Whispering Pines Mysteries Box Set 3

by Shawn McGuire

  “Sure. Miracles happen.”

  Because Unity was a medical clinic as well as a yoga studio and spa, there was a small parking lot behind it so those injured or otherwise ill didn’t have to walk across the village to get help. That’s where I parked the Forester.

  The clinic/spa was dark except for dim ceiling lights in the wood-paneled main lobby and a desk lamp illuminating the front reception area. That’s where Jola was waiting for us.

  “It’s so quiet,” Tripp noted. “Are you the only one here?”

  She wrapped her oversized steel-gray cardigan tighter around her torso and nodded. “I pulled night shift. Drake is on call. Sanjay has the night off. We rotate through overnight shifts that way.”

  “What’s going on?” A soft light shined from a nearby exam room. I assumed that’s where the woman in question was.

  “Come with me.” She motioned for us to follow.

  Tripp pulled the walkie talkie from his jacket pocket. “I’ll update your dad and sister and be right there.”

  Jola led me to the room twenty feet from the reception desk. There, a woman lay on the exam table, covered with blankets.

  White-blonde hair, late twenties or early thirties . . .

  And that was all I could determine. Her head was the only thing not covered up. From the bony appearance of her face—sharp cheekbones and jawline—I assumed she was thin but not necessarily in a healthy way.

  “Her right arm is broken,” Jola explained in a soft voice. “I set and cast it. Her temperature is dangerously low so I’m trying to warm her up. She’s got frostbite on three fingers and two toes. She must’ve been out in the cold for quite a while.”

  I matched her low tone so we wouldn’t disturb the woman. “She was in a car accident?”

  “That’s what Lorena thought. She’d just closed Sundry and was about to go home when she saw someone stumbling into their parking lot. She didn’t hesitate, got her in the car, and drove her right here. She told me the woman mumbled something about a car wreck.” Jola gazed with concern at her patient. “Thank the Goddess Lorena saw her. She would’ve frozen to death out there otherwise.”

  Jola paused, surely thinking, as I was, about Suzette Thibodeaux’s death a few weeks earlier.

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize.” I studied the mystery woman. “She’s really out. The only thing on her I’ve seen move is her chest when she takes a breath. Did you sedate her?”

  “Didn’t need to. Lorena brought her in, and the woman was mumbling incoherently. I brought her to the table so I could check her over. She lay down and was asleep in seconds. It’s like she checked out and simply doesn’t want to come back yet.”

  “Any idea what the cause might be?”

  Jola shrugged and shook her head. “She’s got a nasty bump on her forehead, so it could be a brain injury. She might have suffered a stroke. It’s possible she’s gone into a diabetic coma.”

  “But she’s so skinny.”

  “Being thin doesn’t protect you against diabetes.” She kept staring at the woman, her mind obviously going a hundred miles an hour. “Maybe it has something to do with being out in the extreme weather. I don’t know enough about the brain to feel comfortable making a diagnosis. She may have taken medication or drugs of some kind. I took a blood sample but don’t have the tools here to test it.”

  “Other than the obvious, is there anything else wrong with her? Did we get a name?”

  Tripp entered the room and flashed me an all-clear thumbs-up as Jola reported, “Couldn’t get her name out of her and didn’t find an ID. I’m sure there’s more wrong, but I don’t have the proper equipment here to determine what. She’s got a nasty concussion. Her speech was slurred, and she seemed confused. I’m not a doctor, so I called the hospital—”

  “That’s an hour away,” I interrupted and held up a hand in apology.

  “Right. There’s no way an ambulance could make it here tonight. I talked to a doctor there to get some guidance on what I should do for her. He prescribed rest with as little stimulation as possible until he can examine her. Pain medication might mask other symptoms, so no meds until tomorrow. I asked if I could use a diffuser with lavender or chamomile essential oil to keep her calm. He okayed that.”

