Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller (2 page)

Everything hinged on today and they had no idea which way it would go. They’d hoped—but hoping wasn’t a done deal. When it came to the black things, who knows what would come next?

The “black things” might realize their plan. They seemed to be learning. Then it wouldn’t matter where they were; they could be in this courtroom or in a prison cell or sitting at home. Bobby warned her, once
they
knew they might come for them. No certainty in any of it.

Bobby had made them good and mad. He’d stood in their way and stopped their little plan from succeeding. Well, it had been a big plan, really. She’d bet anything those things hadn’t expected a fight.

She’d begged Bobby to find another way, to wait. The plan he’d created was the kind of risky that set knots twisting in her stomach. It all came down to timing. Timing wasn’t Bobby’s strongpoint. Calling him impatient was like calling salt too salty.

Bless him. He’d always been a time-fidget—tapping his foot when waiting for her to get ready, driving like a maniac to get somewhere earlier than necessary, and getting wildly cranky when they were a few minutes late anywhere.

“We need to take chances,” he’d said the night they were finally caught. “There’s no other way.”

That night, they’d taken a huge risk, but
he
couldn’t wait. The area was too public. Someone would see. It was a goddamn supermarket and of course they had cameras. She’d told him that. In fact, screamed it at him.

He wouldn’t listen.

“If we can block this big one, Em,” he’d said, as he walked across the vacant parking lot, a jerry can of gasoline swinging at his side, “the bastard things might realize they are never getting through. Maybe they’ll give up.”

That was Bobby, ever hopeful.

Maybe it would have ended that night or maybe not. Emily was right, though. They had cameras, outside and in. Must have been a silent alarm, too, because within minutes of Bobby jimmying a side door and disappearing inside, the cops were there.

When Emily heard the sirens and saw the whirling flash of red and blue coming down the road, her mind scattered. Not knowing what to do, she just stood there, willing Bobby to reappear. If he came out now they might get away, but there wouldn’t be time to get a fire going. She bet he was in there worrying more about starting that fire than his own safety.

Seems luck was on Bobby’s side. There were gas bottles stored in there, so even though the fire hadn’t had time to take hold, the exploding containers did the job. The sudden boom knocked Emily backward. She landed heavily on the rough pavement, scraping her hands and legs. An immediate ache triggered in the back of her head like she’d been stabbed there with a fork. The following moments were sheer terror as images of Bobby lying badly hurt or killed in the ensuing inferno pierced her mind.

As she stood and began to run toward the building, choking back tears and panic, Bobby appeared from nowhere, running across the parking lot. Even before he got to her—his eyes wild, his hair sticking up like he’d run greasy fingers through it—he started yelling, “Get out of here. You know what to do.”

They’d worked everything out beforehand. He’d written the plan on a sheet of the kid’s drawing paper, tearing it up and rewriting it over and over until he’d felt it was the best it could be.

When they caught Bobby, she would take off and head home to the kids and the babysitter. She knew the police would come for her, but it was her job to organize the children. Get them somewhere safe.

It was a mad dash to the City, five hours away by car. The entire drive she tried to ignore the thought, if they failed, nowhere would be far enough away.

She arrived at her younger sister’s home at six a.m., just as the sun peeked over the suburban rooftops, chasing away a night, which would become the turning point of everything that was to follow. She banged on the front door not caring the noise she made. Cassie came to answer, her hair sticking out at angles only a pillow and a night’s sleep can shape.

She took the kids without questions. Emily had hinted the week before of trouble in their marriage, and that something was about to give. She let Cassie presume it was Bobby, that he was mistreating her. The lie hung between them like a soft, sticky mess. It was better than attempting to share the truth. Bobby had convinced Emily to stay silent for her sister’s safety.

That was six weeks ago, and she hadn’t held her kids since. Not a day went by when she didn’t worry they’d forget her. She never stopped fretting that the last moment she would ever spend with them was when she kissed them goodbye, as they sat eating breakfast at her sister’s table. Her babies were so happy to be with their cousins, unaware of what was to come. She stood at the door longer than necessary, too afraid to tell them she was leaving, afraid they would beg her to stay and her conviction would fail her.

Emily heard her name called by the court clerk. Bobby had left the stand moments before and was making his way back to his attorney, who didn’t even look up from scribbling on his pad.

In the minute following Bobby’s departure from the stand, a murmur had erupted and floated around the room. Now, at the calling of her name, a peculiar silence pervaded the room.

This trial was the biggest news this community had seen in years. For locals, it provided an exciting break from the ebb and flow of the mundane shift life of their coal-mining town. Most Karlgarin crimes resulted from drunkenness and boredom. Even that brawl a few years back, the one that resulted in the Crane boy’s death from a single punch, had nothing on this.

This crime was one nobody understood, so unexpected and extraordinary the gossip mill hadn’t stopped grinding since Emily and Bobby’s arrest. You could rob and kill people, and that’s one hell of a terrible thing, but arson seemed to evoke a whole other scale of emotion. Perhaps the unpredictability of the outcome or that the act seemed so pointless. Or perhaps this was the real heart of it: arson seemed planned to cause devastation.

The attorney’s hand was on Emily’s back, patting her gently, urging her up and toward the witness chair (as if she didn’t know where she was meant to sit). Emily stood, brushing the creases from her skirt and running her hands down her sides, pulling at her shirt so it smoothed over her waistband. It was the best blouse she owned. Every time she wore it, Bobby mentioned the blue flowers matched her eyes.

With that thought, an impulse entered her head, and instead of walking straight to the stand, she curved past Bobby’s table. As she did, she allowed her palm to trail across his outstretched hand. The surprised look on his face smoothed to a smile as they touched.

