“She may have had a small seizure,” Lynn said.
Lisa felt a stab of dread. “Where are they taking her?”
“University of Kentucky Medical Center.” It was in Lexington, Lisa knew. Lynn sounded fearful, and that scared Lisa anew. “They’re best equipped to treat this.”
“Oh my God.” For a moment, as terror for her mother crashed over her in a near-crushing wave, Lisa felt faint. Then she forced herself to rally. She was all her mother had, and for that reason she had to stay strong.
“I’m going in the ambulance with her. I’m her daughter,” she told the paramedics, who continued to bustle around their patient. There still wasn’t enough room for her to get in. One of them, a chubby, white-haired guy with glasses, slid his eyes over her, then looked at the rest of the group around her.
“Only one family member in the ambulance,” he said, and went back to work.
“That’s me.” Putting one hand on the open door, Lisa prepared to scramble in.
“Here, take this.” It was Scott’s voice.
To Lisa’s surprise, she felt cloth, lightweight and warm and smelling faintly of smoke, settle around her shoulders. A quick downward glance told her that Scott had taken off his shirt and given it to her. Letting go of the door, she thrust her arms into the sleeves gratefully.
“Thanks.” Scrambling into the ambulance, clutching the edges of the shirt together, she looked back at Scott just as someone—Lisa presumed it was the ambulance’s driver—started closing up the doors.
“We’ll meet you at the hospital,” Robin called, added, “Take these, too,” and tossed a pair of slippers at her. Then the doors closed with a metallic clang. Gathering up the slippers, Lisa quickly found a seat on one of the molded benches built into the wall. She slid her feet into the slippers—they were blue terry-cloth scuffs that fortunately fit reasonably well—and started buttoning Scott’s shirt and rolling up the too-long sleeves. It smelled of him, just faintly, and she wasn’t even surprised to discover that the smell was comforting. The paramedics paid no attention to her: They were busy fitting an oxygen mask to her mother’s face and hooking her up to an IV.
“How is she?” Lisa asked fearfully as the ambulance jolted into motion.
“Her vital signs are stable,” the white-haired paramedic answered as he dropped onto the seat beside her. The other paramedic, a young, thin woman with short brown hair, said something from the opposite side of the stretcher, but the shrieking sirens made it impossible for Lisa to hear.
Her mother’s arms were uncovered now—an IV line was inserted into one—and Lisa slid her hand around Martha’s as the ambulance sped toward Lexington.
It felt cold and lifeless in her grasp.
“I’m here, Mother,” she said, and only hoped that Martha could still hear her.
11
By the time all the diagnostic tests had been run and Martha had finally been admitted to the hospital and settled into a small private room, it was after nine a.m. the next morning. Martha’s eyes were closed. Clear oxygen tubes ran into her nose. Her breathing was so shallow as to be almost undetectable beneath the blue blanket that was tucked in around her. The steady beep of the monitor she was hooked up to provided a modicum of reassurance to Lisa, who kept vigil beside the bed. For the moment, her mother slept. Lisa herself was so exhausted that her eyelids felt as though they had lead weights attached to them. She’d been treated for smoke inhalation and a couple of minor burns about the size of pencil erasers on the backs of her legs that had resulted from flying sparks. Other than that, her throat felt scratchy, her stomach was upset, and she had a thumping headache. But she was dressed, in jeans, a yellow tee with, ridiculously, a picture of SpongeBob SquarePants on it, and flip-flops, which had to count as a positive development, considering the outfit she had arrived at the hospital in. The clothes, along with the appropriate underwear, had been purchased by Robin during a hasty visit to the nearest open-all-night Walmart when Lisa could no longer tolerate being stared at as she walked around the hospital in Scott’s shirt. The thought that she’d almost certainly lost nearly all her belongings in the fire was upsetting, so she tried not to think about it. Equally upsetting was the knowledge that her briefcase had been in her bedroom. So, too, had the Garcia file. And Katrina, in the dress that had so closely resembled Marisa Garcia’s.
