The mother came to his defense. "He barely touched you, Sonja!"

"He gave me a shock!"

"It must have been from the rug. Isn't that right, Dr. Bulmer?"

For a second Alan wasn't exactly sure where he was. "Right," he said. He straightened up and hoped he didn't look as pale and shaky as he felt. "That's the only explanation."

What he had felt just now reminded him of the shock he had received from the derelict in the emergency room last night. Only this afternoon he'd felt more pleasure than pain. An instant of searing ecstasy and then… what? Afterglow?

He managed to coax Sonja back up onto the table and complete the examination. He checked the right ear again. No problem this time. No sign of injury, either. Sonja left a few minutes later, still complaining of pain in her ear.

Alan went into his consultation room to sit at his desk for a moment. What the hell had happened in there? He couldn't explain it. He had used the same technique with the same otoscope and speculum in her ear for years without incident. What had gone wrong today? And that feeling… !

Alan didn't like things he couldn't explain. But he forced his mind to file it away for later and rose to his feet. He had a full schedule and had to keep moving.

The next half hour went smoothly. Then Henrietta Westin showed up.

"I just want a checkup."

Alan was immediately alert. He knew Henrietta Westin was not the checkup type. She was a Born-Again Christian who herded her three kids and husband in at the first sign of a cold or fever, but trusted in the Lord for herself. Which meant she usually waited until she was well into bronchitis and on the way to pneumonia or 10 percent dehydrated from an intestinal virus before she dragged herself into the office.

"Anything wrong?" Alan asked.

She shrugged and smiled. "Of course not. A little tired maybe, but what do you expect when you're pushing forty-five next month? I suppose I should praise the Lord I've had my health this long, at least."

That had an ominous ring to it.

Alan checked her over. He found nothing remarkable other than a slight elevation in her blood pressure and pulse rate, the former no doubt secondary to the latter. She had a gynecologist whom she saw regularly "for any female problems" she might have; her last gyn exam had been four months ago and everything had been normal.

Alan leaned back against the counter and looked at her. He had touched her palms and found them slick with perspiration. Those hands were now clutched tightly in her lap, the knuckles white. This woman was about to explode with tension. He decided to arrange some thyroid studies but he doubted that was the problem since her weight hadn't changed in the last two years.

He closed her chart and pointed to his consultation room door. "Get dressed and meet me in there and we'll talk."

She nodded. "All right." As he stepped toward the door she said, "Oh, by the way…"

Here it comes, he thought. The real reason for the visit.

"… I found a lump in my breast."

He flipped her chart back onto the counter and moved to her side.

"Didn't Dr. Anson examine you?" Alan knew her gynecologist to be a painstakingly thorough physician.

"Yes, but it wasn't there then."

"When did you first notice it?"

"Last month."

"You check your breasts monthly?"

She averted her eyes. "No."

So it could have been there three months!

"Why didn't you come in sooner?"

"I… I thought it might go away. But it didn't." A single sob broke through. "It got bigger!"

Alan gently put a hand on her shoulder. "Hang on now. It might be a cyst—which is nothing but a fluid-filled sack— or something equally benign. Let's check."

She unsnapped her bra and pulled it off under the paper cape. Alan lifted the cape and looked at her breasts. He immediately noticed a little dimpling of the skin two inches from the left nipple at two o'clock.

"Which breast?"

"The left."

This was looking worse all the time. "Lie back."

In an effort to stave off the inevitable, Alan examined the right breast first, starting at the outer margin and working toward, around, and finally under the nipple. Normal. He did the same on the other side, but started under her arm. There, beneath the slippery mixture of perspiration, deodorant, and shaven stubble, he felt three distinctly enlarged lymph nodes. Oh, hell! He moved over to the breast itself, where he found a firm, fixed, irregular mass under the dimpled area. His stomach tightened. Malignant as all hell!

—and then it happened again.

The tingling, the ecstasy, the small cry from his patient, the instant of disorientation.

"What was that?" she said, cupping her hands over her left breast.

"I don't… I'm not sure," Alan said, alarmed now. This was the second time in less than an hour. What was—?

"It's gone!" Mrs. Westin cried, frantically running her fingers over her breast. "The lump—praise God!—it's not there anymore!"

"Of course it is," Alan said. "Tu—" He almost said tumors. "Lumps don't just disappear like that." Alan knew the power of denial as a psychological mechanism; the worst thing that could happen now was for her to fool herself into believing that she had no mass in her breast. "Here. I'll show you."

But he couldn't show her.

It was gone.

The mass, the dimpling, the enlarged nodes—gone!

"How did you do it, Doctor?"

"Do it? I didn't do anything."

"Yes, you did. You touched it and it disappeared." Her eyes glowed as she looked at him. "You healed it."

"No-no." He hunted for an explanation. "It must have been a cyst that broke. That's it." He didn't believe that— breast cysts did not rupture and disappear during examination—and from the look on her face, Henrietta Westin didn't believe it either.

"Praise the Lord, He has healed me through you."

"Now just hold on there!" This was getting out of hand. Almost frantic now, Alan rechecked the breast again.

This can't be! It's got to be here!

But it wasn't there. There wasn't a trace of the mass.

"Bless you!"

"Now wait a minute, Henrietta. I want you to have a mammogram at the hospital."

As she straightened up and refastened her bra, her eyes still held that glow. "If you wish, Doctor."

Don't look at me like that!

"Today. I'll call the hospital now."

"Anything you say."

Alan fled the examining room for his desk. He picked up the phone to call the radiology department at Monroe Community Hospital. And stopped. For a few seconds he couldn't think of the hospital's main number, one he called at least a dozen times a day. Then it came back to him. This thing must have shaken him up more than he had realized.

Jack Fisher, the chief radiologist, was not crazy about the idea of squeezing another xeromammography into his schedule, but Alan convinced him of the urgency of this particular request and Jack reluctantly agreed to find a slot for Mrs. Westin.

Alan managed to do a competent job on the rest of the morning's patients, even though he knew he gave a couple of them the bum's rush. He couldn't help it. It was an effort to concentrate on their problems when his mind throbbed with the question of what had happened to the tumor in Henrietta Westin's breast. It had been there! He had felt it! And there was no way it could have been anything less than a malignancy with those nodes in the axilla.

And then it had been gone.

This was crazy!

His state of distraction had one unexpected benefit: He hardly heard Mr. Bradford as he went through his usual catalog of the color, caliber, and frequency of each of his stools since his last visit.

Finally, lunchtime came and he'd made his call-backs and sent Connie and Denise out to eat. He wished Ginny were still working here. She'd started off as his receptionist when he first moved into the building but soon decided it wasn't for her. Maybe she was right. After all, none of the other doctors' wives she hung around with worked for their husbands.