Smoke (36 page)

When Detective Donaldson pointed out that this didn’t explain Angus’s silence once the video came out, Angus said Tucker had threatened him again, saying that if he said anything, he’d send out the pictures. Tucker
had
started a fire that night, and he didn’t know they’d seen John Phillips start one later. For all Tucker knew, he was the source of the fire. And Angus didn’t see how there was any way he could explain everything without it all coming out. The pictures. The blackmail. He couldn’t take the risk. Besides, it was his fault Willow was in trouble. He’d made some joke once about pictures—it was just a joke, he swore—but she’d taken them anyway and look what happened. He deserved to be punished for that, didn’t he?

Mindy was stunned by both the insight and naïveté of his thinking. He hadn’t thought there’d be any long-term consequences, she realized. Like a teenage smoker who casts off the possibility of lung cancer. Not because he didn’t accept that the risks were real, but because he believed his youth provided some kind of cloak of invincibility. His future wasn’t set, it was something malleable, avoidable.

When they reached Cathy’s house, Cathy nearly dragged Willow from the backseat before the car came to a full stop. But Willow broke free from her mother’s grasp to come around to Angus’s side of the car. He had his window down and she leaned in and kissed him, so briefly it was almost nothing. Then she turned and ran up her front steps and into her house.

A silent moment later they were at their own house. Peter and Carrie were right inside the door as if they’d been waiting for them at the window. For the first time in a year, Angus let himself be hugged by his father, his sister. He hugged them back too, hard and long like he used to do when he returned from a month away at summer camp and his friends weren’t around to hoot and holler at the sissiness of it.

When he finally let go, he headed straight for the shower, throwing promises over his shoulder that he’d tell Peter everything as soon as he’d washed away the jail smell and burned the clothes he was wearing. Carrie screamed with laughter at his awkward choice of words, and he flashed a smile, so good to see.

Whether he, or any of them, would be able to lather off the memories, doubt, and tension this week created was something Mindy was already worried about, until she reminded herself she wasn’t going to worry anymore. She was going to hold on to this new state inside her. She felt like an old motor that had turned over after one last try, the try made just to be sure. Her resolve kept threatening to stall out, but she was keeping a steady foot on the accelerator. She felt both exhilarated and exhausted all at once.

This reprieve was short-lived. When Carrie retreated to the garage “because all this drama is seriously interfering with my training,” Peter put the kettle on for tea and told her they had a decision to make. The fire still wasn’t under control, and the evacuation order had been extended on a voluntary basis to the whole town.

“I think we should go,” Peter said.

“But Angus just got home.”

“I know. But I don’t want to get caught in the chaos. I’ve been talking to people about what happened at the Fall Fling. Did you know that twenty-five people ended up in the hospital?”

“Elizabeth.”

“What about her?”

“She was in the hospital.”

“You’ve been in touch with her?”

“She was at the police station. I asked Ben to bring her in case I couldn’t get Detective Donaldson to listen to Willow.”

“You can fill me in on everything in the car.”

“Where will we go? The elementary school?”

“I was thinking somewhere further. What about Zion National Park? We’ve always talked of going.”

“You want to go camping in the middle of all this? What about school? What about work?”

“I called Jim, and he’s okay with giving me a couple weeks off. And I called ahead—there’s a hotel, well, really a motel, that’s having a special right outside the park. I think it would be good. For Angus. For us.”

Mindy’s brain was spinning. These last few days, she’d thought of nothing but getting Angus out of trouble. What would happen afterward wasn’t something she’d let filter into her thoughts. But now, they were there. At the end of this. And what was there to do? How were they supposed to mend and move life forward? Was Angus supposed to go back to school when it resumed, assuming there was a school to go back to, and pick up teenagehood where he’d left off? And what about her and Peter? What about the life she’d been living a week ago? Spin class and errands and nothing, really, that was connected to the person she thought she’d end up being?

“Yes. Okay. Let’s go.”

She leaned into Peter and kissed him hard, like she did at the party the night they met, surprising both of them.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for thinking of this.”

