question he’d been able to answer truthfully. “She wouldn’t have known anything, Tiger,” he’d told her.
He blinked, torn from his thoughts by the quiet approach of the nurse entering the room. She was young and pretty, he saw. He was relieved. The kids behind those swinging doors deserved to hear a soft voice, see a kind face.
“Dr. Pranam says if you’d like, we can phone you when she wakes up.”
“I’d rather wait.” Tamara’s lips barely moved. “Tell Dr. Pranam I appreciate him bending the rules for us. I know visiting hours are over.”
“We bend a lot of rules.” The nurse smiled, but there was sadness in her voice. “Some of these little ones won’t be leaving, so we do what we can to make them happy. And like Dr. Pranam told you, the only way we could calm her when she arrived was to tell her that we’d find Mr. Stone and bring him to see her.”
“Stone.” He looked away uncomfortably. “It’s my first name. Stonewall.”
“Like the general?” The nurse laughed softly as she pushed open the swinging doors. “That explains a lot. I hear you laid waste to the fifth floor.”
“Stonewall Jackson was shot by his own troops.” As the nurse exited Tamara spoke, her face still white but the blank look in her eyes replaced with a glitter of anger. “So unless you want the similarities between yourself and your namesake to go further, I’d suggest you tell me everything you found out from Claudia’s daughter—starting with why you’re so certain she is her daughter. Why would Claudia come back to Boston to see me?”
“Petra said she was dying of cancer.” Stone saw her lashes fall over the angry blue of her eyes. He continued, wanting to get it over with. “Petra’s the kid,” he added. “I told her to call me Stone, and she told me what her name was. I was trying to keep her mind off what was happening.”
Tamara nodded tightly. “Go on.”
He didn’t want to go on. In fact, he didn’t want to be here at all, Stone thought savagely. The whole damn thing was bringing back too many memories—memories of other vigils in other hospitals—and the urge to just walk out was overpowering. Walk out and find a bar, you mean, an amused voice in his head said. So why don’t you, McQueen?
“She wanted you to take care of her daughter when she was gone,” he said shortly. “That’s why the photo was so important to Petra. She knew that with her mom gone she’d have to find you all by herself.”
“She didn’t mention her father?” Tamara was rubbing her thumb against a smudge of soot on her jeans. “She has to have a father, for heaven’s sake. Where’s he?”
“He died in a car accident before she was born, if I understood her right.” The smudge was now a smear, he saw. “I wasn’t listening to everything she said. I was too busy wondering what our chances were of getting out of there alive.”
He paused. “You don’t want her to be Claudia’s daughter, do you? You don’t want to believe any of this.”
“And I don’t believe it.”
Abruptly she stood. She walked over to a bulletin board and stood there studying flyers for a hospital fund-raiser, her back to him. Stone rose, too, his movements more controlled than hers.
“What’s not to believe? If nothing else, she had that photo of you. How the hell do you explain that away?”
She lifted stiff shoulders in a shrug. “Chandra thought it might have fallen from Joey’s helmet. It seems like the most logical explanation.”
“For the love of Mike—logical? Isn’t it more logical to accept that the kid’s telling the truth?” He had the sudden impulse to take her by the shoulders and force her to listen to reason. With an effort he turned away.
He was getting too involved in this, he told himself tightly. He’d spent the past seven years making sure any involvement he had with the rest of the world was as minimal as possible, and lately he’d come to realize even that was becoming too much to take—although her accusation that he’d been ready to detach completely in that rooming house today was far from being a given, he thought, frowning.
He’d wanted to look into its face. He’d been pretty sure he would see his own staring back at him. Instead he’d looked around and seen her, and that had been the biggest shock of all. He closed his eyes.
Beyond those swinging doors was a little girl whose world had been smashed to pieces—a little girl who was asking for him. He knew why she wanted to see him. He hadn’t told the woman who’d been her mother’s best friend everything that had passed between him and the child, he thought heavily.
He’d crashed through the doorway of the rented room. It had been years since he’d run through a burning building but all at once he’d been back in the past, knowing that there had to be clues if only he could see them, knowing that in seconds those clues could disappear forever.
The woman had been lying on a smoldering cot by the wall. Even before he’d fallen to his knees beside her and placed his thumb firmly on what should have been the pulse-point of her neck he’d known instinctively that Joey had been right. She was gone. An even earlier habit had come back to him, and without conscious volition he’d swiftly crossed himself.
“Rest easy, sister.” For some reason it had been important to put it into words, just in case any shadow of her had lingered and could hear him. “I’ll take care of her for you. I’ll get her out of here.”
As he’d started to rise the information he’d automatically noted even while he’d been concentrating on the woman clicked into place and his heart sank. Between the fingers of the outflung hand was the burned-down butt of a cigarette, the sheet the hand had been resting on now only charred fragments. The cot itself had caught and smoldered, he’d realized, and whatever outdated material it had been filled with had thrown off the toxic fumes that had proven so fatal for its occupant. But at some point the smoldering should have become a full-fledged blaze. Why hadn’t it? And how had the fire skipped to the rest of the building, leaving this room untouched?
He’d gotten swiftly to his feet. Finding the child and getting her to safety was his main concern. Giving the woman on the cot one final glance, he’d seen a remnant of the sheet leading from the cigarette to the emptiness of the hole knocked into the wall, and had realized he was looking at the answer to the questions he’d just dismissed.
But as he’d lifted Petra into his arms only moments later, he’d known that the most deadly question hadn’t been answered at all.
“You’re going to find out who killed my mom, aren’t you, Stone?” In the shadows her eyes had been wide with anguish and fixed stubbornly on his. “You’ll put him in jail, right?”
He hadn’t answered her right away. He hadn’t known what to say, since the truth was too brutal. Gee, Tiger, your mom started it herself. She was smoking in bed, see, and the cigarette just rolled from her fingers when she fell asleep. Maybe one day the kid would find out, but he wasn’t going to be the one to—
Except the cigarette hadn’t rolled from her fingers. It had burned right down to her hand. The pain would have woken her immediately.
But by then she was already dead, McQueen. In fact, I’d lay odds she was dead before that
