Deep in the Valley

  A little huff of laughter escaped her. “What did I do before you came along?”

  “The Jeep, June. Total toast. What are we going to do about that?”

  “It’ll have to be replaced. I’ll have to lease something and call a medical supplier to load it. I don’t think Tom and the deputies can get us through much more than a couple of days without a medical vehicle. Talk about your headaches.”

  “Count me in on that expense.”

  “I’ll get reimbursed over time,” she said.

  “Great. Then we can both get reimbursed over time. This is my town now, too, you know.”

  “John, I don’t want you to take on too many of these responsibilities until you’re sure you’re going to stay permanently.”

  “I’ll make a few phone calls today, get some prices,” he said, ignoring her. “And, if your head lets up, call your insurance company.”

  “All that stuff is at the clinic….”

  “Better yet, I’ll have Jessie do it. The girl’s a paper genius.”

  June took a small bite and chewed. “John, you have no idea how much I appreciate all this.”

  “Sure I do. And you’re welcome. But you’d do the same for me.”

  I would now, she thought. As she ate her muffin, let John fluff her pillows, and accepted some pain pills, she wondered how she could ever have doubted this guy. With a wife like Susan, how could he get by with anything? And if Susan and Julianna were friends, there was another vote of confidence, because Julianna was not only one of the nicest people in Grace Valley, she also had the best instincts—the single thing that had probably saved her baby’s life last night.

  Besides all that, John had stitched up June and her dog and stayed the night to be sure she was all right. Could somebody that sensitive be bad?

  She made up her mind. She couldn’t condemn him based on the nervous indictment of a young patient who wouldn’t even explain the circumstances of her complaint! She sighed deeply, at last convinced in her own mind.

  “These will knock you out,” John said, shaking out a couple of pills. “That’s about the best medicine right now. Stay in bed…sleep it off. You’ll feel much better tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, John. I’d be lost without you.”

  Sleep she did. And dream—bright, vivid dreams about the forest, filled with animals and angels. There was a brightly colored parrot diving at her from the highest branches of pine trees, screeching and cawing. She finally realized the phone was ringing insistently.

  She rolled over and checked the clock first: 3:00 p.m. She was groggy from the pain medication. She grabbed the phone. “Hullo?” she said thickly.

  “Dr. June Hudson, please,” a woman’s voice requested.

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “Dr. Wendy Feldtbrow,” she said.

  June almost said, “Not really! Dr. Felt Brow?” But she caught herself. “Um, this is June Hudson. How can I help you?”

  “I understand you’ve been doing a background check on Dr. John Stone?”

  She sat up unsteadily, groping both physically and mentally. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a background check. John is seeing patients in our town clinic and I’ve been checking his references. Strictly routine stuff.”

  “Hmm. Well, it’s a good thing I called. You wouldn’t refer to his references as routine if you knew.”

  “Knew?”

  “About the sexual assault charges.”

  June literally swooned. Next to murder, there couldn’t possibly be anything more serious to allege against a physician, especially an OB. She repeated the charge back into the phone, her voice breathless. “Sexual assault?” she asked weakly.

  “I can tell you had no idea.”

  “Do you think he’d be seeing patients in my clinic if I knew?” she asked incredulously. June got out of bed, carried the cordless with her to the kitchen and started making coffee. She wasn’t sure if the dull ache in her head was a result of the accident or the phone call. “Can you be more specific, please?”

  “Well, let’s see…. I ran into one of the staff of the Fairfield Women’s Clinic. That’s how I learned you’d been asking about Dr. Stone. You must have talked to someone at the clinic.”

  “David Fairfield,” June said, giving the coffee an extra scoop. She wished she could take it as an IV push. “But I assure you, he never—”

  Wendy Feldtbrow laughed softly. “Well, there you go. He might have mentioned to one of his staff that you’d inquired after Dr. Stone’s reputation and it wandered through the grapevine to me. I am a surgeon and at one time had privileges at some of the same hospitals as Dr. Stone. We knew each other. Pretty well, actually.”

