The Wife They Burned novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Two A.M.

Abel shows Ada the melted gas can cap he photographed before he was taken off the case, and Marshall threatens Lantern House if she leaves.

"Off the case," I said. "Why?"

Abel didn't answer right away.

He crouched down by the grave and set his hand flat on the fresh dirt.

The dog sat beside him and leaned on his leg.

"Because I asked the wrong question in front of the wrong man."

"What question?"

"Where the heater came from."

He took his phone out of his jacket and thumbed through it.

He held it out to me.

It was a photo of a doorway, black and wet.

Charred boards. A puddle of hose water. A smear of something red melted into the sill.

"That's your back door," he said. "The one off the kitchen."

"I know which door it is."

I had carried her through it a hundred times, asleep, with her boots still on.

"That red thing is the cap off a gas can," he said. "The plastic kind you buy at a hardware store. It melted where it fell."

I stared at the smear.

"Gas," I said.

"Somebody poured it on the step and lit it. The fire went up the back wall and into the hall. Her room was right off the hall."

I made myself keep looking at the picture.

"The report doesn't say anything about a back door."

"No, ma'am. It says space heater, bedroom, curtains. It says the fire started inside."

"Did it?"

"It started outside. On the step."

"I took this at two fifteen," he said. "By nine the next morning, there was a space heater in that bedroom, black, right under the window. Nobody I asked had carried it in."

"And at ten you were off the case."

"At ten my boss told me the family had been through enough and I'd be writing up a warehouse fire in Cos Cob."

"The fire marshal has been to my house for dinner," I said. "He calls my mother-in-law by her first name."

Abel put the phone away.

"I figured."

The light was going.

Down by the water, the cottage was a black square behind yellow tape.

Joy had called me at nine forty that night.

A mother at Lantern House had gone down on the kitchen floor, and Joy couldn't get her up.

I had kissed Junie on the head and told the nanny I'd be back by midnight.

I had never once, in five years, not slept in that cottage on a Friday.

Everybody at Highmoor knew it.

Marshall knew it, because he was the reason.

He hated the noise of a cartoon in his house.

"Was the call real?" I said.

Abel looked at me.

"The call that got you out of there. Was it real?"

"You tell me."

I took out my own phone.

I opened my texts with Joy and scrolled back to September.

At nine thirty-eight, two minutes before the call, she had written: Mom in 4 collapsed. Ambulance coming. Need you.

At ten fifty-one: She's stable. Go home, my love.

At eleven forty: Ada call me. Call me right now.

The mother in room four had a heart condition nobody had caught.

I had done the CPR.

I was kneeling on Lantern House linoleum, counting compressions, while somebody poured gas on my back step.

"It was real," I said. "She really collapsed."

"Then nobody planned for you to be gone."

"No."

"So whoever lit that door thought you were inside."

The dog put his chin on my knee.

I let him.

He wrote a number on the back of a hardware receipt and held it out.

"My cell. I'm not on the case. I'm not supposed to be talking to you."

"Then why are you?"

He looked at the small mound with the orange boot on top.

"Because her name was on the bedroom door," he said. "In orange."

I had painted it there myself.

She had picked the color.

I took the receipt.

I walked back up the hill in the dark, past the main house's lit windows, and in through the kitchen.

The lunch had moved to the library. I could hear Fallon laughing.

I climbed the back stairs to the attic.

Junie's drawings were in a plastic tub under the bed.

They were the only things of hers that hadn't burned, because she'd made them at Lantern House and I'd brought them home in my car.

Orange suns. Orange dogs. Orange houses with smoke curling out of the chimneys.

I sat on the floor and started putting them in order by date.

Then I got my suitcases down from the eaves.

I had packed one and was zipping the second when the stairs creaked.

Marshall stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, with his tie loosened.

He looked at the box of drawings.

Then at the suitcases.

"You embarrassed my mother in front of her board," he said.

"Your daughter was being buried."

"I know where my daughter was."

"Then why weren't you there?"

His jaw moved.

He stepped into the room and had to duck under the slant of the ceiling.

"You're not going anywhere tonight, Ada."

"I'm going in the morning."

"Think about where."

"I know where."

"Lantern House," he said. "Of course. You'll go play nurse to strangers and tell yourself it's noble."

I put the drawings in a file box and put the lid on.

"Let me make something clear," he said. "The foundation pays for that house. The heat, the food, Joy's salary, the beds. My mother chairs the foundation."

He put his hand on the doorframe.

"If you walk out, Lantern House loses its money on Friday."

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