Chez Tess had ceased to exist.
Only moments after Kate left the restaurant, Monica, Tess, and Adam had gotten busy striking the set. It did not take long to reduce the elegant restaurant to the rubbish-strewn mess it had been earlier that afternoon. Cardboard boxes and other debris now stood where there had been a kitchen, a dining room, a bar, and a dance floor. The baby grand piano was long gone, as was the beautiful commercial range and all the other kitchen equipment.
Adam rolled a big, wooden cable spool into the middle of the room. “Where does this go?” he asked.
“Oh, just set it down right there,” Tess ordered. Adam did as he was told, then sat down on the spool and fished a drumstick out of his suit pocket and began eating, gnawing with obvious relish.
Tess looked at him as he ate. “What are you doing?” she asked. “What is that you’ve got there, Adam?”
“It’s some of your leftover pheasant,” he replied. “It’s really great stuff, Tess. Excellent.”
“Yeah, well,” Tess replied, sounding a little disappointed. “There’s plenty of pheasant left over. Kate had veal, if you recall—and Andrew went right along with it. He had veal too.”
Adam stopped eating abruptly. “You mean Beth,” he said. “Beth, right?”
Monica and Tess stared at him for a moment.
“Who’s Beth?” Monica asked.
“Yes,” said Tess. “Who on earth is Beth? Kate was Andrew’s assignment.”
“Who’s Beth?” Adam jumped to his feet. “Beth was the doctor, the one at the auction. Beth is the woman you just did all this for.”
Monica looked genuinely alarmed. “Adam! Andrew had dinner with a woman named Kate. Her name is Kate. Kate Calder.”
“I don’t understand,” said Adam. “Who is this Kate Calder? Where did she come from all of a sudden?”
“She’s the doctor from the auction.” Then it dawned on Monica. There had been a horrible mix-up. “She’s the doctor who won the auction.”
Monica looked at Tess. Tess shook her head. “Uh-oh . . .” She turned to Adam. “You better get going. Find Andrew and figure this whole thing out.” Tess nodded to herself. This was exactly the kind of thing she had been concerned about— right at the very beginning she had felt uncertain about this assignment.
“I’m on my way,” said Adam. After he left, Tess said a prayer and asked God to turn around the situation if needed.
It was just after three in the morning when Kate’s car rolled to a stop in front of Beth’s house. There were lights burning, and there was the intermittent light of a television, flashing shadows on the ceiling and walls. It surprised Kate that Beth would be such a night owl, but it would make her task a little easier. Kate took a deep breath.
“Well, so far, so good,” she said.
“You okay?” Andrew asked.
Kate nodded. “Let’s just hope I don’t trip on the way to the door and fracture my skull,” she said with a little smile. The two of them got out of the car, but Andrew hung back, letting Kate go up to the house by herself. As she went, Andrew looked down the street and saw Adam walking purposefully toward him. Andrew had no doubt that Adam’s sudden appearance did not bode well for someone. Concerned, he looked back to Kate.
Kate managed to get to the front door of Beth’s small house without serious injury. She rang the doorbell and waited . . . and waited. Impatient, she rang again and heard nothing from inside the house, no sound of footsteps, nothing—except the murmur of the television. She walked to a window and peered inside.
Beth was lying on the couch, dressed in her nightgown and bathrobe. She appeared to be sound asleep. Kate rapped on the window with her knuckles. “Beth! Beth!” she called. “Wake up!”
But Beth did not stir. Kate suddenly felt alarmed. She pounded on the window a little harder. “Beth!” Kate was yelling now. “Wake up!”
Then Kate looked down and saw something that frightened her terribly. Lying on the living room rug was a large, furry dog—and dogs did not sleep through the kind of racket she had been making. In an instant, she knew what was going on, and she did not hesitate. She grabbed a flowerpot full of geraniums and hurled it through the window, shattering it. Then she turned. “Andrew! I need help!”
But both Andrew and Adam had vanished. It was up to Kate Calder to save Beth’s life all on her own.
An hour later, Beth was in the hospital, and Kate was talking to the attending physician. It was the dead of night, and the hospital was quiet—Beth had been taken into the emergency room.
“People get poisoned from those old heaters all the time, and nobody seems to catch it before it’s too late,” the doctor told Kate. “How did you know it was carbon monoxide?”
“I saw the dog through the window,” Kate replied. “And they don’t sleep through doorbells.”
“Well, it’s a miracle you were there,” the doctor said. “If you hadn’t been, she would have died tonight.”
Those words hit Kate hard. She stood still in the middle of the hospital corridor and let the words sink in. Twice in one night she had prevented a death. Andrew’s words were coming true.
“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.
Kate smiled—she almost laughed out loud. “Yes, I am,” she said. “I think I’m fine! Can I see her?”
“If she’s awake—why don’t you go and find out? She’s in 403—right down the hall.”
“Thank you,” Kate said. It was a short walk down the bare hospital corridor, but in those few yards, Kate’s life underwent a profound change. She had made up her mind what to do.
Beth was still a little groggy from the hours she had spent in the room filled with carbon monoxide, but the oxygen tube inserted in her nose was uncomfortable, and would not allow her to sleep. She was pale and weak, but she smiled when Kate entered her room.
