Cold Fire

Holly looked out at the greensward and swallowed hard a couple of times, as if choking on emotion and struggling to maintain control of herself. She was good. Academy Award stuff. She loathed herself for it. When she spoke, she managed to get a subtle and convincing tremor in her voice: “As far as I know, he's the only blood relative I have in the world, and my only link to the mother and father I'll never know. He's my brother, Mrs. Moreno, and I love him. Even though I've never met him, I love him. But what if I approach him, open my heart to him … and he wishes I'd never shown up, doesn't like me or something?”

“Good heavens, of course he'll like you! Why wouldn't he like a nice young woman like you? Why wouldn't he be delighted to have someone as sweet as you for a sister?”

I'm going to rot in hell for this, Holly thought miserably.

She said, “Well, it may sound silly to you, but I'm worried about it. I've never made good first impressions with people—”

“You've made an excellent one with me, dear.”

Grind my face under your heel, why don't you? Holly thought.

She said, “I want to be careful. I want to know as much as possible about him before I knock on his door. I want to know what he likes, what he doesn't like, how he feels about… oh, about all sorts of things. God, Mrs. Moreno, I don't want to blow this.”

Viola nodded. “I assume you've come to me because I know your brother, probably had him years ago in one of my classes?”

“You do teach history at a junior high school here in Irvine—”

“That's right. I've worked there since before Joe died.”

“Well, my brother wasn't one of your students. He was an English instructor in the same school. I traced him there, and learned you'd taught in the room next to his for ten years, you knew him well.”

Viola's face brightened into a smile. “You mean Jim Ironheart!”

“That's right. My brother.”

“This is lovely, wonderful, this is perfect!” Viola enthused.

The woman's reaction was so excessive that Holly blinked in surprise and didn't know quite what to say next.

“He's a good man,” Viola said with genuine affection. “I'd have liked nothing better than to've had a son like him. He comes around now and then for dinner, not as often as he used to, and I cook for him, mother him. I can't tell you how much pleasure that gives me.” A wistful expression had settled on her, and she was silent a moment. “Anyway … you couldn't have asked for a better brother, dear. He's one of the nicest people I've ever known, a dedicated teacher, so gentle and kind and patient.”

Holly thought of Norman Rink, the psychopath who had killed a clerk and two customers in that Atlanta convenience store last May, and who had been killed in turn by gentle, kind Jim Ironheart. Eight rounds from a shotgun at point-blank range. Four rounds fired into the corpse after Rink was obviously dead. Viola Moreno might know the man well, but she clearly had no concept of the rage that he could tap when he needed it.

“I've known good teachers in my time, but none as concerned about his students as Jim Ironheart was. He sincerely cared about them, as if they were his own kids.” She leaned back in her chair and shook her head, remembering. “He gave so much to them, wanted so much to make their lives better, and all but the worst-case misfits responded to him. He had a rapport with his students that other teachers would sell their souls for, yet he didn't have to surrender a proper student-teacher relationship to get it. So many of them try to be pals with their students, you see, and that never really works.”

“Why did he quit teaching?”

Viola hesitated, smile fading. “Partly, it was the lottery.”

“What lottery?”

“You don't know about that?”

Holly frowned and shook her head.

Viola said, “He won six million dollars in January.”

“Holysmoke!”

“The first time he ever bought a ticket.”

Allowing her initial surprise to metamorphose into a look of worry, Holly said, “Oh, God, now he's going to think I only came around because he's suddenly rich.”

“No, no,” Viola hastened to assure her. “Jim would never think the worst of anyone.”

“I've done well myself,” Holly lied. “I don't need his money, I wouldn't take it if he tried to give it to me. My adoptive parents are doctors, not wealthy but well-to-do, and I'm an attorney with a nice practice.”

Okay, okay, you really don't want his money, Holly thought with self-disgust as caustic as acid, but you're still a mean little lying bitch with a frightening talent for invented detail, and you'll spend eternity standing hip-deep in dung, polishing Satan's boots.

Her mood changing, Viola pushed her chair back from the table, got up, and stepped to the edge of the patio. She plucked a weed from a large terra-cotta pot full of begonias, baby's breath, and copper-yellow marigolds. Absentmindedly rolling the slender weed into a ball between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she stared thoughtfully out at the parklike grounds.

The woman was silent for a long time.

Holly worried that she had said something wrong, unwittingly revealing her duplicity. Second by second, she became more nervous, and she found herself wanting to blurt out an apology for all the lies she'd told.

Squirrels capered on the grass. A butterfly swooped under the patio cover, perched on the edge of the lemonade pitcher for a moment, then flew away.

Finally, with a tremor in her voice that was real this time, Holly said, “Mrs. Moreno? Is something wrong?”

Viola flicked the balled-up weed out onto the grass. “I'm just having trouble deciding how to put this.”

“Put what?” Holly asked nervously.

Turning to her again, approaching the table, Viola said, “You asked me why Jim … why your brother quit teaching. I said it was because he won the lottery, but that really isn't true. If he'd still loved teaching as much as he did a few years ago or even one year ago, he would've kept working even if he'd won a hundred million.”

Holly almost breathed a sigh of relief that her cover had not been penetrated. “What soured him on it?”

“He lost a student.”

“Lost?”

“An eighth-grader named Larry Kakonis. A very bright boy with a good heart — but disturbed. From a troubled family. His father beat his mother, had been beating her as long as Larry could remember, and Larry felt as if he should be able to stop it, but he couldn't. He felt responsible, though he shouldn't have. That was the kind of kid he was, a real strong sense of responsibility.”

Viola picked up her glass of lemonade, returned to the edge of the patio, and stared out at the greensward again. She was silent once more.

Holly waited.

Eventually the woman said, “The mother was a co-dependent type, a victim of the father but a collaborator in her own victimization. As troubled in her own way as the father. Larry couldn't reconcile his love for his mother and his respect for her with his growing understanding that, on some level, she liked and needed to be beaten.”

Suddenly Holly knew where this was going, and she did not want to hear the rest of it. However, she had no choice but to listen.

“Jim had worked so hard with the boy. I don't mean just on his English lessons, not just academically. Larry had opened up to him in a way he'd never been able to open to anyone else, and Jim had been counseling him with the help of Dr. Lansing, a psychologist who works part-time for the school district. Larry seemed to be coming around, struggling to understand his mother and himself — and to some extent succeeding. Then one night, May fifteenth of last year — over fifteen months ago, though it's hard to believe it's been that long — Larry Kakonis took a gun from his father's collection, loaded it, put the barrel in his mouth … and fired one bullet up into his brain.”