I'll Stop the World (41)

Once I was settled in Mrs. Hanley’s guest bedroom—didn’t take long, given my complete lack of possessions—Rose revealed her ulterior motive for my lodging situation. The detached garage behind Mrs. Hanley’s house was blackened, blocked off with the tattered remnants of yellow police tape. The fire had occurred a few months earlier, but already the police had lost interest in their investigation, leaving the garage as a charred monument to indifference. Rose was adamant that the odds of there being two arsonists in a small town like Stone Lake were slim. She reasoned that it couldn’t hurt for me to live at the scene of the first crime, where I might stumble upon a clue that could help me solve the second.

Hence, Rose’s presence across a plastic patio table from me on Mrs. Hanley’s back deck, with a yellow legal pad and a pencil, the charred garage looming over her shoulder. “So,” she says, pencil poised to take notes, “tell me everything you know about the school fire.”

“Uh, should we really be talking out in the open like this?” Mrs. Hanley is in the living room with the television on, but the kitchen window is open. Plus, neighbors could walk by and overhear what is bound to be an absolutely unhinged conversation.

But Rose waves her hand. “It’s fine. She’s getting a little hard of hearing, and we can see if anyone is coming,” she says, gesturing to the empty backyards on either side of us.

“Okay,” I say, still feeling pretty dumb. On the other hand, I guess there’s nowhere we could have this conversation where it’d feel normal.

I take a deep breath and begin telling her what I know.

Unfortunately, it isn’t much.

Here’s the thing about my grandparents, and I don’t want to sound like some sort of monster, but the fact is I never really . . . cared how they died. I mean, obviously I knew the same broad strokes that everyone did, but to me, they were strangers. Strangers whose dramatic deaths led to getting a high school named after them, sure, but if anything, that made me even less interested to dig into the details of their lives. To be honest, until I was sitting here across from Rose and her #2 pencil, I’d never really considered them as people at all. They’ve always just been specters, determinedly haunting me no matter how much I wished they—and my entire messed-up family tree—would just go away.

Still, I do know some stuff, beyond just the normal things everyone in town knows, and it’s not because I’m interested, or because I’m related to them.

It’s because Stan. Is. Obsessed.

Look, I get that I’m not exactly fair to Stan or whatever—I don’t really think that’s true, but Alyssa does, and she’s right about most things—but I do not think I’m being even the slightest bit uncharitable when I say that it is freaking weird to have a full-fledged murder board in the basement, complete with red yarn and newspaper clippings and stalker-y black-and-white photographs that Stan probably took while disguised as a tree. Right?

Stan’s tried a bunch of times to pull me into his bizarre CSI delusion, insisting that it’s “important” that I be a part of it, but I’ve mostly managed to avoid getting sucked into the crazy with him. Still, when a murder board takes up half the room in which you do laundry, and you live with an obsessive true crime junkie, you tend to pick up a few things.

So here’s what I know: The fire started in the guidance office on Saturday, October 5, around 6:30 p.m. It was pretty amateurish; whoever did it just doused the carpet in high-proof liquor, then lit it with a cigarette. It was mostly concentrated in one corner of the room and could probably have even been contained by the fire department if they’d gotten there in time. But most of the town was off at some political thing—

“The debate?” Rose interrupts.

“The what?”

“The mayoral debate at the community center next Saturday night between my stepmom, Diane, and Franklin Gibson. Diane and Veronica have been preparing for it for weeks.” Rose wrinkles her nose. “What would Veronica have been doing at the high school at six thirty when the debate is supposed to start at seven?”

I shrug. “Maybe they saw the smoke on their way over and stopped to help?”

“The high school isn’t on the way to the community center from their house. They would’ve been driving in the complete wrong direction.” Rose pulls her dark ponytail over her shoulder and begins absently twirling a few strands around her finger. My chest tightens with a sudden pang. Alyssa plays with her hair when she’s thinking, too.

I wonder what she’s doing today. Is she still mad at me? Has she noticed I’m gone yet? Is she worried?

I clear my throat in an effort to banish the complicated emotions now clogging it up, and Rose looks at me in alarm. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, trying for a smile. “Just thinking about home.”

Something about the word—home—snags like a thorn. All I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember was a life other than the one I had. But since I knew it wasn’t possible, I never allowed myself to hope.

Then somehow, I got my wish. And now all I want is to go back.

How messed up is that?

Rose’s expression softens. “I’m sorry. This must be really hard.”

“Honestly,” I say, shaking my head a little, “I still don’t think I’ve wrapped my brain around it enough for it to be hard.”