Did someone set fire to the house in order to get rid of the Garcia file? That was the question that wouldn’t stop haunting her.
It wasn’t impossible, but it was so unlikely as to verge on it. She was almost—almost—positive about that. That her interest in that long-ago disappearance could have triggered the burning of Grayson Springs was so paranoid that even considering the possibility boggled the mind, she decided, when the suspicion occurred, as it did for the first time in the middle of the night as she waited for one of several CT scans on her mother to be completed. The timing of the fire was coincidental, the probable loss of the evidence in the file unfortunate but not sinister. To believe otherwise was to do nothing less than question the very foundations of her life.
It was stupid, and she simply wasn’t going to go there.
So, bottom line: As far as she was concerned, her biggest problem regarding the file was that she was going to have to tell Scott that she had taken it home.
He wasn’t going to be happy.
Last night, he’d risked his life to save her. He’d carried her to safety, held her, comforted her, even given her the shirt off his back. Their often prickly relationship had shifted: The baiting and antagonism that had been the cornerstone of it for years had vanished. She’d felt—what? Safe in his arms? He’d felt something different than his usual half-annoyed aggravation for her, too. It had been there in his eyes when he looked at her.
Part of it was desire. She was a grown-up woman now, not a girl, and she was mature enough to recognize desire in a man’s eyes when she saw it. And Scott definitely desired her. But then, she’d never really doubted that, on some fundamental level, he did, even if he never would make the slightest move in her direction.
For years there’d been an undeniable chemistry between them simmering just below the surface. But always she’d been the one who’d acted on it, chasing him, doing her best to entice him, trying to get him to want her, while he’d treated her like a stupid, importunate little girl who was more nuisance than anything else.
Last night something had changed. She’d felt that the guard he’d kept on himself all these years had dropped for long enough to let the way he really felt about her shine through.
The idea of it—of Scott openly wanting her—was actually kind of thrilling. Whenever she let herself think about it, her heart started to beat faster. Sleeping with Scott was something she had fantasized about during her teenage years. Now that she was all grown up, she was starting to get the feeling that it wouldn’t take a whole lot of effort on her part to make that particular fantasy come true.
The thing was, though, there had been more than just sexual attraction for her there in his eyes. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but she knew what she’d felt in his arms—a sense of belonging.
That wrapped in Scott’s arms was just exactly where she was supposed to be.
Not that any of it—desire, belonging, a sense of romantic possibility—was going to make any difference to her predicament, she told herself wryly: She knew Scott well enough to be sure that he was still going to be ticked off about the file.
Ticked off enough to fire her? She didn’t think so. But she wasn’t one hundred percent sure.
Something to worry about later, she told herself, and put Scott and the file and every other extraneous thing out of her mind as her mother opened her eyes for the first time in a couple of hours. With the head of the hospital bed raised to ease her breathing, Martha was almost in a sitting position.
“Hey,” Lisa said softly, taking her hand.
Martha looked at her. For a moment she seemed to be having
trouble focusing. Then her gaze sharpened and she smiled.
“Lisa.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve felt—better.” A twinkle of rueful humor in her mother’s eyes made Lisa feel a little more hopeful. That was the mother she knew, and she experienced a brief uprising of relief. Then Martha glanced around and frowned. “Where—am I?”
Lisa’s stomach tightened. She’d answered this same question at least three previous times. “At the University of Kentucky Medical Center.”
“Oh.” Martha accepted the information with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity, then closed her eyes again.
Lisa waited silently.
Bright morning sunlight poured in through the cracks in the closed mini-blinds that covered the single window. A foam cup of coffee, the only pleasant smell among the cornucopia of antiseptic hospital scents, steamed on the stand beside her, perched next to the yellow plastic hospital pitcher of water, the phone, the remote, and a box of tissues. The coffee was courtesy of Andy, who had left maybe twenty minutes earlier to drive Robin back to Grayson Springs to check out the damage. They, along with Lisa, Scott, and Lynn, had been part of the group gathered around Martha in the hospital when they had received word at about two a.m. that the fire had been put out. The cause, they were told, was under investigation.
