How to Start a Fire (30 page)

It had been four days since Roger Hicks had walked into the High Street home and attacked George in her sleep. It had been four days since Kate had hit him over the head with an empty vodka bottle and put him in a coma.

Kate opened the door and hovered in the foyer, inadvertently blocking the detective’s entrance. It was past noon, but the detective noticed that she was wearing pajamas. The top was the same one she’d been wearing when he’d interviewed her. Sheep jumping over stiles. It looked like she hadn’t changed out of those pajamas since he’d seen her last.

“What happened?” Kate asked.

“Can I come in?” Russell asked. He didn’t wait for an invitation but slipped past Kate and found his way to the kitchen. He had been there before. He pulled a chair from the table and took a seat.

“Sit down, Kate.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Please, sit down,” the detective gently said.

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was going to offer you coffee or some other beverage, but if you’re going to arrest me, that would be weird.”

“A cup of coffee would be nice.”

“So you’re not going to arrest me?”

“Should I arrest you, Kate? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Like what?”

“Did you know the intruder?”

“I told you, Detective. I didn’t know him.”

“Have a seat.”

“But I thought you wanted coffee.”

“Right. Coffee. Then sit,” Russell said. He had interrogated and interviewed all kinds in the ten years he’d been on the force, but something about Kate Smirnoff completely derailed his process.

Kate poured the detective a cup of three-hour-old coffee and nuked it in the microwave. “It’s not going to taste good. Do you want milk and sugar?”

“Sure,” the detective said. “Where are your roommates?”

“George’s parents wanted her to come home.”

“Is she okay?”

“I think so. The whole thing happened so fast.”

“And Anna. Where is Anna?”

“I don’t know. She left early this morning. Maybe studying.”

“Do you have family nearby?” Detective Russell asked.

“No. Why?”

“Maybe you should go home too for a while.”

“This is my home,” Kate said. She set the mug of coffee on the table with a carton of milk, a box of sugar, and a spoon. Then she pulled out a chair and sat. Russell poured milk into the stale coffee and then added two teaspoons of sugar.

“Do you have family?”

“When did he die?” Kate asked.

“Last night. This morning. Around 2:00 a.m. The swelling in his brain didn’t go down.”

“So I killed him,” Kate said. She wasn’t looking for confirmation; she was merely stating a fact, a fact that she was going to have to get used to. She felt a deep wave of nausea followed by a hot and prickly sensation in her neck.

“I killed someone,” Kate said. Her eyes started to water, but she kept them open until they dried out. No tears fell.

“It was justified,” Detective Russell said.

“I shouldn’t have hit him the second time.”

“You were scared.”

“Does he have a family?”

“An ex-wife. A daughter. A sister. We’ve notified them. His parents are deceased.”

“Is there something I’m supposed to do?”

“No. We’ll keep your name out of the papers. Try not to think about it.”

“That never works. In fact, you just made it more impossible by saying that.”

“Memories fade.”

“I know. But they just fade. They never go away.”

Anna, too, tried not to think about it. She went to the library, to the park, to the movies, even to an arcade, where she played several rounds of Skee Ball with a pair of preteen boys, trying not to think about it. But all she did was think about the night she couldn’t remember. An insidious guilt took hold inside her stomach and wouldn’t let up. The refrain she silently spoke—
I don’t know anything; I was asleep
—became more and more of a lie every time she repeated it. She hadn’t slept in the four days since she’d slept through the night in question. While Detective Russell was at her home telling Kate that she had just become an unwitting killer, Anna went to the police station and found his partner, Detective Rose Williams.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Detective,” Anna said as Rose led her down a corridor with winking fluorescent lights.

“It’s no bother. I’m glad you came by. Did you see Detective Russell?”

“No. Why would I see him?”

“I think he was dropping by your house this morning.”

“I left early this morning.”

Rose knew that Anna’s next question would be
Why was Detective Russell visiting my house?
Rather than play her hand, she waited to see Anna’s first.

