“Oh dear,” she said to Justine.
“I’m sunk,” Justine stated. “My father will never speak to me again if he finds out.”
Justine was a roundish young woman of twenty-six, but she wasn’t large enough to conceal a pregnancy. June didn’t like where this was going. “Well, he will eventually find out. Won’t he?”
“I’ll need an abortion, June. Right away.”
“One thing at a time,” June said. “Are you absolutely sure you’re—”
“I drove over to Fort Bragg and got one of those little tests. It was very positive.”
“They’re not all that accurate. You should have an examination. And then—”
“I know I’m pregnant! I’m not stupid!”
“Okay, okay…”
“Sorry. I’ve been a little testy lately.”
“Well, that’s understandable. But before we—”
“Can you even imagine how pissed off I am? All that sweet talk! All that business about having spiritual conflict because he couldn’t help himself where I was concerned! That his passion overcame his ethics, and even his commitment to God couldn’t stop him from loving me! That I’d tempt the very saints!”
“Does he say that to every—?”
“What bullshit! He probably got all his spiritual conflict from being scared shitless that his bully of a wife is going to kill him!”
“Justine, really, you don’t have to tell me all—”
“That’s probably a big fucking lie, too! That he hasn’t had sex with her in six years!”
“Really, this is none of my… Don’t they have a five-year—?”
“Do I look stupid?”
“N—” June tried to reply, with shaking head.
“Would I have let him if he hadn’t promised me we’d be together forever? That he wasn’t in love with her anymore, that he hadn’t been in years, and if it weren’t for the children—”
“Oh, famous last—” June began, in spite of herself.
“I should have known! He’s just another duplicitous, horny, groping son of a bitch! And I’m pregnant!”
With that, she melted into more helpless sobbing, and June resumed handing off tissues.
Was this the only person in Grace Valley who didn’t know Jonathan Wickham came on to practically every woman who crossed his path? June frowned as she patted Justine’s back. Justine, as far as she knew, didn’t have girlfriends. She lived a fairly isolated life as the youngest daughter of her widowed father. Standard Roberts owned the flower fields east of town, where he grew many of the flowers Justine sold, and Justine still lived in his house. She had since her mother died when she was sixteen, ten years ago. She probably cooked his meals, did his laundry and cleaned the house. He was a hard man, bitter and unfriendly. Shoot, maybe Justine didn’t know about Jonathan! Who was going to tell her?
Here it was. Here was how his shenanigans could hurt.
“Justine, we can deal with this situation, but you’re going to have to get a grip. And we can’t solve this whole thing tonight. I’ll see you first thing in the morning and—”
“Can you believe how he used me?” she sobbed.
“There’s a lot of hysteria about this event right now,” June said. “Let’s try to maintain a—”
“The bastard! Man, what a guy will say to get laid!”
“I realize you’re overwrought, but—”
“I wonder how Mrs. Wickham will take the news. I bet she’ll kill the little dickhead!”
“Now just hold it!” June shouted. Justine’s head snapped up and June’s eyes blazed. “I realize you’re very angry,” June said.
“Totally pissed,” Justine corrected, but she did so with some control.
“Whatever. Just get a grip before someone gets hurt.”
“Someone has!”
“Let’s concentrate on resolving this rather than making it worse. Shall we?”
Justine slowly and perhaps reluctantly nodded. June let out her breath in a sigh of relief. Boy, this could get ugly. There was not only a wife, a girlfriend, a bunch of offspring and a pregnancy here, but a congregation. A small-town congregation that was heavily populated with women who were more than ready to pull the plug on the womanizing preacher. The shit could really hit the fan.
“What I’d like you to do, Justine, is try to get some rest tonight without doing anything more to escalate this drama. Then first thing in the morning, I’ll meet you here for an exam, okay? Let’s get the facts right before we go in search of a solution. Then, once we know exactly what we’re dealing with, we can—”
June was cut short by the ringing of the phone. She reached for the receiver. “I’m sure you’ll make a good decision once you’ve heard all the facts and all the options, hmm?”
