“I see.” Her tone of voice had cooled to about minus twenty. “Of course. What did you want to know?”

Sunday, November 18, 6:55 A.M.

The wind buffeted Mark as he jogged across Fifth Avenue toward the side entrance of the Plaza, but he didn’t feel cold. His run up to the reservoir and back had left him hot and sweaty. A funnel of gold leaves spiraled to the ground and swirled around his feet. Looking over his shoulder to the east, a streak of dawn bright as a polished steel blade hurt his eyes. He hurried inside and, when he got to his room, showered for a long time. Needles of steaming hot water pelted his skull as he lost himself in the din. Then he turned the cold on full.

An hour later he was ready, his head buzzing from the cups of black coffee he’d downed thanks to room service. Carrying his briefcase, he arrived at the Palm Court early only to find Earl already seated at a table reading the Sunday Herald while sipping a cup of coffee. Earl looked rested, clear-eyed, and calm – everything Mark wasn’t.

He’d been on the Internet until two-thirty, having gone back to learn more about Earl in preparation for their meeting. The man was impressive. Stellar in the field of emergency medicine. A long string of journal publications bearing his name. And a nose for rooting out trouble. More than once he’d made national headlines for his part in exposing deadly malfeasance in the health care field, often at great personal risk. Definitely not the sort to bend under pressure, cow before danger, or compromise to save his own skin. But he might do the right thing on behalf of Kelly.

“Morning,” Earl said, appraising him with the thousand-yard stare Mark would expect from someone who’d survived over twenty years in the pit and thrived on it. Gone was any hint of the sadness he’d seen at Kelly’s wake. This was a guy on full alert.

Mark slid into the chair opposite. “Morning.”

This early on a Sunday the ornate, gold-and-cream room was nearly empty. Waiters in green-striped vests descended on them, handing them menus, filling their water glasses, offering coffee, juice, croissants, jams, and butter, then suggesting a selection of entrées to start.

“I’m fine,” Earl said

Mark ordered tea.

The staff retreated, disappointment etched on their faces.

Before Mark could say a word of his carefully prepared intro that he hoped would ease the tension, Earl spoke. “If you’re here as a cop, Mark, get on with it, and I don’t talk to you without a lawyer present.” His voice was calm, his manner pleasant, but his gaze rock hard.

Shit! “Please, Dr. Garnet. I’d prefer we keep this informal, off the record, and that you simply tell me your take on what I found in my father’s files.”

Earl studied him, eye to eye, but said nothing.

Mark opened the briefcase, retrieved a copy of Kelly’s letter from a manila folder, and placed it in front of him. “To begin with, here’s what she wrote about you.”

Earl regarded it skeptically.

“Just take a look. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of it, I go my way and do what I have to do. You do the same. But I think we can avoid that.”

He didn’t make a move.

“Dr. Garnet, I figure there are two possibilities here. Either you’re the good man that letter and your record say you are, or you’ve been a brilliant fraud, and should be made to answer to the police about your affair with Kelly and what part it played in her disappearance. Me, I’m betting on the first.”

Earl picked up the sheet of paper and began to read intently, the tension draining from his face. Within moments, he was trying to fight back tears.

Her words on paper sounded as clearly in Earl’s head as if she spoke them in his ear. From the secret place his memories of her had hidden themselves over half a lifetime ago came a rush of forgotten sensations – the musical sound of her voice, her scent, the electric feel of her fingers on his flesh. And his agony after her disappearance.

I’ve met a man.

A wonderful, caring man who loves me, and I love him.

What a release it is to be cherished, respected, and liked. I feel as if all the other garbage has fallen away, and I’m free, with a new life ahead of me. Whether it will be with him or not, I don’t know, but I’m full of hope. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it all, and look forward to talking over possible strategies with you. But I am ecstatic!

In a scar so hardened with time that he barely knew it was there, something gave. It felt as real to him as if withered bands of connective tissue no longer able to hold their burden had split open, and a release he’d never expected to find spread through him. Decades after the doubts stopped mattering, he finally learned she’d loved him.

Logically he knew that after all these years he shouldn’t have been affected so deeply. Not until he brought his hand to his mouth in a reflex of disbelief and felt his tears did he realize he’d involuntarily begun to cry. “Excuse me,” he said, hastily dabbing his eyes with his napkin. “This took me by surprise.”

“I understand.”

In Mark’s quiet voice Earl recognized the same nonjudgmental tone he’d often used himself to encourage a distraught patient to talk. Damned effective. He found himself wanting to explain his reaction, especially to someone who’d known Kelly. That Mark was also the son of Cam Roper, the man in whom she’d confided, made it seem even more like speaking directly to a link with her. “I thought she just ran out, on me, on medicine, everything. That I loved her more than she loved me. That she simply wanted to disappear…” He wiped his eyes again. “Sorry. The human heart can be a sneaky organ.”

“We both lost a lot that summer.”

Earl tabled the napkin. “Yes, you said she was like a sister to you.”

Mark seemed about to say something, but instead reached into his briefcase and placed a file on the table. “This contains photocopies of everything in my father’s chart on Kelly.” He flipped open the cover. “What do you make of that?”

Earl glanced down at the page and found himself looking at a record of Kelly’s visit to Cam Roper as a little girl. Soon hard clinical logic displaced the emotional quicksand of the last few minutes – ER had trained him to make that kind of quick change with personal feelings – and he studied it with his full concentration. Reaching the end, he flipped the paper over. “No follow-up?”

“Apparently not.”

He needed only a few seconds to piece together his initial opinion. “I’d suspect the symptoms were functional, possibly stress-related, just as your father did. I’d also agree with his insinuation in the margin that the mother played a big part in the problem. Clearly she ran from doctor to doctor, probably needing excessive reassurances that her daughter was okay. Except…” He trailed off, interrupted by the memory of Kelly arching against him, making love with the lights off. Always with the lights off because of the scars. But he could feel them – a bad job by whoever had closed the wounds, both of them being as rough and wide as a small rope. On their first night together when he asked about it, she grew embarrassed. “I had problems when I was a kid. It’s over now. Please, don’t talk about them. They’re so ugly.” But of course he’d eventually seen them, catching glimpses in the ambient light through the window and once by a full moon, when she fell asleep lying on her back with the covers half off. They looked like sterling ridges on a silver tray.

“Except what?” Mark asked.

“Those scars bothered her, even into adulthood. I’d say they were left by a surgeon who could have used some practice.”