The Lost Enchantress (37 page)

“You saw it afterwards? You saw the extent of the damage for yourself?”

“Well, no,” she admitted, her expression clouding. “Not exactly. I couldn’t bear to come back here. I never even drove down the street again until the other night when I came here looking for Rory.”

“So you saw only photos and news footage?”

“Not exactly,” she said again, doubts appearing like uneasy shadows. “My grandparents—not Grand, my other grandparents, my father’s family—made sure all that was kept away from us. They thought it would make it harder for us to get over it and . . . and to be honest, I didn’t want to see it. I already had as much guilt as I could handle.” She picked up the letter opener, wiped it on her jeans and put it back where it belonged. “I did read a couple of the stories that were in the paper later; I found the newspaper in the school library. They were short on facts and long on aspersions about Grand, and by that time they’d stopped running photos. And then there were the rumors; not even a couple of world-class control artists like my grandparents could stop me from hearing the rumors.”

“So how did you find out how much damage there was to the house?”

“My grandparents,” she replied. “They described it to us the next day . . . Chloe kept crying and wanting to know when we could go home, and they made it clear we wouldn’t be going back . . . that there wasn’t enough left to go back to. And weeks later, when they got the report from the fire investigator’s office, they told us what was in it.”

“So in other words, everything you know about the fire came from your grandparents.” His mouth slanted in a cynical smile. “The world-class control artists.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked, her mind already scurrying down dark, twisted paths that might lead to the answer.

“Nothing. Yet.” He paused, thinking, his expression troubled. “I had a hunch, so I checked it out. I didn’t plan on telling you about it until I knew more. And until Pavane was out of the way. I didn’t want anything to distract you.” He slanted a look at Chloe’s handiwork. “Obviously that plan is no longer viable.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do I,” he admitted freely. “This raises questions and I don’t have the answers. But I know someone who does. I think you should meet him.”

 

 

James Porter’s condo was on the uppermost floor of a brick high-rise in what was once the city’s thriving manufacturing district. Like many of his neighbors, Jim had made the move from the suburbs after his kids left home, happily swapping a half acre of lawn for a short walk to the newsstand, and his ride-on mower for container gardening on the balcony.

Sitting in his comfortable living room, no one would guess it was once part of a watch factory. A big-screen TV anchored one end of the long room, and a classic upright piano the other. On top of the piano was an array of family photos. In one, three generations of Porter men stood shoulder to shoulder in the dress blues of the Providence Fire Department. A double frame held two pictures of Jim and his wife, one a wedding portrait, the other taken of the two of them on their fortieth anniversary.

“Annie’s off visiting her sister in Florida,” he explained as he showed them to the living room, picking up a stray newspaper and golf club along the way and shoving them out of sight.

A tall man, with a full head of white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, he was a spry sixty-something. It was easy to picture him swinging a nine iron.

“Can I offer you something to drink,” he asked before sitting. “A cup of coffee? Or a beer?”

“Thank you, no,” replied Hazard.

Eve shook her head. “Not for me, thanks.”

He took the chair across from the sofa where she and Hazard were sitting and sat leaning forward, rubbing his hands together. “To tell you the truth, I’m just as well pleased she’s not around for this. Not that we have secrets between us,” he hastened to add. “You don’t stay hitched for forty-four years by hiding things from each other. But she didn’t like the way I handled things back then, and she’ll like it less when she hears what your friend Hazard here told me.”

“I don’t want to cause problems for you,” Eve said.

“You’re not,” Porter assured her with an easy smile. “I’ll have to eat crow, but I’m used to that. I want to get this straightened out for you. I’m glad Hazard called me.”

Eve forced a polite smile, anxious to hurry him along and find out the reason for that call. Aside from revealing that he’d met Porter’s son, Jack, at the hospital that afternoon and that Jack had put him in touch with his father, Hazard had been closemouthed about the whole thing on the ride there. “I appreciate you letting us come to see you on such short notice, Captain Porter.”

