Page 80

CHAPTER 80

“I LIT A FIRE,” Troy said.

Baby gripped the phone, listening. The traffic had cleared and Summerly was talking on his phone and driving one-handed, sailing past cars on the freeway like they were standing still.

“It was so stupid,” Troy said. “I was a stupid little boy playing with matches. That was all. Nothing, you know, calculated . My parents left me at home alone while they went to the store, and I took matches out to the yard and started lighting them and flicking them into the grass. The grass caught. Of course it did. It was the middle of summer. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Baby held on to her seat belt as they zipped between two massive semitrailers.

“I guess I wasn’t thinking anything. I was a kid.”

“How big was the fire?” Baby asked.

“Sixty acres.”

“Jesus.”

“It took out three farms, a bunch of the forest, and a grain silo. The town didn’t have power for two weeks,” Troy said. “My father beat the shit out of me. He said I’d taken a life. I thought he meant a horse. I knew some horses had gotten trapped in their stables. I never learned much about the fire. We moved away for a few years after that, to get away from it. The shadow of it. By the time we came back, it was a non-topic in my household.”

“You think Chelsea Hupp died in the fire?” Baby said.

“Maybe she did. Maybe Mom and Dad just figured I was so young, there was no sense in me knowing I’d done a thing like that. Killing changes a person, right?”