Before I can answer, April continues, “It might also be a mountain man, who attacked her in her sleep. Or perhaps she was part of a group, friends who had a falling-out, and she is the lone survivor. It could have been sexual jealousy. Two friends both coveting the same lover, and when one is spurned for the other, the spurned lover—”
“—massacres the group. All except her. As we’ll soon discover, though, she wasn’t the lone survivor. She was the killer.”
“That is a very good theory. We’ll have to be careful.”
I bite my lip and struggle to keep a straight face. With anyone else, I’d presume they were mocking me. My own theory sounds outlandish, so they come up with even more outlandish ones. Except mockery, like humor, is not part of my sister’s DNA. Her words can cut deeper than any sword, but they are spoken in honesty. Harsh truth.
“You’re enjoying those mystery novels you borrowed from the library, aren’t you,” I say, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“They are a much more pleasant way to pass the time than I imagined. Isabel is correct that a mental break is useful for lowering stress, but what I feared would be a frivolous waste of my time has turned into quite the mental challenge. Piecing together the clues, avoiding the trap of the red herring, identifying the killer…”
“A lot more fun to read about than to actually do for a living.”
She waves a hand. “That’s an entirely different thing.”
“It is.”
“The detectives in the novels always find the clues and follow a clear path to the killer. You spend far too much time dithering about, talking to the wrong people, chasing subpar leads, waiting for some vital piece of information to land in your lap. You could learn something from those books, Casey.”
“Right…”
“I’m not saying you’re a poor detective. You’re actually quite adept. But there is always room for improvement.”
“Oh, look,” I say, raising my voice. “We’ve reached the patient. Finally.”
Dalton takes the cue and strides over, guiding April to the injured woman, as if she could somehow miss her. Not that she’d ever snap at him for providing the obvious. To April, Dalton is competency incarnate, and there is no greater compliment she could give.
I’m heading off to speak to Felicity when April’s sharp voice cuts through the quiet. “Casey?”
I turn, slowly, trying not to cringe.
“I am about to examine the victim. Don’t you need to be here, taking notes?”
“Victim?” Dalton mouths.
I shake my head, telling him not to ask, and I make my way back to my sister as she lowers herself beside the injured woman.
* * *
It’s well past midnight. We’re still on the ice, the two fires lighting our makeshift emergency room. Baptiste and Sidra have left with the baby, and they’re camped nearby with Felicity.
The mystery woman is indeed in septic shock, as my sister grudgingly admits, while issuing another warning against me practicing medicine without a license. I say nothing about her detecting without a badge.
The woman is asleep now. At first, April had been reluctant to administer the sedative—the woman had been resting, if fitfully, and as April said, we can’t question her about her injuries if she’s unconscious. I could point out the “can’t communicate with her even when she is talking” language issue, but April would probably just suggest I wasn’t trying hard enough.
Fortunately, we never reached that point. As soon as April tried to look at her patient’s stomach, the woman demonstrated why we needed the sedative. We wrestled her down while my sister administered it, and once that took effect, we were finally able to examine that horrific wound.
“Horrific” is no exaggeration. The flesh surrounding the wound was rotting and putrid, and April had to excise dead tissue to get a look at what lay beneath. Even then, there wasn’t any sign of what caused the injury. No tree splinters. No bullet burns, either. Yes, April’s wild theories amused me, but that didn’t mean I was set on a diagnosis of accidental injury. It was just more dangerous to leap to the conclusion that she’d been attacked, only to have her wake up later and say “Oh, no, I just fell on a branch” after we’d spent days combing the woods for her attacker.
Crime fighting in Rockton often feels like being transported back to the world of Sherlock Holmes. April can complain about me “dithering about,” but most of that is Holmesian thinking and working through the case by making endless notes.
When it comes to actual crime-scene equipment, I’m back in the Victorian age, with my fingerprint dust and rudimentary ballistics. If I need DNA testing, I can send a sample to a lab down south, but so far I haven’t had a case that a modern crime-scene test would break faster than old-fashioned sleuthing.
Medicine faces similar constraints. Being off-grid means we do have power from generators and solar panels, but that goes to essentials, mostly cooking and food preservation. If April had an emergency case requiring our entire power supply, though, we’d all be eating fire-cooked food for a few days, because medical care is our priority. Yet mostly she’s had to wean herself off technology the same way I have.
She works into the night using the combined light of bonfires and strong flashlights. We hold the latter as she abrades the infected wound and then assesses damage. An ultrasound may help here, and she has a portable one in Rockton, but it appears that the injury hasn’t done more than nick the woman’s intestines. That’s what I already suspected. This woman has been alive with this wound for a few days now, which means it didn’t puncture a vital organ.
The short version is that, had she gotten medical care immediately, she’d be in a hospital bed, probably arguing with the doctors to let her out of it. The issue isn’t the wound as much as what happened after—days of stumbling through the Yukon wilderness, each step aggravating the injury, while infection set in.
Her feet and calves are a mess, testifying to the sheer hell of the journey that brought her to us. Two toes are frostbitten and will probably need amputation.
