Nightingale Way: An Eternity Springs Novel (15 page)

“No, it’s not. Funny thing is that I’m enjoying it. You never told me Lucien Davenport was a British earl.”

“I didn’t?”

“No, you didn’t. You never told me much of anything about your family.”

“I don’t like to talk about them.”

Her tone dry, she said, “Oh? I never noticed.”

Now Cat settled back against the pool’s smooth wall and closed her eyes, too. The crisp night air felt cool against her face, and the contrast between the heat of the water and chill of the air refreshed and relaxed her. They sat in silence for long minutes until she felt compelled to say, “I never broke my promise to you.”

“Which promise is that?”

“You asked me not to investigate your parents’ death. I never did.”

He remained silent for a long moment. “It happened a long time ago, but I still miss them.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I’m surprised you never looked into it.”

“You were obviously disturbed about it even years later, so I know it must have been something horrible. If I could help you by not looking into it, then that’s what I wanted to do.” She waited a beat, then asked, “Will you tell me about them now?”

The question was a long shot, but he’d been more open about his job recently than in all the time she’d known him.

Enough time passed that she thought he’d say nothing more about the subject. Her thoughts drifted back to those early days of their marriage. So young and in love, and frankly, a little desperate. Looking back, she recognized that in her heart, she’d known they weren’t meant to last. They’d fallen in love despite themselves. She’d wanted home and hearth and the pitter-patter of little feet on the stairs, and even then he’d been the eagle, always soaring and sailing away.

His voice emerged from the darkness, stark and raw. “There was a wiring malfunction on the hot water heater and our house caught fire. It was the middle of the night. I don’t know what woke me up, but I could smell smoke. I had the attic room and I screamed for my parents, but the landing below my stairs was already ablaze. I couldn’t get out that way.”

Cat opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it. He was talking. She didn’t want to do anything to interfere with that.

“They had fire ladders stored in all the bedrooms. I had used mine a couple days earlier when I snuck out at night to meet some friends and I’d dumped it on the
floor of my closet. It was all tangled up. I thought I was going to die.”

She couldn’t hold back her question. “How old were you?”

“Eleven. I was eleven. Ben was eight. Andrea was a baby.”

It was the first time he’d spoken their names in years, Jack realized. That night was something he never talked about. He’d done so once, a very long time ago to Melinda Blackburn, but not to her daughter. Never to her daughter. He didn’t know why he did so now. He kept the events of that night locked away in a section of his memory that he seldom accessed, having learned at the ripe old age of eleven that survival required compartmentalization. But tonight, as his muscles ached and his heart remembered, the story churned behind his mental walls and demanded release.

He could still smell the smoke, still feel the heat against his skin. He could still hear the crackle and crash of his life going up, literally, in flames.

In the safety of the darkness, he began to speak, and in doing so, he went back.

Something was wrong. He knew it in his bones even before he opened his eyes. His heart pounded. Fear turned his limbs to jelly. He knew that he should move, but all he wanted to do was to pull the covers over his head and hide
.

He smelled smoke. His eyes stung. He began to cough. Fire. The house is on fire
.

Then he was moving, lunging from the bed, hollering
for his dad. He ran for the stairs, but the heat and flames below stopped him
.

Okay. Not a problem. He had the fire ladder. He dashed for his closet where the aluminum-and-fabric-straps ladder lay in a tangled heap. He could hear his mother’s voice in his mind: “This is for emergencies only, son. I don’t want to find out you’ve been using this ladder to sneak out of the house at night.”

“Yes, ma’am. No ma’am. I wouldn’t do that, ma’am.”

He’d done it every chance he’d gotten
.

Safety ladder in hand, he opened the attic window that overlooked the side yard. It took him precious minutes to untangle the mess, and he knew that if he made it safely out of his bedroom tonight, he’d never disobey his mother again—and never fail to take proper care of his equipment
.

Finally, he hooked the end of the ladder to the permanent fastenings his father had installed. He was coughing hard as he fed the ladder through the opening, then scrambled after it, climbing down to safety
.

When his feet touched ground, he didn’t pause, but dashed around toward the front of the house shouting and sobbing for his mom and dad and brother. For the baby. He saw flames engulfing the ground floor and his terror intensified. Dashing onto the porch, he tried to go inside, but he couldn’t. Fire was everywhere. Heat hit him like a fist. “Mama! Mama! Dad!”

He coughed and cried. He screamed. He had to save them. He had to rescue them. He ran to the back door, then around to the front again
.

He didn’t hear the sirens or see the fire truck arrive. When a strong arm caught him around the waist and a deep voice said against his ear, “Come here, son,” at first he thought Jesus was speaking to him
.

Then he registered the black coat with neon yellow bands and knew help had arrived. Firemen. He ran
toward the truck. “Help me save them. We have to save them.”

“We’re gonna do our best, son. We’ll do our best. Now, tell me how many people are inside and where they’re located.”

“Everyone’s on the second floor. Three bedrooms. Mom and Dad have a room and Ben has a room. The baby’s room is next to my parents. They let me move into the attic when the baby was born.”

The fireman spoke into his radio, relaying the information as he motioned for the paramedics to come see to Jack
.

He heard a loud
whoosh
and he tried to run back toward the burning house, but somebody stopped him. Held him. Spoke words to him that he did not hear
.

He couldn’t tear his gaze off the fearsome sight before him. Firemen scurried with hoses. Jack spied the ladder resting against the siding next to Ben’s window. Firemen were climbing into Ben’s window. “Please, God. Please, God. Please, God.”

