Chapter 5 Fire On Forsythia Lane #5
A map of Rockford lies spread open on the coffee table in the Ludovicos’ living room, Weston leaning over it with a red marker in one hand. His brothers are all seated around the table to the left and right of me, watching as Weston draws landmarks on the map.
“The Montgomery house is here.” He makes an X halfway down Forsythia Lane.
“And Boone’s place is two point seven miles away…
here.” He leaves a single red dot on Wolf Spider Hollow.
“But he wasn’t home on the night of the fire.
He was drinking in town, at The Howling Coydog.
” He makes another red dot on the bar on Main Street.
“I talked to the bartender yesterday. He said Boone stayed till midnight and walked from there.”
“That’s a long walk,” Henry concludes, leaning his elbows on his knees as he studies the map. “You think he could’ve walked to the Montgomery house with enough time to light the fire?”
Weston shakes his head. “No. I walked it myself to check—cutting through the woods, so it was the shortest possible route. The bartender said Boone was unsteady on his feet, so I figure he walked at the pace I can walk through the woods with prosthetic legs. And it took me a little over an hour to get to the Montgomery house.”
I pinch my lip between my forefinger and thumb. “So it’s not possible for Boone to have gotten there in time.”
Weston nods, looking across the map at me. “Boone has a solid alibi, which means motive isn’t enough to make him a prime suspect.”
“Why do you want to prove this guy innocent, anyway?” Aidan says, squinting incredulously at his brother. I still haven’t gotten used to his voice, which is huskier and deeper now that he’s crossed the threshold of thirteen. “I mean, he’s a criminal—right?”
“He went to prison, yeah,” Weston says, spinning the marker between his fingers. “But just because he messed up once doesn’t make him a criminal now. Everybody’s innocent until proven guilty. And I just think some people are too quick to want to prove guilt instead of innocence.”
When he says “some people,” I know exactly whom he’s referring to: Marcus, the reporter who is determined to get to the bottom of this case before anyone else does.
As I sit across from Weston, watching his eyes dart over the map, I can’t help but wonder if solving this mystery is personal to him, too.
If it has less to do with proving Jonathan Boone innocent and more to do with proving Marcus Verne wrong.
“I just think there are more possibilities to consider,” Weston says, spinning the marker over the map. “I mean, it’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Right, Tessa? Sometimes the least obvious move is the one you have to make. Sometimes the least obvious suspect is the one who’s guilty.”
“So who’s the least obvious suspect?” I pose the question to all the Ludovico boys, leaning back against the base of the couch.
Noah is the first to answer. “Dad!”
Weston rolls his eyes, cracking a smile and giving his littlest brother a playful shove. “You can’t incriminate your own family, Noah.”
“The old lady across the street?” Henry offers. “You said she’s the one who called the fire department.”
“Why would an arsonist call the fire department to come put out a fire they started?” Aidan volleys back, slumping into an armchair. “That’s just stupid. My money’s on Boone.”
“You don’t have any money,” Henry says with a smirk.
“What about Montgomery?” I interject, trying to think outside the box. “How solid was his alibi?”
Weston tilts his head noncommittally. “According to Marcus, he was staying at a hotel in Albany so he could catch an early flight the next morning. That’s where he was when the fire broke out.”
“Why would Montgomery burn down his own house?” Noah asks, his face twisted with the confusion of a child who is too innocent to understand adult corruption. Sometimes, I don’t understand it either.
“Insurance fraud is a pretty common reason,” Henry answers smartly, but this only makes his little brother more confused.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the insurance company will give you money if you lose your house in a fire,” Weston says. “If the whole house is destroyed, they’ll pay you whatever it was worth.”
Aiden scrunches his nose. “Why wouldn’t he just sell the house instead of burning it down to collect the insurance? Someone would’ve bought it, eventually.”
Weston frowns, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I agree, it seems unlikely. He did a ton of renovations on that place. Seemed pretty close to putting it on the market. And from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, Montgomery is really pissed about the whole thing.”
“Sounds more like revenge to me,” Aidan says with a smug little grin on his face.
“I bet Boone wanted to get back at Montgomery for buying his house, so he went around with those gas cans in the middle of the night, soaked the place, and threw his cigarette in and—kaboom!” He makes an explosive gesture in Noah’s face and laughs when his little brother shrinks away.
