Kitabı oxu: «Silent Pledge»

Critical Praise for
HANNAH ALEXANDER’S
Novels

SILENT PLEDGE

“I found a gaggle of caring, interesting people who stole my heart with their struggles and made me cheer with their triumphs. Bravo!”

—Lisa Samson

SOLEMN OATH

“Solemn Oath absolutely hit the ball out of the park. Hannah Alexander is going to have a hard time writing fast enough to keep up with reader demand.”

—Debi Stack

SACRED TRUST

“Alexander is great at drawing the reader into her story line and keeping them hooked until the resolution of the plot.”

— Christian Retailing

A KILLING FROST

“Running dialogue and a few twists will keep romantic suspense fans coming back for more.”

—Publishers Weekly

DOUBLE BLIND

“Native American culture clashes with Christian principles in the freshly original plot.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

GRAVE RISK

“The latest in Alexander’s Hideaway series is filled with mystery and intrigue. Readers familiar with the series will appreciate how the author keeps the characters fresh and appealing.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Silent Pledge
Hannah Alexander

www.millsandboon.co.uk

In memory of our beloved cousin,

Mark Mercer Patterson,

December 24, 1954 to April 14, 2000.

Cheryl’s childhood playmate and defender.

May his courage and tender heart live on in the

character of Clarence Knight.

We wish to thank Joan Marlow Golan and her

excellent staff for giving us this opportunity to share

our books with a new reading audience.

SILENT PLEDGE

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

Questions for Discussion

Prologue

O dira Bagby sat on the edge of her great-granddaughter’s twin-size bed, soaking a thin washrag with water from an old mixing bowl. She squeezed out the excess and applied the rag to Crystal’s hot tummy. Odira winced every time seven-year-old Crystal coughed.

The hoarse crackle and wheeze sounded loud in their small three-room apartment, and the little girl bent double with the effort to breathe. Her pale, blue-veined face was flushed, and her mouth opened wide as she gasped for breath. The sound of her struggle was worse than a nightmare. Odira caught herself automatically trying to breathe harder and heavier, as if she could take in extra air for Crystal.

The room smelled like Vicks, even though Odira knew that rubbing the ointment on Crystal’s bony chest probably wouldn’t help. It’d never helped before, except to ease Odira’s arthritis for a while and make her feel as though she was at least doing something. Her hands always stayed sore and swollen from the thumping she did on Crystal’s back and chest. Crystal had cystic fibrosis.

“Gramma,” Crystal whispered, stiffening her neck to push the bare sound from her throat. She reached up and pressed her hand against her chest. “Hurts.”

“I know, little ’un.” Odira felt the tears in her eyes that Crystal never cried. “We’ll get help.” Heaving herself up, she lumbered the few feet across the room to her own bed.

She peered at the numbers on the secondhand alarm clock. It was almost midnight on a Saturday night. What was she supposed to do? Crystal’s mom had disappeared last year—and Odira didn’t know who the daddy was. The grandma, Odira’s sweet Millie, was dead. The grandpa “didn’t want nothin’ to do” with the whole mess. There was nobody else.

Bedsprings cried out in alarm as Odira sat down and picked up the receiver of her phone. She leaned forward and peered at the list of emergency numbers on the bedside stand. There was no E.R. in Knolls since the explosion last fall. Odira couldn’t afford a car on her social security, so she couldn’t drive Crystal to another E.R. She didn’t want to wait.

She did all she knew to do. She dialed the home number of Dr. Mercy Richmond.

Buck Oppenheimer woke to silent winter darkness in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Kendra. The room felt like the inside of the unheated toolshed out back, and for a moment he wondered if the pilot light in the central heating system had gone out again.

But as he listened to small sounds gradually creep to him through the house, he heard the furnace popping, and he felt warm air coming from the vent on his side of the bed.

So why was it so cold?

He listened for the soft sigh of his wife’s breathing but didn’t hear anything. He reached toward her and felt the emptiness of icy sheets.

“Kendra? Honey?”

He didn’t hear any sounds coming from the bathroom and no sound of drawers clattering or silverware clinking in the kitchen—sometimes when Kendra couldn’t sleep she’d go in and make some toast.

And sometimes when she couldn’t sleep…

Buck threw back his covers and scrambled out of bed, switching on the lamp. The bedroom door hung open, but there was no light coming from the rest of the house. He didn’t like the feel of this. He pulled on the jeans he’d worn home from the fire station a few hours ago. They smelled like smoke.

“Kendra?” he called again.

No answer.

She hadn’t said much when he came home two hours late from his shift tonight. There’d been a flue fire out in an old home north of town, and he couldn’t get away any sooner. Not that she got mad anymore when that happened, but ever since the arson and the hospital explosion last fall, Kendra was scared. Which was understandable—her fireman father had been killed a year and a half ago in the line of duty. Kendra said she knew that would happen to Buck someday, too.

He went into the kitchen. Kendra wasn’t there, but the door to the back porch stood wide open. Icy January wind blew in, nipping at the bare skin of his chest and shoulders. He stepped to the screen door and looked out, curling his toes up from the cold linoleum.

“Kendra?”

Quiet. Had she gone out again? He fought back the memory of two months ago when he woke up at 1:00 a.m. to find her coming through this very back door, a sweater slung over her arm, her makeup smeared, and the sound of a car motor heading off down the street. She’d acted high on something—not booze, but something. And, man, did they ever have it out that night!

Now he was hearing a car again…the sound of a motor, its chug-chug-chug reaching him through the dark. Music drifted faintly through the icy air. He felt the familiar pain rip through him.

Was she doing it again? After all he’d done for her, didn’t she even love him enough to be true?

He let out a deep breath and watched the white puff drift from his mouth. The air was as cold as he felt inside. How much was a man supposed to take?

