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.”
“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.”