Brianna was in a panic when she returned from Sushi Cosi to her home at Kings Lord Manor. She saw Edward’s car in the driveway.
That’s funny, she thought. After I told him I was having a girls’ night out, he said he was going out, too. He must have been picked up.
She entered the house but didn’t know what to do with herself. She had completely lost her appetite but figured a large glass of wine would help calm her. She opened the wine fridge and was happy to see one of her favorite white wines—2007 Prager Grüner Veltliner—chilling and poured a generous amount into a large, bulbous wineglass, one typically reserved for red wine.
It can’t be true, she tried to convince herself. Jack wouldn’t record my sexcapades, would he? We go way back. We’re too close. He wouldn’t do that to me, would he?
Pacing through her house, she decided to take a swim and steam in their basement’s hammam room. Although it had barely been used since its construction, Brianna realized that she should value it now. Once the house sold, it wouldn’t be hers anymore.
Brianna descended the stairs. As she did, she heard music. Maybe Edward is home and working out in the gym. She swung open the door and heard the shower. Looking toward the large glassed-in space, she was shocked to see two intertwined forms. Her eyes narrowed, trying to make out the faces through the steamed glass. She looked down at the discarded clothes on the floor. And then it hit her.
It’s Edward and Leigh. She was sure of it.
Fury filled Brianna. She started to charge at them. She wanted to smash the glass walls down around them. But then, for some reason, she stopped.
After watching them for a few seconds longer, she retreated up the stairs and threw the wineglass into the kitchen sink, shattering it. Brianna grabbed her car keys and the entire bottle of wine and got back in her car. She was seething: Edward was her husband. Leigh was her best friend. Would Jack deceive her, too? Brianna drove to the Cannondale conservation land and, after finishing nearly the entire bottle, had a good, long, drunken cry. As she gazed at a neighboring spec house developed by Mitch Tallwall, she noted the dozens of evergreens and boxwoods and mountain laurel whose root balls were wrapped in burlap waiting for installation.
It was while studying all of this that she formulated her revenge.
* * *
On the following Tuesday, just before Brianna knew Leigh would be at Le Beau Château for her monthly sexcapade—or Leigh’s monthly minority fix, as they cruelly referred to it—she went to the Château’s second, more concealed driveway and parked her car in a secluded spot. She then entered the house through a side door that Jack routinely left unlocked for the hired sexcapade participants to use.
The house was completely empty. No one had arrived for Leigh’s gangbang yet, not even Jack. Brianna returned to her car and, over the course of a few trips, brought a number of red fuel canisters back to the house. She hid them in a cabinet in the mudroom.
Next, Brianna called Secure, which monitored the alarm system in the house, and gave them the required code—Jack had given it to her one day when he needed help at the estate. She explained to the Secure representative that they needed to temporarily shut down the fire and carbon monoxide alarm system in order to perform a routine test of the interior sprinkler system. She explained that the test would take several hours and that she would call them back when they were ready for it to be turned on again. After hanging up, Brianna double-checked to make sure no fire alarm error message was showing on the home’s surveillance monitors.
She knew the third-floor safe room had six-inch-thick walls reinforced with steel bars, but it wasn’t fireproof. Jack shouldn’t have shown off the security to me or trusted me to be his backup in an emergency, she thought. I know this house as well as I know my own.
Just as she was making sure everything was in place, Brianna heard the front door unlock. She eventually heard Jack’s voice, along with several men who sounded like they were speaking in a foreign language. Not long after, she heard the doorbell and then the sound of Jack letting Leigh in the home.
Leigh had told her that she generally tired of the men after about an hour and a half, so Brianna sat in her hiding spot in the mudroom for about thirty minutes. She worried that Jack might be monitoring the house from the security room. He typically moved between the two spaces during sexcapades, so she knew she was going to have to move quickly to avoid being seen on the monitors.
One by one, she took a canister of gasoline and walked along the perimeter of the largest first-floor rooms, pouring the flammable liquid. She made sure to saturate the bottom of every fabric window treatment. When all the canisters had been emptied, she walked through the house and ignited the window treatments.
