Twenty
“Are you sure you want to hear this?” Jim Porter asked. Eve didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I want to know the truth.”
“All right.” He pulled some forms from the envelope. “This isn’t the official report on the fire; that would be the one on record with the fire marshal’s office. But this one is the truth.”
“And the other isn’t?” she asked.
“Let’s just say it’s not the whole truth.” He handed the report to her and continued to speak in a steady tone as Eve scanned the document. “What you want is on the last page, last paragraph.”
She found the passage he referred to and started reading; some words and phrases seemed to jump out at her almost before she got to them.
Lit cigarette . . . smoking in bed . . . flammable bedcovering . . . original horsehair plaster . . . fast moving . . .
Even with her entire attention focused on the report, Eve couldn’t make all of the words connect to her brain. It didn’t matter; the words that did blast their way through got the message across.
Smoking in bed.
Her lungs began to ache and she realized it was because she’d stopped breathing; she was just sitting there, struggling with the realization that information on which she’d built a good part of her life might be wrong.
Might be wrong?
The man who literally wrote the book on the fire was telling her that what she’d been told was not merely wrong, it was an out-and-out lie.
Eve knew the earth couldn’t be see-sawing under her, but that’s how it felt.
“What it says here . . . about a lit cigarette . . .” Both men turned to her abruptly, and she realized the conversation had gone on without her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted. I’m just so . . .”
“Surprised?” suggested Porter.
“More like stunned. And confused.”
“That seems about right, considering,” he said. “I expect you have a lot of questions for me.”
“Just one for starters: is it true? Was the fire started by my father smoking in bed?”
“I can’t say for certain your father was the one who was smoking . . .”
“My mother didn’t smoke,” she blurted. “And she was always getting after my dad for smoking in bed. She complained that it made the room smell and stained the wallpaper and . . .” She swallowed and now the back of her throat hurt too. “And that it was dangerous. Sometimes he listened and sometimes he didn’t.” She dropped her gaze and stared at the empty envelope on the coffee table in front of her, making her way through a jumble of broken memories and half-formed questions. “If a cigarette started the fire, my dad was the one who lit it.”
“I’m sorry, Eve,” he said. “I know this is painful to hear.”
“It’s all painful,” she retorted, looking up at him. “It’s been painful for the past twenty years. Why on earth did you lie? Did you think it would hurt less if we thought it was a candle and not a cigarette that killed my parents and burned our house down?”
“Yes. That’s precisely what I thought. I know differently now. Hazard explained to me that you blamed yourself because you had lit candles in the turret earlier in the night. If I’d had even the slightest idea that—”
“What? If you had any idea that you’d be pointing the finger at me instead of my grandmother, you wouldn’t have lied? Did you think it was better to let her take the blame and shoulder the guilt?” she demanded, unable to keep the heat from her voice.
He shook his head. “Better? No, there was no better, only bad and worse. I thought I was picking the lesser of two evils.” He rubbed his hands together again, obviously feeling stressed, but he looked her straight in the eye as he spoke. “You and your sister were just kids, and you’d already lost so much: both your parents, your home, everything familiar. The signs pointed to your father being the one responsible, and I knew how little girls look up to their fathers and how important that is when they’re growing up. I didn’t want to see you girls lose that too. I couldn’t bring your father back, but I could let you hold on to your memories of him as a good guy. Let him go on being a hero in your eyes. I didn’t see why one mistake had to cause even more pain to people who’d had enough.”
Eve listened with a growing heaviness in her chest. She ached, but she couldn’t quite put a name to the pain she was feeling. Part of her brain told her she ought to feel relieved, but should relief feel as jagged and raw as what was churning inside her? She didn’t think so.
Porter continued. “That’s why when John Lockhart came to see me to find out how the investigation was going, I agreed to omit any mention of smoking in my final report. Earlier reports from the crew on the scene that night had listed candles as the possible cause, so I just left it at that.”
It didn’t surprise Eve to learn that her grandfather had tried to control the contents of the report; he tried to control everything that involved a member of the Lockhart family, and he usually succeeded. “So this was my grandfather’s idea?”
He shrugged. “Not in so many words. And I didn’t do it for the sake of his son’s reputation or the Lockhart name, though I knew both those things were on his mind. I did it for one reason only, the one I told you, to spare you and your sister.”
“He told me that he and your grandmother were worried sick over the custody hearing that was coming up,” Ported told her. “That surprised me. It seemed to be a no-brainer that the judge would send you to live with them. They had everything and the sun to offer you girls, and your other grandmother was . . . well, there were all those rumors.”
“Right. The rumors.” Loyalty to Grand made her spine prickle. “The rumors that made it easy to toss blame her way and know it would stick. Just a little tip of the scales in my grandparents’ favor, in case the judge didn’t think it was such a no-brainer after all.”
“I’m sorry about that too,” he said. “I’m talking about my part in the shabby treatment your grandmother got. My report could have set the record straight and it didn’t. You have to believe me when I say I never meant her any harm.”
