Set the Night on Fire (4 page)

“Maybe it’s a false alarm.” Lila finished her drink.

“Maybe.” Annie didn’t look convinced. “Three engines, two trucks, that’s an initial alarm. With luck, it’ll be the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“The higher the alarm, the more serious the fire. For example, a three alarm fire could be as many as nine engines, six trucks . . . you know, multiples of three.”

“How do you know all that stuff?”

“Ben volunteers at the fire department. He loves it.”

An uneasy feeling spilled over Lila. She stood up and pitched her empty cup into the trash. “Well, it’s been great seeing you, Annie, but I’d better go. Merry Christmas.”

Annie nodded, as if she understood they’d exhausted the possibilities of superficial conversation, and it was time to go back into their separate worlds. She stood up and hugged Lila one more time. “I knew you’d go places, Lila. You were always such a go-getter. Give my love to your Dad. And have a great holiday.”

B
ut Lila never did give her father Annie’s love. She drove home, trying to quash her growing uneasiness. She turned on the radio, hoping classic rock would calm her. It didn’t. She snapped it off and cracked open the window. As she turned onto Willow Road, she thought she heard a kind of humming, as if a giant machine or pump had been turned on.

When she reached her street, her stomach pitched. Fire trucks and police cruisers lined both sides of the lane. It was impossible to pass. Red and blue lights strobed the air. Tinny voices filtered through radios and walkie-talkies. Firefighters lugged equipment. People, some of them her neighbors, milled at the corner.

She parked on Willow, threw herself out of the car, and sprinted toward the house. A uniformed cop blocked her path.

“Miss, miss . . . you can’t go any further. There’s a house fire!”

“I live here!” she shouted, and detoured around him.

The cop yelled and started after her. Lila kept going, her heart pumping. Tiny flakes of soot sifted through the air. Smoke started to crawl into her nose, throat, and eyes.

The house loomed into view. For a moment, everything looked the same—the stolid red brick with white shutters, and graceful columns in front. Then a plume of orange-red flame, and then another, shot up from the house, and everything became surreal. Hoses stretched from the fire trucks to the yard. Streams of water attacked the flames. Rolls of brownish gray smoke rose in the air. Men in thickly padded brown uniforms with iridescent stripes across their chests gathered at her front door.

She gazed at the scene, horror-stricken. The adrenaline that had fueled her run evaporated, and she felt dizzy, almost as if she might collapse. The cop who’d tried to block her caught up to her. “Miss, you need to come with me.”

“What . . . what happened?”

The cop steadied her with a hand on her arm. “Don’t know yet, but fire at this time of year is most likely a Christmas tree.”

She stared at the cop. The Christmas tree?  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The lights. “But I unplugged them.”

“What, ma’am?”

“The lights. They weren’t working. I went to buy new ones.” She remembered pulling out the plug to the Christmas lights. Had they overheated anyway? Or did she just imagine pulling the plug out of the wall? An iron band of pain clamped her head, just behind her eyes.

“Come with me,” the cop repeated.

She let the man lead her to another official. He was dressed differently from the others. White collar. Heavy jacket. The fire chief.

“Where’s my father? And my brother?”

The fire chief ran his tongue around his lips. It was a subtle move, but it was enough. The band of pain around her head tightened. Something jerked her arm. “What?”

One of the men squeezed her elbow. “Who was inside when you left?”

She couldn’t answer. Saying their names would seal their doom.

“Miss, do you understand what I’m saying?” She nodded. “Who was in the house?”

“My father . . . and my brother.”

Firemen hurried back and forth, looking like Michelin men. One stood in front of the house barking orders into a megaphone. Everywhere she looked were grim faces. She wanted to start over. Turn back the clock. If she raced back to the coffee shop, found Annie, and started chatting again, it would all disappear.

“Where were they?” the chief repeated. “Bedrooms? Kitchen?”

“My . . . my brother was in his bedroom when I left.”

“Where is it?”

Lila pointed to the second floor window. Flames were now licking the glass of his windows.

“And your father?”

“He was in his study. On the first floor. Near the . . . living room.”

An even grimmer look came over the fire chief. He turned around and quietly spoke into a shoulder lapel. She couldn’t hear the words.

An ambulance arrived. Two paramedics got out and conferred with the fire chief. They went to the back of the van, opened the rear doors, and pulled out two gurneys. Four firemen carried them to the front door and waited.

Lila started to rock back and forth.

* *

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, a call went out that the fire was under control. The firemen near the front door slipped masks on their faces, picked up the gurneys, and went inside. Five minutes later there was a commotion at the front door, and two firemen emerged with a gurney. A large plastic bag, curled up, lay on top. Something was inside the bag, curled in a fetal position.

