A/N: Happy Labor Day to those in the US. I'm allegedly working today, but work is out on job #2 because of the holiday making levels low, so I have time finally to write down another chapter of Phantom while fishing for work.

To answer some questions people have asked: Yes, there will be more stories in my series. As for when, the next story will come after I finish Phantom. How long will that be? To quote Fiddler on the Roof, "I'll tell you. I don't know." I do know approximately where we are in this story, but I can't make any estimate at posting schedule, as life is unpredictable, and also, the story somehow always seems longer on the screen than in my head, so my idea of approximate chapters left is probably not even accurate. Many times with the stories, I have thought we had X number of chapters left and was proven wrong, always with more chapters than I thought, not less. It will come when it comes, but it WILL come. Life is also quite crazy lately, with two jobs, about 10 hours a week devoted to my music groups, a farm to keep up, a relative with stage IV cancer, and final details with Mom's book.

Speaking of Mom's book, it went to the printer on Friday, three days ago. The estimate to have my copies in my hands from the publisher is roughly two weeks. I have been told that Amazon and Barnes and Noble update their own websites, which I can understand, so getting the listing live on them may take longer. Or it may not, just depending on my luck in the Amazon/B&N traffic queue of the moment. But it is coming. It will be available both in print and in Kindle/E-book. I've seen the galley proof, in fact read it three times in the last week at the expense of sleep. It looks quite neat with the pictures set and all, and I love the front cover that the art/graphics department came up with.

Enjoy more of Phantom. I hope that things settle down from the crazy pace of the last months, but I make no promises on timetable, just that it will get done.

P.S.: Breaking news. Mom's book has begun to arrive at the Great Big Internet. Info in my profile.

(H/C)

The next week was busy in terms of work with the hospital having a high tide of patients. Cuddy had often wondered why it was that even illnesses that were not contagious seemed to come in cycles, as if dozens of strangers had decided to get, for instance, acute cholecystitis at the same time. There were also a few cases that were much more challenging than cholecystitis, but most of the medicine was simply time consuming, not mysterious.

This, of course, left her mind free to ponder the leading mystery of the moment: House. She did have one differential with the Maestro during that week on their most challenging patient, and he was crisply, purely medical, solving the case but not giving her an inch of anything else. The barbed wire fence was almost audible in his tone. She didn't dare push him further in conversation that time, though she did, on another day, pick up a hot Big Mac again and deliver it with a toss over the fence. It was gone the next time she went up to check.

Food. Who was supplying him with food and other needs? She had started asking a few questions around the hospital, trying to keep them casual, simple curiosity as to who had been there for years and why they thought Princeton was a good place to settle, and her mental list was building. She also had looked up the medical staff - it would be hard to find records on the lower ranks - back from the time of the murder and had started tracing their current whereabouts and status. Work took most of her time, but she chiseled out a few hours late at night with her laptop.

Then there was that abruptly ended conversation with John House. That bothered her more the more she thought about it. His whole attitude had been wrong.

It was a Thursday afternoon that the first light bulb moment of the whole situation came, and as they usually are, it was triggered by an unexpected catalyst. A man came into the ER after having collapsed and fortunately having been resuscitated by a few bystanders who knew CPR. No diagnostic question remained after he was hooked up to an EKG, but he also did have some long-term thyroid issues, and Endocrinology was called in on a consult simply to manage his chronic problems. The patient by that point had had a cardiac cath, had gone for emergency CABG, and was in the ICU, not doing well at all.

His wife was practically glued to his bedside, and Cuddy found herself on rounds listening to the wife as much as assessing the patient. The patient carried no mystery and, unfortunately, not much hope. People working in medicine develop a radar, and while a patient will surprise you at times with a sudden up or downturn, there are also ones whom you feel from the beginning aren't going to make it. This man was such a patient. He had simply had too large of an MI and in fact had had a few smaller ones earlier, well before admission, as proven by his EKG, and he hadn't ever mentioned chest pain or seen a cardiologist until that day of admission when he had no chance of denying it. Too much damage, too much delay in seeking treatment, and he wasn't bouncing back well from his surgery. No, they were going to lose this one. None of the staff worked any less diligently on the case, but they all shared the conviction. The hourglass of life for this man was running out.

