Father Fever

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Until he awakened later that night with part of her slip in his hands and her scent clinging to him.

“If anyone has any information about this woman, please call the Astoria police.”

After all this time! After all his efforts to find out who she was! Pregnant and with amnesia?

He tucked the pad under his arm, grabbed his keys, his cell phone and his jacket as he raced out to the garage. He climbed into the silver-blue sedan between Trevyn’s truck and Bram’s Jeep and dialed the number from the broadcast before racing down the road to the highway.

His conversation with the officer to whom his call was transferred was surreal.

“I’m calling about the young woman fished out of the Columbia River last night,” he said, trying to sound calm rather than the way he really felt.

“Your name, sir?”

“David Hartford from Dancer’s Beach. Is she all right?” he demanded.

“I believe so. You know who she is?”

“Yes.” He knew who she was. She had walked out of his dreams, lived in his heart.

“And what’s her name?”

“I…ah…don’t know.”

“But I thought you knew her.”

“I do. She came to a party at my home. But we were all wearing…masks.” It wasn’t until he got to the last word in his explanation that he realized what this must sound like to the officer. “It was a fundraiser,” he added lamely, “for the historical society.”

“I see. And she didn’t tell you her name?”

“No, I was dressed as a Musketeer and she…” He could feel his credibility diminishing. “No, she didn’t.”

“I see. Then, how do you feel you can help?”

He hadn’t really considered that. He’d just wanted to see her. “I can take care of her,” he said, “until you find out who she is.”

“We can’t release her into your custody, sir, if you’re not a relative.”

“But you don’t have a relative if you don’t know who she is! What’ll become of her when she’s ready to leave the hospital?”

David was at the highway now and had to concentrate to turn into the morning rush-hour traffic.

Fortunately the officer didn’t have an answer for that until David was comfortably ensconced in the stream of cars driving north.

“I’ll have to look into that for you, sir.”

“Thank you,” David said. “I’ll be there in three hours.”

“It’s a long drive from Dancer’s Beach, sir. Take your time. We’ll be here.”

ATHENA SAT IN THE BACK of a cab taking her from the Astoria Airport at the Coast Guard Air Station to Columbia Memorial Hospital. She folded her arms against the need to hold on to the front seat and shout “Faster! Faster!”

She couldn’t believe that she’d seen her sister on the news, pale and limp and pregnant, dragged out of a river like an old boot. She couldn’t imagine what had happened.

And she wasn’t entirely sure which sister this was. She and Alexis and Augusta talked on the telephone once a week, but she hadn’t seen either of them since their masquerade party fiasco in February. They’d met up again at the car that night as planned, both Lex and Gusty convinced that the Musketeers could not have been involved in anything illegal.

“He was too considerate,” worldly Lex had insisted of her Musketeer.

“Too…sweet,” Gusty had sighed.

The following day, they’d all returned home and Athena had spent the next month determined to find incriminating information on David Hartford. She’d hounded Patrick until he’d used every last source he knew, and still his results were unsatisfactory. He could find nothing on Hartford or his friends to take to the police.

“Hartford seems to be a paragon of virtue and journalistic skill, Bishop was decorated several times in the army, and McGinty was simply a drifter when he wasn’t taking brilliant pictures.”

“But what about the gaps in time you can’t account for?” she’d asked.

He’d sighed. “I’ve done everything, Athena. It’s just not there.”

“But how can that be? I thought with all our information on the Internet, everyone’s life story was vulnerable to everyone else’s scrutiny.”

“I don’t know. I’ll keep looking, but be prepared for it to take a while.”

That had been seven months ago.

Athena was trying to accept the situation, to convince herself that their aunt had left the house to Hartford just because she’d wanted to.

And then she’d watched the ten-o’clock news while on her treadmill and stared at her sister’s face on television. But the photo was grainy, though a very distinct pregnancy was clear. She’d heard her own little cry of surprise.

She’d called Gusty and gotten no answer. And there was no one at the school at that hour.

Then she’d called Lex in Rome and the message on her answering machine said—in English and in Italian—that she was off on a sketching trip to try to reinspire herself and would be out of touch for a week. Alexis, in a creative mode, always sought privacy.

So, who’d been pulled out of the river? The picture had been so unclear, and even under good conditions she and her sisters could misidentify one another from a distance.

And what on earth had whoever-it-was been doing in Astoria, Oregon? And pregnant?

Athena had called the hospital to say she was the sister of the mystery woman, and canceled the next few days’ appointments. She’d taken the red eye to Portland, then an early-morning commuter flight from Portland to Astoria.

She had no love life, she told herself, but she had a family life that was complicated enough to keep four people busy.

The cab pulled up to the covered main entrance of the hospital. Athena paid the driver, then leaped out while he retrieved her bag from the trunk. She ran to the main desk, told the clerk who she was, and was treated to one startled moment of staring.

“We’ve been expecting you, Miss Ames,” the clerk said, then called someone. A policeman appeared a moment later. He was tall and slender and probably in his late thirties. “Officer Holden,” he said, hands resting on the creaky leather of his belt. “Would you come with me, please?”

“I’ll watch your bag,” the clerk promised.

Athena handed it over the counter.

“It’ll be right back here when you return.”

“Is my sister okay?” Athena asked the officer as she followed him. “Last night’s news report said she was in satisfactory condition.”

“She…was fine when the nurse looked in on her at 6:12 a.m.,” he replied, a little evasively, Athena thought.

“You say that as though you think her condition might have changed,” she said as she chased his long steps down the hall.

“Well, I think what’s happened suggests that she was feeling much better.”

“What do you mean? What’s happened?”

He pushed open the door to Room 115. Inside was an empty, unmade bed.

“She seems to have run away,” Officer Holden said.

Athena stared at the empty room, sunshine streaming in through the window and across the rumpled bedclothes, and felt her heart sink like an anchor.

“You must be her twin,” the officer said. “I spoke to her briefly last night, and though she looked a little the worse for her experience—you’re identical.”

Athena heard the question though her brain wasn’t focused enough to process an answer. She felt herself nod—yes, they were identical—but her mind was occupied with more important questions about what had happened. Why did she leave? Where would she go? And who was it—Gusty or Lex?

And the most nagging question if not the most important—who’d fathered her sister’s baby, and why hadn’t she told her sisters about it?

Then she heard a man’s voice speaking to Officer Holden and looked up, thinking it was the doctor.

But it wasn’t. This man wore jeans and a gray cotton sweater. He looked grim until he caught sight of her, then a smile smoothed the worry lines on his forehead. He came toward her and caught her arms, his grip firm as he pulled her to him. “You’re all right!” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “You looked so pale and weak on television, I thought…”

She stood in limp surprise in his arms, then he stiffened suddenly and held her away from him. A new frown appeared between his eyes as he looked her over. “You’re not pregnant,” he said in what sounded like confusion.

He looked into her eyes and she felt the contact like a physical touch somewhere deep inside where she already felt lost. “I don’t understand.”

Frankly, neither did she.

“Miss Ames,” the officer said, “this is David Hartford, an acquaintance of your sister. Mr. Hartford, Athena Ames, our mystery woman’s twin.”

Hartford! The name reverberated in her brain while she forced a polite smile and shook his hand. The Musketeer who owned Sadie’s house!