The Temptation Test

by Meredith Webber

‘It was nothing like that. Just the free time. I was thinking you might have free time.’

  ‘Not to spend with you! Not if my life depended on it!’ Jena snorted, then she stormed out of the room, down the hall and up the stairs, only realising when she reached the top that she’d have to go back down again to meet the crew.

  Having them blundering around the place, talking loudly, was hardly the way to convince Noah Blacklock she’d be doing a first-class job!

  Also, she hadn’t properly investigated the back of the building to see how feasible it would be for the cast and crew to enter and leave that way.

  She peered over the railing to see if the coast was clear. A nurse swept across her field of vision, but there was no sign of the aggravating doctor.

  Creeping down the stairs like a timid rabbit was out of the question, but she needn’t make a lot of noise. Not if she took her time.

  ‘Oh, there you are. I’d like to talk to you.’

  Linda Carthew spoke as if she’d been searching the premises for Jena for some hours. Where she’d come from, Jena couldn’t guess—though it was a day for sudden appearances and disappearances so she shouldn’t have been surprised by Linda materialising at the foot of the steps.

  ‘Yes, Ms Carthew?’

  Jena hoped she sounded polite, although the woman’s terse demand had raised her hackles—again!

  ‘Call me Linda. It’s about this liaison business. You’re supposed to be the liaison between the hospital and the film crew, and the hospital includes the board and the administrator.’

  Jena thought back to what the producer had told her about this job and knew trouble lay ahead.

  ‘Actually,’ she replied as she reached the hall and could stand face to face with the woman, ‘I was appointed as liaison between the medical staff, under Dr Blacklock, and the television company, although, of course, we could include a board meeting and the discussions which take place there as well.’

  She tried to make the words sound inconsequential, hoping to avoid a confrontation, but she guessed Linda wouldn’t be easily appeased.

  ‘Dr Blacklock is the board’s employee!’ Linda snorted, proving Jena’s guess correct.

  ‘Really?’ Jena murmured, determined to remain calm while she launched herself straight at the woman’s jugular. ‘I understood he was employed by the State Health Department, which is why the original negotiations for the use of Kareela Hospital were conducted through them and the Minister. Of course, out of consideration for the local people, the board and key staff at the hospital were also consulted.’

  Linda opened her mouth, then closed it again. Apparently, the power of the government still held some sway, and the mention of ministerial support had silenced her.

  At that moment, Jena caught sight of a gaggle of men and women heading towards the front door.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Linda, and she slipped away, across the hall and out the door, hurrying down the front steps to intercept the scruffy-looking group before they could come in.

  Ritual hugs and loud cries of ‘Darling!’ greeted her, and by the time she’d detached herself from the last hugger they were at the bottom of the front steps.

  Noah Blacklock was at the top—Linda Carthew nowhere in sight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOAH could think of no reason why he found the attire of the film crew so offensive—after all, why shouldn’t they wear flowered board shorts and scruffy, paint-stained T-shirts? But Noah thought the scene so distasteful he scowled at the woman who glanced towards him.

  She scowled right back and shook her head as if to say, Buzz off! I’m handling it!

  He ignored the silent message and stood his ground, folding his arms and scowling harder.

  ‘OK, gang,’ he heard her say, spreading her arms to prevent them mounting the steps. ‘Mr Happy up there is the medical superintendent of this hospital and he doesn’t want us trooping in and out through the main entrance, making a noise and disturbing his patients.’

  ‘Mr Happy?’ one of the crew echoed doubtfully. Another punched Jena lightly on the shoulder and said, ‘Way to go, girl! I knew you’d make the perfect liaison person—such tact and diplomacy.’

  ‘I can be diplomatic when I want but it doesn’t always work,’ Noah heard Jena retort. ‘Like now! Will you lot get your sorry selves around the back of this building forthwith?’

  She herded them along the path which, if she had but known it, would merely lead them to Outpatients. Eventually, she might find the back entrance to the building—once they’d negotiated the incinerator, various outhouses and the brick shed housing the emergency generator.