“I guess,” Justine said, not entirely mollified.
“Excuse me,” June said. “Hello, June Hudson…yes…yes…okay, please take a breath…you administered mouth-to-mouth? Uh-huh? He’s breathing again? Okay, look at his nail beds. Okay, how about his mouth? Tongue and gums? Pale, blue, rosy, bright red? Okay, here’s what you do. Run the shower hot and get a good steam going in the bathroom. Go sit in there with the baby. No, you hold him, Julianna. No, he’s going to be fine. We don’t know yet, do we? But if it’s croup or bronchitis or something like that, you might as well get started loosening it up while I drive. No, he’s going to be fine, just do as I say. I’m on my way. I’ll be on the cell.”
She put the phone down and looked at Justine. “You heard,” she said. “It’s Julianna Dickson’s baby—wasn’t breathing and is now blue around the gills. I have to hurry. Sadie!”
The dog came to her at once, ready for a house call.
“Of course,” Justine said. She’d grown a bit pale.
June was standing in her office door, fingers on the light switch, Sadie at her side. “Now,” she said.
“Oh!” Justine said, jumping up. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry to have bothered—”
“No bother. See you in the morning. Sadie, let’s go!”
June had the lights out, the clinic’s back door locked and the engine started in the Jeep in less than twenty seconds. And Sadie, learning to be a doctor’s dog, was in the passenger seat beside her in a flash. This was how she normally moved—like her pants were on fire, not like she was slogging through wet sand.
Route 482 was faster. It never even crossed June’s mind that it was the site of the accident. All she could think of was getting to Julianna and the baby. They were excellent, resourceful, educated parents; they would do everything right. But the reality was that sometimes everything was not enough.
Julianna had called earlier in the day to report that the baby had a sniffle, but no fever. June had told her to “nurse the baby through it,” for there was no sign of the infant developing worse upper respiratory symptoms. The steam room June had suggested was a shot in the dark, plus something to keep them busy and close to the baby. Julianna had just found the child lifeless, bluish, and had brought him back with resuscitation. It could be SIDS and have nothing to do with a cold or upper respiratory infection.
June, Oh God, June, he wasn’t breathing! I don’t know how long he’d been without oxygen!
In all these years and all these babies, June had never heard that kind of panicked call from the Dicksons.
She flew around the curve known as Angel’s Pass and there, in a flash of light, she met the headlights of an oncoming car. She pulled hard right, felt the scrape of rocks and logs as she went off the shoulder. She pulled hard left, seeing no sign of the other car, and attempted to correct her mistake, but it was too late. She fishtailed in the gravel, hit a tree hard enough to bounce off, and the Jeep spun crazily around. Her head broke the glass of the door window as the vehicle skidded into a row of pines. Sadie squeaked in either pain or fear, tossed around the inside of the Jeep like a rag doll. Everything went black.
The underside of the Jeep scraped over metal refuse left from the earlier accident
. There was a spark. Then a flash. Then a hot glow as the belly of the Jeep caught fire.
June felt strong hands in her armpits, pulling her free. Her legs snagged on jagged metal and scraped over broken glass, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She groaned, feeling the heat of the fire on her legs as she cleared the wreckage. Then she was aware of being lifted into capable arms and carried away from the fire and over the road. She could hear Sadie yapping at their side. “Good girl,” the man said. June didn’t recognize his voice, but Sadie calmed and only “talked” in her sweet, throaty way. June was overcome by a sense of well-being even though she could hear the crackling and popping of her Jeep burning behind her.
As he carried her down the road, she sank into his arms. At peace. He had a leather and wood smoke smell about him. At least it wasn’t marijuana, she thought distractedly. With a blast, the Jeep exploded behind them and she flinched. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and immediately she felt safe again. The Jeep erupted in yet another huge blast and she thought of the oxygen she had been rushing to the Dickson’s.