If the fire burns well, she thought, then I’ll have rid myself of Brianna, Jack, and any potential sex video revelation. He told me he would never tape me. He shouldn’t have taped me.
Before exiting, Brianna stood for a moment and watched the flames engulf the gorgeous cream-colored velvet treatments and blacken the ceiling above them, completely satisfied by her work.
Unbeknownst to Brianna, Jack—who had observed Leigh during gangbangs and knew she could handle the men by herself—had exited the home just after the sexcapade started. He walked the property to see if any tree limbs had fallen and damaged the estate’s outer buildings during the previous night’s storm. In the distance, he heard a car engine start.
That sounds too close—like around the estate’s second driveway, he thought.
Then he heard a long series of popping noises, similar to fireworks. Not soon after, the smell of smoke hit him.
Jack dashed back in the direction of the home and soon saw that the first floor was engulfed in flames. He was a thousand yards from it when he called 9-1-1.
Why isn’t the fire alarm system working? he wondered. As he continued running toward the house, he saw four of the five men involved in the sexcapade run to the truck parked at the side of the house near the detached garage. They were naked and clutching their clothing.
Where’s the other one? Jack thought frantically. Where’s Leigh? Where’s her car? When he left the house earlier, he noted that both cars were parked together. Hers was gone.
One of the men got back out of the truck suddenly and ran back toward the house. Jack called to him, but he didn’t hear Jack. In the distance, sirens started to ring out. The man quickly returned to the truck and then it sped away.
Jack tried entering the home from the back patio, but the heat and smoke were overwhelming. Will there be a dead body in there? he wondered. Could one of the men have started the fire and then stolen Leigh’s car? Is she trapped inside?
* * *
Leigh was, in fact, alive and well and speeding down Old Farm Highway. As the first one to realize something was amiss, she was nearly home. During the gangbang, Leigh had tired of the men faster than usual and had gone looking for Jack; she’d wanted him to join. But when she opened the surveillance room’s door to see if he was there, she saw surprised to see Brianna on one of the first-floor monitors, wielding a red gas can and wildly dousing the living room window treatments, the gas spilling in waves from the can’s nozzle.
Shit, Leigh thought. What the fuck is she doing? And then realization hit her.
Oh God! Brianna did come back to her house when I was there the other night. Oh fuck! She knows I’m sleeping with Edward. The broken wineglass in the sink. The missing bottle of white wine…
Edward initially feared that Brianna had returned home early from dinner, but when he didn’t see her car, he’d dismissed it. He’d said the cat must have knocked over the glass. That he must have forgotten to chill the wine. “Believe me, Leigh, if Brianna did come back and found us in the shower together, she would have tried to kill us on the spot,” he’d joked.
Oh God! This is really bad! Leigh had quickly hit the first-floor monitors’ RECORD buttons but didn’t notice that the cameras in the bedroom had already been recording. She grabbed one of the white terry robes Jack provided for his clients and ran out of the safe room. She quietly crept down the home’s back staircase to avoid Brianna. Once in the mudroom, she saw the pile of cans Brianna had brought with her and heard a splashing noise somewhere outside of the kitchen.
My God, Leigh thought, she’s going to burn down this entire home. Leigh exited through the mudroom door and ran to her car. She definitely saw us that night, Leigh thought as she rummaged through her designer purse and jammed the car key into the ignition. As Leigh pulled out of Le Beau Château’s driveway for what would be the last time, she thought, Jack and the other men will hear the fire alarms and get out in time.
But not all the men hired to please Leigh got out alive. Much of the first floor was burned before the smoke penetrated the safe room’s six-inch walls. Having stopped to pull on his jeans, Miguel Ángel Diaz was behind the other men as they fled the safe room. He stumbled and fell at the top of the smoke-filled limestone-paved grand stairwell and, as he tumbled, cracked his head on the second-to-last step, rendering him unconscious.
By the time he stopped rolling down the stairs, the other men were already out the front door. His friend, Juan Jesús Emiliano, tried to go back in to find him, but the smoke had grown too strong.