Читать книгу He Calls Her Doc - Mary Brady - Страница 11

GUY SLIPPED OUT into the warming wind of the early afternoon. He had seen the questions in Maude DeVane’s eyes, and he had no intention of sharing his grief with someone whose loss could be measured in dollars. He kicked a pebble with the toe of his boot and stepped off the curb to cross the wide street.

He remembered the feel of her responsive lips beneath his. Five years ago, for one brief moment he had wanted to be wrong about her. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. He wouldn’t be surprised if Maude DeVane still held out hope that Henry had somehow left the ranch that had been her parents’ to her.

As he reached the far side of the street, he stopped in front of the diner and slid the letter that had arrived in this morning’s mail from his pocket.

To Whom It May Concern: the letter began. Kelly was right about his parents. This letter was from their attorney, most likely at his mother’s behest. Any and all persons now occupying the Whispering Winds Ranch shall vacate…

Nice bluff, Mother. His parents had no control over Lexie’s inheritance, but that didn’t stop them from trying. As the firstborn son, Guy had been the only focus of their attention. Everything he did mattered. Everything Henry did was irrelevant. Guy had tried to shield Henry as much as he could, but Henry was only eight when Guy went off to college. After Guy left, Henry accelerated his campaign to get their parents to notice him. By the time Henry got out of high school, he had already begun a series of extreme adventure trips that would ultimately take his life.

Now Lexie’s grandparents wanted control of the ranch. If Guy thought for a moment they had forgiven Henry for fathering a child at age fifteen with a casual acquaintance, he might think they were trying to protect Lexie. He knew his parents well enough. If there was wealth they could control, they thought it some sort of negligence not to try.

Guy tossed the letter into a nearby trash can, and headed down the block. “Stop at the hardware store,” was Bessie’s plea to anyone from the ranch who went to town. There was always something at the cluttered, dusty old store the ranch needed.

“Hello, Mr. Daley.” The storeowner smiled at Guy and furrowed his well-trimmed eyebrows. “Bessie called. Said she didn’t have lightbulbs on her list this morning and she’d appreciate if you’d get some. Also says she wishes you’d carry your phone.”

“Thanks.” Guy gave the storekeeper what he hoped was an equally friendly Montana-like smile. At the light-bulb display, he touched where the pocket of his lab coat would have been and where his cell phone and pager had spent most of his waking hours. No lab coat. No cell phone. No hospital pager.

He bowed his head and studied blue-and-yellow light-bulb packages before he chose several with no dust.

At the checkout, he picked up a handful of Tootsie Pops in a bouquetlike arrangement and laid it on the counter beside the lightbulbs. He thought about it for moment, and added a second colorful bouquet.

MAUDE PUSHED OPEN the treatment-room door to see Jake Hancock perched on the edge of the patient cart, hospital gown draped loosely over his torso. As Maude stepped inside the room, Abby took up a position at the door, as if she might tackle him if he tried to leave. And she might.

“Abby says you’re trying to bolt.”

“The longer I sit here, the sillier I feel, ma’am.”

“Tell me what happened to you.”

“Nothing worth frettin’ about.”

Maude took a step closer. “Well, now that you’re already here, I’ll examine you, take a listen to your chest and if need be, we’ll go from there.”

“Is it really necessary?” He swung one leg and tapped the cart’s metal end with a boot heel.

She stared steadily at him and knit her eyebrows as if contemplating a great puzzle. She knew his type. Needed a limb dangling before help seemed necessary. “That’s one of the tricky things about trauma medicine. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s ‘necessary’ until I examine the patient and see if it’s necessary.”

“You’re sure?”

“There is one tried-and-true way to cover the worst-case scenario without examining you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small tag with a string attached to it by way of a reinforced hole. One of the M.D.’s who’d helped her train in rural medicine had given it to her. One of my old tricks, he had said.

Maude had thought she’d never use it, but here she was handing it to her third patient.

Abby laughed out loud and came up to stand beside Jake.

Jake took the small tag and let it dangle from his fingertips. “What’s this?”

“A toe tag.” Abby doubled over as she spoke.

Maude held a steady, serious expression. “Tie it on your big toe. Saves us the trouble if…”

Jake held up a hand to stop her. “You’re very persuasive, Dr. DeVane.”

