LITMIR.BIZ

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that in the final analysis, parting company was for the best. If they lived to be a hundred, he suspected, he and Brenda wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes without seeing the pain of David’s loss staring back at them.

      Somehow, he needed to start fresh. Get a grip on himself. Live for real again, instead of simply going through the motions. He just wasn’t sure how to start. Never the kind of guy to get involved in casual affairs, he didn’t plan to take that path now. His son’s memory deserved better of him. Yet he was paralyzed by the prospect of committing to anyone. Most single women his age who weren’t already mothers deeply wanted a baby, while the thought of giving another hostage to fortune caused panic to grip him by the throat.

      He, Brenda and David had come to the zoo as a family during David’s final, painfully brief remission. Though they were living on borrowed time, the occasion had been marked by a kind of frantic, ephemeral happiness. The remembrance of that afternoon had been his reason for coming today. In a way that was irrational and would have been difficult to explain, he’d hoped to catch a sidelong glimpse of his beloved child, if only in memory and imagination.

      Pausing to gaze at the gorillas and orangutans, which David had always loved, Stephen noticed a slim, attractive dark-haired woman and a rather frail-looking blond female child of approximately kindergarten age who were touring the zoo together. The woman’s roses-and-cream complexion glowed as if it had been nourished by a cool but temperate climate.

      Her naturally curly hair, worn short, framed her face in ringlets. Her clothes spoke of classic good taste and sufficient income to indulge it. She was wearing well-polished flat leather shoes, a hand-tailored beige wool skirt and a long-sleeved cashmere pullover in a flattering blue-violet shade. From what he could tell at that distance, the third finger of her left hand was innocent of a wedding ring.

      The child was dressed a bit more warmly than her contemporaries at the zoo, in a plaid wool skirt, a cotton turtleneck and a red hand-knit cardigan with matching kneesocks and black patent Mary Janes. It was clear from the woman’s demeanor, in particular her nurturing but vaguely worried air, like that of a fretful guardian angel, that she was the girl’s mother and loved her very much.

      Unfortunately, to Stephen’s practiced eyes her little girl didn’t look at all well. To begin with, she was too thin for her height. Her large, solemn eyes—he couldn’t see their color, thanks to the distance that separated them—appeared too big for her face.

      For some reason, when mother and child moved on toward the seal island and the aquatic animals, Stephen followed at a slight distance, keeping them in view. Ironic, isn’t it? he thought, giving his head a wry mental shake. That today, of all days, you’d set eyes on a woman who could interest you. Really imagine, for the first time since David’s funeral, how nice it would be to have a family again.

      His emotional state being what it was, he supposed it was just as well that he and the woman were strangers and he didn’t have an excuse to speak to her. The last thing she needed, if his assumption about her child was correct, was an emotionally crippled workaholic doctor cluttering up her life. She was probably married, anyway—a settled, if young and lovely, Minneapolis housewife with a doting, successful husband.

      As it happened, the woman he was speculating about, twenty-five-year-old Jessica Holmes, a British investment analyst, had been widowed six months earlier, while she was in the process of obtaining a divorce from her philandering, well-to-do husband. She and her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, had arrived in the Minneapolis area just two days earlier, and were suffering from jet lag. Their tour of the zoo wasn’t as brisk or cheerful as it might have been, in part because Annie, recently diagnosed with leukemia, was somewhat low on energy, and Jess was terribly worried about her.

      Maybe the zoo hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. Following their exhausting transatlantic flight, and a frantic day spent dragging her daughter to and fro as she tried to contact at least one member of the Twin Cities’ wealthy Fortune clan—as yet to no avail—she’d decided Annie needed a little fun for a change.

      The expedition had proved to be only a modified success. Though she tried to tell herself she was just imagining things, Jess kept thinking she detected the harbingers of some ailment, a cold or the flu, that Annie’s compromised immune system would fight inadequately at best. Even on “good” days, when Annie had a modicum of stamina, Jess couldn’t seem to stop herself from hovering over the girl like a mother hen guarding a beloved and fragile chick. To her shame, Annie had picked up on her fears and, in her innocent, childish way, begun reassuring her.

      I have a perfect right to be afraid, Jess thought, outwardly stiffening her spine and putting on her bravest face. Annie’s form of leukemia is deadly. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and soon. If she doesn’t get it, I’m going to lose her. And that would be the end of both our worlds.

      It was the need for matching bone marrow, a rare and precious commodity, that had brought them to Minneapolis. As Jess had quickly learned once Annie’s condition was diagnosed, her child’s best hope of finding a donor was among blood relatives. Unhappily, they’d already exhausted every possibility among Jess’s scattered family members and the somewhat more prolific clan of her late husband, a prosperous but cavalier bank executive who’d been killed in an automobile crash, along with his most recent mistress, shortly after Jess initiated divorce proceedings.

      Refusing to be immobilized by fear, she’d signed Annie up with a British bone-marrow registry and settled back to bite her nails when she ran across a letter, addressed to her grandmother, that had been among her recently deceased mother’s possessions.

      Specifically, the letter had been tucked in a volume of children’s verses from which her mother had read to her every evening when she was Annie’s age. Scrawled in a strong, masculine hand on yellowing, unlined paper, the letter had suggested that Benjamin Fortune, a legendary American entrepreneur who’d fought with the Allies in France during World War II, was her true maternal grandfather, not George Simpson, her grandmother’s husband of many years.

      In doing so, it had explained why some of the blood tests among her relatives had been so far off the mark, while opening up a whole new world of possibilities for Annie’s salvation. There had been no reason to doubt that the letter was genuine. Making up her mind in an instant, she’d arranged for a leave of absence from her London investment-banking firm and carted Annie off to America in the hope that one of Benjamin Fortune’s descendants could provide the help she so desperately sought.

      So far, every door she’d tried to open remained closed in her face. True, after several minutes of impassioned pleading on her part, the formidable secretary who guarded the entrance to the executive offices of Fortune Industries in downtown Minneapolis like some kind of exquisitely coifed and made-up dragon at the gate had agreed to give Jacob Fortune, Benjamin’s oldest son and the company’s chief executive officer, her handwritten note when he returned to the office three days hence. But Jess doubted he’d bother to get in touch with her. From what she’d been able to glean from her hurried research into the family history, the Fortunes had been the target of numerous false claims on the family wealth over the years. Jacob Fortune could hardly be blamed if he regarded her plea as another swindle in the making.

      Somehow, she’d have to convince him otherwise. None of the other Fortunes had turned out to be accessible. As she’d feared, most had unpublished phone numbers. International directory assistance had been able to give her just three subscribers with the Fortune surname in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area when she phoned before leaving England.

      The two she’d reached had turned out to be unrelated. She wasn’t sure, yet, about the third. Phoning from her country cottage in Sussex several days before their departure, she’d twice managed to contact a certain Natalie Fortune’s answering machine, which had played back a friendly greeting in a young woman’s sweet, energetic voice. To her disappointment, though she’d left a message urging the unknown Natalie to phone her collect as soon as possible, no return call had been forthcoming.

      A second call, made after they reached Minneapolis, had proved even less promising. This time, the answering machine had been switched off. Or unplugged. Maybe Natalie

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