Fireproof

learned the secret that Thomas O’Dell’s wife and mistress had kept for more than twenty years. He wondered what Kathleen O’Dell hoped to accomplish by coming here today.
    He pulled out the bottle of wine that he and Maggie hadn’t finished the night he fixed them dinner. He exchanged the tea glassesfor goblets, popped up the cork, and poured. At first he was going to stick with tea for himself but then he decided this conversation might go down better with some wine.
    There was only half a bottle left. He emptied it into the glasses and slid hers over to her side of the center island, where she had already made herself comfortable on one of the bar stools. Patrick remained standing, taking his old bartender stance, and then remembered how Maggie and Sam had taken these exact positions during their midnight confrontation.
    “Maggie has a misguided sense of obligation to you,” Kathleen O’Dell said, taking a healthy gulp of the wine.
    “Unlike you and my mom.”
    “Why in the world would I feel any obligation to a bitch who tried to steal my husband?”
    Patrick kept himself from flinching at his mother being called a bitch.
    “What is it that you want to talk to me about, Mrs. O’Dell?”
    “I want you to leave. Pack up and get out of Maggie’s life.”
    “Maggie invited me to stay here. I didn’t ask her for a place to stay.”
    “But of course you jumped at the offer.”
    “I’m pretty sure this isn’t any of your business.”
    “So what will it cost?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “What will it cost to get you to leave?”
    “I think you’re the one who needs to leave, Mom,” Maggie said from the doorway.
    Neither of them had heard her come in. Patrick had forgotten to lock the door and set the alarm. Maggie must have recognized her mom’s car in the circle drive.
    “Patrick’s a guest here. I suggest if you want to continue to be one, you’ll leave right now.”
    “I expected you to be curious about him. Maybe even want to meet him. I didn’t expect you to drag him into our lives.”
    “My life. Not yours.”
    Kathleen O’Dell slid off the bar stool and stood in front of Maggie. That’s when Patrick realized she was a bit wobbly on her feet. She may have had a few drinks before she arrived.
    “So you’re choosing this bastard half brother over your own mother?”
    “I’m not choosing anyone. You want to talk about choice, Mom? Maybe you should tell me how you chose to give a tell-all interview to some two-bit reporter.”
    “Jeffery Cole is an award-winning journalist. How was I supposed to know that he would twist my words?”
    “Right, he twisted your words to make it sound like you were betraying your daughter.”
    “Betraying? You see that as a betrayal? But this—inviting him into our lives—that’s not a betrayal?”
    Kathleen O’Dell waved her hand at Maggie like she thought she was being ridiculous. She shook her head, a slow side-to-side motion that Patrick thought looked melodramatic and perhaps even practiced. She made her way to the door without argument, either anxious to escape or simply needing the last word. Either way, Patrick realized she was willing to leave without further explanation or apology.
    Before she left she mumbled something that sounded like “You’ll be sorry.”
    From the disappointment on Maggie’s face, Patrick thought she already looked like she was sorry.

CHAPTER 59

    Tully wore jeans, an old gray sweatshirt, the grimiest pair of high-tops he owned, and a threadbare jacket he’d bought earlier from a Salvation Army thrift shop. Last night when he carefully went through the red backpack he had found an interesting assortment of worthless junk. Or at least he had believed it to be worthless. Then he discovered that whoever had been using the backpack had one of the same habits Tully had—pocketing an extra napkin or two from whatever fast-food joint or vendor he ate at.
    Tully took out all of the napkins—eight different ones, plus four from the same place. Then he bought a tourist map of the District and started highlighting all the napkin food stops.
    More than half of the food places were around the fire site and close to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where the homeless buses picked up and dropped off passengers. The others were downtown. The four duplicate napkins were from a small corner shop called Willie’s between the library and the fire site on Massachusetts Avenue.
    The guy who tripped Tully and ran away