Shattered (15 page)

"Good call," Scott said.

"Somebody hurt here?" Sounding faintly breathless, the EMT reached them and stopped, looking from one to the other. In the dark it was hard to be sure, but she thought he was about her age. She suddenly found her skimpy night attire extremely embarrassing, and was glad of the shadows that helped hide her.

"No," Lisa answered, pulling away from Scott and suppressing a cough as at the same time Scott said, "Check her out for smoke i nhalation."

"Let me give you a listen." The EMT reached into his bag.

"I don't have time. I have to get to my mother." That was a firm negative, uttered as she started moving away. Her throat was raw, her lungs hurt, and she was a little dizzy, a little unsteady on her feet, but none of it mattered. She would have run to the front yard if she could have, but unfortunately, running seemed to be beyond her for the moment. But she could walk determinedly.

"They can check her out at the hospital," she heard the EMT say, presumably to Scott, and realized that they, plus his nephew, were right behind her. "But in my opinion, if she can walk and talk like that, there's no serious damage."

Rounding the corner of the house, Lisa immediately spotted the emergency vehicles: three fire trucks and two ambulances, sirens screaming, their stroboscopic lights sending bright red flashes of color through the night. A dozen or so firefighters in full gear swarmed toward the house. More emergency workers gathered around the figures on the lawn. They were small at this distance, but there was no mistaking who and what they were: her mother lying on her back in the grass with Robin and Andy and Lynn around her. A stretcher lay on the ground beside her, and even as Lisa watched, her heart suddenly in her throat, her mother was lifted onto it. The stretcher was then lifted, and Lisa realized that it was headed toward the ambulance.

"Wait!" she cried, then broke into a stumbling run. Scott was immediately beside her, grabbing her arm to provide support, running with her as he helped her stay on her feet. Robin, who was following the stretcher with the others, looked back at her cry. Lisa waved. Robin said something to the others, but no one slowed. Lisa managed to catch up just as the stretcher was being loaded into the vehicle. By the bright light inside the ambulance, she could see that her mother was deathly pale, her skin waxy-looking, her lips parted, her jaw slack. Strapped to the stretcher, she was covered to the armpits by a white sheet. The top few inches of her blue sleeveless nightgown were just visible above it. Her eyes were closed, and she appeared to be unconscious--or worse.

Fear clogged Lisa's throat. Her hands clenched. Her heart thudded painfully.

"Mother!"

Martha didn't respond in any way. Unable to get inside the ambulance because the paramedics who were still transferring her from the stretcher to the gurney were in the way, Lisa cast a frantic look around and encountered Andy's anguished eyes.

"What happened to her? Did she get trapped in the fire?"

"There was no fire where we were, just a little smoke. We got her out fine. Then she just . . . passed out," Andy said. He was wearing a matched set of blue cotton pajamas. Beside him, Robin, looking equally distraught, wore a knee-length flowered nightgown. Only Lynn, in her white nurse's uniform, looked calm.

"Maybe the shock of it." Robin wrung her hands. "She saw where the fire was. She said your name and then . . ."

"She started shaking." Andy sounded shaky himself. "Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and . . . that was it."

"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.