Page 87 of The Hawthorne Legacy
If that little bitch hadn’t run—
I closed my eyes. I breathed. I felt him breathing. The wind picked up. And I told them everything.
CHAPTER 72
By the time the SUV passed the gates of Hawthorne House that afternoon, I was still shaken. To my surprise, Zara met Jameson, Xander, and me in the foyer. For the first time since I’d met Tobias Hawthorne’s firstborn, she looked less than perfect. Her eyes were puffy. Stray hairs were stuck to her forehead. She was holding a folder. It was only an inch or so thick, but even that was enough to stop me in my tracks.
“That’s what was in the safe-deposit box?” Xander asked.
“Do you want an overview?” Zara replied crisply. “Or would you prefer to read it for yourself?”
“Both,” Jameson said. First, we’d take the big picture, and then we’d comb through the actual materials, looking for subtle hints, clues, anything Zara might have missed.
Where’s Grayson? The question came into my mind unbidden. Some part of me had expected him to be here, waiting. Even though he’d barely spoken to me since the interview. Even though he’d barely been able to look at me.
“Overview?” I asked Zara, forcing myself to focus.
Zara gave a slight dip of her chin—assent. “Toby had been in and out of rehab for a year or two at the time of his disappearance. He was obviously angry, though at the time I didn’t know why. From what my father was able to piece together, Toby met two other boys at rehab. They all went on a road trip together that summer. It very much appears that the boys partied—and slept—their way across the country. One young woman in particular, a waitress at a bar where the boys stopped, was quite informative when my father’s investigator tracked her down. She told the investigator exactly what Toby had been snorting, and exactly what he had said the morning after they had intercourse.”
“What did he say?” Xander asked.
Zara’s tone never wavered. “He told her that he was going to burn it all down.”
I stared at Zara for a moment, then shifted my gaze to Jameson. He’d been there when Sheffield Grayson had claimed that Toby was responsible for the fire. Even after reading the postcards and seeing the kind of guilt Toby carried, some part of me had still thought the fire was an accident, that Toby and his friends were drunk or high, and things got out of control.
“Did Toby happen to specify what he was going to burn down?” Jameson asked.
“No.” Zara kept her reply curt. “But right before they got to Rockaway Watch, he purchased a great deal of accelerant.”
He set the fire. He killed them all. “Was that in the police report?” I managed to ask. “What Toby said about burning it all down—did the police know?”
“No,” Zara replied. “The woman Toby said that to—she had no idea who he was. Even when our private investigators tracked her down, she remained entirely in the dark. The police never found her. They never had motive. But they knew about the accelerant. From what the arson investigators were able to tell, the house on Hawthorne Island had been thoroughly soaked. The gas had been turned on.”
I felt my hand pressing to my mouth. A sound escaped around my fingers, somewhere between a horrified gasp and a mewl.
“Toby wasn’t an idiot.” Jameson’s expression was sharp. “Unless this was some kind of suicide pact, he would have had a contingency plan to make sure that he and his friends weren’t caught in the flames.”
Zara closed her eyes tightly. “That’s the thing,” she whispered. “The house was soaked in accelerant. The gas was turned on—but no one ever lit a match. There was a lightning storm that night. Toby might well have been planning to burn down the house from a safe distance. The others might have helped him. But none of them actually set the fire.”
“Lightning,” Xander said, horrified. “If the gas was already on, if they’d soaked the floorboards in accelerant…”
I could see it in my mind. Had the house exploded? Had they still been inside, or had the fire spread quickly across the island?
“For months, my father believed that Toby truly had died. He convinced the police to bury the report. It wasn’t arson, not technically. At best, it was attempted arson.”
And they’d never gotten to finish the attempt.
“Why didn’t the police just blame it on the lightning?” I asked. I’d read the articles in the press. They hadn’t mentioned the weather. The picture they’d painted was one in which a teenage party had gotten out of hand. Three upstanding boys had died—and one not-so-upstanding girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“The house went up like a fireball,” Zara replied evenly. “They could see it from the mainland. It was obvious it wasn’t just a lightning strike. And the girl who was there with them, Kaylie Rooney, she’d just gotten out of juvenile detention for arson. It was easier to deflect blame toward her than to try to pin it on nature.”
“If she was a juvenile,” Xander said slowly, “the record would have been sealed.”
“The old man unsealed it.” Jameson didn’t phrase that as a question. “Anything to protect the family name.”
I could understand why my mother’s mother had called Tobias Hawthorne’s fortune blood money. Had he left it to me in part out of guilt?
“I wouldn’t feel too sorry for Kaylie Rooney,” Zara said coldly. “What happened to her—what happened to all of them—it was a tragedy, of course, but she was far from innocent. From what the investigator was able to piece together, the Rooney family runs just about every drug that comes through Rockaway Watch. They have a reputation for being merciless, and Kaylie was almost certainly already elbow-deep in the family business.”
