Chapter 3 - The Untouched Girl and the Burning Cabin
Mark Montgomery didn't speak. He couldn't. His throat moved, his lips parted, but all that emerged was a dry, choking gasp.
The silence in the Halston ballroom had turned toxic. Waiters in white waistcoats stood motionless against the back walls, silver trays balanced on their palms, completely forgetting their duties. At the VIP table nearest the stage, Richard and Eleanor St. Clair—Adam’s aristocratic parents, whose family had occupied Boston high society for four generations—were staring at my father with the cold, assessing scrutiny of creditors inspecting a bad loan.
“If my father won't explain,” I said, turning my gaze slowly across the 187 faces in the room, “then I will.”
“Kristen, stop it!” Jessica screamed, her voice cracking into that shrill, spoiled register she used whenever a store didn't have her size. “You’re ruining my life! You’ve always been jealous of me! Just because I got into Brown and you went to a state school! Just because Adam chose me!”
“Adam didn't choose you, Jessica,” I said, not even raising my voice. “Adam chose the twenty-million-dollar trust our grandmother left behind. But we’ll get to that in a minute.”
I took two steps forward, the polished wooden floor cool beneath my bare feet.
“Twelve years ago,” I began, “we were eighteen years old. We had just graduated from high school. Jessica was the homecoming queen, the tennis captain, the shining star of the Montgomery family. And our father’s commercial shipping firm was eighty-four hours away from involuntary bankruptcy.”
A murmur broke out among the business executives in the third row. A man named Henderson, who had sat on the local bank board with my father for twenty years, sat up straighter, his eyes narrowing.
“My father had leveraged every commercial vessel he owned to finance a real estate development in Rhode Island that collapsed during the recession,” I continued. “He was three point two million dollars in debt to hard-money lenders in South Boston. If he couldn't produce liquid capital by July first, our home, his business, and his freedom were gone.”
“That’s enough!” Mark lunged toward the stage, his hands reaching to snatch the microphone, but Investigator Wright stepped into his path with the ease of an iron gate closing.
“Sit down, Mark,” Wright said coldly. “You’ve done enough talking over the last twelve years. Let the girl speak.”
“Jessica had a problem of her own that summer,” I said, looking directly at my twin sister.
Her face had drained of every speck of blush, leaving her makeup looking like chalk against her skin.
“You had borrowed our mother’s Mercedes on the night of June tenth,” I said. “You were driving down Route 6 after an unmonitored keg party at the dunes. You were drunk, Jessica. You were texting your college boyfriend. And you hit an eighteen-year-old cyclist named David Miller, who was riding home from his shift at the marina.”
A horrified gasp erupted from Eleanor St. Clair. She dropped her pearl-handled reading glasses onto the table.
“You panicked,” I said, watching Jessica’s eyes dart wildly toward the double doors of the ballroom. “You didn't stop. You didn't call an ambulance. You drove the smashed Mercedes into the old boathouse at Blackwood Lake, locked the rolling cedar door, and called Dad from a burner phone sobbing that your life was over, that you were going to prison for manslaughter.”
“No...” Jessica whimpered, shaking her head violently. “No, that’s not... that wasn't me...”
“David Miller survived,” I said, my voice hardening. “Barely. He spent six months in a spinal rehabilitation center. But Dad saw an opportunity to solve two problems with a single match.”
Investigator Wright reached into his briefcase and pulled out an audio cassette player and a sealed clear evidence bag. Inside the plastic lay a blackened, twisted piece of brass—the charred remains of an antique Zippo lighter with the initials J.M. engraved into the casing.
“To collect the four point eight million from Atlantic Mutual,” I said, “the boathouse had to burn completely, taking the smashed Mercedes and the victim’s paint-transfer evidence with it. But you were eighteen, Jessica, and you were careless. You soaked the floor in marine gasoline, but you didn't check the ventilation. When the vapors ignited, the backdraft slammed the heavy iron deadbolt shut from the outside.”
The room was so still you could hear the electrical hum of the wall sconces.
“You were trapped inside,” I whispered. “Coughing, screaming, banging your bare hands against the reinforced glass. Dad was thirty miles away setting up his alibi at the yacht club in Marblehead. The only person at the lake house was me.”
I looked down at my left shoulder, where the worst of the scarring began—a thick, ropy network of purplish tissue that stretched over my deltoid and dipped across my shoulder blade.
“I didn't think about your lies,” I said. “I didn't think about how cruel you were to me in high school. I saw my sister dying in an oven. I took a five-pound splitting maul, smashed through the cedar siding, and crawled into three hundred degrees of black smoke. When the roof beam collapsed, I threw myself over your back.”
I looked Jessica in the eye.
“The beam landed on me, Jessica. The burning tar paper melted into my silk shirt, into my skin, into the meat of my shoulders. I dragged you out through the hole in the wall by your hair while my back was literally on fire. That’s why you didn't have a single blister. That’s why your dress was clean. That’s why you got to go to Brown, while I spent eighteen months in pressure garments being bathed by home-health nurses who had to give me morphine just to change my sheets.”
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Tears were streaming down Jessica’s face now, but they weren't tears of remorse. They were the ugly, frantic tears of a creature whose protective shell had just been ripped away with pliers.
“And when I finally woke up in the burn unit,” I finished, looking toward my mother, “the first words out of Alice Montgomery’s mouth weren't thank God you’re alive. They were: You must never tell anyone what happened, Kristen. If you speak, Jessica goes to prison, the insurance money gets revoked, and we lose everything.”