“What brings you to the neighborhood?” Rose said, sliding out a steel-framed chair for Anna and taking a seat in a plush leather chair she’d brought from home. She actually had to chain it to her desk, it was so coveted among the relics in a twenty-year-old squad room.

“I was asleep when it happened,” Anna said as she sat down.

“I know. That’s what you told me when I questioned you. You were still a little sleepy at the time.”

“I had been drinking.”

“I could smell it on you.”

“Sorry. I had had a test that day. I had been studying around the clock leading up to it. I’m premed. But, um, I’m not as good at it as most of my classmates. Anyway, I was drunk and so I didn’t hear George scream.”

“Your friend is okay, that’s all that matters.”

“Right.”

“Is there something else? Something you want to tell me?”

“I saw him, the intruder, when he was being taken out on the gurney.”

“You told my partner at the time you’d never seen him before. Have you changed your mind?”

“No. I don’t know. I was tired. Can I see him? Do you have a picture of him?”

Rose sifted through files on her desk. She had a hospital photo, but it wasn’t the best likeness. Fortunately, Hicks had a record. She found a two-year-old mug shot in her case file. She slid it across her desk.

Rose’s telephone rang as Anna picked up the photo. The detective missed the two-second flash of recognition that crossed Anna’s face. There were four hours that Anna couldn’t recall. But what she did know was that Roger Hicks sure looked familiar. Maybe she’d seen him in the bar that night. Maybe she’d talked to him; maybe she’d invited him home. She couldn’t remember any of that, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Anna placed the photo back on the desk as Detective Williams ended her call.

“Do you know him?” Rose asked.

“He might look familiar. Maybe I’ve seen him around, but I can’t say for sure. How is he doing?” Anna asked.

“He died early this morning.”

After a long and nail-biting application process, Anna was finally accepted at a medical school in St. Louis. George was leaving in a few months for a forestry post in the Russian River Valley. Kate had no plans. If pressed to come up with one, she said that her plan was to stay put. Kate had a stubborn streak, no doubt, but if Anna set her mind against someone else’s mind, Anna won. And Anna, after learning that she had had a hand in turning Kate into a killer, wasn’t going to leave her alone in a giant house in Santa Cruz in front of a television set.

On the drive home from the police station, Anna solidified her plan.

Kate was on the couch watching television, as predicted. George once commented that TV was Kate’s cocktail. And Anna told George that men were George’s cocktail. Anna had held her vodka on the rocks aloft and said proudly, “And my cocktail is a fucking cocktail.”

Anna entered Kate’s basement abode carrying several moving boxes and silently began packing Kate’s belongings. It wasn’t until the commercial break that Kate even noticed Anna’s presence and activity.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m packing,” Anna said.

“But those are my things.”

“I know. You’re coming with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Kate said. “I’m staying. Not only in this house, but on this couch.”

In fact, it was Kate’s inertia that made what seemed an insurmountable task—making a grown woman move from Santa Cruz, California, to St. Louis, Missouri, against her will—possible. While Kate munched on dry cereal and watched one program after the next, Anna took her study pills and continued packing. She packed for almost three days straight with just a few hours of rest when her body physically couldn’t lug another box.

She phoned a moving company and made all the arrangements. She packed all of Kate’s personal effects that were not in her direct line of vision, and she’d wait for Kate to take a shower or use the restroom or sleep, which Kate still managed to do, and then pack more of Kate’s belongings. Anna even crushed a sleeping pill into Kate’s cocoa the last night. By morning, virtually all of Kate’s worldly possessions were sealed up in boxes beneath a sound barrier of packing tape.

Anna phoned George as soon as her plan had taken shape. George supported the unorthodox scheme since she had decided to move home for the summer. She hadn’t known what to do about Kate, and now that problem was solved. George returned to the High Street house to pack up her own belongings, offer Anna any backup she needed, and say her goodbyes. She arrived the night Anna roofied Kate and helped finish packing Kate’s room.

“Are you sure about this?” George asked, suddenly realizing how extreme a measure they were taking.

“I’m not leaving her alone.”

