The woman’s hand was bleeding, the front of her blue silk blouse stained with drops of dark crimson.
Maynard had already begun to apologize to anybody with whom he could make eye contact, holding tightly to Alfred’s leash as he should have been moments before.
“I’m so sorry,” the young man stammered. “He got away from me and . . .”
There would be time for apologies later. They needed to help this woman with her injuries. Spatters of red dappled the linoleum floor beneath her bleeding hand.
Pam was already moving around the counter with a towel.
“Could you take Snowy,” Sidney said, handing her dog’s leash to Michelle, who took Snowy and led her outside as Sidney grabbed the towel from Pam. “Cover it with this,” she said, stepping closer to hold the towel beneath the woman’s dripping hand.
The woman looked at Sidney with a dazed expression.
“Here you go, Mrs. Berthold,” she said, starting to wrap up the bleeding hand. Sidney took a moment to check out the wound and saw that it didn’t look too bad, just a few punctures with some torn skin. “Apply pressure to stop the bleeding.”
Mrs. Berthold then looked at her, that dazed expression gradually morphing into one of absolute rage.
“Take your hands off of me,” she said with a snarl, causing Sidney to step back. The look on her face reminded Sidney of Alfred, just before he lunged.
“We’re so sorry,” Sidney began. “Let me take you out back, and we can clean that up before—”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she stated. “Where’s my dog?” She looked around at the faces watching her. “Where is he?”
Maynard was standing in the corner by the door with Alfred when her eyes locked on him.
“Give him to me,” she ordered, reaching for the leash with her good hand.
Maynard did as he was told.
She wrapped the leash around her uninjured hand and started to leave, Alfred walking by her side.
“Mrs. Berthold,” Sidney called to her. “You might want to have that bite checked out at the hospital.”
The woman stopped just before the door, turning to glare. Sidney noticed that Alfred was glaring as well.
“Thank you so much,” she said calmly, coldly, pulling Alfred closer to her side. “I’ll be sure to mention your concern to my lawyer when we speak this afternoon.”
She then abruptly turned, taking herself and her animal from the building.
“Have a nice day,” Sidney muttered beneath her breath, unsure if she would be able to survive the surprises the remainder of the day might have in store.
CHAPTER SIX
“What was all the racket about?” Doc Martin asked, spinning her chair around from the desk where she sat working on the computer in the back office of the clinic. She took her black-framed glasses from her face and let them hang from a fluorescent-green croakie around her neck.
At a closer look, Sidney saw that she was working on a particularly challenging game of solitaire.
“Snowy and one of the discharges had some words,” Sidney said, kneeling down beside Snowy to better check her over.
“Bring her here,” the old vet said, leaning forward in her chair and motioning with her hands to bring the dog over. Sidney guided the dog to the woman. Snowy responded with a happy wag of her thick tail.
“How’s it going, girl?” Doc Martin asked, placing her heavily veined, calloused hands beneath the dog’s big head and tilting it upright to look into her eyes. She put her glasses back on her face and then proceeded to check out the splotches of crimson that stood out prominently on the shepherd’s white fur.
“Looks like we’ve got some minor scrapes, but no punctures,” Martin said.
“Yeah, thought so,” Sidney said, stroking her dog’s side.
“Who’d she go up against?” Martin asked.
“Alfred the Frenchie.”
“That evil son of a bitch? That bulldog’s got a mean streak a mile wide.” She finished looking Snowy over. “She’s fine. Clean the scratches with some antiseptic and she’ll be good as new.”
Doc Martin started to rub the dog’s ears, causing Snowy to make a low, grumbling moan of pleasure.
“How was the other one?”
“Alfred was fine. Maybe some scrapes too, but his owner’s hand got bit.”
Martin’s eyes widened. “Who did the biting?”
“Alfred. And we’ve got plenty of witnesses.”
“Phew,” Doc Martin said, leaning back in her office chair. “Lot harder to sue when it’s your own beast that bites.”
Sidney used some antibiotic swabs to clean her dog’s wounds and to wipe away the bloodstains.
“That’s a good girl,” she said, looking into the dog’s eyes, then kissing her on the nose.
“How’s it going out there otherwise?” Doc Martin asked as she saved her solitaire game.
“It’s a madhouse.” Sidney gestured to Snowy to go lie down, and the dog padded obediently across the room to curl up on a square cushion against the wall, beside a coatrack. “A lot of walk-ins. I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do to help clear out the lobby.”
She went to the coatrack and took a lab coat from one of the hooks and put it on.
“When you’re done with that, I’ve got some blood work for you to run, a few heartworm blood tests and a kidney function,” Doc Martin said.
“What are you doing?” Sidney asked as she headed for the door and the mob scene beyond it.
“After I finish my solitaire game?” Doc Martin asked with a smile. “I’ve got a spay and a neuter waiting for me, and a basset that swallowed five fifty in quarters.”
“You have fun with that,” Sidney said, pulling open the door.
