His Runaway Nurse

by Meredith Webber

  ‘It’s not that dire. There are specialists in Bendigo who can handle both the blood vessel and the broken femur, but time’s the thing. We need to get him on his way as soon as possible.’

  Flynn had been working on a bandage to hold the pad in place as he spoke, then was pleased to hear Doug announce the second ambulance had arrived.

  ‘Get them up here,’ Flynn told Doug. ‘One of the crew will have to ride in the back, monitoring Patrick all the way and loosening the tourniquet every few minutes.’

  Patrick was barely conscious, the morphine used to ease the pain during his release from the cabin of the vehicle sending him into a semi-comatose state. But Flynn spoke to him anyway, explaining what they were doing and how they were going to move him, where they would send him and what lay ahead.

  He worked with the ambulance bearers to lift him out of the car, pad his legs and injured feet, splint them, then secure the lad on the trolley. Majella watched anxiously for a while, then, as he checked the oxygen flow and fluid lines hadn’t been compromised in the move, and were now held securely in place, she touched his arm and said goodbye.

  The ambulance doors closed behind the injured youth and Flynn looked around. Majella had disappeared.

  If she’d ever been there!

  Of course she’d been there! He’d seen her—spoken to her—she’d touched his arm.

  He pressed his hand across the place she’d touched.

  Hadn’t she?

  Mind back on work. He had more patients to see. What had Julie said? Three others—one with concussion from the ute and he should see the driver of the other vehicle although apparently he was OK. Flynn found the three packed into the local ambulance—the lad with concussion strapped on the trolley, his friends—a young girl who was sobbing with distress and a teenage boy who looked as if he’d like to cry but didn’t want to be thought a sissy.

  Flynn spoke gently to all of them, listening to their voices, checking their responses. They’d be OK until they reached the hospital.

  ‘The other driver?’ Flynn asked.

  Julie shrugged.

  ‘Gone. His vehicle was drivable. He left his name with the police and assured them he’d check with his local doctor as soon as he got home, then drove off.’

  Nothing Flynn could do about that.

  ‘I’ll meet you up at the hospital,’ he said, his voice almost lost in the whine of the tow-truck crane, lifting the wrecked ute onto its tray.

  He turned to head back to his vehicle as the police released the traffic that had been held up while the victims had been tended to and the road cleared. The arc lights still lit the now deserted scene, and shone on a small four-wheel-drive moving slowly up the hill towards the town—shone on the driver, a woman with beads in her hair.

  A shadowy figure sat beside her—whether male or female Flynn couldn’t tell. More figures were in the rear seats, another adult from the size, and a booster seat of the type that usually held a small child.

  Still feeling strange—did confusion make you feel detached from reality?—Flynn made his way to his car and drove back to Parragulla, past marquees and tents that had grown like mushrooms on the showgrounds—giant mushrooms, glowing a ghostly white in the moonlight.

  Festival weekend! It hadn’t yet begun and already he had trouble on his hands. Trouble in the form of the accident, not Majella, although, judging by the beads, the festival was her reason for being there.

  Or had she seen the ads for the auction?

  He tried to remember a saying—something to do with being careful what you wish for, though he couldn’t remember the consequences.

  Weird! In all the ways he’d pictured a grown-up Majella over the years—and they were legion—he’d never envisaged her as either an army medic or a hippy although beaded hair didn’t necessarily signify hippydom. And wasn’t ‘hippy’ an outdated word? One he’d picked up from his mother and her friends?

  But try as he may, he couldn’t divert his thoughts from one person, or his mind from repeating her name. It died to an echo then gathered strength again, nothing but her name, because he had no other thoughts to link to it—this was a woman he didn’t know.

  He abandoned any attempt to control his one-track mind, and continued on to the hospital. Tending patients was a sure-fire cure for a bemused, distracted brain.

