by M. K. Wren
Conan asked, “You’re not going outside with her, are you?”
“No, she’s got twenty feet of rope, and that gives her plenty of leeway. Don’t worry, Conan, we’ve been through this a few times since the storm started. Come on, Heather.”
At Lise’s nod, Will opened the door, gasped at a blast of arctic air, thick with snow. Against the door, snow had packed solidly into a yard-high barrier. Lise looped the end of the leash to the outside doorknob and shouted, “Go, Heather! Good girl!” And when the sheltie leapt out over the packed snow into the storm, Lise shut the door, leaned against it, whispered, “And don’t tarry, for God’s sake.”
For a while, the three of them waited, no one venturing a word, until Lise looked up at Conan and after a couple of tries said, “I’m sorry I blew up in the kitchen. I know you were trying to get some information, but I—”
“Keep your voice down, Lise.” He glanced up the stairwell, then said softly, “I understand your explosion. By the way, didn’t you say Lucas occasionally phoned you while he was in California?”
She nodded. “Not often or regularly, but he kept in touch.”
“Did he ever happen to mention Demara Wilder?”
“No, at least not by name. But about a month ago, he said…” She flinched, as if some memory had taken her by surprise, but after a moment went on: “He said something about being in love again. Well, that was sort of a running joke. Lucas was always falling in love, but it never lasted. And he said something to the effect that if Dad was shaken when Al brought his Vietnamese war bride home, he’d go ballistic if he found out about his new love.”
“Did he mean he intended to marry this new love?”
“I didn’t think so at the time, but it was hard to tell with Lucas. Sometimes he liked to make a joke of things that were—”
She stopped, suddenly alert, and Conan and Will exchanged glances. They had heard it, too: a faint, thudding pop repeated three times. Identifying the sound against the rush of wind was impossible, and perhaps it was only a branch blowing against the lodge.
Lise opened the door, squinting into the wind and snow, and shouted, “Heather? Where are you?” She waited a few seconds, then pulled at the leash hooked on the doorknob, and obviously there was no resistance. “Heather! Oh, God—Heather!” And before Conan could even think about stopping her, she hurdled the barrier of packed snow, stretching the leash taut as she followed it out into the storm.
“Stay here!” Will commanded and plunged after her, leaving Conan to hold the door against the wind to a slit a few inches wide, while he strained to see their shadowy shapes and hear their shouts.
He couldn’t have guessed how long he stood shivering, blinded by the gusts of snow and the cold that literally took his breath away, but he had reached a point of desperation where he was ready to plunge into the storm himself, when two blurred forms loomed toward him.
He threw the door open, and Lise, with the sheltie in her arms and Will huddling protectively over her, stumbled into the atrium amid a miniature avalanche of clotted snow knocked from the packed drift. Conan closed the door and turned, aware of the thuds when Kim dropped her load of wood as she came in from the garage; of Mark swinging on his crutches from the living room; of Tiff, Demara, and Loanh hurrying down the stairs, Loanh with her silk-black hair loose, falling below her waist; and above all of Lise, on her knees to lay Heather on the snow-scattered floor, calling her name in a keening wail. Will gazed down at Lise, struck dumb, it seemed, by her pain.
Conan asked sharply, “Will, is she dead?” Then at his blank look, “Heather, for God’s sake!”
A tremor shook Will’s sturdy body, then he knelt and asked Lise the same question, but more gently.
“No, she—she’s still alive,” Lise answered. She sat back on her heels, and Conan could see that Heather was panting in terror, the fur on her left haunch soaked with blood. Lise barely touched the area, and Heather loosed a yelp like a small scream.
“Will, you’ve got to help her!” Lise cried. “I can’t stand this, I can’t stand any more death! Oh, Will…”
If she had wept then, perhaps Will might have been able to deal with it more adroitly, but she only stared at him with all her pain trapped in her eyes, and Will mumbled, “But I—I’m not a vet, Lise, I don’t know anything about—”
“I’ll help you, Will,” Conan cut in. “Lise, go up to Will’s room and get his medical case.”
