And then she lit the sheet.

She was going to toss the thing right at Timmie. Timmie never let her. Winding up like she was going for the left field corner, she swung the bat straight at Cindy's arms.

Cindy didn't see the bat until the last minute. Her eyes popped. She dropped the lighter, threw up her hands. Caught the bat midforearm and screamed as her bones crunched.

Timmie didn't even wait to see what Cindy was going to do. She dove for the lighter, which was skating across the floor toward another pile of papers. Grabbing it, she scrambled back to her feet and shoved the shrilling Cindy aside to get up the stairs.

The stairs were already involved. Flames licked around the edges like logs on a hearth, and the smoke roiled up toward the second floor as if it were a chimney. Timmie choked and blinked, blinded by the sudden heat. She heard a terrible scream from below her and knew that Cindy had been caught by her own trap. But it was too late to worry about Cindy now.

Who do you save first?

It depended on who she found first.

Her bedroom was empty. Timmie searched her bed, under her bed, around the floor, into the closet. The smoke was getting too thick to see, and she was crawling.

"Daddy! Murphy, where the hell are you?"

On her hands and knees, pulling her shirt up over her nose and mouth, squinting through inky, oily blackness, the fire below moaning with delight. It was too fast, let loose in a house made for a holocaust.

"Daddy!"

She scooted into Meghan's room. Crouched lower. Heard the sirens and couldn't wait. She didn't even realize she still had the bat in her hand until it bumped into something. Something soft. Something big.

She had to bend close to recognize him. Silvery hair, soft blue eyes. Hands tied with the same duct tape that closed his mouth. She almost sobbed with relief. She almost dragged him out without looking for Murphy.

Murphy was four feet farther back. Wedged into a closet, unconscious. Taped and silent and sticky with congealing blood. Impossible to move easily, which was probably the point.

Who do you save first, smartass?

Timmie sobbed with frustration. She looked back to her father, who was calmly watching her, as if he knew that, like always, she'd take care of him. She looked at Murphy, who couldn't help himself at all. She heard the crash of something caving in downstairs and scooted over to untape her father.

"You have to get yourself out, Da," she said in between coughs. "Hold on to Murphy's leg and I'll guide you out."

He smiled. "Okay, honey."

She turned back and grabbed Murphy by the shoulders. Her lungs were bursting. Pinpoints of light danced in front of her eyes. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. If she stopped to worry about it, all three of them would be dead. She yanked on Murphy until she thought she was going to die, and finally felt his dead weight inch across the floor.

"Now, hold on, Da!" she yelled.

Joe took hold of Murphy's ankle and scooted right along with her. Timmie backed toward the door. She could really hear the fire now. Not the wood popping or the joints groaning. The fire. Hungry, primal, ferocious. Howling and cackling with glee, seething with power. Snapping at her like prey on a veldt. And softly, like psychotic counterpoint, her father, singing.

"'They asked me how I knew... my true love was tru-u-u-u-e..."'

"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Could he pick 'em or what? Timmie tried to laugh and ended up choking instead. She kept moving long past the moment she could see. Past the moment she could breathe. She finally got to a window over the back porch and punched it out.

The fire roared below. Timmie could barely make out strobes shuddering against the next house. She heard engines and pumps and voices. Not soon enough. She had to get these two out.

She looked back to guide her father on and realized he was gone. Somewhere along the hallway, he'd let go of Murphy, and she hadn't noticed. Timmie hesitated for only a second. And then, because of who she was, how she was trained, she acted. She triaged, and saved the person who had the best chance of surviving.

Breaking out as much glass as she could, Timmie pulled Murphy out onto the roof. It still held, and a pair of firefighters were just setting up to get a ladder to it. If the fire didn't reach them in the next minute, Murphy would be okay.

Timmie could hear the chaos below and knew it wouldn't be long before the entire house just folded in on itself. She turned away from the man she'd just broken her back pulling out.

"Hey, what are you doing?" the fireman yelled.

At the front of the house, two windows exploded, and the fire claimed the roof. Sucking in a few lungsful of clean air, Timmie climbed back into the window and went to save her father.

Epilogue

Murphy hated hospitals. It was bad enough spending enough time in one to get a story. But that was nothing to actually being stuck in one as a patient. Especially now that he was feeling better.

Well, less dead. He could at least talk now that they'd taken that damn tube out, and he could breathe without coughing up chunks of what looked like coal. His head didn't feel like it was going to fall off, and he could successfully count raised fingers three times out of four. Even with the cast on his arm and the stitches all across his back from where Leary had dragged him over a broken window to get him out of that house, he didn't feel nearly as bad as he knew he should. He was just restless.

Sherilee had been in. She'd helped him finish the piece on the town that had covered up a serial killer. She'd also cracked a bottle of sparkling grape juice for the third Pulitzer she was sure it was going to earn. Murphy drank his juice, wished like hell for the real stuff, and smiled like a good boy. He put up with visits from Mattie, Walter, Barb, and Ellen, who seemed committed to dispensing only innocuous news. He even sat through the dressing down he'd been handed by the police detective who'd had to break into his Porsche to get it out of the path of careening ambulances.

But Murphy didn't want to talk to any of them. None of them knew what it felt like to be immobilized. None of them realized why he had to leave.

He heard her coming all the way down the hall. She was shuffling on feet still raw from where her rubber-soled tennis shoes had melted in the heat. She looked even worse than Murphy, her eyebrows gone and her face peeling like a bad sunburn. Her hair had been singed almost to the roots. She had her burned and lacerated hands wrapped in big, protective mitts to cushion them, and she had a set of stitches on her butt that matched the ones on Murphy's back. All in all, a pitiful sight. Murphy would have felt sorry for her, except that of any of the crowd who'd stopped by to see him, she seemed the most content.

Today that contentment was a little fragile, so Murphy took it upon himself to be the entertainer.

"When am I getting out of here?" he demanded, his throat still gravelly from smoke inhalation.

"I don't know when you're going home," Timmie said, easing into his armchair. "I'm not in charge. Of anything. Ever again."

"Don't be ridiculous," Murphy retorted, trying to find a more comfortable position and just making himself dizzy. "I heard you're going to be the coroner."

"Bite your tongue."

"You mean you don't want to know how people die?"

"Not as long as I live."

"But you got Van Adder disgraced. You got Landry fired, that security guard brought up on charges, and GerySys outbid by a reputable firm that will co-op Restcrest to financial security. Hell, you even got all those nurses rehired."