Chapter 5 Fire On Forsythia Lane #7
Maybe she’s right. But it still makes me cringe to imagine it: showing up at Mrs. Atwood’s door with the intention of making her look at me and go through the Reaction and feel sorry for me and invite me inside.
“I’ll go with you,” Tessa offers eagerly, threading her fingers through mine again. “We’ll do it together.”
She makes it sound like something dangerous, something I’m afraid of. Maybe because she knows me so damn well, she can read my mind. She sees me inside out. Sees the stuff I don’t want anyone to see.
I squeeze her hand back and say, “Okay.”
TESSA
Weston wears shorts, for obvious reasons. I stand beside him on Mrs. Atwood’s front porch, proud to hold his hand as I ring the doorbell. When there’s no answer in the first two minutes, I ring the bell again, and we wait.
And we wait.
And… we wait.
The door has a gridded window in the upper half, the inside covered in bubble wrap except for a tiny triangular hole in the middle that Mrs. Atwood must use as a peephole to see who’s darkening her doorstep.
When a single blue eye appears in that triangle, I nearly jump out of my skin. Mrs. Atwood’s voice hammers through the glass, bitter and shrill.
“Go away!”
“Wait—Mrs. Atwood,” I begin desperately. “Please, can we talk to you? It’s about your husband!”
That makes her freeze, blue eye blinking through the hole in the bubble wrap. I’m not sure the hole is big enough for her to see all of Weston, including his prosthetic legs. She’ll need to open her door if this plan is going to work.
“What about my husband?” she asks, voice muffled through the window.
“He did something to help me once.” Weston speaks up, his voice so sweet and warm, I don’t know how anyone could turn him away. “Something that changed my life. And I’d like to thank you for it, since I can’t thank him.”
Mrs. Atwood frowns suspiciously behind the bubble wrap for a moment before I hear the telltale jangle of multiple locks being unbolted.
Next thing I know, the door swings open, and Mrs. Atwood’s petite, bathrobed frame comes into full view.
She’s about my height, so she has to look up into Weston’s face as she braces herself in the doorway.
“Now, young man, what are you talking—” Her gaze lowers to his legs. And just like that, her guarded frown melts into a look of stupefied shock.
Weston doesn’t crack a joke or say anything to soften the blow; he just lets her react. I give his hand a little squeeze. I know he knows what it means. He squeezes back.
Mrs. Atwood holds onto the door frame with one hand, her other hand clutching her robe around her chest. She seems lost for words, looking Weston up and down. That’s when he takes the floor.
“Your husband donated to a charity called Limitless Life—and as it turns out, that charity helped my parents afford a certain kind of prosthesis that allows me to run. There was a time when I was afraid I might never be able to do that again. And I just wanted you to know how grateful I am for people like Mr. Atwood… who cared enough about kids like me who lost something we all take for granted.” Weston lowers his gaze to the floor of the porch, giving an easy shrug.
“I know you’re not a big fan of visitors, and I don’t want to bother you—”
“No, no,” Mrs. Atwood says, stepping aside and holding the door open. “Come in. Both of you. It’s cold out there.”
Weston and I trade a quick smile, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing.
Success.
Hand in hand, we step into the farmhouse, which is dimly lit by antique lamps and smells faintly of Bengay.
Mrs. Atwood ushers us into the living room and encourages us to sit down.
Almost every chair is covered in a hand-knitted afghan, and I count at least three cats snoozing on the furniture.
Weston cautiously sits on the couch beside a napping tabby, and I take the seat beside him.
Mrs. Atwood mutters apologies for the mess, saying she’s not used to having visitors. As she shuffles around the living room, clearing up old mugs and crumpled tissues, I want to tell her she doesn’t have to tidy for us—but I completely understand the impulse to create order.
We don’t touch the topic of the fire for at least fifteen minutes. Mrs. Atwood makes us tea and tells us about her late husband—how generous and hardworking he was, how he used to make birdhouses from scratch and watch the little winged creatures for hours, sketching them and learning their habits.
I start to relax when I realize Mrs. Atwood isn’t going to put Weston through any kind of awkward inquisition about his legs.
I was worried about putting him in the spotlight like this just to get Mrs. Atwood to open her door to us, but now that we’re in her living room drinking tea and petting her cats, it seems to be the last thing on her mind.
