Rachel could count on one hand, with fingers left over, the times that Thomas had been truly exasperated with her. She remembered the look in his eyes as clearly as if he were standing in front of her now. Rand wore a similar expression.
“Did Mrs. Ranslett fail to pass along my instruction that you stay in bed with your leg elevated?”
Feeling like a child and resenting his attempt—no, his ability— to make her feel like one, Rachel laid aside her candy. “Yes, she told me you’d left orders for me to stay in bed. But I’m familiar with incisions and am aware of the possible complications.” She lifted her chin. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m not your usual patient.” Grateful as she was, she also found his behavior to be absurd—his preoccupation with always being right, being obeyed. So like her father, in that respect. “If it will relieve you of unnecessary concern, I’ll take full responsibility for my healing. You needn’t worry.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “I needn’t worry,” he repeated, rubbing his eyes. Hands clasped, forearms resting on the back of the chair, he pinned her with his gaze. “You’re familiar, Mrs. Boyd, with the femoral artery.”
It wasn’t a question, but still she nodded.
“Are you also familiar with the complications stemming from an occluded femoral artery?”
Wanting to say yes with everything in her, she couldn’t lie, not with his being so close and watching her the way he was. She shook her head.
“A severe blow to the body—let’s say . . . being kicked by a heifer, for instance—renders a contusion, which, in turn, causes the tissue in the affected area—for example . . . your thigh—to swell.” He leaned forward, his shirt pulling taut against broad shoulders, his focus intent. “Imagine the muscles, ligaments, nerves, and blood vessels in that affected area forming a kind of . . . compartment. The swelling in that particular compartment”—he made a fist— “cuts off the circulation of blood, and you know what happens to the body when the circulation is obstructed.”
She knew, only too well.
“The symptoms are”—he counted on his left hand—“pain, swelling, weakness, warmth of the bruised area, tenderness of skin”—then moved to his right—“tingling and numbness of the leg or foot, and the inability to lift the toes, so that a person must limp to keep the foot from dragging. Sometimes,” he said, his voice lowering, “one so afflicted might even resort to using a cane.”
Rachel stared, wordless, feeling as if she’d wandered into a house that wasn’t hers. A house that should have been locked, for her safety, as well as that of the owner. Instinctively, she reached down and covered the bandage on her leg.
“Would you like to know what happens when these symptoms remain untreated?” Rand stared back. “Or if, following the surgery, the artery isn’t given proper time to heal?”
The same muscle in his jaw corded tight, and she knew his question was rhetorical.
“Gangrene, leading to permanent dysfunction of the limb”—his gaze moved down over her body—“or as I witnessed during the war more times than I care to remember . . . amputation.”
Still struggling to absorb the words gangrene and permanent dysfunction of the limb, Rachel went cold inside. She confined her focus to her lap, unable to look at him. Here she’d thought he’d made a simple incision, and that it was his arrogance that was causing him to be so . . . “I’m sorry,” she heard herself whisper, seeing Mitch’s and Kurt’s faces in her mind. “I . . . I didn’t realize h-how serious it was. I just assumed . . .”
Seconds passed, strained and silent.
He finally exhaled, and his sigh seemed to drain the tension from the room.
He rose and returned the chair to the corner. “May I check your incision?” he asked, hand on the footboard.
“Yes,” she whispered, turning onto her side.
“Would you like for me to ask Molly to come in?”
Face half hidden in the pillow, Rachel shook her head. “No. I’m fine.”
She glimpsed his profile in the mirror above the dresser. He looked as if an invisible weight were strapped to his shoulders, and she felt responsible, at least in part, for putting it there.
Gently, he removed the bandages, examined the incision, and applied a fresh dressing.
Aware of his warm hands on her skin and the cool air on her bare thigh, Rachel felt a continued unease with his closeness, regardless of his being her doctor. But her discomfort seemed minuscule in comparison to what he’d just told her. She saw blood on the soiled cloths, and thought again of Mitchell and Kurt, and about what would become of them if something happened to her. “Did I tear the sutures?”
