Gemini Read Online Free PDF Page B

nakedly yellow this morning, and the petunias she’d put into pots on the porch just beyond the open kitchen door gave off a pungent smell of earth, shouldering their fat purple and pink blossoms like they intended to take over the whole garden. And there was a certain luxuriance in being so thoroughly fatigued; an excuse to let her mind roll into whatever corners it chose, a day off from life as much as a day off from work.
    She got a pot of coffee going and took a shower, and by the time she came back into the kitchen, Puck had returned and slumped onto the newspaper for a nap. He jumped off the table as soon as he heard Charlotte rattle the box of cat food, the top sheet of newsprint clinging to his fur so that it sailed to the floor. She stopped halfway to picking it up when a headline and a pencil sketch of a woman’s face caught her eye: “Unconscious Jane Doe Still Unidentified.” Charlotte was wide awake now. She skimmed the few paragraphs so quickly they hardly made sense and then sat holding the page in front of her, reading it line by line until it was clear that yes, this was Beacon Hospital’s Jane Doe. Her Jane Doe, though the sketch was so generously ambiguous it could have been a thousand Caucasian middle-aged women. The article read more like a tantalizing “if it bleeds, it leads” than a plea for Jane’s relatives to find her, which made Charlotte irrationally angry, strangely possessive—as if one of her own family members had been exposed just to sell copy. But when she calmed down and read it again, she realized that what she really felt was protective, as though bad press was as threatening as bad bacteria and it was her job to guard Jane against it all.
    The paper told Charlotte only slightly more than she already knew, but the fact that it focused on the nonmedical questions—Why had no one reported her missing? Where had she lived? What were the police doing to find her relatives? Who had run her down and driven away?—made Jane seem even more vulnerable to Charlotte; more human , she was embarrassed to admit. She tore the article out and put it in a drawer with loose recipes, plastic spoons, and crayons she kept handy for her nephews. She stood outside with her coffee watching morning commuters stalled on the 520 Bridge, plucked a few faded blooms from the wooden flower boxes, then got the article out of the drawer, read it for the third time, and opened her laptop.
    A Google search didn’t tell her much more. No serious investigation had been started until three days after Jane’s surgery, probably because they’d kept expecting her to wake up and tell them her name. It was as if her conscious, relatively stable status when she’d hit the emergency room had lulled them into taking their time about identifying her. They seemed to have few clues about the car that had struck her. No wonder Helen Seras was already asking about Jane; as the vice president who did most of the public speaking for the hospital, she’d be left to explain things if this turned into a bad PR trip.
    —
    Charlotte leaned toward the floor and rubbed her fingers together, tempting the cat to sidle near; he sniffed once and, discerning nothing edible, slunk beneath her attempted caress and wandered away. She loved the diffidence in that animal, quite irrationally; Eric teased that he’d be gone in a heartbeat the day she neglected to fill his bowl. Eric would probably still be asleep; she would call later and tell him about her night, hear what turn his book revision was taking. The closer he got to a deadline, the more he reversed his days and nights, often writing until nearly dawn. So they would both be exhausted, Charlotte figured. He got so immersed in the final stages of a project, she’d come to accept a temporary sense of distance—knew better than to take it personally and knew the same passion would be focused on her once the book was done. But this time felt different to her—not as clearly rooted