Chapter 2
The county announced the inquiry on the sixteenth, four days after.
Renee found out about it the way everybody did, from a push alert, standing in the parking lot of a Target in Longmont with a cart full of things she did not own anymore. Socks. A phone charger. A coat that was not her coat.
She read it twice. She put her phone in the pocket of the coat that was not her coat and stood there in the cold with her hand on the cart.
Evacuation.
Somebody was going to ask.
They were at a rental in Boulder that Gil Vogel had found in about ninety minutes on the night of the fire — a furnished three-bedroom off Mapleton with somebody else's art on the walls and a kitchen with nothing in it.
Chase had been there four nights. Renee had been there two.
She had spent the first two at Maggie's and had come only because Chase asked her to in a voice she had not heard him use in years.
He was on the phone when she got back with the bags. He was always on the phone. He put his hand over it and said, "Hey," and looked at her with that open face, and went back to it.
She put the socks away in a stranger's dresser.
At four o'clock the photograph went up.
It was not a good photograph. It had been taken with a phone by somebody in a line of cars at the bottom of the ridge road on the afternoon of the twelfth, and it was mostly smoke and taillights and a sheriff's deputy with his arm out.
But you could see the truck, and you could see Chase Ridgeway standing beside it in a coat everybody in that county could have picked out of a lineup, and you could see the road behind him going up into orange.
It ran with three paragraphs about the evacuation timeline.
Renee looked at it on her phone at the counter of the empty kitchen. She looked at it for a long time. She was not thinking about the affair. That is what surprised her, later. She was thinking: he is standing still.
"That's not what it looks like," Chase said from the doorway.
"I didn't say anything."
"Renee."
"I didn't say anything, Chase."
Nina Ackley called her the next morning at eight.
Renee did not know her. She knew of her.
She was the one who covered the county — commissioners, water, the landfill fight — for the paper that still put out a print edition on Wednesdays, and she had been doing it for eleven years, and her byline was on about half of what anybody in that county actually believed.
"Mrs. Ridgeway. I'm sorry to call this early. I'm sorry to call at all."
"It's fine."
"I'm working the evacuation timeline. The county says twelve minutes from the first order to the road closure. I've got a dozen people saying it was closer to eight." A pause. Paper moving. "I'm not calling about your husband."
"Okay."
"I need to know how many households on that ridge got a person at the door and how many got a phone alert, because those are two different numbers and the county's giving me one."
Renee sat down on the edge of somebody else's bed.
She could have said no comment. She had watched Bristlecone's people say it forty times over nine years and she knew exactly how it was done. You said it warmly. You said it like you were doing the other person a favor, and then you called somebody senior and it went away.
"We got a person," she said. "Truman Fenner. He's our property manager. He came up at three twenty-five."
"Okay. That's helpful. Thank you." Writing. "And you cleared at —"
"I didn't."
The writing stopped.
"I'm sorry?"
"I didn't clear," Renee said. "I was in the cellar. I was down there until eleven ten that night. Truman came back up the ridge and dug the door out."
The silence on that phone went on long enough that Renee heard a truck go by on Nina Ackley's end.
"Mrs. Ridgeway." Very careful now. "Three vehicles left that property."
"Yes."
"Was anyone —" She stopped. Started over. "Were you in the first vehicle."
And there it was. The question, asked out loud by a stranger, at eight in the morning, in a rented room.
Renee found she had known for four days exactly what she was going to say and had not admitted it to herself even once.
"No," she said. "Everybody thought I was."
She hung up and sat on the bed with the phone in both hands and her heart going like she had run somewhere.
It went everywhere by morning.
Not the affair — nobody knew about the affair, nobody would know about the affair for weeks, and when they did know they were going to decide it was not one. What went everywhere was eleven words in a county paper: Ridgeway said she was not in any of the three vehicles.
By ten a.m. it was on two Denver stations. By noon it had jumped, the way these things do, and by four it was a national aggregator with a photograph of the ridge house from a real estate listing and a headline with the word BILLIONAIRE in it.
Renee watched the first hour of it and then put her phone in a drawer.
Chase came in at one.
He did not slam anything. That was not how he was built. He came into the kitchen of that rented house and put his keys down very gently, which was worse, and said, "Did you talk to a reporter?"
