She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 29 of 32
Chapter 29: On the Lawn
Every phone on the lawn turned toward me.
The television camera swung with them.
"She said it in court!" Valerie's voice cracked high. "She said it at the luncheon! She said it on video! Ask anybody! She's been saying it for a year!"
Two Brookline police officers were coming up the drive behind the engine.
Valerie ran to them with her son on her hip.
"Her," she sobbed, pointing. "She's sick. She hears voices. She told me herself."
I stood up off the wet grass.
My shirt was soaked through and black at the collar. My hair was dripping.
I didn't shout.
"Ask her where the battery is," I said.
The officers looked at me.
"There's a smoke detector in that nursery," I said. "And one in the hall outside it. In March they both had little green lights. Tonight they had nothing."
Valerie's face didn't move.
"What battery?" she said.
Behind her, the lieutenant came around the side of the house, wet to the knees.
"Sprinkler valve was shut," he said to the officers. "All the way. In a basement nobody goes in. I opened it."
The fire investigator came out of the house forty minutes later, and nobody on the lawn had left.
The investigator carried a blackened space heater in one gloved hand and a smoke detector in the other.
"This was behind the rocking chair," he said. "Turned all the way up. The sheepskin was pushed down over it."
He turned the smoke detector over.
The battery slot was empty.
"I have photographs of that heater," I said. "From July. Plugged in, in that same room, on an extension cord under the rug. I gave them to a judge."
The investigator looked at me for a long moment.
"Anything else?"
"There's a stuffed rabbit on the shelf by the door," I said. "Third from the left. There's a camera in its eye."
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