I'll Stop the World (42)

“We’ll get you back,” Rose says confidently, leaning across the table to give my shoulder a reassuring—if slightly awkward—pat. “I promise.”

“Thanks,” I say, wishing I shared her certainty. About anything.

I shift in my chair, tapping a finger on her legal pad, needing to give my thoughts another track to tear down instead of the dangerous one they’re on. “Anyway, I don’t know why they were there, but for some reason they were, and they went inside.”

“What about Millie?”

Millie. So that’s what Mom’s parents called her. Not Lissa, short for Millicent, which she goes by now. Millie. I wonder if she knows that used to be her name.

“They left her in the car.”

“Veronica wouldn’t do that.”

I shrug, not knowing what else to say. This is one of the facts of the case I’m clearest on. Mom was found in the back seat of their still-running car in the middle of the parking lot while her parents burned to death inside. It’s not a detail you can really forget.

“All I know is what happened,” I say. “The police think the arsonist attacked Bill—coroner’s report said he suffered a head injury before he died—and then Veronica died trying to get him out. But I don’t know anything about why they were there or what made them do any of the things they did.”

Rose lets out a frustrated sigh but lowers her head to make more notes on her pad, chewing on her lower lip as she scratches away with her pencil. “Fine. So that’s what happened. Did the police ever figure out who did it?”

I sigh. “Depends on what you believe.”

Shortly after the fire, the sheriff’s department arrested a guy named Michael McMillain, a janitor at the school who, it turned out, had previously served two years in prison for marijuana possession and lied about it on his job application. He’d been fired the day before, which seemed like a decent enough motivation. McMillain’s lawyer argued that his conviction as a teenager was irrelevant, but it didn’t do him any good. Between his lack of an alibi—he claimed he was home alone during the time of the fire—and the town’s ravenous need to convict someone, he never stood a chance. He spent the next thirty-two years in prison.

Stan went to visit him a few times, and even tried to get me to go with him a couple of times after McMillain was released. I always refused. Didn’t see the point.

The thing is, Stan was convinced that McMillain was innocent. He wouldn’t even put his photo up on the murder board. Thirty-eight years later, Stan still hasn’t been able to come up with a convincing theory of who may have set the fire, but he continues to stubbornly maintain that it wasn’t Michael McMillain.

Rose taps her pencil against her lips after I tell her all this, thinking. “So what about Mrs. Hanley’s fire? Did the police think he set that one, too?”

I shrug. “I don’t think so. I only ever remember Stan talking about the school fire in connection with McMillain’s case. I don’t think I ever heard him talk about another fire at all.”

“So he didn’t think the two were connected?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Rose grumbles something unintelligible under her breath as she makes more notes, her brow furrowed. Now it’s my turn to ask, “What’s wrong?”

She sighs. “The police think Mrs. Hanley started the fire herself.”

“Seriously? Why?”

“To get the insurance money. They figured her husband had recently died, she was living on a fixed income, so she decided she may as well burn down a garage full of old stuff she didn’t use in exchange for a little more cash. But they don’t know Mrs. Hanley. All her old photographs of her husband and kids were in there. All their old art projects and report cards and Christmas ornaments. There’s no way she would have destroyed all that on purpose.”

I press my lips together, considering. I haven’t known Rose for long, but I can already tell she has a lot more faith in humanity than I do. “I don’t know,” I say slowly, thinking back to my tenth birthday, when a neighbor gave me their used Xbox and a bunch of games. I had it a week before Mom sold it for booze money. “Money can be a pretty powerful motivator.”

“She didn’t even get any money, though. The insurance company won’t pay since they think she did it herself.”

“Well, yeah, but she wouldn’t have known that at the time. She could have thought—”

“She didn’t set the fire, Justin!”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I was there.” She sighs, looking over at the charred garage, her eyes full of regret. “I was there that day,” she says wistfully, “and I couldn’t do anything to help.”





Interlude

ROSE, THREE MONTHS EARLIER

“This sucks,” Noah said, tossing another rust-stained rag onto the rapidly growing pile. He pulled the back of his arm across his dripping brow, leaving a smear of grime on his sweaty skin.

Rose continued scrubbing away at the leg of a chair, hair escaping from her purple scrunchie in damp tendrils that clung to her face like creeping vines. “It’s not so bad,” she said, panting slightly. Her skin felt hot, like she was burning up from the inside.

“We’ve been working at this for hours, and we’ve barely made a dent,” Noah said, plucking a new rag out of the laundry basket between them and tipping the tin of WD-40 onto it. They were using ripped-up, old T-shirts that had been culled from the donation bin at church for being too tattered to give away. There was always a pile of such things after every clothing drive, with well-meaning but oblivious people hauling in plastic bags of their trash because “someone might want it.”