House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  It was the first she’d heard from him since the encounter with his ex-wife in his driveway. They still hadn’t had that difficult conversation about Claire, and when Leigh’s return call went straight to voicemail, she couldn’t help wondering if he was avoiding her. She wouldn’t blame him. Some subjects were open wounds: the instinct was to wrap them in layers of bandages even when exposure to the air was what they needed to heal. She did a quick Google search for the radio program he was scheduled for and put it on her calendar. If she couldn’t talk to him on Saturday, at least she’d be able to listen to him.

  Her next call was to Saks.

  “Ms. Huyett!” Ashley said in a horrified whisper. “Has something happened to the sheikha? Those men were just here. That bodyguard and two other men, too. They wanted to know if I’ve heard from her.”

  Leigh was dismayed but not surprised. After everything the sheikh did to impede Devra’s efforts even to consult a divorce lawyer, he wasn’t going to take her desertion lying down. “She’s decided to leave her husband,” she said. “She’s living in seclusion for the present.”

  “Oh! I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I told them to call you.”

  An image flashed behind her eyes, of the gun in Hassan’s hand pointed straight at her through the embassy gates. She shook it off. “That’s fine,” she said. After all, the ambassador already knew who she was. He knew where she lived and worked. If he wanted to intimidate her, he would have done it already. “Now—there’re a few things the sheikha needs.” She read off Devra’s shopping list: fine silk lingerie, luncheon suits, cocktail dresses. Devra knew only one way to dress, even if it was only for herself. Her life in a golden cage.

  Leigh had a committee luncheon that day, and when she returned to the office, the receptionist called to her across the lobby. “Ms. Huyett? You have a visitor.”

  She tensed as she turned to scan the half-dozen people in the waiting room, but Hassan wasn’t among them. “Who?”

  The receptionist pointed discreetly to a woman in a beige suit on the couch by the windows. It was the prosecutor Andrea Briggs, and Leigh’s tension turned to nausea.

  “Oh, Ms. Huyett.” The woman tried to shoot to her feet, but the backs of her legs stuck to the leather upholstery, and she had to heave herself to get free. Her hair was damp with perspiration and her suit was wilted. “Forgive me for coming unannounced.” Her flustered hands tried to smooth out the creases in her skirt. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by for a chat.”

  She worked in Hampshire County. She wouldn’t have been in the neighborhood of K Street. She deliberately came here unannounced, to ambush her. “Chat about what?”

  “Your daughter’s case. You know we start trial on Monday.”

  “My daughter doesn’t have a case,” Leigh said in a voice as chilly as the air-conditioning. “You mean Kip’s.”

  “I think of it as hers. I like to think of myself as speaking for the victim.”

  Leigh didn’t want her to speak at all, and certainly not here in front of other waiting visitors. “Come this way,” she said.

  She led her into one of the small caucus rooms that opened off the reception area. The woman seemed to wilt even more under the harsh fluorescent panels in the ceiling. She must have taken the Metro in and walked three sweltering city blocks to Leigh’s office. She dropped heavily into a chair at the small round table. “I’m hoping I can persuade you to reconsider testifying at trial.”

  Leigh was exasperated. “Why are you even taking this to trial? Offer him a plea and be done with it.”

  “Oh, we have. He refused it.”

  “Oh.” She sat down then, too. “What was the offer?”

  “Two years.”

  That didn’t sound so bad. Peter should have grabbed it and saved them all this misery. “Any strings attached?”

  “The usual. He’ll have to stay sober and check in regularly with his parole officer.”

  “His probation officer, you mean.”

  “No.” The woman looked confused. “His parole officer. After he gets out.”

  “Out?” Leigh repeated. Then her eyes flared wide. “Out of prison?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “Oh, my God!” She shot to her feet again. “You mean two years in prison?”

  The woman blinked under the severe light. “The statute authorizes up to ten years. Two years is reasonable for a drunk driving homicide.”

  “Kip was barely drunk! He swerved to miss a dog!”

  “There’s no evidence of that. Beyond his own word, and we all know what a liar he is.”

  Leigh flushed hot. How dare you, she almost said before she bit back the words. She was losing her direction in this conversation.

  The woman sensed her vacillation and leaned in to press her point. “Please reconsider. Testify for the Commonwealth. We need someone to tell the jury about Chrissy. Describe who she was and what she was like.”

  Tell me about Chrissy. If she couldn’t do it for Stephen, she certainly couldn’t do it for a courtroom full of strangers. “Exactly what are you trying to accomplish here?”

  The prosecutor folded her hands on the table. “It’s important to put a face to the victim.”

  Chrissy had her own face. A bright, shining, beautiful face. Leigh’s grief-ravaged face was no stand-in for hers. “I mean, what are you trying to accomplish by seeking jail time for Kip?”

  “Justice for Chrissy.”

  “Putting Kip in jail is the last thing she’d want.”

  She didn’t think the words until she spoke them, but their truth hit her so hard it was like the caucus room ceiling crashed down on her. Not in a million years would Chrissy want to see Kip go to prison. She’d fight like a hellcat to stop it. Whether he was driving or not driving or lying or not lying—it wouldn’t matter. Chrissy would fight to save him.

