“Oh, baby,” Jess whispered, her heart sinking as she enveloped the girl in a guilty hug. “We’ve got to get you back to the hotel at once.”
She wasn’t aware of the tall blond man’s approach. As a result, she almost jumped to find him towering over them.
“Excuse me, my name is Stephen, and I’m a doctor. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked in his decidedly American accent.
He was tall and lean, with boyishly tousled, sun-bleached hair and penetrating blue eyes that hinted at the possibility of Nordic ancestry. His hands were neat and long-fingered. They looked capable. Jess’s off-the-cuff impression was that he had a kind face. Despite everything she’d heard about crime in American cities, she was inclined to trust him. Instinct told her his claim to be a physician wasn’t an empty boast.
Still, she wasn’t accustomed to accepting medical advice from strangers on the sidewalk—especially not where Annie’s welfare was concerned.
With a fluid motion that wasn’t lost on him, she arose. “Thanks, but not really,” she said in her cultivated British voice. “The abrasion on my daughter’s knee isn’t serious. However, she seems to have caught cold. I’ve decided to give up on the zoo for today…and return to our hotel.”
Viewed at close range, she was stunning, in the fair-skinned, dark-haired way Stephen liked best. A young Elizabeth Taylor, as she’d looked when she starred in the classic version of Father of the Bride, he thought, ever the vintage-movie buff. Her accent betrayed that she was British—on holiday in the U.S., if her reference to a hotel was any indication. More than he could have said, he liked her natural air of refinement and her obvious devotion to her daughter.
After three wasted years spent imprisoned in the cocoon of his heartache and loneliness, he realized, the social man in him was on the verge of reaching out again. He had to admit, the idea was more than a little frightening. Meanwhile, in his practiced and usually infallible judgment, her daughter had contracted something more serious than a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.
With an unmistakable air of authority that swept past Jess’s weakened defenses, Stephen crouched to lay his wrist against the child’s forehead and feel her neck with strong but gently probing fingers. Brief though it was, the latter exam caused her to wince. And no wonder, Stephen thought with a slight shake of his head. She had swollen glands, and doubtless a sore throat. Though he couldn’t be sure without a thermometer, he estimated her temperature at one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts.
He made a production of examining her knee, as well. Producing a brightly colored stick-on bandage from the pocket of his tweed sport jacket, where he always carried them for his younger patients, he applied it to the child’s injured knee as if it were a badge of honor before getting to his feet.
“Better?” he asked.
Distracted from her fever and the pain of her injury by the bandage’s novelty, Annie managed a shy “I guess so” as she stared up at the tall, blond stranger. She quickly added a polite “Thank you,” at Jess’s prompting.
“Your daughter has swollen glands and a temperature,” Stephen added, gazing directly into Jess’s dark-fringed brown eyes. “Hadn’t you better take her to a doctor?”
Tempted for a hot moment to abandon her us-against-the-world stance and let herself lean on this blond Viking of a physician who had invaded their privacy as if he owned it, Jess felt anger, tinged with panic, flow through her veins. What was he doing, exactly? Accusing her of negligence? Or attempting to secure a new patient?
“I would if we had one here in the U.S.,” she snapped, then crumbled as Annie shivered slightly. “We just got here from England day before yesterday, and the weather’s much chillier than I expected,” she added almost apologetically, drawing her daughter close. “I’m afraid Annie’s cardigan’s not warm enough….”
Stephen didn’t hesitate. “Here…take my coat,” he insisted, shrugging off his tweed sport jacket and wrapping it warmly about Annie’s shoulders. “Did you come by car?”
Jess nodded, overwhelmed by his take-charge manner and, now that she’d dropped her defenses, more than a little grateful for his intercession.
“Show me where it’s parked,” he offered. “I’ll carry her.”
With her mother at the tall stranger’s side, evincing approval, Annie didn’t protest when Stephen lifted her in his arms. Instead, she seemed to wrap her arms about the blond doctor’s neck and nestle against his tan oxford-cloth shirt as if she belonged there, as if she appreciated his fatherliness.