When Kate awoke, disoriented by her barren room, she wondered if she was dreaming. Just then the moving truck arrived, and Anna began barking orders. When Kate protested, Anna informed Chuck, the senior member of the crew, who seemed in charge, that he should ignore Kate. She was her mentally ill cousin with postconcussion syndrome, which caused her to forget everything that had happened the day before. Anna explained that while she had been telling Kate for months that they were moving to St. Louis, Kate was incapable of remembering it the next morning. George echoed Anna’s directive.

“That’s my box!” Kate would shout. But Anna had had the foresight to label every single box with her own name.

“Poor thing,” Chuck said as he gingerly ducked out of the way when Kate lunged for the box he was holding.

Anna noted that he was remarkably light on his feet for a man his size and reminded herself to tip him extra well, since Kate was likely to become even more erratic as the truck started to leave.

“You won’t get away with this,” Kate said.

As with so many things, Anna did.

Boston, Massachusetts

“Wake up, Anna. Wake up.”

A woman’s voice and a firm hand shook Anna awake. She’d meant to put her head down for just a minute, but she’d been up for twenty-four hours without a moment of rest, and she’d fallen asleep. She couldn’t place where she was at first, didn’t even recognize the woman roughly jarring her out of unconsciousness. But then she sat up and looked at the nurse. Her name was Betty, Anna reminded herself. Betty. Anna said it in her head again. She was having trouble remembering names lately, and she knew better than to refer to any of the nurses as just Nurse.

There was a problem. Anna could see it in Betty’s eyes once she was able to focus on them.

It was a Tuesday night. Not a holiday, no full moon, and yet the emergency room was overflowing with patients. Only a gunshot wound, heart attack, head injury, or compromised breathing would get you within spitting distance of a doctor. One patient with a superficial knife wound had caught a cab and gone to another hospital.

“Did you write this order for Louise Walters?” Betty asked.

Anna didn’t respond. She was trying to remember which patient Louise Walters was. The heart attack? Head injury? Pneumonia?

Anna got to her feet and followed Betty to the patient’s bed. When she saw her, Anna was able to connect the face with the disease, even though the face was partially concealed by an oxygen mask. Louise Walters, fifty-eight, had presented to the emergency room four hours ago with a high fever, vomiting, and severe neck pain. Anna suspected bacterial meningitis and had performed a lumbar puncture to confirm. She wrote out an order for antibiotics and was whisked away for another patient’s emergency. The nurses needed an order for a 5250 shot (5 milligrams of Haldol, 2 milligrams of Ativan, 50 milligrams of Benadryl), a monster sedative cocktail, for a monstrously belligerent homeless man suffering from gangrene.

Betty, a nurse with twenty years on the job, had seen the antibiotic order and intercepted Deana, who had just two years of experience, before she gave it.

“What does this say?” Betty asked.

“‘Twenty grams of ampicillin,’” Anna said, reading her order. “Shit. That’s supposed to be
two
grams of ampicillin.”

“That’s not what the order said,” Deana, who’d almost delivered the toxic dose, told her.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said to Betty. “That was a good catch.”

Anna had only a few hours left on her shift. She went to the hospital’s outpatient pharmacy with a script she’d written for pain meds for Bernard Kent, who had kidney stones: eight 40-milligram OxyContins. Bernard was being discharged, Anna explained to the pharmacist, and she’d volunteered to pick up his prescription for him. On her way back to Kent’s bed, she pocketed four of the pills. She wrote in Kent’s chart that he’d been discharged with a script for four 40-milligram OxyContins. She waited until an hour before her shift was over before she took the first pill.

“I have to work late tonight,” Anna said.

“But you’ve already been there over twenty-four hours,” Nick said. “I even made you dinner.”

“I’m sorry. I got behind on some paperwork.”

“It can’t wait?”

“No. I won’t be too late,” Anna said.

She hung up before any more questions could be asked.

Anna had never believed that whispers could be about anyone other than her. She was aware that this line of thinking was utterly narcissistic. Still, whispers always shamed her, even in a crowded movie theater.