  Tears thickened in her throat. She couldn’t stay another second in this tiny room. She flung the door open. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  “Ms. Huyett,” Andrea called after her. “Please. Just think about it.”

  Leigh hurried past the elevator to the stairwell, and once in her office she closed the door. Behind her was the credenza displaying its array of family photographs, but she couldn’t bear to face them. Prison. Two years in prison. Now she understood why Peter was fighting so hard for Kip. Now she even understood why Kip was lying. Maybe his lie harmed her, but—my God!—he had to protect himself.

  She picked up the phone. “I just had a visit from Andrea Briggs,” she said when Shelby came on the line. “She told me about the plea offer. Two years?”

  “I can’t discuss this with you, Leigh.”

  “When was prison even on the table? You told me suspended sentence and probation!”

  “I told you probably. It’s what we all thought.”

  “You have to do something!”

  “Besides defend him to the best of my ability? What do you think I’m doing here?”

  She put her head in her hand. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just—there has to be something you can do—”

  “Well—” Shelby’s tone was suddenly wheedling. “There’s something you could do.”

  “What?”

  “Testify for the defense.”

  “Me? What could I possibly say?”

  “Tell the jury about Kip. Tell them that he graduated at the top of his class. He won the history medal. He played Hamlet. He raised money for that horse farm and redesigned their website. Stories that show the kind of kid he is.”

  “Can’t Peter testify to that?”

  “Better from you, don’t you think?”

  Probably so, Leigh had to concede. She understood Kip better than Peter did, better than any of them. Of the whole Gang of Four, she was the only one who got him.

  But Shelby meant something else entirely. “You can say something Pete can’t say.”

  “What?”

  “That you don’t blame Kip for you
r daughter’s death.”

  Leigh fell silent. Slowly she spun her chair to face the photographs on the credenza. I know it wasn’t his fault, she’d told Peter and Stephen and everybody. I don’t blame him. But was that a lie? “I don’t . . .” Her voice faded.

  “Think about it. Even if you don’t want to testify, if you’d just sit next to Pete in the courtroom, if I could point you out to the jury in my opening. That would help.”

  The faces in the photos blurred as the tears burned in her eyes. “I don’t think Peter would want me there.”

  Shelby snorted. “Think again.”

  She thought about it the rest of the day—the idea of walking into that courtroom and slipping into the seat beside Peter as if she belonged there. But all she could really think about was what Peter must be thinking. He must think she’d known all along that Kip was facing real jail time. He must think she was willing to stand by and let it happen. Maybe he even thought that she’d urged for it to happen.

  Shelby was wrong. Peter would shrink away from her if she sat down beside him in the courtroom. That was what the jury would see. A broken marriage. A family fractured beyond repair.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Wednesday, end of the day. Only fifteen hours left on Pete’s countdown clock. Shelby was standing by for their call; the prosecutor was standing by for hers. Talk it over, she told them, but they hadn’t. They hadn’t talked at all, about anything. Ever since Pete shot down the surveillance video, Kip was giving him the silent treatment. Once Pete wouldn’t have stood for that, but all the old rules were out the window now. When your kid’s on trial for homicide, a sullen attitude hardly seems worth correcting.

  “Pizza sound good?” Pete called as he headed out that night.

  Kip kept on shoveling mulch into a wheelbarrow and didn’t answer. The landscapers were gone for the day, but here he was, still at work. Anything to save him from thinking about the plea offer. Anything to save him from talking to his father.

  “Okay then,” Pete said. “Pizza it is.”

  He headed down the front lawn, past the newly poured concrete and the yellow tape stretched across the bottom of the driveway. The place looked like a crime scene.

  The pizzeria said twenty minutes, and he sat on the bench by the pickup window to wait. A buzz of voices came from the restaurant floor behind him, and sharp cries and irritated demands from the kitchen in front of him, and all around the one-sided conversations of people on their phones. He tuned out all of it. He needed to think, and think hard. The countdown clock was running out. He had only fourteen hours now to make a decision that would determine the rest of his child’s life. Take the deal. Roll the dice. Or skip out and head for Canada.

  Take the deal. Two years in prison. Roll the dice and go to trial with nothing more than a hired-gun doctor trying to convince the jury that the obvious explanation wasn’t the right one. Kip would sit there looking wholesome, his parents behind him would look supportive and proud. Except that Kip would look sullen, Karen would look devastated, and Gary would look resentful at having to be there. Pete would have to look supportive and proud all on his own. He wondered if he could pull it off.

  It wasn’t enough. Medical testimony that defied common sense and a father who half the time didn’t believe his own kid. They were going to lose and Kip would be sentenced to prison and Pete was supposed to stand by and watch it happen. In his whole life he’d never felt so powerless. What kind of man would let this happen to his child?

