She brushed his worry aside with a hand dripping the East Indian rubies Ben had given her to atone for some violation or other of their marriage compact. “My children need me,” she vowed.
“Not at the expense of losing you for real,” Sterling pointed out. “They’re grown up, for God’s sake. You said it yourself…they needed a nudge and enough rope to hang themselves or pull their lives together in ways they hadn’t begun to contemplate. So far, nobody’s gotten convicted of anything. Jake won’t, either, if I have anything to say about it.”
For once, she didn’t interrupt.
“Strange as it may seem,” he added, “I think this crisis will be the making of him. He’s always been discontented with his lot, generous though it is. Now he’s displeased with nature’s choice of a father for him, as well. In my opinion, once he’s weathered the storm, he’ll know who he is and what he wants.”
Kate gazed at the lawyer’s gracefully aging, craggy-handsome features without replying for a moment. What a treasure he is! she thought. Like me, he’s a senior player on the game board of life, high-stakes Fortune version. Except he has better sense. It occurred to her that they had a lot more in common with each other than they did with anyone else she knew. They even shared the same acerbic sense of humor.
“You’re right, of course,” she admitted, surprising him by capitulating without a fight. “Come sit with me on the sofa, and we’ll talk about the good old days. I’ll pour you that brandy you’ve been wishing for.”
When Stephen and Jess met the next day at the hospital, it was awkward, to say the least. After having established a pattern of easy give-and-take and warm friendliness that only intensified since their initial dinner date, they were barely able to look each other in the face. A bit perfunctory in his examination, though he was as friendly and gentle with Annie as ever, he didn’t stay long.
“Dr. Steve is acting funny,” Annie observed in a chipper voice, giving Jess a puzzled look after he left the room. “Do you s’pose he’s mad at us?”
Doubly embarrassed that her gamine, unnaturally balding five-year-old should notice that something had gone wrong with their relationship, Jess couldn’t help picturing the scene at the Fortunes’ guest cottage in which Stephen had rejected her. To her sorrow, it was hardly the first time she’d replayed that particular tape. The little tableau had unfolded over and over, like a film loop, in her mind’s eye the previous night, as she tried to snatch some sleep at her hotel.
“I don’t see why he would be, do you?” she asked, bending to administer a kiss to Annie’s cheek.
The girl frowned as she considered the question. “Maybe he’s getting sick, too, and he wants to be home in his bed,” she speculated, drawing on her own most vivid personal experience for an explanation. “What happens when doctors get sick, Mummy? Do they have to sleep at the hospital like I do, and take lots of nasty medicine?”
“I should imagine so, if they’re sick enough,” Jess answered. “Doctors are just ordinary people who’ve studied hard for a long time so they can learn to make other people well.”
Thankful Annie would be released at the end of the week and they wouldn’t have to continue their daily contact with the man she loved, Jess rummaged in the tote bag of things she’d brought to keep Annie amused now that she had more energy, and pulled out an illustrated storybook to distract the girl. Yet as she read the classic tale of a young American girl growing up on a strawberry farm with her grandparents, she felt something akin to despair settle in her heart. Until Annie had cleared the hurdle of her transplant—assuming they could find a donor—she and Stephen would be forced to maintain a semblance of the friendship that had grown up between them. And the hollowness of it would tug at her heart.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand it if we don’t find someone quickly, she thought, picturing the waiting game they might have to endure as, one by one, the Fortunes’ test results became available. For Annie’s sake, of course, speed in locating a match was crucial. They’d have just a limited “window” of time in which to do a transplant before the benefits of her chemotherapy waned and her leukemia edged out of control again.
Meanwhile, she was wild about the tall blond doctor who’d courted and rejected her. In just the short interval since their dinner date at the French bistro at the Foushay Tower, she’d learned to care deeply for him—and count on his affectionate presence and support. Now that support was unavailable. It’ll be like living with heaven just out of reach, she realized. Contrasted with the closeness I’d hoped for, the loneliness of it will be staggering.
