Ten
One
D aniel O’Callahan had eyes as cold and clear as the emeralds they resembled. He also had the mind typical of a hard-headed detective and a natural instinct for trouble.
“There’s something fishy going on here,” he muttered to himself, giving his grandmother a hello kiss on the cheek as she lay back in her hospital bed. He turned to stare coolly at the cute little redheaded nurse giving him the eye from the doorway.
“Oh, no, dear,” his grandmother responded cheerfully. “That’s just the remnants of my tuna sandwich. It made a lovely lunch.”
“Right,” he said, not bothering to explain what he’d meant.
Instead, he took a few steps into the doorway and glanced up and down the corridor. Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at him from the nurses’ station. Giggling could be heard. Then, from the other direction, a low wolf whistle. He turned quickly but only caught the tail end of a candy striper’s skirt as she disappeared into another room. The giggling got louder.
He pulled back into the room, frowning. A tall man in top physical condition, with a steely gaze and a chiseled chin, Daniel was used to getting a reaction. Shifty characters tended to draw back into the shadows as he passed, hoping he wouldn’t notice them. Women pulled children a bit closer. Men stepped aside to give him room. When he spoke, others listened as though for instructions on what to do next. All that was routine—at least to Daniel.
But this was different. This was something out of step, unbalanced, completely whacked. He’d never caused women to peer at him and giggle before in his life. It wasn’t normal, and that, along with the weird behavior he’d noticed around the hospital lately since his elderly relative had checked in, needed investigating.
He was a cop, wasn’t he? It was high time he did his job—even if he was on temporary administrative leave from the department while he waited to be cleared of charges of theft during an arrest.
Daniel gazed down at his pretty little gray-haired grandmother, thinking the situation over.
“Listen, Gram, have you told anyone here what I do for a living?”
“That you’re a regular old gumshoe? No, I don’t think so.” Phoebe O’Callahan’s eyes brightened and she dropped into a loud whisper. “What’s up? Are you on a case? Can I help?”
Daniel gazed at the grandmother who had often been more mother to him than anything else and felt a bit of his tension melt away. You couldn’t look at Phoebe and not want to smile.
“Not a case exactly. But I’ve got something I want to look into and it might help if people didn’t know I was a police detective.”
“Oh, goodie.” She pulled herself up against the pillows, her blue eyes sparkling. “What can I do?”
Daniel sighed and half laughed. He took his grandmother’s blue-veined hand in his larger paw and looked at her lovingly. She’d had a very scary fall the day before and he’d brought her in for observation. The doctors had found some problems and since she’d had numerous problems that required hospitalization lately, including a major threat to her hip, she was staying indefinitely while they ran tests and gave her time to recuperate.
“Your job—should you choose to accept it—is to heal those bruises and get yourself well again. That’s what you should be concentrating on.”
“Oh, Danny, come on,” she fretted. “I want to help. Give me a hint. What’s this all about?”
Daniel shook his head. He loved his grandmother, but he was beginning to sense the parameters of a conundrum looming, and when he was working he didn’t usually brook much frivolity. The trouble was, a certain type of frivolity was exactly what seemed to be going on here.
To put it bluntly, the place seemed to have been infected by a love virus—and a pretty nasty one at that. Everywhere you looked, people were billing and cooing. It was pretty disturbing—enough to put you off romance for life.
Just that morning, when he’d dropped by to see how his grandmother had made it through the night, a very angular and heavily made-up occupational therapist had asked him with much batting of eyes if he’d like to share a doughnut she’d saved for him. The cute redheaded nurse had told him he was too handsome to be running around loose, and a tiny little volunteer had offered to give him a neck rub. Women didn’t do that to him. He wasn’t the type. It was just plain weird.
He’d been asking around, trying to find what had changed to bring on this wave of everyone acting like dopey survivors from a sixties love-in. No one admitted to knowing what he was talking about. But the one thing he did know was that a new center had been opened on the hospital campus. He’d been at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, just by accident. Called the Healthy Living Clinic, it seemed to be a fitness center and it was definitely the subject of most of the buzz he heard around the halls. Something told him there was a connection. It might be time to give the clinic a visit.
“Let’s just say I’ve got a professionally open mind,” he said to Phoebe. “But suspicion is lurking in the corners of it.”
Abby Edwards closed her eyes and took a very deep breath. She had to get hold of herself. This was no time to panic. Just because she’d locked herself in the supply closet on the first full day in her new office at the Healthy Living Clinic didn’t mean she was going to prove to the world what a dunderheaded incompetent she was.
“It could have happened to anyone,” she murmured gloomily, trying to convince herself. “Anyone at all.”
Anyone with a disabled attention span and a brand-new inferiority complex that was growing like an overeating teenager.
“Oh!” she cried, rejecting the defeatism with all her might. “Never mind that. What I need is a plan.”
A plan. A plan.
She looked around at the shelves of paper, the boxes of paper clips, the stack of shiny brochures touting the benefits of the Healthy Living Clinic and Dr. Richie’s approach to total health and well-being. You’d think someone would have thought to stock a few tools along with the office supplies. If she could just find a screwdriver, she could go to work on the door hinges and make her escape.
This was so infuriating! She’d arrived this morning so full of excitement, determined to show Dr. Richie that he’d made a good move when he’d decided to take her up on her proposal to revamp his entire public relations operation. It had taken all the nerve she had to put together that presentation and approach the doctor on her own, much less demand larger office space to work in. She wasn’t used to fighting for that sort of thing. Success had always come easily to her in the past.
That was until she’d opened her own public relations firm. Somehow, as though she’d come under some sort of evil spell, she hadn’t managed to do one thing right and her business had failed.
Failed! The word made her gasp, even just thinking it. Failure just wasn’t possible. If her parents had any inkling…
No, she told herself fiercely. You cannot cry just because you’ve messed up again.
Still, she had to wonder. If there was no one there to see you cry, did it really matter?
Yes,
