Sisterhood by Michael Palmer Page A

several pillows, looked at him anxiously.
    “Well, how did it go with Mrs. Perry?” she asked.
    Curtis sank down on the edge of the bed and sighed his relief. “She’s pretty shaken up, but all things considered, she seems to be holding together all right. I offered to go over there and talk with her, but she said it wouldn’t be necessary, that she had people. Best of all, she didn’t say anything about wanting an autopsy.”
    His wife was concerned. “What do you mean ‘best of all’? George, is something the matter?”
    “Well, from what the resident on duty told me, Perrymust either have had a coronary or bled into his vocal cords where I did the surgery. Either way, his wife could try and make a case for negligence by saying he should have been cared for in the I.C.U. Without an autopsy, she’s got no definite findings, so she’s got no grounds for a suit, and I say ‘Amen’ to that.”
    “Amen,” his wife echoed as she turned off the light and rolled over next to him.
    Christine drove slowly, steering by rote, unaware of the traffic around her. On the gaslit sidewalks the night world of the inner city was in full cry. The hookers and the hustlers, the junkies and the winos, and the clusters of young men milling outside tavern doorways. It was a world that usually fascinated her, but this night the people and the action went unnoticed. Her mind had begun playing out a far different scene.
    It was a tennis match. Two women on a grassy emerald court. Or perhaps it was only one, for she never saw them both at the same time. Just a bouncing figure in a white dress, swinging out with energetic, perfect strokes.
    Totally immersed in the vision, she cruised through a red light, then onto a wide boulevard leading out of the city.
    All at once, Christine realized why it seemed like a match. With each swing, each stroke, the woman’s face changed. First it was Charlotte Thomas, radiant, laughing excitedly at every hit; then it was the drawn, sallow face of her own mother, a stern Dutch woman whose devotion to her five children had eventually worn her to a premature death.
    The strokes came faster and faster, and with each of them a flashing change in the competitor’s face until it was little more than a blur.
    Suddenly Christine glanced at the speedometer. She was going nearly eighty. Seconds later, a route signshot past. She was traveling in a direction nearly opposite to her house.
    Shaking almost uncontrollably, she screeched to a stop on the shoulder and sat, gasping as if she had just finished a marathon. Several minutes passed before she was able to turn around and resume the drive home.
    It was after midnight when she reached the quiet, treelined street where she and her roommates had lived for two years. The decision to search for an apartment in Brookline had been unanimous. “An old town with a young heart,” Carole D’Elia had called it, referring to the thousands of students and young working people who inhabited the quaint duplexes and apartment buildings. After a three-week search, they found—and immediately fell in love with—the first-floor apartment of a brown and white two family. Their landlady, a blue-haired widow named Ida Fine, lived upstairs. The day after they moved in, a large pot of soup outside their door heralded Ida’s intention to adopt the three of them. Christine had resented her intrusion in their lives at first, but Ida was irrepressible—and usually wise enough to sense when she had overstayed her welcome.
    Christine, Carole, and Lisa Heller were quite different from one another, but tailor made for living together. Carole, an up-and-coming criminal lawyer, handled the bills, while Christine took care of the shopping and other day-to-day essentials of cooperative living. Lisa, a buyer for Filene’s, was the social chairman.
    With a groan of relief and fatigue, Christine eased her Mustang up the driveway and into its customary spot next to Lisa’s battered VW. The