It was just an illusion, of course, fostered by Jess’s anxiety that she wouldn’t be equal to managing Annie’s medical crisis on her own, not to mention her residual pain over the fact that Annie’s father had so seldom evinced an interest in the girl. Instead of reading stories and taking their precious five-year-old on outings, Ronald Holmes had spent most of his free time chasing other women and driving fast cars while under the influence.
As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. If they could just find a marrow donor…
Their little procession of three had reached her rental car and, squaring her shoulders, Jess fitted her key in the door on the passenger side. Taking Annie from his arms and placing her inside, she exchanged his jacket for the heavy woolen shawl she’d left on the seat and returned it to him.
“We’ll be fine now,” she told him, gazing up into his sky-colored eyes. “Thanks for your help.”
Stephen shrugged off her gratitude with a polite murmur. Of his two chief emotions—a half-formed wish to see her again and his strong concern for her child—the latter took precedence. “Where are you staying?” he asked.
Again the multitude of news stories Jess had seen on the telly about the explosion of crime in American cities caused her to hesitate. Still, the man was a physician, if he was to be believed. And he seemed so kind, despite his pervasive air of loneliness.
“We’re at the Radisson Plaza in downtown Minneapolis,” she admitted impulsively.
Stephen nodded his approval. It was a first-rate hotel, with excellent service. Though he’d never slept in one of the rooms, he’d spent time there himself, at half a dozen medical conferences. She and her daughter were in good hands.
“In that case, you’re just a short distance from Minneapolis General Hospital, which has a superb emergency room, as well as a topflight pediatric center. If you don’t choose to consult the hotel doctor, you can take your daughter there. The concierge will be able to give you directions. In the meantime, aspirin, plenty of rest, fluids and a cold washcloth for her forehead should be fairly safe bets.”
The prescriptive nature of his remarks was softened by a downward tug of smile, as if he were well aware that she hadn’t asked for his advice and might not welcome it. Juxtaposed with his take-charge manner, the slight diffidence was charming. For half a second, Jess found herself tempted to ask his name and how to contact him.
It wouldn’t do, of course. Annie had to be her first and only priority. Still, she couldn’t help staring up at him in surprise. Imbued with wariness up to her eyeballs as a result of Ronald’s infidelity, and totally preoccupied with Annie’s welfare, she hadn’t expected this rush of attraction and interest.
Thanking him again, she buckled Annie’s seat belt and got behind the wheel. A moment later, she was driving away. Motionless in the parking lot, with its rows of automobiles and its scattering of potholes, Stephen stared after them. It isn’t likely I’ll run into them again in a metropolitan area this size, he thought, even if they stay awhile, unless she brings her daughter to Minn-Gen for treatment. Shrugging on h
is jacket again and thrusting his hands into its pockets as he strode toward his Mercedes, he told himself it was for the best. Yet he couldn’t deny that his inner man regretted it.
The moment they reached their hotel, Jess escorted Annie upstairs to their suite, gave her a child-size aspirin with some orange juice from the minibar and tucked her into bed with the cold washcloth that Stephen had suggested on her forehead. “Try to take a little nap,” she whispered, leaning over to kiss her daughter’s cheek. “I’m sure that, when you wake up, you’ll feel much better. We can watch a children’s show together.”
Unappeased, Annie clung to her. “It’s a bore being sick all the time, Mummy,” she said. “And I miss Herkie. Can’t we just go home?”
The question tugged painfully at Jess’s heartstrings. Herkie, short for Herkimer, was Annie’s pet Scottish terrier, to whom she was extremely devoted. They’d been forced to leave the dog behind with Jess’s cousin when they traveled to the U.S. The parting had left Annie desolate.
“I know, darling…. I miss Herkie, too,” Jess agreed, attempting to comfort her. “But you know Cousin Amanda is taking especially good care of him. I promise…we’ll go home to England just as soon as we can find somebody to give you that special treatment we talked about.”