There was still a great deal to hope about. Though the blood tests provided by the Fortune twins, Allie and Rocky, Natalie’s younger sisters, had come back negative, Jess had finally managed to get in touch with Nate’s son, Kyle, and his older daughter, Jane Bolton. Both had been tested. The results would be available soon.
Though Jess couldn’t know it, thanks to the front he put on, their daily contacts were tearing Stephen apart, as well. He couldn’t look at her without wanting her and lamenting what he believed to have been his unforgivable cowardice in pulling back from the brink of their lovemaking. To make matters worse, his affection for her bright-eyed daughter continued to grow by leaps and bounds, threatening to erode his objectivity about her case. If I were to have a little girl, he thought, I’d want her to be just like Annie Holmes. Too easily, he could picture Annie and her mother installed in his lakefront home as his wife and adopted daughter—a family to come home to at night and love.
If only Annie’s leukemia didn’t stand in the way.
Each time such puerile, emotionally crippling thoughts flitted through his head, he wanted to kick himself. Neither Jess nor Annie could help the tragedy that had visited them. They hadn’t brought it on themselves in any way. Instead, they were simply two wonderful human beings, perfect though flawed, blessed and unfortunate, who’d had a rotten run of luck. In the real world, he knew with his heart, if not his gut, you loved the people you couldn’t do without and you took your chances. Guarantees of longevity and smooth sailing didn’t enter into it.
It was just that he couldn’t face the soul-wrenching agony of losing a child again, and proving inadequate to offer its mother comfort. If he were to marry Jess and she were to turn away from him under such crushing circumstances, he knew, the pain of his anguish would fill the universe. Yet he realized that, if he did nothing to make them his and Annie died, he’d grieve her death and Jess’s departure from Minneapolis almost as much.
Still impaled on his dilemma two days before Annie was scheduled to be released from Minn-Gen, Stephen arranged for another specialist to fill in for him so that he could attend an all-day medical conference at a downtown hotel. He hoped a day away from the hospital would give him some perspective.
The conference organizers had chosen to hold the multitopic meeting at the Marriott City Center, directly across the street from the Radisson Plaza, from which—according to Lindsay—Jess would be moving that afternoon without his help. Just a glance at the Radisson’s marquee and busy front entrance brought back memories of their passionate kiss in the empty lounge, not to mention their awkward leave-taking at the Fortune cottage the night he’d shrunk from making love to her.
Closeted in a seminar on the latest advances in the use of genetically engineered monoclonal antibodies to treat leukemia, a topic of critical importance to him and his patients, he found it difficult to keep his mind focused on the speaker’s remarks. You’ve got to do something about this, he told himself. Either give them up, or bite the bullet—ask Jess for another chance and pray the dice fall in Annie’s favor.
Except for a “lunch break” that consisted of tossed salad, sirloin tips and apple pie brought into the meeting rooms so that the busy physicians attending the conference wouldn’t have to miss a beat, the highly technical sessions continued unabated until shortly after 5:00 p.m. His head teeming with new research findings and treatment protocols, Stephen was o
n the down escalator when he heard a familiar voice call out his name.
“Stephen…wait up!”
Pushing her way past several standees to his rear, his ex-wife, Brenda, materialized at his side. “How’ve you been?” she asked in a voice remarkably free of the accusatory tone he’d come to expect, taking his arm as they reached the mezzanine and lounge area opposite Gustino’s Restaurant. “We hardly ever see each other.”
Her red hair cut in a fluffy wedge that flattered her face and her green eyes gazing up at him from behind a pair of tortoise-rimmed glasses he didn’t remember, Brenda appeared to have made substantial progress in getting over her grief since the last time they’d been together. It occurred to him that she might actually have achieved a degree of happiness.
“About the same,” he answered. “I must say, you’re looking well.”
She gave him what for her was a shy smile. “Thanks. I appreciate the compliment. I’d like to have you believe I climbed up out of the quagmire I was in thanks to my own initiative. But I can’t take full credit. The fact is, I’ve met someone….”
