House on Fire--A Novel Read online

  “He said he’s worried about you. He said private investigators work close to the bone and often have to lay off their employees. Could you write the board a letter assuring them I’ve got steady employment for the foreseeable future?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Write it up for me and I’ll sign whatever. What’s wrong with your credit history?”

  “Nothing. I pay on time. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Anyway, how’d it go today?”

  I gave her a quick download on the Neptune Seafood partners, Mort Vallison and Herb Martz, and how the two of them got arrested.

  She said, “This Liz Rodriguez from the Staties?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “So you won’t get paid for any of the work. You’re just doing a good deed. Being a good citizen.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time to ask, but . . . are we financially solvent?”

  “Sure. As long as I don’t need to hire anybody else, we’re doing okay.” Could we have been doing a little better? Sure. But I still refused to handle things like divorce cases, and maybe it was time to get over that particular exception. Matrimonial jobs could be lucrative, but they always made me feel grubby. I did private intelligence work. That did not include putting a GPS tracker on a straying spouse’s car.

  I had standards. Or so I told myself.

  On the way to my desk, my intercom sounded. “It’s Patty Lenehan,” Jillian announced over the speaker. “She’s calling from a Cape Cod number.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  If it was Patty Lenehan, I knew it was important.

  Patty was married to Sean Lenehan, who’d been a member of my Special Forces A-team. He saved my life once, in Afghanistan, and you don’t easily forget something like that. I was the godfather to one of his kids. I was their uncle Nick.

  Sean came back from Afghanistan and Iraq four tours after I left and soon thereafter developed a drug problem. Like millions of Americans, he became addicted to opioids. The epidemic is particularly bad on Cape Cod. But the Department of Veterans Affairs there proved to be no help. And he didn’t have any money. So I paid for an expensive course of treatment at a pricy rehab center in Falmouth called Fresh Beginnings or something.

  Getting him to agree to rehab—that had been the hard part. It was a macho, Special Forces thing: never admit to any chinks in your armor. So I spent a fair amount of time in Westham, trying to convince him. Along the way, I got to know his kids. Finally he consented, and three months in rehab really seemed to do the trick. The past year, I thought he’d remained clean. I just hoped he hadn’t backslid.

  I answered the call. “Patty, is everything okay?”

  “Nick? Please. How soon can you get here?”

  “How soon do you need me?” I mentally ran through the list of client meetings and phone calls I’d scheduled. Which ones I could reschedule and which ones I couldn’t.

  Her voice had gotten high and small. I barely heard what she said and almost asked her to repeat it, until it sank in.

  “He’s—dead,” she said. “Overdose.”

  3

  I thought he was clean.”

  “So did I.”

  “The kids—never mind. I’m going to leave Boston now. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  “Thank you, Nick,” Patty said. “The kids really need to see you. Stay at our place. The guest room’s free.”

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour later I was in my Land Rover Defender 90, driving along the Southeast Expressway toward Cape Cod and Sean’s house.

  I was shocked yet not shocked to hear that Sean had died. I thought he’d successfully gotten free of an insidious opioid addiction. But he’d died from an overdose. It was easy to relapse.

  His death wasn’t just heartbreaking, it was infuriating.

  I liked him a lot. Most people did. He was a natural extrovert, very friendly, very funny, very smart. I used to imagine him running for office, becoming a state rep or a congressman or something. He had the right personality for it.

  Sean was stocky, and strong, and short. Like a lot of the guys in the Special Forces. He had a baby face, and it took forever for his beard to become visible. When it came in, it was a scraggly, patchy mess.

  He and I joined the army at the same time, in what’s called the 18 X-ray program, which was then sort of a new thing. It was an accelerated path into the elite Special Forces. You used to have to join the army and make the grade of E-4 before you could even apply to join it. Instead, in the 18X program, if you’d done some college, you could apply to try out for the Green Berets. The army was recruiting scholar-athletes—the ideal being the PhD who could win a bar fight, or so the joke went. Smart kids who also played football or ran track. That didn’t quite describe me, since I was a pretty mediocre student. But I was a dropout from Yale, which must have intrigued the recruitment office. I was nineteen.

  You went through basic training at Fort Benning plus advanced individual training in one seventeen-week course. Then to jump school for a few weeks—five static-line jumps—and then you’re shipped to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where you go through the unique torture that is Special Forces training.

  Those of you who are left in the program, that is. More than sixty percent of the candidates drop out along the way. You went on long rucksack marches. You went slogging through the swamp. You were constantly wet and cold and exhausted and desperate for sleep. The process weeded out the weak of body and spirit. Sean endured the whole drill without complaining. He always seemed happy despite it all. He’d make jokes to jolly everyone else up.

  I’d been so surprised, at first, that someone that strong could succumb to pain pills.

  After we qualified for the Special Forces, Sean and I were assigned to the same A-team. I was the junior weapons sergeant for some reason—I guess I demonstrated competency in weapons handling, though I was and am no gun nut. (Later I went through the training and became the intel sergeant, which seemed a more natural fit.)

  Sean was the junior engineer, which meant he worked with demolitions. He was our breacher: he blew up doors and walls so we could go in.