  “That’s what I’ve always heard.” Tripp frowned at the woman. “The lots of rest thing. That advice about not letting a concussion victim sleep isn’t true. The body heals best with rest.”

  Jola and I stared at him.

  “But you’re the medical professional.” He took a few steps back and pretended to lock his mouth.

  We chuckled at him.

  “It sounds like you’ve got this pretty well under control, Jola,” I noted. “As soon as it’s safe, I’ll go out and look for evidence of an accident. Hopefully the weather will have improved by then. Did she say anything about another person in the car?”

  “Not a word. Most of what she said was unintelligible. The only thing I understood was the words ‘car’ and ‘crash.’ But I can’t swear to it. It might have been ‘cash’ or ‘slash.’”

  I wanted to go search now, but if there were others trapped inside the car, I didn’t have the necessary equipment to get them out. If they were severely injured, the nearest hospital was an hour away on a good day. With the ice and snow from earlier and now the wind, it would be closer to two hours one way. And I didn’t have a clue where to start the search. Down by Sundry, but had the car been going southeast toward Rhinelander or northwest toward Superior? It was an agonizing decision, but I couldn’t do it. The likelihood of Tripp and I ending up in a crash and stranded ourselves was very high. Despite the “rock-solid” Forester. There was no way I’d risk other lives that way. Especially when I didn’t even know for sure that there was anyone in need of rescue. This mystery woman could have been alone in the vehicle. I inhaled deeply, blew the breath out slowly, and made the call to search as soon as conditions improved.

  “Was there any other reason you wanted me to come?” I asked Jola.

  Using a penlight, Jola illuminated the woman’s face, taking care to keep the light away from her eyes. “See those bruises?”

  It looked like she’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring and forgot to protect her face. “I see them.”

  “They didn’t happen in the accident. Those bruises have been healing for a few days. And she’s got others in various stages of healing all over her body.”

  “You think she’s an abuse victim.”

  “Bastard,” Tripp hissed.

  Jola nodded her agreement with his assessment. “Considering that, maybe it wasn’t an accident. I’m only guessing, but what if someone pushed her out of a car or she jumped?”

  How desperate for escape did a person have to be to jump from a moving vehicle in the middle of a blizzard?

  “She might play some kind of physical sport,” Tripp offered. “Or maybe it legitimately was an accident and she got thrown from the car.”

  I gave him a sad smile. “Always look on the positive side, don’t you?”

  “For the record,” Jola added, “there are no seatbelt marks.”

  She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. That led back to the pushed, thrown, or jumped possibilities. “Could abuse be the reason for the deep sleeping? I mean, she gets to a clinic and finally feels safe so lies down and checks out?”

  Jola shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know enough about that kind of trauma to make that call.”

  Before any of us could say anything more, a massive gust of wind shook the clinic, the lights flickered, and then the power went out.

  Chapter 7

  We waited two minutes before deciding this wasn’t just a flicker. The power wasn’t coming back on. The only light in the whole building was from the battery-powered emergency exit signs in the hallway and Jola’s penlight. I pulled a small flashlight from my jacket pocket and directed the beam at the floor.

  “Does Unity have a generator?” I asked Jola.


  “No.” Disgust was clear in her voice. “We talked about buying one at the last employee meeting, and they voted it down in favor of doing new landscaping in the spring.”

  I gazed at the woman on the table. “I expect you’ll be revisiting that decision.”

  “Damn straight.” She closed her eyes and centered herself for a few seconds. “Sorry. All right, I need to make a plan.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Tripp stated. “Let’s bring her to Pine Time. We’ve got plenty of room.”

  I swear, sometimes my man and I shared a brain. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  Jola considered this. “I’ll need to come, too, and keep a close eye on her.”

  “You can stay in the Jack and Jill rooms,” Tripp offered. “They’re connected by a shared bathroom, so you’ll be right next to her.”

  “I like that plan.” Jola relaxed a little.

  Tripp pulled the walkie talkie out of his pocket again. “I’ll contact Rosalyn and ask her to grab extra blankets from the linen closet and bring them to the room.”

