Fidelity (26 page)

Forrest would make her rich, and she would move away. What else could she do if her husband’s business was burned up? And any deal with Forrest would mean giving him the evidence. She wouldn’t ever be bothered again, and neither would Forrest. Whatever Forrest had done would be forgotten forever.

Hobart drove toward Emily Kramer’s house. When he was still several blocks away, he realized that was burning, too. The sky was bright with fire, and the flashing of lights from fire trucks and emergency vehicles. He parked on Vanowen past the intersection with the street that crossed hers. He looked up and down the street, then trotted across it to the sidewalk and walked toward the glow. As he approached on foot, he felt the odd breeze that came up around fires. A big, hot fire seemed to create its own weather, pulling in air and blowing it out in hot swirls.

When he reached Emily Kramer’s block, there was already a growing crowd of people standing around watching the firemen dragging hoses to the sides and back of the house. The roof and the upper floor where he had cornered her a couple of nights ago had burned through and collapsed into the big empty space of the living room, and now the flames were devouring splintered woodwork and broken two-by-fours and beams. The fire was burning now with such ferocity that he knew their biggest worry was that the hot sparks were being carried to the neighboring houses and yards.

Hobart paid no further attention to the fire. Instead he walked the street searching for Emily Kramer. He made his way among the gawkers, shouldering carefully past people in bathrobes and pajamas and sweatpants, making sure he gave none of them a reason to look directly at him. He kept himself between them and the glare of the fire, so their faces were illuminated and his was a dark shape that passed quickly across their vision.

Then he saw her. He kept walking as he stared at her. She was sitting in an official red car a half block from the house. She opened the passenger door and got out, then took a few steps and looked in the direction of her house. She stopped, as though she were a machine that had suddenly lost power and stalled. The sight she was staring at no longer looked much like a house, and she seemed to be trying to remember what it had looked like an hour ago.

The driver of the red car got out. He was wearing a fireman’s yellow turnout coat and carrying a clipboard. He saw Emily Kramer standing there and followed her eyes to the fire, and then stood there looking, too. It seemed to Hobart that the two of them must have been in the car doing an interview and neither of them had seen the house lately. The progress of the fire seemed to surprise them. The fireman reached into his car to retrieve his helmet, and then shut the door.

Another man got out of a car parked nearby, walked up to Emily Kramer, and put his arm around her shoulders, as though he were comforting her. Her reaction was revealing. She did not look up at the man or speak to him, and she didn’t express surprise. She simply let the man’s arm be around her, and stayed where she was, her eyes on the fire. She seemed to lean into him slightly, like a woman who was cold or tired might lean into a man she considered to be hers.

The fire had reached a kind of peak now that the big pieces of wood were bared and had fallen into a pile. The house was like a gigantic bonfire. Hobart kept moving. He kept his back to the flames as he moved along the street, then turned at the first corner to go to where he had left his rental car.

Hobart swung the car around to face the intersection with the side street so he would be able to see any vehicle driving away from the Kramer house onto the boulevard. He still wasn’t sure whether Emily Kramer had burned her house and her husband’s agency or not. If she had, she was a hell of an actress. But the fire certainly had been set, and what could that fireman talking to her in the car have been but an arson investigator? She might not know it yet, but she was under suspicion.

Hobart opened the side window of his car, lit a cigarette, and listened. Now and then, above the constant thrum of the big truck engines and the pumps, there would be shouts. The smoke coming up from the fire was still a swirl of black. The white clouds of steam had not replaced the black even now, and Jerry Hobart could tell that by the time the fire was out it wouldn’t much matter. The Kramer house was going to be a pile of charcoal.

He inhaled smoke from the cigarette and blew it slowly out into the night air. No matter what the reason for the fires, they were a problem for him, and so was the sudden appearance of this new man. Hobart had hoped that Emily Kramer was not interested in competing with him for Theodore Forrest’s money. Maybe that man she was with tonight had talked her into doing this. Trying to go eyeball-toeyeball with Hobart didn’t seem to be something she would have thought of on her own.