“It’s how I can afford my yacht.” She took the tag from him and tucked it back into her pocket.

He looked at her briefly and then laughed. “Trying to picture someone tugging a yacht up into these mountains.”

She took the stethoscope from her pocket and held it in her hands. “So, tell me how you feel.”

He settled back as if he might stay for the exam. “Like I was kicked into the dirt by a Boardroom Betty. Mostly a pride injury, I suspect. I was only down for a couple seconds.”

“He has two small impact marks on his chest,” Abby offered.

Maude examined him, read the electrocardiogram and found nothing to make her think he had any serious side effects from the kick or the fall, but harbored her usual suspicion for a posttrauma case.

“Sir, you seem to have pronounced your diagnosis correctly. You are ‘fine’ as far as your exam and tests show.”

He leaped off the cart and grabbed the blue work shirt from the counter.

“We’ll give you privacy to dress, but don’t leave yet.”

“Yes, ma’am. And, please, tell the boss I didn’t just get up and run away. He’s likely not to believe me.” He smiled at them as Maude and Abby stepped into the corridor.

“I’ll tell him, Mr. Hancock.” Maude pulled the door closed.

Now, back to the seminar leader’s problem pupil.

Seminar leader. It’s not that she hated Guy Daley or anything—not really. He was being a big brother looking after Henry. Though he was overbearing and a snob and sometimes…

Maybe she hated him a little. She’d have to work on that one if they were going to live in the same valley. Henry had loved him after all. Maybe he’d mellowed in the years since she’d seen him.

“Excuse me.” Guy stood in the hallway, his hair a bit disheveled. A dark lock fell over his forehead, making him look a little like a cross between a certain superhero and his alter ego.

Feelings shot through her which she banished almost before she acknowledged them.

“The tech has the X-rays finished. They look…Well, they’re ready for you to read,” he said, as he followed her down the hallway.

She stopped and turned. “Dr. Daley.”

“I’ll be waiting down there.” He gestured toward the entrance and walked away.

She smiled a little. He couldn’t stand to be sent to the waiting room instead of doing the sending.

She continued to the small recess that served as the tiny clinic’s supply closet and X-ray viewing room. The tech had kindly moved the mop and pail out of the way so she could get a good close look at the X-ray films.

A few minutes later, she went in to see Ms. Stone and found her patient reclined on the cart with a damp wash-cloth over her eyes. Maude touched the woman’s arm.

“Yes.” Cynthia’s voice was weak and, well, pathetic if Maude was to go there.

“Ms. Stone, I’ve looked at your X-rays.”

The patient removed the cloth from her eyes. A hopeful look spread over her face. Maude liked giving good news. It was one of the best parts of being a doctor.

“There’s no break and no signs of any degenerative joint disease. The bone structure of your foot and ankle looks just fine.”

Ms. Stone’s expression became distorted. But she remained silent.

Not exactly the reaction Maude expected.

“You might have a small muscle tear or a strained ligament which wouldn’t show up on X-ray. The tech will tell you what you need to do for it, give you home-care instructions and wrap it with an elastic bandage. If it hurts too much, use an over-the-counter pain medication. I’ll call—”

Ms. Stone began to squirm and look around the room, to look anywhere except at Maude.

“Is there something wrong?” Maude asked.

“I can’t go with Mr. Daley. You’ll have to keep me here until I’m better.” She still avoided looking at Maude.

“Is there a problem I should know about?” Other than a problem with a hotshot emergency doctor not telling anyone he was a physician? Maude quickly put the thought away. She could examine it when she had no one else’s welfare at stake.

“I can’t go back to that place.” Ms. Stone studied her chipped nail polish intently.

“I’m sorry. We have no overnight facilities at the clinic.”

“I need to stay here until I can travel,” she said after a few more moments of polish-studying.

“There are motels nearby.”

The woman looked away, and when she looked back, there were tears in her eyes.

“Then I’d—” She paused.

“Yes?” Maude placed a hand on her patient’s shoulder.

“I’d be alone.”

Maude wondered if Cynthia Stone had ever been alone. She’d met the type, always had nannies, traveling companions, live-in servants. Never alone.

“You wouldn’t be by yourself at the ranch. It’s such a pretty place.”