"Yes."
"Okay." He nodded. He was doing the thing where he ran three moves ahead in his head and you could watch it happen behind his eyes. "Okay. Did you know she was going to lead with it?"
"She asked me a question and I answered it."
"Renee, she's been calling the county about the response time for a week, she was building something —"
"Was it true?"
He stopped.
"Was it true, Chase? What I said. Was any part of it not true?"
"That is not the point."
"It's the only point I've got."
He put his hands flat on the counter and looked at them. In nine years she had seen him do that maybe five times, and every one of them was a night something had gone badly wrong at the company.
"They're going to make this about me," he said.
"I know."
"They're going to make it about me and it's going to land on you. That's what I'm trying to — Renee, you don't know what this is like from the inside. It gets loud. It gets loud and it does not stop being loud for a year."
"I was in a hole in the ground for six hours," Renee said. "I think I can handle loud."
Bristlecone issued the statement at six.
Renee read it in the drawer-phone, sitting on the floor with her back against the dishwasher, because she had gone to get her phone to call Maggie and had not made it any farther than the floor.
It was very good. That was the thing about it. It was three paragraphs and every one of them was warm and none of them were a lie.
On December 12 the Ridgeway property was given approximately ten minutes to evacuate ahead of a fire moving at unprecedented speed.
Three vehicles left the property. In the confusion of that evacuation, and believing his wife had already cleared with the first vehicle, Mr. Ridgeway drove out and did not learn until later that she remained on the property.
He has described the hours that followed as the worst of his life.
The Ridgeways are grateful beyond words to Truman Fenner, who returned to the ridge and brought Renee out.
They ask for privacy while they, like nine hundred other households in this county, begin again.
Renee read it four times.
Nine hundred other households. That was the move. That was the sentence somebody had gotten paid to write, and it was flawless, and it put her back into the crowd she had briefly stepped out of.
He has described the hours that followed as the worst of his life.
Not hers. His.
She was still on the floor when Gil Vogel called. Gil never called her. Gil had been Chase's co-founder for fifteen years and had said maybe four hundred words to her in all that time, most of them about parking.
"Renee. Hi. Hi. I wanted you to hear it from — did you see the statement."
"I saw it."
"Okay." He sounded terrible. Gil always sounded a little terrible, but this was a new grade of it. "I want you to know I didn't — the comms group put that together and it went out on the company account, and I know how that looks, and I said so."
"Did he read it before it went?"
Pause.
"Gil. Did Chase read it before it went out?"
"He read it," Gil said.
"Okay."
"Renee —"
"That's all I wanted. Thank you, Gil." And then, because he was a decent man having a bad week: "Get some sleep."
Maggie Sutter came Tuesday with two feed sacks of clothes.
Not a suitcase. Feed sacks, because that was what she had, and she carried them up the steps of that rental on Mapleton like she was making a point about the neighborhood, which she was.
"You're a size bigger than me in the shoulders and always have been," she said, dumping them on the floor of a stranger's living room. "There's nothing in there you'll like."
"Thanks, Mag."
"There's a coat in the bottom that was my sister's. It's ugly. It's warm." Maggie straightened up and looked around the room, at the art, at the eight-hundred-dollar throw blanket somebody had folded on the arm of the sofa. "Well. This is a place."
They sat on the floor because the furniture was too clean.
Renee told her all of it. It took eleven minutes. The cellar and the drain and the digging, and the gym, and the phone, and the four hundred words of Bristlecone's statement, and the fourth paragraph she had not read yet because it had not been printed yet.
Maggie listened the whole way through without saying one thing, which for Maggie was roughly equivalent to open weeping.
"Say it," Renee said.
"I'm not going to say it."
"You've been not saying it since I got in the truck at your place Saturday."
Maggie picked at a thread on the knee of her jeans.
"All right," she said. "I've known you since you were eighteen.
In twenty years I have watched you get smaller about eleven different times and every single time you had a good reason, and the reasons were always his, and you always told me they were yours.
" She looked up. "That's what I'd say. I'm not saying it, because your house burned down last week. "
"It's not my house."
"There it is," Maggie said.