  “And? What are the details of this assault?” June pressed.

  “If I could, I’d like to start at the beginning. I also knew his wife and we had several mutual friends. John was a good doctor, but he started having professional problems. He was faced with a patient lawsuit, he was reprimanded for dating another patient while he was still married to his wife, he was drinking too much, incurred terrible debt troubles, began making mistakes, generally screwing up.

  “For example, he missed a delivery entirely because he didn’t answer his page even though he was on call. Fairfield suspended him, he was evicted from his apartment, his car was repossessed, and there was even some talk about prescription drug abuse. That was just gossip, of course, but if you could have seen him at the time…”

  “Jesus!” June stared at the coffeepot, willing it to brew faster.

  “I felt so sorry for him, Dr. Hudson. His friends were bailing out on him left and right. I should have known better. After all, I am a doctor. But I offered moral support. As I said, I knew him to be a good doctor at one time. I found myself alone in his company and he became…well, amorous. And insistent. When I was adamant that we not get involved romantically, he assaulted me. He attempted to rape me.”

  “My God.” June thought of John, passing her the cup of tea, the dish towel hanging like an apron from his waist, the dog biscuit for Sadie. His lovely wife, darling little daughter, his dopey handsomeness. She couldn’t put this all together. But if he had been in trouble and addicted to pills and alcohol…

  “I called the police, naturally. I was ready to push it, to file charges and take it all the way, but the deputy prosecutor didn’t think it would fly in court. You know the drill—John’s word against mine. But he was fired from the Fairfield Clinic not long after that.”

  “Fired? He didn’t say he was fired!”

  The doctor snorted impatiently. “Why would he? I’m sure there are a million things he’s covering up. I felt pretty stupid, I can tell you. After all, I’d heard the nurses talk! He was a known flirt. He was accused of sexual harassment on several occasions. I’m sure one of the reasons the Fairfield Clinic couldn’t wait to get rid of him was his known problems with women.”

  “Dr. Fairfield didn’t say he was fired, either!”

  “Well, I can’t explain that. Nor can I tell you the outcome of all his other problems. Everything was kept very hush-hush. I mean, the Fairfield Clinic is awfully prestigious. They wouldn’t want it to get around that one of their doctors—”

  “Yes, but surely there was talk! You must have heard something about the lawsuit? Dating a patient? Drug abuse?”

  “I think I might have heard things, if I hadn’t been the one to accuse him of sexual assault. That kind of took me out of the loop, if you know what I mean.”

  “I would think that very fact would have your colleagues running to you with each new tale!” June said.

  “Well, it seems to have had the opposite effect.”

  “And all this happened…when?”

  “Let’s see. Summer. Seven years ago. He left the Bay Area soon after the trouble started, and I was a practicing surgeon until last year. Now I’m doing some research.”

  “My God. You’ll have to forgive me, Dr. Felt Good—”

  “That’s Feldtbrow.
”

  “Oh dear, sorry. You’ve caught me at a double disadvantage. First of all, the shock of this story has me speechless. And, if I seem a little dense, it’s because I was asleep when you called. I took a big whack on the head last night. Car accident.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “So I need a little time to digest this.”

  “Of course you do!”

  “This is very unsettling, to say the least. Do you have any documentation I might look at? Your police report, perhaps?”

  “I might have that somewhere…filed away. I’ll look around for it. Of course, there is one place I know you’ll find the documentation you’ll need. The police department. This is all a matter of public record. Unless he’s somehow managed to get the records purged.”

  “I suppose,” June said, wondering how she could find out. “And could you give me a phone number? I have to think this through…decide what I’m going to do next…and I may want to talk to you again.”

  “Absolutely.”

  June scribbled out the name and number and they said their goodbyes.

  John Stone was a roller coaster ride. Boring nerd? Deviant? Sweet caretaker? Abuser?

