A/N: Sorry for the delays. RL has been crazy lately. My insane schedule should lighten up in about another month as a few things are adjusted. By the way, Mom's book is now available in Kindle/electronic form as well as print. See my profile for the info. Thanks to those of you who have commented to me privately on it.

Meanwhile, back at PPTH, we are starting to pull threads together out of this mystery.

(H/C)

Cuddy had always heard how the schedule of residency could push a person, but she wondered over the next few weeks how many people had ever tried to combine it with a murder mystery. The pressure was intense. She and Wilson spent every night going over the details, bouncing ideas off of each other. She did wonder why he was suddenly so much into this, but she remembered that he always had, even as a child, liked helping people.

There was also House, the Maestro. She tried her best to visit the rooftop every day if she could, even if just for a few minutes. That at least could be combined with resident duties, though she made plenty of trips without a case, too. He didn't always show up, but she liked to think that he was there watching, even when he was silent. He did participate in several medical differentials. Every time, the sweeping brilliance of his analysis struck her all over again. It was one evening after one of those conversations, when he had successfully solved the hardest case of her time at PPTH so far, one that had stumped even the attendings, one that took him even a few days, that she dared to broach the forbidden subject.

"Maestro," she said, "can you imagine how much good you could do as a practicing doctor?"

He fell silent. A moment ago, he had been alive with satisfaction; he was never in such a good mood as on solving a tough puzzle. Her words burst that mood like a balloon. She almost heard the pop as it died. "There's so much more you could do, so many more cases, if you would come back to this side of the hospital." She hoped he hadn't just disappeared, something he did at times.

He hadn't. After a taut minute of silence, he laughed, a sound with absolutely no humor in it. He was mocking not her but himself. "I can't come back," he said. "And I gave up imagining several years ago. Well, mostly, anyway."

She seized the qualifier on the end. "It can't be comfortable over there. And it isn't good for your health, either. You could have better treatment..." She slammed the brakes on before she made the mistake of mentioning his leg. Unfortunately, he tracked the sentence on to completion.

"I am fine," he snarled, and she knew that was the last word she would get out of him today. Having already irrevocably annoyed him, she decided that there wasn't much harm in pushing on a little bit. Hopefully he was still listening at least and hadn't stalked off at his fastest limp with that amazingly silent though disabled stride.

"Maestro, I...I had a phone call the other day with your aunt Charity. She said that your mother had been having symptoms for quite a while, even before you got sick. For a few years, even. She didn't mention it, didn't think it really was anything important, but she was showing symptoms. She was probably a walking heart attack waiting to happen. Anything or nothing could have set it off. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how many people die of heart attacks while peacefully asleep."

Nothing, but the nothing was a stiff, listening nothing. She knew she had pushed it as far and maybe beyond her limit for today. She turned away for the door to the staircase. "Thank you, Maestro. You've saved someone's life today."

Two flights down, she turned a corner and nearly ran into Brenda, the head nurse from the clinic. They paused for that "you first" dodging shuffle that people perform in unexpected traffic, and then Cuddy continued her descent, feeling too restless today to switch to the elevators even now that she could. One flight down, she froze.

Brenda. The head nurse from the clinic. What was Brenda doing up here at almost the top of the building? Cuddy almost called out to her, but instead she walked on a little farther, letting her feet on the stairs ring, and kept walking in place when she hit the next landing, slowly getting softer. She then carefully opened the door to the floor and closed it, again making it a little softer, a little more distant, than it should have been from that landing. She then stood, straining her ears listening.

The footsteps above continued, and then there was the sound of the door on the top landing opening and closing, the one not to the roof but to the floor. Cuddy stayed still, barely breathing. Finally, very faintly, she heard movement again, the softest pad of feet up that final staircase to the roof. Then came the click of that door, so controlled and muted that if she hadn't been listening, Cuddy wouldn't have heard it. The moment the door closed, Cuddy whipped around and took the stairs at her best surreptitious speed. Once at the top, she eased the door open just a crack and peered out.

Brenda was over at the fence. "Where are you?" The soft words barely reached Cuddy's ears. Finally, Brenda shrugged, putting down absence to eccentricity, and lightly tossed a small bag she held over the fence. In the next moment, Cuddy pulled the door shut as Brenda turned around. Cuddy backed up against the wall, waiting.

The door opened, and Brenda jumped, staring at her. "I...hello, Cuddy. The roof is a nice place to get some air, isn't it?"

Cuddy faced her. "Drop the act, Brenda. You're the one helping him."

Brenda debated, then squared her shoulders and faced the charge directly. "Is helping someone a crime?"

"No, but aiding and abetting a fugitive is."

Brenda counterattacked. "If you know about him and you haven't been to the police yet yourself, you're as guilty of that crime as I am. And he isn't technically charged with anything yet. He's just wanted for questioning."

Cuddy forced her tone to relax. "Look, Brenda, I think we're on the same side here. We both know he's innocent."

Brenda nodded. "That's for sure."

"How long have you been helping him?"

Brenda looked around. "Let's go out to my car. I don't like standing around the hospital discussing this, even in an empty stairwell, and if we went back out on the roof, we...might not be alone. Even though he seems to be in one of his moods tonight."

"That's my fault, I'm afraid," Cuddy admitted. "He can be so stubborn at times."

Brenda smiled, and in that smile, the two of them bonded. "He sure can. Even more than most men."