  Time to take control?

  ‘If you’ve got equipment, you’d be better off going back to your vehicles, driving out of the car park, turning left down the first side road and in through another gate. You’ll find a staff car park with plenty of space, and the back door leads off it.’

  Jena turned to stare at him.

  Surprised by his helpfulness, or annoyed by his interference?

  ‘Thanks!’ she said, and briefly flashed a smile that made the day seem brighter.

  Which was an observation fraught with danger.

  She let the crew wander back towards their cars and came up the steps.

  ‘I apologise for the “Mr Happy” remark,’ she said, then, just as he was about to offer his own apology for scowling, she spoilt it by adding, ‘but you were standing there looking like a thundercloud, and the crew hadn’t even reached the steps.’

  ‘The back door’s down the hall, then left into the narrower corridor then right. You should be able to find it easily enough.’

  ‘Even though I’m blonde?’ she sniped at him, and he found himself growling again.

  Though beneath the anger he wondered about her edginess—about the ‘blonde’ references. Had someone, in this day and age of enlightenment and political correctness, used her looks against her? Or did the old ‘dumb blonde’ attitude hold more sway than he’d realised in the public’s mind?

  Jena hurried through the hall, sorry she’d given in to the impulse to have the last word. And the ‘Mr Happy’ impulse earlier. Why was she behaving so irrationally towards the man when she was supposed to be a soothing influence, not an exacerbating one?

  Because grey eyes with the sheen of polished steel caused tremors down her spine? Seemed to penetrate her skin and leave her flesh uneasy?

  Or because he was as changeable as the wind—one minute being helpful and suggesting coffee, the next treating her as if her presence in his life was anathema to him.

  She put the puzzle of Noah Blacklock from her mind, found the back door and once again intercepted the crew—three men and a woman, three of them familiar from previous shoots.

  ‘OK—here are the rules,’ she told them, when they’d teased her about kowtowing to the doctor. ‘Minimum noise inside the building—on the stairs and in the corridors and hall. As much of the carpentry work as possible should be done outside.’

  She looked around at the rear parking area.

  ‘There’s plenty of space out here.’

  ‘We’ve got the mobile workshop coming up later today and also a hoist, so heavy gear like the dollies and cameras we’ll use upstairs can be hoisted straight up and swung through a window,’ Andrew Watts, the props officer on the project, told her. ‘I sussed it all out when I came up earlier.’

  ‘It’s only when people are tramping up and down the steps there’s likely to be any noise,’ Kate Jennings, the site manager, remarked.

  They were standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up, all of them considering the number of people who were involved in even the shortest of scenes.

  ‘Most people wear trainers, so the actual footsteps won’t be noisy, but you can’t stop people talking to each other.’

  ‘Anyone sick enough to be bothered by a little human conversation is sent to the city hospital,’ a quavery voice said, and Jena turned to find one of the verandah p
atients standing behind them. It was the knitter, Mrs Nevins, knitting needles still in hand, wool in her dressing-gown pocket and the bright bundle of completed fabric tucked under one arm.

  ‘The rest of us are looking forward to a bit of liveliness around the place. Very depressing, hospitals can be. I know the staff all do their best, but it’s not much fun, you know, being surrounded by sick people.’

  Jena was so relieved to hear this opinion that she smiled at the woman.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and meant it, though she knew the warning for the cast and crew to behave with consideration and decorum would still have to be repeatedly enforced.

  ‘The town’s behind you, too,’ Mrs Nevins continued. ‘Not like they were about Noah’s druggies, although I can’t see any harm in the poor young things living here if it might help them stay off the drugs.’

  Noah’s druggies?

  The words puzzled Jena and she wanted to question them, but she felt it might not be prudent to gossip about the person with whom she was liaising on her very first day on the job.

  ‘I’ll see you later, Mrs Nevins,’ Jena told her. ‘Right now, I’d better take the crew upstairs.’

