Chapter 3 - The True Story of the Lake House Fire of 2012
To understand the sheer magnitude of the rot inside the Vance family, one had to look back twelve years, to the summer before our eighteenth birthday.
Jessica had always been the golden child. She was vivacious, charming, and manipulative in a way that our parents mistook for leadership and high intelligence. I was quiet, studious, and preferred reading and painting to attending charity functions. To Alice, I was an afterthought; to Mark, I was a backup asset in case Jessica failed.
That summer, Jessica didn't fail—she committed a crime that would have sent her to prison for twenty years.
Jessica had been dating a boy named Julian, the son of a local mechanic. When Julian discovered that Jessica had stolen five thousand dollars from his father's repair shop to pay off her mounting gambling debts from illicit underground poker games in the city, he threatened to go to the police. Jessica invited Julian to our family’s secluded cabin on Blackwood Lake under the guise of paying him back in cash.
I had been at the cabin alone that weekend, studying for my college entrance exams. I didn't know Jessica had arrived until I heard the screaming from the downstairs living room.
"You're not going to ruin my life, Julian!" I remembered hearing Jessica shriek through the floorboards.
When I ran down the stairs, I found Julian lying unconscious on the Persian rug, blood pooling from a severe head wound where Jessica had struck him with a heavy bronze fireplace poker. Beside him sat two open cans of paint thinner and acetone.
"Jessica! What have you done?!" I had screamed, dropping to my knees beside the boy to check his pulse. He was alive, but barely.
Instead of calling 911, Jessica looked at me with wild, dilated pupils. She had lost her mind. "If he wakes up, he's going to tell the police! I'll lose my scholarship! Dad will disown me!"
Before I could grab my phone, Jessica flicked a gold Zippo lighter and dropped it straight onto the rug soaked in accelerant.
The room exploded into a wall of roaring orange fury.
The fire caught the heavy velvet drapes in seconds, racing up the wooden walls and cutting off the main entryway. Jessica panicked immediately, screaming and scrambling out through the patio sliding door, which she slammed shut behind her, locking the latch from the outside in her blind terror to escape the inferno.
I was trapped inside with an unconscious boy and a ceiling collapsing in flaming chunks of timber.
I didn't think about my future, my skin, or my pain. I grabbed Julian by his jacket collar and dragged him across the burning floorboards toward the kitchen pantry window—the only other exit. As I pushed his limp body through the narrow frame to the safety of the damp grass outside, a massive burning pine crossbeam collapsed directly across my back and shoulders.
The smell of my own burning flesh was a nightmare that never left my senses. The heat melted the synthetic fabric of my shirt straight into my subcutaneous tissue. I screamed until my vocal cords ruptured, but I managed to kick the beam away with my left leg—shattering my ankle and charring my thigh in the process—and crawled out into the dirt before the entire roof collapsed into the furnace below.
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When the fire trucks arrived forty minutes later, Jessica was sitting in the back of an ambulance, sobbing theatrically, claiming she had barely escaped with her life after Kristen had "accidentally started a fire while experimenting with candles."
Julian was in a coma. I was burned over forty percent of my body. And Mark and Alice Vance were already formulating a plan to erase the truth before the morning newspapers hit the stands.
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