“Only one. But I’ve been stitching up patients long enough to know to add an extra knot or two.” She couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded like he was smiling, at least a little. When he finished, he arranged her nightgown over her legs, pulled the covers up to her chest, and paused, his hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t do any damage that I can see.”
“That I can see . . .” The words reverberated inside her. She’d seen the blood on her father’s surgical apron after he’d removed someone’s limb due to gangrene. No matter how many times the apron was washed, the stains never left. She felt Rand looking at her in the mirror.
“Mrs. Boyd,” he said softly.
She couldn’t look back.
He gently squeezed her arm. “Rachel . . . look at me.”
Slowly she did as he asked, watching him in the mirror’s reflection, glad for the distance between them, even if he was standing right behind her.
“There’s no evidence on the skin of internal bleeding, which there would be if you’d damaged the artery again. You know that.”
She nodded, needing for him to leave before the knot in her throat made it impossible to breathe.
He repacked his instruments in his bag, then turned to her. “Ben Mullins needs surgery. And I need for you to assist me.”
That brought her attention back. She rose on one elbow. “What kind of surgery?”
“He has fluid on his lungs. I can remove it, and that will buy him more time.”
She eased back down on the bed, hand resting on her forehead, the truth sinking in. “How much time?”
“A few weeks, at best. Perhaps less.”
She sank back onto the pillow. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “Does Lyda know?”
“I don’t think so. Ben said he wanted to be the one to tell her. But if he doesn’t tell her soon, I will. She needs to know the truth.”
Rachel nodded. A wife deserved to be told if her husband was about to die, just as children deserved to be raised by both their father and their mother. But it didn’t always turn out that way. “I’ll help you in whatever way I can with Ben’s surgery, and . . . I’ll do whatever you advise to get well.”
Rand stared at the man, unable to mask his disappointment. “I understand the reasoning behind your decision, Mr. Welch.” And he did. He just didn’t like it.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Brookston, but that building’s been sittin’ empty for months now. I needed to get it sold.” Harold Welch’s attention swept over the street teeming with Saturday shoppers to a building on the opposite side, adjacent to the Mullinses’ store. “I know what you’d planned on doing with it, and that’s real noble of you. But I needed money in my pocket now, not the promise of money in the future. And no offense, Doc, but”—Welch glanced back, his laughter abrupt—“I’ve seen the way folks around here pay you for your services. Smoked hams and jars of jam don’t pay a mortgage.”
Rand swallowed a bitter sigh. How well he knew. . . . With effort, he extended his hand. “Thank you for seeking me out to tell me, Mr. Welch.” Knowing he shouldn’t inquire further, his curiosity got the best of him. “If it’s not too far out of line, may I ask if the selling price was much beyond what I’d proposed?”
Welch’s satisfied look gave answer before he did. “The buyer met my asking price, plus he gave me an extra hundred dollars to get the place cleaned up and ready by the end of the month.”
Rand whistled low, knowing he’d been beat—and good. “I’d say that’s a mite better than my offer. What’s he going to do with the building?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. He gave me cash on the table. Every last penny.” Welch adjusted his hat and gave Rand an odd sideways glance. “I hope you’re not the type to hold a grudge, Doc.”
Rand eyed him, not certain what he meant.
“You know . . .” Welch shrugged. “In case me or my family comes down with the typhoid.”
Rand exhaled, allowing the hint of a smile. But only just. “You know me better than that, Welch. Although”—he shook his head— “I can tell you right now I won’t be giving you any candy.”
Welch laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. Rand continued down the boardwalk, trying to shake the feeling of having failed. He’d had such vision for that building, but apparently God didn’t think Timber Ridge needed a real clinic. At least not yet.
No new cases of typhoid had been reported in the past two days, so the number of patients held at seven, which wasn’t many, considering how swiftly typhoid could spread. It wasn’t enough to mandate a quarantine of the town—yet—and Paige’s condition continued to be the most serious by far. With every evaluation, she’d grown weaker.
