by Radclyffe
“Everybody’s fine, including Tim. I thought for a while I’d have to get him a bed next to Mary’s.”
Ida laughed. “First-time fathers. Worse than the mothers by a long shot.”
“You got that right.” Harper grinned, leaned over, and snagged a biscuit without getting swatted this time. “I saw that Dad’s SUV is gone. I thought he wasn’t going to take night calls anymore.”
Ida huffed. “Yes, and we won’t be planting the lower forty again either.”
Harper nodded as she buttered the flakey biscuit. Neither was likely to happen in her lifetime. Her father was an old-time country physician, just like she was, and if the call came, it went against the grain to tell the patient to go to the emergency room. Not when all it meant was getting out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, kicking into boots, and driving through the quiet country night with the company of the deer and possum and raccoons who appeared in the headlights, stared for a moment as if questioning why you were intruding on their domain, and bounded off into the underbrush with a dismissive swish of a tail. Those moments were among the most peaceful she’d ever known. Why would she pass those up while denying her patients the care of a doctor who knew them, and whom they trusted, at the same time?
“I told him I’d take his calls. I know all his patients.”
“You ought to—you’ve been going out with him since you were ten.”
“So you work on him—he’s earned a full night’s sleep.”
Ida speared her with a glance. “You think you’ll be ready to turn your patients over to someone else in another twenty-five years?”
“Okay, maybe not.” Harper didn’t think of medicine as a job, but as a responsibility, one she’d wanted since the first time she’d rode beside her father in the front seat of a Ford pickup with his big battered black bag between them, making house calls. She loved being greeted at the door by a friend or neighbor who opened their home to her and put their life in her hands because they trusted her. What she did mattered, and in her heart of hearts, she didn’t think anyone else could do it as well. Except her father. “Maybe I can get him to cross-cover with me now and then. At least he’ll get a few nights off that way.”
“You suggest it, and I’ll work on him.” Ida wiped down the counter with a damp dish towel and asked casually, “How are things at the hospital?”
Harper went on alert. Her mother didn’t do casual. She wasn’t a big talker, unlike her father, who could carry on a conversation with anyone, including strangers in the market, about any topic for seemingly endless lengths of time. Her mother was direct, perceptive, and the power to be reckoned with at home.
“Fine, as far as I know,” Harper said. “Is there something I don’t know about that I should?”
Ida turned and rested her slender hips against the counter in front of the five-foot-long cast-iron country sink. She and Harper were built the same, tall and lanky, slender in the hips and long in the leg. Even their hair color was the same, a brown so dark it looked black in low light. Harper’s hands were like hers too, long slim strong fingers. Right now Harper’s fingers were clenched around the steaming white porcelain mug. Her mother’s blue eyes, almost indigo like Harper’s, shimmered with…worry?
Harper’s shoulders tightened. Her mother was never wrong about something being wrong. Her mother had known when Harper’s sister Kate had been ill, even when no one, including Harper’s father and all his colleagues, could pin down why she suddenly wasn’t eating and was losing weight. And when the leukemia had finally surfaced, there’d been no way to stop it. Harper shook off the memory of saying good-bye to Kate in the bedroom next to hers. “What?”
“Your father.”
Stomach in free fall, Harper pushed the chair back and sat up straight. “What, is he sick? He hasn’t said anything to me.”
Ida waved a hand. “He’s healthy as a horse. But something’s worrying at him. He’s been pacing at night, doesn’t sleep even when he has the chance, and he’s had a couple phone calls that have clearly upset him, but he isn’t talking about it.”
“Is it money?”
“Not unless he’s suddenly taken up gambling.”
Harper snorted. Her father had two interests in life—medicine and his family. He didn’t have time for anything else and had never shown any inclination to change that. She admired him for his dedication to both and hoped that one day she would do as well, heading both the hospital, after her father retired as chief of staff, and a family, when she met the right woman to settle down with.
“Things are busy,” Harper said. “ER traffic has picked up now that the weather has broken, and we’re getting more tourists coming into the area. Other than that, I don’t know of anything at the hospital that might be bothering him.”
“Well then,” her mother said as tires crunched on the gravel outside, “whatever it is, I suspect we’ll know soon enough.”
Harper listened to the familiar sound of her father’s footsteps returning home, uneasiness settling in her middle. Her mother was never wrong about something being wrong.
*
Presley grabbed her roller bag off the carousel and pushed her way through the sparse pack of fellow travelers toward the airport exit. Three men in off-the-rack suits, white shirts, and dark ties held cardboard placards in front of them. One, a sandy-haired, florid-faced man in his early forties, held one with her name scrawled in black marker across it. She walked to him and he greeted her with a broad smile.
