Mary Catherine Laurent was seated against the marble wall in a striped chair with gilded swans for arms. Her printed voile dress was dotted with water spots that hadn't quite dried. The brim of her pink straw hat drooped from having absorbed too much moisture. Wearing a pair of snowy white gloves, she sat with her hands clasped in her lap, her legs pressed together from instep to groin, feet flat on the floor. She looked like a young girl on her way to confirmation who'd been caught in an unexpected downpour. A suitcase stood within easy reach near her feet.

The clerk on duty was a woman with a straight bob hairdo and horn-rimmed glasses. She rounded the concierge's desk at the rear of the lobby. "I called as soon as she got here, Miss Laurent."

"Thank you very much." Claire removed her rain hat and squatted down in front of her mother. "Hi, Mama. It's me, Claire."

"He'll be here soon." Mary Catherine spoke in a thin, faraway voice. Her eyes were looking into another time and place that no one else could see. "He said to meet him here this afternoon."

Claire took the sad straw hat from her mother's head and smoothed the damp hair away from her cheeks. "Maybe you got the days mixed up, Mama."

"No, I don't believe so. I'm certain I got the day right. He said he was coming for me today. I was supposed to be packed and ready. I was supposed to meet him here." Obviously flustered and disoriented, she raised one of her gloved hands and pressed it against her chest. "I'm not feeling well."

Claire glanced up at Cassidy. "Could you get her a glass of water, please?"

Thoroughly baffled, he was staring down at the two women while his trench coat dripped water onto the floor. At Claire's request, he asked the hovering night clerk for a glass of water.

"Mama." Claire gently placed her hand on Mary Catherine's knee. "I don't think he's coming today. Maybe tomorrow. Why don't you come home with me and wait for him there, hmm? Here. Mr. Cassidy has brought you a glass of cool water."

She folded Mary Catherine's fingers around the glass. Mary Catherine raised it to her lips and sipped. Then she looked up at Cassidy and smiled. "You've been very kind, Mr. Cassidy. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

She noticed his wet coat. "Is it raining out?"

He glanced over his shoulder toward the entrance, where the doorman was exercising admirable sensitivity in trying to appear inconspicuous. It was still raining torrentially. Cassidy replied, "Yes, I believe it is."

"Can you imagine that? It was so hot when I came in. Maybe I'd best go home now." She extended her hand up to him. He took it and helped her from her chair, then helplessly looked to Claire for further instructions.

"If you want to go on," she told him, "I can call a cab for Mama and me."

"I'll drive you."

She nodded and returned the glass of water to the night clerk. "You have my gratitude. I appreciate your understanding."

"It's no bother, Ms. Laurent. She never causes any trouble. It's just so sad."

"Yes, it is." Placing an arm around her mother's shoulders, Claire guided her toward the door, which the doorman was holding open for them. "Don't forget her suitcase, Ms. Laurent," he reminded her kindly.

"I'll get it," Cassidy said.

Mary Catherine was impervious to the peels of thunder and flashes of lightning as they waited beneath the canopy for Cassidy to stow the suitcase in the car trunk. Knowing that her mother was in another realm and virtually helpless, Claire assisted her into the backseat and buckled her in.

During the return trip, only Mary Catherine spoke. She said, "I was sure we were supposed to meet today. The Ponchartrain Hotel."

Claire bowed her head slightly and pinched her eyes shut, keenly aware of Cassidy and his rapacious interest in what was taking place. When they arrived at French Silk, he carried the suitcase while Claire ushered Mary Catherine inside and up to the third floor. In the elevator, Claire accidentally made eye contact with him. She looked away quickly, refusing to acknowledge the unasked questions in his intense, gray eyes.

Once inside the apartment, she steered Mary Catherine toward her bedroom. "I'll be back shortly if you want to wait," she said to him over her shoulder.

"I'll wait."

She helped Mary Catherine undress and carefully replaced the outdated clothes in the closet. After seeing that she took her medication, she tucked her in. "Night-night, Mama. Sleep well."

"I must have the days confused. He'll come for me tomorrow," she whispered. Smiling prettily, peacefully, she closed her eyes.

Claire leaned down and kissed her mother's cool, unlined cheek. "Yes, Mama. Tomorrow." She switched out the lamp and left the room, softly closing the door.

She was exhausted. Her shoulders ached with tension. It seemed a long way from her mother's bedroom door to the large, open living area. Like a firing squad, Cassidy was waiting for her there, armed and ready. She had no choice but to face him. Steeling herself, she moved down the hallway.

She didn't immediately see him when she entered the room. Thinking that perhaps he'd changed his mind and left, she experienced an instant of relief-and several heartbeats of disappointment.