Kendra’s mood swings were getting worse. If she wasn’t hiding out at home crying, she was laughing too loudly and flirting with all the guys down at the fire station, going to shows in Branson with her girlfriends, and buying things he couldn’t afford on his fireman’s salary, like lots of jewelry and expensive clothes. There was no middle ground.

He pushed the screen door open and stepped on the back porch, bracing himself in case she came walking in drunk, or maybe even with another guy.

He still heard the car motor idling, but the sound didn’t come from the road. And he recognized that idle. With a deepening frown, he looked toward the small garage where Kendra kept her five-year-old Ford Taurus. The music was clearer now. Clint Black. Kendra’s favorite. The doors were all shut.

But that was stupid. She knew better than to leave the motor running.

“No,” he whispered, then more loudly, “Kendra, no!” He reached inside and flipped on the porch light, then turned and raced down the wooden back steps and across the grass to the side entrance to the garage. Through the windowpane he could see the glow of the car’s interior light, but he couldn’t see around the shelving by the door to tell where she was.

He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

No answer. And she had the only key to the garage—she’d lost the spare one last month.

Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden-brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser—dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope….

She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job.

A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

“I…I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

“So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blackened her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

“Come ’ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

She took a step backward.

His expression didn’t change. “I said come ’ere.”

Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed—if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this—and then she would head to another town and never come back.

“You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow-brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

“Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been testing…

Suddenly his eyes narrowed, and his whole body surged toward her like a black cloud. His right arm rose, and she ducked as his hand came down on her shoulder. She winced and cried out and tried to get away. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt and jerked her toward him. She wrenched away and tried to run, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her.

She fell face-first onto the wood floor. Pain hammered her right cheekbone and elbow as she closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, waiting for a kick in the side or a smack in the head.

He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked back. Hard.

She flinched, but by now she was used to pain. As he lifted her, she drew her feet under her and swung up and around with her left elbow and slammed him in the jaw.

He grunted and let her go.

She stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself and kicked him hard, low in the gut. Without waiting to see what he would do, she ducked past him and ran for the kitchen, holding her hand over her eye.

He screamed a curse and came for her. There was no time to grab a coat, let alone the duffel bag. She just ran out the back door and down the steps and kept on running. She didn’t care where to.

Chapter One

T he crunch of tires on gravel echoed across the unpaved parking lot as Dr. Mercy Richmond drove into the apartment complex where Odira Bagby lived with her great-granddaughter, Crystal Hollis. A bare lightbulb glowed over the small concrete front stoop at the door nearest the alley so she’d know which apartment was Odira’s.

Mercy pulled as close to the steps as she could and reached over to turn up the heat in her car. The curtain at the window beside Odira’s front door was open, revealing a front room with an old threadbare sofa and a straight-backed chair crammed into a ten-by-ten-foot space, along with an old TV resting on a nightstand. An off-white lace doily topped the TV. Mercy had never been here before, but she knew the sixty-six-year-old woman supported herself and seven-year-old Crystal on social security. She couldn’t get a place at Sunrise Villa, the retirement apartments, because the new management didn’t want children.

Before Mercy could shift the gear into Park, the front door opened and out lumbered Odira, all two hundred seventy pounds of her, with wraithlike Crystal beside her, bundled all the way to her nose in a thick quilt.

As Mercy stepped out of the car into the icy wind and hurried around to open the door for them, Crystal started coughing again—the same hoarse, dry sound Mercy had heard in the background when Odira called a few minutes ago. It was typical of a child sick with bronchitis, maybe even pneumonia, brought on by the specter of cystic fibrosis.

“Hope you didn’t have to leave your own little girl at home alone for this,” Odira said in her booming baritone voice that always seemed to shake the walls when she came to the clinic.

“No, I dropped Tedi off at my mom’s on the way here.” Mercy got Crystal and Odira settled in the car, slid into the driver’s seat and pulled onto the quiet street for the five-minute drive to her clinic.

At the first stop sign, she noticed Odira sniffing…great, heaving sniffles. Tears, which she obviously could not contain, paraded down her cheeks. Odira was known to talk more than she breathed, a counterpoint to Crystal’s silent watchfulness. But not tonight.

Mercy cast a second concerned glance at the woman, where the dash lights illumined her broad, heavy face and rusty-iron hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of dull scissors. Beside her, Crystal’s face was thin and pale, filled with a sad knowledge. She raised her hand to cover her mouth when she coughed, just as Odira had taught her to. Her stout, clubbed fingers demonstrated the effects of oxygen deprivation to her extremities throughout her battle with CF.

“Are you two warm enough?” Mercy asked.

“I’m plenty warm.” Odira looked down at Crystal and wrapped a thick arm around her. Worn patches at the sleeves of her thirty-year-old coat had been carefully mended. “You okay?”

Crystal nodded and ducked her head into her great-grandmother’s side.

“What’s Crystal’s temperature?” Mercy hadn’t bothered to inquire about that over the phone because she knew that if Odira was desperate enough to call for help, Crystal was sick.

“Hundred and two.” Odira’s voice sounded like a solid mass in the confined space. “Couldn’t get her temp down, and the coughing just kept getting worse. Think she might have pneumonia again.” She sniffed and wiped at her wet face with the back of her hand. “Sorry…just couldn’t figure out nothing else to do but call you.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Odira.” Mercy laid her heater-warmed hand on Crystal’s face. Yes, it was hot. Crystal’s underdeveloped body was always fighting some kind of an infection. She’d had bouts of both bronchitis and pneumonia since Odira took over her care last year. Who knew what nightmares the child had suffered before that? She talked more now than she had when she first came to Knolls after her mother disappeared. She was healthier, too. That didn’t surprise Mercy. Love and kindness had great power over illness, and nobody could envelop a little girl in love the way big, awkward Odira Bagby could.

Mercy shared the hope with Odira that they would see Crystal live to adulthood, maybe even into her forties, with the new treatments and increased knowledge about this debilitating genetic disease. And by the time Crystal reached her forties, maybe they would have a cure.