They met fifteen minutes later in the parking garage, Cuddy having stopped by to inform the attending of the Maestro's solution on the case. His enthusiasm made her feel guilty for taking the credit, but she could hardly tell the truth. With new treatment ordered, she went on down to the garage, and Brenda was waiting.

Once the doors were shut and they were in undisputed solitude, Brenda launched into the tale. "I've worked here for 14 years. When House first came on as a resident, most of the staff didn't like him. I'm sure you can guess why." Cuddy nodded, smiling. "He's definitely a personality. I'll admit, he drove me nuts. The residents had to put in clinic duty, too. He hated it. Watching him clear out a clinic full of people with emergency sniffles was fun in a way, though. But when someone really had a problem - the man was so good, Cuddy. He was brilliant. He was already a better doctor, even as a resident, than the attendings were."

Brenda sighed. "Then he got sick. He was mad at himself, I think, for missing the infarction. It went undiagnosed for three days, and the staff here made plenty of errors, but I think he was most upset with himself."

"He had to be in such pain he couldn't think straight," Cuddy said.

"Yes, but try telling him that. He really did nearly die. They wanted to amputate, and he refused. I'm trusting you here, Cuddy. This is violating HIPAA."

"I've already violated it myself," Cuddy admitted. "I read his chart the other day."

"Then you know that much. Stacy, his girlfriend, voted for a middle-of-the-road debridement while he was unconscious. He never forgave her for it. He can hold a grudge better than anyone I've ever met."

"Including on himself," Cuddy added.

"Definitely. So during rehab, he couldn't work. Really physically didn't have the strength to. But that just drove him crazy and made him more depressed. I'd visit him once in a while, and I'd mention cases. Just to give him something besides the pain to think about. He would usually be ruthless to me, saying he didn't need pity visits, but still, it was a distraction. He appreciated it, even if he couldn't admit that." Brenda was in full flight now. Obviously, this story had been pent up behind a dam for so long that the telling was a release.

"Then came the day of the murder. I actually talked to him that day earlier. He had just left rehab and was heading home, and we bumped into each other in the elevator. No one else in there at that moment, and we talked for a few floors. Cuddy, if that man had committed a murder earlier that day, I don't know anything at all about people. He was absolutely himself - well, his post infarction self. He went on home, and then he found the body."

"When I got off that evening, I went to my apartment. The police had already come late that afternoon looking for him, but he wasn't at the hospital. When I got home, there he was. He had picked the lock somehow, and he was on my couch. He wanted to borrow whatever money I could give him." Brenda shook her head, remembering that scene. "He even knew where my emergency stash was, in fact had already found and counted it, but he waited there to ask me to borrow it. Didn't just take it. He said I was one of the few people he could think of that might help him out. I told him he was innocent, and he said no, he wasn't. Then I said I couldn't see him killing his landlord, and he said he hadn't."

"He blames himself for his mother's death," Cuddy put in.

"I've worked that out, but it took me a little while. Anyway, he was going to run, only he said limp, of course. He needed some funds. I didn't have much, but I would have given him that. But obviously, the whole plan was absurd. How far would he have gotten? And remember, he was a lot weaker then. He's actually much more mobile now than he was that day. He has been working on things. Unfortunately, the disability is permanent, and the pain is barely treated, but he really has made progress. That day, he wouldn't have made it out of Princeton."

"It was my idea to break into the old wing. I was actually hoping that the case would get solved, that things would settle down and it would be temporary. But I took him back to PPTH in my car that night, and we got over there. He is wonderful at picking locks. Found Dr. Carter's office and set him up. Since then, I supply him with food and with reading material. Managed to get the piano over there once years ago - that was Christmas Day at around 1:00 a.m. And then got him tuning tools because it keeps going out of tune. It's chilly over there."

Brenda sighed, finally starting to run down. "I have tried and tried to convince him to fight that charge. He absolutely refuses. All I can do is make him a little more comfortable, and he won't accept much even on that."

"I'm trying to solve that case," Cuddy admitted.

"I wish you luck on it. How did you get to know him, by the way?" Cuddy recounted the last several months, and Brenda was smiling by the end. "That's very unusual for him. He doesn't just randomly have differentials with people over the years. He follows hospital gossip, and I feed him notes on some of the more interesting cases, but I don't actually dig into them with him. I have helped him with placing a few camera eyes, too, so he can watch the hospital, but there aren't many of them, and he changes them up regularly. Doesn't want to risk anybody noticing, although they are well hidden. To my knowledge, nobody else knows he's over there. Not even Dr. Nordstrom, and House was his favorite. But Old Nordy would have trouble keeping a secret. He would spill the story unintentionally if he knew all of it."

Cuddy could well imagine that, having seen how Nordstrom got into talking about House in his residency before he recalled the full story and slammed the brakes on.

Brenda looked at her watch. "I'm sorry, Cuddy, but I have to get on home. I have something I'm going to tonight. But I'm glad we bumped into each other."

"So am I. I had something to do tonight, too." More case review with Wilson. Cuddy looked at her own watch and stared at it in disbelief. Wilson would wonder where she was, and she'd have to cook up some excuse. "I'm not going to turn him in. But I wish we could help him more."

"Hopefully we can."

"One thing. Could you make up a list of everybody you remember back at the hospital at the time of the murder who especially disliked House?"

"Sure." Brenda reached over, and they shook hands solemnly, sealing a pact. Then Cuddy opened the car door and got out. Deep in thought, she walked to her own car.