“I take it that means you don’t know who killed her,” Silberman observed, tongue in cheek.
That evening, Jake’s arrest was prominently featured on both the local and the national newscasts. Sterling had warned Erica what to expect. After an unsuccessful attempt to reach her estranged husband at the jail, she’d driven to her daughter Natalie’s home to watch the news with her and architect Rick Dalton, her newly acquired fiancé. Several other family members—Natalie’s sister Caroline, her brother, Adam, and his fiancée Laura—had gathered with them, as well. No one could believe what had happened, with the possible exception of Natalie, who had arrived at the Fortune mansion on the lake the night of Monica’s murder in time to see her father’s blood-spattered shirt and listen to his incoherent, drunken ramblings about what had taken place.
Like her siblings, however, Natalie was vociferously convinced of his innocence. “We have to call him…tell him we’re behind him one hundred percent!” she exclaimed when the TV anchorman moved on to another topic.
The conversation she proposed wasn’t to take place. A call to the jail’s information desk yielded only the number of a pay phone in the male prisoners’ dayroom, which continued to ring busy for several hours. Incredibly, the “pull” that had attached to being Fortunes in Minneapolis for as long as they could remember seemed to have evaporated just when they needed it most.
Five
To Jake’s increasing sense of being at the vortex of a whirlpool that would drag him ever downward, severing him forever from the life he’d known, Aaron Silberman’s attempt to win his release on bond at his arraignment the next morning failed. Sourly concurring with the assistant county attorney’s argument that Jake was a poor risk because he’d left Minnesota the night of Monica Malone’s murder, the judge issued a quick denial and banged his gavel, thundering, “Next case!”
The criminal attorney could offer but scant consolation. The arraignment judge, known to have come up from poverty the hard way and to harbor a strong resentment against society’s more privileged members, wouldn’t preside at Jake’s preliminary hearing, several weeks hence. They could try again, with what Aaron Silberman predicted would be better results. “There’s no reason to keep you behind bars, despite the seriousness of the charge,” he said. “When asked, you went to the police of your own free will and told them what you knew of that night’s events.”
Visits with his grown children through a glass panel that didn’t allow them to kiss or touch brought deep embarrassment and pain to him. When they were small, toddling about the house, and later, when they graduated from training wheels to ride their two-wheel bikes unaided around the neighborhood, he’d been like a god to them. He was mortified that, as adults, they should see him brought so low, so hollow-eyed from worry and lack of sleep, in his unpressed regulation-issue jail uniform.
At last he asked them not to come again. “The county jail’s no place for you, any more than it is for me,” he told them unequivocally. “For my part, it can’t be helped. But I don’t want your seeing me here to figure prominently in your memories of me someday.”
Their protests that they’d never view him in that light in a million years didn’t alter his opinion. “I’ll be getting out of here just as soon as my preliminary hearing is held,” he insisted, though secretly he wouldn’t have bet money on it. “We’ll be able to spend as much time as we want together then.”
Somewhat dubiously, they agreed to do as he asked. On the way back to his cell after their last visit, he congratulated himself with a twist of irony that he’d been lucky in one respect. At least Erica hadn’t insisted on visiting him, to carry away the image of how he’d looked at the nadir of his poise and self-respect.
Two weeks later, Jake was still behind bars. His preliminary hearing had been postponed at the county attorney’s request, despite Aaron Silberman’s objections. Meanwhile, at Minn-Gen, Annie’s strength had improved sufficiently for her stopgap chemotherapy to get under way.
On the fateful morning, Jess was seated at her daughter’s bedside in the special “clean air” room where Annie would reside until her bone marrow had regenerated sufficiently to offer some temporary protection from disease. She was smoothing the child’s silky blond curls, with the aching realization that at least partial baldness would result from her treatment, when Stephen entered with a slim redheaded nurse-specialist in tow. The latter was carrying an IV stand and several plastic pouches of the clear, sick-making fluid needed to begin her treatment.