“How could I not?” the old vet called after her. “I’m livin’ the dream.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sayid watched as the child slept.
Her physical injuries had been minor, but not the emotional ones; he wasn’t sure if the five-year-old would ever properly recover. The little girl whimpered pathetically, and his heart broke. It again reminded him of his own daughter back home, no longer a little girl, and the mysterious threat to their safety and the safety of so many others.
The child’s stuffed bear fell from her grasp, and Sayid retrieved it, gently placing it in the crook of her arm. She reacted, embracing the bear as she rolled onto her side, pulling her knees up into the fetal position.
They had gotten very little from Heaven’s Breath’s lone survivor, but what they had begun to pull together from the evidence left on the island filled him with increasing dread.
“Dr. Sayid?”
The man turned to see his head of security, Brenda Langridge, in the doorway.
“How is she?” Langridge asked, her usual steely resolve replaced by a look of genuine concern. He believed that finding this child with him on the island had activated some sort of maternal instinct in the security head.
Stranger things have happened.
“Still sedated,” Sayid said. “They’ve tried weaning her from the sleep meds, but the night terrors are still quite strong.”
“Her entire family is dead, and we can only imagine what she witnessed before ending up in that chest. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if . . .”
“It will take some time, but she’ll survive,” Sayid said quickly. He reached out and laid a hand upon the child’s foot beneath the blanket. “I think she’s quite strong.”
“She’s going to need to be,” Langridge said, the softness in her gaze suddenly turning quite hard.
“Do you have something to report?” Sayid asked.
“I do.” The woman held out a stack of papers. “The National Weather Service is currently tracking four tropical storms.”
He took the papers and began to study them. “Anything that might suggest these will precede an event?”
“Not yet. Three are likely to occur out at sea, but one is causing so
me concern.”
He continued to read the pages and found what Langridge had been referencing as she began to describe it.
“It’s moving up the Eastern Seaboard,” she reported, “and is likely to make landfall somewhere on the coast of Massachusetts.”
The little girl in the hospital bed moaned woefully in her sleep, as if sensing Sayid’s sudden feeling of dread.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The lobby was still full when Sidney came out from the back room, and she threw herself head-on into the chaos, helping the staff of the front desk as best she could by answering questions about medications, signing folks with their pets in for appointments, and checking them out once they’d finished. She’d even managed to answer a couple of medical questions that really didn’t require Doc Martin to get involved. It was all good prep work for when she would someday have her own veterinary practice.
Sidney had always known her life would somehow involve animals. She remembered how convinced she’d been that a show on the Animal Planet channel was in her future, even going as far as having her father record video of her interacting with local wildlife and sending it to the cable network to spotlight her talents. Needless to say, the network never called, and she began to rethink her career opportunities. It was the summer that she turned nine when she decided she was going to work for the Benediction Veterinary Hospital and pedaled her bike in ninety-degree heat across the island to the hospital to inform Doc Martin of that fact.
Sidney smiled at the recollection of how Doc Martin had put her to work feeding and watering a litter of kittens that had been abandoned on the doorstep of the hospital that morning. Martin had even given her a ride home that afternoon, tossing Sidney’s pink Schwinn in the back of her Subaru wagon, and speaking with her father, who, truth be told, hadn’t noticed she was gone. Doc Martin had told Dale Moore that Sidney was welcome to come and help at the hospital anytime she liked. That was all Sidney needed. She’d shown up just about every day, voraciously absorbing everything she could about the hospital, even going as far as to take Doc Martin’s veterinary textbooks home to read and study.
There was no wonder that she’d wound up where she was today: top of her high school class and heading off to Tufts University, where she’d eventually enter the veterinary science program. It was like she’d been preparing for it all her life.
She’d just waited on a woman buying flea-and-tick medicine for her cat when she realized that the lobby was empty.
“Hey, look at that.” She glanced from the empty lobby to the clock, noting that she’d worked through lunch and still had those tests to run for the doc. Pam and Michelle were giving each other high fives for surviving the ordeal as she headed for the back.
“Give me a holler if things get nuts again,” she called out.
Snowy bounded from her bed in greeting, and Sidney gave her some appropriate loving before getting to work on the tests that Doc Martin wanted.
She had just finished the last heartworm test when she felt her phone vibrate. Making sure that everything was done with the test first, she pulled the phone from her back pocket to see a text from Rich.
What’s the word?????
She’d completely forgotten that she was supposed to ask Cody about that favor. About to send a text back saying that she was working on it, Sidney stopped, deciding that she should probably get in touch with Cody first before saying anything more.
Cody.
Again, she felt that horrible weight in her belly that threatened to grow, spreading through her limbs, dissolving her resolve and leaving her little more than a statue firmly rooted to Benediction and watching the world go by.
Dramatic, she knew, but at the same time there really was a part of her that would be willing to let her dreams of leaving the island go, to embrace the old and comfortable, and not have to think about troubling things like leaving her father and the person who, until not too long ago, she thought she loved.
