Chương 3
“It was there when we left.”
“Yes.”
“The brakes were on.”
“Yes.”
He considered this. “So it couldn’t roll away.”
“No.”
His mouth tightened.
Victoria touched the blanket near his knee. “We’ll get you another one.”
Oliver did not look at her. “That one fit.”
“We’ll have one made exactly the same.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“No,” Elena said. “It won’t.”
Victoria glanced at her, wounded by the plainness of the answer.
Oliver looked toward the curtained doorway. Charles stood there, one hand braced against the frame.
“Why did you leave me upstairs?”
Victoria went very still.
Charles answered first. “We didn’t know you were there.”
“I was in the gallery.”
“I mean we didn’t realize.”
“The alarm was loud.”
“Yes.”
“I called.”
Victoria’s fingers tightened on the blanket.
“Who did you call?” Elena asked.
“The house phone. The one near the elevator.”
“Did anyone answer?”
Oliver shook his head.
“Then I called Dad.”
Charles took his phone from his coat pocket. The screen had a crack across one corner. He stared at it.
“There was no call.”
“I called.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t.”
“You said there was no call.”
Charles unlocked the phone. His thumb moved across the screen, then stopped.
The call was there.
One missed call from the house line at 9:17 p.m., lasting two seconds before it disconnected.
Charles’s face did not collapse. He was not a man who collapsed where others could see him. He only sat down in the nearest chair, still holding the phone, and placed his other hand over his mouth.
Oliver watched him.
“Why didn’t you answer?”
“The alarm was going off. I was outside by then. I didn’t hear it.”
“You had it in your hand.”
Charles glanced up.
“You always have it in your hand,” Oliver said.
Victoria closed her eyes.
Elena expected Charles to defend himself. She had seen him explain delayed birthdays, missed therapy appointments, and dinners interrupted by work. His explanations were usually calm and persuasive. They turned neglect into necessity and disappointment into a misunderstanding.
This time he looked at the call log.
“I should have heard it.”
Oliver’s gaze moved toward the window. Morning light had begun to flatten the darkness outside. The glass reflected his face faintly above the blanket.
“I thought nobody was coming.”
Elena reached for his hand.
He let her hold it, but he did not look at her either.
The Reeds moved into a furnished house eleven miles from the manor two days after the fire. It belonged to a corporate rental company and had been selected because it offered a first-floor bedroom, wide hallways, and enough privacy to keep photographs from being taken through the windows. The exterior was pale cedar. The kitchen had white cabinets without handles, and every piece of furniture appeared to have been chosen by someone who disliked evidence of human use.
Elena was given a room near Oliver’s.
She had nowhere else to go. Her small apartment above the manor’s service wing had burned with the rest of the upper floor. She lost her clothes, her passport, two boxes of letters from her mother, a ceramic bowl Oliver had painted when he was six, and six thousand dollars she had hidden inside an old flour tin because she distrusted banks after an identity theft problem in her early twenties.
Charles offered to replace the money.
Elena told him he could not replace money he had no proof existed.
He looked almost offended by the suggestion that she might lie to him and then seemed to understand that this was how she felt whenever he told her to trust his version of events.
A replacement wheelchair arrived the first afternoon. It was black rather than silver, with padded supports Oliver had not requested and rear wheels positioned too far back for him to propel comfortably. He sat in it for less than thirty seconds.
“It’s wrong.”
Victoria crouched beside him. “It’s temporary.”
“It turns badly.”
“They said it was the best available immediately.”
“I don’t want the best available immediately.”
“What do you want me to do, Oliver?”
He looked at her. “Listen before you order things.”
Victoria straightened as though the floor had shifted beneath her.
Elena hid the beginning of a smile by picking up the instruction packet.
Oliver saw it anyway.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You smiled.”
“The brakes are on backward.”
He looked down at the chair. “That isn’t funny.”
“No.”
“It’s a little funny,” he admitted.
It was the first time any of them had come close to laughing since the fire. The sound did not arrive, but the possibility of it changed the room.
Charles spent most of those first days at the end of the dining table with three laptops, two phones, and stacks of documents rescued from cloud storage. He wore navy sweaters and pressed trousers. He held video meetings with the sound muted through headphones, turning his face away whenever Elena crossed behind him.
Reed Manor was insured for more than the cost of rebuilding it, but the policy required disclosure of known electrical hazards and material renovations. The investigators had located the likely origin of the fire near an attic junction box above the west gallery. Temporary wiring for the evening’s event had been routed through the same area.
Charles repeated that last fact often.
Temporary wiring.
He said the phrase with controlled emphasis, as if its existence moved responsibility away from the house and toward someone who had carried in a ladder and left before the first guest arrived.
Elena listened from the kitchen while making Oliver toast he did not eat.
May you like
Three weeks before the fire, she had smelled hot wood near the upper gallery. She had mentioned it to Charles while he stood beneath the chandelier discussing lighting angles for the event. He had looked up, sniffed once, and told her old houses carried odors through the walls.
Two days later, the brass plate around the elevator call button had felt warm.
