Chapter 5 Fire On Forsythia Lane #2
“Absolutely,” Marcus agrees with a nod. “I fully respect the boundaries of ethics in the investigative process.”
I can’t help rolling my eyes at his choice of words. “Where’s the owner? Montgomery?”
“Not here, obviously,” Marcus replies. “I’m sure they’re trying to get in touch with him. But he’s probably out of town.”
“At least nobody was living in that house,” Dad murmurs, taking in the disaster sight across the street. “Shame it burned before it even went up for sale.”
Marcus snaps a few more pictures with his phone, then pivots on his heel and starts for the neighboring house, where the robed woman can still be seen standing in her driveway.
“Follow him,” Dad murmurs to me. “Make sure he doesn’t put his foot in his mouth.”
I shadow Marcus down the side of the road, staying far enough back that he doesn’t even notice I’m stalking him.
“Excuse me!” he yells to the robed woman in the driveway. “Excuse me, ma’am, can I ask you a few questions? My name is Marcus Verne. I’m with The Rockford Chronicle, and I’d like to ask—”
“No questions,” the woman’s shrill voice comes back trembling, almost scared. “No—just… leave me alone.” She turns and charges back to her porch, hugging herself the whole time until she vanishes behind a slamming door.
Marcus stops short at the end of her driveway, cussing on the end of a sigh.
“Lost your touch?”
He whirls around to find me standing a few feet away. The flash of surprise in his eyes is quickly replaced by icy irritation. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? This is no place for kids.”
I wonder, did he consider himself a “kid” when he was eighteen years old? Not to mention, he has to look up to address me because I’m at least two inches taller than him.
I let the insult roll off me with a shrug. “Just thought I’d come see what all the hype was about. Now I’m starting to wish I’d stayed in bed.”
Marcus narrows his eyes as he studies me in the pale moonlight. “Well, if you’re getting cold feet… maybe you should go back home. Leave the dirty work to those of us who can handle it.”
A half-smile twitches at my lips as I take a step closer. “Oh, I never get cold feet. It’s one of the few benefits of being a double amputee.”
As usual, Marcus is not amused. He’s about to parry back when I hear a rustling in the bushes to my left. At first, I think it’s an animal—a skunk, hopefully—and I’m about to take off and leave Marcus to confront the encounter on his own…
But that’s when a man comes stumbling out of the woods—a ratty baseball cap on his head and a cigarette glowing between his fingers. I stiffen, defenses up, as I watch the man stagger out onto the dirt road, his jolty gait proof that he’s either injured or drunk.
I can tell it’s the latter when he gets close enough to where Marcus and I are standing. Even over the stench of smoke hanging in the air, I can smell whiskey. It’s almost as recognizable as skunk.
The guy stops short when he sees us, bristling like someone just pulled a gun on him.
Marcus puts his hands up in some pansy-ass gesture, as if to say, I come in peace. I keep my fists behind my back, letting this guy wonder if I’m hiding something he should be worried about.
As he tips his head back to look at us, a slice of moonlight spreads across his features—and recognition hits me like an uppercut.
Jonathan Boone. I only know his face because I used to see him on this road years ago. Out in his front yard, mowing the grass or working on his car. But that was before he went to prison.
Marcus isn’t a local, so he doesn’t know any of the history I do about this guy—how the story of his arrest wound up in the Chronicle.
How Montgomery was the one to take Boone’s name off the mailbox at the end of the driveway.
How, when you’re out in the sticks of upstate New York, you don’t introduce yourself to local drunks who come stumbling out of the woods at one o’clock in the morning.
“Hello, sir. My name is Marcus Verne—”
“Why the hell you telling me your name, kid?” Boone slurs in response—and I almost laugh at the use of kid.
Boone, on the other hand, seems very amused at the sight of the burning house, which is now just a skeleton. He points with his withered cigarette and collapses into rough, wheezing laughter—the lights of the first-responder trucks blinking across his craggy face.
“What a sight, huh?” He chuckles, lifting the cigarette to his lips. “The bastard finally got what was coming to him.”
And with that, Jonathan Boone continues staggering down the road, veering off towards the woods to avoid the cluster of firefighters. Or maybe to avoid being seen by anyone.
“Who the hell was that?” Marcus rasps, staring after Boone as he disappears into the night. “Did you hear what he said?”
