Patricia used that love as a stealth weapon in the five years since the DownEast Mall.
She saw to it that articles on the shootings, ugly letters reviling Marcia as responsible, and death threats ended up in her mother’s hand. Some she mailed, others she taped to the front door or shoved under it. The night before she’d left for Columbia, she’d thrown a rock wrapped with a particularly vicious note through the living room window, then rushed inside to huddle screaming behind the sofa.
An anonymous tip had McMullen dogging Marcia—at home, at work. Marcia lost her second job. Though the lawyers would have kept her on, she moved farther away—another miserable rental—isolating herself.
She took pills to sleep, more pills to hold off the constant and increasing anxiety. Patricia planted the seeds with her grandparents of her own worries. Her mother sometimes mixed up the pills, or took a double dose because she’d forgotten she’d taken the first.
They, who’d cut Marcia off for divorcing their asshole of a son, showered Patricia with sympathy.
She planted nanny cams in her mother’s house so she could watch her. She knew just when to call from the drop phone she’d bought, how to wake her groggy mother up out of a Xanax-assisted sleep and whisper her brother’s name.
On visits she’d add an extra pill or two, grinding them into the soup the dutiful daughter prepared, then play old videos from when JJ was a baby.
She tearfully reported to her grandparents about finding her mother in a stupor on the couch with the videos playing. While still in college, she’d asked her instructors and professors—she’d majored in psychology—for advice. She arranged an accidental overdose, placed a frantic nine-one-one call, and held her mother’s limp hand in the ambulance.
She left the trail of a worried, loving daughter with a mother lost in pills and guilt. Even as she attended support groups for children of addicts, she found fresh ways to gaslight her mother.
On the night before her brother’s birthday, she slipped into the house, baked his favorite chocolate cake. Deliberately, she left ingredients scattered on the counter, the mixing bowl and pan in the sink, setting the stage.
Then she blew out the oven’s pilot light.
After waking her drug-addled mother, she led her into a kitchen smelling of chocolate and baking.
“It’s dark.” Marcia shuffled and swayed. “What time is it?”
“It’s time for cake! You baked such a nice one.”
“I did? I don’t remember.”
“JJ’s favorite chocolate cake. He wants you to light the candles, Mom.”
Marcia’s eyes darted around the room. “Is he here?”
“He’s coming. Turn on the TV. There’s the remote.”
Obediently, Marcia picked up the remote, and with Patricia guiding her fingers, hit play. On the TV, a grinning, gap-toothed JJ giggled as his mother lit his birthday candles.
“Light the candles, Mom. For JJ.”
“He was my sweet little boy.” Tears, sentiment, and guilt filled Marcia’s eyes. She took the long butane lighter, lit the candles. “He didn’t mean to be bad. He’s sorry. Look, look, he’s so happy. Why did he stop being happy?”
“You need to take your pills. JJ wants you to take your pills. They’re right there. You need to take your pills.”
“I took them. Didn’t I take them? I’m so tired. Where’s JJ? It’s dark outside. Little boys shouldn’t be out in the dark.”
“He’s coming. You need to take your pills for JJ’s birthday. I think you should take one for each candle.”
“Six candles, six pills. My baby boy is six.” Eyes damp as they stared at the TV screen, Marcia took six pills, one by one, with the wine Patricia had set beside them.
“That’s good, very good. JJ needs more light. He needs more light to find his way home. I think he’s lost!”
“No. No. Where’s my little boy? JJ!”
“You have to light the curtains. If you squirt some of the lighter fluid on them, they make such a bright light. He’ll see it, and he’ll come home.”
Marcia picked up the can of fluid. For a moment Patricia wondered if she saw a kind of awareness in her mother’s eyes. Maybe a kind of relief. Marcia doused the curtains with the fluid, set them to flame.
“See how bright! You need to turn on the oven, Mom.”
“I baked the cake?”
“Just like always.” Taking Marcia’s arm, Patricia led her to the oven. “Turn on the oven.” And guided her mother’s hand to the knob.
