No Immunity

Mkema. Hope was dying in the next room.
    A nurse helped her to the foot of Hope’s bed. She stood staring in disbelief at the fever sweat that glistened on Hope’s skin, the blood that oozed so thickly, it turned her eyes to red patches. The pervasive moaning cut through the lines of educated and illiterate, doctors and patients, and reduced all sufferers to one. Hope’s wavering cry carried away the white coat of protection “Doctor” had promised. The sound flowed from her lips, and it took with it all that she was or had been.
    “It is not safe for you here,” the nurse had said, moving her away from Hope Mkema’s bed. “You are still weak.”
    No one told her when Hope died. But she heard outside in the town, a dull tapping on metal and wood, thudding from a thousand hands, wood against rough metal.
    Hope Mkema’s family, her neighbors and friends, hadn’t blamed Kiernan, nor had they objected when a plane arrived unscheduled, allowing her to be airlifted out. She was too weak to travel alone, and it was Jeff Tremaine who was assigned to accompany her, as it turned out not merely to the coast but on a connecting flight back to Bombay .
    And it was Jeff who told her that the dreams and fortune of the area had died with Hope Mkema when she was denied the ribavirin Kiernan hadn’t needed. Odd, she had thought when she woke from exhausted sleep at intervals during the days of travel, what a personal affront death is to Westerners. If Jeff Tremaine could have sued God, he would have. Instead he turned his own guilt on her, and she made no move to deflect it. By the time he left her in a bare-bones hotel in Bombay , she knew that it was time to leave India and go home.
    She would have answered this call of his out of gratitude, but she was sure he wouldn’t understand that. He had expected her to come out of repentance.
    But she had come out of dread.

CHAPTER 8

    Dr. Louisa Larson had made only one faux pas: Grady Hummacher’s hoys.
    She circled her forefinger around a clump of shoulder-length blond hair, around and around, pulling the hairs harder each time, as if yanking her skin away from her skull would create an escape route for her misjudgments. She stared at the empty examination room in her Las Vegas clinic. She no longer noticed the soft ambers and greens of the desert prints she had chosen to be every bit as nice as those in the clinic across town that supported this one in the barrio. Just a month ago the surprised smiles on her patients’ faces when they entered her welcoming office had made the cost worthwhile. And she wouldn’t have wasted half a month on some distant beach anyway, not when her patients needed her and she had a practice to build. And a community to make her mark in.
    After med school a public health guy had talked up applying to a research project in Boston . “Vital, important work,” he had insisted. “A lot of driven types get into it. But they could really use a woman like you, near the top of your class, but also diplomatic. You, Louisa, you sweep people off their feet”—she couldn’t help smiling at that— “and right into your pocket where you wanted them all along.” She had turned him down flat, said You Bet Your Life was not a game she chose to play. But the truth was the guy had made her feel as if he’d cracked her skull open and exposed her mind to the world. She was not about to go to work somewhere where people labeled what she did—focusing on her work and getting everyone else enthusiastic about it—manipulation. She’d worked her tail off in med school. She had no life outside her career. All those years had given her a good view of the failures of medicine, and she damn well planned to be in a position to make changes. You can climb to the top in spite of your competitors, but it’s so much quicker if you can make them see the sense in giving you a leg up. If the research recruiter called that manipulation, then it was no wonder his establishment needed a woman everyone liked.
    Manipulation was what Grady Hummacher had done to her. She had never meant him to be more than a diversion. With Grady all the doors were open and there w-as a prize behind every one. So what if it was all mirage; she didn’t have time for more than that. A delicious diversion, to be dipped into totally, then shaken off, was exactly what she needed.
    And then he’d shown up with the boys. “They’re tabulae rasae,” he’d said as if he’d known the perfect