It was time. A bit shakily, Jess got to her feet. With all the fierce motherly protectiveness she possessed, she wanted to scream that she’d changed her mind and order them out of the room. No one was to touch Annie. Or give her harsh chemicals to make her retch. There would be time enough for that to happen when a donor was found.
Stephen’s heart went out to her when he saw the trapped and terrified look on her face, just as it did to his small patient, who would soon be sick to her stomach and vomiting into a metal basin as a result of his prescribed treatment.
In the weeks that followed his gift to Annie of the plastic cowboy and Indian that had once belonged to his son, he and Jess hadn’t so much as touched again. But that hadn’t kept him from imagining how it would feel to take her in his arms and press his mouth against her softly parted lips. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking of her at night, and imagining what it would be like to have her warm beneath the covers with him. Again and again he asked himself if he had the courage to care for another woman in her vulnerable and unenviable position. If he took that leap and failed with her, too, he’d have a second emotional catastrophe to his credit.
And if he didn’t take the risk? What would he lose by his cowardice? Just the chance to weave a life so gauzy and bright with love in its everyday moments that the inevitable tragedies of my profession might lose some of their power to hurt me, he thought. To hear a precious child laughing in the next room and know that, in a moment, she would scramble up into my lap and demand a story with blissful assurance…to kiss the soft nape of a beloved woman’s neck beneath steam-dampened ringlets as she stirred something aromatic on the rangetop… What wouldn’t I give for these simple but deeply satisfying things, if only I dared to reach out for them?
So far, he hadn’t taken the most tentative step in that direction. Still, the weeks of Annie’s hospitalization had propelled him and Jess from the formalities of “Dr.” and “Mrs.” to a first-name basis. Their almost daily meetings and their mutual concern for Annie had nurtured a camaraderie of sorts that could, he sensed, segue into something stellar, satisfying and, to his commitment-apprehensive soul, infinitely dangerous.
“We don’t have any other choice, Jess,” he said, deliberately resting a hand on her shoulder. “Harsh as this course of treatment may seem, Annie needs this chance for a temporary remission so we can buy time to find a donor.”
He was right, of course. The IV nurse asked her to step back, so as not to impede the procedure that was about to take place, and she did so reluctantly. She all but held her breath as, after carefully preparing Annie’s hand, the woman inserted the necessary catheter in her vein, causing the girl to cry out in pain and distress.
“Mummy…it hurts!”
The catheter wasn’t wholly secured yet. Suppressing a corresponding outburst, Jess turned and hid her face against Stephen’s lab coat. Seconds later, she’d realized her error and stepped back to tough out the moment. “I know you’re right,” she said in a small voice, not quite meeting his eyes. “It’s just that I’d give anything to bear this treatment for her….”
Stephen knew the feeling all too well. There wasn’t a child he treated for leukemia or some other life-threatening blood disease who didn’t bring David’s illness back to him, with all its accompanying rage and helplessness. Unfortunately, his relationship with Annie was far more complicated than any other he’d had with a youthful patient since his son’s death. During their brief association, the frail blon
d girl, with her plucky spirit and adorable British accent, had wormed her way into his affections in a way that, so far, none of his other charges had been able to do.
In part, he knew, that was because of his feelings for her mother, which neither reason nor the memory of his unhappy breakup with Brenda had seemed able to curb.
“We aren’t giving her a full load,” he answered, hating himself for the need to be so matter-of-fact with her. “In just a few days, she should be feeling better and taking nourishment. I have every expectation that, once her bone marrow regenerates, she’ll be able to go home from the hospital for a while, until we’re ready to do her transplant.”
He makes it sound as if the transplant’s a sure thing, though we don’t have a donor yet, Jess thought. Like me, he’s probably counting on the Fortunes to come through, since the initial reports from the marrow banks he contacted for us have been uniformly negative.
