The Wilders

It was damn time for Dr. Peter Wilder to realize that he had to stop standing in the way of progress before he and his precious hospital were left behind in the dust. The sooner she got him to acknowledge that, the sooner they could all move on.

Chapter Five

The reading of the will that evening at his house held no surprises. Fred arrived at seven, with Ella there a few minutes earlier, and it went as Peter had expected. All of his father’s worldly possessions, the house, the small bank account, were to be divided equally among the children. James Wilder had no living siblings, no distant people he felt honor-bound to reach out to beyond the grave. A few mementos went to friends, worth more in sentimental value than they were monetarily, but most items were part of the very small estate that was to be divvied up equally.

His father had left the execution of it entirely in Peter’s hands.

“Short and sweet,” Fred declared. Finished, he placed the will on the mahogany desk and rose to his feet. He snapped the locks back down on his black leather briefcase. “Still, it’s a shame that David and Anna couldn’t have stayed one more day to hear the reading of the will for themselves.”

Peter knew that Ella felt the same way the lawyer did: that David and Anna should have remained out of respect for their father. In her own way, Ella was very protective of her father and his memory. But he knew that no disrespect had been intended by his siblings. Both excuses they’d given were thin, veiling the different demons David and, to an extent, Anna, had to wrestle with. Nothing anyone in the room could say would change that.

So he played down their absence and responded to Fred’s comment with a half shrug.

“They each thought that there wouldn’t be anything unusual about it,” he said. “And pressing circumstances called them away.”

Fred’s expression said he would have expected more from the children of his close friend. He nodded toward Ella as he circumvented Peter’s desk. “Lovely seeing you again, Ella. I hope the next time we meet, it will be under happier circumstances.”

“Yes,” she murmured softly with feeling, “so do I.”

Peter saw fresh tears glistening in her eyes. It was going to take her a while to get over this, he thought. In the meantime, he could give her her privacy.

Placing himself between Fred and his sister, he volunteered, “I’ll walk you out.”

“Speaking of unusual …” Fred picked up the thread of their earlier exchange as they left the room. “Have you, um, you know—”

Peter shook his head. “No, I haven’t ‘um, you know’ yet.”

Fred eyed him as they walked slowly to the front of the house. “Afraid it might be something bad?”

Afraid. Maybe that was the right word after all, he thought. Something about the presence of the envelope made him uneasy. He didn’t want anything changing his image of his father and he was afraid that whatever was in the envelope might do just that.

“Well, it can’t be something good, now, can it? If it was, there wouldn’t be this aura of mystery surrounding it. My father wasn’t the to-be-read-after-my-death kind of person. Or at least,” he sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets as he walked, “I wouldn’t have said he was.” Until now.

Fred looked at him, a sympathetic expression on his round face. “Only one way to find out.”

Peter glanced toward the living room as he passed it on his way to the front door. The thick envelope was still resting on the mantelpiece, where he’d placed it after the reception. And where it was going to stay until he was ready to deal with it.

“Yes, I know. I’ll get to it,” he promised. He stopped at the door. The overhead fixture hanging down from the vaulted ceiling was on high, casting more light through the area than it ordinarily did. The added brightness only marginally negated the somber atmosphere and mood.

Fred’s eyes met his and the man said, “Be sure to let me know when you do.”

Peter didn’t feel comfortable with that. “Whatever it is, it’s my father’s secret.”

Fred laughed softly to himself. “And I was your father’s lawyer—and his friend. He had no secrets from me,” Fred told him significantly.

Peter looked at him sharply. “Then you know what’s in the envelope?”

It was obvious that Fred was not about to say yes—or no. “I have my suspicions,” he admitted.

If that was true, what was all this cloak-and-dagger stuff about? And if Fred knew, what, exactly, did he want to be informed about after the envelope was finally opened and its contents read?

“Then why—”

“Lawyer-client confidentiality,” Fred was quick to cite the standard, one-size-fits-all defense. Fred patted Peter’s arm. “Keep an open mind,” he advised. “Remember, you’re the son James trusted.”

