Do Not Disturb (52 page)

By the time they reached the windswept outskirts of East Hampton, they were back on amicable terms.

“That’s funny,” said Tina idly, watching a fire truck thunder through the dreary landscape of marshland and empty holiday homes, and saying a tiny prayer of thanks that this place was
Honor’s life and not hers. “That’s the second fire engine to pass us in the last five minutes.”

“Probably got a call to come deal with the smoke blowing out of Petra Kamalski’s ass,” muttered Honor.

They both laughed.

But a few minutes later, their smiles disappeared. As they neared Palmers, a huge, gray mushroom cloud of smoke loomed in front of them. Soon it had all but filled the windshield, plunging the road ahead into darkness like a solar eclipse. Honor slowed the car. Moments later a cop emerged out of the gloom, waving at her to stop.

Winding down the window, she was immediately hit in the face by a gust of acrid smoke so strong it made her eyes water. This must be quite some fire.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to turn around,” said the cop. Honor didn’t recognize him. He was young and obviously new in town, and he had the intent, nervous look of someone seriously out of his depth.

“No, no,” she said, nodding at the road in front of her. “You don’t understand. We have to get through. My hotel’s down there.”

“You mean Palmers?” said the young man. He’d obviously mistaken her for a guest. “I’m afraid that’s where the fire is coming from, ma’am. There’s no need to panic,” he added, seeing Honor’s face drain of color and her hands start to shake. “Everyone’s been evacuated safely. We’re only talking property damage.”

Honor shot out of the car. Pushing past the cop, she ran blindly through the makeshift roadblock and into the smoke.

“Miss. Miss!” he yelled ineffectually after her. “You can’t go down there!”

“Leave her.” Tina got out of the car more slowly and stared toward the beach in disbelief. She’d never seen smoke like it. “Trust me, officer. My sister can take care of herself.”

A couple of the young cop’s colleagues, alerted by the shouting, ran after Honor. But years of training meant she was fitter than all of them and was easily able to shake them off in the maze of sandy alleyways that led to the rear of the Palmers complex.

Down on the beach, a gathering crowd stared in horrified silence at the inferno, held back by more police as well as the natural barrier of smoke and heat. Like a zombie, Honor joined them, unable to speak or move as a third fire truck pulled up and its occupants began pumping yet more water at the blaze.

She didn’t know why they bothered. It was clearly too late. Rushing around like red-suited termites, the firemen reminded her of desperate parents, trying to give mouth-to-mouth to an already-dead baby.
Her
baby. Next to the thirty-foot flames, which roared and leaped and licked the sky like the forked tongues of some giant lizard, their puny jets of water and foam were as ineffectual as water pistols in a volcano. Palmers was already a charred skeleton. The fire had consumed her alive, like a flesh-eating virus.

“Hey. Hey, you! What are you doing?”

One of the spectators, a middle-aged man watching the drama with his family, shouted out as Honor slipped through the police lines and ran kamikaze-like toward the hotel.

She couldn’t hear the man, or anything other than the wild beating of her own heart. All she knew was that some force outside herself was pulling her forward, oblivious of the searing heat and choking fumes that poured down her throat and into her lungs like poison. Closing her eyes, she stumbled blindly on.

“Over there!” The man grabbed hold of one of the firefighters and pointed. “Some crazy girl just ran into the building. Look!”

“Where?” yelled the fireman.

“Over there!”

Within seconds, he and two of his buddies were inside. Thankfully, Honor hadn’t made it more than a few feet into what used to be the kitchens, so they spotted her almost at once.
Dragging her outside, disoriented and barely conscious, they handed her over to the waiting paramedics.

“Shit. It’s Honor Palmer,” Honor could hear one of them saying.

“Miss Palmer?” asked a second voice. “Honor, can you hear us?”

But before she could tell them that she could, the voices, and everything else, had gone.

T
HE NEXT SIX
weeks were the worst of Honor’s life.

Confined against her will to a recuperation ward in Southampton Hospital (“I assure you, Miss Palmer,” said Dr. Reeves, her consultant, firmly, “if I catch you trying to discharge yourself one more time, I’ll have you committed. Do you understand the damage you’ve done to your lungs?”) she spent the bulk of her days having increasingly circular, frustrating conversations with the insurance agents, who were determined to link what happened to the hotel’s substandard wiring, despite hard forensic evidence that it had not been an electrical fire.

“Why do you keep asking me these questions?” she complained, for the hundredth time. “The police report was clear; it was arson.”

“Our investigators have yet to determine that,” said the charmless girl sent to interview her. She couldn’t have been much over twenty-one but had already developed the hardened, cynical manner common among her profession. She was dressed all in black, like a particularly unsympathetic funeral director. “And even if they do, the fact that you failed to bring your electrical wiring up to code, despite repeated warnings, may well prejudice your claim even if it was arson. Which we dispute,” she added
with a smile that made Honor want to rip the clipboard out of her hands and ram it down her scrawny, heartless throat.

Thankfully, the police were more sympathetic, although their sympathy had yet to translate into progress.

A few days after the fire, an earnest cop had shown up by her bedside, armed with a long printout of questions.

“Do you have any enemies, Miss Palmer?” he began gently. “I know it’s difficult. But can you think of anyone who might want to cause you or your family harm?”

Honor laughed bitterly. “How long have you got, detective?”