Marital radar was every bit as acute as medical, and his wife knew, even without the doctors' reports. She seemed to respond to Cuddy, saying that she looked like her husband's sister, who had died about her age, and when Cuddy was there seeing the patient, the woman would open up to her.

"It's my fault," she said repeatedly.

Cuddy tried to fall back on reassurance. "There's nothing you could have done, Mrs. Anderson. This is a physical issue. He'd obviously had obstruction increasing for quite a while in his arteries, and he ignored it. You couldn't have helped that."

She shook her head. "He's been worried about me lately. I had a car wreck a few months ago." Cuddy looked sympathetic; the woman was still using a cane. "The stress with me is probably what pushed him into this."

"Mrs. Anderson, this disease had been developing for much longer than a few months. He was ignoring symptoms well before your accident."

"But stress can trigger a heart attack," the woman insisted. "It's my fault. If he dies, it's like I killed him."

"Mrs. Anderson, think about that for a..." Cuddy slammed to a dead halt verbally as she herself thought about that for a minute.

House. House's mother, dying of a heart attack on the day of the murder. House saying that he didn't kill the landlord, with an odd emphasis in his tone.

Did he think he had killed his mother? Could he blame himself for the stress his infarction had caused her?

Was that what he was punishing himself for by refusing to mount a defense?

If so, that was an even harder problem to solve than she had anticipated. Of course, it was illogical. He knew himself medically that someone with advanced CAD could drop with any trigger or with apparently none, as people died in their sleep of heart attacks all the time. But blame was notoriously illogical.

"Are you all right, dear?" Mrs. Anderson had noticed her freeze.

Cuddy gathered her thoughts and firmly reboxed them. While with a patient or with a patient's family, she should be focused on them, not tormented geniuses hiding out in self-imposed isolation from framed murder charges. "I'm fine, Mrs. Anderson. Please, don't blame yourself. This had been building for a long time, well before your accident. And I'm sure he wouldn't blame you. If he were awake, he'd probably thank you for being a good wife to him and staying here. He knows that you love him. That's what he'd be thinking of. And medically, with his level of disease, he was a heart attack waiting to happen. Anything at all could have set it off. Or nothing. There doesn't have to be an acute stressor. Very many people die of heart attacks while they are peacefully asleep."

Mrs. Anderson listened, but she wasn't entirely convinced. Cuddy left her after a few more minutes of attempted comfort, and her thoughts were racing.

He believed he had killed his mother. That had to be it. That explained everything.

Well, not quite. There was the minor detail of who had committed the murder, but she had at least answered one question, even if the answer only complicated the situation further. How could she deal with this?

Could that explain John House's attitude, too? Could John blame his son for his wife's death?

No, John still felt wrong to her. That might be part of it, but there was something additional there.

Could John have told House that he blamed him? She tried to recreate the scene in her mind. House had attended PT that day, had been as usual. Unquestionably, he hadn't known, either about the murder or about his mother, at that point. He came home and discovered the landlord's body. He went over to check for vitals; there had been a footprint and cane marks in the blood. Then he walked from there to the kitchen sink and washed off, and then he had vanished.

When had he found out about his mother's death? In between discovering the body and washing up, had the phone rung? Had John called his son right then to notify him and then blame him for his mother's death? Hearing that from your father while looking at a murdered man in your living room would be enough to knock anybody over the edge.

Cuddy that night pulled out her growing files and reread Blythe House's obituary, and this time, she fastened onto the fact that Blythe had been survived by a sister. She had been thinking earlier that House's father would obviously be the most likely to have heard anything from his son or to be an ally in this investigation of the murder, but that most obvious answer had struck out. (She could hear the Maestro's voice chastising her for expecting the most obvious answer to be the correct one. "Zebras," he would say. "Never get so focused on horses that when you hear hoofbeats, those are all you think about.")

