The Inn at Dead Man's Point (34 page)

“What aren’t you telling me? Is the baby all right?”

“It was yours?”

“Of course it was... She lost it?”

“Shortly after she arrived.”

Al tried to swallow the lump in his throat and it wouldn’t go down. The woman he loved was seriously injured, her daughter was upstairs calling for her mommy, and everything they owned was gone. And now they’d lost their baby.

Dear God, what had they done to deserve this?

Brian was in Katie’s room when Al went upstairs to check on her. His parents were on vacation, so he’d come alone. Phillip Collier was there, too, sitting with Ma by Katie’s bedside. Katie was still wheezing, but she sounded a little better. Al picked her up, careful not to dislodge the oxygen tube, and held her. “I saw Mommy a few minutes ago. She has a big booboo on her head, and she’s still sleeping.”

“What in the hell happened out there?” Brian asked.

“Mattie burned everything – the cars, the garage, the shed, and the inn. I got Katie out through an upstairs window and went back in for Jenna, but Mattie had hit her on the head. She lost a lot of blood, and she’s still unconscious. They’re cutting her hair off now, so they can figure out how to put her scalp back together.”

“Dear God,” Ma whispered. Phillip rubbed her back. He looked stunned. They all did.

“As soon as Mommy gets better, she’ll come to see you, Katie.” He’d take her downstairs to see Jenna, but the sight would give the little girl nightmares. It would definitely give him nightmares.

He turned his face away from Katie and coughed. He’d breathed in too much smoke. They’d all breathed in too much smoke. Katie’s breath rattled going in and out, and he knew it would take both of them time to recover, but the one he worried about the most was Jenna.

Al looked directly at Brian. “Can you hear Katie breathing?”

“Yeah. It’s bad, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s bad, and it didn’t take much to trigger it. That’s why Jenna doesn’t want her at your father’s house.”

“I don’t have anyplace else to take her.”

“Sure you do,” said Ma. “You can come to my house. She’s okay there, and nobody smokes in my house. She likes it at Grandma’s house, don’t you, Katie?”

“Uh huh.” She lay her head on Al’s shoulder and snuggled in like she belonged there. She was already more his than Brian’s.

<>

Katie went home with Grandma the next day, but Jenna drifted in and out of consciousness for two more days. Her lungs were in bad shape from the smoke, and she’d lost the baby, but it was the injury to her head that worried the doctors the most.

Her head was swathed in bandages and the swelling in her face had gone down. He sat by her side holding her hand and talking to her. “You’re going to be all right, Jenna. Katie is at Grandma’s house, and Brian is with her every day. She’s still coughing, but she’s okay. I didn’t think it was a good idea to send her back to daycare until after her mommy came home from the hospital.”

Her eyes opened and she whispered, “Baby.”

Nobody had told her about the baby. Al wasn’t sure she could deal with it now or even comprehend, so he changed the subject a little. “Mattie burned the baby furniture, honey. Everything in the garage and the inn burned, and both cars are gone. After you get out of the hospital, we’ll go buy new ones, okay?”

“‘Kay.” Her eyes closed and a second later they opened again. “No furniture?”

He shook his head. “We’ll stay with my mother when you get out of here.” He tugged on the red polo shirt he wore. “This is Nick’s. I ordered some clothes over the Internet, but they didn’t come yet. Cara ordered some things for you and Katie, so we won’t have to go naked, but we’ll have to shop together for furniture for our new house.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “What new house?”

“The one we’re building on Beach Road. I had the design about finished, but I’ll have to start over.” All the work he’d done in the past few months was gone. He’d kept backups of his work, but the backups were in his briefcase in his car, and Mattie burned the car. All the designs for the Dead Man’s Point project and for their new house were gone. All the archives of past projects, all the framed sketches of the homes he’d designed, and all the plans in progress were gone.

“Did you get the cats out?”