The cops seemed quite certain that the fire had been set deliberately, and it wasn’t a case of some careless guest forgetting to stub out their cigarette. But despite a list of possible suspects as long as the East Hampton telephone directory—disgruntled former employees, business rivals, embittered lovers—there were actually very few people that Honor could imagine going to such extreme, criminal lengths to hurt her. She thought briefly of Karis Carter, but quickly dismissed the idea as ridiculous. If Karis were the crazed, vengeful type, she’d have acted long before now. Who else? Her greedy cousins, the Fosters, were too stupid, not to mention gutless. Lise wouldn’t have had the energy or the foresight to start a fire. Besides, she was so plastic she’d probably be terrified of melting, like the wicked witch that she was.

There was a suggestion that Tina’s former Mafia connections might have had something to do with it, but as far as Honor could tell, this was a theory based more on a lack of any other leads than on anything more concrete. Not even the policeman who’d suggested it seemed particularly convinced.

Honor had had to be physically restrained by two nurses when the cop informed her that her insurance company had hinted to the police that she herself should not be considered above suspicion.

“They simply asked us not to formally close any avenue of inquiry at this stage,” explained the hapless officer. “To be fair to
them, it’s no secret that your business was in some trouble financially at the time the fire occurred.”

“So what?” Honor was practically foaming at the mouth. “You think I torched my own hotel? Palmers was my life! There were people in there, for Christ’s sake. Guests, staff. Friends of mine. It’s a miracle nobody lost their life.”

As with previous tragedies in her life—her mother’s death, the feud with Trey, being abandoned by Devon—the worst part for Honor was the feeling of utter helplessness. It wasn’t just Palmers that had burned to the ground that day. All her hopes for the future had perished with it.

Tina finally stopped by the hospital for a visit a week after Honor was admitted. She’d been too busy partying up a storm in Manhattan to come any sooner.

“So what’ll you do?” she asked, devouring the bunch of seedless grapes she’d brought for Honor while flicking through a gossip magazine. “Go back to Boston?”

Secretly, Tina was rather enjoying all the drama. The Palmers fire was the most fun she’d had since the sex tape came out. Talk show producers were once again beating down her door for interviews, and photographers tailed her whenever she went out for coffee. It was fabulous! Plus, with Honor incapacitated in hospital, it fell to her to show the world just how the devastated (but plucky) Palmer sisters were coping with the tragedy. No one could turn a sob story into TV gold better than Tina.

“I guess I will go back to Boston. For now,” said Honor, wincing as the nurse changed one of the dressings on her arm. As well as serious smoke inhalation, she’d suffered extensive burning to her arms and hands and had already undergone one skin graft. She’d never known pain like it. “But as soon as I’ve screwed my goddamn money out of these insurance leeches, I’m coming back. I’m gonna rebuild Palmers just as she was. Brick by brick.”

“Really?” Tina put down the magazine and looked at her skeptically. “You don’t think maybe the fire was a sign? You know,
like, time to move on? Open a new chapter in your life? Just think of all the things you could do with that insurance money.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Tina. “Whatever you want. Move to Paris. Buy a fuck-off yacht. Give it to charity. Who cares?”

Honor looked horrified.

“The only thing it’s a sign of,” she said grimly, “is that someone’s determined to run us out of town. But they picked the wrong family to mess with. Palmers will be back, and it’ll be bigger and better than ever.”

Tina wasn’t the only one who felt her sister’s obsession with rebuilding the hotel might be a sign of mental instability.

“She won’t let it go,” she told Dr. Reeves. “I’m actually worried about her. She’s turning into a fucking fruit loop.”

“I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” said the doctor. But he was also concerned about his patient’s state of mind. So far Honor had been unable to give the psychiatric team any explanation for why she’d run into a blazing building on the brink of collapse when she already knew there was nobody left inside. She denied being suicidal and claimed her mind had simply gone blank. But combined with her frequent outbursts of temper and repeated attempts to check herself out of the hospital long before she’d made a full recovery, these delusional fantasies about reopening Palmers as early as next year were a real cause for concern. Anyone could see it wasn’t going to happen.

At long last, one crisp, late-November morning, Honor’s release day dawned. She still wore bandages on her arms, and it would be two more weeks before she could risk taking a proper shower. But otherwise, save for a lack of exercise, she was in good health, and Dr. Reeves had run out of excuses to force more rest on her.

“I suppose there’s nothing I can do to get you to go somewhere peaceful and continue your recuperation?” he asked.

He’d stopped by her room to formally discharge her and was dismayed to find Honor hopping about impatiently, rechecking her long-completed packing. She was itching to get on the phone to her lawyer and see what could be done to pressurize the insurers, but she didn’t dare turn on her cell phone in front of Dr. Reeves in case he ordered her back to bed again. Secretly she was terrified that the horrible girl agent was right and she
had
voided her insurance by putting off that electrical work. Then she’d be ruined, and it would all be her own fault.

“Nope,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “There’s nothing you can say. So don’t even try.”

Watching his patient fidgeting, the doctor smiled. She’d gained a little weight during her stay, but it suited her. In a coral-pink cashmere dress that clung to her like a second skin, you couldn’t miss the fact that her small apple breasts had swelled into grapefruits, and the cheeks that had looked so sunken and hollow when she was first admitted were now fuller and rounded with health. When she’d first arrived in her scorched sweatpants, she had looked so skinny and angular, making love to her would have been like sticking your dick into a fistful of thistles. This new, softer, smiling Honor was really much more alluring.