What We'll Burn Last, page 9
“What are you suggesting?”
“Frank and Richard both admit they saw Ellie that day, and she was flashing that same photo. The one of us. Don’t you think it’s strange that Ellie visited every house but yours?”
So much for our truce. She folded her arms across her chest. “What did your dad say?”
“Ellie knocked on the door around noon, showed him the photo. He confirmed it was taken in the neighborhood, but he wouldn’t tell her more.”
“Why not?”
“He didn’t know who she was, and you remember that podcaster who showed up here for the ten-year anniversary.” She didn’t. She’d moved out long before then. Dominic seemed to realize that too, because his jaw tensed again. “Anyway, everyone imagines themselves an investigator these days.”
“You mean like what we’re doing?”
“That’s different.”
Is it? “So what happened next?”
“He made Thea a sandwich.”
“That’s it?”
“Whole conversation took about twenty seconds, he says.”
“What about Frank?”
His eyebrows knit, as if her question surprised him. “He won’t talk to me.”
“That’s strange.”
“Not really. Serena’s close with your mom, and you know how this neighborhood is. Your mom got custody of the Silvestris.” He rubbed his forehead until it reddened. “The Silvestris talked to the sheriff’s office, at least.”
Leyna felt herself slipping into a familiar darkness. In her mind, she saw Ellie walking away from the restaurant, and Grace walking away from the house. The two images blurred together until they became a single movie chronicling her failure. She imagined them both turning and staring at her in reproach for not doing more.
She pulled her gaze away, focused again on the water stain on the floor. A gold ring on fake oak.
The stain flashed.
Not a stain.
Metal.
Leyna jumped up from the bed as if scalded, heart in her throat. She rushed to the dresser, dropped to her knees, and reached for it even though she didn’t need to hold it to know what it was. She’d recognized it the instant it glinted in that shaft of sunlight.
An open gold cuff with a glass-petaled rose capping each end.
CHAPTER 12
MEREDITH
Saturday, 10:05 a.m.
Meredith made a very good income replicating artwork.
She’d copied the works of many of the early-twentieth-century masters, but her specialty was the Cubist paintings of Picasso. There was something that appealed to her about how Picasso deconstructed an object and reassembled those fragments into something less literal.
She found it especially exhilarating to break apart people. A copy of Picasso’s Seated Nude, a figure in nearly monochromatic shapes, almost indistinguishable from the background, hung above Meredith’s bed. It was the only one of her replicated paintings she’d ever kept for herself.
In her line of work, the trick was sticking to the rules:
Always use the right materials.
Always pick a painting held in a private collection—although that was important only to her shadier clients, of course, the ones who wanted to pass off her work as the real thing. For them, it made no sense to re-create Picasso’s Accordionist when a simple online search turned up the original hanging in the Guggenheim.
And always take care with the canvas. Oil paintings could take months to dry, and weeks of work could be destroyed in minutes through careless transport or storage.
Meredith was meticulous, but perfection was impossible. She would never know, for instance, the precise ratio of medium to pigment the artists used or the type of animal hair their brushes were made of.
There were techniques for aging a canvas; the process she used involved bleach, thinner, and brown paint, though she’d also experimented with soaked cigarette butts and tea bags. If the commission was generous enough, she could sometimes find a painting from the same period, strip the canvas, and reproduce a masterpiece in its place. Picasso was a favorite not only of hers but of her buyers—he was prolific and often left his works unsigned. One of her works had convinced an authenticator that a lost Picasso had been found. She’d been proud of that one, even if the client had skirted the law.
What Meredith created was an illusion of sameness, getting as close to the original as the resources and her talent allowed. Fortunately for her bank account, she was damn good at creating that illusion.
If the price was right, Meredith would paint anything. If someone wanted to pay her fifty thousand dollars to paint Dogs Playing Poker, she would take the deposit and get straight to work. After all, she wasn’t the one taking the risk; she wasn’t the one at the mercy of ever-evolving technology that made forgeries easier to detect. She sold her paintings as replicas—she signed the back of most pieces and had contracts acknowledging that fact, though some asked her to forgo this step. Some clients owned the original paintings that she reproduced but hung her replicas and stored the authentic works in free ports to avoid taxation and customs rules or to keep them safe. Some wanted to impress their friends with artwork they couldn’t otherwise afford. And some—well, legally, she wasn’t responsible for what her buyers did with her work, even if she knew just how important it was to them that she get every brushstroke exactly right.
But the painting she’d hidden from Leyna earlier wasn’t for a client. Meredith knew her daughter believed she’d been working on a commission. She could’ve corrected the misunderstanding, shown her the canvas, but she didn’t feel the need to explain herself—she took great pride in her reputation in the field. And Meredith didn’t want to deal with the inevitable questions.
Sometimes she just needed to imagine what Grace might look like.
Over the years, Meredith had painted many such portraits, always in the summer. Grace would’ve turned thirty-three in a couple of weeks.
Will turn, she corrected herself. The morning Olivia came to the Clarke home demanding to see Adam, Meredith had told her he’d run off with Grace. Meredith liked to believe what she’d said that day was true.