Rand reached the buckboard and tossed his bag up on the seat. He could still see the girl clutching the half-melted stick candy in her sweaty little hand.
“I’m saving this one . . . for later,” she’d whispered to him late last night between coughing spells. “Mama says . . . I need to . . . eat my soup first.” After sharing with the Fosters about their daughter’s worsened condition, he’d encouraged Helen Foster to let Paige have anything she wanted to eat, to make all of Paige’s favorite foods, whether it be cookies or meatloaf. Mrs. Foster’s expression had sobered, and Rand had spoken to them more plainly about their daughter’s prognosis.
It was a fine line to walk, deciding how forthcoming to be with patients—or in this case, the patient’s parents—about the prognosis. He wanted to give them hope, wanted to leave room for God to intervene if He chose to, yet he also wanted them to know the truth so they could have time to be better prepared. If there was such a thing. Knowing death was coming, or not knowing . . . Both ways held blessings, he guessed.
He climbed into the wagon and gathered the reins. He’d seen God work in miraculous ways. He’d also seen God remain silent. Well, not exactly silent, he reckoned. God always spoke. Sometimes His answer just wasn’t the one a man wanted.
Rand guided the buckboard down the crowded street toward Miss Clara’s cafe, trying to dislodge the melancholy that settled over him. Miss Clara would have his usual breakfast waiting for him, and he’d sit at his usual table by the window and watch the townspeople as he ate. He knew how to cook. A man didn’t live thirty-four years, nearly half of those without a woman in his life, or in his kitchen, without picking up a thing or two about cooking.
His specialty? Hot-boiled peanuts.
He smiled, his stomach growling. Knowing how to make boiled peanuts was hardly something to brag about, but those peanuts helped him earn his keep through medical school in Philadelphia, then during his training in New York City. For all the boast and swagger with which Yankees regarded the South, Northerners loved boiled peanuts.
Miss Clara must have been watching for him, because when Rand pulled the buckboard up to her restaurant and walked inside, the older woman was bustling down a side aisle, covered plate in hand.
“Morning, Dr. Brookston! I got your biscuits slathered in gravy, scrambled eggs, and sausage right here. Hot, wrapped, and ready to go!”
Ready to go? Rand frowned, seeing his usual table open by the window. “You eager to be rid of me this morning, Miss Clara?” He summoned his best hurt-puppy look, not having to work at it too hard.
She squeezed his arm tight and gave him a grandmotherly hug. “Don’t you go tryin’ to make an old woman feel bad. I’m just thinkin’ you don’t have the time. A boy was in here a few minutes ago. Cute little dark-headed thing, came in yellin’ your name. Bless him, he couldn’t say much of anything else, leastwise that I understood. I just nodded and told him you’d be coming by anytime. He gave me this.”
Rand took the envelope dusted with flour and read his name on the front. He opened it. The thickness of the stationery should have been a clue as to its sender, but when he read Colorado Hot Springs Resort in fancy type across the top of the paper, he guessed no further.
Dr. Brookston,
A guest at my resort is in immediate need of your attention. Please come at the earliest possible moment.
With kindest regards,
Brandon H. Tolliver
Rand slid the note and envelope in his side pocket, praying it wasn’t another case of typhoid. The resort’s grand opening was only three weeks away—as if anyone in Timber Ridge could forget with the banners Tolliver had strung up all over town—and an outbreak of typhoid in town already didn’t bode well. But at the resort . . . That raised another level of concern.
“Thank you, Miss Clara.” He brushed a kiss to her papery cheek. “You’re an angel.”
“If I was thirty years younger, you wouldn’t dare be kissin’ me like that.”
He smiled at her reproving look.
Then she smiled too and winked. “Which sure makes me glad I’m not. Run on, now.” She patted his arm. “You’ve got some doctoring to do. I’ll have fried chicken and mashed sweet potatoes tonight, so come on back and see me.”
