Shadow Woman (30 page)

“Hello, Dr. McKinnon,”
said Linda.

“Pleased to meet you, Miss
Haynes. I have a feeling you must have shown up in Ithaca after my
time. I would have remembered.”

She looked as though she was not
surprised by anything men said to her, just mildly disappointed. “I
was Sue Preston then.”

“It doesn’t help,”
he said. “I’ve been out about ten years, and you’re
only twenty…” He squinted at her. “Eight”

The big green eyes widened. “How
did you know that?”

“I’m a specialist in
looking at people as bundles of cells. Yours are twenty-eight.”

She looked around her, but
nobody was nearby bursting to explain it. “This is some kind of
trick.”

He shook his head. “Nope.
You weigh one hundred and twenty-two pounds, right?”

“I don’t know,”
she said. “I don’t weigh myself every day.” She
lowered her head and conceded from behind her eyelashes, “That’s
close, though.”

He leaned closer, and she turned
her ear to listen. “Those guys at carnivals who guess your age
and weight?”

“What about them?”

“They’re all old
doctors.”

He could tell she was getting
used to him now. She just smiled, showing perfect teeth and spilling
a prodigal supply of the precious spice into the room, but it was all
for him. “Now I know it’s a joke.”

“Some do it to save up for
their malpractice insurance, some just hate golf. I think some of
them do it just to get away from these.” He showed her his
beeper. “Ever have one of these?”

“I’m not the kind of
person anybody needs urgently.”

“Good. Don’t ever
start.” He put his beeper away. “Well, I should introduce
you to more people. Or you should introduce me. Just because I
haven’t met you at one of these things doesn’t mean I
know more people than you do.”

“This is my first time,”
she said.

Marian Fleming drifted up with
Harry Rotherberg. “There,” she said. “I knew you
two would have something to talk about. But I need to take Carey back
for a minute. This is Dr. Rotherberg. He’s the head of
pediatrics, so he can answer any questions you have about the new
wing.”

Carey flashed a valedictory
smile at the young woman and stepped away with Marian. “How am
I doing?”

“You’re my paladin,”
she said. “Right now I’m going to jump you over a few
pawns and get you to work this bunch over here.”

“The captain of industry
with the plaid cummerbund?”

“Yep. Know him?”

“I’m pretty sure
I’ve seen his cummerbund at these things before, but his name
doesn’t leap to mind.”

“He’s
Charlie Fraser. That’s his tartan. He comes
off as a dope, but he’s not. He’s given about a hundred
thousand so far this year. Be nice to him.”

“What a devious plan.”

“Oh, and Carey?”

“What?”

“Since Jane isn’t
here, I’ve seated you with Susan Haynes. I’m counting on
you to romance her a little for me.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t know
anybody,” said Marian. “Harry’s a great
pediatrician, but ten minutes with him is an evening in Mister
Rogers’ neighborhood. She’s got money and she wants to do
good with it.”

“I’ll get it for you
if I have to turn her upside down and shake her.”

“I have no doubt. Your
reputation precedes you.” There was no trace of a smile as she
expertly moved him into the space before Charlie Fraser. “Charlie,
this is Dr. McKinnon,” she said.

Carey shook Fraser’s hand
and smiled while Marian Fleming said, “And this is Honoria
Fraser, his wife.”

“I’m glad you could
come,” said Carey. “I had heard you had given us quite a
bit of help in the past, and I wanted to thank you.”

Fraser looked shocked. “Who
are you, anyway? What do you do?”

“I’m a surgeon.”

Fraser leaned over and kissed
his wife on the cheek. She laughed, then put her fingers over her
mouth as though it were a breach of decorum. Her husband said,
“That’s another one for you, Honey.”

Carey said, “I don’t
understand.”

“I made a bet with Honey
two years ago. Every year I get a printed thank-you note with my name
written on it so the I.R.S. will be satisfied. But to this day, no
actual human being connected with the hospital ever walked straight
up like a regular person and said thanks. I said nobody ever would,
or if they did, it would be an administrator from fund-raising. You
just won her the bet.”

Carey looked worried. “Uh-oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“If nobody ever did it
before, maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I guess this means you’ll
stop giving money now?”