  Mrs Nevins nodded, but made no move to return to her bed on the verandah. She waited until the motley group had spread out up the staircase before adding, ‘There’s a ghost up there. They say the hospital closed the floor because of numbers but it was the ghost. Old Dr Granger’s wife, it is.’

  She tucked her knitting more firmly under her arm and turned away, her slippers making no sound on the tiled floor. Only the click of her knitting needles, growing fainter, indicated her departure.

  Great! Jena thought as she followed the chuckling members of the crew up the stairs. Now we’ve got a ghost as well as an unwelcoming doctor.

  She was smiling to herself over the silly thought when a loud cry diverted her thoughts from ghosts and the doctor. She took the remaining steps two at a time, intending to yell, quietly, at whoever had made the noise. She was willing to bet there’d be ghost sightings among the crew on a daily basis, now the ghost’s presence was known.

  But it wasn’t a ghost which had caused the loud cry. That much was obvious when Jena reached the top landing and took one look at the white-faced woman who sat there, clutching her left shoulder and moaning pitifully.

  ‘What on earth happened?’ Jena demanded, turning to the rest of the group for an explanation.

  ‘Something hit me on the shoulder. It’s broken for sure.’ Kate was the one who answered, so apparently no one else had seen the accident.

  Jena looked around and saw what had probably caused the problem, though the crew’s wary attitudes suggested they were ready to lay the blame on the ghost.

  ‘There’s a wrought-iron bracket on the wall. It probably held trays at one time.’ She pointed out this obstruction to Kate as she knelt beside the young woman. ‘You must have been turning to talk to someone and walked into it.’

  As she spoke, Jena studied the affected shoulder. Though it was years since she’d done the prac. work in her nursing training, she could see a loss of contour in Kate’s shoulder which suggested a dislocation. She hadn’t seen the bracket so hadn’t been facing that way, but if she’d struck it front on, a dislocation was likely.

  ‘Well, at least you chose a good place to have an accident,’ Jena told her. ‘Do you want me to get someone to bring a stretcher or can you walk back down the stairs?’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ Kate said grimly. The haste with which she rose to her feet, and the apprehension in her eyes as she looked around, suggested she hadn’t accepted Jena’s logical explanation of the accident.

  Jena turned to Andrew. ‘Could you and Brad help Kate down the stairs? Don’t touch her arm or shoulder. I’ll get the doctor.’

  She slipped away from them, mentally rehearsing what she would say to Noah Blacklock. How to present him with a new patient within an hour of the advance crew’s arrival, after assuring him he’d barely notice the crew in ‘his’ hospital.

  She found him in the men’s ward, sitting on a chair pulled up beside the bed of a young boy.

  Playing chess.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Dr Blacklock,’ she said, using his formal title in these surroundings. ‘But one of the crew’s had an accident…’

  Her voice tailed away but fortunately the boy took over, lifting the chessboard carefully from the side of the bed and placing it on his locker.

  ‘Serves you right, Noah! Off you go. I’ll work out a way to get out of check while you’re gone.’

  He grinned at the doctor, who was grumbling about losing this one chance to beat him, but although the smile made the small face come alive, it did nothing to disguise the signs of chronic illness on the child’s face.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked, as Noah accompanied her out of the ward.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be more concerned with your own patient?’ Noah snapped. ‘I assume it’s something serious or you wouldn’t have disturbed me.’

  His reaction sparked one in Jena.

  ‘Not when you were obviously snowed under with work,’ she snapped right back at him.

  They’d reached the hall, and met the cluster of crew members surrounding the injured Kate.

  ‘I think it’s a dislocated shoulder, anterior dislocation,’ Jena continued in her coolest tones. Then for pure devilment she added, ‘The ghost did it.’

  The look of horror on Noah’s face told Kate she’d struck a nerve, but his concern when he looked at Kate’s shoulder, the gentleness of his hands as he felt the joint, made her feel mean for doing it.

  She shooed the rest of the crew back upstairs, reminding them they had jobs to do and not much time in which to do them.