Despite her denials to Yasmine, and to herself, she found Cassidy attractive. Physically, certainly. But there was something else ... his dedication, tenacity, determination? She was attracted to the same qualities as those which repelled her. She feared him, yet he had demonstrated unusual kindness and sympathy toward her mother. As her eyes sought him through the darkness, all she knew for certain about her feelings for Cassidy was that they were ambiguous.

Through the shadows, she spotted him at the sideboard, in his shirtsleeves. In an oddly intimate way, his trench coat was hanging on the coat tree along with her raincoat and hat. When he turned around, Claire saw that his hair was still wet and that he was holding two snifters of Remy Martin. He joined her in the center of the room and extended one of them to her.

"Thank you, Mr. Cassidy."

"It's your liquor."

"Thank you anyway."

Claire was glad that he hadn't turned on any lights. There was light enough coming through the wall of windows. Occasionally the swollen clouds were illuminated by a flash of lightning that made the entire sky look like the negative of a photograph. But for the most part the storm's temper was spent, leaving in its wake a heavy but nonthreatening ram. Silver streams of it ran down the windows, squiggly rivulets that cast wavering shadows across her as she moved toward the windows. The river was discernible only as a wide dark band lined by lights on both levees. An empty barge was chugging upstream.

The first sip of cognac seared her esophagus. The second spread a soothing warmth through her, starting with a slight sting to her lips and ending with a tingle in her toes. "At times like this, I wish I smoked," she remarked.

"Pardon?"

She listened to his footsteps as he approached her. "I said sometimes I wish I smoked. This is one of those times." Turning, she found him standing closer than she had expected. His eyes were the same color as the rain slashing the windows, and they were focused on her with a breath-stopping intensity.

"Smoking's bad for you."

"Yes, I know. I guess I envy the immediate relaxation it gives the smoker." She ran her fingers up the bowl of the snifter. "Have you ever seen a cigar smoker blow smoke into his brandy snifter before taking a sip?" He shook his head. "It's pretty, the way the smoke swirls around inside the crystal. The smoke is inhaled when the liquor is swallowed. It's provocative, sensual. I think it must make the brandy taste better. Or maybe the cigar. I don't know."

"Who have you seen do that?"

"No one, actually. I saw it in a movie about Sir Richard Burton. Maybe that was a habit unique to him. Maybe it was the vogue in the nineteenth century."

His disturbing gaze remained fixed on her face. "What made you think of that, Claire?"

She shrugged self-consciously. "The rainy night, the cognac."

"Or were you just trying to distract me?"

"Could you be that easily distracted?"

He hesitated a moment too long before giving her a curt no. Then he tossed back the remainder of his drink and returned his empty snifter to the sideboard. When he rejoined her at the windows, he was all business. "What went on tonight?"

"You were there. You saw."

"And I still don't know what happened. She flipped out, right?"

"Yes. She flipped out."

"Look, I didn't mean that to sound-"

"I know you didn't."

"How often does she... How often is she like that?"

"It varies. Sometimes there's a buildup. Sometimes it occurs out of the blue. Some days she's perfectly lucid. Others, like the first time you met her, she seems to be confused, senile." Her voice turned gruff. "Sometimes she's as you saw her tonight, completely detached from this world, living in another one."

"What triggers it?"

"I don't know."

"What do the doctors say?"

"That they don't know either. It's happened for as long as I can remember, and her lapses have gotten progressively deeper and more frequent the older she gets. The first I remember them, they were little more than bouts of depression. During her spells, as Aunt Laurel referred to them, Mama would retire to her room and cry for days, refuse to leave her bed, refuse to eat. Aunt Laurel and I catered to her."

"She should have gotten treatment when it started." Claire bristled and turned a glare on him. "That was an observation, not a criticism," he said.

Claire studied him for a moment. When she was convinced that he was sincere, she relaxed her hostile posture. "I know now that she should have been placed under a doctor's care immediately. A depression that deep is abnormal. But I was a child. And for all her good intentions, Aunt Laurel didn't know how to deal with mental illness. She didn't even recognize it as such. Mama was a young woman whose love had forsaken her. Her family had disowned and disinherited her. Aunt Laurel mistook her illness as nothing more than a broken heart."

"A broken heart that wouldn't heal."

Claire nodded. "One day Mama did what she did tonight. She dressed up and sneaked out of the house with a packed suitcase. I was very young, but I remember Aunt Laurel becoming frantic with worry until a policeman brought Mama home. He knew us, you see. He had spotted Mama walking along Canal Street, lugging her suitcase. When he approached her and offered assistance, he could tell she wasn't rational. Thankfully, he brought her home instead of taking her to the police station. She was spared that degradation."

"During these spells, she imagines she's eloping?"

"Yes. My guess is that before my father deserted her, he proposed that they elope. He must have gotten cold feet and left her stranded. Mama imagines that he's coming for her at the designated place. Tonight I'm sure she took a bus as far as the trolley, then rode it the rest of the way out St. Charles to the Ponchartrain."