He put out his cigarette and found himself thinking about Valerie. He could always see Valerie’s face in his memory, even bring it back from different times of their lives. He could see her at fifteen or at twenty or at thirty, but she always seemed best to him as he had seen her last. As she broadened, her shape had the look of a woman, and the age on her face made her look smarter and softer. He hated it when she made fun of herself, saying she was old and losing her looks. It felt as though she was reminding him of his own age-the same as hers-and saying he was ugly, and at the same time telling him he was foolish and pitiful for hanging around a woman like her, instead of a newer model. He pictured her now, leaning into his car window as he prepared to drive off and leave her a few days ago.

He saw the cone-shaped beams of a pair of headlights appear from the direction of the Kramer house, and realized that the smoke must be lower now, spreading like a hazy smog on the boulevard. He closed his window. The car appeared at the intersection ahead of him and stopped, and he could see the driver. It was the tall man who had put his arm around Emily Kramer.

Hobart waited until the man had made the right turn onto Vanowen, then started his engine. He waited, watching the car move off. He could see there was a second, smaller person in the passenger seat. Hobart kept his eyes on the car, letting it get farther and farther away. A pair of cars passed him in the same direction. When the car was almost too far ahead to see, he turned on his headlights and followed.

He gained on it until he was about a quarter mile behind. When a truck came up behind him, he let the truck pass him, and then moved into the space behind it so the man with Emily Kramer would look in his rearview mirror and see the truck’s headlights and not Hobart’s.

Hobart followed the truck up the street for about two miles, keeping his eyes ahead on the car carrying Emily Kramer. When the truck in front of him turned off to the right, he sped up a bit and fell in with a pickup truck and an SUV, hiding by being part of the traffic instead of a single car for a time. The SUV peeled off to the left-turn lane, and a few blocks later the pickup coasted up the driveway and between the pumps of a gas station.

Hobart lay back in the right lane and kept his distance until the man made a right turn onto a side street. Hobart decreased his speed. He didn’t believe there was any chance the driver had noticed his set of headlights more than any of the others, but on a residential street this late at night, his car would be the only one. He made the turn after the man, pulled to the curb, turned off his headlights, and watched the man’s taillights until he turned again.

Hobart crept forward until he reached the corner where the other car had turned. He stopped at the stop sign and saw the car going into a driveway beside a house. He waited for fifteen minutes, drove around the block to go past the driveway where the car had gone, and noted the house number. The garage door was closed now. There was a dim light visible on the second floor of the house, but then it went out.

Jerry Hobart made the left turn at the corner, switched on his lights, and drove back out to Vanowen. He was tired, ready to go to his hotel and get into bed, but this had been a good night for him. Emily Kramer must have found the evidence her husband had hidden. Torching her own house and office could only be an attempt to make Hobart believe that the evidence was destroyed. He knew that she was spending time with a man, but he knew exactly where they were living. He could take her anytime he wanted to.

Ted Forrest reached Route 3 3 and passed west of Mendota just as the night was showing signs of giving way to the dim gray light before the sunrise. As he drove through the Central Valley, now and then his car would dip into a low, shallow pocket of fog. It was what the old people used to call the bean fog. In the days before heavy, efficient irrigation, the fog was a big source of free water for the vegetable crops.

He knew this highway so well that he descended into the basins of fog without slowing. He believed he would detect any obstacle blocking his lane in plenty of time, and if he couldn’t, he could veer off the road and let the car exhaust its momentum in the level rows of artichokes and radishes he had been passing for the last couple of miles.

When he reached a rise and recognized the long flat road ahead, he took his cell phone out of the glove compartment and turned it on. As it awoke, he heard the familiar musical tone, and then almost instantly, the one that said he had a message. He glanced at the screen: thirteen messages, twenty-one missed calls.

Forrest had already felt tired and anxious from his night’s work, and listening to the messages seemed like an insurmountable task. He decided not to listen to them. He would be home in a little while anyway. Then he changed his mind. He had to know if Kylie had called, and it wasn’t safe to leave her calls in his voice mail. He dialed the message number and the code, then listened.

