If I rewind history fifteen minutes, this chaotic mass of fire and smoke was a stunning lake house. Now its owner is being cremated in the ruins of his home, and we two survivors stumble about as reality slowly returns with soul-searing clarity. An imaginary newscaster’s voice speaks in my head: Brody Royal, multimillionaire sociopath, burned to death last night in a fire started by his antique flamethrower. Sadly, Royal was unable to complete the murders he was contemplating prior to his demise, due to a sudden and suicidal intervention by a man he’d ridiculed as harmless for the past twenty years—
Brody’s house shudders like some giant creature, and then, with the sound of cracking bones, one wing implodes. The heat diminishes for a few seconds, then suddenly intensifies, as though feeding on the evil within. Soon it will drive us farther back, away from Johnston’s body.
Caitlin stares at the burning wreckage as though she can’t quite grasp what’s happening. Five minutes ago we both believed we were dead, yet here we stand. Covered with ash and streaked with sweat, her face has a burn scar to match my own. I want to speak to her, but I don’t quite trust myself.
Beyond her, the lake’s mirrored surface reflects back an image of the tower of flame, and with a rush of fear I see our future in it. Like the pillar of fire the Israelites followed across the desert, this beacon too will lead men to us.
“Is that a siren?” Caitlin asks, looking away from the raging flames, and toward the narrow lane at the edge of the light.
“I think so.” My older ears belatedly pick up the distant whine.
“That way,” she says, pointing westward, away from the lake.
I peer through the darkness, but I can’t make out any police lights through the orange glare and waves of superheated air.
“What about Henry’s files?” Caitlin asks. “I should hide them.”
The charred box that Caitlin salvaged from the burning basement stands a few feet from Sleepy Johnston’s body. From the looks of the ashes inside, little of Henry Sexton’s journals remains.
“There’s nowhere to hide them,” I tell her.
“What about the boathouse?” she asks, a note of hysteria in her voice.
“They’ll search that. It’s too late anyway. A neighbor’s coming. Look.”
The nearest house is seventy-five yards away, but a pair of headlights has separated from the garage and begun nosing down toward the lane that runs along the lake here. Perhaps emboldened by the siren, the car’s driver has finally decided to investigate the fire. Must have heard the gunshots earlier, I think, or they’d have been here long before now.
The siren is growing louder and rising in pitch. “That’s probably the Ferriday fire department,” I think aloud. “But the law won’t be far behind. I hope it’s Sheriff Dennis, but it could be the FBI or the state police. They may question us separately. We need to get our stories straight.”
Bewilderment clouds Caitlin’s eyes. “We both lived through the same thing, didn’t we?”
I take her hand, and the coldness of it startles me. “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”
“Everything you did in Brody Royal’s basement was self-defense. They were torturing us, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not what I mean. The tough questions won’t be about what happened in the basement. They’ll be about why it happened. Why did Royal kidnap us? Why did he want to kill us? We’ve held back a lot over the past couple of days.” And not just from the police, I add silently.
“What if we just say we don’t know?”
“That’s fine with me, so long as you don’t plan to publish any stories about it in the Examiner.”
At last, realization dawns in her eyes. “Oh.”
A half mile from the lake, the whirling red lights of a fire engine break out from behind the trees that line the levee, then veer onto the narrow lane that runs along the shore of Lake Concordia. A half mile behind it, three vehicles traveling in train quickly follow. The flashing red arcs are much closer to the road on those vehicles, which means they’re police cruisers. Our window of opportunity to shape history is closing fast.
“I found Brody Royal’s name in Henry Sexton’s journals,” Caitlin says, spinning her story on the fly. “That led me to interview his daughter. Out of fear of her father, Katy panicked and took an overdose of pills before I arrived to question her, but she still implicated Brody in multiple murders. Katy’s husband walked in on us after she passed out—that would have been documented by paramedics, if not police. Up to that point, everything’s more or less true. Royal learned from Randall Regan that I’d questioned Katy, and they retaliated to keep me from publishing what I’d learned from her.”
This fairy tale might convince the Concordia Parish sheriff, but probably not the FBI. “Too many people saw me go into St. Catherine’s Hospital,” I say. “They know I spent twenty minutes alone with Brody. Now that he’s dead, his family’s liable to make all kinds of accusations about me going after him. Kaiser will find out sooner or later.”
“Surely you can explain that conversation somehow?”
“I sure can’t admit that I tried to cut a deal with him.” Under the pressure of the approaching authorities, my mind ratchets down to the task at hand. “What if I pick up where your story leaves off? I went to St. Catherine’s Hospital to make sure Royal wasn’t going to take some kind of revenge against you for his daughter’s suicide attempt. I suspected that he’d ordered several murders during the 1960s, and Katy had verified that to you. I also believed Royal had ordered the hit attempts on Henry at the newspaper and the hospital, and I was worried he’d do the same to you. That makes sense, right?”
Caitlin nods quickly, her eyes on the whirling lights.
I step closer to her. “Are you going to tell the cops about your recording of what Katy said?”
“I might as well, since Brody burned both copies. They’re going to read about it in tomorrow’s paper anyway.”
Closing my eyes, I see Caitlin’s Treo smartphone and my borrowed tape recorder being consumed by the fearsome blast of a flamethrower. “You really don’t have another copy at the newspaper?”
Her look of desolation is my only answer.
The fire engine has reached the head of Royal’s driveway. We only have seconds now.