Besides cuts, scratches, and dehydration, there are no other obvious wounds. Or that’s what April concludes. She’s wrong, though, and I take no pleasure in pointing that out. Whatever our issues, proving April wrong is uncomfortable for me and always has been, even when we were children. Perhaps even then I’d realized, deep down, that she didn’t point out my own flaws and mistakes to be cruel.
I glance at Anders, who’s assisting April. “Can you grab me a pop? I’m getting a little dehydrated myself.”
April turns a hard look on me. “If you’ve allowed yourself to get into that state, then I believe you can remain there a little longer, Casey.”
“She’s not actually asking for a soda, April,” Anders says. “She’s asking me to step away.”
“Then she should say so.”
“I was trying to be discreet,” I say.
“Asking for refreshments in the middle of a medical procedure is hardly discreet. I presume you are questioning my assessment. I do not need you to correct me in private. I’m a grown woman, capable of handling criticism.”
I’m opening my mouth to apologize when she adds, “However, since it’s unlikely I’m mistaken, if you wish to be corrected in private, I understand that. Your ego is more fragile.”
Off to the side, Dalton gives me a sympathetic eye roll as he holds the flashlight for us.
“I believe this scratch is significant,” I say, running my finger along a shallow cut in the side of the woman’s abdomen.
“She has many cuts, Casey. She was fleeing through the forest.”
“This part of her body was under several layers of bandage.”
April goes still and then blanches, just a little.
I continue. “It’s possible that this cut is unconnected, but there’s also something here.” I take her forceps and point. “This looks like part of the abdominal injury, but I don’t think it is. There’s a deeper wound over here
.” I move the forceps an inch to the left. “That seems like an impalement of some sort. An object that went directly in, causing a deep wound. This part here”—I pull back—“is much shallower. The infection has made it seem like it’s all one injury running together, especially after abrading the dead tissue. But if that other part is impalement, what’s this?”
“Three cuts,” Dalton says. “First on the side. She avoids that and gets a shallow slice. The second blow penetrates, but not deeply. Then comes the third.”
April frowns. “I’m sorry, Eric, but I don’t understand. Avoids what?”
I get to my feet, forceps still in hand, and walk over to Dalton. He nods, knowing what I intend. Still, when I stab at him with the forceps, April gasps, leaping up like I’ve gone mad.
Dalton swings sideways, avoiding the blow, and the forceps graze his side instead.
“One,” he says.
I pull back for another stab, and this time, as I make contact with his stomach, he yanks away, staggering backward. He barely has time to say “Two” before I’m on him again, and this time, the forceps hit him straight in the stomach, my hand sliding up the metal, as if they’re penetrating deep.
“Three,” I say as I turn to April. “Three blows. Looks like you were right after all. She didn’t fall. She was attacked.”
FOUR
After that, we transport the woman to the ATV, and I drive her back to town with April, while the others bring the horses. An hour after we reach Rockton, I’m in bed, asleep.
That sounds awful. I’ve just realized that someone in the forest attacked this woman and left her for dead, and I’m going to drop her off at the clinic and catch up on my beauty sleep?
No, I’m not. I’m going to …
Well, that’s the problem. What am I going to do at 3 A.M., with an unconscious and medically stabilized victim who doesn’t speak English or French, and a crime scene somewhere in a night-dark forest? The answer is nothing. I can do nothing tonight. Which doesn’t keep me from hovering over the patient until April drives me out. Or from heading to the police station until Anders physically bars the doorway. Or from returning home and pulling out my notebook until Dalton slings me over his shoulder and carries me up to bed.
They’re correct in their chorus of “There’s nothing you can do tonight, Casey, except get a good night’s sleep.” It just feels wrong. Someone tried to murder this woman and I’m heading off to my comfy bed, curled up with my partner, my dog snoring on the floor beside me.
It’s not even light out yet when I bolt upright with a gasp, as if surfacing from underwater. As I hover there, Dalton murmurs, “You can’t do anything tonight.”
I glance down at him, lying on his back, his fingers tracing my bare side.
“The nightmare is bullshitting you,” he says. “Nothing has changed. You’re not forgetting anything. You’re not failing to do anything.”
“Nightmare?”
He gives me a hard look, as if I’m being coy. It takes a second for the dream to filter back. Me, napping in bed while shouts echoed all around me, people screaming and running for cover, a mass murderer with a knife charging from the forest, slaughtering residents as I grumble that I really wish they’d stop screaming so I could sleep.
I tell Dalton, and when he chuckles, I’m the one giving him the hard look.
“Sorry,” he says, reaching up to pull me down in a tight hug. “I know it was frightening at the time.” He presses his finger below my breast, where my heart beats triple-time.
“Reminds me of nightmares where I forget to study for exams,” I mutter. “I haven’t been in school for a decade, but I still have them.” I sigh and look up at him. “You don’t ever get those, do you?”
“Having never been to a class or taken an exam, oddly, I do not.”
“Lucky bastard.” I shift in his arms. “I bet you don’t get anxiety dreams at all.”
He purses his lips.
“Do you even know what those are?” I ask.
“Never heard the term, but considering what you just described, yeah, I get them. After my parents left Rockton, and I was sheriff, I used to have nightmares where no one listened to me.”
