Doctor and Protector

by Meredith Webber

  ‘It probably isn’t,’ McCall pointed out to her. ‘There’ll be new arrivals in town, and people you know of but don’t actually know. Stick to people you know by name, and we’ll get Suzy to go through patient records and add names of men between those ages you’ve treated in the last few years.’

  ‘I can’t have Suzy doing that—she’ll wonder why.’

  ‘Say it’s a research project,’ McCall suggested, and she slanted her glance his way.

  ‘I suppose to a certain extent that’s true—after all, didn’t you say it was your research project? Though I’m a little bit taken aback at how fluently you can come up with a plausible lie. Makes me wonder if I can believe anything you say.’

  She was pulling into a driveway as she spoke and McCall saw a large wooden house, white-painted with yellow trim, up ahead of them. As Cassie stopped the car a small boy appeared from behind a shrub, his arm slung across the back of the golden Labrador, the dog walking sedately beside him.

  ‘Hey, Ethan!’ Cassie called, and although the dog turned to look at Cassie and wag his tail with great enthusiasm, the child continued on his way.

  ‘Blondie’s taking me home,’ he said. ‘I was lost and I told Blondie and she’s taking me home.’

  ‘She’s coming back for me next,’ a voice from behind the bushes added.

  ‘My nephews, Ethan and Isaac,’ Cassie said, turning towards McCall, her face alive with love and pride. ‘Isaac, come out and say hello to someone who’s come to stay.’

  ‘No, I’m lost.’

  Cassie shrugged.

  ‘They haven’t been here long, but we’ve already discovered it’s easier to obedience train dogs than kids.’

  She led the way towards the door Ethan and the dog had entered. It took them into an old-fashioned laundry, with a concrete floor and cement tubs—though the washing machine and dryer were obviously the very latest models.

  ‘Country ways, coming through the back door,’ Cassie said, as she kicked aside dog bedding to clear a path to three steps that led up into the kitchen.

  It was a large room, cluttered at the moment because the ‘lost’ boy was being greeted with hugs and kisses by a teenager, so like Cassie in spite of her jet-black hair that she had to be a sister. Another woman, in her mid-fifties McCall guessed, sat at the table shelling peas, and over by the stove was Abigail Carew, Cassie’s mother, whom McCall had met earlier in the day.

  ‘So this is the man!’ the youngest of the women said. ‘Boy, are we ever glad to have you come to stay. But you must be either brave or stupid, or really besotted by Cassie, to venture into this house of women.’

  ‘The one with the flapping lips is Anne, my youngest sister,’ Cassie said, throwing a black look at the speaker. ‘And this is Gwen, who’s a kind of nanny for the boys, and a sanity-keeper for the rest of us. You met Mum earlier. Ethan, this is Mr McCall.’

  ‘Man!’

  McCall turned at the word and saw the second twin had followed them into the house and was standing in the doorway, studying him as if he were an unknown species.

  Which perhaps he was, in this house!

  ‘McCall! Great name.’

  Anne set the little boy aside, stood up and thrust out her hand.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you I’d kiss you, only Cassie would be upset, but having you come to stay is just the best thing. Not only for Cassie, who looked like she was never going to get over that loser Ross, but I was reading where it’s bad for little boys to grow up without a male influence in their lives and I’ve been thinking, because Cassie’s a dead loss at relationships, that I should get my boyfriend Brad over here more often, but he’s terrified of coming. Says there’s something very scary about a houseful of women.’

  She studied McCall for a moment, before adding, ‘You don’t look like you’d scare easily.’

  ‘Anne, behave yourself! And do something useful. Set the table in the dining room.’ Abigail waved her voluble youngest daughter out of the room, then turned to McCall.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t honestly say it’s not always like this. In fact, some days it’s even more chaotic. Cassie, take McCall through to the guest room, and show him around the house on the way. You’ll still get lost,’ she added to McCall. ‘At some stage someone joined two houses together and this place is the result, so there’s not a lot of system in the way it’s laid out.’

