“I do my best,” I say.
“Open up,” she says, shining the light into my throat. “You need to get to the ER.”
I have an $8,000 deductible on my insurance. I’m not going anywhere near the ER. “I’ll be fine.”
“Your face is covered with blood. You have an open contusion on your forehead. And your lungs are filled with smoke. Two choices: You can ride in the ambulance or come with me. The ambulance costs extra, though.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Good call.”
One of the EMTs waves to Hadley. “Sit tight and breathe deeply,” she says, leaving me by the tree.
A fire truck pulls in behind the ambulance, and another team of firefighters uncoils a hose along the shore. Seton joins me and slides onto the ground. “They think my mom’ll make it through this,” she says, closing her eyes. “How did you wind up here, anyway?”
Some of the events of the morning are still hazy, but they begin to return to me as I tell her about leaving Idlewood and jogging to the Ridge Trail, pointing to where the rock face spills from the peaks above us. “I was at the overlook and thought I smelled a cigarette until smoke started billowing from the shore. By the time I got here, the whole house was in flames.”
Seton swears under her breath and moves a lock of hair from my forehead. “That’s a nasty cut.”
The wound throbs the moment she mentions it, but I don’t mind, especially if it means having Seton this close. These moments between us pop up when I least expect them, offering fleeting glimpses of possibility. I lay my hand over hers. Seton closes her eyes. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
She rests her forehead against mine. Pain shoots through my temples.
“Ow!” I say.
“Sorry,” Seton says, shifting away to signify a return to the friend zone, a dance we’ve mastered. I wonder what would happen if one of us chose to seize one of these moments, if we followed our feelings wherever they might lead us. I wonder if our relationship would survive.
“My mom’s done it this time,” Seton says. “First, she took a sledgehammer to those cameras. And today, with the security system gone, she started a fire.” She catches herself. “Are you recording this?”
I shake my head. “I don’t have my phone,” I say as the final memories of this morning snap into place: the noise behind me, the swing of a tree branch. I glance around the cove, trying to make sense of it.
“What?” Seton asks.
“The boat was already here,” I say. “It was tied to the dock.”
“Yeah,” Seton says. “Because my mom was here.”
But Mrs. Haviland was in the burning house, not on the shore with me. “Your mother stumbled out of the house and collapsed in the courtyard,” I say. “Then I heard a noise and saw a tree limb swinging toward me. Someone attacked me, but it wasn’t your mother.”
Seton stands and faces the fire. “That means someone else was here,” she says. “But who?”
Chapter Ten
As each sweep of the fire hose washes more of the crime scene into the lake, Seton snaps photos of what evidence she can, including her mother’s boat. When she returns to where I slump against the tree trunk, she faces the bare rock face above us. “You had a view of the whole lake from up there, Charlie,” she says. “What did you see?”
“Therewasa boat on the water.” I take a moment to reconstruct the scene in my mind, still not trusting my memory. “It was heading toward the cove.”
“Maybe you saw my mom drivingtowardthe fire. Maybe one of those lanterns drifted into the house and smoldered all night.”
That could be true, but it wouldn’t explain who walloped me in the head.
Seton asks, “Is there anyone who has a score to settle with your family? Or with Paul?” She pauses. “Besides my mom, that is.”
“You’d know better than I. You’re the one who lives here,” I say as I remember the man who came by the site yesterday in the truck, the one my mother couldn’t get rid of fast enough. “Don’t get mad, get Moodey,” I say.
“Vance Moodey,” Seton says. “What about him?”
