Saturday, 2:20 p.m.
Still irritated that Leyna had left her like that—dismissed her, really—Meredith was forced to find a way to buy them both more time. Fortunately, the idea had occurred to her quickly.
Would some people deem it too extreme? Of course. The world was full of passive handwringers. But would it work? Probably. And if it didn’t, at least her house would be the one still standing.
Meredith headed to the corner of the garage where she stored old art supplies. A few years earlier, she’d experimented with encaustic painting, a form of art that used pigmented and heated wax. She’d hated it. The medium offered too little control, and her attempts turned out nothing like she’d intended. She’d thrown out the wax immediately.
But she’d kept the blowtorch.
The fire was coming for them. There was no getting around that. But she could create a defensible space. She grabbed the torch and screwed on the canister of butane. How much time did she have until Leyna came looking for her? Another sixty seconds? She hoped that would be enough.
She carried the torch to the edge of her property. The wind gusted southwest, toward Ridgepoint Ranch. Toward her home. The taste of smoke sharp on her tongue, she considered the path the fire would likely take. The hardscaping around the house was fire-resistant—concrete, river rock, flagstone pavers. But beyond that, nothing but trees with crisp leaves or brown needles, trunks stressed by drought, and acres of wild grasses that would burn quickly.
She looked at those grasses, flattened by the wind. She could do nothing about the trees, but if the flames met a field already scarred by fire, they might be forced onto a different path. True, carried by the wind, the flames might jump that dead space and consume her home anyway. But she couldn’t dwell on that. In any case, the fire was coming her way.
She eyed the patch of dirt to her left, grown hard after so many dry summers. She couldn’t risk firefighters digging on her property or water from their hoses eroding the ground.
She turned the knob on the blowtorch until she heard the hissing of the gas, then stabbed the ignition button. She turned up the blue flame to its highest setting. She touched the flame to a patch of dry grass, praying the wind didn’t turn on her.
That night in Grace’s bedroom, Adam hadn’t been unconscious for long. After a few tense minutes, he’d opened his eyes and stumbled to his feet, the mallet that had rested against his leg landing with a soft thud on the carpet. He touched his head, and his fingers came away tipped in red.
Just as Grace had, he asked, “Why’d you do that?”
Meredith offered him the same explanation she had her daughter. “I thought you were hurting her.”
This set his eyes blinking, quick and rhythmic, like the lights at a rail crossing. He dropped on the bed, and Meredith got the impression it hadn’t been by choice. More urgently, he said, “I feel kinda sick.” His fingers rose to his head again and he winced.
Not good.
“Let me get you some ice.” Meredith moved to leave, but he stopped her with a hand on her wrist. She was surprised by his strength. When he lowered his hand, Meredith noticed on her wrist a smear of Adam’s blood, nearly black in the dim light.
In horror, she thought, I did that. She swiped her wrist on the leg of her pants. Olivia is going to kill me.
Adam seemed unconcerned with his wound now, was focused wholly on Grace. Her mouth thinned, and she crossed her arms. Her eyes were feverish and slick, and Meredith couldn’t tell if she’d been crying or if she was about to.
Meredith knew she needed to get Adam help. She was fairly certain he had a concussion, and she recalled a story about a high-school athlete who’d died recently during a scrimmage. In her head, she heard again that sickening sound of bone cracking. A mallet strike would’ve done at least as much damage as a tackle on the football field. Adam’s lack of consciousness, no matter how brief, worried her too.
Not good at all.
Meredith left to get Adam a clean towel and some naproxen. When she got back, Adam was gone.
She clutched a phone she hadn’t yet dialed. “Where’s Adam?” she asked her daughter.
The sound coming from Grace’s throat was growl-like, and she vibrated with obvious rage. At Adam? Or at her mom?
Meredith was deciding which it was when Grace exploded. She upended her mattress with little effort, and it slid to the floor. She swept everything off her dresser. She yanked the lamp off her nightstand, throwing the room into darkness, and shattered it against the far wall.
“We need to help Adam,” Meredith said emphatically, but her daughter sank deeper into her fury.
Grace had always been quick to anger, but it had never been that bad. Meredith remembered the insults Grace had hurled at Adam earlier. The way her eyes had flashed when Meredith had interrupted—what, exactly? She still wasn’t sure.
After several minutes, Grace burned herself out and fell onto the box springs of her now mattress-less bed. She stared at the ceiling, and somehow this sudden silence marked only by her daughter’s labored breathing was worse than the anger that had come before.
In the quiet, Meredith glanced at the phone she clutched. Had Adam gone home? She waited for Olivia’s inevitable call. The accusations she knew would follow: What have you done to my son? What kind of monster hits a boy in the head with a mallet?
Meredith would have preferred to make sure Adam was okay before sending him back to Olivia, but if he was already on his way home, perhaps it was for the best. His mother could take him to the hospital. She wondered if Olivia would report her to the police. If she had already reported her. Would she wake up in the morning to flashing lights in her driveway?
Staring at the ceiling, Grace whispered, “Get out.”
Meredith had been happy to oblige. She picked up the mallet and left Grace’s bedroom.
Though it had been burning for only seconds, the small fire Meredith had started zipped along the grass. Toward the Millers’ house. Toward the Durans’. But, thankfully, away from her home. Just as she’d intended.
The wind pulled the flames away from her, and in a couple of minutes, when enough of the grass had burned, she would extinguish them with a hearty blast from her garden hose.
A gust picked up several glowing leaves and dropped them on the roof next door. Not hot enough to do damage, and even if they did, it wasn’t her house.
Meredith felt a stillness settle in her chest. She’d been waiting for this day for sixteen years. She would burn down the whole neighborhood if it meant protecting her daughter.
Meredith had to protect the grave, because bones didn’t burn.