Then she had turned off the ringer of the phone. Feeling relieved at having thought to avoid the concerned calls she knew she would be receiving, she had gone into the bathroom. There she had stripped off her damaged clothes, sponged the dried blood from her arm and leg, coated the injured areas with an antibiotic salve, and still shivering from the aftermath of her nearly fatal encounter, changed into pajamas and a woolly robe.
When Scott arrived, his concern for her had been so obviously genuine that for the present it took away the hurtful realization that Ryan Jenner had a close relationship with another woman. Scott had taken her hand and insisted she lie down on the couch. “Monica, you’re pale as a ghost and your hands are freezing,” he told her. He piled pillows behind her head, covered her with an afghan, and fixed a hot toddy for her. Then, realizing she had not had any dinner, he looked into the refrigerator, selected tomato and cheese, and grilled a delicious sandwich for her. “My specialty,” he said cheerfully.
It was good to see him, Monica acknowledged now, as she decided to give herself another ten minutes before getting up. She hadn’t intended to tell him about Olivia Morrow, but found herself explaining to him the events of the past few days and her disappointment that Morrow had died before Monica could talk with her about her grandmother.
Scott, however, had been quick to say, “Monica, I will bet you the ranch that Olivia Morrow has a connection to the Gannons. Trust me. I’m going to find out. Your father believed that Alexander Gannon might have been his father. There were plenty of articles about Alexander Gannon, and a number of them had biographical information in them. Seeing the pictures your dad had collected, and comparing photos of him and Gannon at the same age throughout their lives was startling.” He spoke quickly, obviously excited that Monica might allow him to help her.
Before he left, Scott had said, “Monica, I’m going to say this once and then never refer to it again. I am desperately sorry I was stupid enough to ask you out while I was still married to Joy. If you’ll allow me to see you now, it will be as a friend. On my word of honor, I will not in any way make you uncomfortable. Let’s do it this way. I’m going to follow up on Olivia Morrow, and in two weeks I’ll call you for dinner. And I’m going to ask Joy to phone you. Would that be okay?”
I told him it would be fine, Monica thought. And it
Having settled that in her mind, Monica sat up. Wincing at the pain that shot through her arm and leg, she got out of bed slowly, went into the bathroom, and turned on the taps in the Jacuzzi.
The very warm swirling water did help the stiffness and by the time she was dressed, she was feeling better. She put on a small pot of coffee and as it perked, she went into the bedroom. I look like a ghost, she thought, as she dabbed on some blush, then twisted her hair and fastened it up with a clip.
The memory of Ryan saying that to her less than two weeks ago, when little Carlos pulled that same clip out, caused a sudden lump in her throat, and she felt her eyes stinging with tears she had no intention of shedding. I’ll phone Nan and ask her to bring the O’Keefe file over to Ryan’s office, she decided. I don’t want to run into him, and from now on there’s no real reason I should. It’s a big hospital.
Her final decision, as she sipped the coffee, was to downgrade the possibility that she had been deliberately pushed. As I told Scott, if that man was just trying to shove me aside so he could make the light, he was probably horrified that I might have been run over. No wonder he ran away. Most people would in that situation.
In a cab on the way to the hospital, Monica made the call to Nan, then phoned ahead to inquire about Sally Carter. She was relieved to learn that Sally had had a good night, but outraged that there had still been no visit from her mother. I’ll notify Family Services this morning, she vowed.
Her first stop at the hospital was to visit Sally. She was sleeping quietly, and Monica decided not to risk waking her up. The nurse on duty reported that Sally’s temperature had gone down to only a degree above normal, and that the asthma attack had passed. “Doctor, last night, after you left, when she woke up, I thought she was crying for Mommy, but actually she was saying, ‘Monny.’ I think it’s possible that when she was here last week she heard other kids calling you Dr. Monica.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” a familiar voice said. “I’ve heard that’s the effect you have on your patients.”
Monica turned swiftly. It was Ryan Jenner. “I doubt Sally knows my name,” she said, then catching the look the nurse was giving her and Ryan, she added, “Dr. Jenner, may I speak with you in private?”
“Of course,” he said, his tone immediately as formal as hers. She walked with him to the corridor. “I’ve sent the file on Michael O’Keefe to your office,” she told him.
“It just came. Your secretary told me you’d probably be here checking on Sally. Monica, I just heard about what happened last night. Is it possible that you were pushed? My God, I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been.”
“I’m all right. Ryan, I have to ask you not to visit me on this floor, unless of course it involves a patient. I get a feeling that there’s some gossip about us.”
He looked at her. “And you don’t like that?”
“No, I don’t. And I should think that you certainly wouldn’t, either.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she went back inside the Pediatrics Ward and began to make her rounds of the other small patients in her care.
41
After his initial panic attack at the realization that he had murdered Olivia Morrow, Dr. Clayton Hadley composed himself by reviewing over and over again every detail of his final visit to Olivia.
Tuesday evening he had told the clerk at the desk that Ms. Morrow was feeling very ill, and he had asked Olivia to be sure to leave the bolt of her front door unlocked so that she would not have to get out of bed to let him in. If the bolt had been on, the risk would have been much greater-she would have had to physically let him in herself. But the bolt was not on, so he had been able to slip into the apartment noiselessly.
She had been asleep when he tiptoed into her bedroom, but woke instantly when he stood over her. Olivia had a night-light near the bathroom door and he could see that as soon as she recognized him, her expression of surprise turned into one of fear.
She slept on two pillows on her queen-sized bed, and two other pillows were next to her. Long ago when he had visited her at home, after she had suffered a mild heart attack, she explained that she sometimes brought a cup of tea and the newspaper back to bed in the morning and piled those extra pillows behind her back.
As he reached for one of those spare pillows, the thought that ran through his head was,
Frail as she was, he was shocked at how fiercely she tried to push it away. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but to him it seemed an eternity before her emaciated hands finally relaxed and fell limp on the coverlet.
When he removed the pillow, he saw that while she was struggling Olivia had bitten her lip. A single drop of blood was on the pillow he had used to suffocate her. Nervously he had considered switching it with the one under her head, but he realized that the sight of the blood there might raise questions. Instead he went to the linen closet. Neatly stacked on the middle shelf he found two other complete sets of sheets and pillowcases. Each set consisted of two sheets and four pillowcases. One set was cream-colored, the other pale pink. The set on the bed was a shade of peach.
Hadley decided he had to take the chance to replace the soiled pillowcase with one of the pink ones. It’s not much different, he had consoled himself, and if anyone notices, they’ll probably think the other peach pillowcase was lost at the laundry. He knew Olivia sent her sheets out to the laundry weekly because she had joked to him that one of her luxuries was fine cotton sheets, which she had professionally washed and ironed. When he changed the pillowcase, he was horrified to realize that the blood had also gone through to the pillow itself. Panicked, he knew it would be noticed if he tried to take it with him. He decided that the best he could do was to have the new