“Do I look like an idiot?”
asked Fraser. He looked down at his tuxedo. “Well, I suppose I
do. But I’m not. I do lose most of my bets with Honey, but so
would you.”

Carey looked at Honoria Fraser
and smiled. “I can believe it.”

“Let me tell you something
about fund-raising, since you seem to be sensible,” said
Fraser. “These dinner-dance things are a mistake. When I want
to lure investors into my business, I take them to the plant. I let
them meet the good people I’ve got working for me. They show
them the machinery and computers and trucks. They let them see how we
make our products, from the quality of the raw materials to the
packing and shipping. They show people what Charlie Fraser’s
going to do with their money. Now, if I was an idiot” –
he turned his head to survey the room – “I would put on
something like this party.”

“Charlie!” said
Honoria sharply.

“The doc doesn’t
care,” Fraser assured her. “He can tell I mean well.”
He turned to Carey. “There’s nothing that makes a person
who gives money cringe more than a fancy party. It costs money, and
if he’s reasonably intelligent he knows it’s his money.
He didn’t give it so he could go to a party. He gave it so some
poor kid gets his turn on a kidney machine. He’d like to see
that. If it comes down to parties, he knows he could do a pretty good
party himself for a few thousand, invite whomever he pleased, and
serve better food.”

Honoria said to Carey,
“Charlie’s quite the blowhard, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Carey agreed.
“You are, Charlie. But you’re absolutely right. I can’t
talk Marian out of throwing these parties, but I can do the rest for
you.” He wrote a telephone number on his ticket and handed it
to Fraser. “This is my office. Call any day, and I’ll
have somebody arrange a tour for you, and for anybody you want to
bring. If you see where the money goes, and what it does for this
city, I think you’ll be proud.”

“I am proud,” said
Charlie. “I’m just telling you how to get more.” He
glanced at the number on the ticket. “I will do this, you
know.”

“I expect you to,”
said Carey. “Bring some friends.”

There was a chime, and people
began to move beyond the screens dividing the cafeteria in half.
“That’s dinner,” said Charlie. One of the waiters
pushed the button to make the opening widen, and Carey could see
white linen and gleaming silverware for the only time this year. “If
you don’t have anybody to sit with, you can come with us.”

“Marian’s got other
plans for me,” said Carey.

He drifted across the paths of a
few familiar couples moving toward the tables and scanned for Susan
Haynes. He found her standing with one arm across her chest and the
other holding a glass of champagne, listening to Harry Rotherberg
talking about the ultrasound machines the hospital was about to buy.
Katie Rotherberg moved in ahead of Carey and separated them.

Carey said, “Dinner time.
Don’t worry if the meat tastes funny. You’re already in
the hospital.”

“ ‘Please be seated
and the maitre d’ will call you when your stomach pump is
ready’?”

“I can see you’ve
been to benefits before. Why this one?”

She shrugged. “I’m
new in town, and I saw it in the paper. Hospitals tend to be
everybody’s charity. I thought it was a good opportunity to get
a look at the local gentry and make it clear I’m one of the
good guys.”

He looked at her in mock
suspicion. “You’re some kind of businesswoman, aren’t
you?”

“Good grief, no.”
She giggled. “Nobody in my family has ‘been’
anything in ages. My father used to sit on boards of directors. That
way he got mail and was allowed to own a briefcase. But he didn’t
actually know anything or do anything, or they wouldn’t have
wanted him around. His epitaph should have been ‘He Voted
Yes.’”

“Your mother?”

“She voted no. When I was
about three. She turned up a few years ago, but we didn’t have
much to talk about. To complete the whole sordid family tree, I have
an older brother. Come to think of it, he’s something – a
fisherman.”

“A commercial fisherman?”

“No, silly. Trout. He
spends his summers at his house in Jackson Hole and his winters in
rehab places. They don’t seem to have any therapeutic value,
but it’s a quiet place to tie flies, once his hands stop
shaking.”

“I’m sorry.”

She touched his arm, and it felt
as though it had been brushed by a bird’s wing. “Don’t
sound so solemn. None of this just happened, you know. It’s all
old history.”