“It’s our family, Min.”

“It is. A good family.”

“I’m going to start packing the car. Can you get Carrie out of the garage?”

“This motel doesn’t happen to have a ballet barre somewhere, does it?”

He smiled. “No place is perfect.”

“This place has been. Pretty close to.”

“We don’t need perfect,” Peter said. “Let’s just go for ordinary.”

Mindy got Carrie out of the garage easily. The words
road trip
were barely out of her mouth before Carrie was sprinting, tap, tap, tap, toward the house asking whether there was a pool where they were going to stay. Mindy told her to ask her father, but she wasn’t sure Carrie had heard her. As someone whose happiness often came from others, Mindy felt Carrie’s joy shoot through her. This would be good. This would be what they needed.

Mindy walked toward the garage door and clicked it open. She took their daypacks and water bottles from the container where they kept them and brought them to Peter’s car, leaning them up against the side. Just to be able to breathe clean air would do them all wonders, she thought, her eyes itching. To see the sky, clear of smoke. Or were those clouds? Who could tell anymore.

She went back into the garage and looked around for something else that needed to be moved, or put in place, but there was nothing. She ran her hand along Carrie’s barre—smooth, polished wood that was slightly shinier at the place where Carrie normally stood. She put her own hand in that spot, her feet slipping into first position for the first time since she’d shown the basic positions to Carrie when she was four. Her right knee protested at the turnout, but she dipped into a plié anyway, first demi, then full. Maybe when they got back, she should take that adult ballet class they were holding at Carrie’s studio. And find some work. Something more than the volunteering she’d been doing and hating. She had the beginning of an idea of what that might be, but she didn’t want to fully voice the thought, not even to herself. Not yet.

“Carrie looks just like you,” Elizabeth said.

Mindy turned around, less gracefully than she would have liked.

“I must look funny standing here.”

“Not at all,” Beth said. She was still dressed in her hospital scrubs.
Because she didn’t have a home to go back to,
Mindy thought.
Not right now. Maybe not ever.
“I always wished I could do that.”

“You could. Anyone can.”

She shrugged. “Soon I’ll be too big to do anything.”

“That is such great news, though.”

“It is.”

They stood there, staring at each other. Mindy couldn’t remember a silence like this between them. From the beginning, they’d always been so easy together, filling the air with idle chatter, gossip, and the deeper stuff too. For the last year, Mindy had been living with all of that in her head, along with a fistful of regrets.

“Why are you here, Elizabeth? Do you need something?”

“Ben brought me.”

“Oh, I see,” Mindy turned away, tears forming. “Well, we’re about to leave so, if there wasn’t anything . . .”

“Min, come on. Of course there’s something.”

“Something Ben thinks you should say?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it too.”

“Mean what?”

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was cruel. I froze you out. I pushed you away because I needed to push everyone away. I did it to you. I did it to Ben. And I’ve nearly lost everything because of it.”

“From where I’m standing, you seem to be getting everything you’ve always wanted.”

Elizabeth laughed then, a full belly laugh that left her clutching her side with a frown of worry.

“Everything okay?”

“I’ve been cramping, but the doctors say it’s nothing.”

“I bet it doesn’t feel like nothing.”

“No. It really doesn’t.”

“What was so funny, then?”

“If you knew what a complete disaster my life has been recently . . .”

“So tell me about it.”

“Now?”

“No, we’re going out of town for a while. But maybe, when I get back?”

“I’d like that. I really would.”

“I would too,” Mindy said. “And I’m sorry too. Those things I said, about it being your fault you couldn’t get pregnant. That was so awful. You can’t imagine how bad I’ve felt.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

Elizabeth took a step toward her and folded her into a hug.

“I’ve really missed you, you know?”

“I’ve missed you too.”

CHAPTER 43

The Smell of Rain

Elizabeth

When I climb back into our car
after I say good-bye to Mindy, I’m not sure where we should go. I suggest we go to Ben’s parents, like he mentioned earlier, but he’s talked to them and they’re resting, and in the end, he says, he doesn’t want to go there. He feels too restless, and maybe we should just check into a hotel or something.