Peter thought of the envelope that contained a secret his father had all but taken to his grave. The secret that James Wilder hadn’t shared with him in life. “Apparently not.”

The look in Fred’s brown eyes told him that he could all but read his thoughts.

“Think of it as not burdening you until he absolutely had to.” Fred glanced at his watch and looked surprised at the hour. “Well, I need to go. Selma is holding dinner for me.” He laughed, patting his ample stomach. “Sometimes, I wish she was a worse cook than she is. Then I wouldn’t have this—” he searched for a descriptive word that wasn’t entirely unflattering “—robust physique. ‘Bye, Ella,” he called out, raising his voice. “And let me know once you break the seal,” Fred said again, lowering his voice so that it wouldn’t carry.

Fred let himself out and closed the door behind him. The next moment, Ella was entering the foyer.

“What was all that about?” she asked.

Turning around, Peter saw that she had managed to pull herself together. Ella was good at rallying. He had to stop thinking of her as his baby sister. She was a grown woman and a doctor to boot. That meant she could handle her own battles.

Still, something had him saying evasively, “Just lawyer talk.”

“I thought Fred was finished with all that in your study.”

“You know lawyers, they never stop.” He could see that Ella wanted details, so he embellished a little, elaborating on what had actually been on his mind earlier. “He wanted me to draw up a will, now that I’m head of the family.”

Ella drew in a breath, as if that could protect her from what she was thinking. She shook her head vehemently. “You’re not going anywhere for a very long time, big brother.” Peter was eleven years older than she was, which made him half brother, half father as far as she was concerned. And she intended to hang on to both halves. “I absolutely forbid it.”

Peter laughed, amused. “I’ll let Fred know.”

Ella tucked her arm through his. “You do that,” she agreed. “Meanwhile, let’s go out to dinner. My treat.”

He glanced at his watch. It was getting late. “Aren’t you on call?”

She’d drawn the graveyard shift. “Not for another few hours.”

He smiled fondly at Ella. He’d decided to open the envelope after she went home. But there was no hurry. The envelope wasn’t going anywhere. “Then you’re on. And I warn you, I have expensive taste.”

“Sky’s the limit,” she declared with a nonchalant wave of her hand. “As long as the sky’s hovering somewhere in the ten dollar neighborhood,” she added, her eyes twinkling.

He laughed. “I’ll get the coats, Rockefeller.”

“NHC is sending a man to negotiate with us at the end of the month,” Bethany announced without preamble as she walked into the small, cluttered office within an office where Peter retreated when he wasn’t either making hospital rounds or seeing patients in either the exam room or the E.R.

It was barely eight o’clock in the morning. His patients didn’t start coming in until nine-thirty and he had yet to make his rounds of the three that he currently had staying at the hospital.

Looking up from the medical journal he was reading, Peter frowned ever so slightly. He was going to have to remember to lock his doors until his hours began officially. Not even Eva, his nurse/receptionist was here yet.

He looked at the redhead for a long moment. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?”

Determined to break through his resistance, Bethany gave him a very complacent smile. “Not anyplace more important.”

So much for catching up on his reading before making his rounds, Peter thought. Putting a bookmark into the medical magazine, he let the pages flip closed and rose to his feet. “Well, you might not have anywhere else you need to be, but I do.”

She shifted to block his way. Other people at the hospital might think of Peter Wilder as a kind, gentle man, but at the moment, she thought of him as a stubborn jackass. A sexy jackass, but a jackass none the less. “That’s what you said yesterday in the cafeteria.”

He looked undaunted. “And it’s still true. I’m not a hundred percent certain what it is that some of the other members of the board of directors do with their time, but mine is better spent doing what I was meant to do—doctoring.”

It wasn’t exactly true. He knew that four of the members were doctors, just like he was. Senior members of the staff, they had full agendas to follow even when they weren’t seated around the table, reviewing tedious budgets and constricting overall policy. He knew she was an efficiency expert, whatever that actually meant.