As Crystal’s coughing and wheezing increased, Mercy turned onto Maple, the street that fronted Knolls Community Hospital and her clinic. The hospital came into view, glowing a dark rose color in the security lights set strategically around the grounds. Mercy slowed to the required fifteen miles per hour as she passed the property, set in a scenic residential section of town, with plenty of open lawn and evergreens. Bare branches of oaks and maples jutted out from between humps of burlap-protected rose plants.

She looked up to see, without surprise, that the administrator’s office was illuminated on the second floor. Mrs. Pinkley had opted to move her operations into an unused storage area rather than take the time to repair her own suite, which had been damaged in the explosions when the E.R. was destroyed. The E.R. was Estelle Pinkley’s first priority. Knolls Community usually employed about two hundred fifty people, many of whom would be out of work until they had the west wing with an emergency department. Estelle’s sense of civic responsibility had impacted her career as prosecuting attorney for a great deal of her life. Why stop just because she’d changed careers? At seventy, she was a more powerful force than a whole roomful of attorneys.

Odira sniffed and wiped her face again. “Sure do miss Dr. Bower.” Her heavy voice had an unaccustomed catch of sadness. “Bet you do, too. Bet you get all kinds of calls like this since there ain’t an E.R.”

Mercy reached over and patted Odira’s fleshy shoulder. “You know I wanted to come.” But what the woman said was true. Mercy’s practice had been overwhelmed the past three months. She missed Lukas a lot, and not just for his professional ability.

Lukas Bower, the acting E.R. director, was working temporarily at a hospital on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, a three-hour drive from Knolls. Patients and hospital staff members continually asked Mercy when he’d be back. She wondered, too. Nobody missed him more than she did.

“Don’t seem right he should be out of work just because some monster wanted to set fire to the E.R.” Odira pulled Crystal closer. “Don’t seem right we should all be suffering like this.”

“I feel the same way.” Mercy looked down at Crystal. “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

“My chest hurts.”

Mercy bit her lip and prayed silently, the way Lukas had taught her to do. God, please help me with this one. She’s so young. Why is she suffering like this? The question came up often lately in Mercy’s mind, and after all the talking she and Lukas had done about the subject, she still hadn’t found a satisfactory answer. Every time she found herself questioning God about it, she felt afraid. Sometimes it seemed as if all those great, profound truths she and Lukas had discussed last summer and autumn had deserted her, and that her new belief in Christ was just a fairy tale.

She turned into the dark parking area of her clinic, less than a block from the hospital. “Let’s get inside and get a breathing treatment started.”

Clarence Knight just happened to be in Ivy Richmond’s kitchen, raiding her refrigerator and practically swallowing three frozen chocolate chip cookies whole, when the phone rang for the second time Saturday night.

He jerked backward and knocked his head on the overhead compartment where Ivy had been hiding the treats from him. He thumped his elbow on the door and spilled crumbs down the front of his size 6XL T-shirt in his rush to get to the phone before the ringing could wake Ivy. If she came in and found him eating, she would roast him whole over an open fire, all four hundred twenty pounds of him.

He jerked up the receiver, then realized his mouth was still full. He chewed and swallowed. “Mmm-hmm?”

“Hello? Who is this?” It was a man’s voice. Sounded familiar. Sounded upset. “Clarence?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Is Dr. Mercy there?”

Clarence swallowed again. “Hmm-mmm.”

“Do you know where she is? This is Buck. I just tried her at home, and I couldn’t get her. I need her bad. Kendra tried to—” His voice broke. “She needs help. I’ve got to get her somewhere…got to get her on some oxygen.” There was another crack in his voice. “Clarence? You there?”

Clarence swallowed again. “Hol’ up, Buck. Ith’s okay.” One more swallow. There. “Mercy dropped Tedi off here a little bit ago, ’cause she was on her way to the clinic for some emergency. What’s the matter with Kendra?”

Buck took a breath. “She tried to kill herself. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She was running her car motor out in the garage when I found her. The doors and windows were all shut.”

Clarence grunted as if he’d been hit in the gut with a football. “Oh, man.” Poor Kendra. And poor Buck. “She okay? Where are you?” He knew they were still having trouble in their marriage, but was her life bad enough for her to want to die?

“We’re still at home. I’ve got to get her to Dr. Mercy’s,” Buck said. “There’ll be oxygen there.”

“Yeah, Dr. Mercy’ll check her out. Want me to call the clinic and see if I can let her know you’re coming?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Clarence.”

There was so much relief in Buck’s voice, Clarence went even further. “You’ll be coming right by here on your way….” He hesitated. He’d just started getting back out into public after losing all that weight, and he still had a long way to go. Could he do this?

Yeah, he’d do anything for Buck. Buck had been there for him when he was in trouble. “I could meet you out at the street. All you’d have to do would be stop and let me get in and ride with you. Then you wouldn’t have to do this all by yourself.” And maybe he could talk to Kendra some. He knew firsthand what depression could do to a person.

There was a pause, and he braced himself for Buck to turn him down. He’d lost over a hundred pounds since last spring, but he’d still draw a big crowd at a circus sideshow. He was big and clumsy and took up two seats wherever he went, and strangers stared and laughed, and he knew the few friends he had were probably ashamed to be seen—

“You’d do that for me, Clarence?” came Buck’s relieved voice. “It would help.”

Clarence blew out a bunch of air he hadn’t realized he was holding in his lungs. “Sure would, pal. Look at what you did for me last fall. I’ll be waiting out front when you get here.”

He hung up and glanced toward the hallway that led to Ivy’s bedroom suite. Good. No lights, and he thought he could hear her snoring over the hum of the refrigerator. Mercy’s daughter, Tedi, had gone straight to sleep in the spare bedroom without waking her grandma. He guessed neither of them had heard him on the phone.

Ivy had once compared his voice to a derailed locomotive running loose through the house, and she really griped when he woke her up in the middle of the night. Especially when she caught him eating.