“You know it? You know that place and about that thing he has strung across the canyon?”

Maude smiled. She hadn’t seen Henry’s contraptions, but he had an uncanny respect for the land; she trusted him to somehow make Mountain High fit in to the natural surroundings.

She realized Ms. Stone was waiting for a response.

“You chose to participate in the program, didn’t you?”

“Well—um—yes.”

“And you paid for it?”

“Of course.” She looked at her fingernails again. “Well, my father did.”

Maude stepped back and folded her arms over her chest. “Then you’re the boss. Choose to participate or choose not to. They can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. You can discuss options with the people from Mountain High.”

Cynthia Stone crossed her arms over her chest, mimicking Maude’s stance, but said nothing.

“I’ll send in D—um—Mr. Daley.” Mr. Daley. Dr. Daley, whatever. It wasn’t her place to rat him out.

Cynthia huffed out a derisive sound. “It won’t do any good. I don’t trust any of them. I don’t know what they think they’re doing out there in the middle of the wilderness on that horrible ranch.”

“I’ll send him in.”

Maude left the door slightly ajar as she exited the room. Horrible ranch. She thought many things of the ranch where she grew up, but horrible was never one of them. Not even when its isolation helped cause great harm to her sister.

She remembered the ever-present smile on the face of her beautiful sister. A sister who had once been so smart and capable.

“You can go in and see Ms. Stone now,” Maude said as she approached Guy Daley. “She’s convinced she needs to stay.”

He nodded and disappeared into the treatment room.

If he didn’t talk the woman into leaving, there was always Sheriff Potts. The imposing man with the badge had little trouble in a face-to-face confrontation. Though law enforcement was rarely needed in the small rural valley’s only clinic, the sheriff was always glad to help out—at least that’s what Doc Avery told her. He had told her a lot of things during the short two weeks she had to get acquainted with his, and now her, practice.

Not much later, Maude looked up from the office desk where she was finishing paperwork to see Guy coming down the hallway toward her. So soon. She wondered if she’d need the sheriff after all.

“The tech is helping her learn how to use crutches and then I’ll take her back to the ranch.”

Maude swallowed a startled “What?” She couldn’t believe the woman in the treatment room would consent to going anywhere with him, let alone back to the ranch, and so quickly.

“She said she’d leave because—” He paused.

She checked to see if he was gloating.

Holding his expression emotionless, he said, “I told her you’d make a house call.”

She pushed up from her chair to face him. “You what? A house call? For a minor ankle injury?” She thought of the old and the infirm patients Doc Avery used to visit at home. She would gladly see those people, but Cynthia Stone didn’t fit any category of patient who might need a house call.

“Having you come by to check up on her was the only thing that got her interested in leaving.”

The ranch. The place she had managed, with one excuse or another, not to go back to for over ten years.

“Tell her I won’t be there.”

“She’s your patient,” he stated matter-of-factly, and walked out the door.

Even after Henry most generously bought the ranch from her parents to save them from bankruptcy and to fund their retirement and her sister’s care—Maude could not make herself return.

Soon, Mountain High’s blue van pulled up to the door.

Yes, she did hate Guy Daley. She did so want to be bigger than that, but he made it too easy.

Worse—

He was forcing her hand. She should visit the ranch for her own sake. She hadn’t had the moral fortitude to go back there since she left for medical school, and had even less courage after her parents sold the ranch to Henry. Making a house call would keep her from chickening out.

She stepped into the warm afternoon sunlight and walked over to where Guy stood looking tall and Western, not at all like a Chicago doctor, and leaning on the van’s driver’s side door with his arms crossed.

“I’ll come,” she said as she stopped in front of him.

He unfolded his arms and looked at her to continue.

“Please keep an eye on Mr. Hancock. My confidence is low that he’d report any problems if he had them.”

Guy frowned and Maude knew he wanted to ask for confidential patient information, but he didn’t, always the utmost professional. Recalling the earlier promise she’d made, she said, “He asked that I tell you he ‘didn’t just get up and run away.’ That I released him.”

“That would be Jake.” One corner of his mouth turned up into the beginnings of what she knew to be a beguiling smile.