“I have hospital rounds to make,” he told her, heading for the same door that she had breached a minute ago. “So, unless you want to spend the greater part of the next hour standing in the hospital corridor, waiting for me to finish seeing my patients, I suggest you get back to whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.”

And with that, Peter made his second escape from the woman in as many days.

“What do you know about Bethany Holloway?”

Finished with his rounds, his office hours still more than half an hour away, Peter decided to swing by the chief administrator’s office to get a little information that might ultimately help him outsmart the attractive board member.

Henry Weisfield looked up from a travel brochure he’d been wistfully perusing and pushed his bifocals up his long, straight nose to look at the doctor he still thought of as “James Wilder’s boy.”

He smiled, letting his mind wander for a second. “That if I were thirty years younger, I’d be actively pursuing her. Why?” Henry slid his thin frame forward on his chair, his gray eyes momentarily bright with questions. “Are you interested?”

You would think that by the time a man hit forty, people would stop trying to pair him up with someone. Peter had been badly disappointed with that route once, and had more important things to do than spend time risking a part of his being that modern medicine had not come up with a way to heal.

“Only in so far as wanting to know where she comes from and why she’s here,” he answered after a beat.

Leaning back again, Henry told him what he knew. “The woman has not one but two business degrees. Graduated with top honors from Princeton and is a real go-getter. Wallace is very taken with her,” he added.

Peter thought of the way the chairman had fawned over Bethany yesterday. “I’m sure that’s a hit with Wallace’s wife.”

“Your father thought she had potential, too,” Henry remembered.

Not if he’d known that the woman would back a takeover by one of the larger HMO companies, Peter thought. “If she’s so brilliant, why isn’t she sitting on the board of some big-name organization? Why has she graced us with her presence here?”

“Good question.” Henry nodded more to himself than to him. “My best guess is that it has something to do with not wanting to be a little fish in a big pond.”

That made sense, he supposed. Peter wandered over to the window and looked down the four stories to the back parking lot. It was beginning to fill up. Employees were reporting for the morning shift; visitors were beginning to make their pilgrimages to see friends and loved ones in hospital rooms and outpatients were coming in for tests they most likely didn’t want to take.

They were doing fine just as they were, Peter thought. They didn’t need some bloated conglomerate coming in, telling them what to do.

Fisting his hands, he leaned his knuckles against the windowsill. “So she’s taken over our pond and is trying to make a name for herself here, is that it?”

Henry thought before answering. “Sounds about right.” And then he chuckled to himself. “I hear that you walked out on her in mid-sentence at the board meeting yesterday.”

Peter turned around to look at him. “I had patients waiting.”

Henry’s smile told him he knew better. “No, you didn’t. I checked your schedule. You left a full half hour before your first appointment.”

Peter thought that was rather an odd thing for Henry to do, but then Henry had always been one to move to the tune of a different drummer. Eccentric, he was still an excellent administrator, able to find ways to cover expenses at the last minute time and again. Henry was one of a kind and Peter was fond of him.

So he leveled with the man. “I didn’t want to lose my temper.”

“Lose your temper?” Henry echoed with a short laugh of disbelief. “I would have paid good money to see that. I didn’t know you even had a temper. Most of the staff thinks of you as patience personified.”

Peter felt himself chafing a little. Yesterday, Bethany had referred to him as a saint. Henry was telling him that the people at the hospital thought of him as the soul of patience. Deep down, he knew he was neither. He was just a man trying to do the best that he could at any given time.

Peter sighed. “I am what I need to be at the moment.”

Henry leaned forward and peered at him through the bottom of his glasses. “And right now, you seem a little—” Feigning surprise, he splayed his somewhat gnarled hand across his chest. “My God, you’re a little annoyed.” And then he smiled. “And this has to do with Ms. Holloway?”

Peter nodded. He had no idea why she rubbed him the wrong way so hard. Ordinarily, he took annoying people in stride. “The woman is a cheerleader for Northeastern Healthcare.”

Henry sobered a little, but looked at Peter sternly. “Northeastern Healthcare is not the devil, you know.”