  Nodding a temporary farewell to Gwen, who was now patiently showing the twins how to shell peas, McCall followed Cassie out of the kitchen, through a room that might once have been a veranda on one of the two original houses, but was now closed in, then through the dining room where Anne was setting up two high chairs. They passed along a corridor. ‘That’s a bathroom,’ Cassie explained, pointing to a door. ‘But you won’t need to remember that because the guest bedroom has its own. We all fought so much over who’d have the room with an en suite, my father decreed it would be kept for guests.’ They finally entered a big room that opened up onto a lattice-shaded veranda.

  ‘There! All yours,’ Cassie said, waving her hand as if to display the generously sized bed, a desk with a small chair and a comfortable reclining armchair.

  She hesitated and he sensed by the way she was studying the carpet that her usual confident manner had deserted her. He guessed why when she said, ‘Don’t take any notice of Anne. She’s at the age where she says whatever comes into her head without any thought to the consequences.’

  McCall was surprised but he was also touched by her embarrassment. The ‘loser Ross’, as Anne had called him, must have been someone special in Cassie’s life for her to still be upset about him. The fiancé doctor Dave had mentioned?

  ‘I have met other teenagers,’ he said, and she looked up and smiled at him.

  ‘I suppose you have,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to get settled in. If you can’t find your way back, just yell and I’ll send the dog to find you. Seems she’s being trained to find lost boys.’

  Lost boys!

  The phrase seemed to beat through McCall’s brain long after Cassie had departed. Not that he was a boy, or lost for that matter, yet somehow it seemed to have a pathos that echoed something in his life.

  The emptiness perhaps?

  Or did he just feel that because it was so long since he’d been in a family home—as in a house filled with the warmth that only a close-knit family could generate?

  Frowning at his thoughts, he opened his small overnight bag, dug out clean clothes, then entered the fought-over en suite bathroom to shower and shave before dinner.

  Cassie was sitting on the bed when he came out, with—fortunately—a towel wrapped around his waist.

  Not that she’d have noticed if he’d been naked, he realised when he saw what she held in her hand.

  ‘Gwen’s already touched it because she brought in the mail, and Mum as well because she always goes through it and puts it into piles for each of us, and probably Anne too because it’s natural to look through what’s arrived. I haven’t opened it because it looks just like the others looked, and I brought some gloves from the kitchen if you want to open it.’

  She sounded so distraught he touched her gently on the shoulder.

  ‘I could call Dave and get him to open it,’ he suggested. ‘You needn’t even know what it says.’

  She looked up at him, unasked—perhaps unaskable—questions hovering in the green depths.

  ‘I think I need to know what it says,’ she said at last. ‘So, if you’re authorised to open it, go ahead.’

  She handed him some pink kitchen gloves and the letter, the tremor in her fingers revealing how upset she was.

  McCall ignored the gloves but took the envelope, holding it by its edges, and set it down on the bed. He reached for his briefcase and found a small box of surgical gloves—extra large—and a plastic envelope into which he could slide the letter once he had it out.

  ‘Like surgery, isn’t it?’ Cassie said, but he knew her heart wasn’t in the c
asual comment. Her voice and posture reflected the tension that had caused her fingers to shake.

  He used the sharp blade of his penknife to slit the envelope open, though it was a pre-sealed one and he knew there’d be no giveaway trace of saliva on it, then slid the letter out, opening it, reading it, feeling the reaction in a tightening in his belly and a sudden rush of red-hot rage that someone—anyone—could taunt another human being this way.

  ‘What does it say?’

  He looked at the woman on the bed. She had stiffened her posture and straightened her shoulders as if bracing herself physically might help her mental anxiety.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked, sitting down beside her but holding the letter in its plastic sleeve so the single line of typing faced away from her.

  She hesitated for a moment, as if seriously considering the option of not knowing. Then she nodded.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘But only me. And Dave, of course. Not Mum. I don’t want her worrying any more than she is already.’

  McCall understood, but still he hesitated.