By now, Jess knew that attempting to match bone marrow was a much more difficult and complicated process than obtaining compatible blood types for a transfusion. For a successful transplant to take place, donor and recipient had to share at least three, and preferably more, of the six markers, called human leukocyte antigens found on every human bone-marrow cell.
The first to be drawn and analyzed, Lindsay’s blood had indicated compatibility with only two of Annie’s six antigens. But there was still hope. Rebecca, Adam and Caroline had appeared on schedule for their blood tests, despite worries over Jacob Fortune, who was facing murder charges. The reports on those tests would be back soon. And, thanks to Lindsay, others were in the works.
Meanwhile, Jess would hug the prospect of taking Annie home for a while—even if that home had to be a hotel room. “I’ll try to remember that tonight, and tomorrow, when she’s so sick,” she whispered.
After what seemed infinite adjustments and calibrations, the IV nurse had completed her task. Jess was free to rejoin her daughter. Violating the rule that forbade family members and approved visitors sitting on a patient’s bed in one of the special “clean rooms,” she snuggled close to Annie on the side opposite the catheter and put both arms around her. Unfortunately, like Stephen and the IV nurse, she was wearing a mask to prevent infection, and she couldn’t kiss the girl’s cheek.
“It hurts, Mummy,” Annie complained, nestling against her. “I want to go home to England, and see Herkie. Why do we have to do this?”
Jess knew instinctively that a glib explanation wouldn’t cut it. “I realize this is nasty medicine, and that it hurts a lot, sweetheart,” she said. “I wish I could take it for you. But the truth is, it has some good things about it, too. In a few days, you’ll be feeling better, and soon after that you’ll get to leave the hospital for a while, until we can find that very special medicine I told you about. Once you take it, you won’t be tired and sick all the time. We’ll be able to do lots of fun things together.”
Annie remained skeptical. “I miss Herkie so much,” she whimpered. “Seeing him again would make me feel better, too, don’t you think?”
Stephen remembered the girl mentioning someone named Herkie once before. I wonder who he is? he thought. Someone Jess is fond of, too? With other patients to see, he didn’t have time to ask.
“You hang in there, okay?” he urged, lifting Annie’s chin with one gloved finger. “I’ll be back to check on you in a little while. You know, there are more cowboys and Indians where the first ones came from. I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned up in your room one of these days.”
As morning wore on into afternoon, Annie got progressively sicker. Holding the basin under her chin when she threw up and wiping her face with a damp towel, Jess worried that she’d get the dry heaves. But she was only moderately successful in getting her wretched, unhappy child to take an occasional sip of water. Though Stephen checked back as promised, around noon and again about 5:00 p.m., each time he could only stay a minute.
Shortly after his departure, the last of Annie’s retching stopped. She fell into a fitful sleep. Stiff from maintaining a sitting position for most of the day, Jess got to her feet and strolled over to the window for a change of scene. She was just in time to see Stephen leave the building in dress slacks and a sport coat and get into a silver-gray Miata convertible where a slim woman with shoulder-length ash-blond hair had been waiting for him. To her dismay, he and the woman exchanged a quick embrace before the little sportster shot out of its illegal parking space near the hospital entrance and joined the flow of cars out of the parking lot.
Her first reaction was a stunning sense of loss—one that brought home to her just how far her fantasies about him had flown. I should have known better than to believe that nurse’s aide when she intimated that he wasn’t dating anyone, she thought, the bottom dropping out of a place inside her that had cautiously begun to dream again. A man like that might play hard to get. But he’d be in constant demand nonetheless. What a fool he must think me, mooning over him! She wanted to die when she remembered how, just a few hours earlier, she’d rested her cheek against his lab coat, seeking comfort.
He could be sure it wouldn’t happen again. As she sank into the Leatherette lounger beside her daughter’s bed, she reflected that an endless parade of single mothers with sick children must develop crushes on him, unaware that his kindness and concern were strictly professional and humanitarian. Face it, she told herself bitterly. You and Annie are alone in the world, locked in the battle of her life. And it’s likely to remain that way. You need to put blinders on where romance is concerned.
