LITMIR.BIZ

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to her surprise he said, “I teach economics at a private college near Vancouver. I plan to do some writing this summer.”

      “Will your wife and daughter be able to amuse themselves all day?” she asked. “I’m afraid there’s not a lot going on in the town of Azure Bay—though Kelowna is less than half an hour away, and it’s a good-size resort city.”

      “Steffi’s an outdoor girl,” Alex said. “She loves hiking and swimming, and she’s a pretty fair amateur photographer. She’s not the type to hang around malls or video arcades.”

      “I see.” Gina paused, thinking about the reality of a two-month stay at Edgewood Manor for anyone unaccustomed to this kind of rural existence. “How about your wife? Is she—”

      “My wife is dead,” he said quietly.

      “I’m sorry.” Gina glanced at him. He was staring across the lake, his profile cold and unrevealing. “I thought…I was sure you spoke of this holiday as her idea.”

      “In a way it was.” He continued to look at the shimmering expanse of blue-green water. “My wife died three months ago after a lengthy illness. When I was going through her papers, I found the brochure about Edgewood Manor.”

      “I see.”

      “My wife was the one who planned our vacations,” he went on. “I was always too busy to bother with details like that. Besides, she had a flair for finding the perfect place and organizing quirky off-beat holidays that were perfect for us. So when I found that brochure in her desk, I looked on it as a sort of message from her.” He gave Gina a tired smile. “And it seems she was right again.”

      “I hope so,” Gina said with gentle sincerity. “I hope you and your daughter enjoy the summer.”

      “It’s been hard for Steffi,” he said. “Really hard. I’m worried about her.”

      Gina was silent, recognizing his difficulty with talking about his family’s trauma. He was a man who didn’t share his feelings easily.

      “She’s at an age where a girl needs her mother,” he went on in a low voice. “It was bad enough for Steffi to lose her, but to watch how terribly Janice suffered at the end…”

      He fell silent.

      Gina glanced at him again, wanting to reach over and squeeze his hand, or put her arm around him and give him a sympathetic hug. But she kept her hands folded tightly in her lap.

      “What…what was your wife’s illness?” she inquired hesitantly. She knew she was prying, but something about the man compelled her to ask.

      “She had Huntington’s,” he said, still staring at the lake.

      “Oh,” Gina murmured, wrung with sympathy. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

      She was silent a moment, trying to remember what she’d heard about the condition. “I always thought…” she began.

      He turned to face her. “Yes?”

      “About Huntington’s. I thought it didn’t affect people until quite late in life.”

      “Usually it doesn’t,” Alex said. “But it can strike in the early thirties. That’s when my wife first started to develop symptoms—about ten or eleven years ago. Her father and an uncle both died of it,” he added, “so we knew what to expect. But the children of people with Huntington’s still have a fifty percent chance of escaping it.”

      “And until the symptoms appear…”

      “You keep hoping,” he said bitterly. “You cling to hope until the last minute. You tell yourself maybe the tremors are just fatigue, and the dizziness is some kind of allergy. You grasp at straws as long as you can.”

      “But hasn’t a test been developed recently? I thought there was some kind of genetic marker that can be isolated and identified.”

      “That’s true,” he said, looking at Gina in surprise. “You’re very well-informed.”

      “I watch public television,” she said, “and read a lot. I’ve always had an interest in scientific things.”

      “Of course you have,” he said with a quick smile. “Anybody can tell that by looking at the things you carry in your pockets.”

      She smiled back. “My mother was a chemistry teacher until she retired a few years ago. She always encouraged me to have an inquiring mind.”

      “What about your father?”

      Gina tensed, reluctant to get into a personal discussion. But he’d told her about his own family tragedy, so it seemed graceless not to respond to his questions.

      “My father was in sales,” she said. “He traveled a lot. When I was about eleven, he left on a trip to Ontario and wound up staying there. My mother raised us all alone.”

      “Us?”

      “I have a sister who’s ten years younger than I am. She and my mother live in New Brunswick. I came out here almost twenty years ago to go to college, fell in love with the province and never left.”

      “Why did you decide to go to school so far from home?”

      “I have an aunt who lives in Vancouver near the university,” Gina said. “It was cheaper to stay with her than in a dormitory somewhere. And UBC offered a really good course on hotel management, which was always my career choice.”

      “I see.”

      Alex leaned back again, lifting his face gratefully to the warm rays of sunlight.

      “In answer to your question about testing,” he said after a brief silence, “it was something my wife never wanted to do, even after the test became more readily available. She said she refused to live with a death penalty over her head. As it happened, the disease progressed a lot more rapidly than is usual once the symptoms appeared, so maybe she was wise.”

      Maybe, Gina thought. But it wouldn’t have been her own choice. She always preferred to know what she was dealing with, to confront the reality head-on no matter how awful it might be. She wondered about Alex’s daughter, though. Had she been tested? Surely—

      Alex suddenly got to his feet, then waited courteously while she did likewise. “We’d better get this deal concluded,” he said. “I have to be back in Vancouver before nightfall.”

      She walked with him back into the hotel, relieved that their painful conversation was ended.

      But as they strolled through the hallway with Annabel at their heels and paused in the kitchen to greet Mary, Gina was alarmed to realize she was already counting the days until the first of July…

       CHAPTER THREE

      ROGER STROLLED into the kitchen and patted Gina’s shoulder as she worked at a little side table near the window.

      Outside, the late-evening sun was setting behind the mountains, casting long purple shadows across the yard. The lake glistened with fiery streaks of orange, and the twilight air was warm and murmurous with crickets and the music of bullfrogs by the water’s edge.

      “What’s this one?” he asked.

      Gina squinted at the scrap of wire and golden feathers in her vise. “A yellow nymph,” she said. “Like the ones I made last year, but with some minor improvements.”

      “Those yellow nymphs were great flies. Remember the big trout I caught, Gina?”

      “How could I forget? You’ve mentioned it practically every day for the last year.”

      “You’re just jealous,” he said placidly. “We should try to get up to Bear Creek again. We’ve hardly been fishing

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