He knew he couldn’t wait to decide. The fire was gaining ground too fast for that. He ran down the hall toward the crying sound. All the doors along the hallway were closed. Maybe she had heard that you shouldn’t open a door in a fire. Even a kid her age might know that. Then, he got to the door with the crying behind it and knew the real reason she hadn’t come out. The door was locked, and there was no key in the hole. The child’s cries were more strangled now, rasping with smoke like Des’s throat. He croaked a reassurance that he would get her out even though he wasn’t sure how.
“Under the rug,” the child rasped from the other side of the door. “I think she put the key under the rug.”
Des dropped to his knees and pawed at the hallway carpet. The electric lights had gone out. Probably the system had been burned out by the fire. It was too dark to see, and his streaming eyes were useless anyway. Des fought down his terror as he prayed to find a bump under the rough wool nap. When his fingers touched it he almost cried out with joy and relief. He fished the key out and lunged at the door, feeling for the keyhole. The key took two turns to catch, and Des thought he might go crazy from being so scared in the meantime.
Then the door was open, and the little girl had leapt into his arms.
“Keep low,” he said. “There’s not so much smoke near the floor.”
If that was true, Des couldn’t tell. The smoke was pretty thick everywhere by now. They stumbled and crawled toward the staircase. They had just reached the top of the stairs when, with a roar and a crash, the flames broke through into the hallway at the opposite end from where they had just been. Des saw orange and blue lick up the delicately flowered wallpaper. Then a line of fire shot toward them down the center of the hallway ceiling, like a flaming arrow in a cowboy movie.
The child’s high-pitched scream was right next to his ear, and he wanted to tell her to shut up. Instead, he grabbed her arm and pulled her down the stairs, bumping her from one step to another, knowing that if he lost his grip on her she would fall. He also knew that if he didn’t drag her this rough way they could lose their race against the flames and be caught in the river of burning carpet he had imagined on his way up these same stairs.
Suddenly, he remembered what his mission had been when he first ran into this house. He had come to save the mother, not the child. He had not thought for even a second that he could lose his own life in the attempt. He had only cared about Miss Desiree. He glanced back toward the stairway and the balustrade to the left toward her room. Flames rimmed the opening to the hallway in that direction. In less than a moment they would spread into a wall of fire across the only way he might possibly reach her.
Des continued his plunge down the stairs with the child in tow. He couldn’t afford to hesitate for a second, even though what he was doing could cost the life of the person he loved more than anyone or anything in the world.
She would want you to save her baby, a voice inside him said. She always called the little girl her baby. He knew the voice was speaking truth, whether he wanted to hear it or not.
They had reached the heavy front door. In a flash of premonition, Des saw the etched glass cracking from the heat of the fire and the pale veneer curling into charred blackness. Though none of that had happened yet, he knew it would, and very soon.
Des shoved the door open and dragged himself and the child onto the veranda. Wind was whipping the lime trees that bordered the brick walk from the house to the road. Miss Desiree took such pride in those lime trees. She would hate to see them wracked and bent by the storm, even though she would know they were plenty strong enough to survive.
Des dropped the child’s arm, and she fell onto the bricks. He didn’t pick her up. The child was safe now. He knew that the mother, unlike her trees, would not survive this night. He heard the sirens in the same moment he came to understand that there was no use running back inside. He would only turn to charring blackness along with the white-painted woodwork and the chintz-covered chairs and all the rest of the bright, beautiful things she loved. She wouldn’t want that to happen to him.
“Desiree,” he whispered because his throat was too raw to scream. Her name was so like his own, Desiree and Destiny, that people said they should have been mother and son. But they weren’t. She was only the closest thing he’d had to a mother since his own mom died before he was old enough to know her.
Des reached down and grabbed the child’s arm again and began dragging her along the brick path, getting her away from the house as a second-story window exploded too close above them. He could only move in a crouch now. He was weak from gasping for breath. He felt the hard brick through the soles of his sneakers and then the softer sod as he pulled himself and his burden onto the lawn just inside the gate and the tall fence. He fell to the grass and buried his face in it, surprised that he could smell the greenness through the smoke that filled the wide yard and sooted the flower beds.
Des heard the trucks and the shouts of the men as they dragged heavy hoses down the path to shoot a futile stream of water at the blazing hulk that was already too far gone to save.
It was too late. Too late for her house. Too late for her. Too late for Des, and for the one bright shiny part of his lonely life.
He wrapped his arms around the child who lay sobbing at his side. He needed somebody to hang on to, even this kid he’d always been a little jealous of. She sobbed against him as his eyes continued to stream, not only from the smoke and fire this time, but also from tears he wasn’t ashamed to cry.
Chapter One
Twenty-four years later
She should have come here long ago. Taylor Loyola Bissett knew that the minute she stepped from the cab. She was out of her element, as her Great-Aunt Pearl would have put it, but that was exactly what Taylor wanted to be. “Stay where you know the territory and the territory knows you,” her aunt said over and over, like a chant. “That way you will always be in tune.” Taylor could feel herself out of tune with this place already, and that both frightened and thrilled her.
Her immediate impulse, conditioned by years of Aunt Pearl, was to get back in the cab and escape. But Taylor never did anything on impulse, at least not before today. Besides, all the way from the Key West Airport she had been less than at ease with the driver of this outlandish pink taxi who looked like he’d just crawled off skid row. She’d prefer not to drive any further with him, not even back to the airport. She couldn’t leave the Keys yet anyway, anymore than she had been able to resist coming in the first place. There was something to be settled for her on this island. She’d been haunted by that feeling for weeks now. She had to find out what it was all about. Maybe then she could put the past, what little she could recall of it, to rest at last.
Taylor climbed out of the cab, dragging her belongings with her. She should have had the driver help with her bags, but he hadn’t offered and she hadn’t asked. She did stupidly independent things like that sometimes. Her hair was heavy on her neck from the humidity, and tendrils clung to the dampness of her cheeks. By the time she lugged this load up the steps to the guest-house porch, she’d be drenched with perspiration, and the Key Westian looked too small to have a bellboy. She stopped to catch her breath and also to try to get a handle on her apprehension.
Everything bad that ever happened to the Bissett family had happened on this island, starting with the day her father, Paul Lawrence Bissett, met Desiree Loyola. He was a young naval officer, fresh from a small town in northern New York State and green as the valley of the St. Lawrence River for which he had been named. She was a pale-eyed beauty who captured the young naval officer without so much as