Clarence and his sister, Darlene, had come to live with Ivy Richmond—Dr. Mercy’s mom—three months ago when their health got too bad to live on their own. And Ivy had bullied him every day since then to eat right, exercise, take his vitamins, exercise, take his medicine, drink a bucket of water a day and exercise. She’d even tried to make him go to church with her. He’d done everything but that.

Since he couldn’t bend over and pick up all the crumbs he’d scattered on his way to the phone, he shoved them aside with his foot. Though sloppy and crude, it might save his life. He had to hurry and brush his teeth and get out to the curb. He wanted to be there when that pickup truck came rolling by.

Shouldn’t’ve taken that Lasix a couple of hours ago. He knew from Mercy that the medicine kept him from retaining fluid, but it also kept him running to the bathroom all night long.

Crystal Hollis lay on Mercy’s softest, most comfortable exam bed in an overheated room, with a pink teddy-bear sheet draped over the lower half of her body. Some of the color had returned to her face, and the sound of her breathing was not as labored, nor her lips as blue, as a few moments before.

Mercy pressed the warmed bell of her stethoscope against the little girl’s chest. “Take a breath for me, honey.”

Seven-year-old Crystal had the body weight of a five-year-old, with stick-thin arms and legs and a slightly protruding abdomen—clearly the cystic fibrosis affected her pancreas as well as her pulmonary system. Which meant Crystal could eat as much as an adult and still not put on weight. It was a constant battle. She had an aura of maturity in her longsuffering expression and sad gray-blue eyes that befitted someone seventy years older.

Her chest sounded a little better, but not enough. She coughed and Mercy grimaced. The breathing treatments weren’t going to cut it this time.

“How’s she doin’, Dr. Mercy?” Odira’s deep voice rumbled from her chair four feet away. She leaned forward, her puffy face filled with tense worry.

Mercy sighed and placed the stethoscope back around her neck. She tucked the sheet back up over Crystal’s bony shoulders and took the little girl’s hand in her own. “I’d like to see her breathing better, Odira.” She perched on the exam stool beside the bed and faced the child’s great-grandmother. “The X-rays don’t show what I suspected, but this could be early pneumonia. I’d like to have her checked out by a pulmonologist in Springfield. I could transfer her to St. John’s and…” The expression of sudden fear in Odira’s face halted her words.

“But you’re her doctor,” the older woman argued. “You’re the one we trust. Couldn’t you just do one of those consults they talk about on TV? That big place up in Springfield would be so scary for Crystal, and they might not even let me stay with her. You know how those big places are.”

Mercy patted Crystal’s hand and released it, then stood up and walked over to the chest X-rays placed in the lighted viewer box. The films most definitely indicated bronchitis. Time to blast those lungs with high-powered antibiotics. Odira always made sure Crystal received the nutritional support Mercy suggested, including the pancreatic enzyme supplements and vitamins, but Mercy would increase the caloric intake even more for a while. Crystal’s fever had dropped a little, but Mercy didn’t want to take any chances.

Accompanied by the unrhythmic sound of Odira’s loud breathing, Mercy checked Crystal’s heart once more. With severe disease, right-sided heart failure could occur, but there was no sign that the CF had progressed that far. Would it be possible to keep them here?

Mercy turned around. “Odira, are you feeling okay?”

“Don’t worry about me, Dr. Mercy. I’m just worried about keepin’ our girl in Knolls. You people know how to take care of us right.”

“I’ll try,” Mercy said. “I’d like to get her temperature down before I decide.”

“You need me to be your nurse?” Odira asked. “I know how to follow orders, you know.”

“Yes, if you would.” Mercy gave her instructions to go to the staff break room and get a Popsicle out of the freezer for Crystal. It would be a special treat for the child and would be a painless way to help drop her temperature and add a little fluid.

Odira struggled to get to her feet and finally succeeded. “I sure do appreciate your heart, Dr. Mercy.”

Mercy knew her patients hated the thought of leaving Knolls for a hospital stay, even to places like Cox or St. John’s, two of the top-rated hospitals in the country. Mercy didn’t blame them. They liked a small community hospital with down-home caring, close to where they lived. Their indomitable hospital administrator took pro bono cases and occasionally paid for them from her own bank account. This would probably be one of those cases.

“Please, Dr. Mercy,” came Crystal’s soft, hoarse voice. “Can’t I stay here?”

Mercy sighed and looked over into the little girl’s solemn eyes. Her softheartedness always got her into trouble. But she supposed she could call Dr. Boxley as a consult. He was an expert on CF patients, especially children, and he’d given her advice on Crystal’s care before. And Robert Simeon wouldn’t mind checking her out as a favor. With his specialty in internal medicine, he’d had some experience with this, and he lived and practiced right here in town. And the ICU staff at this hospital was the best anywhere. Maybe…

She looked once more into Odira’s hopeful face and sighed. “I’ll set you up for an admission.”

The strain of worry gradually eased from the older woman’s heavy expression. She walked out into the hallway toward the back. “That’s our doc,” she called over her shoulder.

Chapter Two

D eep-voiced curses and shouts careened down the short hallway of the Herald, Missouri, emergency room, followed by the whiff of stale beer and marijuana smoke. The hospital was in for another exciting Saturday night on the shore of Lake of the Ozarks.

Dr. Lukas Bower stepped to an uncurtained window in the E.R. staff break room and stared out at the glimmer of frosty moonlight over the water. Ice crusted the shoreline but didn’t reach the center. He could see the bare branches of trees swaying in the wind like the fingers of skeletons, grasping through the air to catch the wispy clouds that drifted past.

He shivered. This place gave him the creeps, and he’d only been here a few days. He couldn’t say exactly why the town bothered him so much. Maybe it was just because he missed Mercy and Knolls and the friends he’d made there—the life to which he planned to return as soon as the new emergency room was built and his short-term contract here was up. Or maybe it was the depressing, uncooperative attitude of some of the staff here. Or maybe it was his own attitude.

