"No, Mama-"

"I'll never look at you quite the same way again, Phoebe." Essie straightened. "I'll always look at you and see my little girl, my own baby girl, but now, every time I look at you, I'll see a hero."

"You beat him down to the floor," Phoebe reminded her. "I guess you're a hero, too."

"Maybe at the end of it. Well, I hate to wake him up, but I don't want to stay in this hospital anymore."

"Can we go home now?"

Essie brushed a hand over Carter's hair, faced her daughter again. "We're never going back there. I never want to go inside that place again. I'm sorry. I'd never feel safe."

"But where can we go?"

"We're going to stay with Cousin Bess. I called her, and she said we're to come."

"To the big house?" The idea of it had Phoebe's eyes opening wide. "But you and Cousin Bess don't hardly speak. You don't even like her."

"This morning, she's my favorite person in the world, save you and Carter. And we're going to be grateful to her, Phoebe, for opening her home to us when we need it."

"She didn't open it to us when Daddy died, or when-"

"Now she is." Essie snapped out the words. "And we're grateful to her. It's what we have to do."

"For now?"

"It's what we have to do," Essie repeated.

They rode to Cousin Bess's in a police car while Carter wolfed down the cold burger and fries, gulped down the Coke. They circled the park with the fountain sparkling in the air. The grand old house was rosy brick and soft white trim; it was lush with green lawn and tended flowers and draping trees.

It was a world away from the tiny shotgun house where Phoebe had lived for more than eight of her twelve years.

She noted her mother's back was poker straight as they climbed up the stone steps to the front door, so she stiffened hers as well. Mama rang the bell like company would, rather than family. The woman who answered the door was young and bright and beautiful. She made Phoebe think of a movie star with her golden fall of hair and slender build.

There was sympathy on her face as she held out her hands to Essie.

"Mrs. MacNamara, I'm Ava Vestry, Ms. MacNamara's personal assistant. Come in, come in. Your rooms are all ready for you. You must be exhausted, so I'll take you right up. Or if you'd rather have some breakfast, or some tea?"

"They don't need anyone fussing over them."

Cousin Bess made the announcement from the curve of the grand stairs. She stood, dressed in a crow-black dress, her thin face pinched with disapproval. Her hair was as gray as a Brillo pad with odd wings of black at either temple.

Now, as always, the first glimpse of her father's cousin made Phoebe think of the mean Almira Gulch, come to stuff Toto in her basket. Wicked old witch.

"Thank you for taking us in, Cousin Bess," Mama said in the same quiet voice she'd used when Reuben had a gun to her head.

"Doesn't surprise me you got yourself into a mess. The three of you are to wash, thoroughly, before you sit at my table or lie on my sheets."

"I'll see to it, Ms. MacNamara." Ava turned her beautiful, compassionate smile onto Phoebe, then Carter. "Maybe the children are hungry.

Maybe after their bath, I could ask the cook to make pancakes or-" Apparently the idea of more food after the horrors of the night, the burger, the fries, the ride in a police car, was too much for Carter's stomach. It tossed up the Quarter Pounder right there on Cousin Bess's antique Aubusson carpet.

Mortified, exhausted, Phoebe just closed her eyes. Maybe she hadn't been shot and killed, but she was sure her life was over.

Mama had tended Cousin Bess's house for twenty years now, scrubbing, polishing, arranging. She'd served that demanding old woman until the day she died.

Through those two decades, the house had become Essie's worldnot just her home, or even her sanctuary. Her entire world. And what was outside it, her fears. It had been nearly a decade since Essie had gone beyond its terraces, its courtyard.

Reuben's death in prison hadn't broken those locks for her, Phoebe thought as she rose to put her gun in the lockbox on the top shelf of her closet. The bitter end to Cousin Bess's bitter life hadn't thrown the doors open for her.

In fact, it seemed to Phoebe those events had simply added more and stronger locks.

If Cousin Bess had done the right thing, the kind thing and-fat chance-passed the house to her mother instead of shackling Phoebe to it, would things have been different? Better? Would her mother be able to walk out of the house, stroll over to the park, pop in and visit a neighbor?

They'd never know.

Where would she herself be now if not for that night? Would she have married Roy? Would she have found a way to keep her marriage together, to give her daughter the father she deserved?

She'd never know that either.

So they'd have the lilies in the parlor, order pizza, and settle in together for a Friday night at home.

And Phoebe would go out to dinner Saturday-just this once. There was too much in her life already that needed tending without adding a man to it.

She'd cried when she spoke to Roy last, yes, she had. But those tears had mostly been anger. She'd shed most of the sorrow and disappointment long before, when Carly had been only a baby.

Too much that needed tending, Phoebe thought again as she changed. She glanced at the blush pink lilies in the cobalt-blue vase on her dresser. Flowers were lovely. But blooms faded and died.

Chapter 6

Still, flowers and an evening of girl movies smoothed out a lot of edges. At the end of the marathon, Phoebe carried her sleeping daughter to bed. Any-o'clock made it to just past midnight this time.

Twenty minutes later, Phoebe was as deeply asleep as her daughter. The sound of the doorbell had her bolting straight up in bed. She rolled out, glancing at the bedside clock-three-fifteen-before snatching up her robe. She was already at the steps and starting down when

Essie and Ava came out of their rooms.

"Was that the doorbell?" Essie clutched her robe closed at the neck, and her knuckles were white. "At this hour?"

"Probably just kids fooling around. You stay up here with Carly, okay? In case it woke her."

"Don't open the door. Don't-"

"Don't worry, Mama."

That twenty-year-old fear, Phoebe knew, was always waiting to push off from the bottom of the dark pool toward the surface.

"I'll go with you. Probably just a couple half-drunk teenagers playing pranks," Ava said before Phoebe could object.

No point in making it bigger than it was, Phoebe decided, and let

Ava walk down with her. "She'll be upset the rest of the night," Phoebe murmured.

"I'll see she takes a sleeping pill if she needs it. Stupid kids." Phoebe peered through the pattern of textured glass on the panel of the front door and saw nothing. They'd run off, she thought, likely laughing hysterically as kids would over waking up a household. But when she rose to her toes to study the veranda more carefully, she saw it.

"Go on up, Ava, tell Mama it was nothing. Just kids being a nuisance."

"What is it?" Ava clutched at Phoebe's arm. "Is there something out there?"

"Go on up and tell Mama. I don't want her scared. Tell her I'm just getting a glass of water while I'm down here."

"What is it? I'll go up and get Steven's baseball bat. Don't you open that door until-"

"Ava, nobody's out there, but I need to open this door, and I can't until you go up and tell Mama everything's fine. She's working herself up into a state by now. You know she is."

"Damn it." Loyalty to Essie overrode the rest. "I'm coming right back."

Phoebe waited until Ava was up the stairs before she unlocked the door. She scanned the street-right, left, across-but her gut told her whoever had rung the bell was gone. She had only to crouch down to pick up what lay on the doorstep. Then she shut the door and relocked it before carrying it into the kitchen to set it on the table.