"As good as I would be?"

"No one's as good as you would be. Or Mara."

Paige sighed. She stroked Sami's dark hair.

"Mara would have loved this little one. She's a darling." Sami was staring at the strip of red leather that looped around Nonny's neck and through a papiermache strawberry. Paige lifted the strawberry and touched it to Sami's tiny hand. "I miss Mara. I keep reaching for the phone to call her, or thinking of things to tell her. She was such an important part of my life." She paused. "I let her down."

"Nonsense," Nonny said.

"I wasn't there when she needed me. I was too wrapped up in my own life to take the extra time and make sure she was okay. I knew she was going through a difficult time. I should have made the effort." I "It might not have made any difference."

"No, but at least I wouldn't feel so guilty."

Nonnv shot her a knowing look. "You probably would anyway. You have a thing for guilt, Paige When you were little, you blamed yourself for your parents' wanderlust, but it wasn't right then, and it's not right now. You may be a wonderful doctor, but you aren't a mind reader. You had no way of knowing what Mara was feeling inside."

That didn't keep Paige from wondering. She had relived Mara's death in her imagination dozens of times. "It haunts me, thinking of that. The feelings have to be awful for a person to reach the point of contemplating suicide, and to go through with it" The horror hadn't yet begun to fade.

"Have you ruled out an accident?"

"Oh, Nonny," she said with a sigh, "Mara O'Neill didn't do things accidentally. She was an all or nothing personthen again, she had so much to live for, not the least of which was Sami, that I can't imagine she would deliberately kill herself. It just doesn't make sense."

Nonny sent her an understanding look. ill guess it never will. If Mara had secrets, they've gone to her grave with her."

Paige wasn't ready to accept that. Although her first order of business was to restore an element of normalcy to her life, which meant returning to work Monday morning and immersing herself in her patients'

lives as though everything were as it always had been, her second was to dig deeper into Mara's last day.

Between diagnosing Danny Brody's poison iVy, removing a bead from Lisa Marmer's nose, assuring a terrified Marilee Stiller that the spanking she had given her three-year-old that weekend hadn't injured him, and repairing a subluxation with a quick snap, she talked with everyone who, to her knowledge, had had contact with Mara that last day.

By lunchtime, when she caught Angie alone in the kitchenette at the back of the office, she had a large sheet of paper covered with notes.

"From what I can figure, Mara came here first thing in the morning.

She was writing up reports when Ginny arrived, but it was standard stuff, nothing to suggest she was tidying up before killing herself.

She didn't even finish what she was doing, because the first of the emergencies arrived. She saw patients until ten."

"Feverishly?" Angie asked.

"Not particularly, according to Dottie"the nurse-practitioner on duty that morning"But Dottie wasn't looking for anything unusual, any more than the rest of us were. Whether her energy was unduly frenetic is anyone's guess."

She studied her notes while she absently ate the orange slice Angie handed her. "She was on the phone between patientstalked with the lab, with the desk at Two-E"the pediatric wing of Tucker General "and with Larry Hills." Larry was the pharmacist at the local drugstore.

"There were some outgoing calls, too Ginny says, but unless they were long distance, we'il never know who they were to.

At ten, she asked me to cover so that she could run over and confront the lab over Todd Fiske's tests. She was annoyed, but certainly not distraught, and she was back in forty-five minutes. There were more patients after that, more phone callsa consult on the Webber child, several calls to parents. No one remembers whether she took time for lunch. You stopped her in the hall at about twelve-thirty. She was distracted then and for most of the afternoon, from what Dottie said.

Peter was the last to see her. That was at four-thirty. The coroner said she died around midnight."

She sank back in her chair. "That leaves a big gap during which she took a large amount of Valium. What was happening to her all that time?"

The phone rang. Angie answered it, then passed it to Paige, who felt an instant's fright. She had called Mrs. Busbee twice during the morning and ubyeen tGold all was fine, but that could have changed "Jill Stickley is here. She'd like to talk with you for a minute."

Not Sami. Jill Stickley. Paige felt relief on one score, concern on another. Jill's name hadn't been on the daily roster. She would have remembered. Seventeen years old and one of Paige's original Tucker patients, Jill held a special place in her heart, which was only one of the reasons Paige was alert. The other was that the Stickleys had been through more than their share of rough times of late. One more wouldn't do "Show her into my office," Paige said without pause.

ill'll be right there." She rose from the table with an apology to Angie.

"Go," Angie urged. "I'll see if I can learn anything more about Mara's day. Something's missing."

That had been Paige's thought exactly, but it was gone from mind the minute she saw Jill Stickley's face The girl was standing awkwardly in her office loohng exhausted, pale, and tense.

Paige imagined that Jill's father, a frustrated insurance salesman, had beaten her mother again or that her mother, who had been unemployed for a year before landing a lower-paying job had been laid off again, or that Jill's brother had stoien another car and been caught again ditching it at the Tucker landfill.

She put an arm around Jill's shoulder and said "No matter what it is, it can't be that bad." After a while, nothing was. "Go on. Tell me."

ill think I'm pregnant," Jill said in a reed-thin voice while frightened eyes sought Paige's reaction.

Paige swallowed. "Pregnant?" It wasn't what she'd expected at all.

"Uh, I thought we agreed on birth control pills."

"We did. Only I messed up, I guess."

"What makes you think so?"

"I'm late."

"How late?"

"A couple of months."

Paige glanced at her middle, which was covered with loose layers and revealed nothing. The hand she put there learned far more. Beneath it was a distinct bulge. "A couple of months? Oh, sweetie. This feels like four at the least."

Jill's eyes filled with tears. ill guess I lost count," she whispered.

Lost count? Paige cried silently. How could you lose count? We've been talking about sperm meeting egg since you started menstruating five years ago. I pushed abstinence until abstinence became a pipe dream, and then I pushed contraception.

But the arguments were moot. The deed was done. "And you're terrified."

The girl nodded.

Paige rubbed her back. "Does Joey know?" Joey was the longtime boyfriend, an automobile mechanic, six years older than Jill. "Of course he knows," Paige answered herself.

"He's seen this bulge."

But Jill shook her head. "He thought I was getting fat. He's been razzing me about it. So I told him the truth last night. He said he didn't want any part of a fat girlfriend or a screaming baby, and that I could do what I wanted with it. I thought he'd get used to the idea overnight, so I went home and sat up all night praying for it, but when I stopped at his place this morning, he had packed up and gone."

Paige sighed. "Oh, sweetie." uX can't tell my dadhe'll go apeshitand if I tell Mom, he'll accuse her of keeping secrets from him He 11 hit her big time for that." She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand.

"I've really messed up this time, haven't l?"