Hand of Fate by Lis Wiehl Read Free Book Online Page A

arms.

    Chapter 9

Northwest Portland
    Forty blocks. That's how far it was to Good Samaritan Medical Center, yet it was still the closest hospital. But Allison would walk all day if she had to. She would walk until her feet fell off. Dear God, she prayed, protect these two precious innocents. And everyone else caught in this nightmare.
    At first she half ran, half walked, the child wailing and clutching her coat collar. Every block or two, Allison made herself stop and turn in a circle, her eyes looking for anyone searching for a lost child. She saw dozens of panicked people, but no one who seemed to belong to the little girl clinging to her. She spared a thought for Nicole and the juror. Loving God, watch over us . . . words that were part of the grace she and her husband Marshall said every evening and that she had never meant more than now.
    Allison's breath was coming in gasps, forcing her to slow to a fast walk. For a moment, she pressed one hand against her belly, checking in with that little hum she had been feeling for several weeks, the hum of connection. Still there. She shifted the little girl from one hip to the other. The child was finally quiet now, her face wet with tears. Her black hair fell to her shoulders, and in her ears were tiny sparkling stones. Her dark-green coat was a little too big for her, the sleeve edges frayed.
    "What's your name, sweetheart?" Allison tried.
    The girl's dark eyes stared into hers, but she didn't make a sound. Was she in shock? Or something worse?
    "My name's Allison. What's yours?"
    She still looked blank. What was the Spanish word for name? Something like yah-ma?
    "Yah-ma Allison," Allison ventured, pointing at her chest, still moving along as fast as she could. She had managed to put ten blocks between them and what was happening. At least here most people were on their feet. "Yah-ma Allison," she repeated, then turned her finger to point at the girl and raised her eyebrows. "Yah-ma?"
    "Estella," the girl answered. At least it sounded like that. She patted her own chest.
    "Okay," Allison said. "Estella." Her mood lightened a little. If only she could ask Estella where her mother and father were. If only the girl were old enough to reel off a phone number or an address. Or at least say if she felt sick.
    When she came to the freeway overpass, Allison's mouth fell open. Interstate 5 in both directions was bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye could see. A person could have walked down the river of cars and never touched the ground. And they weren't moving at all. Ambulances, cops, and the desperate were using the shoulders, but there were already places where these were choked off too.
    By the time they were a half mile from the hospital, Allison was overwhelmingly thankful that she had worn flats. One of Estella's small feet rested just where the bulge of her pregnancy was beginning to show. The weight had been nothing when she had begun her mad dash from downtown. Now her hip and shoulder ached with each step. The girl's head drooped against Allison's shoulder. Either she was used to strangers, or she was tired, or--and Allison didn't want to think too much about this--she was getting sick and no longer had the energ y t o fuss. They were in Northwest Portland now, an older part of town where the roads were notoriously narrow. Today they were gridlocked, filled with cars whose panicked drivers were convinced they had only a few minutes before they would die. Ambulance drivers cycled through various siren tones and even squawked out orders on their speakers, but there was no place for people to go.
    One ambulance simply took to the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians before it. It didn't seem like the sidewalk would be wide enough, but the ambulance scraped between the building and the parking meters with less than an inch on either side, and then forced its way back into traffic a block later.
    By the time Allison reached the hospital, it had been more than an hour since the alarms