  ‘It’s not nice—he’s upping the pace. You have to realise this is a game he plays, screwing the tension of his victims tighter and tighter.’

  ‘Cassie, Grandma said you’ve to come to dinner, and bring man.’

  The small boy in the doorway—McCall wouldn’t hazard a guess as to whether it was Ethan or Isaac—spoke to Cassie but studied her companion as if a male presence in the house was as much a novelty as Anne had suggested.

  ‘Let’s leave it until after dinner,’ McCall said, standing up then slipping the letter into his briefcase. He locked it, then, remembering the inquisitiveness of small boys, put it into the top of the cupboard.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to the woman who remained sitting on the bed.

  She sighed.

  ‘It’s a bit like watching a serial on the television. They always seem to stop the episode before you find out what’s happening.’

  ‘That’s to keep you coming back for more—this lull is to stop you getting indigestion during your meal.’

  She stood up and walked to the door, where she stooped to sweep the child into her arms.

  ‘Let’s go, kidlet,’ she said cheerfully, and McCall shook his head in admiration. She was one strong woman, Cassie Carew.

  He made to follow, then realised he was still dressed in a towel. He hoped the dog would come along and lead him back to the dining room.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TOO tense to notice, or care, what she was eating, Cassie tried to blot out the fear she felt by studying the newcomer to their table.

  And the family’s various reactions to him. The twins showed off, Anne flirted and Gwen, ever self-contained, contented herself with an occasional comment. But it was her mother’s behaviour that most interested Cassie.

  Abigail was in hostess mode, and as she asked non-threatening questions, introduced interesting but uncontroversial topics of conversation, and generally kept the talk flowing, Cassie remembered how much her mother had enjoyed entertaining—and how good she’d been at it. Though since her husband’s death, and taking over his legal practice, she’d had little time for anything but work and family.

  Cassie was wondering if it bothered her mother—if she missed her old life—when the phone rang.

  Anne, being a teenager to whom the phone was a link to life itself, was first out of her seat to answer it. She returned to the table minutes later, a glum expression on her face.

  ‘Not Brad, then?’ Cassie guessed, and Anne frowned at her.

  ‘No, it was Derek—for you. Well, not really for you. He wants Blondie for some blood.’

  ‘Urgent?’ Cassie asked, and Anne shook her head.

  ‘I told him you were eating, and he said to finish your dinner first, he could wait twenty minutes.’

  Cassie looked down at her plate. Considering how she felt, she’d managed to eat a reasonable amount.

  ‘I’m finished. It was lovely, Mum. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll take Blondie now. I’ll wait and bring her home so don’t expect me any time soon.’

  Abigail nodded, but as Cassie pushed back her chair she noticed McCall wolfing down what remained of his steak and veggies.

  ‘Hey, don’t hurry. I’m only taking the dog over to the vet’s. You don’t have to come.’

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said, rising and coming around the table. ‘Great meal, Mrs Carew, thank you.’

  Then, to Cassie’s surprise, he slipped an arm around her waist, but any protest she might have made would have been drowned out by the twins who were clamouring to be allowed to go, her mother telling McCall to call her Abigail and Anne whistling cheekily at McCall’s pretend show of affection.

  So she waited until they were outside before she told him it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘Of course it’s necessary,’ he said, not removing his arm, which felt warm and solid against her body. ‘Anne’s a teenager—she’ll tell all her friends and it will add credence to the story. And Gwen probably has cronies in town, so they’ll get to hear as well.’

  Anne and Gwen aren’t watching now, Cassie would have liked to have said, but they were almost at the car and he’d let go then, so the arm might as well stay for the moment.

  Oh, yes?

  And where had that thought come from?

  ‘And while we’re on the subject of this pretence,’ McCall continued, ‘you’d better be prepared for the odd casual touch in public. You might even train yourself to reciprocate.’

  Cassie was so stunned by this announcement, it took her a moment to absorb what he’d said.

