A Gala Event (25 page)

“Well, then you know what I mean. So Ken invited me into his special circle, and I kept investing more and more, and it kept paying out, until it didn't. So I asked him flat out, what's the problem? And that's when Ken told me the fund was underwater, and he'd been juggling the accounts to make the payouts but he just couldn't do it anymore. And then he asked me how much insurance he had on the house, and what would happen if it burned down.”

That was something Meg had not expected to hear. “You think Ken Eastman was planning to burn down his own house?” she asked.

Jacob looked down. “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “But he didn't come out and say it in so many words.” Then he faced Meg and Lydia. “Look, you've got to understand the situation. By the time we had that conversation, I'd sunk just about all the savings I had into his fund. It had been doing really well, so we just kept plowing all the earnings back into it. Or at least, that's what Ken said. But then something went wrong. The statements kept looking real good, but one day I came to him and told him that I needed to take some cash out because I had to put on a new roof, and after he waffled for a while he more or less admitted that the investment fund was in the toilet because of the lousy economy, and the only way I'd get my money out of it was if he could get his hands on a big chunk of change. I guess he had started thinking that
collecting the insurance on the house was the easiest way out of the mess he'd gotten himself into.”

Jacob shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “He was real careful, you know? He never came out and said,
I'm going to burn down the house for the insurance money
. He just asked if he had good coverage on everything, and that included arson. So I said, that's part of the standard package, and then I made a joke about why he was worried about arson. He kind of shrugged and said something like, you never know. Things happen. And then he went on to say, ‘I read somewhere that a water heater could explode without any warning and start a fire.' I told him, sure, it's been known to happen, if you don't vent it properly and there's a spark of some kind to set it off. And then he gave me this weird smile and said, ‘I'd better make sure mine's okay.'”

“How long before the fire was that?” Lydia asked.

“Maybe a month? I didn't think anything more about it; I thought he was just joking around. And I never did see the money I asked him for—I had to take out a bank loan for the roof.”

“And you didn't remember this conversation when the house did in fact burn to the ground?” Meg demanded.

Jacob turned to look at her. “Why would I? The police said it was the kid's fault, messing around with making drugs or something. No one ever suggested anything different. He was convicted, wasn't he?”

“Yes, he was,” Lydia said.

By a judge who had lost a lot of money to Ken Eastman
, Meg added silently, although that had never been made public. Maybe that judge hadn't gotten her money back, but it was possible that she'd wanted to shut down the whole investigation before anybody looked too closely at the Eastman finances, fearing there might be a paper trail that led right
to her. “Jacob, do you believe that Kenneth Eastman was planning to burn down his own house for the insurance money?” Meg asked, looking him in the eye.

Jacob stared at her for several seconds, then said, “God help me, yes. I didn't ask him directly. Maybe I didn't want to know. I guess I figured, Ken was a smart guy, most of the time, and if he did it, he'd do it in a way that nobody would get hurt. So I went along with it. We bumped up the insurance on his place, which I probably shouldn't have, because there were some issues with it: knob and tube wiring that was still active, no smoke alarms—although those were less common then than they are now. In any event, it was pretty clear to anyone that once a fire got started in that house, the whole place would go up pretty fast. Plus it was well outside of town, and it would take the fire department some time to get trucks out there. By then it would be hard to stop.”

“Jacob, as you very well know, three people, including Ken, died in the that fire,” Lydia said. “What went wrong?”

Jacob immediately looked defensive. “Why do you think I would know? If you're asking if Ken tried to kill himself, I'd say no.”

“So why didn't Ken and Sharon get out? And Sharon's mother?” Meg asked.

“Look, Meg, I don't have any answers,” Jacob protested. “I was just sick about it when I heard. And I did get a copy of the fire inspector's report—had to, before I could authorize any insurance payout. The fire happened in the middle of the night, and everybody—except Aaron, it seems—was in bed, asleep. They never left their beds. Had to have been smoke inhalation that got to them.”

“Even Virginia?” Meg said. “She was on the ground floor, in a different part of the building. She may have had trouble getting around, but she wasn't crippled. Surely she could have
climbed out a window, under the circumstances.” Ideas were beginning to swirl around in Meg's mind, each one less pleasant than the one before. “What if . . .” she began.

“What, Meg?” Lydia asked. Now both Lydia and Jacob were looking at her.

“Jacob, do you believe that Ken was planning to use the water heater to start the fire? Does that fit with the fire report you saw?”

Jacob held up both hands. “No! I had no reason to think that. It's possible, in theory, but I couldn't tell you for sure. I only knew what I'd read about in reports. Ken would have to have done some digging on how to rig it up, and this was before the Internet made it all so easy. If I had to guess—and this is just a guess—I would say he would have rigged it to look like an electrical fire. I mentioned all that knob and tube stuff. If you leave it alone, it's safe enough—although a lot of insurers nowadays won't touch a house that still has it—but when people start messing around with it, adding new lines and such, that creates problems. Plus it's easy to access. A lot of it would have been exposed, running through the joists in the basement—easier than trying to go through plaster walls. People cut into it for new circuits, but something jiggles loose and nobody notices, so it arcs. I don't recall what Ken's looked like, but it was an old house, right? And a lot of people could have messed with it over time.

“Bottom line? Ken could've planned to start something where he could get at it, in the basement—it'd be easy to loosen a few wires or strip off some of the old insulation. Loosen the gas feed to the water heater and set up the old wires to arc, it would all go boom.”

“But how would he know when it would start?” Lydia asked.

Jacob shook his head. “I don't know. But isn't it kind of irrelevant? That part of the basement was where Aaron
started the real fire, which did the job just fine. They found his drug-making equipment there.”