Grace’s gone, Meredith had said. Adam too. You know how impulsive young couples in love can be.
Meredith liked to pretend it had really ended that way: Her daughter and Olivia’s son out there somewhere, together. Happy. Sometimes she considered putting Adam in one of her paintings of Grace, just to see what that might look like. Once, she’d gotten as far as the shadow of his jaw before she’d decided the canvas was ruined and slashed it with a palette knife.
For her Grace series, Meredith always chose a linen canvas. Expensive, but the finer weave produced smoother skin, and Grace’s skin had been flawless. Was it still? Or had time and experience marred it? She couldn’t imagine that Grace had been leading an easy life.
While waiting for Leyna to return, Meredith tried to find her way back into the painting, but thoughts of the missing Sacramento girl intruded. Ellie Byrd. Her case so much like Grace’s.
Meredith picked up a brush, dipped it into a small pot of paint thinner, then dabbed the tip on a towel. She studied the painting, hoping inspiration might strike again. When using oil paint, she built dark to light, fat over lean, with the initial layers containing less oil, the final strokes thick with unadulterated paint. This year, inspiration was slower to come. Usually, she’d be working on the eyes by now—a delicate blending of phthalo blue and titanium white that had taken years to get right—but Meredith was still laying down the first thinner, darker layers. Even then, she was pretty sure the painting was crap.
Lately, it had grown more difficult to paint. Whenever she picked up a brush, her fingers would inevitably tense into rigid claws, her stroke lacking its usual ease. She’d ruined more canvases since April than in the five years before.
Now, with Grace’s birthday looming and everyone obsessed with Ellie Byrd’s disappearance, she was even more stuck. She was behind schedule on her latest commission, which was likely the reason her broker had already phoned twice that morning.
Movement outside drew her attention. Richard made his way down his driveway. Her spine stiffened.
That dumbass.
Richard held a tool—thin pole, orange handle, black blade. A trimmer. He was headed toward his yard with a damn trimmer.
While the sun baked and the wind howled.
Meredith tore off her painting smock and headed outside to suggest to Richard a better use for his power tool.
THE FIRE
The parched forest northeast of Ridgepoint Ranch faces many threats.
If power equipment fails or a tree falls on it, an arcing conductor might ignite nearby vegetation.
Then there’s the human threat. Someone burns trash in the backyard. Tosses a cigarette in the grass. Leaves a campfire unattended. Soaks a hillside with gasoline and lights a match.
But on that morning in late July, it is the giant pine that has been smoldering overnight that sets McRae Meadow ablaze.
As the morning dew evaporates, what will soon become known as the McRae Fire starts to spread. Smoke unfurls where flames feed on dry brush and oxygen. White wisps uncurl where water steams and evaporates from the trees. Black plumes rise where soot collects.
The wind carries the smoke as a warning, but at first no one is close enough to heed it.
Soon, the fire will flow along bulldozed trails and the folds of the mountainside, pulled toward the former gold-mining town of Johnsville as if following a channel.
A mile away, a man decides to water the patch of grass in front of his cabin. It’s a point of pride, that small lawn. When his grandkids visit, that’s where they play. They’ll be visiting in four days, and he wants them to have a nice place to build their Lego forts.
Five minutes into the man’s task, an ember from the McRae Fire lofted by a convection column alights on a leaf near the man’s home.
At nearly the same moment, the man catches his first whiff of distant smoke. There’s only one main road out of Johnsville, and the man decides it might be time to go. He heads inside to grab his go bag.
To grow, a fire needs three things: oxygen, fuel, and heat.
On his way inside, the man walks past the glowing leaf. An inch to the left and he might’ve smothered it with his sneaker. But he passes it, oblivious, and the wind blows. There is plenty of oxygen to feed the flames.
Still, the spark is vulnerable and nearly extinguished a second time. It needs fuel, and the grass is now lightly watered. Unfortunately, dried oak leaves have scattered nearby. A gust carries the ember, and more leaves blaze.
Two leaves.
Ten.
Fifty.
Then a patch of dry wild grass explodes.
If the man notices it at this moment, there is still time for him to soak the small fire with his garden hose, abandoned only a few feet away. The fire will cool below its ignition temperature and be denied its third need—heat.
But the man does not see it. He packs his medication as the bonds holding hydrocarbons together break; the newly produced carbon lends a yellow glow to the increasingly insistent flames.
As he looks out his window, the man finally notices the flames of the spot fire.
Too late.
Without cell service and no landline, he’s unable to warn his neighbors. Panicked, he can’t find the keys to his truck. He leaves on foot.
The father of two and grandfather of three is the first to die in the McRae Fire. He won’t be the last.
CHAPTER 13
LEYNA
Saturday, 10:18 a.m.
Leyna rose to her feet and held out the bracelet in her palm. It was a distinctive piece, and she harbored no doubt.
“This is Ellie’s,” she said, breathless. “She was wearing it the day we met.” She tilted her hand so the metal again caught the light.