“It’s a date,” he said, and gave her another quick peck on the cheek.
His mood slightly more hopeful, Rand maneuvered the buckboard past farm wagons lined up by the feed store. Past the congestion, he urged the mare onto the road leading from town to the resort and ate his breakfast on the way, his patients occupying his thoughts.
One patient in particular, at the moment.
He’d seen Rachel yesterday afternoon and was pleased with how her incision was healing. What pleased him almost as much was the friendship, for lack of a better term, that seemed to have been forged between them. He wasn’t fool enough to think she’d changed her opinion about him personally—Rachel Boyd was not a fickle woman. Her mind, once stayed on something, wouldn’t be easily swayed. He knew that well enough.
But her opinion about him as a doctor had changed.
He found it hard to put into words, yet he felt it when she looked at him, when she asked questions about the procedure he’d performed on her leg, and about the surgery they would perform together on Ben Mullins. As best he could define it, Rachel had respected his abilities before.
Now she respected him . . . as a doctor.
She’d asked for information on Ben’s upcoming procedure, and he’d given her a paper a colleague had written detailing the steps and the possible complications, as well as what to watch for during recovery.
Ben’s breathing had worsened in recent days. A wheeze had set in, signaling more fluid on his lungs, but his strength wasn’t what it needed to be to undergo the procedure. As of yesterday, Ben still hadn’t told Lyda the truth of his situation. Ben insisted that he was waiting for the right moment. Rand sighed. He’d told Ben that, come Monday, if Ben hadn’t told Lyda the truth, he would.
Rand rounded a curve and spotted a man on foot up ahead. Recognizing Charlie Daggett and his lumbering gait, Rand slowed the wagon alongside him. “Morning there, Charlie. Headed out to the resort?”
“Morning, Doc.” Nodding, Charlie patted his coat pocket. “I got me some—” he paused, squinting until his eyes almost closed— “documents of great import for Mr. Tolliver.” He sighed, his whiskered face relaxing in a grin. “Least that’s what he called them.”
Rand smiled at Charlie’s astute assessment. “Would you and your . . . important documents like a ride?”
Charlie lifted a muddy boot. “You sure you’re offerin’?”
Rand waved him up to the bench seat, knowing it would be a tight fit. “Come on up.”
The buckboard creaked beneath Charlie’s weight, and even before Charlie settled in beside him, Rand smelled liquor thick on the man. He gave the reins a flick.
Charlie belched, and the taint of soured bourbon pressed closer. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Either Charlie had started early this morning or he’d gotten a late start last night.
“So tell me, Charlie, how are things going for you?”
“Good, I guess. Got more work than I know what to do with and a body that can do the work. That’s a good pairin’ in my book.”
“Indeed. I’d have to agree.” Rand glanced down at Charlie’s hands. Huge hardly described them. Work-worn and thick-fingered, Charlie’s hands looked as if they could snap a piece of lumber clean in two. He remembered Charlie doing something similar to a man’s wrist last fall. But according to Sheriff McPherson, the fella had deserved it. “You’ve been in Timber Ridge for, what . . . seven years?”
“Eight. Come August.” Charlie fidgeted with one of the remaining buttons on his coat.
“How long have you been helping out Ben Mullins?”
“Ever since I came. I walked into his store that first day, asked if he needed help unloading the wagon out back. Mr. Mullins . . . he looked at me”—Charlie mimicked the actions—“looked back at the wagon, then looked back at me again, and hired me right where I stood.”
Rand smiled, able to imagine that scene quite well, from both sides. “How’s Miss Lori Beth Matthews these days?”
Charlie went quiet. “She’s good, I guess. Last I saw her.”
For a time, Rand had seen Charlie and Lori Beth together on occasion and could tell Charlie had it bad for the woman. And Lori Beth looked equally enamored. But he hadn’t seen them together in a long time and had begun to wonder. “From where I sit, she sure seemed to enjoy your company, Charlie. And you, hers.”