“Bandit is the only one they’ve found so far. Angelo brought him home from the emergency clinic this morning. The firefighters found the bodies of Coco and Midnight inside the inn. Callie is still missing, and so is Albert. Callie wasn’t on the bed when I grabbed Katie, and the windows were open, so maybe she got out. After you get home, we’ll go out and look.”

She rolled to her side. “What happened to Mattie?”

“She tried to cremate herself. When the authorities release her remains, we’ll have the funeral home finish the job.”

Jenna reached up to feel the bandages on her head. “She hit me.”

“Yes, she did, several times.” He wasn’t sure where Mattie got the strength to hit someone that hard, unless it was rage. One strike of the iron bar had left an indentation in Jenna’s skull and others had split the flesh right down to the bone.

“Poor Mattie.”

He couldn’t summon any sympathy for Mattie. She’d killed his baby and nearly killed the baby’s mother. They should have kept that woman under lock and key instead of turning a lunatic loose in a nursing home. It was a wonder she didn’t burn that place down. If she had, a lot of people would have died. As it was, the only ones lost in this fire were Mattie Worthington, two cats, and a baby who’d never had a chance to live.

The nurse came in, and Jenna asked about the baby. Instead of answering, the nurse glanced at Alessandro and left the room. Jenna pinned him in an intense look and said, “Tell me.”

He sat beside the bed and took her hands. “You lost the baby right after the fire, before you woke up. It never had a chance.”

Her eyes filled with tears and the sudden grief threatened to strangle her. She was only three months pregnant, not far enough along to show, so the baby wasn’t much of a baby yet, but she already loved him. Alessandro mopped the tears off her face and her big, strong Italian looked like he might cry along with her.

“Jenna, I thought you were going outside when I went upstairs to get Katie. If I’d known—”

She touched his face and he held her hand there. “You did the right thing, Alessandro. If you hadn’t gotten Katie out, she would have died.”

“I know, but we lost the baby, and I almost lost you.”

She scooted over and he lay on the bed beside her and held her. “We’ll make another baby, honey, or several more babies, and I’ll love every one of them as much as I love you and Katie.”

Jenna knew how much Alessandro wanted this baby, and she wanted so much to give him a son. She leaned into his shoulder and let herself grieve for the child they’d lost.

Alessandro had risked his own life to save her life and Katie’s. If she’d ever doubted his love, those doubts were gone now, burned away in a fire set by a hateful old woman who’d intended to incinerate them all.

After she recovered, she and Alessandro would make another baby, and they’d put this ordeal behind them. Mattie Worthington’s hate would not ruin the rest of their lives.

Chapter Twenty-One

J
enna left the hospital, and Alessandro took her to his mother’s house, where the two of them settled into the basement bedroom. Katie was so glad to have her mommy home that she chattered until she started coughing. Jenna sat on the side of the bed with her until she quieted. They’d all been coughing, especially Alessandro. She’d spent much of her time in the inn unconscious and lying on the floor, where the smoke wasn’t as thick.

“Mommy, where’s Callie?”

Bandit had been released from the hospital and he’d followed them downstairs. He was a mess, with part of his fur burned off and patches shaved off where they’d put in IV lines at the vet hospital.

“I’ll go out and look for Callie this afternoon,” said Alessandro.

Katie asked, “Can I go, too?”

Jenna caught Alessandro’s eye and shook her head slightly.

“Not this time, Katie Bug,” he told her.

Mattie had six cats at one time. One was long gone, two died in the fire, and one was here. Albert and Callie were the only ones left. Albert might have made it, but Callie had been upstairs in Katie’s bed when the fire started. Unless she went out through a window, she was still in the rubble of the burned inn, and Jenna didn’t want Katie to find her body. She’d already had enough trauma to last a lifetime.

