“Did Toby happen to specify what he was going to burn down?” Jameson asked.
“No.” Zara kept her reply curt. “But right before they got to Rockaway Watch, he purchased a great deal of accelerant.”
He set the fire. He killed them all. “Was that in the police report?” I managed to ask. “What Toby said about burning it all down—did the police know?”
“No,” Zara replied. “The woman Toby said that to—she had no idea who he was. Even when our private investigators tracked her down, she remained entirely in the dark. The police never found her. They never had motive. But they knew about the accelerant. From what the arson investigators were able to tell, the house on Hawthorne Island had been thoroughly soaked. The gas had been turned on.”
I felt my hand pressing to my mouth. A sound escaped around my fingers, somewhere between a horrified gasp and a mewl.
“Toby wasn’t an idiot.” Jameson’s expression was sharp. “Unless this was some kind of suicide pact, he would have had a contingency plan to make sure that he and his friends weren’t caught in the flames.”
Zara closed her eyes tightly. “That’s the thing,” she whispered. “The house was soaked in accelerant. The gas was turned on—but no one ever lit a match. There was a lightning storm that night. Toby might well have been planning to burn down the house from a safe distance. The others might have helped him. But none of them actually set the fire.”
“Lightning,” Xander said, horrified. “If the gas was already on, if they’d soaked the floorboards in accelerant…”
I could see it in my mind. Had the house exploded? Had they still been inside, or had the fire spread quickly across the island?
“For months, my father believed that Toby truly had died. He convinced the police to bury the report. It wasn’t arson, not technically. At best, it was attempted arson.”
And they’d never gotten to finish the attempt.
“Why didn’t the police just blame it on the lightning?” I asked. I’d read the articles in the press. They hadn’t mentioned the weather. The picture they’d painted was one in which a teenage party had gotten out of hand. Three upstanding boys had died—and one not-so-upstanding girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“The house went up like a fireball,” Zara replied evenly. “They could see it from the mainland. It was obvious it wasn’t just a lightning strike. And the girl who was there with them, Kaylie Rooney, she’d just gotten out of juvenile detention for arson. It was easier to deflect blame toward her than to try to pin it on nature.”
“If she was a juvenile,” Xander said slowly, “the record would have been sealed.”
“The old man unsealed it.” Jameson didn’t phrase that as a question. “Anything to protect the family name.”
I could understand why my mother’s mother had called Tobias Hawthorne’s fortune blood money. Had he left it to me in part out of guilt?
“I wouldn’t feel too sorry for Kaylie Rooney,” Zara said coldly. “What happened to her—what happened to all of them—it was a tragedy, of course, but she was far from innocent. From what the investigator was able to piece together, the Rooney family runs just about every drug that comes through Rockaway Watch. They have a reputation for being merciless, and Kaylie was almost certainly already elbow-deep in the family business.”
If my worthless daughter had taught you the first damn thing about this family, you wouldn’t dare have dialed my number. The conversation I’d had that afternoon came back to me.
If that little bitch hadn’t run, I would have put a bullet in her myself.
If what Zara was saying about my mother’s family was true, that statement probably wasn’t metaphorical.
“What about the fisherman who pulled Toby from the water?” I asked, trying to concentrate on the facts of the case and not think too long or hard about where my mom had come from. “Did the file elaborate on that at all?”
“The storm was severe that night,” Zara replied. “Initially, my father believed there were no boats out, but eventually the investigator talked to someone who swore that there was one boat on the water during the storm. Its owner was practically a shut-in. He lives in a shack near an old abandoned lighthouse in Rockaway Watch. The locals steer clear of him. Based on the investigator’s discussions with townsfolk, most seem to think he’s not quite well in the head. Hence, taking his boat out that night, in the midst of a man-killing storm.”