  All those years of working closely with explosives must have done damage to his brain. At least, that’s the theory. It’s called breacher syndrome. Repeated exposure to low-level blasts can cause traumatic brain injury. He came back with terrible headaches, shooting pain in his forehead. He also started getting regular migraines. A doctor at the VA hospital prescribed Oxydone, a nasal inhaler that dispenses a powerful opiate quickly, and just like that, Sean was hooked.

  I should have checked in with Patty weeks ago. I guess I was figuring that if he was back on drugs, she’d let me know. I obviously figured wrong. I was angry at myself for not staying more closely in touch.

  He saved my life once; I should have been able to save his.

  4

  I drove past Sidney’s Clam Shack (Voted best fried clams on the Cape!), a few motels with VACANCY signs, and competing beach-toy stores on either side of the road that were both shuttered now that summer had passed. I drove carefully and at exactly forty miles an hour. Westham was a famous speed trap, crawling with cops waiting to ticket summer visitors for driving two miles an hour over the speed limit. This was the off-season, but the Westham cops would probably be even more aggressive than usual given the scarcity of prey.

  When I rang the doorbell, Patty flung open the screen door and hugged me, hard. She was a small, compact brunette, a former high school cheerleader who ran almost every day. She was a nurse at Cape Cod Hospital and worked long hours, and she seemed to have an infinite supply of energy. Like a lot of military wives whose husbands were gone so much, she ran the house; she had no choice.

  But now you could see she was depleted, her eyelids heavy, her eyes swollen
. Her mascara was smeared. She was still in her hospital scrubs. Her kids were swarming and bickering behind her.

  “Thank you, Nick,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For being here.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  Brendan was ten, and the oldest. He was a cool, smart kid whose dad had been deployed for much of his childhood. And when Sean got back, he soon became an opioid addict. So for much of Brendan’s life, his father was absent, in one way or another. I was Brendan’s godfather and his surrogate dad. I was sort of a surrogate dad to his brother, Andrew, and his sister, Molly, too.

  I know I’m never going to have children—I don’t want them, thanks—but I admit to getting a paternal glow from helping these kids out. My nephew, Gabe, is the closest I’ll ever come to having my own. I love him dearly, but he’s an odd one.

  I felt terrible for Brendan and his siblings. Normally, when I came by their house, Brendan would come running. Not like when he was four or five, literally racing through the house to fling himself at me. But still, he hustled and beamed. This time he was hanging back. His eyes looked bruised. He was mournful and distant, just like his mother. Brendan was often called on to be the man of the family with Dad gone a lot, and he took it seriously.

  I stepped into the room and hugged Brendan and then Molly, who was eight and just as tall and played soccer. “Where’d Andrew go?” I said. I could see Andrew, six, hiding behind the La-Z-Boy recliner. “He just disappeared.”

  Andrew burst out laughing. He didn’t seem to be sad at all. I wondered if he was too young, if he just didn’t get the enormity of what had happened to him.

  “Andrew’s being annoying,” Brendan said.

  Andrew ran over to me and hugged me around the legs. “When’s Daddy coming back?” he said, his words muffled.

  Oh, he understood something.

  “Baby,” Patty said, “Daddy’s not coming back. He’s in Heaven, honey.”

  “No!” Andrew said, correcting her as if it were obvious. “He’s coming back. Daddy always goes away, and he always comes back.”

  “Dad’s dead,” Brendan snapped, stunning everyone into silence.

  “Hey, Bren,” I said. “How’s the coin collection?”

  He turned to me. “I got the new proof set—you wanna see?”

  “I would.”

  We went to his room, where he pulled out from a desk drawer the latest additions to his coin collection and made sure I understood their importance. How all the proof coins bore the “S” mark of the U.S. Mint at San Francisco. The special-edition Lincoln penny struck with the “W” mark of the West Point Mint. When he finally fell silent, I said, “I know how hard it must be to lose your daddy.”

  “But isn’t your dad still alive?”

  “He is,” I admitted.

  “What about your mom?”

  “She’s alive too. Lives outside of Boston.”

  There was a pause. “Isn’t your dad in prison?”

  “Yep.”

  “Was he in prison when you were growing up?”

  “Part of it. When I was a teenager he fled the country, went into hiding. Left us with nothing. Eventually the good guys caught up with him in Switzerland.”

  “‘The good guys’?” Brendan smiled. “Was your dad a bad guy?”

  “Very much.”

  “But he’s alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Did Mom tell you how Dad died?”

  I hesitated. Had she told Brendan? I wondered. He kept talking. “It was an overdose. He was back on the drugs. I knew it. I knew he was. I could always tell when he was using.”

  I nodded.

  “He’d get all sad and really angry, and him and Mom used to fight all the time. I don’t—I don’t understand, Uncle Nick. Why’d he do it?”

  “Because he was an addict, and it’s really hard to quit some of those drugs.”

  “No. Why’d he go and . . . kill himself?”

  “I’m not so sure he did.”

  “He took an overdose.”

  “But it’s really easy to do that by accident. Even if he didn’t mean to.”

  “But we really needed him! Why did he do it?”