The internet yielded an address and phone number for Charity Welch. (Really, what had Blythe's - and Charity's - parents been thinking of in naming their children?) Cuddy took a deep breath, but this conversation couldn't possibly go worse than her last one with House's relatives had. She dialed.

"Hello?" This was a pleasant inquiry, not a military demand, unlike John, who had practically answered the phone as if demanding name and rank from the caller.

"Mrs. Welch?"

"Yes. May I help you?"

"I hope so. My name is Lisa Cuddy, and I'm a resident at the hospital in Princeton."

"Yes?" A request for further information, but also a slight tightening of the tone. The hospital in Princeton carried definite associations for her, and Cuddy knew that she was most likely thinking of her nephew now. However, unlike John, she didn't go immediately into anger.

"This might sound strange, but I've been doing some research. Someone mentioned the case ten years ago with your nephew, Greg House."

Charity sighed. "Yes, I thought that must be what you were thinking of when I heard Princeton."

"I assure you, I don't mean any harm to him. I've been reading the details, and things just don't quite seem to add up."

"No, they don't. I've always thought that, but the police seemed so sure he was guilty."

"Have you heard anything from your nephew since his disappearance?" Cuddy asked.

"No, I haven't. Of course, we weren't very close while he was growing up. John was in the military, you know, and he and Blythe moved all around. He - they had trouble having visitors."

Cuddy noted the change in pronoun. "You think John was the leading force in that?"

Charity gave a soft laugh without much humor in it. "My dear, if you had ever met John House, you'd know that he was the leading force in everything in that household."

Even without meeting John face to face, Cuddy could easily believe it. "So you never saw your nephew much?"

"No, I didn't. I sent cards and gifts, of course, but I only met him a few times when he was a child. But Blythe - we would talk on the phone when we could, and since Greg grew up and left home, she would look for chances to call, so we've talked more. Empty nest, you know."

"When you could?" Cuddy asked. "You had to look for chances?"

"Well, she - John always wanted to do things together when he was around. She'd try to find chances when he was out. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes," Cuddy replied. She understood better than she wanted to; the picture forming of Blythe and John's marriage, backed up by her brief conversation with the man, was all too clear. John had been a controller, and Blythe had submitted, only participating in private, minor rebellion when his back was briefly turned.

How had House reacted, growing up with such a father?

Charity was prattling on, a lonely, aging woman who had found an interested ear to fill. "Anyway, Blythe would talk about Greg a lot. His medical career. She was so very proud of him, thought he had the makings of a brilliant doctor. His illness; she was worried about that, of course."

"Of course," Cuddy agreed. "Was John?" She hoped that question wouldn't be off-putting, but nothing about this conversation was quite socially standard, after all.

Charity tightened up just a little, but the disapproval wasn't aimed at Cuddy. "I only have what Blythe said to go on, you understand, but she did say he thought Greg was playing it up for attention." Cuddy, remembering the purely physical pain in House's eyes, recalling that fierce spasm that had almost hurt her own hands in massaging it, clenched her teeth. "She never liked to criticize John much, though. She would make excuses for him. His doubting Greg's illness was almost the worst thing I can ever remember her saying about him."

Almost? "What else did she object to?" Cuddy asked. It was probably a short list; maybe Charity remembered the other points of disagreement.

"Well, she said he always had been so strict on Greg when he was growing up. Even later. She said he always had too high of expectations and was too critical, and even when Greg was in medical school, John never seemed satisfied with him and didn't let his pride show." Cuddy was coloring in the lines on her mental picture of John, but Charity's next sentence brought her up short as much as Mrs. Anderson's self-accusation had earlier that day. "When Greg was so sick with his leg, she said that John never really had believed him all those times he was injured as a child."

All those times? "Greg got hurt a lot as a child?"

"Yes, Blythe said he just never really was that coordinated. Always hurting himself somehow."