“The baby,” she whispered, her hand searching her bloody head for a cut.
“Is there a baby in the car?” the man asked, surprised.
“No…the Dickson baby,” she said. “I have to…”
She felt him gently lay her on soft, velvety grass. Her hand was pulled away and replaced with a cool, damp rag. “I didn’t think I saw anyone else in there,” he said. “Your dog—she has a cut, but she’s okay I think.”
June pressed the rag against her head wound and blinked the blood out of her eyes. That was why she couldn’t see; she wasn’t blind after all. Even through closed eyes she could see the glow coming from the burning Jeep. “Oh no,” she cried. She could not take care of the town without the Jeep. She began to quietly sob.
“But you have your life,” he said. Had she expressed that thought aloud, she wondered? “Here, hold still.” He pulled the cloth away and rinsed it out in the shallow stream beside her. He wiped her eyes clean, then placed it again on her head, stifling the bleeding.
The next time he took it away, she could see clearly. He was a handsome and muscular man, but young. Not even thirty. He wore a homespun, collarless shirt. His hair and beard were dark, and the beard was real. His pants were held up with suspenders made of rope and his boots looked a hundred years old.
“Thank you,” she said weakly. “Who…who—” She was suddenly overcome with nausea. He must have seen the signs because he quickly raised her back and leaned her over to the side. She lost her dinner on the ground.
“Just relax. You’re going to be okay,” he said.
“Where did you come from?” she asked him.
“I live around here.”
“But where? I don’t… Who are you?”
“Just a neighbor, ma’am. Good thing I happened by. Here,” he said, taking the cloth again and rinsing it one more time. She saw then that he had an ax. He followed her eyes and smiled as he returned the rag to her cut. “It’s good I had it with me. I had to use it to get you out of that tangle.”
“You opened the Jeep with an ax?” she asked dumbly.
“There weren’t too many choices,” he said. He stood and hefted his ax. “I think you’ll be okay now. The fire is going to bring your friends to you.”
“You’re leaving?”
“No, I’ll be right over here,” he said, crossing the road in the direction of the burning Jeep.
Then someone was patting her cheeks to rouse her. “Doc,” he was saying. “Come on, Doc, this ain’t no time to play possum.” When she came to again she was looking into the beady eyes and matted beard of Cliff Bender. “Hey, Doc, hey! Come on, Doc!” She shook her head to clear her vision. She must have lost consciousness after the man had left her.
“Where…? Cliff?”
“Can you stand, Doc? Be a good idee t’git further away from that fire, you know what I mean. Just in case the trees take spark. Want me to carry you?”
Her hand was still pressing the rag against her head. “Did you do this?” she asked, lifting the rag.
“Naw, you must’a done it yourself. Took a nasty whack, did you?”
“Oh man,” she moaned. “Sadie?”
“She’s right here, Doc. Up we go…. On your feet now.”
With a hand under her elbow, he brought her upright. The world swam and she swooned against Cliff, nauseous again.
“Easy does ‘er,” he urged.
Before they’d taken twenty steps, June could hear sirens. “Cliff, did you see that man?”
“Who’s ‘at, Doc?”
“The man who pulled me out of the Jeep. He pulled me out and put this cloth on my head. Did you see him?”
“I got here right off, Doc. I was on the road when the Jeep blew. I reckon I’d a seen him if he was here.”
“He was here.” Or, she thought, I could have been hallucinating. She pulled the cloth off her head and studied it. It was not hers; it didn’t come from her medical bag or her Jeep. “He rinsed the rag in the stream,” she said.
“What stream is ‘at, Doc?”
“Why, the stream right over…” But she didn’t know where it was. “Do you think I might’ve crawled out?” she asked Cliff.
“Or maybe got throwed,” he suggested.
“Yeah,” she said. “Throwed.”