  ‘I’ll be up later,’ she promised, then walked behind Kate and Noah towards the casualty room.

  ‘We’ll X-ray it first,’ Noah explained to Kate, ‘just to check there are no broken bones, then I’ll give you a light anaesthetic and pop it back into place.’

  Jena gave an inward shudder. ‘Popping it back into place’ sounded easy, but she remembered enough of her training to know it could only be reduced either by moving the arm, flexed at the elbow, in horribly awkward contortions or by the surgeon putting his foot, minus the shoe, into the shoulder joint and somehow levering the head of the humerus out until the muscles surrounding it pulled it back into its correct position.

  ‘Read about the Hippocratic method of reduction, did you?’ Noah asked, and Jena realised her shudder must have been outward as well as inward.

  ‘Do you use that method?’ she asked him, as she accompanied the pair into the X-ray room.

  ‘No! I find it a bit violent. The four-step Kocher method does me.’

  ‘Hey, you guys, it’s my shoulder we’re talking about here. What’s going on?’

  Kate was pale with pain but had recovered enough equilibrium to join the conversation.

  ‘We’re discussing different ways of getting it back into place,’ Jena told her, then she shot a teasing look at Noah before giving more reassurance. ‘Dr Blacklock seems to know what he’s doing.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Kate asked. ‘As far as work goes? I don’t want to lose this job.’

  She sounded panicky and Jena was pleased when Noah reassured her.

  ‘Three weeks in a complicated kind of sling, that should do it. It’s mainly to give the torn tendons time to heal. You’ll be able to use your fingers and hand but the sling will keep the shoulder stable.’

  ‘And tonight? I can go home, well, back to the motel, tonight?’

  ‘Let’s take the X-ray and see how bad it is,’ Noah said gently. ‘I’d actually prefer to have you stay overnight in the hospital if it won’t be inconvenient for you, in case of complications.’

  ‘What complications?’ Kate demanded, and Jena glanced at Noah, wondering just how honestly he’d answer.

  ‘There could be injury to the nerves around the joint which would re
sult in a loss of feeling in your arm. There could be injury to a vein or an artery, causing internal bleeding we’d pick up if you were in hospital. Also, the X-ray could show an injury to one of the small bones in the shoulder, but if we stop chatting and take the pictures I might be able to rule it out right now.’

  A nurse Jena hadn’t met appeared from the direction of Casualty.

  ‘Heard voices and thought you might need me,’ she said. ‘Dislocated shoulder? You want lateral as well as anteroposterior shots?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Noah told her, then let her lead Kate into the small room and position her, seated, on the table.

  ‘Did you meet Marion?’ he asked Jena. ‘Positive genius with an X-ray machine. Well, with this particular machine, which, as far as I’m concerned, should have been consigned to the trash about ten years ago. However, Marion can coax spectacular results from the antiquated old thing and as the Health Department is starting to believe even cases needing an X-ray should be transported elsewhere, I won’t be getting a new one in the foreseeable future.’

  Jena heard impatience in his voice and wondered if this centralisation of services aggravated him. Yet he’d apparently chosen to come to work in Kareela, knowing it already existed. He must have applied for the position, as people of his rank in medical circles didn’t get transferred willy-nilly.

  Unless…

  The phrase she’d heard earlier, ‘Noah’s druggies’, echoed in her mind, but a sneaky glance at his strong profile confirmed her earlier impression. The man looked far too alert and fit and healthy to have had anything to do with drugs.

  As another premonitory shiver slithered down her spine, Jena turned her attention to Marion, who was positioning Kate ready for the X-ray.

  ‘Out of here, you hangers-on,’ Marion said, waving Jena and Noah from the room. ‘I’ll bring the negatives and your patient through to Theatre, Noah.’

  Jena backed out of the small room and was about to walk away, knowing she should see the rest of the crew to let them know what was happening.

  ‘I understood most of the television crew would be staying locally. Is there a problem for this lass if she stays in overnight?’