Surprise, Doc! You're A Daddy!

“EVEN WITH the recent advances in imaging technology, there’s still a lot we don’t know about brain damage,” a voice said somewhere in the stratosphere.

A throbbing ache kept his eyes shut. He inhaled the scent of antiseptic and heard a familiar blur of noises: doctors being paged on an intercom, carts jouncing out in a hallway.

“This fresh injury on top of the old one, how is it going to affect his memory?” asked a woman’s dry voice.

He recognized the sound, but he couldn’t place her. A faint image came into his mind of a rounded face with a charming touch of freckles.

Someone leaned over him. He squinted up through the harsh light.

The face belonged to a woman in her sixties, with wavy silver hair and hazel eyes. Instinctively, his mouth formed the name, “Mom.”

His parents were dead. That’s what people said in…where?

He tried to recapture the name of the town, or the face he’d visualized earlier. It seemed terribly important, but all he could see was his mother’s startled expression.

“He’s awake!” she cried. “Hugh’s awake!”

Hugh. He rose on a warm cloud of relief. Of course, his name was Hugh, and he’d just come out of an immense black hole. The last thing he remembered was struggling to breathe through shattering waves of cold water.

He’d been sailing with his friend Rick when the boat overturned in the wake of a cabin cruiser. “How’s Rick?” Hugh asked thickly.

“Oh, thank God!” his mother cried. “He can speak!” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll talk about Rick later.”

Something was wrong, he gathered, but couldn’t figure out what. Was he worried about Rick or something else?

Impossible to concentrate.

Whatever was nagging at him, he couldn’t deal with it now, and he didn’t have to. He was safe, in a place where he belonged.

After all, where should a doctor feel more at home than in a hospital?

HOURS LATER, Meg sat drinking tea across the table from her father in his Santa Barbara home. She was still trembling with disbelief.

The events of the day had passed in a nightmarish glare of unreality. Coming out of the gas station to find no sign of her husband. Calling the police, answering endless questions, listening to speculation about how and why Joe had disappeared.

“Somebody must have forced him,” she kept saying, but no witnesses could be found. Zack O’Flaherty had driven down when she called and waited for her, clumsily offering to help with Dana, tactfully refraining from voicing the suspicions Meg knew he must feel. She would always be grateful that, at this time of need, her father had come through for her.

The phone rang, startling her so badly she spilled tea on the table.

“I’ll get it.” With his thin face and pouchy eyes, Zack looked older than his forty-five years, but he walked to the phone with a steady gait.

Meg couldn’t bring herself to look at Dana, sleeping nearby in a crib borrowed from a neighbor. What if the police had found Joe’s body? What if her little girl had to grow up without a father?

“Yes, I see. Where—? Was there any sign—? I understand. Thank you, officer.” Gently, Zack put down the phone.

He isn’t dead. If he were, Dad would have asked about claiming the body. Meg managed to breathe again.

“They found your car at a train depot in Los Angeles.” Her father resumed his seat across from her. “It was ransacked, but that might have happened after it was abandoned.”

“A train depot?” she repeated, trying to derive some useful information from this development.

“They didn’t find any blood in the car or nearby,” Zack went on. “And no bodies…no injured men have been reported near freeways. For now, Joe’s classified as a missing person.”

“He was kidnapped!” Meg said.

“I don’t doubt it, honey.” Her father covered her hand with his. “He had no reason to run off. Even if he suffered some kind of panic attack, he’ll come back.”

“He didn’t leave of his own free will,” she said. “I know that, Dad.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

He couldn’t be sure, though, Meg thought. No one could, except her, because no one else knew Joe so well.

A gurgle from the crib drew her attention, and she walked over to monitor the baby. Her daughter wiggled beneath the blanket, then settled back with a blissful sigh.

Joe wouldn’t leave her and Dana. Wherever he was, whatever had happened to him, his connection to his wife and daughter would bring him home.

Meg would never stop searching for her husband or believing in him. No matter how long it took.

Chapter Two

Two years later…

Through the tinted window of the high-rise office building, Dr. Hugh Menton stared down over the sundrenched vista of West Los Angeles. Below, expensive cars navigated the street between sleek modern structures.

He ought to be thrilled that he and his brother could afford a suite in such a prestigious area. Once, being pediatrician to the children of celebrities and business tycoons had been everything he’d hoped for.

Yet, even though he’d outwardly recovered from the still mysterious loss of a year and a half of his life, and even though he’d regained his medical skills, Hugh didn’t feel right working here, catering to the rich.

His mouth twisting with disappointment, he turned and tossed the morning mail onto his gleaming oak desk. There was no response yet to his application to take part in a research project working with poor children. He’d hoped to hear from Pacific West Coast University Medical Center by now, since the Whole Child Project started next month, in October.

“You know, the reason you didn’t get your letter is that I’ve been stealing your mail and burning it,” said a tenor voice from the hallway.

Hugh looked up with a grin. “Sure you have.”

“You’ll get tired of playing Dr. Schweitzer,” warned his brother. Despite the teasing tone, there was a glint of worry in his green eyes, so much like Hugh’s.

Although at thirty-seven Andrew was only two years Hugh’s elder, he played the role of senior partner to the hilt. That might be partly because, with his shorter, stockier build and brown hair, he more closely resembled their late father, Frederick Menton, a legendary physician.

And, Hugh reminded himself, Andrew had had to assume the entire responsibility for their joint practice during his own disappearance. “I hope you know that I’d stay here with you if I could. But ever since I got back, I’ve been restless.”

“I’ve noticed.” His brother fiddled with the stethoscope around his neck. “Regardless of how well your injuries have healed, you shouldn’t trust these impulses, bro. This isn’t like you. You used to enjoy the good life.”

Maybe he was right. Hugh couldn’t account, rationally, for the sense of incompleteness that had dogged him since his return.

As far as anyone could tell, he must have spent that year and a half as a drifter. He’d disappeared at sea off Oceanside and been found unconscious nearly eighteen months later in Los Angeles, with a fresh head wound and no identification. In between, there wasn’t a clue where he’d been.

The only thing Hugh knew for certain was that the experience had changed him. Once ambitious for prestige and material success, he now longed to do something meaningful with his life. And for an emotional release that he couldn’t name.