“No. I’ll help Will. I won’t leave her, I won’t!”
Conan pleaded, “Lise, please, you’ll only make it harder.”
“Come on, Sis.” Mark stretched out a hand to her. “Let Will get on with what he has to do.”
Her resistance collapsed, and she touched Heather’s forehead, then rose and ran for the stairway.
Will swallowed, and once she had gone seemed to recover his confidence. “Kim, you’d better turn the generator back on. I need a good light. And a table. The kitchen table.”
Kim objected, “The kitchen table?” then shrugged as she headed for the garage.
Will apparently didn’t hear her. “Tiff, get some sheets to cover the table. Demara, I better have one of the floor lamps in there.” When he lifted Heather, she cried out and struggled, but only briefly.
She seemed small and fragile in Will’s arms, and Conan ached for her suffering. And for Lise, who loved her, who had already lost too much.
Chapter 14
Within fifteen minutes, the makeshift operating room was in readiness, and the assistants in the preparations ushered out—in Lise’s case, reluctantly. The kitchen table, draped in an incongruously flowered bed sheet, had been pulled into the center of the room under the ceiling light, with a brass floor lamp augmenting its light. At one end of the table on a paper that had come out of a plastic envelope marked STERILE DRAPE, an assortment of medical paraphernalia was laid out: gauze pads and rolls, micropore tape; bright steel tools lying atop their crinkled brown sterile wraps; Betadine and antibiotic ointment; suture kit; disposable syringe and needle; a rubber-sealed vial designated XYLOCAINE; and Conan’s electric razor. And the surgeon, sleeves rolled up, his scrubbed hands double gloved, stood in a funk of uncertainty, while his patient lay trembling and bleeding on the flowered sheet.
Will was dithering again. “I don’t know anything about dogs. I mean, I grew up on a farm, and we had dogs all over the place, but I don’t know anything about them medically. Hell, I could kill her if I give her the wrong medication or cut in the wrong place, and Lise…well, she’d be all yours then. She’d never forgive me.”
Conan stood at the other end of the table at Heather’s head, constantly stroking her, acutely aware that if in panic she snapped at his tender fingers the result would be near agony. “Damn it, Will, you’re a doctor,” he said irritably. “Your patients are mammals. So is Heather. Now, I suggest you start by removing enough fur around the wound so you can see how bad it is. And what caused it.”
Will repeated, “What caused it?” as if that question hadn’t yet occurred to him. Then he took a deep breath and reached for a pair of scissors. “Okay, try to keep her still.” He set to work, cutting away the blood-stiff fur and tossing it on the floor.
Heather whined and struggled, and Conan bent over her, elbows on the table, caging both her front and back legs, grateful that it didn’t seem to occur to her to use her teeth to escape. When Will had the fur reduced to stubble and began gingerly wiping away the blood with a gauze pad, she yelped and began struggling in earnest. Will desisted, peered at the wound, and Conan leaned closer to see it. It was a furrow perhaps two inches long, angling down from back to front through the muscles padding the femur, and ending in a small, seeping, red circle.
Will said grimly, “This looks like a bullet wound.” Conan only nodded, finding no surprise in that. Questions, yes, but no surprise.
Will, however, was appalled. “Conan, who would—who could be out in that blizzard to shoot her?”
“I don’t kn
ow, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t announce it loud enough for everyone in the next room to hear. Is the bullet still there?”
Brows drawn, Will reached for the syringe and the vial of Xylocaine. “Well, I can’t probe for it with her flailing around. God knows how she’ll react to this, but it’s all I’ve got in the way of an anesthetic.” He filled the syringe, then, like a man about to test an electric circuit with his bare finger, began injecting the clear liquid into the skin along the edges of the wound. Heather again struggled, but again Conan managed to restrain her.
Then the three of them waited, Will holding the syringe, Conan holding Heather, the sheltie panting, showing the whites of her eyes, but apparently none the worse for the injection. Calmer, in fact, which meant the anesthetic was working.
