Consumed

“You got in to see him? How’d you manage that? From what I’ve heard, the man’s office is like a fortress.”

Her voice got dry. “Funny how if you mention you’re an arson investigator, doors open.”

“I gotta remember this.”

He braked at a red light and watched two young women pass in front of his SUV. They both looked at him, did a double take, stared like they were sizing him up for a fuck. Ah, yes, the younger generation with their high standards and fine-tuned morals at work. And if he had any sex drive at all, maybe he’d reroute from this stupid meeting and go pick the two of them up in a bar.

Instead, he might as well have been looking at a pair of bicycles.

There was something very, very wrong with him.

“Hello?” his sister said.

“Sorry.” He hit the gas as the light changed. “What were you saying?”

“I never got to sweep the house. As soon as the fire was out on the first and second floors, we got called onto another alarm. The six-one-seven closed the scene and you were the Incident Commander.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Did you guys find anything that wasn’t in the official arson report?”

“Are you accusing me of withholding evidence?”

“No. I’m asking because the agent died before he finished his job on the scene, and I’m worried that information was lost.”

“Oh . . . shit, that’s right. I remember something about the guy dying. Lemme think, I mean, you saw it all yourself: old house, daughter was a mess, Charles Ripkin shows up the next day and does a presser on how he owes the department an unbelievable debt. A month later, he sends a crew to break ground on the new facility. Daughter, Kristina, survived, but was scarred.”

“Constance was her name.” There was a pause. “It just doesn’t add up. Why’d she make her way to the attic? While she was one fire?”

“She panicked. Instead of dropping and rolling, she ran and ended up in the elevator. She told us later she thought that was where a fire extinguisher was. She flailed around, pushed a bunch of buttons, fell out upstairs. She was found right outside the open doors of the thing.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It’s what she told police happened. Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know. I want to find out, though.”

“Anne, you’re not a homicide detective, and the case is closed. Oh, and there was a fire extinguisher in the elevator, mounted under the button panel.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“So why didn’t she use it on herself?”

“I guess she collapsed. I don’t know.” There was a silence. “Hey, before you go. What’s up with you and Mom? You can’t wait to get rid of her most times and won’t even talk to her on the phone—and now she’s staying with you?.”

Up ahead, the Canterbury Inn’s lit-up exterior looked like an ad for autumn in New England, the maples on either side just beginning to turn red, the colonial’s yellow clapboards, white trim, and black shutters as traditional as they were attractive.

“She’s fine,” Anne muttered. “And I want her to stay.”

As Tom pulled into the lane that went back to the parking area, he was aware of a loosening in him, his breath entering his chest and exhaling suddenly not that great an effort. How long had he been suffocating? he wondered.

Okay, that was a question he’d do well not to dwell on.

“Thank you,” he heard himself say. “Thank you for . . . being with her. She loves you a lot and has never understood why you hate her so much.”

* * *

Anne was pulling into her driveway as she ended the call with her brother, and as she tossed her cell into her bag, she glanced back at Soot.

“You ready for dinner?”

The dog wagged his tail and chuffed, which was something he was starting to do. After a couple of days of food and antibiotics, his personality was beginning to emerge. Turned out he was a talker, ready to respond with a vocalization whenever he was addressed. He’d also started dreaming, his paws twitching and muzzle working when he was in a deep sleep.

He was also sleeping with her now, apparently. After she’d found him in her bed the night before, she’d tried to crate him when she and her mom had turned in. He’d stared at her with such tragedy in his eyes that she’d brought him upstairs . . . and woken up with him curled in against her in the morning.

It had been the first good night’s sleep she’d gotten since before she’d lost her hand.

Too bad she was not going to enjoy one again anytime soon.

Hooking Soot to his leash, she went up to her front door and—

Her mother opened things up before she could unlock them, and the woman was ever perfect, ever smiling. The scent of meatloaf, home-cooked and prepared with a mother’s love, made Anne want to think up something she absolutely had to do—on the other side of town.

“You’re home!”

Charles Ripkin’s shark eyes came to mind. “Yes. Hi. Um, hello.”

As she stepped in, she stopped and looked around. “What the hell have you done?”

Her mother closed the door. “Well, I thought things would work better this way. The flow was blocked by your sofa, that chair was going to fade in the sun, and I bought you that new coffee table.”

“Where is my old one?”

“I put it down in the cellar. It wasn’t right.”

Anne shut her lids and started to count to ten. When that got her nowhere, she decided to shoot for a thousand. “Mother. You can’t just take over here. This is my house, my things, and I don’t care about ‘flow.’ Okay? Cut it out.”

“But it’s better this way.”

The words came out before Anne could catch them. “Your better and my better are not the same. Just like you and I have absolutely nothing in common and never will.”

Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. “I am sorry. I just . . . I thought you would like it.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that I put the furniture where it was because I wanted it there? And stop trying to please me. You’re only making me mad.”

“You’re so like your father.”

“I am not like him at all. But whatever, that’s a compliment compared to being like you.”

“Anne!”

She let Soot off the lead and put her purse down. “You are the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever been near, but you crumble when it counts. You always have.”

Cue the tears. “I’ve only ever tried to love you. I know that you don’t . . . respect me because you think I’m just a housewife. But I’m proud of you, I always have been, and I’ve been worried about you.” That high-pitched voice with the Watertown accent, cracked. “When you were in the hospital, recovering, I just wanted to—”

“Rearranging my furniture is not the way to work out your issues about my injury.” She made herself dial back on her anger. “My hand is not your problem.”

“But I would like it to be. I want to be your mother, Anne. Even though you’ve only ever seen me as your father’s wife.”

Anne laughed harshly. “I don’t see you as that, either.”

“How can you say such cruel things?”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she looked around her little house and realized this confrontation, which had been coming for years, was the reason she hadn’t been around her mother. There were things you couldn’t take back, words that were daggers, glares that left marks.

But she didn’t want her mother to leave. As much as she would have preferred to have the woman anywhere else, she didn’t want to tell her brother Ripkin had threatened their mother because the last thing she needed was him taking over everything. And if she and her mother had it out? Nancy Janice would leave and either go back to that house, which had a goddamn tree in it, or she would go to a hotel, and there was no telling whether Ripkin could find her if he wanted.

Chances were good that was a yes.

Lowering her head, Anne decided she needed food and Motrin. “I apologize. I’m sorry.”