Her eyes bright with fever, Annie considered her mother’s statement. “Will it really make me better?” she asked.
On occasion, bone-marrow transplants had been known to fail. However, the technology was improving by the minute. Jess wouldn’t let herself entertain the possibility of defeat. The trick was to find a donor.
“Good as new,” she promised. “Try to sleep a little, won’t you, sweetheart?”
While Annie dozed beneath a blanket, with the hotel bedspread for added warmth, Jess curled up on a love seat in the adjoining sitting room and occupied herself by jotting down the phone numbers of several twenty-four-hour walk-in clinics. She also looked up the number for Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. As she did so, images of the tall blond doctor who had befriended them at the zoo drifted through her head.
Annie was still awake when Jess checked on her, half an hour later. Though her fever had receded somewhat, it wasn’t gone altogether. The thermometer Jess gently inserted in her ear continued to register a slight temperature. To her surprise, Annie was hungry.
“Can we get cheeseburgers, Mummy? Like we saw on the telly?” the five-year-old asked.
Against her better judgment, Jess ordered cheeseburgers and milk for two from room service. She wasn’t surprised, just saddened, when Annie ate just several bites of her sandwich and pushed her plate aside. She tried to take comfort in the fact that the girl had drunk most of her milk and seemed ready to snuggle beneath the covers again.
Maybe she’d feel better in the morning. If so, Jess planned to head for the public library. Lacking phone numbers, she might be able to locate addresses for several of the Fortunes by poring through the Minneapolis city directory. Feathering a gentle kiss on Annie’s cheek, she returned to the sitting room and switched on the television, adjusting the sound to a barely audible level.
Having stopped by his office to handle an emergency appointment after leaving the zoo and gone on to complete his late-afternoon rounds at Minn-Gen, Stephen was back behind the wheel of his sleek sedan, listening to light classical music on the radio as he drove toward his home on the wooded shore of Lake Travis, in the Minneapolis suburbs.
Some people would say I have everything—a medical degree, an expensive car, a striking contemporary house with a view of the water, he thought with a familiar tug of irony and loneliness as he turned off the two-lane highway that led into what was referred to locally as “the village” and crossed the rustic bridge that spanned the creek that fed the lake. Well, they’d be wrong. Though he cared deeply about each of his patients and genuinely loved his work, his son’s death had eviscerated his personal life; for the past three years, it had been as empty as a discarded shell washed up on a beach, bereft of its former inhabitant.
Yet as he passed the former home of Benjamin and Kate Fortune, half-hidden behind its screen of mature firs and oaks, and proceeded the half mile or so along Forest Road to his own somewhat less imposing gate-posts, he realized that a Rubicon of sorts had been crossed. Hesitant though he was to give his heart a second time to either child or woman, he’d allowed the mother and daughter he met at the zoo to open a chink in his armor. Into it had flowed an uncomfortable host of half-coveted possibilities.
No need to get bent out of shape just yet, he thought wryly. It isn’t likely you’ll see them again.
Set well back from the road, with its deck and its broad expanse of windows facing the lake, Stephen’s cedar-sided house appeared somewhat closed and unwelcoming. Raising the garage door with his remote control, he drove inside and shut off the Mercedes’s engine.
Each time he ascended the shallow quarry-tiled steps that led into the silent, empty kitchen, he experienced a moment of heartache that there was no David to greet him, no eight-year-old clamoring for his attention. Some evenings, he couldn’t stop himself from going to the doorway of his son’s former room and touching the toy cars, plastic action figures and stuffed animals that lined the built-in shelving in unnaturally neat rows.
Tonight, he switched on some music, popped a packet of frozen lasagna into the oven and poured himself a glass of Bardolino. At this time of year, the sun set around 7:30 p.m. Chelsea and Carter Todd, the young daughter and son of his next-door neighbors, were still playing outdoors, under the watchful eye of their sixtyish baby-sitter. Stepping out on the deck to sip his wine while the lasagna heated, Stephen stared at the blue expanse of water that fanned out from his pier and wondered if the laughter of another child, a different woman, would help to make him whole again.