It would be so much easier.
Sidney felt herself getting angry for even thinking such things. She’d wanted this for as long as she could remember, and she wasn’t about to let guilt and doubt eat away at her dreams.
She considered calling Cody but doubted that he would answer while working, and the same for texting. When at work he was pretty focused on the job. Plus his father the hard-ass had a thing about cell phones.
What she had to do was obvious, but not what she wanted to do at all. She guessed that she could contact Rich and tell him Cody said no, but that would just end up contributing to the giant pool of guilt she was already carrying around. No, she pretty much knew what she would do.
A moment later Doc Martin came out from surgery, pulling off her bloody gloves and depositing them in the special waste container.
“Everything good?” Sidney asked, tidying up her work space.
“Yep, everything’s fine,” the doc said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her lab coat and tapped one out. “Except it was five fifty in change, some aluminum foil, chicken bones, half a tennis ball, the eraser end of a pencil, and three hair barrettes inside the basset.” Doc Martin put the unlit smoke in her mouth. “He was like a friggin’ hairy piñata,” she said, lips tight around her cigarette.
Sidney laughed.
“Hey, I’ve pretty much caught up here, and the front has calmed down. Would you mind if I took off early today? I’ve got to take care of something.”
“I don’t see any problem,” Doc Martin said. “I was planning on closing early today anyway on account of the storm.”
“Thanks.”
“Everything all right?” Doc Martin asked. “Your dad doing okay?”
Sidney shrugged as she removed her lab coat. “As good as can be expected I guess.” She hung the coat on one of the hooks. Snowy was watching her expectantly from her bed.
“Us old folks can be a real pain in the ass,” Doc Martin said, making her laugh some more. “You’ll be old yourself someday. How old are you now? Thirty-two?”
“Eighteen,” she answered, suppressing a smile.
“Going on thirty-two,” Doc Martin said with a nod. “So . . . Cody. Anything new with that?”
Doc Martin knew that they’d broken up, and why, and seemingly supported her decision.
“Nothing new. We’re still broken up, but I’m going over to the boatyard to ask a favor for Rich Stanmore and . . . unngh.” She made a face and laughed uneasily.
“Is that a smart thing to do?”
“If I didn’t have to do it I’d be ecstatic, but I told Rich I would. And besides, I can’t avoid seeing him forever.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” the old vet said as she walked to the back door, turned the knob, and pushed it open.
The door was practically torn from her grasp in a gust of wind.
“Crap!” she said, attempting to hold on. “The wind’s really picked up. You be careful out there; do what you have to do and then get home.”
Snowy jumped up and was now standing attentively by Sidney’s side, knowing that they were about to leave.
“If you need any help closing up, call my cell,” Sidney said.
Doc Martin had used her foot to keep the door from blowing wide open again and was trying to smoke, but the wind kept pushing the smoke back in her face.
“I’ll be good,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Sidney gave her a wave and headed out the other door to say her good-byes to the front-desk staff.
“Heading out for the day,” she told them. “Everything cool?”
“A-okay, captain,” Pam said. “Going anyplace good?” she asked as Sidney placed her back against the door, ready to push her way outside.
Again she made the face. “Rather be going to a funeral,” she said, opening the door wide as she and Snowy left the building, escorted out by the laughter of Pam and Michelle.
But in all honesty, she really would have.
CHAPTER NINE
It had little to do with what the damaging high winds, rain, and pounding waves could do to the marina, and everything to do with the amount of work he and his harbormaster father had to do to maintain the safety of the boats still moored there.
It had everything to do with being distracted.
Cody moved down the docks. All the boats that could be removed had been yesterday—hauled back to homes or stored in the nearby boatyard. The remaining crafts were too big to move, and although ultimate responsibility for the safety of those boats rested with the owners, Cody still took it upon himself to make sure that they had been properly prepared. As he walked, he checked that all the lines were doubled and that chafing protection was in place where the dock lines passed through the fairleads and chocks or over the sides of the vessels. He checked to be sure that all the boats had ample fenders to protect their hulls when the waters became increasingly choppy.
Everything was looking pretty good, and he desperately started to go through his mental checklist to find the next thing that he could do to occupy his time.
To keep from thinking about . . .
Too late. He’d already opened that door. Before Cody knew it, his mind was racing, bringing him back to that night when his girlfriend did the unthinkable.
Just the thought of Sidney and what she had done to him filled him with equal parts anger and hurt. She had said that she didn’t want to hurt him, but then turned right around and ripped the heart from his chest and threw it into the harbor.
She might as well have just shot him in the head.
Sure, they’d had their problems over the years. Who didn’t? No one’s relationship was 100 percent perfect, but he was at least willing to work on things.
She had said that she needed a clean break, a fresh start. But what about him? Had she even taken the time to think about what he might want? They had been together for so long, he couldn’t imagine their lives separately, and that just made him feel sick to his stomach.
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