“Your future.”
“—a true medical library, recall?”
“Yes but you stopped writing, and all these years I had no idea. I thought some awful fate’d befallen, that you were . . .
dead. Now look at you.”
“I can explain.”
“What have you done to yourself?”
CHAPTER 13
They had brought their voices down and spoke under the minstrel’s songs, and the muffled conversations of Hinky Dink’s.
“I’ve a daughter in medical school. Can’t do that on what a woman makes—not in any womanly profession or in my chosen profession.”
“But you’re a gifted physician with surgical skills touting phrenology and nonsense and selling snake oils! And doing it as a man. A waste on more levels than I can say.”
Hinky interrupted, asking if the young Dr. Tewes would care to partake of a drink. She ordered Amaretto liquor.
“My God . . .” Christian moaned, “Ransom—”
“What of ’im?”
“—has the wrong idea about . . . and—”
“No one else is to know, Dr. Fenger. No one! You must promise. You must reveal my secret to no one, and especially not to Alastair Ransom.”
“But the blackmail and the—”
“I’d never’ve gone through with it, sir, never.”
“But Tewes may’ve?”
“A means to an end.”
“To gain access to Alastair’s case?”
Jane nodded. “I can explain why.”
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“You don’t understand. As angry as I am at Tewes, you must know—”
“I can sense Ransom wants to hurt me . . . ahhh, Dr.
Tewes, that is.”
“Hurt you? He wants to drown you in Lake Michigan, and I just handed him all the justification.”
“That’s his knee-jerk reaction? Kill Tewes?”
“He could be lurking in the shadows of the alleyway just outside right now.”
“Then the two of you . . . you really were plotting—”
“Dr. Tewes’s demise, yes.”
“My God . . . perhaps I play my part too well.”
“I’d say . . . yes.”
“How can we stop him without telling him the truth?”
“There mayn’t be any stopping him short of his discovering you wear knickers!”
“Shhh! Please.” She looked around but no one heard above the lament being sung of unrequited love. “But Ransom’s a law enforcement official, a police officer, an inspector in the—”
“All the more reason to fear him.”
She gulped and Hinky handed her the Amaretto at the same instant. She threw it back and swallowed. “I needed that.”
“We have to tell him something.”
“No!”
“I . . . we left it with his calling on you at your office . . .
asking for a miracle cure for those recurring headaches he’s suffered since the bomb.”
They sat in silence. The balladeer song changed to a mother’s child lost to war. Finally, Jane said, “All right . . .
when he comes to see me . . . do you think him foolish enough to . . . in my own home . . . that he’d—”
“No, actually, I think he’ll gather information on you—
Dr. Tewes—for now.”
“Clumsy . . . comes ’round ostensibly for an examination? For the headaches?”
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“A phrenological exam, during which he’ll interrogate you—Tewes that is. We agreed at the last only to get some dirt to counteract Tewes, but . . .”
“But what?”
“For one, he’s bloody unpredictable, and I didn’t like that look in his eyes when—”
“Far from pleasant, agreed. Funny . . . as children, I admired him so, but he’s so changed . . . and I rather doubt he has any memory of—”
“As children?”
“I have the dubious honor of having gone to the same school when I was four, before Father moved us to the far north side.”
“Can’t imagine Ransom ever having been a child.”
“But in so many ways . . . he still is.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“This new science of the mind and neurosurgery fascinates the child in me, I suppose.”
“I insist on walking you home, Dr. Tewes. In the event you should encounter any unpleasantness.”
“A big unpleasantness named Ransom, you mean? That won’t be necessary, Doctor.”
Christian released a twenty-year-old sigh. “My God, so it’s now Dr. Jane Francis. Had you not gone off—”
“Believe me, sir. I learned more from watching you work than anything in all my studies, both here and abroad.”
“And now you’re back. Declare yourself, Jane, and I’ll do all in my power to get you an appointment at Cook County.”
“As what? I would be put to work doing nursing and scut work, and we both know that, dear, sweet Christian.”
He stared into her knowing eyes.
“Don’t look that way at me. You know it’s true. You, sir . . . you live in a world of your own making, but the rest of us . . . we live in this world.”
“In the end, we all of us create our own reality. You’re foolish to’ve created yours as Tewes!”
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“You say that . . . that it is up to me, yet you know why I had to leave Chicago, and why I had to return as Tewes.”
“A woman asking for a look at a private collection of medical books to fulfill her dissertation so she might graduate on to medical school, yes.”
“And I was turned down.”
“You ought to’ve fought them!”
“With what?”
“With the strength your father instilled in you!”
“You sound like my Gabrielle.”
“Your girl . . . now in medical school?”
“Yes, and she is such a dreamer.”
“Dreamers are needed in this life.”
“Perhaps . . . but my dreams were done in by reality.”
“But reality is what you create of it, my dear.”
“You and Gabby will love one another.”
“You . . . daughter.”
“Sadly, the young man murdered at the train station was seeing Gabrielle, and God forgive me, I’d forbidden their seeing one another, and now this.”
“Poor child.”
“She can’t be distracted from her studies—not by anyone or anything, not if she’s to succeed.”
“Succeed like her mother or like Dr. Tewes?”
She bridled at this. “We’ve had disagreements . . . over not allowing anything to distract her from her goals.”
“Her goals?”
“Yes, her goals.”
“Well, Jane . . . I am an outsider here, but—”
“The young man who was killed, he’d walked her home from the fair. It was to be the last time she’d see him! That’s what I told her . . . and prophetically and sadly . . .”
“And how is she taking it?”
“Too calmly . . . too well. Going about . . . my God, as if nothing of the sort could possibly’ve happened.”
“A holding pattern; in order to deal with it. Grief must 128
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manifest itself in some form or other. Keep her close; keep a watch on your daughter, Jane.”
“I have.”
“To lose someone close is difficult enough, but to lose someone to this madman afoot in Chicago?” Dr. Fenger looked profoundly sad for Gabrielle.
“Yes, so here again is reality. Like a hurdle everywhere.”
“Still . . . inside here,” he said, pointing to his head, “you can and will one day turn a corner, and when you do, you’ll be living your dream, as Dr. Jane Francis.”
“Discouraged, disillusioned, hurt. How do I ever dream again?”