As they reached the newly
unscreened section of the cafeteria, Marian Fleming caught Carey’s
eye and nodded toward the front of the room near the head table. He
gave his head a tiny shake, and she picked up two place cards from
the front table, ushered Leo Bortoni and his wife from the back to
Carey’s place, and watched Carey take Susan Haynes’s arm
and walk her to the rear table. He could see that Lily Bortoni was
delighted, having interpreted the move as a sign that her husband was
appreciated. He liked them both, and he congratulated himself for
having accidentally made them feel good. He pretended he had been
looking past them for someone else, gave a little shrug, and
continued toward the back of the room.

Carey and Susan Haynes sat at a
table for four, but they were alone. He looked at her. “I guess
this is where we’re supposed to talk about Cornell.”

“Do we have to?”

“Briefly. Uris Library.”

“Cruel to put it at the
top of a hill,” she said. “Thought I’d die.”
One of the photographs in the alumni magazine had shown the view from
the library, so its altitude was all she knew about it.

“Goldwin Smith Hall.”

“Big, old, and cold.”
She said it with an air of profound boredom. She hoped that was the
long, low one across the quadrangle with the statue in front, but
whatever it was, the description seemed to satisfy him.

“Had enough?”

“More than enough.”
She leaned closer. “So what about your life story?” she
asked.

“I was born in this
hospital, and sort of never got out,” he said. “My
education was just a leave of absence. I’m a surgeon.”

“Married?” He wasn’t
sure if she said it so quickly and adroitly because she didn’t
care, or because she did care.

“Just. Three months ago.
She’s out of town right now.”

“Oh, yes. Marian said
something about that. I forgot. What kind of surgeon are you –
plastic surgery?”

“If you need anything
cosmetic done, Buffalo isn’t really the best place. There are
hospitals in Los Angeles and Boston that do more of those in a week
than we do in a year. What I do is mostly basic medicine. If you have
no further use for your gall bladder or your appendix, I’m your
man.”

Her eyebrow raised in a perfect
arch. “Do I look sick?”

“Hardly. But you could be
a hypochondriac. The rich ones sometimes give money so they’ll
have a nice place to stay during their next anxiety attack. I
promised Marian I’d explore every avenue.”

“You’re doing just
great,” she said. “I feel as though I’d been
strip-searched. All my avenues have been thoroughly probed.”

“Are you going to cough up
the loot?”

She nodded. “Some. I told
you before that if I’m going to live here, I have to establish
myself up front as one of the good guys. That makes me eligible for
unearned invitations and so on.”

“What made you pick
Buffalo?”

She turned the big green eyes on
him and looked at him shrewdly. “I like it. Or maybe it’s
better to say that I don’t dislike it, which is not true of
certain other places. And real estate is cheap, so I can sell my
house that’s teetering on a precipice in San Francisco and buy
something nicer here. As you may have guessed, my heart and Mr.
Haynes’s no longer beat as one. Before that, we spent some time
being no longer a fun couple. I used to come through Buffalo when I
was in college, and I decided it was the sort of place where I could
be happy.”

“Because it’s not on
the circuit you’re used to.”

“If you’re tired of
humanity, maybe it’s time to meet new specimens. That’s
the theory, anyway.” She brightened. “Did I pass my
examination?”

“Sure,” he said.
“You’re healthy as a young Hereford cow and as sane as
Monsignor Schumacher.” He glanced at the tables around him and
nodded. “Evening, Monsignor.” He turned back to her. “I
think you’ll like it here, at least for a time. It’s
smaller than you’d think, and people are clannish. But you’re
the sort of person who makes a good impression, and anybody who comes
here voluntarily has passed the first test.”

“And you’ve passed
yours,” she said. The caterers arrived and dealt out plates of
food from a cart, leaning down to mutter into each person’s
ear, “Careful, the plate is very hot.”

She tasted the salmon on her
plate and said, “You can go unplug the equipment. It’s
very good.”

“That’s Marian’s
fault. She’s always destroying cherished traditions. Usually
after these things we used to spend half the night admitting people,
giving upper GIs and so on. I have no idea what we’ll do with
ourselves.”

She looked at him, her chin
resting on her hands. “That brings me to something I’m a
bit concerned about myself.”