No-not a food smell. Smoke.

Smoke was drifting up the stairwell, reaching with ghostly tentacles, spreading like fake, stage fog, the kind that comes from dry ice. She could hear something now, too-a faint, far-off crackling sound.

Fear came first. It spiked through her like a lance, pinioning her to the spot. Paralyzed, unable to breathe, she closed her eyes tightly and clamped her hands over her ears, trying to shut out the screams. Momma! Jonathan…Chrissy! Where are you? Momma!

But the screams were inside her own head.

She never knew how she’d come to be there, but suddenly she was running down a hallway, hammering on doors with her fists and screaming, “Fire! Fire-get out! You have to get out!” Screaming until her throat was raw. Screaming and banging until doors opened to angry faces…slowly comprehending faces…frightened faces. And in the midst of that chaos, her mind was rejecting it all, insisting with the adamance of a stubborn child, No-no, this can’t be happening. It can’t be happening, not to me!

Angrily now she herded them down the hallway toward the stairs-children and old people, some half-dressed, some crying…some too dazed to even be scared. Inwardly raging, she felt almost glad to have an excuse to scream at someone, a reason to vent her fury at the Fates who would play such a cruel joke on her. Not me! Why is this happening again…to me?

The understanding came to her gently, more like a sunrise than a thunderclap. The screams and shouts and poundings faded and she entered a strange kind of calm, almost like a dream. Of course you, Joanna. Of course you.

In the dream she heard whispers, voices from the past. Doveman’s voice, saying, “…Look in the place where I was when I lost it.” She’d come full circle, Joanna had. The Fates had brought her back to the place where she’d lost herself, twenty-five years before. For reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, she was being given another chance. A chance to find Joanna.

On the second floor the smoke was thicker. Doors were opening even before she got to them, people finally roused by the commotion, coming out to see what was going on and meeting with the black, choking cloud.

“Get down!” Joanna screamed at them. “Stay low, but hurry! Get out! Run!”

Down the stairs she went, elbowing people aside, stumbling, half falling, lungs screaming for air. It was her nightmare come to life-the blackness and choking smoke…the colors of fire, flames licking up a door frame, hissing across the ceiling…and a strange keening sound that she realized finally was coming from her own throat.

From somewhere nearby she heard glass breaking. People were all around her, pushing past her, some crying and choking, others eerily silent, all running, running for the front door and the clean clear air outside. She kept trying to make headway in the opposite direction, certain there must be someone else left inside, certain that only she could save them. But as in her nightmare, no matter how hard she tried, her legs would not propel her forward. She felt herself being carried along with the crowd, helpless as a leaf in a torrent.

Then she was outside, moving like a sleepwalker through the crowd of people that had gathered in the street…dark shapes with shocked faces, eyes staring past her at the smoke that had begun to billow from broken windows. Somewhere in the distance sirens wailed, getting louder, coming nearer. Someone clutched at her arm and she jerked around, startled and uncomprehending.

A woman stood there, arms wrapped protectively around the baby clinging in terror to her neck. The woman was shouting at her, her face contorted with anguish and fear, screaming words Joanna couldn’t hear. The noise and the wailing of the sirens filled her ears, filled all the space inside her head. Clapping her hands over her hears, she bent her head close to the woman’s and shouted, “What?”

“It’s Michael! I can’t find Michael! I don’t know what happened to him-I thought he was right there. Oh, Lord- Oh, Jesus…I don’t what I’ll do if anything happens to him. First his momma and now…”

Michael. The little boy whose mother had died. The child she and Ethan had spent the day with Saturday, in the park. The child who had stood in front of his mother’s apartment and gazed up at her with lost, golden eyes. She remembered the feel of his small hand stealing into hers, felt it so vividly she looked down and was surprised not to see him there.

She clutched the woman with both hands just as the sirens yelped and died, so her voice grated loud in the comparative silence. “You think he’s still in there?”

The woman’s head bobbed frantically. “He mighta went to his old place-I know he had the key. He’d do that sometimes, when he was missin’ his momma bad. It’s the first one you come to, right at the top-”

But Joanna was already running, pushing through the crowd with her panther’s stride, making for the cracked concrete steps that would take her back into the burning building. Back into Hell. Back into her own half-forgotten past.


Ethan unbuckled his seat belt and hitched himself forward. “What’s going on? Why are we stopping?”

Tom Applegate shrugged. “Can’t see, sir. An emergency of some sort-they’ve got the street blocked off.”

“Some kind of mess up ahead,” Rupert Dove muttered, tapping his gnarled fingers on one bony knee.

Ethan demanded harshly, “Can’t we get through some other way?” Urgency jumped and twitched in all his muscles; he felt a tightness in his chest and a churning in his belly he couldn’t explain, except that he knew he had to see Joanna-or Phoenix, or whomever she decided she wanted to be; it no longer mattered to him, and he wanted, needed, to tell her that-now.

Tom lifted a hand from the steering wheel in a gesture of helplessness. His eyes met Ethan’s in the rearview mirror-steady, uncompromising but not without compassion. Staring back at him, Ethan knew what he had to do. Without a moment’s hesitation, he reached for the door handle.

“You ain’t goin’ without me,” Rupert Dove wheezed as he pushed his own door open. Ethan heard the old man’s raspy breathing close behind him as he wove his way between idling cars, wading across the streams of headlights and through clouds of engine exhaust. Just as he reached the sidewalk, Tom Applegate pushed past him, swearing, to take his customary place in the lead. Behind them in the clogged street, horns began to bleat futilely.