Lisa discovered that she was extremely anxious to know the cause. Even though she was sure—sure—that it would be found to be an accident. Which would mean that it could have had nothing to do with the Garcia file. Which would, she discovered, be a huge relief.
If the fire was set to destroy the file . . . She didn’t want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion, but she couldn’t help it: It might have something to do with me.
“You should—go home and—get some sleep.” Martha’s eyes opened again to focus on Lisa. Martha had regained consciousness not long after arriving at the hospital and had been awake several times since then, but thanks to the medication being pumped into her veins—at least, Lisa prayed her fogginess was due to medication—she seemed to only intermittently remember that the house had burned. Which was probably something to be thankful for. Her mother would grieve for the house she loved, just as Lisa was grieving. And at the moment Martha didn’t need that kind of psychic pain.
“I’ll go home later.” She squeezed her mother’s hand. It was cold—too cold—and dry. An insurance adjuster would be meeting her at Grayson Springs at about seven p.m., but other than that she meant to spend the rest of the day at the hospital, and to sleep there, too.
“You look—tired. I’ll be—fine here. Really.”
Martha’s short white hair fanned out against the pillow like a bird’s ruffled feathers. Her paper-thin skin seemed to have developed a myriad of new wrinkles overnight. Her eyes as they met Lisa’s were red-rimmed and puffy, and had a disoriented look to them that Lisa found alarming.
“You know I’m not going to leave you.”
“Annalisa.” Martha managed a small smile. “I’m so—glad—you came home. When you were gone—I missed you—so much.”
“I missed you, too,” Lisa said softly, her heart aching. She’d been so young and self-involved when she went away to college that she had never even considered what it might have cost her mother to simply smile and let her go. Now that she’d grown up enough to realize this, she wished with all her heart she could go back through time and call more, visit more, come back sooner. But there was no changing the past; all she could do was be here for her mother now.
A quick knock on the open door made her look around in time to see a balding, fortyish man in a white lab coat step into the room. Nodding briskly at Lisa, he moved to her mother’s bedside.
“Hello, Mrs. Grant, I’m Dr. Metz, Dr. Spencer’s associate. Let’s take a look at you.”
Dr. Spencer was her mother’s regular physician. “Where’s Dr. Spencer?” Lisa asked.
“He’s on vacation. He’ll be back on Monday.”
When the brief examination was over, her mother closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and seemed to fall almost instantly asleep. With a worried look at her, Lisa rose and followed the doctor out into the hall. They stopped in the busy corridor, and as hospital life went on around them Lisa regarded him anxiously.
“How is she?”
He shook his head. “We’re still running tests. We won’t know for sure until some of the results come back.”
“She doesn’t seem to be thinking clearly. Half the time she doesn’t know where she is or remember that our house burned last night.”
“Some confusion is probably normal under the circumstances. She suffered a trauma when your house caught fire, and then there’s the ALS, which is complicating the diagnosis a little bit. My best guess is that last night she suffered a transient ischemic event”—Lisa looked at him questioningly—“basically a small stroke, which would account for her lapsing into unconsciousness at the scene and her confusion today. I’ll be able to tell you more when the test results come back.”
“And that will be?”
“Later today, possibly, for some of them. Others may take a little longer.”
The cell phone in Lisa’s pocket went off. It was her phone, which fortunately she had left in the workout room the night before, allowing it to survive the fire. Robin had brought it to her at the hospital, and Lisa had been so glad to see it that she had almost cried. So much else had been lost that it had suddenly seemed as precious as a recovered treasure. While she fished for it, Dr. Metz, giving her another nod, took the opportunity to escape. Of course he must be a busy man, with lots of patients to see, but she didn’t feel that she knew much more than she had when he’d come into her mother’s room. Certainly she didn’t feel reassured.