Arriving at a nearby restaurant with his dinner date, a friend of his ex-wife’s who had recently undergone a divorce herself, Stephen scolded himself for being an easy mark. When the woman had phoned out of the blue to tell him about her newly single state and confessed her overwhelming loneliness, he’d done his awkward best to sympathize. She’d quickly responded by asking him out to dinner. Though he’d squirmed and struggled to think of an appropriate excuse to beg off, there had been no getting out of it. She’d been available “most any night.”
He was in for a boring, frustrating evening, he guessed. From what he could remember of Gloria, she talked of nothing but golf scores, bridge, her poodle, Muppet, the spoils from her most recent shopping trip and the latest dirt circulating in his ex-wife’s social set.
His current experience of her didn’t turn out to be very far off the mark. For a while, as they ate their mesclun salads and pasta fresca with sun-dried tomatoes, he found he could uphold his end of the evening’s bargain by simply nodding, smiling and posing a negligent question now and then. Still, it was uncomfortably clear that the former Gloria Denham had serious designs on him.
I can’t wait for her to drop me off so I can run upstairs—to check on Jess and Annie one more time before I head home to Lake Travis, he realized. Their welfare has begun to mean a lot to me on a very personal level.
After interminable small talk over coffee and dessert, and several hints on his part that he had early rounds the following morning, Gloria murmured at last that perhaps she’d better drive him back to the hospital. “That is, unless you’d rather…” she added, her voice trailing off in embarrassment at the startled look he gave her.
Stephen quickly filled the awkward silence that followed by thanking her for being so understanding. “It’s not everyone who’s willing to sympathize with the demands of a busy physician’s schedule,” he said.
He considered himself fortunate to escape with soothing reassurances and a brotherly kiss on the cheek when she halted her Miata in front of Minn-Gen’s main entrance a short time later. Before her taillights had disappeared down the circular drive, he was striding toward the elevator. Somehow, the evening with Gloria had made him doubly eager to see Jess.
Donning a surgical gown over his street clothes and slipping on a mask and a pair of gloves at the nursing station, he entered Annie’s room. During his absence, dusk had fallen. Yet Jess hadn’t bothered to switch on a lamp. In th
e half-light from the hall, he could see that Annie was sleeping—if not altogether peacefully, at least without a great deal of restlessness.
The pretty, dark-haired Brit he’d compared so favorably with his ex-wife’s friend had spent the past several hours staring into space from the Leatherette lounger beside her daughter’s bed, alternately contemplating what she believed would be a loveless future and worrying that they wouldn’t have found a matching donor when all the Fortunes had been tested. Now, at Stephen’s light step, she turned and got to her feet.
“How’s Annie been doing?” he asked in a husky whisper, approaching to stand a little too close.
She couldn’t see his mouth, just his Viking-blue eyes and the expression they contained. From what she could tell, it was as deceptively warm as usual—maybe even a little warmer, out of sympathy for their current plight. Thanks to the tableau she’d witnessed from her fourth-floor vantage point, she had a fair idea just how far that warmth could be expected to carry her. Exactly nowhere, she told herself. Thank God I woke up to my silly daydreams before I thoroughly embarrassed myself.
“About as well as can be expected, I guess,” she answered.
Was he imagining it, or was her precise British intonation a little cool? He tried again. “How about you, then? Have you had any dinner?”
She shook her head.
“You have to eat, Jess. If you don’t want to leave Annie’s side long enough to go to the cafeteria, let me run down to the snack bar and get you something.”
He wasn’t her brother. Or her keeper. Instead, he was her daughter’s physician, a highly trained specialist with many patients to worry about—hardly the sort of person you dispatched to the nearest lunch counter to get you some fish and chips or an American hot dog.
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