by Lori Wilde
“What? Because I can’t figure out what he’s up to?” I said. I felt sheepish that for a few minutes I’d actually believed that Conahegg had come to the hospital simply to see me.
“He’s pretty cute.”
“He’s okay.” I shrugged.
Cute didn’t begin to cover it. I thought of his flint eyes, those muscular thighs, that powerful voice.
Don’t forget the arrogant attitude, I reminded myself. The cocky way he looked at me made me want to bop him over the head and pop him into my bed all at the same time. Rhonda, however, did not need to know about the last part.
Rhonda heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I swear, Ally, sometimes I think you’re dead from the waist down. The guy’s a major hunk.”
“Define major hunk.”
“You’re hopeless,” she muttered. “Absolutely hopeless. If that man doesn’t melt your butter, it’d take a million years of global warming to thaw you out.”
“Oh, all right. He’s good-looking, I’ll grant him that.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
I didn’t like liking Conahegg so much. Especially when I didn’t know if he liked me or not. What was it about him that caused me to behave in the manner of a fifteen-year-old with a crush on the most popular guy in high school? Although as I recall, in high school all the girls had had a crush on him, me included.
“Getting you to talk about men is like pulling snakes’ teeth.”
“Snakes don’t have teeth.”
“That’s why it’s so hard.” Rhonda grinned. “Spill the beans. Is there chemistry between the two of you? You know, sparks.”
“There’s sparks.” I glowered. “But not the kind you mean. He’s opinionated and domineering and he embarrassed me.”
And he flushed the marijuana down the toilet instead of arresting Sissy like he could have.
Okay, so he wasn’t all bad.
“Come on, your last boyfriend was when…? College? Dang, Ally that was ten years ago!”
I was well aware of that fact. I was boyfriendless by choice, not happenstance. Guys clutter your life. Overall they weren’t worth the headache. They either died on you like my daddy, or used you as a crutch like my old boyfriends, or disappeared on you like Rhonda’s ex-husband, or cheated on you like Rocky did Sissy.
Yeah, okay, so maybe I had trust issues when it came to men.
“You’re an attractive woman. You’ve got a great body and flawless skin,” Rhonda went on relentlessly. “If you’d only wear a little more makeup and get a new hairstyle. That page boy might be functional but it’s not sexy. Oh, and you might consider some blond highlights.”
“I’m not going to bend over backward to attract some man.”
“No? But you’ll jump through hoops for your family.”
“Rhonda, I don’t have any choice. You know my mother. If I didn’t manage her finances, she and Tessa would be in the poorhouse within a week.”
“How do you know?” Rhonda busily applied a second coat of browny-purple-puke color to her nails. “Ever let ’em sink or swim?”
I stared at her appalled. “Of course not. That’d be like letting a baby play on the highway.”
She snorted. “And your sister. Why doesn’t that girl get a steady job and take care of her own son? Why do you have to be Denny’s surrogate mother?”
“I love taking care of Denny,” I protested.
“You should have a child of your own. A man of your own. A life of your own.”
“I have a life.”
“Oh, yeah? Never mind a boyfriend, when was the last time you even went out on a date.”
“I don’t need a man to complete me.”
“You’re not going to tell me that you believe in that stupid feminist slogan—a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle? What’s that supposed to mean anyway?” Rhonda frowned and examined her nails with narrowed eyes.
“It’s true. I have no need for a man.”
Rhonda stuck her leg out at me. “Come on, pull the other one. Every woman needs a man. Unless of course she prefers another woman.”
She was trying to get my goat and I knew it. I closed my eyes and battled the heat rising to my cheeks. “I have physical needs. Just like anybody else. But I know how to control myself.”
“There’s a fine line between self-control and shutting yourself off to your sexuality.”
Rhonda didn’t know what she was talking about. I had feelings. Lots of them. Thinking about Sheriff Conahegg brought a warm tingly sensation into the center of my body. An unwanted sensation.