“It’s the Rink,” the caller identified himself when Lisa, frowning after Dr. Metz with some frustration, said hello. “Uh, I gotta ask you something: Did you make off with that file we were looking at yesterday? The one where you’re, like, the victim’s twin?”
Lisa grimaced. Busted so soon. “Yeah, I did.”
“Thought so.” Rinko sounded relieved. “When I got to work this morning and it wasn’t here, I freaked for a minute. Looked everywhere. Then it occurred that you might have taken it home to look at it some more. No biggie. Although you probably ought to be getting it back in here.”
“Yeah, it is a biggie.” Lisa leaned back against the wall and sighed. “Our house burned last night. I’m afraid the file burned, too.”
“Oh, man.” Rinko was silent for a moment, as if to let the news sink in. “I’m sorry about your house.”
“Thanks.”
Glancing up, she discovered Scott walking down the hall toward her, looking tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and very much the big-shot DA in a navy suit, white shirt, and red power tie. He’d left the hospital at about three a.m. shortly after she’d been pronounced fine but not before telling her to take as many days off as she needed to deal with what had happened. Now, for whatever reason, he was back. As her eyes fastened on him, Lisa felt an instantaneous tingle of sexual awareness followed by a warm little glow that roughly translated to Hey, I’m really glad to see you. This was the first time she’d ever felt that particular combination of reactions to his presence, and they came as a not-unpleasant surprise.
Then she saw that he wasn’t alone. In full lawyer mode—black skirt suit and pumps, blond hair pulled back, carrying a briefcase—Kane was with him, saying something to him, nodding earnestly at his reply. There was another suit-clad lawyer with them, too, a man—thirtyish, thin, glasses. Hendricks, that was his name. Like Kane, he was an ADA. As Lisa watched, Scott said something to his companions and made a “give me a minute” gesture. As the two of them obediently stopped with the obvious purpose of waiting for him out of earshot, he continued to stride toward her.
In that instant while she watched him walking toward her, an image flashed into her mind: Scott bare to the waist, as he had been last night
after he had whipped off his shirt so that she could wear it to the hospital. At the time, she’d been too preoccupied to do more than subconsciously register the sight. Now she remembered vividly how muscular his shoulders were, and that his arms were as big and brawny as if he continued to do a lot of physical labor—or, alternatively, worked out. His chest was wide, with a wedge of dark brown hair and well-developed pecs that gave way to flat abs. It tapered down in a classic V to narrow hips, where his pants had interrupted the view.
She’d seen him bare-chested before—fairly frequently, actually—when they’d been kids. But there was a difference: Now he was a full-grown man.
Their gazes met. Lisa’s pulse, which was primed to quicken, wasn’t put to the trouble.
Ouch, she thought. Reality bites.
Whatever she might have thought she’d seen in his eyes for her last night was nowhere in evidence as she met them today. There was nothing personal in his expression at all. In fact, he looked like his usual maddening self again, hard and purposeful, all business, every inch the successful lawyer and her boss. If he was, as she’d so briefly enjoyed imagining, lusting for her body, he gave no indication of it now.
Clutching the phone tighter, she gave him a cool look in r etaliation.
“Um, Buchanan’s here,” she said in a lowered voice to Rinko. “I’m going to have to go.”
“Oh, crap. Well, if it helps, you can tell him that we already uploaded everything that was in that file. All that was lost was . . .”
“The original documents,” Lisa finished for him in a dry undertone as Scott reached her. Then, louder, she said, “Thanks. You’re a prince.”
“Who’s a prince?” Scott asked as she disconnected. His gaze slid over her, and his impatient look was leavened by a flash of amusement. “Like the T-shirt.”
She was suddenly conscious that without makeup and with her hair knotted into a haphazard bun at her nape, she was looking something less than her best. The reason she was conscious of it wasn’t so much Scott, who’d seen her just about every which way there was to see her many times before this, but Kane, who from her spot some two doors away was eyeing her up and down. With dislike. That’s when the other shoe dropped: The reason Kane was so consistently hateful to her was because of Scott.
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