughter of an old friend, and she’d known her since infancy. “Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

  “He’s stalking me, that’s what!” Jenna shook her off, wild-eyed. “I knew he would, and last night he was there, lurking right outside my window!”

  “Hunter?” Such behavior wasn’t unheard of in divorcing husbands, but Leigh couldn’t quite picture the tech billionaire crawling through his in-laws’ rhododendrons.

  “Him or one of his goons.”

  “You didn’t see him, then.”

  Jenna tossed her head, but her mouth was trembling. “I heard him! Or more like, I felt him.” Below the too-short pajama top, her navel protruded like a pop-up timer announcing the turkey was done. The baby wasn’t done yet, though. She was only five months along. “It was like this disturbance out there, you know? Like electricity buzzing through the air. He gives it off, that vibe. I used to feel it all the time whenever he was close. I used to think it was exciting, you know? But now? It’s like this evil force in the universe. It totally freaked me out! You need to get the judge to issue a restraining order. Today!”

  Leigh tried again to put a soothing arm around her. Jenna wasn’t always this high-strung, and it was tempting to blame the pregnancy hormones for the transformation, but that was Hunter Beck’s excuse (We had the perfect marriage, he told the judge, until the hormones made her crazy), so Leigh was more inclined to blame Hunter. “Did you call the police?”

  Jenna shook her off again. “What’s the use? They won’t believe me. Even my own parents don’t believe me!”

  Her parents lived on Hollow Road, a half mile from Peter’s job site, on a farm they operated as a nonprofit retirement facility for aging horses. Jenna grew up there, a pretty girl who’d enjoyed all the conv
entional successes in school—cheerleader, homecoming queen, sorority president. After college she went to New York and took a low-level job in a high-tech company where she made the conventional mistake of sleeping with her boss. A rite of passage, some would say, that would have left her older, wiser, and working somewhere else—except that her boss then made the unconventional move of marrying her. Less than a year later she was here, half-dressed and hysterical in Leigh’s driveway.

  “I understand,” Leigh said. “But we need to prove he was there. There has to be some actual violence or threat of violence before you can get a protective order.”

  “But the judge likes me. I know he does! He took my side on every one of Hunter’s stupid motions.”

  After she fled their marriage, Beck filed a bizarre, grandstanding lawsuit demanding the right to attend all of her prenatal checks, access to the obstetrical records, and regular visitation with his unborn child so it could hear his voice in utero. Leigh got the case dismissed—not because the judge liked Jenna better, but only because the law was clear that a woman’s body was her own and a father had no rights until the child was actually born.

  But Hunter Beck wasn’t a typical father. He was a man unaccustomed to hearing the word no, and he would never accept defeat. He held a press conference on the courthouse steps decrying the court’s undermining of the sacred bond between father and child. His wife would return to him, he assured the reporters; their marriage would be fine. All he wanted in the meantime were the same rights that every other expectant father enjoyed. The judge’s ruling meant this precious time would be lost to him forever. He filed an appeal, too, which was even more grandstanding: by the time the upper court heard the case, the baby would be born and a whole new set of rules would apply.