Dear God, don’t let it be Daddy. But God wasn’t listening.

The firemen carried the gurney to the ambulance. One of the paramedics looped a stethoscope around his neck, bent down, and unzipped the bag. Seconds later, he shook his head and zipped it back up. A few minutes later, two other firemen came out with a second bag. She held her breath as the paramedic repeated the procedure. With the same results.

A black van, which somehow skirted the trucks and police cruisers, pulled into the driveway. The words “Cook County Medical Examiner” were stenciled on its side. Two men got out and joined the paramedics near the ambulance. Lila saw them gesture and nod.

A flake of snow swirled down in front of Lila. Then another. She couldn’t feel them. Or hear the hum of equipment, the shouting of firefighters. The only sound in her ears was the pumping of her heart. Loud. Accusatory. In her haste to prove she was the responsible child, the child who fixed things and made them right, she’d screwed it all up.

L
ila sat in her father’s office in the middle of January, staring out at the night. Hilliard and Associates occupied a suite of offices on the thirty-fifth floor of the Chase building in downtown Chicago. She’d spent most of the afternoon going through her father’s will with his lawyer, and now she was here to pick up his and Danny’s personal effects.

Her father had started the firm when she and Danny were babies living at Gramum’s. It began as a management consulting firm, but her father had a sixth sense about business and the ones that would be successful. Genial and persuasive, he also had a knack for making connections and attracting capital. Within five years his management consulting practice had evolved into financing new ventures.

At the beginning, he’d taken ownership percentages in lieu of fees. It paid off. The business expanded rapidly, and Casey Hilliard grew wealthy. He bought the house in Winnetka and moved everyone, including Gramum, into it. Though the business bore his name, it eventually became a partnership and was a highly successful venture capital firm for early-stage entrepreneurs, seeding companies all over the globe. Only recently, anticipating his retirement, had he begun to wean himself from his work.

It was after eight now. Lila had started sorting through Danny’s cubicle, one of a dozen running down the center of the floor. Her twin had objected to his humble trappings, of course, but her father had been adamant that Danny start at the bottom, just like everyone else.

“Lila didn’t,” Danny had whined one night when they were together for dinner.

“Stop comparing yourself to your sister,” their father admonished him. “You two are different.”

“Much to your embarrassment,” Danny fired back.

Their father shook his head and patiently explained that people rose to their zeniths at different points in their lives. Lila was a rising star, but Danny would outshine everyone, once he settled down.

Judging from the absence of personal items and decorations, though, Danny hadn’t settled down. He probably considered the job a way-station, a temporary breather between gigs. Lila wasn’t altogether unsympathetic—the cramped space reminded her of a horse’s stall in a barn.

The receptionist had thoughtfully supplied several cardboard boxes, and Lila packed his things: a brush, dental floss, a few pens, and a number of issues of
Entrepreneur Daily
. She found a Blackberry in his desk drawer, but when she tried to turn it on, nothing happened.

Story of Danny’s life.

She moved into her father’s office. His shelves held an eclectic assortment of books, including
The World is Flat
,
Freakonomics
, and a complete set of Shakespeare’s plays. A silver golf ball inscribed by someone Lila didn’t know sat on a shelf next to a cloisonné bowl that held paper clips and rubber bands. Lila smiled at that—she had the same thing on her desk at Peabody Stern. One wall was devoted to framed photos: her father shaking hands with Arab sheiks, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, even Donald Trump. She carefully wrapped them before putting them in a box.

On the bottom shelf was a grouping of framed photos of Danny and Lila: as babies in matching sailor suits, eight years old, fifteen, then separate photos of them as adults. Lila’s was a posed portrait taken when she joined Peabody Stern. She was wearing a navy business suit and white blouse, her smile cautious. The shot of Danny, taken in happier times, showed him on the deck of a sailboat. He was hoisting the sail and grinning broadly at the camera. He looked like he was attacking life and swallowing it whole. That was Danny. He was either in love with life or ready to throw it back in your face. She couldn’t recall smiling that broadly—ever. Work. Discipline. Responsibility. That was her mantra. But for what? So she could plan funerals for the people she loved? Pack their personal effects in cardboard boxes?

She watched the twinkling lights of a distant plane slowly arc across the night sky, then glide behind a tall building. Columns of white steam, silent and indifferent, rose from the buildings. The smoke from the fire at home had been brown.

She turned back to the desk. A file drawer on the right needed to be emptied. She dumped the manila folders into a box. There would be time to weed out client files and return them later. No one at the firm was applying any pressure, but she sensed they might if she took too long. Like her, they had a future to contemplate—without Casey Hilliard at the helm.

