Los Angeles, California, October 22
Elizabeth Hart stepped through the doorof her town house and let her briefcase slip from her hand without regard for its contents. She used her hip to close the door, kicked off her shoes, and abandoned her raincoat to the floor as she headed down the hall to the kitchen.
Where had she put that bottle of Scotch?
Elizabeth searched through several cupboards and finally found the unopened bottle tucked in the back of the pantry. She grabbed a tumbler from the sink, opened the freezer, and filled the glass with ice. With an unsteady hand, Elizabeth poured the tawny liquor nearly up to the rim. She took a sip, coughed to catch her breath, then carried her drink as well as the bottle into the living room.
Guided only by the glow of the streetlights streaming through the windows, Elizabeth made her way to the couch and sat down. She set the bottle of Scotch on the coffee table and picked up the remote.
Leaning back, she took another sip of her drink, clicked the remote, and watched flames appear between the perfectly arranged ceramic logs. Fake embers started to glow at the base of the logs, and Elizabeth strained to hear… nothing.
Other than a slight whoosh on ignition, the fire was silent.
And odorless.
And very, very clean.
She had bought the town house five years ago, choosing it not for its proximity to work or its architecture or even its exclusive neighborhood. She had bought it because it had a fireplace.
Only at the time, the hearth had been built to burn wood.
They’d all ganged up on her, though—her mother, her father, and the guy she’d been dating. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember if it had been Paul or Greg. Wood fires were dirty, labor-intensive, and smelly, they’d told her. Natural gas would fit her lifestyle so much better.
Grammy Bea had been her only ally against them. But living an hour’s drive away in the mountains was not nearly enough to help counter the pressure presented by the united front of her parents and her boyfriend. The gas logs had been installed before Elizabeth had moved in.
There was something intrinsically primal in tending a wood fire. On her winter breaks through college and med school, Elizabeth had spent weeks holed up in the mountains with Grammy Bea. Setting kindling to paper, hearing the crackle of burning wood, and cleaning out ashes were daily rituals Elizabeth had cherished. A wood fire meant warmth, both physically and emotionally, and required patience to build and nurturing to sustain, creating a humanizing rhythm for the day.
Elizabeth clicked the remote, and the flame in her hearth disappeared. She clicked it again, and it whooshed back to life.
She took another, longer drink of the Scotch, relishing the burn on the back of her throat.
Her stomach warmed. Her muscles prickled with the release of tension.
The train derailment had occurred just ten miles north of the city. Forty-three passengers had been injured, six of them critically.
Elizabeth had dealt with three of the most badly injured passengers.
Two of them had been almost routine, if such a thing could be said of trauma cases, and Elizabeth had worked with her usual efficient skill. The young man with the ruptured spleen and another man with broken ribs and a punctured lung would live, and heal, and go back to their lives which had been interrupted so rudely by fate.
The Scotch was because of patient number three.
Elizabeth would remember Esther Brown and her husband, Caleb, for as long as she lived. The elderly couple had been traveling to Seattle to visit their daughter and grandchildren.
Caleb had been lucky, coming away from the train wreck with only cuts, several bruised ribs, and a swollen knee. Esther had sustained injuries that were life-threatening to a seventy-eight-year-old woman: a shattered leg, a broken wrist, and internal bleeding.
But before Elizabeth could take Esther to surgery, Caleb had insisted on praying with his wife.
And he had insisted that Elizabeth pray with them.
Prayer was not foreign to Elizabeth, having grown up in the shadow of Grammy Bea.
She was well aware of its power, and praying with Esther and Caleb did not mean she was getting emotionally involved. It only meant that she was a surgeon willing to use whatever means possible to help her patient deal with the trauma of surgery.
And so Elizabeth had stood beside Caleb, placed her hand on Esther’s arm, and added her own will that the woman would live.
But something had happened then.
Something unexplainable.
Elizabeth’s body had started to warm. Her skin had tightened. Her heartbeat had slowed, and the trauma room had faded from her sight until only light had remained.
An array of colors in their purest form had surrounded her. A rainbow had swirled through her head in a brilliant display of laser-sharp beams. And Esther Brown had been there with her.
Only Elizabeth hadn’t seen Esther, she hadbecome her. She had felt the blood rushing through Esther’s veins and the beat of Esther’s heart, and she had taken each breath with the woman. And she had felt Esther’s determination to live.
Elizabeth lifted her trembling hand, examining its silhouette in the light of the hearth. It still tingled with lingering warmth.
Elizabeth knew Grammy Bea was up in heaven, laughing her head off.
Elizabeth had not only loved Grammy Bea, she had adored her. While her parents had been off vacationing someplace or attending never-ending conferences, Elizabeth had been quite content to bask in her grandmother’s attention.
The only time Bea had agreed with Elizabeth’s parents was when Katherine and Barnaby Hart had announced that their daughter would grow up to be a doctor. That prophecy had come at Elizabeth’s birth, and everyone, including Bea—and later including Elizabeth herself—had worked for thirty-one years to see that it happened.
The only discord was when her dad had announced that Elizabeth would train as a surgeon. Bea had spoken up then, rather forcefully, claiming that, yes, her granddaughter was destined to be a healer, but she should study for general practice instead.
Surgery was too constrained, Bea had argued. Too focused on body parts and not the whole patient. Bea claimed Elizabeth had been born with the gift of healing, carried down through her family’s maternal line, and being in general practice was her destiny.
A healer? As in the mumbo-jumbo of magic?
Bea had insisted the solid white streak in Elizabeth’s hair was a sign of her gift, but Elizabeth thought it was nothing more than a genetic anomaly. It wasn’t even all that uncommon.
She was not a healer. Such a thing was not possible.
Or so Elizabeth had thought before today.
By the time they’d gotten Esther Brown into the operating room and Elizabeth had gotten herself prepped for surgery, the change had occurred.
At first, Elizabeth had been too focused on the procedure she was set to perform to pay much attention to the whispers. The surgery team usually whispered as patients were going under, and Elizabeth had learned to block out the unimportant chatter.
It wasn’t until her scalpel was poised over Esther Brown that one of the nurses stopped her. Elizabeth had looked up to find a sea of panic-widened eyes staring at her over their masks.
And then everybody started talking at once. The patient’s vitals were normal. There was no sign of a shattered leg or a broken wrist, and her once distended stomach was flat.
Elizabeth had grabbed the chart away from one wild-eyed attendant, cursing the entire trauma team for anesthetizing the wrong patient.
Dammit. She’d nearly cut into a perfectly healthy woman.
For more than half an hour, they checked every monitor and took several more X rays.
Admissions was called, and Esther’s wristband was read and reread and electronically scanned several times. Elizabeth had finally pulled off Esther’s surgery cap and oxygen mask and studied the woman’s face.
It was her. Her hair was a bit whiter, and her features were no longer drawn in pain, but the woman on her operating table was the same woman she had prayed over less than an hour ago.