“Still here?” she asked.
Kate nodded. “I was just talking to your doctor. You’re only going to be here overnight.”
“What about Bruno?” Beth asked.
“He’ll be fine.”
Beth stirred a little under the covers. “It’s very scary,” she said. “All I remember is getting really, really sleepy.”
“That’s how it happens,” Kate replied. “You don’t see it or smell it. You just go to sleep and you never wake up.” It sounded to Kate like an ideal way to die.
“If you hadn’t been there . . .” Beth shook her head slowly. “And what were you doing at my house at three o’clock in the morning?”
“I . . . uh . . .” Kate shrugged and laughed. “I don’t know. I have no idea. Look, Beth, get some sleep.” She stood to go, then stopped. The reluctance to share her discovery and the credit for finding it—once upon a time a reflex almost built into her genetic makeup—had suddenly vanished. It was foolish for her to have come so far, to have learned so much, without going through with the plan; the plan that Andrew had taught her had come from God. Kate sat down again.
“I do know why I was there, Beth. I came to your house . . .” This was it. She took a deep breath. “I came to tell you that I had found a gene sequence, Beth. I’m almost there.”
Beth, her head on the pillow, nodded slightly. “I see,” she said. “Well, congratulations.”
“I was thinking, maybe if we worked . . . together . . . we’d get there sooner. That is if . . . you want to work with me.”
Kate Calder had been so myopic, so wrapped up in her own cares and obsessions, that it had never occurred to her that Beth might not want to have anything to do with her. Of course, Kate could hardly have blamed her if that was the way she felt. Not a day had passed in the last year or two that Kate hadn’t made some nasty crack or cutting remark to Beth. Kate could only look back at her own bad behavior with horror. She had been so insensitive and uncaring . . . She was going to try to change. And she hoped that there was really such a thing as forgiveness.
Beth smiled at her. “This isn’t like you at all, Kate. What’s happened to you all of a sudden?”
Kate smiled brightly. “I discovered something else,” she said. “You can do wonderful things, if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
“That’s quite a change of heart,” Beth said. Then she noticed that Kate was still dressed in the red velvet evening gown that she had worn to the restaurant. “How was your date, by the way?”
“Fascinating,” Kate replied.
Kate walked out of the hospital and into the sights and soft sounds of the dawn of a new day. There was a light, fresh-smelling breeze blowing and the sky was clear except for some thin, pinkish clouds. There was birdsong in the air. All in all it promised to be a fine day. Kate filled her lungs with the sweet air as if breathing in hope. Andrew was waiting for her in the parking lot of the hospital, and she crossed the street, walking toward him. He could tell by the way she walked that there was something different about this Kate Calder, that she had become a new person. There was a serenity about her and a confidence in her step that had not been there before.
She walked up to him and looked him in the eye for a moment before speaking. “I understand it now,” she said, nodding to herself. “It was Beth who would have died last night and not me, after all.”
Andrew smiled softly and nodded. He shrugged as if apologizing for something. “Yes, she was supposed to win the auction, not you. I was supposed to take her to dinner, but I never knew her name, so when you ended up winning . . .” He shrugged again. “You can imagine what I thought . . . particularly when you told me about your illness, back there at the restaurant.”
“You thought it was me,” Kate said. “You thought that I was the one who was going to die.”
“That’s right. I thought it was you.”
Kate glanced back at the hospital. “I guess that’s why Beth wanted to win so bad. Somehow she saw you coming, and I—as usual—had to get there first. The old me, that is.” And she meant that. The old Kate was really gone—and gone for good. She could feel it, as if a part of her—a malignant part—had been cut out of her. And although she had not had a wink of sleep and had been through a harrowing night, she felt relaxed and refreshed.
“I’m sorry,” said Andrew. “I’m sorry that you had to go through it. It could not have been easy for you.”
“Hey,” said Kate, laughing out loud. “God made a mistake. Surely this isn’t the first time He’s done it.”
“No,” Andrew replied quickly. “People make mistakes. Sometimes even angels make mistakes.”
Andrew gazed at her for a moment, and his voice lowered. “But God doesn’t make mistakes. He saved two lives last night instead of one. Three counting Norman Delmonico. I told you that death sometimes passes you by. God chose to make it pass by last night, and that was His decision. We cannot know why. But we know the result. He saved your life in one way and saved Beth’s in another.”
“Yes,” Kate said, “I think maybe He did. So, I’ve still got a few more years left, huh?”
Andrew nodded. “Yes, you do, Kate. And now you know what to do with them, right?”
Kate nodded. “I do know now. Thanks to you.” She shook her head slowly. “It was certainly a wild way of finding out, I’ll have to say that. Do you always operate like this?”
“We work the way God wants us to,” Andrew replied. “It’s really very simple.”
Kate sighed. “A heck of a way to earn a living,” she said with a little smile. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Of course,” said Andrew. “Ask me anything.”
“These few years that I have left—” she paused a moment as she thought calmly about the end of her life. “—when those years are over—”
“When they’re over, Kate . . .” He took her hand and kissed it gently. “Then I’ll see you for dinner . . .”