“Ms. Worth?”
“Yes.” She barely managed not to snarl. There’d been no first-class cabin, and the plane had been small and cramped and the service nonexistent. She’d managed a cup of coffee that tasted like lukewarm instant and a bag of nuts for breakfast. “How far is it?”
“About forty-five minutes.” He took the handle of her bag and headed for the exit. “Not much traffic out that way, so we’ll make good time.”
“Fine.” She followed along beside him into a sunlit morning. The air was crisp and a good twenty degrees cooler than she was used to at this hour of the morning. That was a bonus, of sorts, and about the only positive thing she’d noticed thus far. The airport was ridiculously small, which explained why she’d had to take two flights to get here. Really. Could she get any farther from civilization?
He led her to a black town car. While he took care of her bag, she climbed into the back and immediately checked her phone. Hopefully he wouldn’t want to chat once he saw she was busy. She scrolled through her several business email addresses and then her personal, sending instructions to her admin on several matters that had come up since the last time she’d checked. Thank God Carrie would be arriving the next day. Between the two of them, they ought to be able to wrap this up quickly.
The sooner they set the groundwork for a transition team to take over, the faster she could do what needed to be done and get out of here. The familiar anger at her brother and his maneuvering surged through her, and she tamped it down. Some battles were not worth fighting, and since he had the support of the board behind him, she’d had no ammunition with which to fight back. So here she was, pushed out of sight for the time being. The sooner she finished off the takeover, the better. Preston was mistaken, though, if he expected her to let him campaign for the CEO position while she was exiled in the ass-end of nowhere.
She glanced out the window at the city, or what there was of one, and discovered it had disappeared. Rolling hills and broad fields bordered the two-lane road. Farmhouses, white or yellow seemed to be the common color, sat along the road or back a distance on narrow dirt drives, the houses generally dwarfed by larger blood-red barns, silos, and a jumble of other buildings. No one had close neighbors. The landscape couldn’t be more different than Phoenix, where the starkly beautiful desert stretched for miles to the foot of the craggy mountain faces. Here, color exploded everywhere: greens in every shade and hue, deep yellows and rich earthy browns, purple-and-white flowers—lilacs, at leas
t she thought they were lilacs—and other plants and flowers she could not name. The dizzying riot of bold colors was annoyingly distracting, and she turned back to her iPhone.
She opened a news app and after a second realized she had no signal. She stared at her phone. Was it possible? Really? No cell service? Where in God’s name was she?
Clutching her phone as if it were a lifeline to civilization, she leaned back and closed her eyes. The transition was projected to take six months. She’d give it three. Any longer than that and she was likely to lose her mind. Damn Preston and his maneuvering.
The vehicle slowed, and Presley sat up. A dented red mailbox with peeling reflective numbers perched atop a gray wooden post at the mouth of a dirt driveway. The car turned in and passed between fields of what Presley presumed was grass stretching as far as she could see on either side. Surely this was a mistake. “Are you certain this is the right address?”
“Says 246 on the mailbox, ma’am. And this is County Road 64.”
“Yes, but there’s nothing out here.”
“Well, there’s a house right up ahead past those trees. Isn’t that what you were expecting?”
“I was told a house had been rented for me, but I didn’t expect it to be—” She gritted her teeth. “Let’s just see what we see, shall we?”
The car bumped along a lane as long as two city blocks and barely as wide as an alley. The house was a neat wood-sided square structure—yellow, of course—with a broad porch running the full length of the front, the requisite red barn—not as big as some she had seen—fifty yards away, and a clothesline strung from the rear corner of the house to a big oak tree loaded down with sheets flapping in the breeze.
“Obviously, we have the wrong place. Someone lives here,” Presley said. Someone else, thank God.
The front door opened and a middle-aged woman in pale blue pants, a blue-and-white checkered shirt, and a flowered apron around her waist came down the porch and approached the car. Her graying blond hair was pulled back in a loose twist. Her smile was wide and welcoming.
Presley rolled down the window. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, I think we are in the wrong—”
“Would you be Ms. Worth?”
For a moment, Presley was almost too surprised to answer. “Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m Lila Phelps. The housekeeper.”
“The housekeeper.” Presley heard her voice rise at that. “I didn’t know the house came with a keeper.”
Lila laughed. “Well, I don’t live here, but the rental agency said you’d be needing a housekeeper, and I’m right up the road. My cousin Sue works for the agent and she called me, and I can use the extra with my youngest about to go off to community college in the fall. The house needed airing out and I just finished washing all the linens. Of course, if you don’t need me—”
“Do you cook by any chance?”