You’d think she’d set the court on fire by the uproar that instantly followed. The judge banged his gavel against his desk like he was killing some small creature up there. The guard moved toward her, both hands reaching to his right side, presumably for his gun. Bobby’s attorney looked at her as though she had gone stark raving mad (this close up she could see he’d spilt something on his sleeve). Smarty Pants cried, “Your Honor!” or “You’re upon her!” She wasn’t sure which because something happened when their skin touched.

A jolt traveled from her fingertips into the core of her body, stopping her flat. Her legs felt rooted to the ground, as though invisible hands had risen from the scuffed linoleum floor and clasped her ankles. The breath stole from her body and she struggled to breathe.

That simple touch changed everything.

Maybe it was because she knew if they failed today, they might never touch again and being this close to him, a feeling so deep, so pure, overwhelmed her. Suddenly she didn’t want anyone thinking he was crazy or an alcoholic or anything else he wasn’t, except the bravest man she had ever known.

Even if Bobby would be angry with her later for changing the plan, she couldn’t dwell on that now. In a burning flash of certainty she made a decision.

She would tell the truth.

Reluctantly, she pulled back from his touch, and turned toward the witness chair. The guard moved back to his spot by the wall. The judge sat back, scowling, but at least he’d stopped banging his gavel. The crowd in the courtroom grew silent again.

With each step the decision embedded itself deeper into her like a burrowing worm.

Whether they could handle the truth or not, they were going to get it.

Chapter 2

Emily settled herself into the witness chair and clasped her hands together, the sweat already beginning to form between her palms. The room felt stifling despite the air-conditioning.

Even with her head bowed, Emily felt the eyes of the spectators and jury boring into her. She pulled at the annoying hangnail jutting from her cuticle. The flap of skin peeled away leaving a stinging, red strip.

Her chipped nails and dry, cracked hands were almost as unkempt as her short, stringy, brown hair, now streaked with gray. She no longer cared about her appearance, a by-product of the past few months.

Emily scanned the courtroom. Everyone looked so much smaller from here. The spectators stared at her and whispered to each other, their hands half covering their mouths. Those simple actions dug into her confidence.

She recognized a few television news personalities in the back. Even they were wide-eyed, like they’d never seen a person give testimony before. Her sister sat two rows from the front, holding one hand to her mouth, the other flattened against her chest. Her red, swollen eyes fixated on Emily. Then there were the others she’d labeled “Snoopy Dogs,” people who hadn’t missed a day of the trial. They were voyeurs who reveled in other people’s woes.

The torn quick beside her fingernail throbbed. The stress of the past few months had activated some kind of determined plucking-at-her-skin impulse, as though she could save herself by picking her way out of her own body.

Smarty Pants cleared his throat as he walked toward her, smiling like they were best friends; he hadn’t smiled at Bobby. No doubt he figured she was the soft little woman he could break. He probably thought she would turn against Bobby to save her own neck.

Miss Prissy had been at her about that.

“Let’s say Bobby forced you to help him. You feared for your life. He beat you.”
And the kicker:
“Say he was abusive. An alcoholic.”

Miss Prissy had promised if Emily would just do that—throw Bobby at them like he was disposable—then she could go home to her kids or, at the worst, receive only a few months in prison. Good behavior would have her out quickly, and then she could pull her life together.

According to Miss Prissy, Bobby was going away for a very long time and Emily could do nothing about it. No words from her would save him. He was done.

The prosecutor threw out a few friendly lines like they had met in line at the post office and were just killing time. Small, simple questions about the kids and her life. She felt the big ones coming like a killer wave on the horizon.

Sure enough they came, springing from Smarty Pants’ lips, which seemed held in a permanent smile.

“Mrs. Jessup, were you originally aware of your husband’s escapades?”

He put his hand up as though stopping traffic.

“Let me be more precise. Did you know he was wantonly destroying property and putting innocent lives at risk?”

Emily opened her mouth to answer, but he continued.

“Did you in fact know he had been running around for over six months committing these shocking and callous crimes?”

Emily sucked in a deep breath, her chest expanding as air rushed into her lungs. Her throat felt tight and dry. She suddenly wished she’d taken one more gulp of water before she’d come up.

She couldn’t look at Bobby. Instead she fixed her stare on Mr. Smarty Pants’ sky blue tie sprinkled with tiny, white flowers. The tie seemed too cheery for the prosecutor, who’d now stopped his peacock strutting and stood only a few feet from her, his arms crossed.

“No, I didn’t know. Not in the beginning.”

He swung toward Bobby, and then back to her.

“So he deceived you. Breached your trust, would you say?”

“Yes, I guess, at first.” She hesitated, “But he had his reasons.”

“Oh, can you enlighten the court as to those reasons?”

“He was protecting me.”

“Ah, protecting you. Then presumably at some point he stopped protecting you and enlisted you, or forced you to accompany him. Then you left your children in the care of various strangers and joined him in his exploits. Have I got that right?”

The prosecutor walked over, leaned his elbow on the edge of the witness box, and stared straight at her, his face no more than a foot from hers.

“He did force you, didn’t he?”

Force her?

That was a funny way of wording it. If you call having no other choice
forced
, then, yes, she was
forced
. In fact, they were both
forced
if you put it that way.

Emily took another deep breath and counted to three. She’d watched Bobby take those deep breaths on a regular basis these past few months. He said they calmed him, filled him with certainty.

She took one more breath, so deep her chest hurt. Then her mind traveled back to that night, the one that changed her life, the night, which began with her not knowing and ended with her wishing she
didn’t
know.