Peter looked at him in surprise. He’d expected to find an ally in Henry of all people. “Henry, you don’t mean that.”

Rather than retract or retreat, Henry shook his head. His expression mirrored the confusion Peter felt inside. “Oh, I don’t know,” the older man said with a sigh. “Maybe I do. Maybe we’re looking at the face of progress and by digging in against it, we might be turning our backs on something really worthwhile.”

He had no idea what might have caused Henry to say that, but he knew in his soul that the man couldn’t possibly mean it.

“What’s worthwhile is good patient care. You know that, Henry. You don’t have to be a doctor to know how going the extra mile can mean the difference between saving a patient and overlooking symptoms in the interest of the almighty profit margin.”

Whether Henry was playing devil’s advocate or had been brainwashed, Peter had no way of knowing when the administrator said, “The doctors at NHC aren’t all soulless creatures.”

Peter was willing to make a concession only up to a point. “Maybe not, but the organization that they work for won’t allow them to access that part of themselves.” He blew out a frustrated breath, feeling the base he was counting on eroding right beneath his feet. “Let them go take over some other hospital. We’re small—barely a blip on their radar. Why the interest all of a sudden?”

Henry looked surprised by the question. “Don’t underestimate what your father accomplished here. How hard he worked to make sure that Walnut River General was not just up to par, but above and beyond that in every possible way. Before James came on board, this was just ‘a blip’ as you called it. But not anymore. Definitely not anymore.”

But Peter saw it another way. “If we were all that good, David would be here instead of practicing on the West coast.”

“David’s not here because he and your father came to loggerheads and they never patched up their differences,” Henry reminded him. “And besides, maybe we’re just less vain than the patients he finds in Los Angeles.” Henry glanced at the latest quarterly bulletin that the hospital had released. On the front was a list of names of the physicians on staff. “We have excellent cardiologists, excellent orthopedic surgeons and even an oncologist who graduated from Yale.”

Would those same doctors remain if the NHC took over? Peter had his doubts. “Then why would we need NHC?”

It was a tired voice that answered him. “Because we need new equipment.” Henry sighed. “We need a lot of things.”

Peter looked at him incredulously, still unable to believe what he was hearing. “So you’re advocating the takeover?”

Henry shrugged. His head hurt. He’d been thinking of nothing else and waffling ever since the rumors had begun. “I’m advocating retirement. Mine,” he clarified.

It was the last thing Peter had expected, or wanted, to hear. “Henry, no.”

“Yes,” Henry said gently. “I’m old, Peter. Older than your father was.” A lot older, he thought. “And I’m tired. Tired of wrestling with hospital policies, tired of wondering how we’re going to be able to fund this program or that—”

Peter cut in. “You’ve always done a fantastic job. We all thought you were part magician.”

“It’s time for someone else to pull a rabbit out of a hat,” Henry said wearily. He loved the hospital, loved the people who were there, but his health wasn’t what it used to be and it was suffering. He couldn’t do as good a job as he had been doing and he refused to be in a position where the board voted to release him from his contract. “To struggle and lose sleep over ends that just refuse to meet.”

Peter looked at the man closely. Henry did look tired. And there had been that late-onset diabetes that he knew Henry felt confident no one knew about. But he did. That was why he didn’t press, even though he wanted to.

Still, he had to ask, “Your mind’s made up?”

“About the retirement? Yes. About everything else? No.” Henry shook his head again. “In theory, I agree that NHC should keep its sticky fingers off us. But we’re not going to do anyone much good if we have to close our doors because the funding’s not there to keep us going. Doesn’t matter how good our reputation is if we can’t get supplies because there’s no money. Even when we don’t charge some of the poorer patients who can’t afford us, the services aren’t really free, you know. Somebody has to pay for everything from a swab to a suture to everything else. Every department wants more and I just can’t find a way to get it.”

Peter squared his shoulders, as if ready to do battle with some invisible force. “I refuse to believe that HMOs are the only answer.”

“Maybe they’re not,” Henry gladly conceded. “But I for one don’t have any other answer.” He rocked back in his chair. “Except to retire.”