Jenna looked in the mirror and nearly didn’t recognize herself. She still had stitches in her head, and since her hair was blond and fine, the stitches were visible through her chopped off hair. So were the bruises. Her hair was an inch or two long in most places, and it would grow back, but right now she looked awful. “I look like something out of a horror movie.” Surprising that a ninety-year-old woman could hit that hard. Rage against Charlie and his bastard had given her strength, and Jenna hadn’t seen her coming. The first blow had stunned her, and before she could react, Mattie had hit her again and again, until Jenna blacked out.

There was a box on the coffee table in the rec room. Alessandro opened it and pulled out one soft hat after another. “Gina thought you might want something to wear until your hair grows out. Cara bought you a bunch of clothes, and Maria said she’d take you and Katie shopping as soon as you were up to it.”

“We just bought new clothes, didn’t we, Katie?”

“Yeah, but they got burned up in the fire.”

“Yes, they did.” Everything got burned up in the fire, including the woman who’d set it and some of her precious kitties.

All that time they’d spent packing, and the china and crystal was gone. The antique furniture she’d lovingly polished, the hand-sewn linens, all her mother’s papers and pictures, Katie’s toys, their clothes, her purse, even her car with Katie’s car seat. It was all gone. But what she missed the most was the baby.

Alessandro’s baby.

After lunch, while Jenna lay down with Katie and Bandit, Al drove out to the inn. He took Bandit’s new kennel along in case he found Albert or Callie, but he didn’t have much hope that either cat was still alive. If they were, they must be starving by now.

He’d spent so much time at the hospital with Jenna, he hadn’t had a chance to see the inn after the fire. Seeing the blackened mess with a few burned timbers spiking into the sky, the big stone fireplace scorched from smoke, and the pile of rubble sickened him.

The branches on the pretty Japanese maple tree had been burned off and there was nothing left but a blackened stalk, but it wasn’t the only tree that had been burned. Part of the beauty of this place had been the trees – maples and madronas and firs – and so many of them were scorched now, he wondered if Nick still wanted to go through with the deal. Trees had surrounded the garage and shed, and now most of those trees were gone or too badly damaged to save. The ones between the inn and the road were still there, a little singed, but okay.

He walked around the property, trying to see what they could do with it to restore some of the former beauty of the spot. After the rubble was cleared out and the burned trees removed or trimmed back, it might be okay. They could plant new trees, but it would take time to erase the scars from the fire.

He poked around the bedroom side of the inn, looking for his computer and files, but what he saw was a melted mess. Nothing was salvageable. As he kicked a piece of metal aside, he uncovered the body of a cat. A little piece of calico fur told him it was Callie, Katie’s best friend. After wrapping what was left of the body in an old towel from the trunk of Ma’s car, he put her in the trunk. And then he walked around calling Albert, the only other cat that might have survived. Minutes later, he heard a rustling in the trees at the edge of the property and looked over to see Albert limping toward him. Poor old cat could barely walk.

Talking softly to the injured cat, he approached slowly. Albert meowed and let Al pick him up. He put him on the front seat of the car. After one last glance at what was left of the inn, Al drove to Tacoma, to the emergency veterinary clinic. He left Albert there to be examined and treated, and he left Callie’s remains to be cremated. It was the least he could do for Katie’s best friend.

He made a stop on the way home to pick out a present for Katie. She was napping when he arrived, so he put the little calico kitty he’d gotten from the Humane Society beside her on the bed.

Jenna put her hand on his shoulder. “You found Callie?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “She’s being cremated, and Albert is at the emergency vet hospital. He’s in bad shape, honey. I don’t know if he’ll make it.”

Bandit hopped on the bed and sniffed the kitten. Katie stirred and opened her eyes. And then she giggled. They’d lost her favorite kitty, but the kitten would help soften the pain of the loss.

If only he could replace his work that easily. Everything he’d worked so hard to accomplish was gone – the plans he’d poured his heart and soul into, the wall of framed sketches of every home he’d designed, his computer, his backups and files. He could replace the computer and the software, but he didn’t have a desk to put it on or a place to put the desk.