  As for the festival, nothing he could do would make it go away. He had to grin and bear it, and accept the fact that while it brought much-needed income to the town and its citizens, it also brought some very strange people to Parragulla—including the woman he’d been seeking?—and some very bizarre medical problems more often than not.

  Thinking of a past festival patient who’d imbibed oil meant for rubbing on arthritis-inflicted joints, he sighed and he pulled up in his parking space at the back of the hospital. The festival might be a time for most of the townsfolk to kick up their heels and party, but for him and his staff it was a time to hold their collective breaths and pray they’d get through it without a major disaster.

  Although, with one accident already, he wasn’t too hopeful.

  Majella glanced towards the man standing in the middle of the road as she drove slowly past. His back was to the light so his face was shadowed, but she’d seen enough of it earlier to know Flynn hadn’t changed much. Maturity and age had probably etched lines she hadn’t noticed into his tanned skin, but the blue eyes still seemed to burn with passion for whatever he happened to be doing—in tonight’s case saving lives—while the silky black hair still flopped onto his forehead.

  ‘Who was that?’ Helen asked, maybe sensing Majella’s interest in the shadowed figure.

  ‘Local doctor,’ Majella told her, then wondered at her own evasiveness. She’d bored Helen silly in those early years, with tales of Flynn, to the extent that all three of the Sherwoods had teased her by using ‘but Flynn said’ as a clincher to any argument.

  Those early years with Helen and Sophie and Jeff—a runaway rescued by the kindest of families! How far away they seemed. Yet as they’d driven closer to Parragulla she’d felt the shadow of the past growing heavier and heavier.

  She’d known it would be hard—this return to the town of her childhood—and had decided she was mentally strong enough to handle it. But she hadn’t factored Flynn into the equation. That he was a doctor had been no surprise—it had always been his ambition. But she thought he’d be long gone from the small country town—thought he’d have grown into a man too intent on being the best to be contained within its boundaries.

  She took a deep breath and thought of all the reasons why she’d decided to return to the town she’d fled twelve years ago.

  ‘Grace still sleeping?’ she asked Sophie, who sat beside the three-year-old in the back of the vehicle.

  ‘Like a baby,’ Sophie joked, and Majella smiled.

  All the reasons?

  Never one to fool herself, Majella shook her head.

  Yes, moving back to Parragulla might prove a practical solution to a number of problems, but the main reason was, and always had been, Grace. Grace, and a conviction, deep within Majella’s soul, that only here, in spite of her own unhappy childhood, could she come to terms with the past, and go forward to build a happy, secure and laughter-filled home for her little daughter.

  Although if Flynn was living in Parragulla—Flynn with a wife and family, Flynn as the family doctor—would it still be possible?

  Of course it would be. He was a childhood friend, nothing more.

  Well, nothing more than one clandestine meeting, one stolen kiss…

  Friday dawned with a special radiance, as if the heavens themselves approved of the Aquarius Festival. Begun way back before Flynn’s birth, it had grown from an informal annual hippy get-together to the biggest exhibition and display of natural products and alternative resources in Australia, raising the population of tiny Parragulla from one thousand souls to twenty thousand for its five-day duration.

  The radiance held litt
le delight for Flynn, peering blearily at the bit of it that was sneaking through a crack between the drawn curtains, cursing the wild cackle of the kookaburras who doubtless had had neither accidents nor dreams to disturb their sleep.

  The phone had woken him—he’d promised something—now his mind stumbled to catch up with his awakening body. Festival—Majella—it’s late—get to work.

  ‘I know I’m late,’ he muttered at Belle, his receptionist, as he rushed into the surgery twenty minutes later. ‘If you’d had the night I had, you’d be late too!’

  ‘I heard about the accident. How are the kids?’

  Belle’s voice was anxious—accidents in small country towns affected everyone in the community.

  ‘Three are fine,’ he assured her, ‘and I phoned the hospitals in both Bendigo and Melbourne to check before I went to bed. Becky was still unconscious and being prepped for Theatre, Patrick was in Theatre. That was about three a.m. so I’ll phone again before I see any patients.’