“Happy to oblige. And call me Jim. We’re not crossing swords in front of the television cameras now.” He glanced at Hazard. “I recall a press conference or two down at headquarters when this lady’s questions had me dancing on coals. She’s a tough cookie when she has that mic in her hand.”

“You might have danced a little,” she countered, her smile genuine this time, “but you never backed away from telling the truth.”

“That was my way.” He looked her straight in the eye. “It still is.”

“Good. Only this time you have me at a disadvantage; I have no idea what questions to ask.” Restless, she slid forward on the sofa cushion. “Did Hazard tell you what I found upstairs in my grandmother’s house . . . his house now?”

“No. All I know is that something happened in the couple of hours between the first time he called me and the second that was urgent enough to make you want to get together with me right away. Why don’t you fill me in on the rest?”

Eve briefly explained finding Chloe’s handiwork in the turret and how it suggested that at least some of the framework up there predated the fire.

“But that’s not possible,” she concluded vehemently, and then, in a beseeching tone, “Is it?”

“It’s not only possible,” he replied, “it’s likely.”

“But. . . . how?”

“Now mind you, I wasn’t there while the renovations were going on, so I have no way of knowing how much of that framework survived or exactly which beams had to be replaced. But I put in two solid days at the burn site, that is, your grandmother’s house, and I can tell you that the door frame you’re talking about was still standing after the fire.”

“Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent. I remember being up there and seeing those words your sister wrote.” He pressed his lips together and shifted his gaze away from hers for a few seconds. “There are things you see afterwards, once the fire’s out and the trucks are gone, usually just some little thing, that brings you up short and stays with you. So, yeah, I’m real sure.”

Frowning, Eve struggled to make sense of what he had said. She tried not to sound as skeptical as she felt, but it wasn’t easy. “So you’re telling me the fire started in the turret, passed harmlessly through that doorway and then destroyed the second floor and a good chunk of the first?”

“No.” He picked up a manila envelope from the table beside him. “I’m telling you the fire didn’t start in the turret. It started in your parents’ bedroom.”

“A
re you sure you want to hear this?” Jim Porter asked. Eve didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I want to know the truth.”

“All right.” He pulled some forms from the envelope. “This isn’t the official report on the fire; that would be the one on record with the fire marshal’s office. But this one is the truth.”

“And the other isn’t?” she asked.

“Let’s just say it’s not the whole truth.” He handed the report to her and continued to speak in a steady tone as Eve scanned the document. “What you want is on the last page, last paragraph.”

She found the passage he referred to and started reading; some words and phrases seemed to jump out at her almost before she got to them.

Even with her entire attention focused on the report, Eve couldn’t make all of the words connect to her brain. It didn’t matter; the words that did blast their way through got the message across.

Her lungs began to ache and she realized it was because she’d stopped breathing; she was just sitting there, struggling with the realization that information on which she’d built a good part of her life might be wrong.

Might
be wrong?

The man who literally wrote the book on the fire was telling her that what she’d been told was not merely wrong, it was an out-and-out lie.

Eve knew the earth couldn’t be see-sawing under her, but that’s how it felt.

“What it says here . . . about a lit cigarette . . .” Both men turned to her abruptly, and she realized the conversation had gone on without her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted. I’m just so . . .”

“Surprised?” suggested Porter.

“More like stunned. And confused.”

“That seems about right, considering,” he said. “I expect you have a lot of questions for me.”

“Just one for starters: is it true? Was the fire started by my father smoking in bed?”

“I can’t say for certain your father was the one who was smoking . . .”

“My mother didn’t smoke,” she blurted. “And she was always getting after my dad for smoking in bed. She complained that it made the room smell and stained the wallpaper and . . .” She swallowed and now the back of her throat hurt too. “And that it was dangerous. Sometimes he listened and sometimes he didn’t.” She dropped her gaze and stared at the empty envelope on the coffee table in front of her, making her way through a jumble of broken memories and half-formed questions. “If a cigarette started the fire, my dad was the one who lit it.”