At last, Weston finds a way to smoothly transition to the topic of the fire: Mrs. Atwood remarks on how quiet it usually is up here on Forsythia Lane.
“The night the Montgomery house burned down must’ve been the most excitement you’ve had up here in a long time,” Weston says casually, scratching the tabby cat under her chin.
Mrs. Atwood shudders at the mere memory of the fire. “I just kept praying those firemen would be alright, and that they’d put it out before it spread down the street.”
“You were the one who called the fire department, right?” Weston waits for her to nod before adding, “Good thing you happened to be awake.”
Mrs. Atwood sips her tea and strokes a black cat that’s snuggled in her lap. “It was strange, because I couldn’t sleep at all that night. I’m usually in bed before ten o’clock, but that night I just lay awake for hours. Then, at about eleven thirty, I heard a car pull up to the Montgomery house.”
My interest piques at this new piece of information. “A car?”
“I didn’t get up to see whose car it was,” Mrs. Atwood continues. “I figured it must’ve been Mr. Montgomery, since no one else was living there.”
“Did you happen to hear when the car drove away?” Weston asks, letting the tabby climb into his lap and curl up in a purring ball of orange fluff.
A longhaired gray one comes slinking over to join the snuggle fest, and I almost laugh because Weston looks impossibly cute engulfed in cats.
He’s like an animal magnet wherever he goes.
And honestly, I can’t blame any living creature for wanting to cuddle with him.
“I must’ve been asleep when the car left,” Mrs. Atwood says, frowning as she recalls the night.
“But I keep my windows open a crack at night this time of year. I love the cool mountain air when I’m sleeping…
Only, that night, I could’ve sworn I smelled lighter fluid.
It woke me up again around midnight, and that’s when I got up to have a look around. ”
“Was that when you saw the fire?” Weston asks.
Mrs. Atwood shakes her head. “No… everything was dark over at the Montgomery place. No cars in the driveway. I thought maybe I imagined all of it. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t.
I kept feeling like something wasn’t right…
When I got up about a half hour later, I saw the whole top floor of the Montgomery house was on fire. ”
“Just the top floor?”
She nods. “The windows were either open or they’d been blown out—the fire was getting to the roof, and I knew that house was going to come down like a ton of bricks. I called the fire department as quickly as I could.”
Weston thinks about this for a moment, stroking both cats simultaneously behind their velvety ears.
I can tell the gears in his mind are turning a hundred miles an hour, but he doesn’t share his deductions with Mrs. Atwood.
Instead, he just gives her a sympathetic smile and says, “I’m sorry you had to go through that. It must’ve been scary.”
“It was,” she admits, caressing the black cat. “But my babies and I are safe—that’s all that matters.”
By the time we part ways with Mrs. Atwood, her cats have become inseparably attached to Weston. She invites us to stop by again, any time we want, and we both thank her profusely for her kindness.
Back in the front seat of Weston’s truck, we sit parked in the driveway for a few minutes, discussing and deducing.
“So whoever set the house on fire showed up in a car,” Weston concludes. “And they made sure the attic burned first so the whole house would become a sort of self-ventilating furnace and be totally destroyed. But somehow… the fire didn’t start until at least thirty minutes after the arsonist left.”
I tilt my head, turning over the possibilities in my mind. “We know they used lighter fluid because Mrs. Atwood smelled it.”
“And the fire department found traces of accelerant.”
“But if the arsonist lit a match, it would’ve started burning immediately,” I add, pinching my lower lip between my fingers. “So maybe they lit something else… like a candle.”
“A candle?”
“Yeah… That would’ve taken longer to burn out. And by the time it did burn to the end and ignited the accelerant, the arsonist would’ve been long gone. He would’ve had time to establish an alibi somewhere else.”
Weston taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Want to look around the crime scene before we head back?” he asks, quirking his eyebrows at me in a way that’s impossible to refuse.
“Is that legal?”
“I’m pretty sure we can’t do any more damage at this point,” Weston says with a grunt, shifting the truck into reverse and pulling out onto the road.
We stop in the driveway of the Montgomery house—which is just a pile of rubble and ash.
Nothing but a blackened skeleton remains of the beautiful Victorian house that once stood here.
I hop out of the truck with Weston, and we cautiously approach the disaster zone, which is roped off with crime scene tape to keep intruders out.