Resigned to the inevitable, Peter asked, “So, how soon?”

Henry glanced at the calendar on his desk and flipped a few pages. He was grateful that Peter wasn’t calling him a coward and accusing him of running away from the battle. “April, maybe May. I’ve already half been scouting around for a replacement.”

Whoever came wouldn’t be nearly as good, Peter thought sadly. “Won’t be the same without you.”

Henry smiled, appreciating the kind words but knowing better. “You’ll manage, Peter. You’re a Wilder. The Wilders always manage.”

The man’s words echoed in Peter’s head long after he’d left Henry’s office. He knew his father had felt that way, as had his grandfather. He only wished he could feel half as confident about it as they had.

Chapter Six

It was hard not to fidget. Even harder not to let his eyes shut.

Peter couldn’t help thinking he had more important things to do than sit here, trapped in this airless room, held prisoner by what felt like an endless board meeting.

For the better part of the week, his schedule had been entirely filled with patients. The rest of the time Peter found himself looking over his shoulder in an attempt—successful for the most part—to duck the very woman that fate now had him sitting next to in this so-called official meeting of the board of directors.

Larry Simpson, the current board secretary, had all but put him to sleep, reading the minutes in a voice that could, hands down, easily replace the leading medication for insomnia.

Part of the reason he was struggling to keep his eyes open was because he’d put in an extra long day yesterday. It had actually extended into the wee hours of the next morning—today. Too exhausted to drive home, he’d slept in his office. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the misshapen sofa was not the last word in comfort. He was now paying for his impulsive choice with a stiff neck, not to mention the various other parts of his body that felt less than flexible today.

After Larry had finished droning on, the first order of business had been the formal announcement of what he was already privy to: Henry Weisfield’s pending retirement. That led to an impromptu testimonial by Wallace during which he listed Henry’s skills and accomplishments.

“He’s going to be a hard man to replace,” Wallace predicted, using the exact words he had employed when he’d spoken about the passing of James Wilder. “But I charge each and every one of you to keep your eye out for a suitable candidate to at least partially fill Henry’s position.”

“We could try offering Henry more money,” suggested Gladys Cooper, a fifteen-year veteran of the board.

“Not everything is solved with money.” The words slipped out of Peter’s mouth before he realized he was actually saying them aloud rather than just thinking them.

“No,” the redhead at his elbow agreed. “But it certainly does help pave the road and make things a lot easier.”

Not wanting to get caught up in another confrontation with Bethany, Peter replied, “Can’t argue with that.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can,” she countered with a smile he couldn’t begin to fathom.

Damn, but he wished she’d stop wearing that perfume. It wasn’t overpowering. It was very light, actually, but it left behind just enough scent to stealthily slip into his senses, blurring things for him.

He had opened his mouth to respond when the sound of a cell phone playing a shrill samba reverberated through the room. The next second, Wallace’s wide hand covered his jacket breast pocket.

“Sorry,” he apologized with a sheepish expression. “Forgot to turn off my phone.” But when he took it out to shut off, he looked at the number on the tiny screen. His expression turned to one of curiosity. He held up his hand as if to beg an indulgence. “I need to take this. Why don’t we just take a break for a few minutes?” he suggested. Not waiting for the members to agree, he quickly left the room.

Everyone around them rose from their chairs, taking the opportunity to stretch their legs. Bethany watched the man at her left for a cue. Now that she had him in her sights, she intended to follow his lead in order to finally be able to say more than a handful of words to him regarding the takeover.

Peter remained seated. So did she.

“You didn’t go home last night, did you?” Bethany asked quietly.

The question caught him off guard. But then, he thought, it really shouldn’t have, given the fact that she had been popping up all over since Monday. “Are you stalking me, Ms. Holloway?”

She maintained a mild expression, as if tracking him down had never even crossed her mind. “No, I just noticed where you were parked when I left last night.” She didn’t add that she’d waited a quarter of an hour, hoping he would appear, since it was already after-hours. But sitting in her car on a cold January evening was her limit. “It snowed last night.”