“Yep.” I sigh, shoving my hands into my pockets and heading back in the direction of the fire trucks. “And I don’t think he’s the only one who feels that way about Montgomery.”
“What do you mean?” Marcus says, catching up to me. “Does he have a lot of enemies?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. He’s made a lot of money buying foreclosed houses and reselling them at a profit. Some of those previous owners aren’t the biggest fans of him, for obvious reasons.”
“You know who that guy was, don’t you?” Marcus pries eagerly, trotting along beside me. “What’s his name?”
“Jonathan Boone. He used to live in that house.”
“What house?”
For an investigative reporter with business cards and the ability to put on a suit jacket in the middle of the night, Marcus Verne isn’t very sharp. The penny doesn’t drop for him until I stop in my tracks and point at the smoking structure of the Montgomery place.
“That house.”
TESSA
“Oh, my goodness… that’s terrible.” I breathe the words through my fingers as I stare at the video playing on my laptop screen—a blazing inferno swallowing up that beautiful old Victorian house Mr. Montgomery put so much work into remodeling.
I woke up sometime after midnight to the distant wailing of fire engines—but Forsythia Lane was too far away for us to see anything from our house on the east side of Rockford.
Estimating from the number of emergency vehicles I heard, I assumed the blaze was unusually chaotic.
But I didn’t know just how disastrous it was until Weston sent me the story featured on the homepage of The Rockford Chronicle’s website, complete with video clips of the fire.
The article doesn’t provide much insight about how it happened, saying only that the fire department was summoned at twelve forty-five by a concerned neighbor. According to the fire chief, the cause of the fire is still unknown and under investigation.
I don’t get the full scoop until Weston comes over to see me later that morning.
I’m in the midst of spring cleaning, and today that project involves emptying my bedroom closet, sorting donations, and organizing the rest of my things into labeled bins and baskets.
Weston’s blue eyes widen adorably as he leans against the doorjamb, taking in the apocalyptic mess surrounding me.
“You’re becoming predictable, you know that?” He grins, and it’s the first ray of sunshine I’ve seen today. “Whenever I show up at your house uninvited, I’m guaranteed to find you either baking, cleaning, or writing.”
I laugh, tiptoeing my way through the chaos to get to him. “Well, you’re rather predictable, too. I usually find you either punching something, working out, or eating.”
“Hey, I still play the ukulele,” he argues. “I’m a very complex and multilayered guy.”
I smirk, grabbing the drawstrings of his hoodie to tug him down to my lips. “You are,” I whisper, and kiss him softly. The smell of smoke lingers on his clothes, making me draw back with surprise.
“Have you been smoking?”
A laugh startles out of him. “What? No—”
“You smell like smoke.”
“Oh, it’s probably just my hoodie,” he explains, lifting his sleeve to his nose and taking a sniff. “I wore this last night when me and Dad went up to see the fire.”
“You were there?”
He nods. “We wouldn’t have been if it weren’t for Marcus. He’s the one who got the video and wrote that article I sent you. Dad was worried he’d get a little overzealous. This is the first exciting thing that’s happened since Main Street flooded last fall.”
“I don’t know if I’d call a house burning down exciting,” I say with a shudder. “At least nobody was hurt or killed. Do they know anything else about how it started?”
Weston shrugs, shaking his head. “According to my dad, the fire marshal was called to investigate, which means there’s enough evidence for them to suspect arson.”
My eyes widen. “Do you think someone burned it down on purpose? Why? I mean, what would be the point of burning down a house nobody’s living in?”
Weston leans back against the doorframe as I return to my task of sorting and organizing a pile of giveaway clothes.
At last, he answers my question with one word. “Revenge.”
I frown. “Who would want to get revenge on Mr. Montgomery?”
Weston goes on to tell me about another person he saw last night—Jonathan Boone, the former owner of the house that burned.
As he tells the story, I vaguely remember seeing news of Boone’s arrest in the papers a few years ago.
He was arrested for his second DWI and sentenced to prison for three years.
“Rumor has it, by the time he got out, he was so deep in debt he couldn’t pay the mortgage on his house,” Weston explains, sitting on my bed now and fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube he found in my “miscellaneous” basket.
“The house went into foreclosure, and Montgomery bought it at auction for a real good price. Then, of course, he renovated it so he could resell it for twice as much, like he usually does.”
“So you think this Boone guy is still holding a grudge against Montgomery for buying his house?”