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at their ears. Help was on its way. Faye sensed that this was a good thing.
    Tilda had a lot to say, most of it unintelligible. Exhausted from trying to speak, she sank back, her head lolling against the driver’s seat. Faye hadn’t understood much, but she’d caught a few troubling phrases. “Needed to be safe,” and “No place to go,” and “Nobody to trust.” Still more troubling was this: “Myrna…she wouldn’t wake up. I couldn’t…Faye, can you help?”
    By the time the paramedics arrived, Tilda was dead, and Faye was left to wonder why a dying agoraphobic who had traveled only a couple thousand miles since 1972 had driven thirty miles to ask a relative stranger for help.

Chapter Three
    Faye didn’t know Myrna’s number or address, but she was able to give the emergency personnel enough information to find her. Then she told the story of Tilda’s final moments several times to various people in uniform. Finally, they left her alone while they examined the Monte Carlo and its owner, trying to figure out what had really happened to Tilda.
    Faye had long since sent Amande to their room, over the girl’s protests that she wanted to be where the action was. One of the prerogatives of parenthood was the occasional ability to separate a child from “the action.”
    Now, she was alone in the parking lot, still too upset to let her daughter see her in this condition. She wanted…needed…more information, and she had a bad feeling about the sooty stench of Tilda’s dying breaths. There was only one Rosebower number stored in Faye’s phone, so she called her client, Samuel Langley. He’d lived his entire life in Rosebower, so he surely knew the Armistead sisters. And, though she’d told the emergency personnel how important it was to find Myrna, maybe somebody local could find her quicker than an outsider wearing a uniform.
    When Samuel answered his phone, Faye could tell by the background noise that he wasn’t sitting alone at home. She heard voices and a siren and the engines of more vehicles than had any right to be on the streets of nighttime Rosebower. “What’s happening down there?”
    His response was overpowered by the sound of another siren.
    Faye tried again. “Samuel, something’s happened to Tilda Armistead. I need to find Myrna.”
    â€œWe’ve got Myrna. Nobody could get her to answer the phone—the woman’s half-deaf—so several of us who live nearby took matters in hand. We got a ladder, broke a window, and went looking for her. She’s fine. But did you say you knew where Tilda was?”
    Faye could hear shouting and the quiet wailing of a woman’s voice. She thought of her call to 911. It would have triggered a call to Tilda’s next of kin, but Samuel was telling her that Myrna wasn’t home. Faye doubted she had a cell phone, so she couldn’t know of Tilda’s death. The noise of sirens said that something was going on in Rosebower, in terms of emergency personnel, but Faye could feel a disconnect between what she knew and what Samuel knew. Even twenty-first-century technology can’t be instantaneous. Tonight, that time lag had a deadly feel.
    All Faye could do was tell Samuel what she knew and ask him to do the same. “Tilda was here at my hotel with me until…Samuel, she’s dead. Some kind of respiratory failure, I think. It sounds like something just as awful may be happening where you are.”
    Now Samuel was yelling outright. “I’ll call you back, Faye. I can see firefighters suiting up to look for Tilda right now. I can’t let them go into a burning house for no reason.”
    The line went dead.
    ***
    Faye watched the last marked car pull out of the parking lot. Tilda’s body had long since been taken away, but Faye could already guess the result of the autopsy. The cause of death would be smoke