Tom was the first to arrive. He merely glanced at June before applying his fire extinguisher to the Jeep and surrounding brush. Cliff didn’t wait to be asked—he pulled a second extinguisher from the Chief’s Rover and gave assistance. They hadn’t made much progress when the volunteer fire department arrived with the only truck. Sam Cussler drove, and when he came to a stop Rob Gilmore, Scott Wiley, Chuck Burnham and Lee Stafford leaped off, dragged hoses and splattered flames. Soon after them, from both directions, came pickup trucks filled with men, sand, shovels, extinguishers, picks, pails and axes. A runaway fire in this part of the world could leave the mountains looking like the face of the moon. Firefighting was not only serious business, it was everyone’s business.
Tom crouched down in front of her. “What happened?”
“A car,” she said. “There was a car coming right at me.”
“Out here? There’s no car.”
“But I saw lights…coming at me…and then—” She pulled the rag off her head. “Oh brother, wait till I tell you what happened next.” There was a loud blast from the direction of her Jeep, now little more than a black cinder. “Oxygen tanks! Tom, I was on my way to the Dicksons. The baby had stopped breathing!”
“Okay, let’s go,” he said, helping her to her feet.
“Uh, Doc?” Cliff said. “It weren’t no car. Look there.” He pointed down the road a bit, to where the ground was freshly graded from the cleanup after Judge and Birdie’s accident. Pushed off to the side, barely visible from where they stood, was a rear windshield, whole and undamaged, leaning against a tree. Someone must have meant it for salvage, then overlooked it, clear and nearly invisible in the daytime. The reflection of flames and headlights bounced off it eerily.
She’d been nearly killed by her own reflection.
And saved by an angel?
Sixteen
June felt as though her head were caught in an ever-tightening vise. The morning light from the window was no help. She groaned and tried to sit up.
“Good morning, sunshine,” John Stone said.
She looked at him through swollen slits. There he was, jauntily dressed in his starched percale shirt, pressed pleated pants, tasseled loafers. In a town full of loggers, farmers, vintners and ranchers, John really stood out. This morning he carried a cup of tea and had a dish towel tucked into the waist of his slacks. My very own Mr. Jeeves, she thought.
“Wow,” she said weakly. “I must have really tied one on.”
“I have some Percodan for you,” he said. “After you’ve had a bite to eat.”
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you re
member?”
She closed her eyes briefly and it was all there. “Accident, fire, the Dicksons, the hospital….” Sadie lay beside her on the bed; a piece of scalp about the size of a silver dollar had been shaved and about a dozen stitches applied. In sudden panic June reached into her bedside table for a mirror. The cut on her forehead stretched into her hairline. It had been neatly stitched and discolored from the antiseptic, but her hair was all there.
“I wouldn’t shave your head there. You’d look pretty stupid if I had.”
“Whew. I figured your sense of style would come in handy eventually.”
“Your X ray was clean—no fracture. Mild concussion. Major head pain. I gave you some analgesic and brought you home. I thought I’d stay and make sure there were no complications. I guess you’re going to have to take the day off.”
She accepted the tea. “What about the baby?”
John reached into his pocket and brought forth a dog biscuit for Sadie, which she politely accepted. “His chest was clear, but the emergency room doctor thinks it’s possible they’re looking at a mitral valve stenosis. Julianna and Mike are taking him to a pediatric cardiologist today.”
“Oh dear. That’s going to be tough. That could mean heart surgery.”
“Maybe. But at least they caught it—that was a very close call. All kinds of close calls last night. Be right back,” he said. He returned with an English muffin on a tray.
“As valets go, you’re pretty good,” she said. “But I don’t know if I can eat.”
“You have to if I’m going to give you something for pain. It’s your only chance of keeping it down.”
“I guess. Where’s my dad?”
“I told him to go home and get some sleep. He’s going to have to take some of your patients today. I can cover most of them, but I’ll need some help.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “June, think maybe we need another doctor?”