So that’s why her eyes are shining and there’s a new spring to her step, Stephen thought. He felt no jealousy—nothing but happiness for her and a measure of relief for himself. Thanks to her new heartthrob, whoever he was, he’d been absolved of some of the guilt he still felt for the part he’d played in her unhappiness.
“I’d like to have you meet him,” Brenda went on, when he didn’t speak. “Pass judgment, as it were. I always did value your opinion.”
Unsure he was ready for that kind of responsibility, Stephen tried to demur. He had errands to run, and considerable catching up to do by phone on his patients at the hospital.
His attempt to escape was doomed to failure. “Here he comes now,” his ex-wife said, motioning to a balding, sandy-haired man with the muscular build of an athlete.
Stephen recognized him as a fellow participant in several of the day’s seminars. “So…he’s a doctor, too,” he commented.
Her cheeks took on a pinkish tint. “Guess I’m a sucker for altruistic and talented authority figures,” she quipped, abandoning him to link arms with her new beau. “Tom, this is my ex, Stephen Hunter. Stephen, Tom McCaffrey. Tom’s an internist in Wayzata. He specializes in family medicine.”
Taking each other’s measure, the two men exchanged a firm handshake. From what he could sense, Stephen came to the provisional conclusion that Brenda was in good hands.
“Have a drink with us,” Tom McCaffrey said, clearly pleased to find the new woman in his life on friendly but unemotional terms with her former mate.
Unable to refuse the imploring look Brenda gave him, despite his concern that the threesome might prove an awkward one, Stephen agreed to accompany them into Gustino’s piano lounge for a quick cocktail. As he slid into a chair across one of the low, round tables from them, he braced himself, hoping David’s name wouldn’t be mentioned.
It didn’t come up right away. As they chatted amiably about how Tom and Brenda had met, during a weekend excursion for singles to Michigan’s Mackinac Island, he began to see the encounter as a positive event. Though Brenda’s company still called up painful memories of their son’s illness and death for him, he found he wasn’t hurting anymore about the breakup of his marriage to her—just about the inadequacy as a spouse he believed it had brought out in him.
I hope Tom McCaffrey can make her happy, he thought.
Just then, the internist’s beeper went off. “’Scuse me, folks,” he said with a grin, reaching over to squeeze Brenda’s hand as he got to his feet. “My cellular’s on the fritz. Gotta find a public phone booth and call my service.”
To Stephen’s dismay, the moment they were alone together, Brenda gravitated to the topic of David’s death, albeit approaching it from a perspective they’d never discussed. “I really hate to bring this up when we’re getting along so well, but you’re the only person who’d understand,” she said, her green eyes taking on their shadowed look. “Tom and I are talking marriage. And I’m terrified of saying yes. He wants children. I’m not sure I could bear to have life catch fire in me again…carry another child beneath my heart for nine months and wonder if someday I’m going to lose him or her, the way we lost David….”
It was his dilemma, expressed from a woman’s perspective. Her eyes bright with the tears he’d never been able to cry in her presence, Brenda was waiting for some kind of response from him—a dreaded confirmation that her fears were valid and should be heeded or, if he could muster it, a word of encouragement.
Bringing himself to offer the latter, he guessed, would serve as partial atonement. “This time last year, I never thought I’d be saying this,” he admitted. “But life is meant to be lived. It’s what David would want for us. In his place, I urge you to go for it.”
Digesting his words, she was suddenly smiling at him.
As Tom McCaffrey returned to the table and he seized the opportunity to bid them goodbye, Stephen hoped he had the chutzpah to take his own advice. He guessed he’d better. His future happiness depended on it.
As he waited for an attendant to retrieve his Mercedes from the hotel garage, Lindsay was helping Jess move her things from the Radisson to the guest cottage on the Fortune estate. After loading up, the two women stopped at a supermarket so that Jess could stock her newly acquired larder with some of Annie’s favorite groceries. As they strolled the aisles together like friends and the part-time homemakers they were, instead of an investment banker and her daughter’s pediatrician who’d just learned they were related, Jess reflected that it was almost like having a sister—something she’d always wanted.