Without warning my mind flashed to a startlingly clear image of Conahegg. Strong, dimpled chin. Sharp, intelligent eyes that missed nothing. Hard, honed body.
Electric shivers spiked my spine.
“Besides,” I croaked, fighting to deny what was happening inside me. “Sex is overrated.”
“You’ve never had an orgasm, have you?” Rhonda taunted.
“Shut up.”
“You haven’t! Oh my God, Ally. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” She got up and threw her arms around my neck, careful to keep her nails splayed outward.
I backed away, eager to extricate myself. “Please, it’s no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Rhonda was shaking her head and damned if she didn’t have tears in her eyes. “You poor thing. I had no idea.”
“Stop it.” I didn’t want her pity.
“You’ve got to quit substituting your family for a real life before it’s too late. You’re thirty-one and not getting any younger.”
Thankfully, the clock chose that moment to strike eleven.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I sprinted for the door. I had to get out of here. Away from talk of Conahegg. Away from Rhonda and the overwhelming sympathy in her eyes.
ON TUESDAY MORNING, three days after Sissy shot Rocky, Joyce Kemper, the director of Cloverleaf Home Health Care, handed me two manila folders. “Here’s your new cases. The first one is a knee laceration. You’re to give IV penicillin for five days. The other patient is a twenty-seven-year-old male with GSW to the foot. Administer IV vancomycin once a week for four weeks and dress the wound thrice weekly.”
GSW. Gun shot wound. My heart sank. Cloverleaf wasn’t a big place. We probably didn’t average one gunshot wound to the foot a decade.
I opened the top file and stared down at the name. My worst fears confirmed.
Rockerfeller Hughes.
“I can’t take the case.” I handed the file back to Joyce.
“What do you mean?” She stared at me blankly. In the five years I’d worked for Joyce I’d never refused a case.
“I know the man,” I explained.
“Is he a relative?”
“No, but he’s my sister’s boyfriend.”
“So?” She pushed the file at me.
“Sissy is the one who shot him in the foot. It would be a conflict of interest for me to take care of him.”
“You didn’t shoot him. What’s the conflict?”
“Come on, Joyce, have a heart.”
“Ally, there’s no one else to send. Yvette’s swamped. She’s got twenty-five patients to see this week. You only have sixteen. Marcie’s out on maternity leave and Kayla’s on vacation. You lose by default.”
“You could do it,” I pointed out.
Joyce looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. Joyce was far beyond pleasingly plump and she was loath to move her girth any more than necessary. “I have to run the office.”
“Felicity can handle things for the amount of time it would take you to give Hughes his antibiotics and change his dressing.” I waved toward the outer office where the secretary sat.
“Absolutely not. It’s your territory. In fact, your other patient lives in the same trailer park.” Joyce glowered.
I folded my arms over my chest. “You don’t understand. I despise the guy.”
“And you don’t understand. Take the case or you can find yourself an
other job.”
I shook my head. Surely, I had heard her wrong. She was willing to fire me if I didn’t go see Rockerfeller Hughes?
“I’ll switch with Yvette.”
“She’s gone to Zion Hill for the day. She won’t be back until five. You can switch with her for the duration of his treatment but for today, he’s yours.” Joyce waved the file in my face. She bared her teeth and shook her jowls like a bulldog.
“Oh, fine.” I snatched the file from her hand. “But if I end up killing him, then you’re responsible.”
“Thank you, Ally.” Joyce’s voice was pure NutraSweet.
I stormed from the office wondering which god I had offended to get this crap assignment.
Sissy had come home last night with hickeys tracking up and down her neck. To my disgust she said that she and Rocky had made up and he’d promised her he was going to divorce Darlene.
I had fought the temptation to get a gun and finish Rocky off so I wouldn’t have to hear for the one millionth time what a wonderful person he was for not pressing charges against her. This from the sleazebag who’d turned Sissy on to drugs, encouraged her to quit her job to sing with his band and who, upon occasion, took the back of his hand to her face.