Two blocks farther on they found the street filled with fire engines and police and EMS vehicles. Beyond the police barricades shadowy figures were going efficiently about their business in a world turned chaotic, moving quickly, shouting orders, wrestling equipment, or bending quietly over silent shapes huddled on stoops and curbs. Outside the barricades people stood clumped together in groups, holding each other, some weeping, some just staring at the frantic scene with dazed and empty eyes.

With Tom running interference, Ethan pushed his way through the crowds and vehicles. He spotted Kenny Baumgartner near an EMS wagon and waved at him as he approached one of the cops manning the barricade. “I’m a doctor,” he shouted. “I can help.”

The cop looked over at Kenny, who yelled, “It’s okay, he’s a doctor. Let him in.” He shifted the barricade enough to let Ethan through, then moved to block Tom Applegate and Rupert Dove when they would have followed.

“They’re with me,” Ethan said, but Tom already had his I.D. out.

“Where he goes, I go,” the Secret Service agent said flatly. The cop gave the I.D. a glance, then looked up…and up…at Tom’s impassive face, and moved aside. He looked as if he wanted to step in again when Rupert Dove moved to follow in Tom’s wake, then thought better of it and waved him on through.

Ethan waded toward The Gardens through a swampy quagmire of déjà vu. Had it been so short a time since he’d been here? A few days that seemed like hours-or a lifetime. It seemed the same to him in so many ways-the darkness, the aura of tragedy and disbelief and shock-and yet so much was not the same. Then he’d been one of the shadowy figures going about his work with detached calm, his emotions safely shut away in the protected Eden of his quiet place. Now he was one of them-the shattered and frightened ones, caught unawares by capricious disaster, his emotions all out in the open, unshielded, unguarded and unprepared. Joanna…Joanna… His fear for her was like a beast, tearing at his insides. It would not listen to arguments and reason. No use telling it she might not be here at all, and that if she had come, in all likelihood she’d have escaped the building along with everyone else. On some primitive level of awareness he knew. He knew.

A baby’s crying penetrated the worry that cloaked him, and then a woman’s voice, bright and shrill with hysteria. It seemed somehow familiar to him. Focusing on the sound, he saw a woman clutching a sobbing, hiccuping baby, struggling in the determined grip of a paramedic. A new fear joined the beast already gnawing at his insides as he recognized Michael’s aunt, Tamara.

He had no memory of how he got to her, only of touching her arm and finding it dangerously cold and clammy. He joined the paramedic in trying to get her to sit down on the steps of the EMS truck, but she turned on him, clawing blindly at his shoulders, her voice shredded, made almost inaudible by her terror and grief. “Oh, God-Michael’s in there. Michael’s in there. She went after him, but they ain’t come back. Oh, God-somebody go-”

“She? Who went after him? Who?” His throat brought up the words, and it was like coughing up glass.

“I don’t know her name…” Tamara’s knees were buckling. As Ethan and the paramedic eased her and her baby to the ground, she gasped out, “She was with y’all the other day when you brought Michael-”

Ethan turned blindly-and ran straight into a solid wall named Special Agent Tom Applegate. Breathing hard through his nose, he said flatly, “I’m going after her.”

The Secret Service man’s voice was just as unequivocal. “Sir, the only way you’re going in there is over my dead body.”

Something primative leaped inside Ethan’s chest. Adrenaline surged through his muscles. His fists curled. The next thing he knew he was caught in a viselike embrace, and his arms were pinioned to his sides. Near his ear Tom’s quiet voice, breaking a little, was saying, “Sir, I’m sorry…I can’t let you go in there. You know I can’t. I’m sorry…”

Seconds passed. Ethan’s sanity balanced on a razor’s edge. Then a long quivering breath dragged agonizingly through his chest. “All right,” he breathed. “All right…”

“Sir, let the firefighters do their job. They’ll find her. If she’s in there, they’ll do everything they can to bring her out.”

But will it be in time? Will everything be enough? “Yeah…okay. All right…”

The bands around him eased. He drew another excruciating breath; his heart was racing, every beat torture. Dazed and shaking like a sleepwalker woken up too suddenly, he pulled away from the Secret Service man and looked around. But it was another few seconds before he was able to make full sense of his surroundings, and when he did, realization slammed him in the chest. Pivoting, he clutched a handful of Tom Applegate’s shirt.

“Where’s Rupert Dove?”


There were some advantages after all, Doveman thought, to being old. Old age made a person invisible, especially to the young. Young folks concentrating hard on doing a worrisome and difficult job paid no mind to an old black man-not until it was too late. He heard the shouts that followed him up the steps of the corner row house, but he paid them no mind. Then he was inside the burning building, and couldn’t hear them, anyway.

The noise of the fire filled his ears, filled his head, filled his mind, suffocating thought. Ahead of him through the swirling, billowing smoke, he could see the stairs. Pulling the tail of his shirt over his face, he focused on them, held his breath and began to climb.

He knew just where she’d be. He’d spotted that third-floor window, the first one on the side, the one with the crumpled ledge and the remains of a broken balcony hanging off the bricks. The one where that boy’s poor momma had died. Doveman knew his Joanna. If she’d gone after the boy, that’s where she’d look for him. If she was alive, that’s where she’d be.

And she was alive, Doveman was sure of that. The Lord wouldn’t have brought her all this way to take her now, not when she was so close to the Promised Land…


Momma? Where are you? It’s dark, and I’m scared. I can’t see you, Momma…