I Set the Sheets on Fire, Then the Clubhouse novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Count

Guarded by Cade, Becky learns eleven men knew and that he knew for three weeks, and that he burned his hands checking the building was empty.

They put me in the garage office with a camp cot, a space heater and Cade Ostrow.

The fire crew had saved the back wall and the garage.

Everything else was black wet timber and a smell I could taste.

Cade stood inside the door with his arms at his sides.

His hands were wrapped in somebody's shop rags, and the rags had gone dark.

I sat on the cot with my back against the cinderblock and my phone in my lap, still showing zero.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

"Ask me," he said at last.

"Ask you what?"

"What you asked the room."

"I don't need to ask you," I said. "I watched you look at the floor."

"Ask me anyway."

My voice came out flat. "How many knew?"

He didn't flinch from it.

"Eleven," he said. "Dario, Boone, nine more. I can give you every name."

"Were you one?"

"Yes."

I had known it, and it still landed in the stomach.

"How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks," I said.

I stood up.

"You ate at my table three weeks ago. You fixed the sink in my kitchen on Sunday. I made you coffee."

"I know."

"You watched me make the bed."

"Becky."

"In that room." My eyes were stinging and I hated it. "You stood in that room, with your hands in your pockets, and you let me wash her hair out of my pillowcase."

He said nothing.

I crossed the floor and hit him.

It was an open hand, across the face, hard enough that my palm rang.

His head turned with it.

He turned it back and stood there and let me see the mark come up on his cheek.

"Again if you want," he said.

I wanted to.

I drew my hand back, and then I saw what was on the rag around his knuckles.

It was fresh blood, soaking through.

"What did you do to your hands?"

"Nothing."

"Cade."

He looked at the wall.

"After you came down the stairs I went up," he said. "Nobody had checked the apartment. I figured you were in there when the alarm went."

"I checked every room. I was out before you moved."

"I didn't see that. I saw smoke." His jaw worked. "The bedroom doorknob was hot, and the door had swelled shut. I pulled it open anyway."

I stared at him.

"You went into a burning room for me. For someone you helped lie to."

"Those are two different things," he said. "I'm not asking you to like the second one."

I didn't have an answer.

There was a first-aid kit on the shelf above the workbench, a green metal box with a dented lid.

I took it down because I couldn't stand there with my hand still raised.

"Sit," I said.

"You don't have to."

"Sit down, Cade."

He sat on the cot.

I knelt in front of him and unwound the rags.

The skin on his palms had blistered, and one blister had split.

I cleaned it with saline and he didn't make a sound, but his whole forearm went hard under my fingers.

I could feel his pulse thudding at his wrist.

It was going fast.

I told myself that was pain.

I wrapped gauze around his left palm, and my thumb ran across the heel of his hand to hold it down.

He breathed in.

I felt it in his fingers, a small catch, gone almost before it happened.

I wrapped the right hand more carefully.

Neither of us said anything.

When I finished I stayed where I was, kneeling on the cold concrete with his bandaged hand in both of mine, and I realized I hadn't let go.

I let go.

"I'm still going to hate you," I said.

"Okay."

"That doesn't change."

"I don't need it to."

I sat back on my heels.

"The money," I said. "Thirty-eight thousand. He moved it this morning to her account."

"I saw the lease," Cade said. "Dario had Elena sign it two months ago. I didn't know about the money."

"Would you have told me?"

He looked at me for a while.

"I'd like to think so," he said. "But I told myself I'd tell you for three weeks, and I didn't. So I can't promise you a thing."

It was the first honest sentence anyone in that club had given me all day.

It didn't make me forgive him.

It made me listen.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and picked up my phone.

"Then I'm not leaving without it," I said. "Every dollar. Out of Dario's pocket and out of Elena's."

"You can't win a fight at the table. They'll vote with him."

"Then I'll make them watch me ask."

He was quiet.

When he spoke, it was in the careful voice of a man handing over something that might go off.

"Becky, listen. Friday, Dario's going to stand up and say you tried to kill Elena."

"I told them to get out."

"It'll be his word, and eleven patches who already lied once."

"And Boone?"

Cade's mouth tightened.

"Boone will let him," he said.

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