Trying my best not to think about my sister, I got in my car and looked at my other patient file and discovered I’d been given Tim Kehaul, as well. While Cloverleaf is not huge, it’s not that small. Population seven thousand or thereabouts. What were the odds of me getting two of Sissy’s boyfriends to make home health visits to?
Rocky lived in a trailer park in Andover Bend. A particularly redneck community where the average IQ score hovered somewhere around my shoe size. Most of the people who lived there supplemented their welfare checks and unemployment income by fishing and raising vegetables to sell at a community roadside stand.
The road into Andover Bend was a narrow, one-lane affair. After a couple of miles the asphalt petered out where the county turned the road over to the development. I passed several shotgun shacks with dirty-faced kids playing in the yard. Dust billowed behind my tires.
I wondered if they’d dismissed Rocky from the hospital with a saline well instilled in his arm or if I’d have to start one myself. The idea of prodding Rocky with a large bore needle was not entirely unpleasant.
Rounding the curve, I blew past the nine-hole golf course which was better maintained than most of the residences. Tanned guys with bellies overlapping their belts and beers clutched in their hands, maneuvered golf carts around the fairways.
The clubhouse was next and the community swimming pool, filled with kids on colorful floatation devices and mamas at poolside reading, tanning and gossiping.
Then the road arched toward the river. The farther I went, the grungier the houses grew. The area flooded frequently and since no one could afford to build to code, they couldn’t buy flood insurance. Water-level stains ringed the buildings, some waist high. The vehicles, parked in the driveways and on patches of bare lawn, were almost exclusively pickup trucks. And aged ones at that.
I crossed a small bridge so low to the ground it almost touched the water. Here, the Brazos looked swampy and brackish. Not like the healthy branch that flowed past my place.
The posted speed limit was twenty-five miles per hour. I slowed. I was in no hurry to see Rockerfeller Hughes or go into his disgusting house but eventually I rolled to a stop outside a clump of about thirty trailers that had seen better days.
I decided to visit Tim first. Rocky could wait.
Tim’s trailer was the best in the bunch and that wasn’t saying much, but at least his grass was trimmed and there were no rusting vehicles in the yard. He even had curtains in the window, and his front porch steps looked sturdy and reliable.
I parked and turned my head to peer directly across the road at Rocky’s house. In contrast to Tim’s double-wide, Rocky owned a tiny repo job teetering precariously on cinder blocks right at the river’s edge.
His dilapidated truck was parked nose in against the house. The windows were screenless and there was no underpinning around the bottom of the trailer.
Beer cans and whiskey bottles were stacked like a shrine to alcohol consumption right next to a rusted burn barrel. There was one tree in the whole yard. An old oak with a half-dozen dead branches that needed pruning.
I’d never been inside Rocky’s trailer, although I had come to pick Sissy up here one night after she called me, crying. She’d been standing by the road when I’d arrived and kept her face turned away from me.
It wasn’t until we’d gotten home that I’d seen the bruise on her cheek. She’d been smart to hide the marks from me. I would have called the cops on Rocky right then and there and she knew it.
What was it about my little sister that made her such a loser magnet? Rocky wasn’t the first, well…rocky relationship she’d had.
She’d always been something of a wild child and from the age of fourteen had engaged in risky sexual behavior. I preached to her about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases until I was blue in the face. It took me a while to catch on that the more I preached the more promiscuous she became. Finally, I stopped commenting on her sex life. But I never stopped caring.
“Oh, Sissy,” I whispered. “When will you ever learn?”
I let the engine idle, pretending I wanted to hear the last of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” on the radio, when in reality I wanted to avoid getting out of my car.
I collected Tim’s file, along with the doctor’s orders and my bag of antibiotics and IV supplies. I made sure I had Betadine and alcohol preps.
