Mystery Heiress. Suzanne Carey

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 Monica Malone’s name had turned up in a long-outdated, somewhat sensationalized magazine article about Benjamin Fortune’s career that she managed to dig up at a library near her home in England before leaving for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