Will waited a few minutes more, then released a long sigh, reached for Conan’s razor and began shaving off the stubble of fur, absorbing the seeping blood with gauze pads. When he put the razor aside, he swabbed the orange Betadine over Heather’s pale, naked skin, then stripped off one pair of surgical gloves and gently palpated the wound with his fingertips. “I can feel the bullet right under the skin. Went in at an angle, so I don’t think it did more than tear some muscle.”
He took up a scalpel, and with one deft stroke opened the wound an inch further, extracted the bullet with pickups, then placed it on the sheet where it lay dull and gray in the center of a pink chrysanthemum, a blunt-pointed cylinder less than a quarter inch in diameter. As Will pressed another pad to the wound, he asked, “What do you think, Conan? Small caliber. Maybe a twenty-two.”
“Where did you acquire your expertise with bullets—on Burnside?”
“I’ve taken out a few at the storefront.”
“Well, you’re right about the caliber, and it probably came from a small handgun.”
“How can you be sure it’s not from a rifle?”
“It couldn’t have been fired from any great distance—not in this storm—and if it had been fired from a rifle at short range, it would’ve gone on through her leg. Besides, a rifle is very difficult to tote around without people noticing.”
Will nodded as he took the needle holder out of the suture kit. “Can you get a hand free to mop up the bleeding? Don’t touch the wound. You’re not sterile.”
Heather lay quiet now, with trusting patience, and Conan came around to the side of the table and began soaking pad after pad, while Will, his hands seeming too big for the fine task, wielded the minuscule scimitar of the suture needle and methodically closed the wound with a line of tiny, black knots. Finally he squeezed antibiotic ointment along the line, taped a square of gauze over his handiwork, then wound Heather’s leg with strips of gauze to secure the bandage, predicting gloomily, “She’ll probably try to chew this off.” At length, he removed his gloves and tossed them on the floor with the rest of the bloody detritus of the surgery. “Conan, what are we going to tell those people? That somebody’s out in this blizzard shooting dogs?”
Conan stroked Heather’s silky head. “No, Will, we’re going to tell those people—including Lise for now—that Heather gashed her leg on something unidentified, probably a frozen branch.”
“Right. I suppose you want the bullet for evidence?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but found a plastic bag in his medical case, dropped the bullet into it, then stowed it away next to the filled specimen bottle.
Conan asked, “When you and Lise found Heather, was her collar off?”
“Yes. Lise followed the leash out to maybe six feet past the steps toward the garage, and the collar was there, but no Heather. I guess she’d slipped out of it. Lise just kept going. Fortunately Heather was lying only a few feet from her collar.”
“I doubt very much that she slipped out of her collar without help. If you’d been a second later, you probably wouldn’t have found her at all. Will, I can tell you one thing: no outsider just happened through the storm and saw Heather and took a shot at her. Let’s clean this place up. I don’t want Lise coming in here and seeing bloody gauze all over the floor—nor Kim to be offended by dog hair in the kitchen.”
Will looked around and seemed amazed at the mess. While Conan opened drawers until he came up with a paper bag, Will found a broom in the pantry. As they cleaned up the litter, Will asked, “You think somebody here in the lodge shot her? How, Conan? How would they get outside to do it?”
“Mark could’ve gone out the back door in the kitchen. Demara, Tiff, and Loanh out any of the upstairs windows at the back of the lodge, especially the ones at the east end. Kim could’ve gone out the outside door of the woodshed. And she already had a parka on.”
Conan noticed that Will didn’t take exception to the suggestion that Mark might have been agile enough, despite his broken ankle, to make his way around to the front of the house through the storm and back again in a short time.
Will paused to check Heather, who seemed content to lie quietly, then he took his tools to the sink and washed them. “Conan, if anybody’d been outside, we would’ve seen snow on their shoes.”
“Yes, but I was too distracted by Heather’s plight to notice anyone’s shoes. Did you?”
“No.” Will put his equipment in his case, closed it and turned the combination lock, then carefully lifted Heather. “Can you hold her a minute while I clean up this table?” As Conan took her in his arms, Will shook his head. “Poor pup. Why would anybody want to hurt her?”