  “If she can,” Jola began, “ask her to turn the heat up a little too.”

  “No problem.” Tripp gave a salute and went to the lobby to contact Roz. While he did that, Jola took a small notepad and a pen from the pocket of her bark-brown uniform top and started making a list of supplies she’d need from the clinic. “I could bring her over in the van. It’s already loaded with all this stuff.”

  A ready stash of supplies versus safety on the snow-covered road. “I’ve seen your van. You’ll probably end up spinning out. You need to hold a fundraising event during tourist season. You need a generator and a new van. And I’m guessing plenty of other equipment.”

  “Don’t get me started.” She flapped a hand at me. “Okay, let me concentrate on my list.”

  I mentally added “funding for Unity” to the agenda for the next village council meeting. The clinic needed a little help.

  “Check that list twice,” I cautioned. “Once we get to Pine Time, we’re not leaving again until this storm blows over.”

  I watched with interest while Jola made her list. She hovered her hand near her patient’s head and wrote what she’d need for injuries there. Then she moved down to the woman’s upper chest, hovered, and wrote again. She repeated the exercise until she was satisfied with her list and then went through it one final time.

  “Lily Grace,” she blurted as though remembering to add her sister to the list. “She’s at home alone. And she’s not a fan of storms.”

  “Your cottage is just on the other side of the highway, right?”

  “Across the highway and over the creek. I was thrilled when I found out it was available for rent. My home is a quarter mile away so I can walk to work even in a blizzard.” She paused and analyzed the statement. “That’s both a blessing and a curse.”

  “Give Lily Grace a call,” Tripp instructed. “Tell her to pack a bag and that we’ll call again when we leave here. We’ll pick her up alongside the highway.”

  “She can grab some clothes for me too.” Jola plucked at her uniform shirt. “This is getting a little ripe.”

  Moving the patient and supplies from the exam room to the Subaru was a team effort. Tripp took the bag Jola packed to the vehicle and positioned the SUV close to Unity’s back door. Jola stepped into the hallway and returned seconds later with a portable stretcher/wheelchair.

  “I knew we’d need this thing and stood my ground on it,” she reported. “It was only a couple hundred bucks. With all the outdoor activities our tourists do and the resulting injuries, I was prepared to buy it myself if the staff voted this one down.” She showed me how it folded from in half for storage, to a flat stretcher for carrying patients, and then into a wheelchair. “I couldn’t get over the state of this place when I started here. Plenty of holistic options, which I’m totally in favor of whenever possible, but little that resembled actual medical equipment.”

  “I knew we hired the right person. You’ll get this place straightened out.”

  Jola smiled. “Tripp can take this to the car. The exam table is mobile, so we’ll roll her to the back door, but we’ll need the wheelchair at Pine Time.”

  The exam table wasn’t hard to push, but it took a little maneuvering to get it through the doorway and into the hall. At least moving the woman this way kept any jostling to a minimum. As we pushed her, I thought of little kids who fell asleep and had no clue their parents were moving them from a friend’s couch to the back seat of the car to their bed once they got home.

  At the door, Tripp lifted the woman from the table, and I walked with my arms beneath his, ready to catch the woman in case he slipped. Even though he did all the carrying, I added an exercise routine with plenty of upper body work to my daily to-do list as we shuffle-stepped the few feet from the door to the Forester. If I didn’t get back into shape, the first week or two of the tourist season would kick my butt.

  “Careful now,” Jola ordered while guiding the woman into the back seat. She decided the best option was to sit with her patient’s head in her lap and an arm draped across her shoulders to keep her steady and from potentially rolling onto the floor. The last thing this poor woman needed was to have her brain bounced around again.

  Finally secure in the toasty-warm SUV, and wrapped in blankets, the patient was ready for transport. The last task was a quick call to let Lily Grace know we were on the way.