Dominic plucked the cuff from her palm and held it as if the glass petals were precious gems, as if the cuff weren’t some trinket you could order online for twenty bucks. He touched one of the roses with his fingertip.
“You’re sure it’s hers?” At her nod, he brought the bracelet closer, examined it with the careful attention of a jewelry appraiser. The grim set of his mouth suggested what he searched for—blood or other signs of a struggle.
After he’d gone over it several times, his face relaxed. “How did it get here?” He tested the hinge. “Seems solid.”
Leyna remembered how it had come off in her hand when she grabbed Ellie’s arm at the restaurant. She suddenly worried they shouldn’t have touched it. What if they’d smudged fingerprints or compromised evidence less obvious than blood?
As if reaching the same conclusion, Dominic placed the bracelet carefully in his pocket. It might pick up fibers there, but at least any remaining fingerprints wouldn’t be destroyed by the oils on his hands.
“I’ll call the police and let them know.” His voice rose, obviously excited, and Leyna grew concerned that the bracelet wouldn’t give them the answers they so desperately sought. Leyna was accustomed to living with her own disappointment, but the thought that she might give Dominic false hope turned her stomach.
Still, she nodded. “Good idea. Call the police.”
Leyna knew how that call would go. They would ask their questions and thank him for calling, but without blood or some other sign the bracelet had been forcibly removed, what did it prove? Only that Ellie had been in the neighborhood at some point. The authorities already knew that. And that was if they took Leyna’s word that the bracelet was Ellie’s. Leyna was a stranger who’d seen it only once. More decisive proof had already been established in the statements of the Silvestris and Dominic’s dad.
“That other thing I was trying to tell you…” His voice trailed off, and when his eyes met hers, they burned. The same intensity found its way into his voice. “What if your mom wasn’t lying? What if Adam and Grace really did run away—because she was pregnant?”
The hope in his face made her hesitate, but then she gave a slow shake of her head. “She wasn’t.”
But his expression remained fevered. Leyna was familiar with wanting something as badly as Dominic wanted this.
“You were twelve,” he said. “You might not have noticed.”
“You were eighteen. Wouldn’t you have?” She said it as gently as she could. “And if that’s what happened, why would neither of them get in touch with family? Adam knew what this would do to your mom.”
They both knew what it would do to us.
“The math works.”
Except it didn’t.
Part of her wanted to allow him this lie, because it would mean Grace had lived long enough after she’d left to deliver her baby. It would mean she’d made it out of Ridgepoint and that Leyna might finally find out what happened that night. Her heart hurt with wanting that.
The problem was, it couldn’t be true. The Clarke sisters had shared a bathroom. Leyna had seen Grace in her underwear, and those last weeks, she’d lost so much weight that even their mom had grown concerned. She’d pushed enough bananas in Grace’s direction to feed a troop of monkeys.
Then there was the incident a week before she disappeared. Grace had forgotten to lock the bathroom door, and when Leyna burst in, her sister had thrown a package of sanitary napkins at her. Her expression dark, accusing. Always so angry at the end. Shit, Ley, I can’t even use the toilet without you stalking me?
That afternoon, Grace had spent the day on the couch, a heating pad on her stomach, popping ibuprofen every four hours and using her cramps as an excuse to be an asshole to Leyna.
Even had Grace conceived soon after, and even had she delivered weeks early, the baby would’ve been born in late autumn. Nearly a full year younger than Ellie.
The only explanation that had ever made sense was that Adam had killed Grace or that he’d tried to and Grace managed to escape and start a new life. There was never going to be a happily ever after for Grace and Adam.
Dominic’s voice dropped to a whisper, still not willing to let it go: “What if Ellie was looking for Adam because he’s her father?”
“Grace had her period, Dom. Right before she disappeared,” she said softly, her hand spasming with the urge to grab his. “It doesn’t matter if Ellie’s not ours. She’s someone’s. If we can help find her, we will.”
His shoulders deflated, and Leyna knew she’d convinced him.
That’s me—killer of hope, ruiner of things.
When Leyna’s phone vibrated in her pocket, she was grateful for the excuse to look away. She checked her phone, hoping cell service had been restored, but it was only the reminder she’d set for herself earlier that morning: Press conference.
She turned to Dominic to ask if the Millers had Wi-Fi, then remembered the check-in instructions she’d found in the kitchen.
“Press conference is about to start,” she said. “Want to watch?”
Dominic shook his head. “I’ll watch at home after I call in about the bracelet.” He stood. “Catch up with you later?”
He left then, off to make his report and add to the illusion that they were doing something that might actually help Ellie Byrd.
Leyna grabbed her laptop from her car, started the generator—if the Millers complained later, she could always Venmo them a few bucks—went back into the house, and logged in using the Millers’ Wi-Fi password. On the screen, the room the press conference would be held in was done in shades of gray, gold, and brown, with a podium at the center. Stretched against the pale wall was the usual lineup of uniformed men—except for the public information officer, they were all men—hands clasped in front of them, at full attention. Holsters at hips and pressed shirts in tan, blue, green, and black were meant to convey that all resources were being deployed in the search for Ellie Byrd. That she mattered.
