What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,49

a family practice doctor for this part of your cares now.”

I said, “Okay.” But then I jumped off the exam table. Blondie had just passed by the open door, wearing a white lab coat. His hair was shorter and the streak looked newly foiled, thicker than before.

“What’s wrong, Allie?” Dr. Andrew laid his warm fingers on my wrists, his eyes intent with concern.

“I thought I saw someone.…” My voice was barely a whisper. “A doctor who passed by. Who’s that?”

Dr. Andrew poked his head out. “Tim!” he called, waving. Blondie entered the examination room. “Tim, this is Allie Kim. She rules the nights of Iron Harbor. Allie, this is my son, Dr. Tim Tabor.”

Blondie extended his hand. Knowing that mine would feel like a claw of ice, I took it and gave it the sturdiest shake I could.

“Allie, hullo,” he said cheerfully.

I forced a sickly smile, my brain a kaleidoscope of awful memories, my pulse thudding loud enough so that I could hear the dull beat in my ears and wondered if he could, too. My eyes roved over every inch of his face. There was something different about it: the chin was square, and the wrinkles around his eyes more pronounced, but the eyes were the same. “You have an accent!” I finally said.

“All those years as a phony Brit.” He grinned crookedly at Dr. Andrew. “It’ll go away, at least for me. For my wife and our sons, not so much.”

Dr. Andrew placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Tim just got back from London. He was doing a research fellowship in surgical skin procedures. Now he’s here in the urbane town of Iron Harbor. Not much like London, huh Tim?”

“It’s home, Dad,” he said. He gave me a big, genial smile—with no hint that he’d ever seen me before. “You’ll have to excuse me. Nice to meet you, Allie.”

“Me, too—you, as well,” I stammered. I had never fainted, but I recognized the strange sensations I was having as the precursor to some kind of blackout. “Dr. Andrew, I need to lie back down for a moment.”

He peered down at me, his eyes narrow. “Are you eating well, Allie? Dieting too much?” He frowned. “Could you be pregnant?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut until the vertigo evaporated. “Really, I’m fine. I’m not exactly sexually active enough to be pregnant.”

“It only takes once.”

“I’ve heard that. Let’s change the subject. You must be happy to have your son home.”

“Two down, one to go,” said Dr. Andrew. “My son Marcus is still in college. Undergrad. He won’t be a doctor though, like Drew and Tim. He’s studying journalism. I know he’ll write about all this. He’s bitten with the bug to translate the world of science. I think he’s having a pretty good time over in New Haven, too.” Typical of Dr. Andrew that he wouldn’t say the obvious school in New Haven: Yale. “Tim was in London a long time, almost six years. We only saw the little guy once. Now Tim and Drew are running around looking for land so Tim can build a house.”

I forced myself to focus on the conversation. “Didn’t he look around when he got here?”

“He just got here two weeks ago, Allie.”

“That’s all?” I almost shouted the words.

“You sound surprised. All they’ve been doing is getting used to life in Iron Harbor. You know, seeing my dad, who’s just thrilled, and Drew taking Tim fishing, like when they were kids, and we had the old boathouse.… My wife won’t let the grandbabies out of her sight.”

My spine stiffened. “Two weeks ago? Did he visit a lot before?”

“Not really. It was hard on all of us. Started work yesterday. I told him to take some time but that’s not the Tabor style.” He offered a faint, proud smile.

I fell back against the cushions and the crumpled white sanitary sheet. Should I ask Dr. Andrew for the name of a counselor? People with XP have a lot of psychological issues. Maybe this was a neurological issue. Maybe my brain was shrinking up.

Juliet was right.

I had seen her having an innocent conversation with our doctor’s son, also a doctor, who’d been in England when we saw Blondie in the apartment last spring. How Juliet knew Tim Tabor was a mystery to me. Why she was in a car with him in Duluth was even more of a mystery to me. Why she thought I was nuts was now, however, perfectly obvious. I had hallucinated