  As I pulled away from Unity, I immediately found that the sleet that had melted on the road earlier had frozen. Like Dad had said, the SUV handled well, but I still didn’t push it to more than ten miles per hour. The swirling snow had also partially covered Lily Grace in the short time she’d been standing next to the road waiting for us.

  “Finally,” she grumbled as she climbed into the cargo area, the only available spot left for her in the Forester. “I’ve been standing out there for like an hour.”

  Tripp checked the clock on the dashboard. “More like ten minutes.”

  “Well it felt like an hour,” she complained. “It’s nasty out there. That wind is fierce, and I swear the temperature dropped ten degrees while I stood there.”

  She was right about the wind. The gusts had created numerous drifts. In one place, Tripp and I had to get out and clear snow and a small pine tree that had fallen across the road.

  “Bonus points to you for suggesting we bring shovels,” Tripp told me when we got back in the SUV.

  I waved off the compliment. “I’m a native Wisconsinite. You’re from California.”

  “They get snow in California,” he objected.

  “Where did you live?” Lily Grace asked.

  “Ramona.”

  “Which is?” I led.

  “East of San Diego.”

  “How often do they get snow?” Lily Grace asked in her typical teenage doubting-everything voice.

  “Believe it or not,” Tripp began, “there was a storm in 2014, I think, that dumped almost a foot in the mountains to the east. Ramona got a dusting too.”

  Lily Grace barked out a laugh. “California boy.”

  “In his defense,” I informed, feeling bad about teasing him, "he may not have grown up with inclement weather, but he experienced plenty while traveling cross-country.” He’d spent five years traveling across the western half of the country searching for his mother, but there was no need to open that topic.

  Forty-five minutes after leaving Unity, we pulled up to Pine Time, and I backed the Forester as close to the front sidewalk as I could. While Tripp shoveled a bit of drifted snow from the path, Jola folded the stretcher thing back into a wheelchair. Our patient moaned softly as we pulled her from the back seat. Then as Jola pushed the chair, Tripp walked behind to catch her if she slipped. With Lily Grace taking care of the bags and the front door, I returned the vehicle to its spot in the driveway.

  That’s when I noticed the older-model BMW mini-SUV parked on the far side of River’s big Bentley SUV. Both were ca
ked with snow. The longer I studied the BMW, the more familiar it looked. It was a popular model that I’d seen everywhere in Madison, however. It could belong to anyone.

  I entered the B&B to find a pile of boots on the rug but no people. They must have already brought the patient upstairs. Rosalyn appeared from the kitchen side of the hallway.

  “Hey,” I greeted. “Whose car is out there?”

  “River’s.”

  Smart aleck. “I’m familiar with River’s car, thanks. I meant the other one.”

  “Morgan and Briar are here. River was worried the power would go out over at their place and said something suave and chivalrous about the mother and grandmother of his child needing to be safe during the storm.” Roz was talking fast and cramming a ton of words into each breath. “Morgan is staying in the Grand Suite with River. Briar said they should have their own room so is in The Treehouse. River insists on paying for the extra room.”

  “And we know not to argue with River. If we do, he’ll look you in the eye and do that hypnosis thing. I’ll stop up and say hi.”

  “Briar went right up to her room and said she’d see us in the morning. I’m not sure if she went to bed or what she’s doing up there.”

  “She’s a green witch. She’s probably meditating and drawing energy from this storm.” I laughed, unsure if that was even a thing she could do, and then asked my sister, “Any reason you’re talking so fast and ignoring my question about the other car in our driveway?”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I demanded. “Did something happen? Is Dad okay?”

  She exhaled and flapped a hand at me. “Daddy’s fine. Nothing happened.”

  I waited while she played with her fingers but volunteered nothing more.

  “Roz, what?”

  Her face contorted with a wince of pain, and she finally looked me in the eye. “Jonah’s here.”

  Chapter 8

  I stared at my sister, confusion, or maybe denial, fogging my head. “Jonah who?”

  She blinked at me like I’d completely lost it. “How many Jonah’s do you know?”