  “He couldn’t help it.” A long moment passed, and then I said, “He was really proud of you, you know that?”

  Brendan’s face had gone red. He’d begun to weep silently. Tears were dripping off his cheeks. He shook his head.

  I went on. “He was. He was always telling his friends stories about you. Like how you insisted on carving the Thanksgiving turkey? And your mom didn’t want you to use the big sharp knife? But you did it anyway and you did it perfectly. Didn’t even cut yourself. He was so proud of you.”

  Brendan clamped his hands over his face. “He showed . . . He showed . . .” He was choking out the words and finally got out: “He showed it in a great way, huh?” he said with bitter sarcasm.

  I went back downstairs to the family room with Patty. It was a cozy, crowded place with a fireplace, an orange shag carpet, a big TV.

  “‘He always comes back,’” Patty said, quoting her younger son. “Do you know what Andrew means? He’s talking about the Oxy. He’s talking about how even when his dad was here, he was gone.”

  “So he knows?”

  “He’s seen the light go out in his father’s eyes. The way he’d disappear for days at a time. Then come back. But he just doesn’t know that this time, Daddy’s not coming back.”

  “Patty, I talked to Sean three weeks ago and he seemed fine. He was off the pills. He said the rehab worked.”

  “Yeah, but you know how precarious addiction and recovery can be. He wasn’t strong enough. He gave in to it. Went back to it. Then got fired. From the construction crew.”

  “You mean, laid off?” Cape Cod contractors worked a seasonal, cyclical business.

  “Fired. Couple days ago. He’d gone back to using, and his boss could see it.” She paused, turned away, and suddenly broke down in tears. I put my arms around her. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  There had always been a spark between Patty and me, but neither one of us ever acknowledged it or acted upon it. That would have been the ultimate betrayal of my comrade, off fighting the war after I’d come back, and that was unthinkable. Still, she had lively eyes and an irresistible smile, and her daily running kept her in great shape.

  She said, her words muffled against my shirt, “I found him passed out on the bathroom floor. Overdosed on an Oxydone inhaler.”

  “Did the kids see him?”

  She sniffed, pulled away. Shook her head. “They were at school, thank God. He’d bought the Oxy off another vet whose doctor prescribed him twice as much as he needed.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I just have to hold it together for the kids. When you have kids, you don’t get to fall apart.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not a parent; you can’t really know.”

  “Fair enough. But I think I understand.”

  “You understood Sean, that’s the thing. Sometimes I felt you knew him better than I did. What you two went through together.”

  I nodded, attempted a smile.

  “It’s gonna take all the energy I have just to get up in the morning and get through the day,” she said.

  I nodded again.

  She’d moved over to a corner of the family room where a small writing desk was stacked with envelopes and staplers and a Scotch-tape dispenser and a calculator. She picked up one stack and waved it.

  “The funeral home wants twenty thousand bucks. That’s twenty thousand bucks I don’t have. He used up all our savings on drugs.”

  “Twenty thousand? For what?”

  “Well, eighteen, to be exact. A couple years ago Sean saw
a flier somewhere advertising free burial for vets in the national cemetery in Bourne. You may now prequalify! it said. He wanted to plan for the future. So the funeral home sold him what they called a pre-need funeral contract. I guess he didn’t really look at the fine print. So now I have to come up with eighteen thousand bucks on top of whatever Brendan’s braces are going to cost.”

  “I’m happy to loan you whatever you need,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure how liquid I was these days. Business had been slow.

  I took the top envelope from the stack she’d been waving. Haddad Funeral Home. I opened up the bill and read it over.

  “I’m not taking a loan from you, Nick,” she said.

  “Interesting,” I said, slipping the statement back into the envelope. I took note of Haddad Funeral Home’s address in Orleans, Massachusetts. “Mind if I borrow this?”

  “No, you’re not paying them a visit. It’s my problem, not yours.”

  I gave her the envelope back. “Okay. Hey, I’m keeping you from your kids, aren’t I?”

  “More like protecting me from them. Nick, do you think Sean always had this . . . weakness? Was he always like this?”

  She meant the drugs.

  “People change, Patty.”

  “You think?”

  “When he came back the last time, he was different. All that breaching, all those explosives, all those years—I think it did something to him.”

  “And the stress of what you guys went through.”

  “Maybe. But, man, he could do anything. I remember when the Humvee broke down and we were waiting hours for the mechanics, he finally got out and got under the thing and got the hoses unkinked or whatever it was, got it running again. Sean was the engine whisperer. There was nothing he couldn’t fix.”

  “Yeah,” she said sadly. “Except himself.”

  5

  Sean Lenehan’s funeral was at Our Lady of Grace church in Westham. It was a long Catholic ceremony, and it was better attended than the wake. Most of Patty’s family was there: her dad and two of her brothers were lobstermen in town and had a lot of friends in the business. They mostly wore Windbreakers and Carhartt work jackets and Patriots jackets—not a lot of suits or blazers for the men—and drove pickup trucks with lobster traps in the back. Whereas Sean’s family all lived in South Carolina and weren’t that close, and I think his parents were dead.