LITMIR.BIZ

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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 his 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.

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