She gazed at her father’s computer. The fire had destroyed his laptop; with luck he’d backed everything up here. She’d have to determine which of his files were personal—it might affect the disposition of the estate. She was just booting up the machine when someone knocked at the door.

“Come in,” she called out.

A man about her own age peeked around. Sandy hair swept low across his forehead, dark brown eyes, an athletic build. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Hi.” He entered, extending his hand. “I’m Brian Kinnear. I worked with your father. I . . . I’m so sorry.”

Lila wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. He probably had no idea what it was like to lose a father. Or a brother. Still, he took the time to make the gesture. “Thank you.”

“You’re here late,” he said.

“What time is it?”

“After nine.”

“I didn’t realize . . . I should go.” She massaged her temples. “How about you? Do you always work the night shift?”

“My team has a presentation tomorrow.” He shrugged slightly as if apologizing for the fact that life goes on.

She waited.

“Your . . . your father was my mentor. He taught me everything. I just wanted to say again how sorry I am.”

Their eyes met. His expression was sad but kind. Now she remembered him. He’d been at the memorial service. Carrying a white handkerchief, which he stuffed into his pocket when he went through the receiving line.

He motioned toward the boxes. “It’s going okay?”

All except one was filled. “I still have to download his personal files from the computer.” She peered at the monitor and moved the mouse to the
My Computer
icon.

 “What will you do with them?”

 She looked over. Another decision to make. She’d been making so many:  the memorial service—although Aunt Valerie had helped; what to do with the house; how long to stay in Chicago. She didn’t know if she could handle another, even one as simple as where to store her father’s files. But Brian had a question on his face.

She sighed. “Burn them to a disc, I guess. Or email them to myself.”  She went back to the computer. There was a disc drive on the tower. She opened one desk drawer, then another. No CDs. She flipped up her palms. “Any idea where he kept blank CDs?”

“Why don’t I get you some from my office?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

While he went in search of discs, she sat down and moved the mouse to her father’s Internet browser. Might as well check her email. A second later, the Hilliard and Associates website popped up. It was the home page on his browser.

She leaned an elbow on the desk. It was a well-designed site, streamlined and graphically pleasing. They’d preserved as much white space as possible, and the font, in burgundy, was subdued but professional. The H&A logo sat inside in a box at the top with a graphic that looked like a Celtic knot. She’d always meant to ask him why he included it in the logo. With its overlapping knots and braids that seemed to lead nowhere, it was, at the very least, unusual. Now, she’d never have the chance.

A list of partners scrolled down the left side of the page, with links to their bios and areas of expertise. The other pages on the website were listed across the bottom of the page. The middle had only two lines of copy, a quotation:

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
Demosthenes (384 BC–322 BC)

She remembered when her father e-mailed her a link to the beta version of the site. He’d searched for the quotation for weeks, he claimed. When she said she liked it, he sounded pleased. And proud. Like a kid.

Brian came back with the CDs and handed them to Lila.

“I guess you’ll be taking Dad’s name off the website.”

“There’s no hurry,” he answered quickly, but the way he said it made her think the partners had already discussed it. “Our webmaster’s in India anyway.”

“India?”

He nodded.

Lila frowned. “You couldn’t find someone closer?” There were probably a dozen web designers in the Chase building alone.

“Your father wanted it that way. Lots of companies take advantage of offshore companies for customer service and web design. The cost savings are significant.”

“Of course.” She paused. “Dad was always in the vanguard.”

“That’s for sure.”

Lila took the CDs, fed them into the drive, and started clicking on various icons.

“So what are you going to do . . . when all this is over?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know.” Lila started to transfer a folder to the CD. “I took a leave of absence from Peabody Stern.” The truth was, with the proceeds of her father’s estate, she probably wouldn’t need to work. But she hadn’t quit her job. That would require another set of decisions, which she wasn’t capable of making yet.

“You know, if you’re interested, you could join us here.”

She looked up. He nodded as though to reinforce the offer.

“Come on. I’m not on your level. Not by a long shot.” He looked down quickly. She gazed at him. “They put you up to this, didn’t they?”

His ears and neck turned crimson.

“Please tell your partners I’m grateful. But I don’t need their . . . your pity.” 

“That’s not it. If you have half the skill your father does . . . did, we could use you.” 

She leaned back and crossed her arms.

“I didn’t mean to imply . . . you know, I’m really screwing this up.” He hung his head so ruefully Lila almost smiled.

“Okay. You get a pass for first-timer’s nerves.”

“Poor play preparation. You will think about it, though?”

This time she did smile. “I will. And, Brian . . . thanks.”