We'll Meet Again by Mary Higgins Clark Page A

weakness to Calvin Whitehall was to be doomed. He had taught himself to ignore Cal ’s references to his drinking and was convinced that the only reason Whitehall restricted himself to one glass of wine was to prove his superiority of will.
    He picked up the phone and spoke immediately.
    “ Cal, how goes the empire?” Peter Black enjoyed asking that question. He knew it irritated Whitehall.
    “It would go a lot better if Molly Lasch weren’t out there making waves.”
    Peter Black felt as though the resonant tone of Calvin Whitehall’s voice was making the receiver tingle. Holding the phone with his left hand, Black deliberately stretched the fingers of his right hand, a trick he had picked up to relieve tension. “I thought we’d already established that she was making waves,” he responded.
    “Yes, after Jenna saw her night before last. Molly wants me to locate Annamarie Scalli. She insists she has to see her, and obviously she doesn’t intend to be put off. Jenna was hammering at me about it again this morning. I told her I had no idea where Scalli is.”
    “Nor do I.” Black knew his tone was even, his words precise. He remembered the panic in Gary Lasch’s voice:
“Annamarie, for the sake of the hospital. You’ve got to help.”
    I didn’t know at the time she was involved with Gary, Peter Black thought. What if Molly
did
get to her now? he wondered. Suppose Annamarie decided to tell what she knew. What then?
    He became aware that Cal was still talking. What was he asking?
    “… is there anyone at the hospital who might have stayed in touch with her?”
    “I have no idea.”
    After he put the receiver down a minute later, Dr. Peter Black spoke into the intercom. “Hold my calls, Louise.” He put his elbows on the desk and pressed his forehead with his palms.
    The tightrope was fraying. How could he stop it from breaking and sending him hurtling to the ground?

22
    “She didn’t want to worry you, Billy.”
    Billy Gallo stared across his mother’s bed at his father as they stood in the intensive care unit at Lasch Hospital. Tony Gallo’s eyes were welling with tears. His sparse gray hair was disheveled, and the hand that patted his wife’s arm was trembling.
    There was no mistaking the kinship of the two men. They had strikingly similar features-dark brown eyes, full lips, square jaw lines.
    Sixty-six-year-old semiretired Tony Gallo, a former corporate security officer, was a school crossing guard in the town of Cos Cob, a stern and trusted fixture at the intersection of Willow and Pine. His son, Billy, thirty-five, a trombonist in the orchestra of the road company of a Broadway musical, had flown in from Detroit.
    “It wasn’t Mom who didn’t want to worry me,” Billy said, his tone angry. “You wouldn’t
let
her call me, would you?”
    “Billy, you were out of work for six months. We didn’t want you to lose this job.”
    “To hell with the job. You should have called me-I would have stood up to them. When they refused her permission to go to a specialist, I wouldn’t have let them get away with it.”
    “Billy, you don’t understand; Dr. Kirkwood fought to get her to a specialist. Now they’ve okayed surgery. She’ll be fine.”
    “He
still
didn’t send her to a specialist soon enough.”
    Josephine Gallo stirred. She could hear her husband and son arguing, and she had a vague awareness that it was over her. She felt sleepy and weightless. In some ways it was a nice sensation, to lie there and almost float, to not have to be a part of their argument. She was tired of begging Tony to help Billy when he was between jobs. Billy was a fine musician, and he wasn’t cut out for a nine-to-five job. Tony just didn’t understand that.
    She kept hearing their angry voices. She didn’t want them to argue anymore. Josephine remembered the pain that had yanked her from her sleep this morning; it was the same pain that she’d been telling Dr. Kirkwood, her primary care physician,