He frowned at his image in the reflection from the window, at the harsh brilliance of fluorescent light that caught and bounced back from his glasses. With so many night and weekends shifts, he’d almost forgotten what the inside of a church looked like on Sunday morning, or how the crisp winter air smelled in the Mark Twain National Forest.

But by no means had he forgotten what Mercy Richmond looked like, the rich alto sound of her voice, the warmth and sweet fragrance of her on those rare occasions lately when they’d seen each other. The thoughts he was having only made things worse.

A shouted epithet echoed through the room once more. He turned from the window and glanced toward the open break-room door. All he’d heard for the past ten minutes was the arguing of the bikers who’d engaged in a brawl down the road at the apartments—if the rickety string of rock buildings by the lake could be called that.

The shouting grew louder. Lukas grimaced. Should he call the police to come and stand guard? With a population of about three thousand, Herald, Missouri, was only about a third the size of Knolls, and the police force had the same number of personnel. This was a rough town.

He walked back into the small five-bed E.R. to see if the X-rays were back on the patient who was shouting the loudest. They weren’t. Brandon Glass, the Saturday night tech, had to take care of both X-ray and lab, and sometimes he couldn’t keep up. He never attempted to disguise his resentment when Lukas gave him more orders.

“I’m not done with you yet, Moron,” one of the bikers muttered to the other through the thin curtain. “If my baby’s got a scratch on her, I’ll take it out of your hide.”

The privacy curtains were open, and Lukas turned around to glance at both men. The mouthy one held an ice pack to his nose, and the skin around his eyes had already begun to darken. Blood matted strands of his brown hair and stained his black T-shirt. Thanks to his running monologue, everybody within earshot knew that his “baby” was his Harley-Davidson. Thanks to his temper—and that of his antagonist in the next cubicle—and a broken beer bottle, his left forearm had just been prepped for suture repair.

Lukas sniffed. The room even smelled like motor oil and alcohol…and pot.

The other biker, who wore black jeans and boots and a black leather vest with nothing else, lay with his head turned way from his adversary. His name was Marin—from which, obviously, his biker buddies had hung the moniker of Moron, like little kids taunting one another. Marin’s antagonist attitude had apparently dissipated with the dwindling effects of the alcohol and other drugs coursing through his veins. His eyes gradually closed as Lukas watched. Good. They were winding down. Maybe the police could concentrate on breaking up barroom fights tonight. And maybe they could spend some time searching for that little girl who had disappeared from the Herald city park last week—if that acre of rusted swings and overgrown grass could be called a park. Lukas had overheard a conversation about that yesterday morning between a couple of policemen who were waiting for their prisoner to be X-rayed. Rumor said it was a kidnapping, and she apparently wasn’t the first child to disappear lately in Central Missouri. It made Lukas sick to think about it.

“Dr. Bower, the films are back,” came a strong, deep female voice behind Lukas.

He turned to see Tex McCaffrey—no one ever called her Theresa—hanging the X-rays up on the lighted panel.

“I had to do them myself. Godzilla’s in a bad mood tonight.” She cast a glare toward the open door that led directly into the radiology department. “Can’t get good help around here anymore.”

Lukas wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with her. Tex was the paramedic-bouncer in this joint, and she served as the E.R. nurse on Saturday nights and quite a few weekdays, from what Lukas could pick up from the nursing schedule. If something came in she couldn’t handle, she could call for a nurse from the twenty-bed floor—not that Lukas had heard of that happening. He couldn’t imagine efficient, self-assured Tex getting anything she couldn’t handle. In just the short amount of time he’d worked with her, he’d been very impressed by her skills…and her size. He didn’t have the nerve to ask how tall she was, but he had to look up at her to make eye contact, so she was taller than five-ten.

Lukas checked the films, nodded, returned to the sink. Nothing broken. “Ready to help me with the sutures?” he asked.

“Got it all set up. I cleansed it, then irrigated it with five hundred of saline.” She paused and grinned in the direction of the glowering patient in question. She blew a couple of stray strands of curly dark blond hair from her face. “Care to guess his alcohol level? Three-twenty.” She almost sounded proud of him as she stepped in his direction. “I put the suture tray out of his reach.”

Broad-shouldered Tex was in her early thirties and could probably throw the whole biker gang on their kickstands if they got too rowdy. She was also Lukas’s next-door neighbor in a duplex at the edge of town. Her first cousin was Lauren McCaffrey, who was once one of Lukas’s favorite nurses down at Knolls—until she got him involved in this mess.

Lukas pulled on a pair of sterile gloves as he followed Tex’s athletic form to the curtained exam cubicle. She had set out 5.0 nylon for the suture and the requested lidocaine for anesthetic. Good. He glanced at the patient’s name on the chart again, hoping he could pronounce the last name properly. Proper name enunciation helped raise the patient comfort level, and he really wanted this particular patient to be comfortable.

“We’re ready to start, Mr. Golho—”

“I told you when I came in, don’t call me mister,” the muscled, tattooed man growled from beneath the ice pack on his nose. “Nobody calls me mister when I’m on the road.”

Oh, yeah. Lukas glanced at a note Tex had penciled in on her chart. So much for proper name enunciation. How could he have forgotten? “Catcher.”

“Ha!” came a voice from the other side of the curtain. Apparently Catcher’s antagonist hadn’t fallen asleep after all. “Why don’t you tell ’em where you got the name?”

“Shut up.”

“You want to know where it came from, Doc? They called him that ’cause he used to ride without a shield, and he caught bugs in his teeth.”

“I said shut up!” Catcher came halfway off his exam bed before Tex grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back.

“How do you feel about another tattoo, Catcher?” she asked, giving him a leering grin as she eased him back onto the exam bed. “Dr. Bower, here, is gonna test your pain tolerance.”