She did believe him. He looked almost as distraught as she felt, and that made it impossible for her to hate him or even work up a decent anger.
“Heck,” said Porter, “I thought she had a lot of guts for doing what she did to get you and your sister out of there. And she was plucky enough not to let the talk get to her; she just kept her chin high and acted as if she didn’t even hear it.”
“Oh, she’s plenty plucky,” Eve murmured. “Among other things.”
“She told her story about what happened and stuck to it. Lots of folks get flustered or don’t remember things, but not her.”
“You met Grand?”
“Just the once. She came back to the house the next day. Said she wanted to see things for herself. It was cold, so we sat in my car so I could run the heater while I took her statement.” He gave a pensive half smile. “I remember I had to stop her from climbing a ladder to get inside the house . . . and it wasn’t easy.”
“Plucky,” Eve said again, thinking it was a good bet he hadn’t stopped Grand from doing anything, merely delayed her. What had she wanted in the house? Eve wondered. What did she expect would have survived?
Porter cleared his throat. “If I haven’t said it already, I’m sorry for everything. I added to your troubles when all I was trying to do was help. Like I said, the lesser of two evils. That’s what I thought I was doing.”
“You made a judgment call,” Hazard said. “Sometimes in life that’s what you’re called on to do, whether you like it or not.” He was speaking to Porter, but his pointed gaze swept to include Eve, reminding her that she’d made a similar call at the hospital that very afternoon, and he’d made one in an Irish village nearly two centuries ago. “So you do what your heart says is right and hope for the best. Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you intend. And sometimes you get a miracle.”
“Oh, there was a miracle that night,
all right,” declared Porter, his remorseful expression becoming animated. “More than one, in fact. But I had nothing to do with it.”
“What sort of miracle?” asked Eve.
“Your grandmother getting down those stairs, for starters. I spent a lot of time afterwards examining the burn patterns and the materials and doing the calculations. There was half-century-old horsehair plaster in the walls up there, for Pete’s sake; do you know how that stuff burns?”
“Fast?” she guessed.
“Real fast. There had to have been flames on those stairs by the time she got to them. It would have taken a miracle for her to get to the bottom and still have the juice—and the air—to make it through the smoke to your room and get you kids out.”
“Where there’s a will . . .” Affection and admiration warmed her voice. “Grand has always been very protective of the people she loves.”
“Something sure was,” he retorted. “Because that’s not even the best part. I told you the fire didn’t start in the turret. Well, it didn’t even burn there.”
The revelation caused Eve’s brow to furrow.
Hazard made a low sound of surprise. “That would explain the door frame.”
“That’s right,” confirmed Porter. “The fire never reached the top of the stairs. And it should have. Fires don’t make decisions: burn here, don’t burn there. Burn left, don’t burn right. They just burn.” He said it with respect. “The fire started in the bedroom at the end of the hall and moved toward the stairs. When it got there, it should have spread out in both directions.” He moved his hands far apart to illustrate. “It didn’t. Instead it stopped on the stairs to the turret like there was an invisible, fire-repellent curtain hanging there. And if that wasn’t a miracle, it was one hell of a magic trick.”
“Wow.”
“That sums it up pretty well,” agreed Hazard.
They’d just left Jim Porter’s condo and were standing at the end of the hallway waiting for the world’s slowest elevator. Eve stared out the tall window on her left without appreciating the view of the city lights and the bay in the distance. She was still reeling from everything Porter had told her.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said softly, trying the words on, letting the notion wash over her. “I feel . . .”
“Free?” Hazard suggested. “Vindicated? A thousand pounds lighter?”
“Exhausted. I think I’ll need a week to let it all sink in and sort out my feelings.”
He took her arm and spun her to face him, his grasp firm on her upper arms. “The one thing that matters most doesn’t need sorting. Let this sink in right now: you weren’t responsible for any of it, Eve. Not the fire, or your parents’ deaths, or any of the other things you’ve convinced yourself were your fault.”
Moved by his fervor, she searched his eyes. “How did you know Porter lied on the report?”
“I didn’t.”
“You must have had an inkling; you reached out to him even before I discovered Chloe’s name on the door frame.”
“ ‘Inkling’ is too strong a word. I had questions. And at first I didn’t even have those, only a vague uneasiness about the way the fire was supposed to have happened. The more Taggart went on about the energy in the turret and how it was a place of power, the more suspicious I became. Your grandmother is a very powerful enchantress, not as powerful as you are—or could be—but definitely no one to be trifled with. Taggart is in awe of the T’airna legacy,” he told her, a bemused smile playing at one corner of his mouth. “And he doesn’t awe easily.”
She tingled inside as he slowly slid his palms down her arms and took her hands in his as he continued talking.
“It didn’t make sense that a loving grandmother with all that power at her disposal, a grandmother willing to risk her life to save her granddaughters, didn’t use her magic to protect them in the first place.”
“Fire is a natural element,” she pointed out. “If Grand had barred it from the whole house we wouldn’t have been able to light a match or use the stove or fireplace.”