Oh, yes. This was Henry Daley’s brother. Charm had poured from Henry at every turn. From his brother it had to be coaxed and, if given, was hard fought for. The only people she ever saw charm the great Dr. Daley were his brother Henry and Henry’s daughter, Lexie. For Maude, the charm had never been there.

“I’ll come tomorrow morning.” “Solo practice” popped into her head. “Make that afternoon. Tuesday morning is office hours, there are patients for me to see.”

“Tomorrow afternoon then.”

She could have sworn he gave her the tiniest of bows before he reached for the sliding passenger door and made himself busy making room for Queen Cynthia.

As Maude turned away, a sense of relief flooded through her, followed quickly by annoyance. She couldn’t let Guy Daley get to her. Much water had flowed under many bridges for both of them, and the past needed to stay in the past.

THE NEXT MORNING, dressed in her neatly pressed blue oxford shirt and navy slacks with her lab coat over her arm, Maude entered the foyer of the Wm. Avery Clinic ready to let people see how well she could do the job. The truth be told, she was better than old Doc Avery, at least technically, and the more patients she kept alive and healthy, the more people in this valley would accept her as Dr. DeVane and forget about little Maudie.

Arlene, the receptionist, looked up with a nervous smile. That would change, Maude knew. They’d all get used to her.

“Good morning, Arlene.” Maude turned slowly in the empty reception area. “Are they all in the treatment rooms?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. DeVane.” The receptionist took the pencil from behind her ear and fiddled with it. “They—um—canceled and two of them who are usually early didn’t show up at all. I’m really sorry. Mrs. Effington was here for her nine-thirty, but when she saw no one else was here, she—um—decided to leave, too.”

“Is there anyone left on the books for today?”

“Only Mr. Stanley to have his stitches taken out, and he’s already in one of the exam rooms.”

Maude felt some of the puff go out of her ego, but she was careful not to let Arlene see. “And he’s only here because he can’t take the stitches out himself?”

“I suspect you’re right, Dr. DeVane. Can I get you a cup of coffee, or maybe tea?” Arlene was trying hard to put her at ease.

“No, thank you. Say, Arlene, how would you like a paid day off?” The offer didn’t seem to make Arlene any more comfortable and Maude continued. “I’ll see Mr. Stanley and while I do, you make a note for the door. If anyone needs us, they can call the emergency number, and you won’t have to be here all morning without anyone to greet.”

“I can do paperwork.”

“Paperwork will keep.” Maude gestured at the empty waiting room. “They’ll come back. In the meantime, we’ll make lemonade out of this big lemon of a day.”

Arlene nodded and Maude went in to see the only one of Dr. Avery’s patients willing to have her treat him this morning.

After Arlene left, Maude stayed at the office for a while. When she was tired of reading charts, but mostly frustrated at being alone, she went to find an ear that would give her sympathy—or a knock upside the head, whichever she needed the most.

“SALLY, THEY STOOD ME UP!” Maude said as she entered the back door of a large, rambling old house in a cul-de-sac only a few blocks from her own tidy little home.

Sally Sanderson, Maude’s friend since childhood, glanced up from the washer into which she had been shoving colorful clothing of many small sizes. “Well, I’m glad.”

“What?”

Sally snorted a laugh as she pulled her mop of blond curls away from her gray eyes and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Go pour us some coffee. I’ll be done in a sec.”

Maude put cream and sugar into Sally’s—I need the energy, she had said about the added calories—and sat down to wait. Sally did need the energy. Her slight five-foot-two-inch body chased five children all day and half the night.

“I wasn’t sure I’d get to see much of you after Doc left,” Sally said as she set a basket of folded towels by the door and took a seat at the worn wooden table big enough to seat the small army of Sandersons and a few more.

“Me, too.” Maude laughed. “Doc Avery was supposed to be here for a month after I got here, but it seems their granddaughter had her delivery date recalculated.”

“Mommy. Mommy.”

Sally reached down and picked up Lizzy, a shy five-year-old replica of herself, who had wandered into the room, spotted the intruder and made a beeline for the safety of her mother’s lap. The sparkling stars mounted on floppy stalks attached to the headband Lizzy wore batted her mother on the chin and Sally pushed them gently aside. “Doc’s gone only one day and here we are. I’m delighted to have your company.”

“I’m glad you are. Thank you.”