While Lukas cringed at her choice of words, Catcher repositioned the ice pack on his nose and laid his head back against the pillow. “No prob. Go to it.” He closed his eyes.

Lukas nodded. “Okay, Catcher. Have you ever had an allergic reaction to any anesthetic in the past?”

One eye came open. “Why?”

“Because I’ll be injecting lidocaine into the wound.”

“No, you won’t.” Both eyes were open now, and their dark brown-gray gaze held Lukas in a hard stare.

“Excuse me?”

“No ’caines. Can’t do them.”

No lidocaine? No anesthesia? Lukas did not want to hear this. He did not feel safe sticking a needle and Dermalon into the flesh of an already combative drunk. “You mean you’ve had a reaction in the past?”

“I mean I’ve been busting a cocaine habit, and I’m not going back to that.” Catcher took a firmer grip on his ice pack. “Just do it.”

Lukas looked at Tex and shrugged. Coming to work in Herald had been a big mistake. Oh, Lord, let my fingers be tender, because any moment I may have to eat them.

“Am I gonna die now?” Crystal’s matter-of-fact tone stabbed the silence in the exam room.

Mercy turned from her vigil by the telephone, where she’d been waiting for Dr. Boxley to return her call. Thank goodness Odira was still in the other room. “No, honey.” She got up and crossed to Crystal’s side and pressed the back of her hand against the child’s face. “You’re just sick again. Are you feeling worse?”

“No.”

Mercy gently stuck the wand of the tympanic thermometer into Crystal’s ear. She waited a few seconds to get a reading. The temp was almost back down to normal. “Aren’t you feeling any better?”

Crystal tilted her head sideways, seriously considering the question. “Yes.”

Mercy sat down on the exam stool next to the bed and took Crystal’s left hand in both of her own. “Then why do you think you’re going to die?”

Crystal’s clear water-blue eyes held Mercy’s for a long, quiet moment. “A girl at school told me.”

“Then don’t listen to her.”

“But then I asked Gramma. She said I might, but when I do, I’ll go straight to heaven and I’ll never get sick again.” She paused for a few seconds. “I’d like that.”

As a mother, Mercy couldn’t help imagining her own daughter saying those words. She’d never heard a child so young expressing a wish to die. What hurt the worst was the realization of Crystal’s suffering, both physical and emotional. From a year of treating Crystal, Mercy knew that the little girl, with her soft heart, worried more about her great-grandma Odira than she did about herself. Odira wasn’t in the best health, with her excess weight and high blood pressure. What would become of Crystal if anything happened to her great-grandmother?

“But, Crystal, we want to keep you here with us longer,” Mercy said softly. “I know it might be selfish of us, when heaven is so wonderful, but do you think you could be strong for Gramma and me?” Jesus, what do I say? How can this be happening? She tried not to think about the situation, but the questions grew too numerous too quickly. Her faith still felt so fragile.

“Gramma needs me,” Crystal said quietly. “I’ll stay awhile.”

They heard the sound of Odira’s footsteps and heavy breathing, and then she came lumbering through the open exam-room door. “I didn’t even think about using a Popsicle to get Crystal’s temperature down. Here’s a red one, her favorite. You’ve got a nice little freezer in there. Looks like you’ve got that back room all set up like an emergency room. I bet you use it a lot, what with the hospital—”

They heard the crash of a door flying open out in the waiting room, then the boom of a familiar voice—like a jet during takeoff. “Dr. Mercy! You in here?”

Clarence held the door open for Buck to carry Kendra through. “Dr. Mercy!” he called again. “Got those patients for you.” He tapped Buck’s shoulder and gestured toward the open doorway that led to the exam rooms at the back of the waiting room. When he’d telephoned Mercy she’d told him just to bring Kendra to the first exam room. Clarence knew where everything was. He should. He’d been here enough times.

After he’d finally lost enough weight to get around on his feet a little better, Dr. Mercy had made him come to her office once a week so she could weigh him and check him over. He hated going, hated the way the other patients in the waiting room stared at him and whispered. Still, when Mercy asked him to do something, he did it. If she asked nice.

Mercy came rushing down the hallway, her long dark hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, wearing baggy old jeans and a thick wool sweater. Her dark eyes looked tired. “Hi, Buck. Bring her back here. I have a bed ready for her. I’ll need you and Clarence to help keep an eye on her.” She reached forward and laid a gentle hand against Kendra’s cheek, and some of the tiredness cleared from her eyes. “Hang in there, Kendra. We’ll get you on some oxygen.” She pulled the stethoscope from around her neck, warmed it in her hand for a second, then placed it against Kendra’s chest.

Clarence watched Mercy as she guided Buck into the exam room and helped him lay his wife on the bed. He enjoyed watching her work. When she treated patients, she acted as if they were a part of her own family. Of course, that also meant she nagged them like family. At five feet eight, she was four inches shorter than Clarence, but there were times when she seemed bigger than life, especially when she stood over him as he balanced on that dinky little exam bed wearing nothing but his shorts and a sheet.

But the times she made the biggest impact on him were when she saw his depression and bullied it out of him. He didn’t get that way as often as he used to, but some days the heaviness of his thoughts messed him up big-time. Those were the days he didn’t want to diet, didn’t want to exercise, didn’t even want to get out of bed. That was when her tender toughness showed itself. She could look into his eyes and say, “Clarence, we’re going for a walk. Get your shoes on,” or “You haven’t come this far to give up. Just get through today,” and then she would tell Ivy to keep watch. And Ivy could be the queen of mean.

As soon as Buck eased Kendra down onto the exam bed, Kendra covered her face with her hands. Her body shook with sobs that grew louder and more forceful. “Why didn’t you just let me die?” She turned her head sideways on the pillow, and her light brown hair, as soft-looking as a sparrow’s breast, fell across her cheek. “Everybody’d be better off that way.”

Buck took a deep breath and hung his head, his square jaw working like a grinding machine. Buck was a big man, lots of muscles, with hair cut so short that his ears, which were already big, looked like doorknobs. He had a big heart, and nobody doubted that he loved his wife. Except her.