  ‘I would like you to know,’ she informed him, in her frostiest tones, ‘that I am not the kind of woman who demonstrates her affection in public, and carrying on in that way would be a worse give-away that you’re a fraud than not touching you.’

  ‘OK,’ McCall said easily. ‘But you could smile occasionally, and not look at me as if I’m something lower than slug slime.’

  ‘I haven’t been looking at you like that!’ She was so indignant she practically spluttered, then was even more indignant when he laughed.

  ‘No,’ he said, touching her gently on the shoulder. ‘But you’re looking far too tense and worried. I know it isn’t easy, but could you at least try looking happy? As if having me around is giving you some pleasure, not causing you heartburn.’

  Arguing with him was futile and Derek was waiting, so she whistled for Blondie, who, once she heard the car door open, realised she was going for a ride and leapt aboard.

  ‘Now, tell me what this vet wants with your dog,’ McCall said, when they were on the way through town. ‘Did Anne say something about blood? Is your dog’s blood special in some way? Is she tick-resistant?’

  Cassie smiled to herself. McCall had told her he was curious, and the longer she was in his company, the more she realised it was true.

  ‘Blondie’s one of Derek’s blood-bank dogs,’ she said, smiling again because she knew he probably wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Blood-bank dogs? The vet has a blood bank?’

  ‘No, not here in Wakefield. The university vet schools in most states have blood banks for dogs, and a pack of dogs they keep for blood for other dogs. The dog blood banks have been so successful, Melbourne University has recently set up a cattery for cat blood.’

  She glanced towards McCall as she swung onto the gravel road leading out of town to Derek’s acreage property. McCall, as she’d guessed he would be, was staring at her in disbelief.

  She smiled to herself as she explained.

  ‘Say a dog is hit by a car and brought to the vet. The dog’s lost a lot of blood—what’s the vet to do?’

  ‘Give it fluids,’ McCall said.

  ‘But blood is better,’ Cassie told him. ‘Hence dog blood banks. Derek has a Rhodesian ridgeback called Stan, and uses Stan’s blood quite often, but say a dog has had an op today and needed blood after it, then he’s probably taken all that S
tan can safely give.’

  ‘I can understand that part,’ McCall said, as she pulled up outside Derek’s surgery. ‘But what about cross-matching? Do all dogs have the same blood type?’

  Cassie got out and opened the back door for Blondie who never minded a visit to Derek, mainly because of the good-sized bone he always had on hand for her.

  ‘More or less,’ Cassie answered McCall. ‘Greyhound blood is particularly prized as it’s the most compatible of all the breeds, but we haven’t any greyhounds in town, so we use what we’ve got. The only problem arises if an animal needs a second transfusion later in its treatment. Say we give a dog Blondie’s blood tonight, then in a fortnight the same dog needs more blood. After ten days you have to find another donor dog, because in that time the injured dog will have built up antibodies against Blondie’s blood.’

  McCall was still trying to come to terms with dog transfusions and antibodies when a door in the low-set building opened and a man appeared in the brightly lit oblong. He was tall and thin, younger than McCall had expected the vet to be, and totally silent, though he bent to fondle Blondie’s ears and may have murmured to her.

  ‘Hi, Lennie, this is McCall, a friend who’s staying with me.’

  Not the vet, then, McCall realised, putting out his hand to Lennie.

  ‘Hi, Lennie, good to meet you,’ he said, and though Lennie shook, he didn’t waste his breath on a similar platitude.

  Instead, he turned and led the way along a passage to a well set-up operating suite. A stocky figure in full theatre garb was bent over an operating table, while a radio speaker, set high in a wall, provided background noise.

  ‘Dog’s here,’ Lennie told the surgeon, who turned, nodded at the newcomers, then asked Lennie to prep Blondie and get a catheter into her.

  ‘Derek, this is a friend of mine who’s staying for a while. Henry McCall. He doesn’t like the Henry part so everyone calls him McCall.’

  Derek nodded again. Like Lennie, he didn’t seem much for small talk, though he did explain what he was doing.