“Let's leave Aaron aside for now,” Meg said. “Say Ken rigged it so that the wires shorted out and started the fire, and then went back up to bed to wait for the fire to start. Would it have been fast? Or maybe he decided to take a late shower, which would trigger the burner in the water heater? Could that work?”

Lydia looked at her with dismay. “What an awful idea! But assuming that was true—which I'm not ready to do—why didn't he get out? Why didn't Sharon notice smoke or something?”

“Maybe they were waiting until the fire was fully engaged,” Meg said. “If they called it in too early, the fire department might have been able to put it out too soon, and good-bye big payout.” Which didn't explain how Sharon could have let her own mother die.

Lydia now looked vaguely ill. “What if . . . Oh God, I hate to say this. What if he drugged his wife and his mother-in-law so they couldn't sound the alarm, either? Sharon might not have been in on it, and I seriously doubt her mother was. Virginia was already suspicious of Ken, and maybe she shared that with Sharon. Or maybe Ken wanted them both out of the way.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “But something went very wrong, didn't it? Because Ken didn't get out. Was that just stupidity? I mean, he knew there was a fire, but he waited too long to leave? He didn't count on smoke or gasses or whatever knocking him out first?”

“That's a good point, Lydia,” Jacob told her. “Most people don't know that it's inhaling the smoke and gasses that kills most people in fires. And it can act fast. Ken might have thought he had more time than he did. And worse—sometimes burning materials like fabric can create cyanide gas, which is
definitely poisonous. If they had some fancy curtains in the room below, that might have been a factor.”

“What an awful way to die,” Lydia whispered.

“Ladies,” Jacob said firmly, “these are all guesses. You can't prove any of this. Yes, Ken upped his policy on the house not long before the fire, and on himself and his wife. The investigators knew that; I didn't cover up anything. But I don't think he planned to die. From what I remember of the guy, he was too sure of himself, and he thought he could find a way out of the fix he was in. He probably believed that with the insurance settlement he could make everything right—it's like a gambling addiction, you know? But the point is, we'll never know. I mean, who the heck would've done an autopsy on any of them to see if there were drugs in their system? Or looked through the rubble for an old wire? They had their suspect: Aaron Eastman set the fire, then sat on the lawn and watched the place burn down with his family in it. He was a sick kid.”

“But what if he didn't?” Meg protested.

“Is that why you're here? Aaron Eastman comes back from jail claiming that he was innocent?” Now Jacob looked angry. “He was a punk and a druggie. And he loved rubbing his dad's nose in it.”

“He was a kid, and he was acting out!” Meg threw back at him. “That doesn't make him a killer.”

“Okay, so maybe it was an accident. Maybe he lit up something or was cooking something in the basement and it got out of hand. But that fire happened, and he was the only one who got out, and he wasn't touched by the fire. What else can you think?”

Meg had to admit that what Jacob said made sense. Even if Ken had rigged up some way to start a fire in the basement, no one had seen evidence of it at the time, and
obviously there was no way to look now. Likewise, even if he had drugged the two women to keep them quiet, it was kind of late to do an autopsy on either of them. “Did the insurer pay out?” she asked finally.

“Yeah, after the fire marshal cleared things. Funny thing is, Eastman was so deep in debt that just paying off the bills ate up most of the money. The kids kind of scraped by on a separate policy that the grandmother left to them, rather than to Ken or Sharon. Of course, the investors, like me, never saw a penny, because Ken had long since cleared out those accounts, and besides, he hadn't left any official records for his fund, or if he did, they went up in flames. It was one big Ponzi scheme, you know? The new money coming in went right back out to pay those great dividends to new investors, and once he had us hooked, he didn't even pay those, except on paper. You'd think we would have known better, but Bernie Madoff got away with it a long time after that. People who are making good money from a fund don't look too hard at it. We were greedy. And most of us never talked about it with one another—we didn't even know who else was taken in. Anyway, it made us look stupid, and there was nothing to be done about it once Ken was dead. Why do you two care? What's it to you?”

Meg and Lydia exchanged a glance. “Jacob, to be honest, Aaron still doesn't remember what happened,” Meg said. “He's not looking to blame anyone, and he's done his time. He just wants to know whether he really did what everyone keeps telling him he did.”

“Good luck with that!” Jacob said bitterly. “Why can't you just accept the simplest solution? The kid was high on something, and he set a fire, either deliberately or accidentally, and he got out and saved his own skin, without even considering the rest of his family. That's cold. He should pay for that, and he did. And there's no way to prove anything different
happened. Sure, his dad was a con artist and cheated a bunch of people out of some money, but that doesn't mean he deserved to die. And his mom and grandmother?”

“But that's the point, Jacob. Aaron can't believe he could have done something like that, or let it happen, and frankly, after spending time with him, I can't, either.”

“Prison changes people,” Jacob countered.

“Yes, but not usually for the better. He doesn't claim to have found God, but he's clean and sober, and he still doesn't remember. He's just looking for answers.”
And if he doesn't find any, what will he do?
Meg wondered, not for the first time.

Jacob stood up. “Ladies, I've said all I have to say. I think you're on a wild-goose chase, but I guess your hearts are in the right place. Now, if you're not looking for insurance, I have work to do.”

Lydia and Meg stood up as well. “Thank you for speaking frankly, Jacob,” Lydia said. “We'll be on our way now.”

Once outside, they went back to the car and sat inside it, but Lydia didn't start the engine. “What have we learned?” she asked Meg.

“We figured out that Ken Eastman was fleecing his neighbors, which might be a motive for someone to kill him. We now know that he took out a whole lot of insurance not long before the fire—that can't have been cheap, and he was already living on the edge. He may or may not have had a hand in starting the fire, but it's unlikely that he planned to die in it. And we have no proof of anything at all. I hate to tell Aaron that we've failed, but I can't think of anything else to ask.”