I lingered near the front door, arms crossed, ready to make a run for it if necessary.
“Your mother said she wanted to talk one-on-one. She was very specific about not involving you. She made me swear I wouldn’t drag you into it. Her words.” Tom glanced around quickly, as if my mother might be hiding on the staircase, ready to chastise him for breaking his promise. “We only talked for half an hour. Your mom said—essentially, she said there’s something about Fiona the world doesn’t know, and she wants to share it. Your mother was offering me the chance to break the story for her.”
“Why you?” I asked it before I could stop myself, the accusation blunt.
Tom smiled, chagrined.
“Sorry,” I said. “It just sounds like a big story. If my mother was going to take a risk like this, she’d have made sure everything was perfect. She’d have approached the biggest paper she could find.” Not the Kansas City Telegraph hung there unsaid.
“I’ve written a lot about the Homestead over the years. It’s not like I’m going to win a Pulitzer, but it caught your mother’s eye.” A spark of defiance when he said this.
“You never interviewed me,” I pointed out.
“Not for lack of trying. I called your house when you were accepted to the University of Chicago and left my info, just in case. In fact,” he said slowly, “maybe that’s where your mother got my number. From your machine.”
I watched him put the pieces together, his expression deflating. The possibility that my mother had reached out to him because of sheer coincidence, and not because she’d loved his work. My mother could do that to you. Pop the bubble of your ego. I could’ve warned him.
“So did you say you’d work with her?” I pressed.
“Of fucking course,” Tom said. “Pardon my French. But after that first conversation, she never called back. I waited every day. I followed up a few times, but she never responded. It was like that call never even happened. Then I saw the fire on the news and … here we are.”
The dark house. The damp rooms that still held a shadow of heat. “Here we are,” I repeated. “Okay. Must’ve been a big disappointment. I mean, my mom says she’ll work with you, then she vanishes on you? Did you ever come by the house? Maybe try a little too hard to get in touch?”
He blinked, his expression passing through wounded surprise and into a stony hurt. “No. Of course not. I wouldn’t do that, I respected her privacy. I’m not a—I wouldn’t do that.”
“All right,” I said, letting my doubt hang there. “If you say so.”
“Hey, I’m only here to help you find your mom,” Tom said. “That’s it. If you don’t want me here, just say so.”
I hesitated. I was surprised by how reluctant I was to see him go; he was my only connection to my mother right now. “You really don’t have any idea why my mother was interested in Fiona?”
“Not a clue. Your mother was careful. She wasn’t going to give me anything until she was good and ready.”
“She’s always been skilled at withholding.” I sighed and pushed my hair off my face. “Whatever it is, it must be big. Because I’ve had a lot of time to sit around this house waiting for you, and … I’m pretty sure this fire wasn’t an accident.”
He lifted his eyebrows, gave a low whistle. “Big claim. How do you figure?”
“My mom was terrified of fire. For obvious reasons, right? She unplugged the lamps and the coffee maker every night before she went to sleep. She never used a space heater or lit a candle. Ever. I know they’ll try to pass this off as an accident, but it wasn’t.”
“I’m sure the police will take it seriously.”
“You want to bet? The local chief of police hasn’t taken anything seriously since we moved here. He’s only equipped for the occasional domestic dispute or—or a cat stuck up a tree. This is way outside of his usual expertise.”
He nodded slowly. “Do you have any enemies around town?”
I laughed, swift and bitter. “Yeah, you could say that.” There’d been graffiti. Kids who’d follow me home yelling names at me. Freak, monster, devil baby, whatever. Someone once smashed a bunch of test tubes in front of our house on Halloween. “But I don’t think this was vandalism,” I said. “There’s no V pattern. The geometry is all off. A fire will extend upwards from the point where it was set”—I sketched this out with my hands, broad sweeps—“but this fire doesn’t have a pattern. It’s like it started everywhere at once.” Uneasy, I remembered that bird with its one singed wing.