  Door Number Three. Take Kip and run for the border. Find some kind of work that didn’t require papers. Construction probably, but he’d settle for line cook in a mining camp if he had to. It wouldn’t be the life Kip was meant for, but it sure as hell beat the one he was headed to. Pete started to think through the practicalities, what they needed to pack, where their passports were, currency exchange rates, whether Kevin could wrap up the Miller job on his own. Who he could trust to say good-bye to.

  Then he thought of Mia and the geyser-force of the idea shut off like somebody turned a valve. His marriage might be over, but he couldn’t leave his little girl, no more than he already had. That meant he’d have to send Kip up there on his own and find some way to sneak money to him across the border. Kip would live like a fugitive for the rest of his life. It might be years before he saw him again.

  It was a moment before he realized his phone was ringing. Zack’s name was on the screen. “Hey!” he answered, startled and pleased, as he stepped outside to take the call. There’d been some texts and emails back and forth, but this was the first time he’d spoken to either of the twins since the day they were lost at sea.

  “Hey, Pete,” sounded in two-part harmony; Dylan was on the call, too.

  “Where are you? Is everything okay?”

  “Bar Harbor. We’re in port for a few hours and thought we’d check in,” Zack said.

  “We know you got that, uh, thing coming up next week,” Dylan said. “And we just wanted to say, you know, good luck and everything.”

  “Thanks,” Pete said. “Be nice if you’d say it to Kip.”

  “Already done. As soon as we hit dry land, we texted him.”

  Good enough. That was the equivalent of an hour-long face-to-face in their universe. “So how’re things up there? Are you having the time of your life?”

  “Yeah. The worst time.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s been a bad scene, Pete. Dad’s drinking too much and fighting with the clients—”

  “Then we have to try to smooth things over—”

  “These rich people—they’re all assholes—”

  “And their tips have been lousy!”

  “You want to come home? I’ll send you the airfare.”

  “No. Thanks, man—”

  “Not that we haven’t thought about it—”

  “But we decided to tough it out.”

  “You know why?” Dylan said. “It’s funny. We keep hearing Chrissy’s voice.”

  “You can’t just quit! Remember? She used to say that every time we wanted to quit the team or drop out of chorus or whatever. You can’t just quit!”

  Zack said it with Chrissy’s exact intonation, and it made Pete grin to think that it took the memory of their little sister’s scolding to motivate two nearly grown men. But she was always one determined little girl. He remembered something else. “That club she started? The antibullying thing? Remember that slogan she came up with?”

  They answered him in unison. “Don’t back down. Stand up! Stand up for yourself.”

  They all laughed, but in seconds the laughter trailed off into awkward silence.

  “So—you’ll be home at the end of the month?”

  “Two weeks. We got our cousin’s wedding, but we’ll hang out after, okay?”

  “You bet.”

  The pizza was boxed and on the counter when he went back inside, and as he drove back to Hollow Road, he thought how much he was going to miss those guys. No child should ever have to have an ex-sibling, and no dad an ex-stepson either. But that was where they were all headed. As bad as a first divorce was, a second divorce had to be even worse. After the first, you were at least still related to the kids you were leaving behind. After the second, there was nothing to tie you together. You were leaving each other for good.

  The news was on the radio. Another mass shooting, another lone gunman, this time at a concert hall in Nashville. Pete barely heard it. In thirteen hours they had to call Shelby and tell her yes or no. On Friday he had to wire another fifty grand to the bank, and on Sunday he was supposed to take Mia to Six Flags for the day and he didn’t know how he was supposed to manage any of it. How could any man take care of his family in this world? If you couldn’t even let them go to a country-western concert, you might as well give up trying.

  You can’t just quit.

  The phrase rang out inside the truck cab as clear as if Chrissy were seated there beside him. You can’t just quit. Don
’t back down. Stand up for yourself.

  He braked hard and pulled off to the shoulder of the road and sat there a minute with his flashers on and Chrissy’s words reverberating in his head. You can’t just quit.

  It was crazy. He couldn’t let his eighteen-year-old make this decision on his own but he’d let the words of a fourteen-year-old ghost sway him? But there it was. She was a determined little thing. She could reach him all the way from the grave.

  He swung a U-turn and headed back the other way and out to Providence Road and north to Leesburg. Target was still open, and he barreled through the aisles and in twenty minutes filled the cart with almost every item on the college checklist.

  It was dark by the time he got back to Hollow House. Kip was there, still at work out front, spreading mulch in the border with a work light strapped to his baseball cap. He did a double-take when his light swept over the heap of bags and boxes in the back. “What’s all this?”

  “Grab an armful and help me carry them in, would you?”

  “Dad—are these school supplies?” He swung his head around, and the beam of light swung with it. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re going to trial next week, that’s what. And a week after that, you’re going to school. So we don’t have much time to get ready.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about saying no to the plea bargain.”

  “And lose?”

  “And take our shot. You get up there and tell the jury exactly what happened that night.”

  His eyes opened wide. “Are you saying—? You believe me?”

  Pete nodded. In that moment at least?—yeah, he did. “Who needs corroboration?” He clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re your own best witness. You can charm the birds out of the trees, and that’s what you’re going to do at trial. You hear me?”