“All right. So what’s that about?” Sally stroked Lizzy’s hair.

“Yesterday morning at the grocery store they were gossiping, called me little Maudie.”

“And you just had to hide behind the dill pickle display and listen?”

“Well something like that. It was canned peas.” Maude reached down and patted Barney, the docile family dog that had followed Lizzy into the room and now sat with his head against Maude’s leg. “What if this keeps up?”

Sally snort-laughed again and Lizzy looked up at her. “This is St. Adelbert, honey. It took them a year to decide to plant flowers around the flagpole in the town square. Give them time.”

“I just feel sort of blindsided. I came here because I knew there would be no one when Doc Avery left. It’s not as if I’m an outsider. They know me. Most of them know my family. Was I some kind of moron when I was a child?”

“No, but you were cute.” Sally hugged the child on her lap. Laughter played in her big wide-set eyes.

“Cute? Who wants a cute doctor?” Maude stirred her coffee.

“Barry Farmington.”

“Oh, please. He doesn’t count. He’d hit on a lamppost if he thought he could get some.” Maude sipped coffee, put it down and stirred again.

“They’ll come around,” Sally assured her.

“What do I do in the meantime? I’m used to working sixteen hours a day.” Maude tapped her fingertips on the tabletop until Sally reached over and quieted the tapping by covering Maude’s hand with her own.

“Since it won’t last long, take some time for yourself. Drive to Kalispell and have a massage. Go out and make new friends. Eat dirt. What do you feel like doing?”

“I don’t know. Yesterday, when a patient came in as an emergency, someone must have called Doc Avery. He stopped in…on his way out of town.”

“Cora and Ethel. Know everything. Blab all.” Sally smoothed the hair back from her daughter’s forehead. Lizzy snuggled closer into her mother’s bosom.

“You heard.” Maude crossed and uncrossed her legs.

Sally nodded. “I was behind the cornflakes this morning.”

Maude put her face in her hands.

“It’s early.” Sally patted her on the head and played with her hair the way she did her daughter’s. “Besides, they asked you to come and take over.”

Maude laughed and looked up. “I didn’t tell you what they said the first time I called, when I was just starting my Rural Medicine fellowship. It’s too embarrassing.”

“How about…‘Oh, Maudie, you’re too cute to be our doctor’?”

“Close. ‘We’re sure we’ll find someone before you’re ready.’ I know I heard the head of the selection committee cringe when she said it, too, hoping I wasn’t going to beg for crumbs or anything. That was two years ago and I was already board certified in internal medicine.”

“The jerks, but like I said…”

“I know. It’s early.” Maude sat up and pulled her shoulders back, and then slumped forward onto her elbows. “Maybe I’ll go to Fiji and then come back next spring to see if ‘little Maudie’ is better than no doctor at all.”

“Yeah, go. And while you’re there, you can choose another profession, maybe something that doesn’t take any backbone.”

As if to emphasize Sally’s point, Barney put his paws on Maude’s lap and stretched up to lick her face. “Thank you. I needed that,” she said to Sally and Barney. She scratched the back of the dog’s head.

“See the patients that come. Treat them like kings and queens, and give away ice-cream cones. They’ll come back.”

“Possibly. Where are the rest of the kids?” Maude reached out and touched the silken cheek of the girl in her friend’s lap and got a shy smile as a reward.

“The twins are having a nap—early, but I take what I can get. The older two are on a playdate, so I have peace and quiet—just what you’re shunning. Remember this day. You’ll rue it if you waste it. Now tell me what else has you going.”

“Going?”

“You’re twitchy and I know all this maudlin—” she paused to cover Lizzy’s ears “—crap is a cover-up for what you don’t want to talk about.”

“I am not—” Maude gestured with her spoon “—twitchy.”

“You stirred your black coffee. Twice. The only time you get that twitchy is when—Oh, yes.” Sally threw a fist in the air. “Lizzy honey, Mommy wants you to take that pack of Oreos we just bought and go watch television.”

Maude dropped her coffee spoon on the table with a clatter. She eyed her friend suspiciously as Lizzy hopped down, sprinted for the cupboard and, hardly stopping, turned and ran to the family room holding her prize with both hands, blond curls flying, sparkling stars dancing wildly.