When I could avoid it no longer, I climbed out of my trusty Honda and headed toward Tim’s trailer.
I knocked at the screen door.
And waited.
I knocked again and fidgeted, shifting my weight, tucking my supplies first under one arm, then the other.
Nothing.
I checked my watch. A little before noon. He should be awake, even if he was feeling bad.
Clearing my throat, I knocked again. “Tim,” I called out. “It’s Allegheny Green. Home health sent me out to check that knee and give you some antibiotics.”
No answer.
I opened the screen and knocked on the front door. It swung inward at my touch.
“Tim?” I stepped forward and stuck my head around the door.
The room was dark, the curtains drawn.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
I took a deep breath. The place smelled funny but I saw no garbage in the trash can. The kitchen was clean, no dirty dishes or food in the sink.
“Tim?”
My voice echoed in the empty room.
With a staggering sense of dread, I moved farther into the house. I set my supplies on the bar and inched down the narrow hallway paneled in dark particle board. The first door on the right was a bathroom. No one in there.
That left the two bedrooms. With the closed doors.
“Tim?”
Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe. My chest tightened. I only knew one thing. I did not want to open that door.
I rapped on it gently with my knuckles. “Tim, it’s Ally Green.”
Not a sound. Not a peep. Not a whisper.
The hair on the back of my neck rose.
I reached for the knob.
Forget it. Leave. Go. Tell Joyce he wasn’t home.
But I didn’t move. I stayed. My hand growing sweaty on the knob.
My heart pounded in my ears.
What’s the matter, Ally? You’re not Aunt Tessa, you don’t have visions. Open the damned door.
And so I did.
The bedroom was even darker than the rest of the trailer. Pitch-black in fact. Like the bedroom of a night-shift worker who keeps foil on the windows. My fingers fumbled along the wall, searching for the switch.
Light flooded the dreary room with shocking intensity.
I blinked.
And then I screamed at what I s
aw.
Tim’s naked body dangling from the ceiling.
CHAPTER FIVE
HAND OVER MY MOUTH, I stumbled through the house and out to my car, struggling not to toss my cookies. The bright, beautiful day was a shocking contrast to the dark tragedy I’d witnessed.
Taking several slow deep breaths, I lowered myself into the front seat, picked up my cell phone and dialed 911.
I waited.
The sun beat down. Sweat plastered my floral print uniform top to my back. I pushed my bangs from my forehead and waited. I closed my eyes but when I did, I saw Tim’s body slowly rotating from the end of the rope and I quickly opened them again.
I’m a nurse. I’ve seen a lot of grisly things. But I’d known Tim. He’d spent time at my house.
My stomach roiled. I got out of the car and paced the lawn with my hands folded across my chest. I glanced over at Rocky’s trailer, saw his bedroom curtain move and knew he’d been staring at me. Cocking my head, I studied the window and I wondered if he’d seen anything going on at Tim’s.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. I mean it was pretty clear Tim had hung himself. It wasn’t murder, but then why would Tim kill himself? Depression over getting arrested? Surely not. It hadn’t been that big a deal. Then again, I realized how little I knew about Tim and his inner life. What seemed inconsequential to me might have been earth-shattering to him.
I nibbled a fingernail. Honestly, I was a little numb.
Feeling vulnerable to Rocky’s scrutiny, I got back in the car. Ten minutes later, when the patrol car rolled to a stop beside me, my knees were still quaking. I had rested my head against the steering wheel, steeling myself for what lay ahead. Therefore, I didn’t notice that the deputy walking around my car was no deputy.
Knuckles rapped against the window and I jumped like a skittish cat at Fourth of July fireworks.
Sheriff Conahegg pantomimed rolling the window down. I did better than that. I swung open the door and got out.
Damn, he looked handsome with that badge pinned to his chest, and that gun hanging on his hip. Nonsensically, he made me feel safe and I realized I was glad to see him.
