Mystery Heiress

As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. 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. At this time of year, the sun set around 7:30 p.m. Chelsea and Carter Todd, the young daughter and son of his next-door neighbors, were still playing outdoors, under the watchful eye of their sixtyish baby-sitter. Stepping out on the deck to sip his wine while the lasagna heated, Stephen stared at the blue expanse of water that fanned out from his pier and wondered if the laughter of another child, a different woman, would help to make him whole again.

In the sitting room area of her downtown hotel suite, Jess had drifted off to sleep. She awoke shortly after 10:00 p.m., stiff from the unnatural position in which she’d been slumbering on the love seat, and somewhat unsettled, thanks to a confusing dream. Annie was still asleep, her forehead warm and dry against the back of Jess’s wrist, but not excessively feverish.

Deciding to let her sleep, Jess poured out a glass of mineral water and returned to the sitting room. The local news was on. Someone handed the sandy-haired anchorman a note as she retook her seat. It was clear from his facial expression as he scanned it that he considered the note to be of major importance, and she turned up the sound a little.

“This just in,” the man was saying. “Former Hollywood leading lady and longtime Minneapolis resident Monica Malone was found dead this evening in her Summit Avenue mansion. We take you to Mary Ann Galvin, our reporter at the scene. Mary Ann…”

Positioned at the curb in front of the Malone mansion, which had clearly seen better days, the reporter gripped her microphone with barely disguised excitement. Several uniformed officers, the flashing lights of a police cruiser and a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape were visible behind her.

“Thank you, Jay,” she said. “According to a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, Miss Malone, thought to be in her midsixties, was found sprawled on her living room floor shortly after 10:00 p.m. She was pronounced dead at 10:15 p.m., when police arrived.

“Stating that the matter is under investigation, officers have declined to comment on the cause of death, or speculate as to whether foul play was involved. However, a tenant of one of Miss Malone’s neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had heard she suffered a head injury….”

The name of the deceased former movie star rang a bell with Jess, and not just because of her films. I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere, and recently—I know it, she thought. Seconds later, she remembered where. Monica Malone’s name had turned up in a long-outdated, somewhat sensationalized magazine article about Benjamin Fortune’s career that she managed to dig up at a library near her home in England before leaving for America. Its author, who claimed to have known the Fortune patriarch personally, had suggested that he and Monica Malone had “conducted an off-and-on affair for years.”

In part because of Ronald’s infidelities during their marriage, Jess supposed, she strongly disapproved. Yet she couldn’t have denied that she found every scrap of information she could accumulate about the man she now believed to have been her grandfather extremely fascinating.

When Jess awoke again, around 6:30 a.m., Annie was worse. Her temperature had soared to 103 degrees. She was coughing, shivering and whimpering. Terrified, Jess decided to take the advice of the tall blond doctor they’d met at the zoo and take her to Minnesota General Hospital’s emergency room. However, she didn’t think she could bear to see Annie carted off in an ambulance if it wasn’t necessary. It would scare her to death and, incidentally, break Jess’s heart.

Accordingly, she bundled the girl up in two sweaters and a raincoat, and wrapped her in one of the hotel blankets. A sympathetic bellhop helped her carry Annie downstairs and summoned a taxi for them.

“Mummy… Mummy…where are we going? You’re coming with me…aren’t you?” Annie asked in alarm as the bellhop settled her in the cab’s back seat.

“Yes, of course I am. We’re going to the hospital that nice doctor told us about yesterday,” Jess said soothingly, unable to keep tears of consternation and panic from running down her cheeks as she got into the taxi beside her and drew her close. “You need better medicine than I can give you, darling. Plus some doctors and nurses to help make you better as soon as possible.”

Both she and Annie were grim-faced, tense and more than a little frightened as their cab drew up to Minn-Gen’s emergency room entrance. Before Jess could get out and pay the driver, a nurse and an orderly were hurrying out to meet them. “You’re Mrs. Holmes, right?” the nurse asked. “The doorman at your hotel phoned to let us know you were coming.”

The next few minutes passed in a blur. While the nurse examined Annie and took her vital signs, one of the secretaries at the nursing station helped Jess fill out an admitting form. The latter didn’t seem unduly concerned about Annie’s condition until Jess wrote leukemia under the heading Known Medical Conditions. A quick conference between the secretary, a nurse and a male physician who was in the process of tending to an accident victim ensued.

“You’d better page Dr. Todd,” the male physician decided, adding for Jess’s benefit, “She’s a pediatrician. I think I saw her come in earlier. She’s probably still in-house.”

With barely a skipped beat, the name of Dr. Lindsay Todd and the words “to the ER, stat” were being read over the hospital’s public address system.

Jess barely had time to smooth Annie’s forehead and whisper a few calming words to her before Dr. Todd appeared. Brown-haired, leggy, sweet-faced, in her mid-to-late thirties and decidedly feminine looking despite her white coat and stethoscope, she was crisp but extraordinarily kind and gentle as she gave Annie a thorough going-over and peppered Jess with questions.

The exam finished, Dr. Todd patted Annie’s hand and turned to Jess with a concerned frown. “I’d like to run some tests…get her white-cell count, check on the number of immature cells, that sort of thing,” she announced. “Or rather, I’d like to have an expert do it. As it happens, we’re in luck. Dr. Hunter’s in the building.”

Jess knew what the tests were likely to show. Though she suddenly felt very far from home indeed, maybe it was for the best that Annie’s crisis had occurred in Minneapolis. Maybe these energetic can-do Americans could keep Annie alive until she could find a donor.

“All right,” she whispered.

“Good. You two hang in there.”

Exiting Annie’s cubicle, Dr. Todd pulled the curtain shut. At her request, the hospital operator paged Dr. Hunter. Called back 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, he isn’t,” Erica confirmed.

“Any idea where we can contact him?”

It was beginning to sound as if Jake were in some kind of trouble. Standing there in her sheer panty hose, lacy undergarments and partially buttoned silk blouse, with her toes curling into the plush beige carpeting, Erica took a hurried moment to think. Should she answer in the negative, and try to reach Jake the moment her caller hung up the phone? Of course, that would mean telling an out-and-out falsehood. Though she continued to have protective feelings toward Jake—still loved him, in a guarded way, if she was willing to admit the truth, she didn’t want to lie to the police on his account.

“Actually, he’s been living in his late mother’s house, up on Lake Travis, since our breakup,” she said.

“We’ve already looked there,” Detective Rosczak answered brusquely. “Any other ideas?”

Erica didn’t have any. “Maybe one of our children would know,” she speculated. “Or his secretary at Fortune Industries. Of course, she won’t be in her office until Monday. Please… can’t you tell me what’s wrong? Though we’re separated, I still care about him.”

The line was empty of conversation for a moment, as Detective Rosczak apparently decided whether or not to answer her question. “He’s wanted for questioning in the death of Monica Malone, ma’am,” he admitted at last.

Erica gasped. “Monica…dead?” she repeated in astonishment. “Where? When? How did it happen?” A ghastly thought struck her. “Surely she wasn’t murdered!”