“Ted.” It was Caroline’s voice, not Kylie’s. “I think you should come home right now. You know that we need to talk, and putting it off isn’t helping.”

He pressed the three key to erase it, and left his finger on the key while he listened to the next message. “It’s now seven o’clock. I’m going out for dinner with some friends. I assume that you heard my earlier message and decided to ignore it. Or maybe you left your phone off all day, which amounts to the same thing. I won’t be home before ten, but you can call my cell number.”

He listened to the next call. At first there was near silence, but he could hear a woman breathing, and sounds that could be traffic. Then she said, “Sorry I missed your call during business hours, Mr. Forrest.” It was Kylie. “I was still at violin practice and then I went to work, and didn’t get a chance to check messages. I’ll be available and waiting for your call from now until tomorrow.” She didn’t seem to know how to end her message. “This is Kylie Miller. My number is-” He hit the three and erased it.

Next there were eight more calls from Caroline, each one just a second or two. “Call me,” or “It’s Caroline,” “Me again,” and once, “Shit!” Her final call was at three in the morning-he looked at his watch-about fortyfive minutes ago. That was good. She had probably given up and gone to sleep. He could go in, take another of the spare bedrooms, and get some sleep, too.

He remembered that when he had left he had resolved to check Kylie’s voice mail to be sure she had erased his call from yesterday. He took his eyes off the road long enough to dial her mailbox number, then her phone number. On the first call, a young girl’s voice said, “Hey, Kyl. This is Tina. Get back to me on the party tonight.” The time on the call was six fifteen. Why had Kylie’s phone not been on at six fifteen? Oh, yes. He remembered. Violin lesson. His own message had been left in the morning, so if she had neglected to erase it, he would already have heard it.

He still didn’t hang up.

The next message was the same voice: “Kylie? Do you still want a ride tonight? Call me.” Ted Forrest felt his breathing become shallow, and noticed a hollow feeling in his stomach. He told himself it was all right. He had called her early and left his message that he would be gone. She had erased it, tried to call him back, and then decided to go to a party with her girlfriend Tina. He had heard of Tina, he thought. Kylie talked constantly, but it was like a cat purring, just a steady sound that come out because she was comfortable and contented. He had not listened to her anecdotes closely enough to know all the names with confidence.

He knew that he should be delighted. It wasn’t good for a young girl to be isolated from friends her own age. It might even make her feel restless and tired of him, her young mind reacting to get what it needed, the way a growing body did when it was missing some nutrient. Going to a party was good in a dozen ways. Kylie was gregarious and had lots of friends. If a few of them started to notice that she was hardly ever available in the evening, they might begin to talk. That was probably the danger he had to worry about most because it was out of his control. If they talked, the gossip would eventually reach one of her friends’ mothers.

But he couldn’t keep from feeling a blind, galloping sort of jealousy. He knew that there was no realistic hope of keeping Kylie away from boys her age, and absolutely no chance that any of them wouldn’t be interested in her.

He kept listening. “Kylie, this is Mark. I was wondering if you were doing anything on Friday. My number is-” Forrest erased the call.

Forrest erased two more calls from boys, and one from a girl who sounded too giggly to be a safe, sensible companion, and who invited Kylie to “hang out” because Hunter and Shane were going to be there.

When he had heard all of the messages he put his phone in his pocket and began to feel a manic energy. He knew it was only the shallow, nervous agitation that came from too many hours at the wheel. He had driven all the way to Los Angeles, spent a night awake there, and driven all the way back, all in changing states of worry or fear or excitement.

But he had done it. He had managed to burn both the Kramer house and the office in one night. He had destroyed the evidence that Phil Kramer had wanted to use to blackmail him, and probably any secret copies that Kramer had never intended to hand over. If Philip Kramer had been devious enough to hide the evidence in a third place, then Kramer had defeated himself. If it hadn’t turned up by now, then he had not left word where it was hidden. It would stay hidden forever.