I’ll be the luckiest woman in the world if our efforts to find a donor for Annie succeed and we manage to stay connected, she thought. A moment later, she revised her prognostication somewhat. Without Stephen in the picture, an important ingredient would be missing from her contentment.
Though she couldn’t help reliving their aborted lovemaking and its aftermath as Lindsay parked her station wagon in front of the cottage and helped her carry her luggage and their purchases inside, she refused to dwell on it for the moment.
“Stay for a cup of coffee,” she invited. “It’ll be a housewarming of sorts.”
It was almost time for the evening news. Addicted to watching since Jake had landed in hot water, Lindsay realized she wouldn’t make it home in time to watch the program from the outset. Aware of her plans to assist Jess with the move, Frank had assured her he’d get there early. Their children’s dinner wouldn’t be delayed by much.
“Okay,” she agreed, pleased to be Jess’s first guest in her new place of residence. “But then I have to split. Mind if I turn on the television?”
Readily granted permission, she flicked on the set and sunk into one of the living room’s lattice-printed couches as Jess ground the coffee beans. It turned out that she hadn’t done so a moment too soon. Datelined Los Angeles, the evening’s first report featured Monica Malone’s adopted son, Brandon, holding forth for reporters on the damaging evidence revealed by a series of affidavits the Hennepin County attorney’s office had requested he turn over to them. Until that moment, Lindsay hadn’t been aware of their existence.
“The affidavits were in my mother’s and my safe-deposit box, which I opened this morning in Minneapolis, as the executor of her estate,” the late film star’s suntanned heir recounted into a battery of microphones, raking a hand through his unkempt dirty-blond hair as if the gesture were a habit with him. “Naturally, I read them before turning them over to the authorities. When a person’s mother has been brutally murdered…”
“Can you be more specific about what the documents contain?” one of the journalists asked.
“Why not?” Despite his loss, the would-be actor seemed to be enjoying his moment in the spotlight. “The affidavits contain testimony from several people who knew Jacob Fortune’s mother, Kate, many years ago, when she was an unmarried waitress,”
he said. “In each of them, the witness claims she was pregnant with Jacob Fortune before the man she married, Benjamin Fortune, came on the scene. In other words…”
Pausing, he invited his questioners to draw their own conclusions.
“Jacob Fortune isn’t the preeminent heir to the family’s power and financial assets, the way people have always assumed?” one of them asked, putting words in his mouth.
“It would seem that way,” he replied, a smirk of satisfaction lending character to his somewhat ordinary face.
“Sounds like, if it turns out to be genuine, the evidence your mother gathered about his past could constitute a motive for murder,” a different reporter said. “Do you agree with that assessment?”
Shrugging, Brandon Malone preened for the cameras. “What do you think?” he asked.
With the abruptness characteristic of network news programs, the scene shifted to New York, where the TV anchorman noted for the record that Jake had been released from jail on bond while awaiting trial, and moved on to an unrelated segment. Switching off the set in disgust, Lindsay accepted the mug of coffee Jess handed her and took a restorative sip.
“I suppose you heard,” she remarked. “According to the ‘evidence’ dredged up by Monica Malone’s ne’er-do-well brat, Jake is my half brother…the son of a man none of us have ever met.”
Startled, Jess realized that, if the allegation was true, it would explain the lack of correlation between his offspring’s antigen sites and her daughter’s. However, she was too tactful to put her observation into words. “Evidence, so-called, can be fabricated,” she said. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that’s what’s happened in this case.”
Hugging her in response to the positive words, Lindsay took a few additional sips of her coffee and bade her goodbye, promising to pick her up in the morning and drive her to the hospital. After watching the news segment about the Malone murder case, she was eager to hurry home and get her husband’s take on the case’s latest development. Yet as she drove the short distance that separated the Fortune estate and its guest cottage from her own lakefront residence, she found herself puzzling over something totally unrelated to the content of Brandon Malone’s interview.
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