“Everything’s booked,” I say. I’d checked at some point earlier this week, when I thought I might have to find somewhere other than Ben’s parents to stay for a while. The only places left were places we could only afford if Ben’s parents were paying, or if I only intended to stay there for an hour or two to turn a trick.

“What do you suggest?” Ben asks. His leg is bobbing up and down.

“You seem really jumpy.”

“Yeah. I . . . I don’t know what to do with myself.”

I have the odd urge to start singing Dusty Springfield’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” only the White Stripes version. But I’m a terrible singer, and that would be a really weird thing to do, wouldn’t it?

“How about we go to my office?” I say. “I have a change of clothes in my desk. And then we’ll figure it out from there?”

He agrees. Is that a good sign, or only a sign that he’s being kind to his pregnant, likely homeless, soon-to-be-ex-wife? Or maybe it simply hasn’t occurred to him that we could go our separate ways today. That he doesn’t need to be chauffeuring me about town or anywhere. That he could cut whatever ties still bind us, and sail away. But that’s me forgetting about the baby again, and now I get it. He’s worried about him or her. He’s still here because of the part of him inside me. And sometime today he’s going to tell me that. When his mind settles down. When I’ve stopped doubling over with cramps.

When I tell him it’s okay for him to go.

Ben drops me off at the office and says he’s going to see if he can rustle us up some sandwiches.

“If Sandwich Time hasn’t been abandoned,” he says with a smirk, but there’s a good chance it has been. Driving over here from Mindy’s was like driving through a stage lot—the buildings all look fake-fronted, cardboard cutouts of some real, lived-in place, somewhere else.

I find the clothes I remembered in my desk drawer—black yoga pants and a long sweatshirt. There’s even fresh underwear, socks, and a bra. I had some notion, when I started working here, that I might have the need to change my clothes after combing through a dumpster or chasing down a witness who didn’t want to talk to me. Really, I was imagining myself as Laura Holt from
Remington Steele
, all tousled in the dirt while Rich stood by watching. Only Rich is no Remington Steele, far from it.

I find Rich sitting at his desk, a bottle of whiskey open before him. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Rich in jeans or a T-shirt. He looks far from himself, the only connection being his ever-present cowboy boots.

He’s staring out the window at his regular view: the Peak, the fire, the abandoned town. I try to remember if I know where he lives in all this mess, but I come up empty. Probably somewhere safe, like Ben’s parents, or his sister. I scan his office, looking for an image I remember. I find it on his ego wall—a picture of him and Honor and Tucker. His hand is on Tucker’s shoulder.

“You’ve heard?” I say. “About John Phillips?”

“I just came from speaking to Detective Donaldson.”

“I guess I was wrong, after all.”

“Seems like.”

I sit in the chair in front of him, wondering if I should say what’s on my mind. He could fire me on the spot. And really, I have no evidence but my suspicions, which haven’t proven to be the most reliable of late.

But, what the hell? Might as well get as many answers as I can today.

“You’re the one who leaked it, right?”

His gaze shifts away from the window. “What’s that?”

“The surveillance video. You knew Tucker was involved somehow, and you knew if that video came out, the police would be more likely to believe Tucker’s story. Blame Angus.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You’ve been steering me away from him from the beginning. You didn’t want me to go ask questions at the school. You didn’t want me looking into anyone but John Phillips.”

“And John Phillips was responsible.”

“But you didn’t know that. You thought Tucker started it. What happened? Did Honor tell you something? Maybe that Tucker had been out that night?”

His eyelids flicker.

“That’s it, isn’t it? After John Phillips pointed the finger at a group of kids, before he knew who Tucker was. Honor came to you, didn’t she? She knew he’d been out that night. Thought he’d started the fire. That’s why she’s been volunteering at the school so much.”

“I’d tread lightly, Elizabeth. Very, very lightly.”