Chapter 6: Monday

The brass plate beside the door on the fourteenth floor said The Margaret Hale Fund.

I had stood in front of it a dozen times since my grandmother died.

I had never let anyone see me do it.

"Good morning, Ms. Costigan," said the young man at the front desk, and held the door with his foot.

"Good morning," I said, and went in on my crutches.

Nobody at the Fund looked twice at the cast.

My office was at the end of the hall, with a window over the river.

On the wall hung a portrait of Margaret Hale in her gardening hat, scowling at the photographer.

I sat in the chair I had sat in only four times.

"Two years," Arthur said from the doorway.

His hip was better, but he'd brought the cane.

"She'd say it was about time."

"She'd say I should have taken the room from the first day."

"She'd say a good many things. Most of them were rude."

I laughed, and he lowered himself into the visitor's chair.

On the desk lay a green folder with the Lakefront Orthopedic Institute stamped across the front.

"Read it," he said.

I had read the summary last spring, when the board sent it.

The Fund's gift of forty million dollars had built the Institute's wing.

The board's last duty was to choose its founding director.

I opened the folder to the page I hadn't read.

There were three names.

The first was a surgeon from Boston. The second was a woman from Johns Hopkins.

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