“I’m sorry, Eve,” he said. “I know this is painful to hear.”

“It’s all painful,” she retorted, looking up at him. “It’s been painful for the past twenty years. Why on earth did you lie? Did you think it would hurt less if we thought it was a candle and not a cigarette that killed my parents and burned our house down?”

“Yes. That’s precisely what I thought. I know differently now. Hazard explained to me that you blamed yourself because you had lit candles in the turret earlier in the night. If I’d had even the slightest idea that—”

“What? If you had any idea that you’d be pointing the finger at me instead of my grandmother, you wouldn’t have lied? Did you think it was better to let her take the blame and shoulder the guilt?” she demanded, unable to keep the heat from her voice.

He shook his head. “Better? No, there was no better, only bad and worse. I thought I was picking the lesser of two evils.” He rubbed his hands together again, obviously feeling stressed, but he looked her straight in the eye as he spoke. “You and your sister were just kids, and you’d already lost so much: both your parents, your home, everything familiar. The signs pointed to your father being the one responsible, and I knew how little girls look up to their fathers and how important that is when they’re growing up. I didn’t want to see you girls lose that too. I couldn’t bring your father back, but I could let you hold on to your memories of him as a good guy. Let him go on being a hero in your eyes. I didn’t see why one mistake had to cause even more pain to people who’d had enough.”

Eve listened with a growing heaviness in her chest. She ached, but she couldn’t quite put a name to the pain she was feeling. Part of her brain told her she ought to feel relieved, but should relief feel as jagged and raw as what was churning inside her? She didn’t think so.

Porter continued. “That’s why when John Lockhart came to see me to find out how the investigation was going, I agreed to omit any mention of smoking in my final report. Earlier reports from the crew on the scene that night had listed candles as the possible cause, so I just left it at that.”

It didn’t surprise Eve to learn that her grandfather had tried to control the contents of the report; he tried to control everything that involved a member of the Lockhart family, and he usually succeeded. “So this was my grandfather’s idea?”

He shrugged. “Not in so many words. And I didn’t do it for the sake of his son’s reputation or the Lockhart name, though I knew both those things were on his mind. I did it for one reason only, the one I told you, to spare you and your sister.”

“He told me that he and your grandmother were worried sick over the custody hearing that was coming up,” Ported told her. “That surprised me. It seemed to be a no-brainer that the judge would send you to live with them. They had everything and the sun to offer you girls, and your other grandmother was . . . well, there were all those rumors.”

“Right. The rumors.” Loyalty to Grand made her spine prickle. “The rumors that made it easy to toss blame her way and know it would stick. Just a little tip of the scales in my grandparents’ favor, in case the judge didn’t think it was such a no-brainer after all.”

“I’m sorry about that too,” he said. “I’m talking about my part in the shabby treatment your grandmother got. My report could have set the record straight and it didn’t. You have to believe me when I say I never meant her any harm.”

She did believe him. He looked almost as distraught as she felt, and that made it impossible for her to hate him or even work up a decent anger.

“Heck,” said Porter, “I thought she had a lot of guts for doing what she did to get you and your sister out of there. And she was plucky enough not to let the talk get to her; she just kept her chin high and acted as if she didn’t even hear it.”

“Oh, she’s plenty plucky,” Eve murmured. “Among other things.”

“She told her story about what happened and stuck to it. Lots of folks get flustered or don’t remember things, but not her.”

“You met Grand?”

“Just the once. She came back to the house the next day. Said she wanted to see things for herself. It was cold, so we sat in my car so I could run the heater while I took her statement.” He gave a pensive half smile. “I remember I had to stop her from climbing a ladder to get inside the house . . . and it wasn’t easy.”