“No time. Not necessary,” he said shortly.

“And did you find the culprit?”

“What do you think? It wasn’t late. There were plenty of people still around on Greenwich Avenue, along with all the students in Washington Square. The fellow would only have had to have hightailed it from a completely deserted Patchin Place and then he’d have blended in with the crowd.” He sighed. “No. Nobody saw anything. We’ve nothing to go on. But we did find a paving stone that had been thrown through our front parlor window, thus confirming my suspicions. Someone broke the glass then hurled some kind of primitive bomb inside.”

“And Aggie?” I asked. “Did they find her body?”

“Yes. Badly charred, I’m afraid. Do you know of any next of kin who should be notified?”

“Next of kin? They turned her out when they knew she was pregnant, Daniel. They told her never to come back, that she was no longer their daughter.”

“All the same, officially…” he began.

I shook my head. “I know the family had a small farm somewhere in the Hudson Valley. More than that I can’t tell you.” Then I cleared my throat, hardly daring to ask the next question that was going through my mind. “And our house? Is it completely destroyed? Everything gone?”

He nodded. “Pretty much. It’s still smoldering in there so I didn’t get a chance to look too closely, but I’d be surprised if there was anything—” He’d started the sentence sounding so matter-of-fact but then his voice cracked and I realized how deeply he too felt about what had happened to us.

“What will we do?” I asked, the bleak despair coming to the surface. “Where will we go?”

“We’ll be all right.” Daniel stroked back my singed hair from my cheek. “I promise we’ll be all right. The commissioner has said that there would be money coming and the department would take care of us. Whether that means they’ll rebuild our house for us, or just give us enough to get by for the present, I can’t say. I didn’t like to press too much. But for now my main concern is to make sure that you are safe. I want you out of the city, far away from here.” He paused, then frowned. “You can go up to my mother to start with. I don’t want to put her in danger in the long run but…”

“Daniel,” I interrupted. “She’s gone, remember. On her trip out West.”

“She’s already left?”

I nodded. “Her letter said, ‘By the time you read this I shall be gone.” She said she didn’t tell us before because she was sure you’d try to dissuade her and she was determined to take her chance to have one big adventure in her life.”

“She can’t have got too far. We’ll locate her and bring her back.”

“No, Daniel. Let’s not spoil her one big adventure.”

Daniel gave a testy sigh. “No matter. You can go to the house. Martha will take care of you.”