Clarence wished there was something he could do to help them both.

Mercy leaned over. “Kendra, tell me how you feel. Do you have a bad headache?”

Tears dripped across Kendra’s nose onto the pillow, and her lower lip trembled. “Yeah, real bad.”

Mercy gestured to Buck. “Would you please hook up the oxygen? I want her on a one hundred percent nonrebreather mask.” She reached toward a box beside the bed. “Kendra, I’m going to put this little clip on the end of your finger. It’s attached to something called a pulse oximeter, which will tell me how much oxygen you have in your system. And I’m sorry, honey, but I’m going to have to stick you for blood. It’s going to hurt, because I have to go deep enough for an artery. We’ve got to find out how aggressively we need to treat you. Buck, has she been confused?”

“Yes, at first.” Buck scrambled around until he found the tubing and mask he needed. “On the drive in I had the windows open, and she cleared up. Now she just keeps crying.” He stepped back over to his wife’s side.

Mercy leaned over Kendra again. “Are you dizzy? Do you feel sick to your stomach?”

Kendra’s face puckered. She covered it with her hands once more and didn’t reply.

Buck cleared his throat, tried to speak, cleared it again. “She was feeling sick earlier, Dr. Mercy. She had some shortness of breath.”

Mercy turned around and saw Clarence standing in the doorway. “Call an ambulance for me, would you?”

“No!” Kendra cried out. She reached toward Buck, eyes wide and frightened, and tried to sit up. “Don’t let them haul me away!”

“It isn’t for you,” Mercy took Kendra’s arm and eased her back down. “I have another patient tonight. I need to transport her over to the hospital, and I can’t leave you right now.”

Clarence picked up the telephone in the room, then hesitated and frowned at Mercy. “You want to call an ambulance to haul somebody less than a block? Doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mercy checked the pulse oximeter box. “Do you have a better idea? I have a sick child in there, and her great-grandmother isn’t in much better shape.”

“Let me take ’em.” Clarence spoke the words against his will, as if something outside himself were making the decision for him.

“I can drive, long as I can fit behind the wheel. I’m a mechanic, you know. My driver’s license is up to date.”

“Thank you, Clarence. Take my car.” Mercy leaned back over Kendra. “My keys are on the desk in my office, and use the south entrance at the hospital. Get a move on. They’re waiting for the patient.”

For a moment, disbelieving, he could only stare at her. Just like that? He hadn’t driven in two years, and she trusted him with her new car?

And then, in spite of the pain that still lingered in the room from Kendra’s tears and Buck’s stoic silence, he felt a glow of satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. For once, he was on the giving end.

Chapter Three

T ex blotted and held, blotted and held as Lukas finished the last of the twelve interrupted sutures on Catcher’s arm. The big biker hadn’t even grunted through the ordeal. In fact, Lukas was sure that he himself had been the only one who grimaced every time the needle pierced flesh. Even with alcohol to mask the pain, it had to hurt. This man was tough.

Company had begun to arrive halfway through the procedure, as the first of Catcher’s biker friends came clomping into the E.R. carrying plastic packs of pimento cheese sandwiches and chips and soda they’d purchased from the vending machine in the waiting room. After an irritable glance in their direction, Tex had shown no reaction to their arrival. Even when one of the buddies came in and handed half a sandwich to Catcher, Lukas didn’t make a remark. They weren’t supposed to have food in the E.R. and if OSHA found out about the infraction, there would be complaints and fines and forms filled out in quadruplicate, but Lukas wasn’t in the mood to play hall monitor to a bunch of aging tattoos this early on a Sunday morning. Most of them just came in for a minute to check on their buddies, then wandered out to the waiting room, which was separated from the treatment area by a door and a sliding window where the secretary sat.

One husky woman wearing tight denim jeans and a heavy gray sweater shoved through the dividing door, food and soda tucked against her side by her left arm, holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her right hand.

“Hey, Catcher!” she blared. “They treatin’ you okay back here? I’ll bash heads if they’re not.” She took a deep whiff of air. “Phew, smells like medicine and puke back here. Don’t you guys have any air freshener?”

Lukas clipped the nylon thread. “Okay, two more and we’re finished poking you, Catcher.”

Someone else in leather and tattoos stepped into the E.R. doorway from the waiting room beyond. “Hey, look, they got a TV! Hey, nurse, you guys got cable here?” A blare of music screamed through the rooms.

Lukas heard Tex’s sharp intake of breath and caught a glimpse of her angry scowl, and he shook his head at her. “We’re almost finished here.” Lord, please just hold this all together a little longer. Give me patience and compassion.

A loud clank and clatter pierced his concentration. His hands almost jerked the final suture too tightly. Neither he nor Tex could look up from their work just now, but as soon as he’d snipped the last of the threads, Tex put her things down and snapped off her gloves.

“If you’ll finish up here, I’ll check out the crash,” she said.

Lukas could almost see her flexing her muscles as she metamorphosed from Tex the paramedic to Tex the bouncer. Uh-oh. Not only was she about to make a scene, but she was also about to make him look like a coward. He did have a little pride left.

“Um, Tex, why don’t—”

Catcher groaned. “Oh, Doc, I think I’m gonna hurl.”

With a final glance over his shoulder to see Tex strutting off to bash heads, Lukas grabbed an emesis basin. “Breathe in through your nose if you can, Catcher, then out through your mouth. There you go.” He took the ice pack from Catcher’s limp hand and placed it against the man’s forehead.

More voices shouted from the other room. Tex’s was the loudest. “I said put that chair back down where it belongs and give me that coffeepot!”

Lukas had Lauren McCaffrey to thank for all this. Sweet-faced, innocent-eyed Lauren. When her cousin Tex heard through the family grapevine that there was an E.R. physician temporarily without a job, she’d called Lauren, looking for a replacement for a doctor on suspension.

