Chapter 4 - The Investigation Deepens
Monday morning arrived with a gray, steady drizzle that matched the mood of my insurance claims adjuster.
I met Grant Hollowell and the insurance investigator, a sharp woman named Marcus, outside the skeletal remains of my house. The front half of the structure was heavily charred, yellow tape flapping miserably in the wind.
"We processed the lockbox," Grant said, handing me a clipboard to sign. "Your parents are furious, by the way. Your dad spent three hours at the precinct trying to claim you 'gave them verbal permission' to retrieve the box. We checked your phone records and my bodycam footage from Saturday. No such permission was given."
"Are they going to arrest him?" I asked, looking at the blackened window frame of what used to be my kitchen.
"They issued a citation for interfering with an emergency investigation and trespassing on a restricted fire scene," Marcus chimed in, adjusting her trench coat. "More importantly, Erin... we finished the root-cause analysis on the fire."
My stomach tightened into a hard knot. "The laundry-room wall. Was it an electrical short?"
Marcus shook her head, her expression grim. "No. The wiring behind that wall was completely up to code—we pulled the copper conduit. The fire started inside the wall cavity, but it didn't originate from a spark or a frayed wire."
Grant stepped closer, his voice dropping lower. "It started from a slow-leak pipe fitting that had been improperly patched about six months ago. The moisture rotted the drywall backing and shorted a junction box, but the initial pipe work... it was done with cheap PVC couplers that weren't rated for high-pressure residential flow."
I stared at them, confused. "Who did the plumbing? We had the house inspected when we bought it three years ago."
"The previous owner didn't do it," Marcus said, pulling a folded contractor invoice from her folder. "We pulled the municipal permit history for this address. Four years ago, your father pulled a DIY renovation permit for a laundry room refit. He did the plumbing himself to save money."
The world seemed to tilt slightly on its axis.
May you like
My father. The man who had refused to give my barefoot children a place to sleep because his precious baby shower was more important, had built the very ticking time bomb that nearly burned us alive.
And instead of rushing over to see if we survived, his first instinct—while my children were shivering in the cold—had been to sneak past police tape and steal a metal box to hide the evidence of his own shoddy handiwork.
