“I’m so glad,” I tell her. “So glad. Kat and I have been looking for you in every corner of the park. I was beginning to think...” But I do not finish. I don’t want to say I was beginning to think about abandoning her in San Francisco. I pull back from her to look at the infant in her arms. She is absolutely beautiful. I don’t see a hint of the man who helped create her and I am glad I don’t.
“You’re all right, then?” I say instead. “You were well taken care of?”
“Of course we took good care of her.” The nurse still in the carriage is now extending the pillowcase bag to me. “There’s extra diapers in there and a few things for the little one—just what we could scrounge up. I think Mrs. Bigelow should be staying in a proper shelter tonight at the Presidio, but she was adamant that she join you here.”
I take the bag. “Thank you so much for bringing her.” I guide Belinda away from the carriage and the entrance with its broken gates and trodden-down grass and that horrible bulletin board.
“Where is Kat?” Belinda says as we clear the entrance.
“In our tent. She’s been worried for you and the baby, I think. I hope that’s all it is. She’s... she’s different this morning.”
Belinda looks at me, concern etched across her face. “Does she... does she blame me for what happened on the stairs?”
“She does not. And don’t be asking her about it, please, Belinda.”
“Have you... has he...?”
But Belinda cannot finish her question.
“I haven’t heard from Martin. I don’t think I will.”
Her eyes widen.
“He was still in the house when we ran out of it,” I tell her, though surely she must know this. She saw Martin’s crumpled form, the blood on the stair, the leg bent in an impossible angle. “In the kitchen. I had to get him away from the front door so that Kat wouldn’t see him. She thinks I sent him away. But he didn’t look good, Belinda. He was breathing strange.”
“And he’s still there? In the house?” Belinda asks softly.
I lower my voice, too. “I’m fairly certain the house burned down last night. And I’m thinking he was either dead inside or still alive inside it, which means he won’t be troubling us anymore.”
Belinda stops and looks up at me in dread. “But if that’s true that means... that means we killed him!” she whispers.
“No. No, it does not,” I say, as softly but as firmly as I can. “It was gravity and the earthquake and the fire and the limits of the human body that killed him. All the forces of nature. Not us. Do you hear me? And don’t forget it was only me that left him. Me. I could have told a policeman or soldier about him, but I didn’t. I didn’t save him, and that’s not the same thing as killing. It’s not.”
It’s not.
Belinda looks unconvinced. She stares at me and I want to assure her I’ve had time to ponder this. Far more time than she has had.
“You’re sure?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“What if he got out of the house?”
“He didn’t.” Surely he didn’t. They dynamited Van Ness, not Polk. Not Polk. Nobody checked the house to see if anyone was still inside. Not the houses on Polk.
Tears as shiny as polished silver form in Belinda’s eyes. She blinks and they slide down her cheeks. I know why.
“There was no James Bigelow,” I tell her gently.
She smiles mournfully. “But there was.” She looks down at the cherub in her arms.
“And Martin killed him. That’s who was doing the killing, Belinda.”
“Was he going to hurt us?” Belinda murmurs, her eyes still on her sleeping child.
My mind takes me back to the seconds before Martin was sailing down the stairs, his arms and legs akimbo. I see in those beautiful eyes a glittering purpose, cold and hard as ice.
“Yes, I think he was.”
