to the hospital around 5:00 a.m., after a restless night, when an elderly patient suffering from polycythemia, a condition in which the body makes too many red blood cells, causing the blood to thicken excessively, had taken a turn for the worse, he’d barely had time to shave. His blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue as he strode into the emergency room.
“What can I do for you, Lin?” he asked.
The brown-haired pediatrician quickly filled him in on what she knew of Annie’s condition. “The mother’s been told she needs a bone-marrow transplant,” she said.
Stephen nodded. “Let’s have a look at her.”
A moment later, with Lindsay Todd following closely in his wake, he was pushing aside the curtain that screened Annie’s cubicle.
Jess’s eyes widened as she glanced up at him. “You!” she exclaimed in surprise, unable to stop herself.
Two
Stephen’s heart lurched with surprise, regret, and a strong sensation of déjà vu. On some deeper level, he supposed, he should have known the acute leukemia patient Lindsay had summoned him to examine would turn out to be the feverish blond child who’d skinned her knee at the zoo, accompanied by her lovely but worried dark-haired mother. The possibility likely would have occurred to him, if he hadn’t been so gosh-darn tired and failed to scan the personal information on the child’s chart, which almost certainly included a permanent address in England.
He did so now, with a quick downward glance.
“Hello again, uh, Mrs. Holmes…Annabel…” he said, extending his hand to Jess and lightly ruffling Annie’s hair as he assumed his professional role like a coat of armor. “Under the circumstances, I won’t say I’m happy to see you, though I’m pleased you decided to take my advice and come here. This is a very good hospital.”
Aware of Lindsay’s confusion, he added, “I met Mrs. Holmes and Annabel yesterday at Como Park Zoo.”
“Oh,” Lindsay murmured. “I see.”
It was clear that she didn’t—that she couldn’t begin to imagine why, lacking a child to accompany him, he’d taken refuge from his busy but lonely life at a typical children’s haunt. He wasn’t in a position to explain. Nor would he have wished to, in any event.
“Let’s see how this young lady’s doing this morning,” he proposed instead, picking up his stethoscope.
The exam, which included numerous questions and a great deal of gentle prodding and observation on Stephen’s part, took several minutes. It wasn’t difficult for him to see that Annie was very sick indeed. He could almost have guessed what her white-cell count would be. Her English doctors had been correct in stating that she needed a transplant as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t just place an order for matching bone marrow as if it could be purchased from a catalogue. With just one in twenty thousand unrelated persons eligible to donate, from a genetic standpoint, and a paucity of registered and blood-typed volunteers, it could be difficult, bordering on impossible, to find a donor.
While they were searching, Annabel Holmes would likely need some form of chemotherapy as a stopgap measure. “No luck finding a donor for your daughter in England, I take it?” he asked Jess.
She shook her head. “That’s why we came to the U.S.”
Why Minneapolis in particular? he wondered. Does she have people here? There wasn’t time to ask. He was being paged again. To him, the brief request to call the nursing station on 301 West was shorthand for the fact that Mrs. Munson, the elderly polycythemia patient, needed him again.
“I’ve got to run upstairs for a few minutes,” he said. “In the meantime, Mrs. Holmes, I’d like to have the nurses here admit your daughter as my patient, with Dr. Todd as pediatric consultant, and assign her to a room. I’ll need your permission to run some tests so we can determine what her current status is…bone-marrow aspiration and biopsy, X rays, an electrocardiogram, blood and pulmonary-function tests, that sort of thing. I’ll be in touch just as soon as her results are available. Okay? Naturally, we’ll sign her up at once with every available U.S. registry.”
Annie’s illness was rapidly approaching a crisis point, as Jess had already begun to sense. Her little girl would die or, if a miracle was in the offing, she’d get better. It was that simple, and that terrifying. Except for their quest to find a donor among Benjamin Fortune’s descendents, her prospects weren’t bright. Barely contained panic causing a lump to settle in her throat, she nodded without answering him.
A sensitive barometer to everything Jess was thinking and feeling, Annie picked up on her fear at once. “Do I have to stay here?” she chimed in worriedly, gazing up at the tall blond doctor she’d trusted without hesitation the previous afternoon. “Can’t I go back with Mummy to the hotel?”
“I’m afraid it’s the hospital for you, sweetheart,” Stephen said, smiling in an attempt to hide his own consternation over the likely severity of her case. “We need to have you handy, so we can do our best to make you better.”
She appeared to think over his explanation and accept it. “Well, could I have another of those cool bandages, then?” she asked with five-year-old straightforwardness.
He didn’t make a production of asking where it hurt—just produced the requested bounty from the pocket of his lab coat and solemnly affixed it to the back of her hand, as if it were a good-conduct medal. A moment later, after ordering the tests he’d outlined, along with an antibiotic drip to help Annie’s compromised immune system combat her current infection, he was gone.
Jess couldn’t stop herself from shaking.
Lindsay rested a hand on her shoulder. “Dr. Hunter’s the best hematologist around, bar none, and I’m not just saying that because we’re friends and neighbors,” she vowed. “Your daughter’s in good hands.”
West of the city, in the posh, handsomely appointed master bedroom where Erica Fortune, Jacob Fortune’s estranged wife, slept alone, the bedside phone rang sharply. It was going on 7:40 a.m., a bit early for fifty-one-year-old Erica to be up in her previous incarnation as the pampered but increasingly unhappy mate of Fortune Industries’ chief executive officer, who’d succeeded his widowed mother following her fatal light-plane crash in the Brazilian jungle.
These days, as a woman alone bent on finding herself, if not exactly thrilled that her husband had walked out on her, the sleek, silvery-blond Erica rose early. Nibbling on cinnamon toast and drinking black coffee as she dressed for a 9:00 a.m. Saturday class at Normandale Junior College in Bloomington, she reached for the receiver and murmured an absent hello.
Her green eyes widened when her caller identified himself as Lieutenant J. B. Rosczak, a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department.
“Is this the Jacob Fortune residence?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure how to answer him. “Yes,” she agreed tentatively, setting her coffee cup aside. “I mean, it was, until a few months ago. This is Mrs. Fortune. Jacob Fortune and I are separated. What’s this about, anyway?”
Seemingly reluctant to discuss the matter with her in any detail, the police lieutenant ignored her question. “I take it he’s not there, then, ma’am?” he said.
“No,