  June called the clinic to see how the day had gone. Apparently Elmer and John had managed very well; even Charlotte was in a good mood. “Just like old times,” she said. “Having your dad take charge of the office again.”

  “Well, I hate to upset your routine, but I’m planning to come back tomorrow.”

  “Isn’t that a bit soon?” Charlotte asked.

  “For you, probably. For me, not at all. And tell me, how is Dr. Stone holding up? I believe he was up all night, sitting vigil over my split skull.”

  “He’s starting to wilt,” Charlotte said. “Looks like he should call it a day pretty soon. But he said he wants to go out to your place to check on you before going home.”

  “No!” June looked down at the tablet on which she’d written Dr. Wendy Feldtbrow and a phone number. She ripped the page off and folded it in half. “I mean, that’s not at all necessary.” She couldn’t see John now for she wouldn’t be able to conceal her concern and confusion and anxiety about him. “Tell him to send Elmer out here. I’m perfectly all right. I don’t even have a headache. But I do want to borrow my dad’s truck. I have a couple of errands.”

  “You shouldn’t be driving.”

  She didn’t feel like arguing with Charlotte. “Fine, I’ll let my dad drive. And maybe have him take me out to dinner. But I don’t need John tonight.”

  “You sure?”

  “Oh yes. I’m sure.”

  Elmer arrived at six. He gave two sharp taps on the front door to warn her, then opened it. “June?” he called. “You see this out here?”

  “See what?”

  “You better come look.”

  Sadie bounded out the front door ahead of her. When June got to the porch, she gasped. It was covered with gifts. There were flowers, plants, casseroles, cakes, pies, cookies, cards, stuffed animals, embroidered pillows, bows, bells, an ice chest filled with tea and lemonade, a daisy afghan, a stack of paperback novels tied up with a ribbon, videos, playing cards, a get-well poster—everything but a side of beef. She had never heard a single car engine; Sadie had never raised an alarm.

  “Looks like the whole town has been here, “she said, stunned.

  “A long way from a dozen eggs or a basket of fruit, eh, June?” he asked.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

  “Makes a body feel it might’ve been worth it to take a sick day, after all,” Elmer suggested.

  She realized then that perhaps they never had. Either of them. Oh, they’d had the occasional day off, even that rare case of the flu or a sprain. But neither of them had ever been seriously ill or hurt. The people in town must have been terrified at the mere thought they might lose their doctor.

  With that, she smiled. Hadn’t she just been thinking, with all the fuss the women made over John Stone, that she’d never had that kind of welcome? Come to that, she’d had to live with the fact that there were still people who sought out her father first.

  So this was what they really felt, she thought with secret satisfaction. They loved her. They valued her, after all.

  “Good thing you weren’t hurt bad,” Elmer said. “You’d have to rent a Quonset hut.”

  Seventeen

  June knew with reasonable certainty that Tom could be found at the café in the morning. In fact, it was typical for their paths to cross several times a day, whether as they were catching a meal or a coffee break, or when some medical emergency threw them together. Like the accident. But with a sense of urgency, she decided to see him at once.

  “I’d like to run out to the Toopeeks,” June told Elmer as they were clearing the front porch of gifts. “And…let’s take some of this stuff out there. Much as I appreciate the gestures, there’s no way I can make use of it all.”

  “Goody,” Elmer said. “I haven’t had a piece of Philana’s pie in weeks. You know, she makes a new pie every afternoon. Puts George Fuller and Burt Crandall completely to shame. As I remember, she could make ’em that good even back when she was working with nothing but a campfire and mud-pit oven.”

  Back when…

  When June was small her favorite thing in the whole world was to spend the night with the Toopeek family. They had a fire in the yard and slept in bedrolls on the hard-packed dirt floor of their dark, musty little house. It was more of a lean-to than a cabin. The family had moved to the valley when Tom was three, the fourth of what would be seven Toopeek children.

