The basement! I can get to the basement! The door's in this hallway! I can hide downstairs in a corner! I can use the laundry tub to soak rags and wrap myself in-!

No! That's crazy! I wouldn't have a chance! When the smoke filled the basement, no matter how many wet rags I tried to breathe through, I'd still be suffocated!

And the heat would be unbearable!

And the overhead floor would eventually collapse! I'd be buried by flaming-!

Fear made her tremble so hard that her bladder muscles nearly failed.

But I can't just stand here!

The smoke made her bend over, retching.

At once a new thought gave her frantic hope.

It might not work!

But God help me, it's my only chance!

She held her breath and scurried forward, dodging past the fiery kitchen door. The heat struck her clothes. For a terrifying moment, she was certain that their cotton would burst into flames.

Blinded by the smoke, she reached the stairs, tripped, banged painfully forward, and clambered on her hands and knees up the steps. The heat became mercifully less, although the smoke increased, and when she had to breathe, her lungs rebelled, her chest racked with spasms. Determined, she scrambled faster, harder, and suddenly the steps ended. Pawing at nothing, propelled by her thrusting knees, she arched through the air and sprawled, slamming her chin on the upstairs floor.

Ahead, at the hallway's midpoint, even with the smoke, she had no trouble seeing the flames at the top of the vestibule's staircase. With a roar, they swelled toward the ceiling.

Hurry! The smoke made her eyes weep. It seared her throat.

She struggled to a crouch and darted forward, moaning as she neared the increasing heat, the spreading blaze. The crackling whoosh of the flames became deafening.

She whimpered, seized with terror that she might not be able to reach her destination, that the surge of blistering heat would force her back.

No choice now! She cursed, mustered her resolve, and veered to the left. Chased by a gushing arm of flame, she found her open bedroom door, lurched through it, and slammed the door shut behind her.

By comparison with the furnace of the hallway, the air in her bedroom was wonderfully cool, although thick acrid smoke continued to sting her eyes. Her exertion forced her to breathe and made her cough so deeply that she spit out phlegm.

She didn't care! She had a chance now!

Move!

The glow of the lamp on her bedside table was useless, so enveloped by haze that it was almost invisible.

That didn't matter! In this familiar bedroom, she didn't need to see in order to do what she had to. She lunged past a chair and reached French doors. When she yanked them open, she couldn't believe how delicious the outside air smelled. Flames that shattered windows to her right illuminated the gardens and shrubs below her.

But all Tess paid attention to was the giant oak tree beyond the small balcony outside her room.

That oak tree had been the reason Tess had broken her arm when she was eleven. One Saturday afternoon, after having come home from her gymnastic class, she'd been so excited by her progress on the overhead bar that she'd studied the oak tree from the balcony and wondered how easy it would be to leap toward the nearest branch, then swing toward a farther branch until she reached the trunk and climbed down, hand over hand, to the ground.

Tempted beyond her ability to resist, she'd leapt, grabbed the branch, clung by one hand while she'd stretched her other hand toward the next branch… and screamed when she felt her fingers slip…then screamed again, even more fiercely, when she'd hit the lawn, her left arm twisted under her. The arm had projected in a wrong – a horribly wrong – direction. Until that moment, she'd never known a greater agony.

Her father had burst from the house and rushed to pick her up, then raced to the garage and driven her, speeding through red lights, to the nearest hospital.

Her father.

Dead.

How much she missed him.

And now her mother was dead as well! Tess still couldn't adjust to the sight of the blood from the bullets that had struck her mother's abdomen and chest.

She couldn't believe it had happened.

Dead?

Her mother couldn't be dead.

You bastards!

As flames squeezed through the top, bottom, and sides of her bedroom door, Tess crammed the handgun into her burlap purse, tugged its top closed, and wrapped the purse's strap repeatedly around her wrist until there wasn't any slack.

The flames no longer squeezed but erupted through the sides, top, and bottom of her door.

No time!

Tess retreated into the smoke of her bedroom. Responding to her years of training, she crouched, braced one foot behind the other, and bent her knees in a sprinter's pose.

She blurted a prayer.

And propelled herself forward.

THIRTEEN

She jumped, felt her sneakers touch the balcony's ornate metal railing, and vaulted outward, hurtling through the air. In the dark, she feared that the past would reoccur, that she'd lose her grasp on the tree limb and plummet toward the lawn.

But she was twenty-eight now. Her tall lithe body reached the tree much sooner than she expected, her long arms stretching, her firm hands clutching.

The jolt of grabbing the branch swung her down, then up toward another branch. She took advantage of that motion, and as the branch she held began to droop, she hooked her legs around the farther branch and dangled, her hips bent toward the ground, balancing her weight between one branch and the other. The moment the branches stopped bobbing, she groped, hand-overhand, shifting her legs, toward where the two branches converged.

With an expert twist, she upended herself, facing downward now, and inched along the two branches, finally clutching the trunk where she huddled, supported by stout limbs, concealed by leaves.

Her heart pounded so fiercely that she feared she might become sick.

Had the gunmen seen her leap from the balcony?

Despite the flames that burst from windows near the front of the mansion, she strained to convince herself that this area remained in shadow.

The branches had bobbed. True. Yes. She couldn't pretend that they hadn't. But if the gunmen were concentrating on the doors from the mansion, they might not have thought to look toward this side of the house where there weren't any doors.

And in particular, they might not have thought to glance toward the least likely exit, a balcony on the upper floor.

Well, Tess trembled, I'll soon find out.

She yanked open her purse and tugged out her pistol. It gave her great satisfaction to think that the men who'd killed her mother might be killed by the gun her father had trained her to use. Even though it hadn't been cleaned in six years. Even though the spring in its magazine might have been weakened from so many years of having been loaded.

Tess couldn't think about that risk. All she could think about was…!

Descending the tree.

Doing her best to escape through a barrier of thick evergreen shrubs toward the darkness of a neighboring mansion.

She climbed down the tree, huddled at the base of its murky trunk, aimed toward the shadowy back of the mansion, saw no one, and bolted toward the shrubs on her right.

A bee seemed to buzz. A bullet splintered the oak.

In midstride, Tess whirled, crouched, and raised her father's pistol.

A lunging target appeared, silhouetted by flames that suddenly gushed at the back of the mansion. A target with a gun! A target who stooped and aimed toward Tess.

The lessons at the shooting range came back to her.

She squeezed the trigger. The pistol roared, its recoil jolting the barrel upward.