I groan, rolling away from the window and the light, and pull the pillow over my throbbing head. After we dropped Mr. Butler back at Rainier Vista, Dave drove us straight to the nearest bar, where he told the bartender to keep the vodka martinis coming until I was good and drunk. With not much more than a couple bites of Chex Mix lining my stomach, it didn’t take him long. By the time I reached the bottom of the first glass, the room was already spinning. Things started to get fuzzy somewhere halfway through the second one. I have no memory of the third or how I got from there, a slightly seedy cocktail lounge with bad music and a sticky bar top, to here, wrapped in soft Egyptian cotton.
I push myself up on an elbow and look around the hotel room. Hip and generically modern with a great wall of windows looking out over the water. In the distance is a mountainous horizon, jagged peaks of terrain jutting up into the steel sky. “Where are we?”
He gives me a funny look. “Honey, we’re in Seattle, remember? Birthplace of Starbucks and flannel capital of the world, where everybody drives a Subaru. I always thought that last one was an exaggeration, by the way, but it’s not. For a city so focused on clean living, you’d think there’d be fewer cars.”
“I know Seattle. I meant, what hotel? I hope you didn’t have to carry me.”
“Hey, that’s what brothers are for.” He grins.
“I’m sorry we missed last night’s dinner reservation.”
He plops into an armchair by the window, waving off my apology. “The bar food was actually okay. I mean, it wasn’t foie gras, but it was a hell of a lot better than that fast-food curry, which, by the way, was definitely not lamb. But just so we’re clear, you’re not getting out of feeding me a sit-down breakfast this morning before we go.”
“Go where?”
“We can hammer out the agenda at breakfast. We’ve got places to go and people to talk to, so let’s go.”
I fall back onto the bed, pulling the covers up to under my chin. “You go. I’m not up to doing anything today.”
“This isn’t a vacation, Iris. We’re on a mission here, remember? Your mission.”
“I know, but tomorrow, maybe. Today let’s stay in our pajamas, order room service and have a movie marathon.”
“I’m already dressed.”
I reach one arm out, pluck the hotel TV directory from the nightstand. “I bet they have Beaches.”
“Come on. I’m not that much of a stereotype.”
“Sorry to break it to you, bro, but you are.”
He rolls his eyes but doesn’t argue the point. “Would you please get out of bed and in the shower? I called around to some old-folks’ homes near Rainier Vista, and guess who I found? Your father-in-law. Will’s father. I thought we’d start by paying him a visit.”
Father-in-law. I roll the word around on my tongue, and a fresh round of yesterday’s hurt throbs in my chest, a hot white pulse that crushes my already trampled heart. And my brand-new father-in-law is not the worst of it. I push up onto an elbow.
“I maybe have had a few too many martinis last night, but I happen to remember every single word that old man said. A woman and two children died in a fire that he’s convinced Will set. Maybe Will did it and maybe he didn’t, but you know what they say, where there’s smoke and all that...”
“Well, while you were sleeping off the booze, I did a bit of digging into that fire. I checked the newspapers and read the redacted police report online, and the old man’s story was pretty accurate, except he forgot to mention one thing. The police traced the gasoline jug to a store in Portland, which begs the question. How does a seventeen-year-old kid with no car and no money buy gas in a city almost two-hundred miles down the road?”
“Did they mention any other suspects?”
“Only Will’s father.”
My eyes go wide. “Will’s father was a suspect?”
“Of course. The husband is always the first one the police question. Don’t you watch CSI? Especially when he’s got loose hands like Will’s father did. He was too drunk to remember his alibi, but he had one. A neighbor said he was passed out on their couch when the building went up in flames.”
Flames. The word gives me a full-body shiver.
“And the kids?”
“Two siblings, three and five. Fast asleep in the apartment across the hall. Their mother was working the night shift.”
My stomach twists with horror for that poor woman. I think of her tucking her babies in that night before heading off to work, telling them she’d be home by the time they awoke, telling herself they’d be safe in their own beds. Their tragedy is every mother’s worst nightmare.
I curl around my pillow, burrowing deeper under the comforter. “You know, everything I’ve learned since the crash is so confusing. Him getting on the wrong plane to the wrong destination. Making up a conference. Meeting this friend Corban he never told me about. All these lies about where he came from and what his childhood was like. I don’t understand any of it. Except for the house.”
“Your house?”
I nod. “We must have seen a hundred. There was something wrong with every one of them. The kitchen was too dated or the yard was too small or the street was too busy. Nothing was ever perfect enough for Will. Our broker showed us that house more to prove a point than anything else. Like, see what you can get if you cough up another hundred grand? But you should have seen his face when we walked in the door.” I smile at the memory of how everything about him went completely still but the color in his cheeks, which got more and more flushed with each room we walked through. “By the time we got upstairs, it was a done deal. He had to have it.”
A sudden gust of rain machine-gun patters against the window. Dave swings his feet up onto an ottoman, folding his arms across his chest and settling in. “It is a gorgeous house.”
I think about the first time we walked up the steps, his face when we pushed through the stained-glass door, how I knew before we walked through, it was a done deal. “We made an offer that same day. Even though it meant mostly empty rooms and a mortgage we could afford only by the skin of our teeth. But now I understand why owning it was so important to him.”
“Because the house was a symbol of how far he’d come.”
“Exactly.” As I say the word, a familiar anger rises inside me all over again, and I lurch upright in bed. “If he had just told me why he wanted it so badly, I wouldn’t have fought him so much. I wouldn’t have complained about giving up my Starbucks habit or how we never got to go on vacation so we could buy our dream house. There’s not a soul on the planet who would have understood more than me. But he wasn’t ever planning to tell me, was he?”
Dave sighs, lifting both hands into the air. “Not this again,” he mutters.
“Not what again?”
“We already had this discussion, at length, last night at the bar. You even took a poll. An overwhelming eighty-seven percent of half-drunk hipsters agree that, no, Will was never planning to tell you.”