I fight a sputtering laugh. “For you, that would be a nightmare. Did it ever happen, though? Even back then?”
“Hell, yeah. There are always people who don’t listen until I show them why they really should.”
“So that was the nightmare, then? You gave orders, and someone ignored you?”
“Everyone ignored me. Laughed at me, even. I’d wake up in a cold sweat. Truth was that it shocked the fuck out of me that people did listen. I was the youngest resident, and here I was, playing sheriff, giving orders and tossing curses and glares. I was never the biggest or toughest guy here. I just acted like it. I’d seen it work for Ty, but that’s different.”
“The man is the size of a grizzly.”
“And I’m not. Yet residents treated me like I was the person I was pretending to be, while I kept waiting for someone to call me on my bullshit, and no one did.”
“So the nightmares stopped?”
“Eventually. Now I just get the ones where you’re not here, and when I go looking for you, no one knows who I’m talking about.”
I wince.
“Yep, those suck,” he says, kissing my cheek, “but then I wake up, and you’re here, and I know you’re staying, so I can shove that bullshit in the closet where it belongs.”
I run a finger over his cheek, prickly with stubble, the winter beard shaved. He’ll keep the stubble, though. There’s something in his face that needs the scruff to keep him looking like the hard-assed sheriff. Otherwise, there’s always an innocence there. A wide-eyed innocence and a wounded innocence, and a man who cannot allow the world to see either. It’s only when it’s the two of us that the wall comes down and that strong jaw relaxes and those gray eyes lose a little of their steel, letting me see what lies within.
What lies within is a boy who grew up in the forest, with parents who loved him and a younger brother who adored him. A harsh but also idyllic life. Then Rockton’s sheriff Gene Dalton found him.
Gene took the boy home and, according to the town records, the nine-year-old was suffering from severe malnutrition and had been abandoned by neglectful parents. That was bullshit, but it gave Gene the excuse to present his wife with a son after they’d lost their own child down south in the tragedy that brought them to Rockton.
It was like those old stories of missionaries “rescuing” “heathen” children, when the truth was that they stole those children from loving parents who followed a different way of life.
What happened next is hazy in Dalton’s mind, tainted by the stories Gene told him growing up. Then, a few years ago, he reconnected with his brother, Jacob, and learned that his parents weren’t the negligent guardians that Gene claimed.
Yet it wasn’t as if he’d been taken as a baby. Dalton had repressed nearly a decade of good memories, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. So he decided not to. His birth parents were dead, and the Daltons had retired down south, so what was the point in digging up the past? What’s done is done. Keep moving forward.
It obviously isn’t that easy. All those questions he’d tamped down had left a smoldering keg in his soul, the rage and hurt of a boy who’d been abandoned by loving birth parents and then, as an adult, come to realize that his loving adopted parents actually kidnapped him. Little wonder he has nightmares where he wakes to find me gone, to discover I never existed at all.
It was only last winter that Dalton agreed to talk about his parents. While Jacob is more than happy to fill in the missing memories, he cannot supply the most critical answer of all. Jacob had been seven when Dalton disappeared into Rockton. He knows their parents searched frantically for his brother. He eventually came to understand that Dalton was in Rockton, where their parents assured Jacob that his brother was healthy and happy. They made it sound like having an older sibling at board
ing school in a far-off place.
He’s gone away to learn new things and grow up, and when he does, he’ll come back to us.
From what I’ve heard of Steve Mulligan and Amy O’Keefe, there is no way they decided their son was better off in Rockton and left him there. So what really happened?
We have no idea. They both died fifteen years ago.
So much trauma visited on a family who only wanted peaceful lives in the forest. Further proof, as if we needed it, that the biggest danger out there isn’t the animals or the landscape or the weather.
It’s the people.
And here we are, reminded of that yet again with the tourist we found. A woman who came here expecting to deal with the animals and the landscape and the weather, and what put her in our clinic, fighting for her life, was another human being.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions,” I whisper against Dalton’s chest.
“Yeah, pretty sure I’m trying not to jump to the same ones.” He pulls back to look down at me. “We can discuss it, if that’ll help you sleep.”
I shake my head. “Once I start, I won’t stop. We’re thinking the same thing. I know we are. It can wait. It can all wait.” I glance at the clock. “At least for another couple of hours.”
He pulls me to him in a kiss, and I lose myself in it, pushing the rest back, at least for now.
* * *
It’s 6 A.M., the sun fully risen, and I’m in the clinic, cupping a mug of hot coffee between my hands as Dalton stokes the fire. My sister had been up all night with the patient. We’ve sent April to bed now, and we’re sitting vigil waiting for the woman to wake. We’ve left Storm with Petra—the clinic is no place for any canine, but especially not one who can destroy a thousand dollars in equipment with one enthusiastic wag of her tail.
As for the patient, the sedative wore off long ago, and this is simply the deep sleep of exhaustion. She’s hooked up to an IV replacing her fluids. There’s a heart monitor, too. That is all we can do for her right now, that and antibiotics.
A Stranger in Town Page 3