When he saw a fireman hand Ben over to a man on the ladder, relief turned Jack’s knees to water, but his gaze remained glued on the opening
.

He waited
.

And waited
.

And waited
.

He struggled against the fireman’s hold
. Save them. I have to save them.

Now, decades later, Jack lived those long minutes over again. His throat was tight, his voice raspy, his emotions raw, as he said, “We didn’t save them. My parents and the baby died inside the house. Ben died in the ambulance. Smoke inhalation. He didn’t burn. Ben didn’t burn.”

At the time, that had meant the world to him. He remembered that, how he’d held on hard to that one reality
amid all the chaos of the aftermath. Something inside him had died right along with his family. He’d been a broken boy who, he saw now, had never completely healed.

Cat waited a respectful moment before saying, “I’m so sorry, Jack. What a horrible experience for you to go through.”

He didn’t respond to that. He’d never been good at accepting sympathy for the loss of his family. He always wanted to shout, “I didn’t save them!”

Cat knew him well enough to pick up on his reaction, and with her next words, she took the conversation in a different direction. “What were your parents like?”

Jack lowered his gaze from the starlit night sky and peered across the hot springs toward the shadow that was his ex-wife. He could almost hear her holding her breath, waiting to see whether he would respond to her question or shut her out. Once again, his responsiveness surprised him. “My mother made the best cookies I ever had in my life. Better than Sarah’s, even.”

“Wow,” Cat said. “That’s saying something.”

“I can’t taste anything lemon today without thinking of her.”

“That’s lovely, Jack. What was her name?”

“Elise. My father was D.L. Daniel Lucien Murphy Davenport.”

“Murphy, hmm? So just how is it that you and Cam are related?”

“It’s one of those distant cousin things. My father’s mother was a Murphy from a branch of the family that didn’t stay in Eternity Springs. She was a nurse during World War II, stationed in England. Since she had an interest in genealogy and Eternity Springs, she looked up the Davenports and met my grandfather, who was a bombardier in the RAF. He died during the war. My
grandmother returned to the States and eventually remarried and settled in California.”

“Our marriage license lists your birthplace as Palo Alto.”

“My father was a computer engineer.” With that, he was done talking about himself, so in an attempt to distract her, he asked, “Are you thirsty? There’s bottled water by the showers.”

“I’m fine. Where did you go after the fire, Jack?”

Well, hell
. “I’d forgotten how nosy you can be.”

“This isn’t nosy. This is normal curiosity. You’ve just told me more about your background than you told me in all the years that we were married. Did you live with relatives after that?”

“No.” He hadn’t had any relatives to live with, but damned if he’d say that. Made him sound like a whiner.

Cat waited expectantly. He wanted to bare his teeth and snap at her. She asked, “Did you go into the foster system? I’ve always wondered how my mother dragged you into her web.”

Jack figured he might as well tell her all of it and get this over with. He didn’t know why he’d started blabbing, but since he had, no sense stopping now.

“I dodged the foster system. The Davenport Trust provided for me financially, and my parents’ wills named the CEO of my dad’s company as my guardian.” He heard Cat’s quick intake of breath when he mentioned the famous man. “He was a great guy and I appreciate all he did for me, but I became another company project, the mascot in a way. They saw that I had an education with a capital E. I wanted to grow up and become a fireman, but I showed an aptitude for languages. One day my guardian called me in to his office and introduced me to a nice woman named Melinda.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen.” Jack thought back to that meeting. His
lips twisted in a rueful smile. “I still wanted to be a fireman.”

Melinda had told him that he could fight fires the likes of which he’d never imagined if he would join her team. He’d done exactly that.

Now, though, he wondered if he might be all burned out.

Silence dragged on between them, and just as Jack began to think that she wouldn’t say any more, she spoke with a faint note of bitterness in her tone. “You wanted to save the world.”

“I wanted to save my family,” Jack replied. He wondered why he’d never seen it quite that way before.

“Did you?” Because he knew she referred to their family, it was another shot through the heart. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back as he absorbed it. “One thing my training taught me was how to assess the odds of success. I knew that we were doomed from the first. I couldn’t reach you, Cat. I did try, but in that horrible moment when you handed me the cemetery map, I knew that I had lost you. I knew I’d lost everything a second time. I didn’t admit it to myself, but I knew that’s where we were going. I couldn’t reach you.”

“I was a mess,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper as it floated across the surface of the hot springs pool. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t all your fault that we fell apart. I can see that now, and I knew it then. I can say it now.”

“It was a hard time for us both.”

“I was so wrapped up in my own pain that I couldn’t see past it to yours. I’m sorry, Jack.”

He said her name, just her name, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“I’ve never known exactly what my mother does, and I certainly never knew what you did. I knew you served our country and that what you did was important, but I
never drew a connection between the people and the job. Nic Callahan painted that picture for me when she told me how you rescued Gabe. I’ve learned some important things about you since we’ve been in Colorado. You’re a rescuer, Jack. That’s something to be proud of.”

In the darkness, he snarled.
Rescuer my ass
. He couldn’t save Tony Martinez. He couldn’t save Mom and Dad and Ben and Andrea. He couldn’t save Lauren or his marriage. “I’m tired, Cat. I’m so damn tired.”

The shadow opposite him moved. Cat crossed the pool to him. She leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead. “Then rest, Superman. Take a little break. Give your scrapes and bruises and wounded heart time to heal. I’m told Eternity Springs is good for that.”