  Their barren camplike life-style was not some Native American custom, but due to poverty. By almost anyone’s standards. But June never remembered a time that she considered the Toopeeks poor. She didn’t even realize they’d been poor until junior high, when they weren’t anymore. And she was nearly grown before she learned that a few Valley people had had to fight against their neighbors to support Lincoln’s right to settle where he had. Elmer, Judge—who had not yet been a judge but had always been called one—Sam, Myrna, Bud Burnham, old Cliff Bender—who had been old since June was a kid—and Mikos Silva… They were an odd lot. It seemed some of the people in the area had a problem with Indians living off the reservation. What they didn’t understand was there was no reservation in California for Lincoln and Philana; they had left their people in Oklahoma. But apparently there were a number of white townspeople who would have run the Toopeeks off if they hadn’t been stopped. Many times June wished she could have witnessed that battle.

  Marilyn Hudson not only defended the Toopeeks’ right to homestead, she also befriended Philana. The women took to each other at once; they shared their philosophies and customs regarding domestic arts, child rearing and marriage. But the idea of June sleeping overnight there horrified her. “They sleep on the ground, Elmer,” she had complained.

  And Elmer countered, “They sleep on bedrolls and keep each other very well. Let her go. She’ll learn something.”

  June didn’t learn the things her mother had envisioned. She didn’t learn how lucky she was that her family had a Maytag washer and Frigidaire refrigerator. Instead, she learned the names of all the stars, how to cook fish on a stick over the fire, how to track a deer by its droppings, how to make an herb plaster to cure poison ivy and oak. She ran wild with Tom and a couple of the other Valley boys. She went home dirty, exhilarated and smelling gamey.

  Lincoln and Philana had been in their twenties when they’d hobbled into town in a dilapidated old pickup with four little kids and a fifth imminent. They’d had some sort of disagreement with their families and left them, using the last little bit of their money to buy a small parcel of land from an aging farmer. They lived first in tents—a state of affairs that drove some Valley people crazy—then they built the little cabin with trees they cleared and cut with primitive tools. That cabin was still the anchor of the current house, the house Tom and Ursula had built to hold their
own brood of five. Lincoln and Philana still lived in the original cabin, though they shared the rest of Tom’s house.

  Ursula was Navajo. She and Tom had met when both were students at Sacramento State University. She often joked that she had to get him quick before he went all the way back to the Cherokee Nation for a wife. Tom, of all the Toopeek children, was the one most interested in preserving some native customs; he even took his degree in history. But then law enforcement drew him, first in Sacramento and eventually back home. Most of Grace Valley welcomed him back gratefully, in need of an experienced lawman, but there were still those who didn’t think he and his should even live there, much less hold a position as authoritative as chief of police. They were probably the same ones who wouldn’t use June as a doctor because she was a woman.

  It was from Ursula that June learned how ethnocentric the tribes were. You weren’t simply Native American, you were Cherokee or Sioux, Navajo or Cheyenne. And despite the fact that the Toopeeks had left their reservation and taken land among the whites, they clung to old ways and were not quick to change. Recently, within the past year, June had heard Lincoln say to his daughter-in-law, “That may be the way the Navajo do it, Ursula, but the Cherokee do it so.”

  Of all the things June learned from the Toopeeks, the most important was their sense of abundance. Even when they had next to nothing, they always seemed to have a little left over to share. Whereas Elmer would grouse at June, “Turn that damn light off—you think we’re made of money?” Lincoln would say to her, “Our table is your table, and bring your mother and father.”

  When Elmer and June arrived at the Toopeek house, there was a light on in every window and the glow from a campfire behind the house. There were strict burning regulations in northern California, but the old father of the police chief would have his ritual fire whenever he pleased.

  “June!” Tanya Toopeek said in surprise when she answered the door. “You’re just in time. Grandfather is praying for you.”

  “Good deal. Get your brothers and sisters to get some stuff out of the truck, will you?”