“I’m so sleepy. I need to sleep.”
“Just turn on the oven, then you can take a nap.”
“Then JJ will come?”
“Oh, you’ll see JJ soon. Turn on the oven, that’s right. Why don’t you just lie down over here on the couch?”
As her mother collapsed on the couch, Patricia used a second lighter—one she would take with her—to light the already soaked living room curtains.
As she edged toward the door, she watched her mother’s slack face. “Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to JJ, Mom.”
Her voice slurred, her eyes closed, Marcia tried to sing.
By the time the gas fumes did their work, when they met flame and combusted, Patricia was in her bed in her grandparents’ house.
She slept like a baby.
*
The phone on Reed’s nightstand signaled an alert. He rolled over, scooped it up, squinted at it.
“Ah, hell.”
“Cop stuff?” Eloise Matherson stirred beside him.
“Yeah.” Not directly, he thought, but since he’d followed Essie’s tack with alerts on incidents connected to the DownEast Mall, not one he wanted to ignore, either.
“Sorry.”
“How it goes.” She stirred again. “Want me to take off?”
“No, go back to sleep. I’ll text you later.” He gave her butt an easy pat as he got out of bed.
Their friends with—occasional—benefits status suited them both. Nothing serious, as the friends aspect of the equation remained the priority.
He grabbed some clothes in the dark and, taking a quick shower, thought about Marcia Hobart.
He had a file on her, and he’d refresh himself there, but he remembered she’d been divorced when her son had opened fire in the DownEast Mall Cineplex. Hobart had lived with his father, and his younger sister with the mother.
Domestic worker, he recalled as he pulled on jeans. Moved twice—that he knew of—since the shooting.
His alert reported firefighters battling a five-alarm blaze at her current residence—one that threatened neighboring properties. They’d recovered a single body inside the Hobart residence.
He snapped on his off-duty weapon, grabbed his keys and a bottle of Mountain Dew from the refrigerator. Chugging some, he jogged down the two flights of steps from his apartment to the weedy gravel lot and his car.
The car, the same Dodge Neon his parents had given him when he’d graduated high school, was pretty much a piece of crap. Just the way his apartment building was pretty much a dump.
He’d opted to make do and follow Essie’s lead, saving whatever he could toward a down payment to buy a house.
And as it turned out, his dump of an apartment put him five minutes from Marcia Hobart’s address.
In under two he heard sirens.
When he spotted patrol cars, he pulled over to park. He recognized one of the uniforms working the barricades, aimed for him.
“Hey, Bushner.”
“Quartermaine. In the neighborhood?”
“Not far. What do you know?”
“My ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Good you confirmed that. What else?”
“Heard the nine-one-ones reported an explosion and the fire. House down there is toast with a crispy critter inside. Smoke eaters are still knocking it down. The house on the east side took a hit, but everybody got out.”
“Mind if I walk down?”
“No skin off mine.”
He could see the firefighters in turnout gear silhouetted against the snaps and pulse of fire. Spumes of water arced through the haze of smoke and raining ash. Civilians stood back, clutching children or each other. Some wept.
He heard the bark of orders, the crackle of radios.
And saw Bushner had it right. The house where the beleaguered Marcia Hobart lived was toast. He watched it fold in on itself, shooting flames and firefly sparks into the smoke-choked dark. More hoses attacked the flames crawling up the west wall of the house on the east side, still more soaked down the walls of the house on the west to stop the spread.
The patch of lawn in front of all three houses, the narrow strips between, were a blackened morass of soaked ash and mud.
He scanned the crowd, considered the young couple with the infant in the woman’s arms and a yellow Lab at their feet. Tears streamed down the woman’s face as they stared at the east-side house.
Reed moved toward them.
“Is that your place?”
The man, late twenties by Reed’s gauge, with a sleep-tousled mop of blond hair, nodded as he put an arm around the woman. “It’s burning. Our house is on fire.”
“They’re putting it out. And you got out. You and your family got out.”
“We just moved in two weeks ago. We haven’t even finished unpacking.”