In the sitting room area of her downtown hotel suite, Jess had drifted off to sleep. She awoke shortly after 10:00 p.m., stiff from the unnatural position in which she’d been slumbering on the love seat, and somewhat unsettled, thanks to a confusing dream. Annie was still asleep, her forehead warm and dry against the back of Jess’s wrist, but not excessively feverish.
Deciding to let her sleep, Jess poured out a glass of mineral water and returned to the sitting room. The local news was on. Someone handed the sandy-haired anchorman a note as she retook her seat. It was clear from his facial expression as he scanned it that he considered the note to be of major importance, and she turned up the sound a little.
“This just in,” the man was saying. “Former Hollywood leading lady and longtime Minneapolis resident Monica Malone was found dead this evening in her Summit Avenue mansion. We take you to Mary Ann Galvin, our reporter at the scene. Mary Ann…”
Positioned at the curb in front of the Malone mansion, which had clearly seen better days, the reporter gripped her microphone with barely disguised excitement. Several uniformed officers, the flashing lights of a police cruiser and a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape were visible behind her.
“Thank you, Jay,” she said. “According to a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, Miss Malone, thought to be in her midsixties, was found sprawled on her living room floor shortly after 10:00 p.m. She was pronounced dead at 10:15 p.m., when police arrived.
“Stating that the matter is under investigation, officers have declined to comment on the cause of death, or speculate as to whether foul play was involved. However, a tenant of one of Miss Malone’s neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had heard she suffered a head injury….”
The name of the deceased former movie star rang a bell with Jess, and not just because of her films. I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere, and recently—I know it, she thought. Seconds later, she remembered where. Monica Malone’s name had turned up in a long-outdated, somewhat sensationalized magazine article about Benjamin Fortune’s career that she managed to dig up at a library near her home in England before leaving for America. Its author, who claimed to have known the Fortun
e patriarch personally, had suggested that he and Monica Malone had “conducted an off-and-on affair for years.”
In part because of Ronald’s infidelities during their marriage, Jess supposed, she strongly disapproved. Yet she couldn’t have denied that she found every scrap of information she could accumulate about the man she now believed to have been her grandfather extremely fascinating.
When Jess awoke again, around 6:30 a.m., Annie was worse. Her temperature had soared to 103 degrees. She was coughing, shivering and whimpering. Terrified, Jess decided to take the advice of the tall blond doctor they’d met at the zoo and take her to Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. However, she didn’t think she could bear to see Annie carted off in an ambulance if it wasn’t necessary. It would scare her to death and, incidentally, break Jess’s heart.
Accordingly, she bundled the girl up in two sweaters and a raincoat, and wrapped her in one of the hotel blankets. A sympathetic bellhop helped her carry Annie downstairs and summoned a taxi for them.
“Mummy… Mummy…where are we going? You’re coming with me…aren’t you?” Annie asked in alarm as the bellhop settled her in the cab’s back seat.
“Yes, of course I am. We’re going to the hospital that nice doctor told us about yesterday,” Jess said soothingly, unable to keep tears of consternation and panic from running down her cheeks as she got into the taxi beside her and drew her close. “You need better medicine than I can give you, darling. Plus some doctors and nurses to help make you better as soon as possible.”
Both she and Annie were grim-faced, tense and more than a little frightened as their cab drew up to Minn-Gen’s emergency room entrance. Before Jess could get out and pay the driver, a nurse and an orderly were hurrying out to meet them. “You’re Mrs. Holmes, right?” the nurse asked. “The doorman at your hotel phoned to let us know you were coming.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur. While the nurse examined Annie and took her vital signs, one of the secretaries at the nursing station helped Jess fill out an admitting form. The latter didn’t seem unduly concerned about Annie’s condition until Jess wrote leukemia under the heading Known Medical Conditions. A quick conference between the secretary, a nurse and a male physician who was in the process of tending to an accident victim ensued.
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