“We don’t know that’s what happened,” Weston reminds him. “Dad says investigators look at two main things with arson cases: did the suspect have a motive to burn the house… and did the suspect know that the house was going to burn?”
“How can you prove that someone knew it was going to burn?” Aidan asks, squinting dubiously at his brother.
“There are clues,” I answer. “You can look at what was destroyed in the house… If anything valuable was removed before the fire, that usually indicates the owner knew it was going to happen.”
“If I knew our house was going to burn,” Noah muses philosophically, “I would grab… Weston.”
This makes Weston laugh and ruffle his little brother’s hair. “Thanks, bro. I’m honored.”
“If I knew our house was going to burn,” Aidan chimes in, “I’d grab my Nerf guns.”
“I’d grab Thor,” Henry adds, reaching down to pat the sleepy golden retriever on the head.
“I’d grab my running blades,” Weston says decidedly. “After getting Noah out, obviously. The rest of you would have to fend for yourselves.”
Henry rolls his eyes in a good-natured way, but Aidan takes this as an opportunity to wage a wrestling match with Weston, tackling his brother to the floor.
The two of them start grappling with each other, and I sigh, knowing this display of brotherly affection could take a while. I pull the map closer to examine it.
“Mr. Montgomery wouldn’t have had to save anything from the fire because the house didn’t have any personal belongings in it,” I observe aloud, though I’m pretty sure Henry is the only one paying attention at this point.
“So we’d need to find some other kind of proof that he knew the fire was going to happen and that he had a sufficient motive to burn the house for the insurance rather than just selling it. ”
“Maybe there was something wrong with the house,” Henry offers, resting his chin on his fist. “Maybe he knew he wouldn’t be able to sell it.”
The gears in my mind start spinning at his suggestion. “Wes.”
He’s still grappling with Aidan on the floor, the two of them rolling around and coming dangerously close to toppling a table lamp.
“Agh! I’ll pin you!” Aidan howls, arms flailing.
“You don’t gotta hope in hell, little brother—”
“WES.”
His head of messy blond hair pops up at the sound of my voice. “Yeah?”
“Can we please focus?”
Aidan takes the opportunity to get on top of Weston and nail him to the floor. “Pinned you!”
“Okay, you win,” Weston relents, crawling back over to the coffee table and fixing his rumpled shirt. “Where were we?”
“Well, I was just thinking… isn’t Rudy’s dad a real estate attorney?”
Weston nods. “Yeah. Why?”
“How likely is it he’d do us a favor?”
“What kind of favor?”
“A title search on the Montgomery house. To see if there’s anything irregular with the history of the property—something that was possibly overlooked during the sale. Something that would motivate him to burn the house down to collect the insurance.”
Weston nods slowly, gears spinning behind his eyes now. “I can definitely bribe Rudy into asking his dad… Whether Rudy can bribe his dad is another story.”
“Meanwhile,” I add, “we should try to talk to the lady who lives across the street. What’s her name? Does anyone know?”
“Mrs. Atwood,” Henry supplies. “She’s a recluse. Hasn’t come out of her house since her husband died a few years back.”
I frown, turning to look at him. “How do you know that?”
Henry messes a hand through his chestnut-brown hair. “There’s a guy in my class who delivers groceries for her every week. He says he’s gotta leave them on the porch ’cause she won’t even open her door. She leaves the money out there for him, too.”
“That must be why Marcus hasn’t had any luck getting her to talk,” Weston muses, rubbing his forehead. “Maybe Tessa can get her to open up. As one recluse to another?” He smirks at me, waggling his eyebrows.
I narrow my eyes into a teasing glare. “We’re going to have to do better than that.” My finger traces over the curve of Forsythia Lane, pausing on the red X. “And I think I know exactly where to start.”
WESTON
I love this scheming, sneaky detective version of Tessa Dickinson. She’s a girl of many talents—I’ve known that since the day I first met her. But I don’t think she’s ever looked more beautiful than she does when she’s thinking like a criminal.
Together, we puzzle out the best way to get a recluse like Mrs. Atwood to open up her door and be willing to be interrogated by two teenagers about a crime she probably had nothing to do with.
Our first step is to talk to Rachel at the Chronicle and get her to dig up the archived obituary of Mr. Charles Atwood. She does this without question, of course, because she secretly loves me.
While she pecks away at her keyboard in search of the long-lost obit, Tessa anxiously taps her fingers on her chin beside me.