Charlie’s expression remained carefully guarded. “Sometimes a person can’t see everything from where they’re sittin’, Doc.”
Surprised at his response, Rand toyed with how to phrase his next question, having waited a long time for the right setting in which to ask it. He could be subtle when needed, but being a doctor gave him license to dispense with that subtlety on occasion. Especially when it involved the welfare of a friend and patient, whether or not that patient knew yet that they were sick. “How long have you been drinking, Charlie?”
Charlie’s hand stilled on his coat button. He looked off over the fields covered with snow. “A long time, Doc.”
The creak of wagon wheels and the steady thud of the horse’s hooves marked off the silence, lengthening the moments. Most people couldn’t abide the quiet when they were with someone else, but Rand welcomed it. With the right person, even the quiet became a kind of conversation.
Charlie kept his head turned, still gripping the button on his coat. Clearly, he was done talking.
Rand had spoken with Charlie on many occasions in the past two years, but this was the first time he could remember Charlie Daggett shutting down the conversation, which told him Charlie was hiding something. Not surprising. Every person he’d known who was dependent on liquor or morphine or some other substance had a secret hurt. It provided a way to dull the pain, be it from a physical ailment or an emotional one.
One look at the emptiness in Charlie’s face and hearing the way his breath came quick, Rand grew even more certain—Charlie’s wound was emotional.
He left Charlie to his silence, and as they rounded the final curve leading to the resort, Rand found his gaze being drawn upward. Impressive was the first word that came to mind. Money was the second.
From a stately stand of spruce and aspen, the main hotel of the Colorado Hot Springs Resort rose in four-storied splendor. An expansive porch, braced with thick honey-colored pine beams, encompassed the front and sides of the structure and appeared to extend all the way around the building. Shuttered floor-to-ceiling windows, trimmed in black and burgundy, sat evenly spaced on each level, row after perfect row, accentuating the stunning white-painted timber. No expense spared.
It looked more like a painting than real life. As if this little pocketed valley hidden deep in the Rockies had been waiting, carved out specially for this occasion, since the mountains were formed.
Rand pulled the buckboard to a stop in front of an ornately carved hitching post.
A young boy dressed in finery worthy of a Southern cotillion ran to meet them. He grasped the mare’s bridle. “Welcome, Signore Brookston. Signore Daggett.” He had a special smile for Charlie, and no wonder, with the animated wink Charlie gave him.
Rand set the brake and climbed down. He dug into his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Grazie,” he said softly, silently thanking Angelo again for teaching him a few phrases in Italian.
Triple pairs of French doors, decorated with fragrant evergreen boughs, stood like sentinels on the front porch, waiting to welcome guests. He gave a low whistle. How had Brandon Tolliver managed to build such a place? Much less fund it?
“You ain’t never been out here, Doc?” Charlie joined him at the edge of the flagstone walkway.
“Not in a few months. It looked impressive then, but . . . this.”
“It’s fancy, all right.” Charlie nudged him in the arm. “Wait ’til you see the innards.”
Smiling at Charlie’s phrasing, Rand watched a man and woman exit the hotel through one of the French doors. Dressed as if they were headed to an evening at the opera in New York City, the couple continued down one of the many strolling paths that meandered around the trees and boulders. “I didn’t think the resort was open yet.”
“It’s not,” Charlie answered. “We’re having what Mr. Tolliver calls a dry run. He invited in all the higher-ups who gave money to help build this place, them and their families. They’re staying here for free. Tryin’ things out and makin’ sure everything works before the payin’ folks arrive.”
Rand nodded. A good idea, and what a way to be thanked.
The door opened again, and two more couples, equally opulent and graceful, shadowed the previous couple’s steps, then took a path leading down to one of several smaller buildings dotting the grounds—the hot springhouses where patrons could partake of the area’s famous mineral pools.
Rand took it all in, unable to deny the fact that he was impressed with Tolliver’s accomplishment, while knowing full well that the contagious nature of typhoid fever would not be.