“A whole pack of cookies and television?”

“Who is he?”

“No. No. No.” Maude held her hands up. “It’s not what you think. He isn’t anyone.”

“Better and better. You usually fall for the somebodies who treat you badly and send you back crying to me.”

“I don’t cry. Besides, I like to think I dump them. I’m a busy doctor, remember. No time for such dalliances. Love ’em and leave ’em.”

“Let’s see. It’s not Curly or Jimmy Martin. Who else did you see yesterday? Um. Oh, yes, Jake, but he’s not your type. He’s the right age and heaven knows good looking.”

“Hey, Jake Hancock’s an idea.” Maude knew where Sally was heading, and she didn’t want to go there.

“Is not. He’s too cowboy for you. Besides, if you’d have thought so, you’d have jumped his bones when your parents tried to set you up with him a couple years ago, after they moved off the ranch.”

“And they had nothing left to do but meddle in their daughter’s life,” Maude finished for her.

Sally tapped her chin. “There’s a man out at your ranch running Mountain High. It must be him.”

“It isn’t and never has been my ranch.”

“Oh, you are dodging on this one. He was in town a couple of times before you got here. I hear he’s hunky.”

“Sally, he’s Henry’s brother,” Maude said.

“The doctor? From Chicago?” Sally folded her arms over her chest and wrinkled her brow. “We don’t like him, do we?”

“I’m trying not to hate him.” Maude let a flash of pain for her lost friend Henry grip her.

“Just give me ten minutes with the man.”

Maude laughed imagining five-foot-nothing Sally taking on Guy Daley. She’d do it, too.

“What’s he doing on your ranch, anyway?”

Maude started to reply, but Sally waved her off. “I know you don’t own it, but you should.”

“Because I grew up there?”

Sally nodded emphatically.

“The truth is—” Maude paused.

“What? What have you been hiding from me?”

Maude put her chin down toward her chest and then confessed, “I could have had it.”

“The ranch!”

She nodded. “If I had wanted to be in debt until I was a hundred and ninety-three. The bank said as an M.D. and as a prospective long-standing member of the community we could work something out.”

“So that’s not it.”

“No, it’s not. I just couldn’t imagine working that hard for something…” Maude let her voice trail off. She didn’t know if she could say the words even to Sally. She barely said them to herself. She put her hands down on the table and rested her chin on them.

“Something?” Sally prodded in a gentle tone.

When Maude said nothing, Sally poked her on the arm. When Maude still didn’t respond, Sally poked harder.

“Ouch.” Maude rubbed her arm that really didn’t hurt.

Sally had squared her shoulders and made herself look like Atlas ready to shoulder the world.

Maude chuckled. “Yeah, you don’t have any worries of your own.”

Sally relaxed against the slat-back chair. “Well, there is the new worry I have about Lizzy hurling Oreos all over the carpet in front of the TV because she’s no doubt sitting too close, catching as much electromagnetic radiation as she can.”

“Maybe we should go rescue her.”

“Lizzy, sit on the couch and watch TV,” Sally called over the sound of Big Bird. Then she looked at Maude and smiled. “I can always flip the couch cushion over. Now what’s up with the ranch and how much does it have to do with one Daley brother or the other?”

“It didn’t have anything to do with a Daley brother. At least it didn’t at the time.”

“It had to do with…” Sally peered over the top of her glasses at Maude.

“I didn’t want to work that hard for something that broke my heart every day.” Maude expelled a breath of frustration.

“Amanda,” Sally said quietly.

Maude nodded her head as she thought of the accident twenty years ago that now seemed as if it had happened yesterday. “One day I was the goofy girl with an older sister who wanted to take over from Doc Avery and the next day all I had were neighbors hovering over me not telling me a thing about what was going on.”

“And all this time, I thought it was because you couldn’t afford it.”

“Mom and Dad owed so much to the banks, I told them to sell it to the highest bidder.”

“Yeah, one of those rich Coasters or some Arab sheik. I hate it when families move off the ranches.”

“Henry was sanctimonious when he thought I’d lose my childhood home forever. He was determined I’d want it someday, so he bought it to save it from your Coasters and sheiks. Said he’d sell it to me when I was ready. He was so excited, I just couldn’t convince him I might never want the ranch. And my parents, well, they were tickled to be out from under the burden and retire to Great Falls with the nest egg Henry overpaid them. And we all knew with Amanda in a bigger town, she’d be well taken care of for the rest of her life.”