“Scenic views, right there on the Lake of the Ozarks,” Lauren had said. “Small-town E.R. probably a lot like Knolls. It’ll be like a vacation. How much trouble could a five-bed E.R. be?”

And so Lukas had signed on for three months—until the earliest estimated time of completion for the Knolls E.R.

More shouts rang out from the waiting room, and then Lukas heard the squall of a siren as an ambulance pulled up outside, lights flashing.

This place needed more staff on Saturday nights. It was time to call the police. And he would never trust Lauren McCaffrey again.

“No!” Kendra’s shoulders came up from the pillow, her hands grasping Buck’s shoulders in desperation. Her eyes widened in fear above the clear oxygen mask. “You’re gonna shut me away like I’m crazy!”

Mercy saw Buck’s expression freeze as he held his wife.

“No, Kendra,” she said firmly. “That’s not what this is.” She took the younger woman by the shoulders, eased her back down and readjusted the mask. “Listen to me for a moment.” She waited until she felt some of the tension release from Kendra’s arms, then took her by the hand and squeezed. “Honey, you’re in trouble. You have an illness that is causing you to behave the way you are, and we need to get you help.” She paused. How would she explain this to a child? “We need to protect you until we can get your illness under control with medication. We’re going to put you in the hospital for ninety-six hours, and the doctors and nurses up there will keep a close eye on you and make sure you’re safe.”

Kendra held Mercy’s gaze for a moment, focusing first on Mercy’s left eye, then on the right, with disconcerting intensity. Her whole body quivered, and again tears dripped down her cheeks. “Where?”

“Cox North in Springfield. They’re specially trained to take care of cases like this.”

“What kind of a case is this? What’re you talking about?”

Mercy tried to pick her words carefully, but she had to be honest. “From what I’ve heard and seen, and from what I know of you personally, I’d say you have bipolar disorder, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so…”

Kendra tightened her grip on Mercy’s hands. “Does that mean I’m crazy?”

“No,” Buck snapped in frustration. He closed his eyes and sighed, combing his fingers through his short hair. He stepped back from the bed and flexed his shoulders wearily. “What am I going to do with her, Dr. Mercy?”

“Stop talkin’ over my head like I’m a kid.”

“Then stop acting like one.”

The antipathy shot between them like an electric bolt as their gazes held for a long moment.

“This won’t help,” Mercy said softly. She gave them a few seconds to calm down as she watched the changing emotions play over Kendra’s face. She looked like a young Michelle Pfeiffer, with an exquisite beauty that could easily have transmitted itself onto the movie or television screen. But all she’d ever wanted was a husband and children. Lots of children. They’d discovered recently that she couldn’t have kids, just a few months after her fireman father was killed in the line of duty.

“I won’t go to any psychiatrist.” Kendra’s soft soprano voice once again held anger and pain.

“You’re going,” Buck said, frustration still evident in his voice.

“I’m sorry, Kendra,” Mercy said, keeping her voice firm. “You tried to commit suicide tonight, and we can’t take the chance that it’ll happen again. Too many people love you.”

Kendra snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

Mercy leaned forward. “You feel that way right now because your mind isn’t processing your emotions properly. But your condition can be treated. You’re sick, and just like we’d do if you had some kind of bacteria in your body that was making you sick, we can treat you with something that will help your brain work better. We’re going to keep you safe and administer some medication and give you time to heal.”

Kendra glanced around the small exam room as if seeking a way to escape. “Can’t you just do that here? Why do I have to go all the way to Springfield?”

“Because our hospital doesn’t have the facilities to care for you.”

Kendra closed her eyes, and her whole body stiffened. “You mean you don’t have a padded room here,” she said.

Mercy understood, and the identification she felt with Kendra right now was disconcerting. Depression was painful, but manic depression must be like standing on a fault line during an earthquake. It was frightening how easily your mind could betray you.

Kendra sniffed and wiped several stray tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. When Buck grabbed a tissue from the exam-room desk and tried to give it to her, she ignored him and withdrew from his touch.

Mercy suppressed a sigh. She’d tried several times to explain to Buck why she thought Kendra was behaving the way she had been in the past six months. And Buck had tried, without success, to bring Kendra in to see Mercy for a thorough exam. All he’d managed was to get her checked for strep throat a couple of months ago.

The tears in Kendra’s eyes shimmered like blue crystal. “What kinds of drugs would they make me take?”

“I’m not sure,” Mercy said. “The doctor in Springfield will decide that.”

“I don’t want a doctor in Springfield. You know me better than they would.”

Buck reached over and covered her hand with his. She tried to jerk free, but he held her fast. “Stop fighting this, Kendra.” He looked at Mercy. “I know the procedure. If you’ll do the paperwork and call Cox North, I’ll take her up. I’m a trained EMT, so it’ll be legal, and I’ll see if Clarence will come with me, just to make sure she stays in the truck.” He shot Kendra a biting glance. “Otherwise, Kendra, the ambulance will have to take you, with a policeman riding shotgun.”

“Why should you care?” she snapped back. “Just as long as you get rid of me. They could be hauling me to the junkyard.”

“Cox is a good facility,” Mercy said quietly. “I know from firsthand experience. I was there for a ninety-six-hour involuntary stay five and a half years ago, and I remember the time well. The staff treated me with patience and concern.”

Husband and wife focused their suddenly silent attention on her. Neither showed surprise at her words, because most people in town knew about the incident.

Mercy had seldom spoken about those days, though, and she did so now with difficulty. During a nasty custody battle over Tedi, at the same time Mercy’s father was dying of cirrhosis of the liver, Mercy sought help for her own depression. Unfortunately, the physician on call that night was a buddy of her ex-husband, Theo. They had joined forces, double-crossed Mercy and had her committed before she could do anything to stop them. When Theo used the incident in court against her, she lost custody of Tedi. She had worked five years to rebuild her practice.