Conan didn’t reply to that obviously rhetorical question, but he was well aware that he had lost his guard dog. He pressed his cheek against her head and whispered, “Sweet lady, you didn’t deserve this.”
When Will had disposed of the bloody sheet in the trash, wiped the table with bleach, and pushed it back into its nook, Conan said, “You’d better take her in to Lise. I’ll take your medical case up to your room.” Conan transferred Will’s patient into his arms, then picked up the case, careful to keep the weight balanced on the palm of his hand. “Come on, Lise will be waiting.”
Will sighed gustily. “Thank God I’ve got good news for her.”
Chapter 15
When Conan and Will came out of the kitchen, Lise was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, her back against the hearth ledge, a drawing pad on her knees. The paper was covered with an erratic jumble of dark shapes. At her side was a wicker dog bed. She looked up at Will, then tossed the pad aside and came to her feet.
Conan watched the transformation in her face from fear to joy when Will carried Heather to her. “She’s going to be fine,” Will said softly as he knelt to place the sheltie in the basket.
Lise made a choked sound between a sob and a laugh and knelt with Will, murmuring reassurances to Heather. Then she impetuously flung her arms around him. “Oh, Will, thank you, thank you!”
His face glowed pink, and he seemed incapable of a response. It didn’t matter. A moment later Lise was again lavishing her attention on Heather.
Loanh, who had been sitting on the couch reading, rose and leaned down to embrace Lise, her long, silky hair falling forward over her shoulder. “I am so happy for you, Lise.”
Lise patted her hand. “Thanks, Loanh.”
Tiff didn’t move from the armchair at the west end of the couch, and the hectic movements of her crochet needle didn’t stop. She observed Lise’s joy complacently, opining that at least something had gone right, and perhaps that was a sign that the worst was over. Even the wind seemed to be letting up a little.
Mark sat at the end of the dining table near the kitchen door, fiddling with the portable radio from which snorts of static and garbled music erupted. He glanced at Lise, but made no comment. Nor did Kim. She was sitting in the other armchair, legs drawn up under her, hands pushed into the sleeves of her heavy cardigan. She seemed numbed both physically and mentally by the cold that occupied the room despite the fire crackling in the fireplace.
Conan listened for the wind, and perhaps Tiff was right; perhaps it was letting up a little. He wand
ered casually toward the bar to give the display of guns a visual check, but saw no empty spaces, and the locks on the glass doors were apparently intact. He was wondering where Demara was, when, as if materialized by his thought, she came into the living room from the atrium, carrying a nail file and a bottle of scarlet polish. She was still wearing the black parka and shoulder-strap purse; still apparently ready to depart at any moment. She paused by the couch and asked, “Is the dog okay?”
Loanh rose and nodded. “Yes, she is okay, thank God.”
“So, what was wrong with her?”
Will sat down on the hearth ledge, glanced at Conan, then explained, “She gashed her leg on something. Maybe a frozen branch. It’s a deep cut, but I stitched it up, and she’ll be okay. Lost a lot of blood. Lise, try to get some water down her. If she was a human patient, I’d have her on a saline IV, but I’m not even sure where to find a vein.”
Will’s explanation of the cause of the injury was apparently taken at face value. Only Lise, with a lift of her eyebrows, showed any skepticism, but she said nothing. The others seemed indifferent, or simply preoccupied, trapped as they were in the shadow of a tragedy that perhaps only one of them entirely understood. Mark concentrated on the radio, while Tiff’s needles looped through the bright strands, and Demara sat down at the other end of the dining table and began filing a long, scarlet fingernail.
Finally Kim rose and said, “I’m going to turn the generator off. Will, would you mind bringing in some wood for the fireplace?” He nodded and followed her toward the atrium, then she paused and asked, “Did any of you leave the lights on in your rooms? They should be turned off when the generator’s not running.”
Conan shifted the medical case in his aching hand. “I’ll check them, Kim. I’m going upstairs anyway.”
She nodded as she crossed the atrium to the garage door. “You don’t need to check my room. I’m sure I turned everything off.”