"That's always been where they were to meet?"

"No. The meeting place changes. She's never quite clear on when or where she's supposed to meet her young man. Rather than facing what's obvious, she always blames herself for not getting the instructions straight."

Claire turned away from the windows and looked at Cassidy. "The night Jackson Wilde was murdered, Mama sneaked out and went to the Fairmont. Andre called and told me that she was in the hotel lobby waiting for her beau, so I went to fetch her. That's why I was there. After I learned what had happened, I asked Andre not to mention my being there. Since my presence there had nothing to do with Wilde, he agreed to safeguard my privacy. I'm sure that you and your colleagues got a thrill out of eavesdropping on our conversation, but you misinterpreted it."

Cupping the bowl of the snifter between her palms, she drained it. Cassidy took it from her and returned it to the sideboard. "Wouldn't it be easier on everyone if you had your mother institutionalized?" he asked.

Claire had anticipated the question. It had been posed to her hundreds of times over the years. Her answer was always the same. "Undoubtedly it would be easier. But would it be best?"

"I can see you've got definite opinions on the subject."

Agitated, she began pacing in front of the windows. "For as long as I can remember there have been people from the medical community, from the social services, and from law-enforcement agencies trying to force me to commit her."

"And before that, they tried taking you away from her."

Claire stopped pacing and whipped around to confront him. "You couldn't leave it alone, could you, Mr. Cassidy?"

"No, I couldn't. That's my job."

"Your job sucks."

"Sometimes," he admitted. "Instead of feeding me that hearts-and-flowers rendition of your childhood, why didn't you level with me and tell me about your run-ins with the authorities?"

"Because they're too painful to recall. I still have nightmares about them. I dream the social workers are dragging me, kicking and screaming, from Aunt Laurel's house. Mama's confused and upset. I don't want to go."

"According to the records, little Claire Louise Laurent gave them hell. I can well believe it."

"Things would be going fine," she said. "Then Mama would have a bad spell and do something to stir them up."

"What about your great-aunt? You described her as a loving, caring parent."

"She was, but the experts," she said, emphasizing the word contemptuously, "didn't think so. She was peculiar and therefore didn't fit their textbook criteria for a perfect parent. They'd come for me. I'd be taken away. On three separate occasions I was placed in foster homes. I ran away time after time, until I exhausted them and they let me return home.

"When I was about twelve, Mama wandered away and was lost for several days. We finally located her in a sleazy hotel, but by then the police were involved. Human Resources got wind of it and came for me. I wasn't being brought up in a healthy environment, they said. I needed direction, stability.

"I swore I would run away from wherever they took me and would continue running away, and that no matter what they did, they couldn't keep me separated from my mother. I guess they finally believed me because they never came back."

All her pent-up resentment was turned full force on Cassidy. "I don't give a damn what the records downtown say about me. I gave them hell, yes. I would still give hell to anybody who tried to separate us. I belong with her. I welcome the privilege of looking after her.

"When she got pregnant, she could have done the easy thing-and at that time the fashionable thing among the wealthy. She could have gone to Europe for a year and put me up for adoption. According to Aunt Laurel, that's what my grandparents urged her to do. Or she could have gone across the river to Algiers and found an abortionist. That would have been even simpler. No one would have known, not even her parents. Instead, she chose to have me and to keep me, even though it meant sacrificing her inheritance, her entire way of life."

"Your sense of responsibility is admirable."

"I don't feel responsible for her. I love her."

"Is that why you don't lock her in where she can't possibly get out?"

"Exactly. She doesn't need locks, she needs love and patience and understanding. Besides, that would be cruel, inhumane. I refuse to treat her like an animal."

"She could get hurt out wandering the streets alone, Claire."

She slumped down onto the padded arm of the white-upholstered sofa. "Don't you think I know that? Short of locking her in, I take every precaution to guard against her wanderings. Yasmine does, too. So does Harry. But she has the cunning of a young girl about to elope. Sometimes, in spite of our diligence, she gets past us, like tonight when I thought she was safely asleep."

For a long moment, conversation died. Distant thunder broke the silence, but it wasn't intrusive. Claire folded her arms across her middle and looked up to find Cassidy regarding her with that damned absorption of his. His stare made her uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, and she wondered if he was as aware of the quiet darkness as she.

"Why do I always feel like you're looking at me through a magnifying glass?" she asked resentfully.

"You invite close inspection."

"I'm not that much of an oddity, am I?"

"You're an enigma."

"My life's an open book."

"Hardly, Claire. I've had to pry every scrap of information out of you. You've lied to me every step of the way."

"I went to the Fairmont that night to get my mother," she said wearily. "There was no reason to tell you that."