Cuddy closed her eyes, picturing House - the Maestro - who could be almost graceful even in a limp now, whose hands danced over the keyboard of his piano with sureness and dexterity. Oh, dear God. Her picture of John House abruptly crystalized into one far more sinister.

"Why are you wondering about Greg, dearie?" Charity asked.

"One of the attendings mentioned him, someone who knew him back as a student," Cuddy said, perfectly truthfully. "He remembered how brilliant he was medically. He thought it was unfortunate he hadn't gone on to finish his studies, but then he closed up, wouldn't tell what had happened. So I had to research it further."

"Of course," Charity said. "I can understand being curious. I can't stand it myself when somebody only tells half a story."

"And when I read the old reports in the media, it just didn't add up. Something seemed wrong. I'll admit, I have no right or permission to be investigating this, but I just couldn't leave it alone."

"Well, I wish you luck with it," Charity said. "The way Blythe described him, I can't imagine him murdering anybody. Oh, she said he got impatient at times, but don't we all?"

"We sure do. One thing that I noticed in the stories; it said that Blythe died of a heart attack on the day of the murder."

"Yes. They thought that had, what would you say, unbalanced Greg, made him snap in an argument with his landlord."

"Did she have any history of heart trouble?" Cuddy asked, hoping for a ringing affirmative, something that she might point to medically with House. Preferably a very long history, far predating House's infarction.

"Well." Charity drew the word out to multiple syllables. "She'd never gone to a heart doctor. She didn't mention anything in an appointment at all, not even with her doctor. But she had little twinges. She'd tell me about them sometimes, and I wanted her to go. But she could be stubborn, just like my Andrew." There was fondness along with exasperation in the tone.

"He was your husband?" Cuddy automatically assigned the past tense. Yes, Charity was almost certainly a widow, willing to fall into conversation at the drop of a hat and frustrated for lack of listeners now, at least at home.

She hoped that Andrew had appreciated his wife, hadn't just tried to control her like John had his.

"Yes, he was." Charity's voice softened. "He never wanted to admit anything himself. He always worried about me, but he never admitted to anything himself, and when he had a heart attack, the doctor said he probably had been having symptoms earlier."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Cuddy said.

"Oh, dearie, that was years and years ago. But thank you, just the same. I have my friends and my groups, but it does get so quiet around the house now sometimes, you know?"

Cuddy gently nudged the conversation back toward her goal. "So Blythe was having symptoms?"

"Yes, she was."

"For a long time before her son became ill?"

"For a few years."

Cuddy seized that and filed it for future reference. If Blythe had a long - and ignored - preexisting history of CAD, then it would be harder medically for House to blame himself. At least, it should be.

But with her new insight on John, she was now wondering if John had blamed his son that day on the phone, not just in grief and the moment but in calculation and venom.

At that moment, there came a knock on the door of her apartment. "Mrs. Welch, you've been much more than kind, but I'm afraid I'll have to go now. There's somebody at the door."

"Okay, dear. It was nice talking to you. Call me again sometime."

"I will." Cuddy hung up and headed for the door. It was James Wilson. "James! I wasn't expecting you tonight."

"Is that a problem?" he asked. "I was in the neighborhood, and I thought that..."

At that moment, the phone rang. Cuddy jumped, afraid that Charity had called her number back, and Wilson looked at her oddly. "Hadn't you better get that?"

She moved over to the phone and answered, hoping for any innocent, professional conversation. She got her wish. It was another resident at PPTH who had at the last minute had an offer of an unused ticket to a concert for tomorrow night and who thus was looking for someone to cover her late shift. Cuddy was glad to oblige, but the conversation with gratitude included did take a few minutes.

Finally, she hung up and turned around to see Wilson reading the copious printouts of news articles on the case. Well, she had left them sitting out in plain sight while fishing through her growing file for Blythe's obituary. He even would have had to move them to free up a spot on the sofa to sit down. He looked at her, puzzled.

"Why are you studying a murder ten years ago?" he asked.