  ‘Did you get any sleep?’

  Concern for him now! He found a reassuring smile for Belle, although what sleep he’d had hadn’t been particularly restful. It had been dream-filled sleep—dreams of a child he’d known—a quiet child, so well behaved, for a long time he’d considered her a different species to himself, his sisters and other children he knew.

  ‘I snatched a couple of hours,’ he told Belle, remembering her question just in time. ‘Then the chairman of the Festival Committee phoned to ask if I’d give the “good-bye and thank you for coming” speech at the Festival Ball on Wednesday.’

  ‘I hope you said you would.’ Belle had reverted to bossy mode, her momentary concern for him banished by her concern for Parragulla as a whole. ‘Considering you got that fancy new ultrasound machine from the festival profits last year.’

  ‘Would I dare say no?’ he countered, then realised his opinion of festival time must have been written on his face for she gave him a stern look.

  ‘When you were a boy, you were always saying you wanted to see the world,’ she reminded him. ‘Well, at festival time the world comes to you. And the money from it does a lot of good in this town—remember that.’

  ‘It’s not the festival I object to, it’s the people it attracts!’ he grumbled, more upset by the echo persisting in his head—the woman’s name—than Belle’s scolding. He pushed through the door that led to his private office.

  ‘She might be dead. Have you thought of that?’

  He’d sensed rather than heard Belle following him into the office, but it was her statement not her presence that shook him.

  ‘Who might be dead?’ he demanded, and she gave him one of those infuriating women-know-everything looks.

  ‘The woman you’ve been looking for—Majella,’ she said calmly, and Flynn dropped into his chair and stared at Belle in disbelief as she continued without missing a beat. ‘She was fifteen, Flynn, when she ran away. Where would she go? Who would she turn to? A protected, cosseted kid like that—where would she end up but on the streets?’

  And hearing Belle put the bleakest of his own thoughts into words, his heart faltered momentarily—then he remembered.

  ‘Well, she’s not dead,’ he said, and took delight in the shock on Belle’s face. Belle prided herself on being the first to know everything that happened in Parragulla. ‘She’s alive and well, and, I suspect, right here in Parragulla.’

  ‘You found her?’ Disbelief vied with delight in Belle’s voice.

  ‘She found herself,’ Flynn replied, aware his own contrary reaction to Majella’s return might, at least in part, be to do with the fact that the woman he’d been searching for had turned up of her own accord.

  Unless she’d seen the ad…

  ‘But that’s wonderful. Have you spoken to her? Do you know why she ran away? Was she pregnant like her mother was when she ran away? She was about the same age. I wonder if she kept the child? It’d be, what—eleven or twelve by now.’

  ‘She wasn’t pregnant when she ran away!’

  Stupid thing to say to Belle! She’d want to know how he knew, and it was impossible to explain his conviction—to put into words the sweet and gentle innocence of the young Majella who’d trembled in his arms that strange, almost dreamlike night he’d finally kissed her.

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Belle protested, right on cue. ‘Oh, I know the old man spread the word she’d gone back to boarding school and everyone believed it—why wouldn’t we?—but from the time that private investigator you hired told you she didn’t—well, there had to be a reason for her to run away.’

  ‘There could have been a dozen reasons for her to run away,’ he told Belle, ‘none of which would include pregnancy.’

  None of which he’d ever been able to give credence to.

  ‘Now, don’t I have patients to see?’ Flynn asked before Belle could start theorizing, not wanting to get any further into this conversation, which was already churning up the emotions he’d felt back then—anger at Majella for leaving as she had—for hurting her grandfather, a man Flynn revered. And for hurting Flynn himself in a way he hadn’t been able to fully comprehend, although betrayal was the closest he could come to it. A betrayal of their friendship that had grown so slowly yet had seemed to have reached a new level just before she’d left.