Sally rubbed Maude’s shoulder. “Do you want the ranch now?”

“I don’t. Too many memories. Too much work.” But as she said the words she thought of taking a dip in the swimming hole and long hikes to the hunter’s cabin.

“Are you sure?”

“We did have fun there.”

The two friends sipped coffee as warm sunshine streamed between the white curtains with embroidered red tulips and fell over them like a warm blanket. Maude thought of the solace they had found in each other in grade school when they realized they each had an older sister who outshined them by, Sally had said, about a gagillion candlepower.

“Maudie likes the enemy,” Sally singsonged softly.

“Creep.” Maude laughed and smacked the top of the table with her hand. “I’m going back to the office where there is no one to tease me.”

“No, you aren’t. You’re going to the hunk’s ranch to make a house call.”

“Nothing is a secret in this town.”

“There’s nine hundred and seventy-three of us in the entire valley besides you—no, nine hundred and seventy-four—Midge had her baby last week and, of course, we all know as much of everybody’s business as we can ferret out or make up.”

“Can we change the subject to something that doesn’t involve me?”

“But you came here to talk about you.”

“I came here to sulk. You can imagine the jubilation that will break loose in this town if they find out there is a real doctor, a man doctor, in the valley.”

Sally waggled her blond eyebrows at Maude. “Want to eat Oreos and watch Sesame Street?”

“Yes, and then I have a house call to make.”

Lizzy sat between them on the couch. All three wore headbands with sparkling stars on floppy stalks and ate cookies with a big yellow bird. Barney sat on the floor with his muzzle on the edge of the couch, eyes watching each cookie go from package to mouth, hoping.

EARLY WILDFLOWERS greeted Maude as she drove the highway toward the ranch. At intervals a granite gray stream rollicked beside the road, and in some places rough escarpments soared high, held back by luck and prayers.

Around many curves in the road, snowcapped mountains peeked above pine trees but never seemed to get any closer. Around others lay breathtaking drop-offs where the world fell away and if you drove off the edge, no one would find you for weeks—or ever.

Maude accelerated, loving the sense of adventure clinging to the edge gave her. She smiled. Henry had taught her to push the envelope once in a while. And then she slowed, wondering if anyone would ever care that she felt that way, if she’d ever have a relationship and a family like Sally had, if the town would ever accept her as their doctor.

What would her sister have done under the circumstances?

She gripped the steering wheel hard and then made herself relax. There wouldn’t have been any such “circumstances.” Amanda, the golden child, had been smart and beautiful with an aura of grace and strength. Everyone would have welcomed her warmly as a replacement for Doc Avery…even though she wasn’t a man.

She rounded the last sharp curve, and the valley green with both darkness and light spread out before her. The stunning nature of the land had not changed.

She could face Guy Daley—

“Oh God.” She laughed. She had tried so hard not to think of him. If what didn’t kill you made you stronger, then this man had contributed greatly to her strength over the years.

She slowed to turn onto the long road from the highway to the ranch house. The roughly graded gravel took her through what had been pastureland, but now seemed unused and undisturbed, still beautiful, not lessened by having nature’s free hand.

As she rounded the last corner, the ranch house and buildings came into view.

She stopped near the barn.

A rustic yet sturdy-looking two-story log building stood next to the house, apparently a guesthouse for the participants in Henry’s program. It didn’t destroy the look of the homestead, but it had replaced the old oak tree. The one that Granddad had always insisted shouldn’t be growing there, and maybe it shouldn’t have been.

They’d put the building right where Amanda had lain for so long in the snow. A heart-wringing longing filled Maude, and she rested her forehead on her white-knuckled hands. She missed her sister and the life they’d had.

She suddenly felt closer to Amanda than she had in years. “I’m doing it, Amanda.” She would fulfill her sister’s dream no matter how hard she had to fight to get the people of the valley to accept her. The lovely, craggy valley, full of skeptical people, would have a doctor, one who cared, and one everyone could call Doc.

The sound of rapping on the window of the car brought her head sharply up.