Chapter 10 - FIRE IN THE NIGHT
No one slept after Sarah's confession.
Danner separated her and Richard immediately.
Richard refused to answer questions without counsel.
Sarah started talking and could not seem to stop.
She described waking before dawn six years earlier and finding Richard's Range Rover in the service garage.
The front passenger headlamp was cracked.
Black paint streaked the bumper.
There was mud packed into the wheel well.
Richard told her he had hit a deer.
Then news arrived that my father had died on the mountain road.
"Why didn't you tell police?" Danner asked.
Sarah sat at the long dining table with both hands wrapped around a glass of water.
"I was afraid."
"Of Richard?"
"Of everything."
"That's not an answer."
She looked at me.
"I had already signed things."
"So you protected yourself."
Her eyes filled.
"I thought it was an accident."
"You washed the car."
"Richard told me to."
"And you did."
She flinched.
I did not raise my voice.
I did not need to.
"Then you let me bury our father believing there had been no other vehicle."
"You weren't here."
The sentence was out before she could stop it.
There it was.
The old weapon.
My absence.
Her excuse for everything.
"No," I said.
"I wasn't."
Sarah looked down.
"But you were."
Danner ended the interview at two in the morning.
He did not arrest Sarah.
Her statement alone was not enough to prove criminal involvement in my father's death.
But he reopened the crash investigation.
Richard left with his attorney and private security after being ordered not to remove records or assets.
Before he entered his SUV, he looked at me.
"You think she's telling the truth because it hurts me."
"No."
"Then why believe her?"
"I don't."
That answer bothered him.
"I believe evidence."
His mouth tightened.
"Your father understood evidence too."
"Did that frighten you?"
Richard stepped into the vehicle.
"Your father frightened everyone eventually."
Then he left.
I took Lily back to the caretaker's cottage because she refused to sleep inside the manor.
I understood.
The mansion had become a place where doors meant rules and footsteps meant punishment.
The cottage, shabby as it was, felt safer.
Mrs. Kent stayed with us.
Hale took the sofa.
A deputy parked near the gate.
At three forty-seven, I woke to the smell of smoke.
For one confused second, I thought I was back overseas.
Then I heard Lily cough.
I opened my eyes.
Orange light flickered beneath the cottage door.
"Up."
My voice changed instantly.
Hale rolled off the sofa.
Mrs. Kent woke in the chair.
Smoke was already filling the ceiling.
I lifted Lily from the bed.
"Cover your mouth."
She obeyed without asking why.
The front door would not open.
I pulled harder.
Something held it from outside.
"Blocked," Hale said.
The rear window.
I kicked through the lower pane, knocked away the remaining glass with a chair, and lifted Lily through first.
Hale climbed out and took her.
Mrs. Kent followed.
I went last.
The moment my boots hit the ground, the roof over the front room collapsed.
Flames rolled through the windows.
Lily screamed.
I wrapped my body around her and moved her farther back.
The deputy at the gate came running with an extinguisher.
It was useless against a structure already consumed.
Fire engines arrived nine minutes later.
By then, the caretaker's cottage was gone.
Everything I had carried home in my duffel burned.
Uniform papers.
Photographs.
Letters.
The few possessions I had kept through a decade of deployments.
I watched them disappear and felt almost nothing.
Lily was alive.
That was the inventory that mattered.
Then Hale swore.
"The ledger."
We had brought the red ledger to the cottage after photographing the pages.
It had been inside a locked metal evidence case beside the sofa.
Now the room was a furnace.
Danner arrived in sweatpants under his coat.
"Everyone out?"
"Yes."
He looked at the front door.
A length of chain hung from the handle.
Someone had looped it through the porch railing from outside.
Danner's face changed.
"This wasn't an accident."
The fire marshal found traces of accelerant beneath the front steps.
Two ignition points.
Professional enough to spread quickly.
Crude enough to be obvious after inspection.
"Someone wanted us to know," Hale said.
"Or wanted us dead," I answered.
At dawn, firefighters entered the shell of the cottage.
The evidence case had warped but survived.
The ledger inside was scorched at the edges, wet from hoses, but readable.
That was our first piece of luck.
The second came from Lily.
She was sitting in Danner's patrol car wrapped in a blanket when she called me over.
"Daddy."
"What is it?"
She held out her fist.
Inside was a silver cuff link.
Black stone center.
Initials engraved on the back.
RB.
"Where did you get this?"
"Outside the window."
"When?"
"Before the fire."
My pulse changed.
"How long before?"
"I woke up because I heard somebody talking."
"Who?"
She swallowed.
"Aunt Sarah."
Danner leaned closer.
"What did she say?"
Lily stared at the burning cottage.
"She said, 'You promised nobody would get hurt.'"
A cold silence settled between us.
"Who was she talking to?" I asked.
Lily opened her hand again.
May you like
The cuff link rested in her palm.
"Uncle Richard."