  He watched Belle stand up and walk towards the door. Had he sighed, that she turned and looked back at him?

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be better on Wednesday when the festival is over for another year,’ he told her, to be rewarded with one of her array of ‘women’ looks—this one clearly saying, Oh, you poor foolish man!

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the festival,’ she said, in case he hadn’t read the look.

  ‘I’m not sure that I was either,’ he told her, then he waved his hand and she departed, already speaking bossily to the patients in the waiting room, organising them for him—organising them out of love…

  Flynn got on with his day—lifting the phone to call the hospitals again, learning that bone fragments had been removed from Becky’s brain, the chest wound had been closed, and she was now in an induced coma, while Patrick was stable after operations on his femur and lower legs and feet.

  Satisfied that all was as well as could be expected with his distant patients, Flynn moved on to those closer—mostly people like Belle who’d known him all his life; known his father, who’d walked out on the family when Flynn had been six; known his mother and naturally wanted all the latest news of her and the new life she was forging for herself with a man she’d met by chance last festival.

  And if, as he worked, he wondered about the woman with the beads in her hair, it was only because his subconscious mind kept replaying scenes from the past—scenes he’d thought forgotten a long time ago.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FLYNN!

  Thoughts of him—memories—crept insistently around in Majella’s head as she helped Helen and Sophie set up the Nature’s Wonders stall. Behind them, in the area they’d set aside for a display on the Native Animal Rescue Service, Grace played happily with her toys.

  She was such a placid child—Jeff’s genetic legacy, for though Majella had practised docility throughout her childhood, she knew her own natural disposition was more volatile.

  Jeff!

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, dispelling the horrific pictures that invariably flashed through her mind when she thought of him. Surely a time would come when her first thought of Jeff would be of him alive—of the kind, protective teenager she’d first known, or the encouraging, supportive young man who’d stood beside her every step of the way through her tough army training, or even the gentle, loving husband—the father of Grace.

  Shouldn’t her memories of Jeff not be the pictures she’d seen of the fireball that had engulfed the crashed helicopter, killing not only him but other medical personnel going to the aid of storm-devastated people on a small island few Australians had ever he
ard of before the accident?

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ Helen asked, her keen eyes scanning Majella’s face—trying to read her mood.

  ‘Do I look as if I need support?’ Majella asked, keeping her voice light—making a joke of it. After all, what was the point of taking this first huge step towards personal independence if she needed Helen to hold her hand while she took it?

  ‘You look haunted,’ Helen said quietly. ‘As haunted as you did when you first came to live with us.’

  ‘One more injured animal to care for,’ Majella remembered, then she hugged Helen, bent to kiss Grace, and walked swiftly out of the big marquee.

  The real estate office was in a storefront—a shop Majella remembered as being empty and decrepit back when she’d left town.

  ‘Mrs Sherwood,’ the agent, a brisk-looking woman in her forties, greeted her. ‘You’re right on time. Now, as I explained to you on the phone, the property is a deceased estate and there are some clauses in the will which mean the executor of the estate likes to meet all potential buyers so he can explain the circumstances under which the auction might not go ahead.’

  The woman paused, took a breath, and continued before Majella could question this statement.

  ‘For this reason he usually shows buyers around the house himself. Unfortunately, he’s not always as punctual as we’d like, but we’ll drive out anyway—you can look at the grounds and outbuildings—and hope he’s turned up by the time we’re ready to do the house.’

  She led Majella to a smart new four-wheel-drive, opening the passenger door for her, reciting all the time statistics about the town’s growth and potential.

  ‘We’ve five B and Bs in the town already but if that’s what you decide to do with Parragulla House, don’t be put off—there’s still a big demand for quality accommodation. And weddings—functions—it would be ideal for something like that.’

  ‘Not a family?’ Majella couldn’t help asking. ‘Is there something wrong with it as a family home?’