“True, but she might have been able to protect the house from any negative effects of her magic. Some heavy-duty magic went on in the turret. Haven’t you ever wondered why she didn’t take precautions to keep it from spilling into the rest of the house?”
Eve shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I assumed she had and that whatever she did failed or was just no match for the fire.”
“Did she tell you that? Did she ever explain to you what happened?”
“She tried,” Eve admitted sheepishly. “I refused to listen. I didn’t want to hear anything about magic, or about that night.”
“And I couldn’t let it go. Especially after I watched televised news reports from back then.”
She looked at him with surprise. “How on earth did you do that? That was way before the digital age, back when tapes were used over and over again.”
“Not all of them. Many of the ones that survived have been turned over to the History Center and are being archived and brought into the digital age.”
“Yes, but that’s a fairly new project,” Eve countered, “and a huge one. It will be years before those archives are available to the public.”
“Which is no doubt why the director was so happy to receive my generous contribution, and so eager to locate the footage I was looking for. Once I saw it, I knew I wouldn’t quit until I found out what really happened.”
“Why? What did you see on the film that made you so determined?”
“You,” he told her. His mouth slanted with gentle amusement. “I saw you. Minus the style and self-assurance and professional savvy, of course. But it was still you. The same beautiful eyes,” he said, lifting one hand and running the back of his fingers along her cheek. “The same sweet, stubborn chin. I played the clip over and over. In it, you were standing on the steps of the church following the memorial service.”
Eve closed her eyes, her face suddenly hot. She’d never seen the film clip he was talking about, but she remembered the day itself. She remembered being there, the flurries of snow in the air, the cold wind that whipped the tears from her cheeks, the whisper-thin layer of ice on the church steps.
“A tall, thin woman with silver hair and silver spectacles is standing just behind you and your sister,” he said.
“My grandmother Lockhart.”
“She tried to move between the two of you to take your hands as you went down the steps, but you stepped in front of her; you took your sister’s hand yourself and stuck your chin in the air and started down. And for just an instant the camera catches exactly that, the two of you apart from everyone else, together, and alone. A child protecting a child.” Emotion hovered in his voice and his hands tightened around hers as he dipped his head and briefly touched his forehead to hers. “That’s what you were, a child. That scared, lonely child made some hard decisions, and you’ve honored every one.”
He drew back to look into her eyes, smiling faintly. “That’s why I couldn’t let it go. You’ve spent most of your life seeking the truth for other people, Eve. I decided it was time someone did the same for you.”
A bell signaled the elevator’s arrival. Eve bit her lip; his words had struck a well of emotion and tears filled her eyes. Before they could spill, Hazard distracted her with one of those annoyingly smug shrugs he was so good at.
“That and the fact that I know a damsel in distress when I see one,” he said carelessly.
“A damsel? I am no damsel,” she retorted, gladly taking the bait. “And I wasn’t exactly in distress either.”
“If I’m not mistaken, it’s the sole responsibility of the party who rides to the rescue—metaphorically speaking—to identify the damsel and determine the degree of distress.”
He gestured for her to enter the empty elevator ahead of him.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, brushing past him. “The damsel—and I use the term loosely—ought to be the one to say if she is or isn’t in distr
ess.”
“Unless she’s bound and gagged and can’t speak for herself.”
The doors closed and the elevator started down.
“She could still signal with her eyes.”
He arched one brow. “Did I forget to mention the blindfold?”
“Yes . . . conveniently enough.”
Eve was surprised to feel the corners of her mouth turn up; surprised she could manage even a small smile with so much on her mind that wasn’t anything to smile about. And it was only because of Hazard that she could. She was very glad he was there to distract her from herself. Hell, she was glad he was there period . . . and grateful that she hadn’t been alone when Porter dropped his bombshell, grateful she wasn’t alone now. She would have gotten through it alone if she’d had to; she always did. But it was nice that for once she didn’t have to.
“Hazard?”
He angled his head to look at her. “Yes?”
“Thanks. You know, for riding to the rescue. There may have been a little bit of distress going on.”
Smiling, he reached for her hand and carried it to his mouth, murmuring as his lips touched her skin. “Any time, Enchantress.”
When they stepped from the elevator into the lobby, there was an elderly woman with wavy white hair coming toward them, moving slowly and clutching a lacy, rose-colored shawl around her narrow shoulders.
She waved her free hand to get Eve’s attention. “Dearie, would you mind holding the elevator for me?”
“Not at all,” Eve replied.
“I’ve got it,” Hazard said before she could reach for the button. He stepped back and used his shoulder to stop the doors from closing.
“Thank you, thank you,” the woman said.
When she was about two feet away from Eve, her hands fell to her sides, revealing a round gold brooch securing her shawl in front. Eve’s gaze was immediately drawn to the robin’s-egg-sized moonstone at its center. As she stared at it, the stone flashed so brightly she squinted and lifted her hand to shield her eyes. It was like staring into the sun; she couldn’t see anything. Or hear anything, she realized, not liking it. When someone grabbed her arm from behind, she assumed it was Hazard.
The Lost Enchantress Page 29