The woman beamed. “Does it rain in April?”
“Not where I come from,” Presley muttered. She pushed open the door and stepped out. “Breakfast at six a.m., dinner at seven thirty.”
“I can leave you something warming in the oven for your supper, but I’ll be needing to be home come four or so to see to the family’s meal.”
“Fine. Just leave instructions with it.”
“I can manage that. And do the wash and keep the place tidy and do the grocery shopping.”
“Excellent. I’ll give you a list of my preferences. I work in the morning over breakfast, so no radio.”
“Don’t like the noise myself.”
Presley nodded briskly. “We’ll get along fine, then.”
“I expect we will.”
Presley paid the driver, and he carried her suitcase up to the front porch. With her hands on her hips, she turned and surveyed her new home. All she could see were hills and fields and cows. There were a great many cows right up the road, and if she hadn’t been able to see or hear them, she could definitely smell them. She was going to make her brother pay for this.
Chapter Two
Harper’s mother turned with a cup of coffee in her outstretched hand just as Edward Rivers came through the kitchen door, greeting him as she had thousands of times before upon his return from a late-night call. He smiled, kissed her cheek, and took the coffee.
“Morning, Dad,” Harper said.
Edward sipped the coffee. “Mary and the baby doing all right?”
“Both fine.” Harper didn’t bother to ask how her father knew of Mary Campbell’s nightlong labor and early morning delivery. Somehow, he always seemed to know what was happening with everyone in the community, and certainly the condition of every patient in the hospital everyone still called the Rivers Hospital, as it had been named when her great-great-great-grandfather and several local mill owners had built it 150 years before. She hadn’t yet mastered his access to the local grapevine, but she was getting better every year. She’d only three years of medical practice to his thirty, so she didn’t feel too bad. “I’ll be heading back to check on her in an hour or so. Is there anyone you need me to see?”
He set down his cup, took off his suit coat—he always wore a suit and tie when seeing patients, in high summer or the dead of winter—and hung it on a peg inside the kitchen door. He rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and took his usual seat at the head of the table.
“Nothing urgent. I’ll be making rounds myself midmorning.”
Tires crunched on the drive. Flannery’s Jeep, the top already off in homage to the long-awaited warm weather, appeared outside the window above the sink and disappeared again as Flann pulled under the porte cochere. Harper glanced at her mother. “Family meeting?”
“Edward?” Ida asked.
Harper’s father nodded slowly.
Ida said, “I’d better put on more coffee.”
Edward rubbed his face, and for the first time Harper realized he looked far more tired than a night up seeing patients should account for. Maybe her mother was wrong. Maybe he was ill. A spear of panic, completely unlike her usual steady, calm approach to a crisis, shot through her. Her father had been her hero, the primary presence in her life, for as far back as she could remember. She was the oldest child, the first he took on rounds with him, before Flannery and then Carson, and now Margie. Kate had not lived long enough to join him. Harper couldn’t imagine the family without either of her parents—her father’s quiet anchor or her mother’s unbending strength—or her life without them. The day would one day come. Just not now.
“Dad?”
His dark brown eyes met hers and he smiled briefly. “Wait till you hear the facts, Harper. Listen to your instincts, but never disregard the facts.”
“Yes, sir,” Harper said, remembering one of the first lessons she’d learned at his side.
The back door swung open and Flannery blew in, energy pouring off her as it always seemed to do. The second oldest, she’d been in motion from the time she could walk, and she’d walked earlier than them all, their mother said—always the first to climb the tallest tree, the one to ride her bike the fastest, the rebellious teen pushing every boundary she could find. Harper’s father said he’d always known she’d be the surgeon, and he’d been right. Whereas Harper favored her mother in appearance, Flannery had the golden-brown hair and chocolate eyes of her father’s side of the family, and the temperament of a thoroughbred born to race. She looked like the soccer player she’d been in high school, with a little less height than Harper and more breadth in the shoulders. She kissed her mother, squeezed her father’s shoulder, and pulled out a chair next to Harper at the table.
“I’ve got an eight o’clock,” she announced to the room in general.
“You’ll make it,” Edward said. “Routine hernia, isn’t it?”
“That and an appendectomy to follow that Harper picked up in the ER last night.” She nodded to Harper. “Good call, by the way. Thanks for letting me sleep.”
“I was there with a delivery. No reason for both of us to be
awake.” Harper had called Flannery at five a.m. after seeing Bryce Daniels at three when the ER nurses had stopped her for a curbside consult. The sixteen-year-old had the classic signs of appendicitis, and she’d gotten his workup started before waking her sister.
The swinging door from the dining room pushed open and Margie, wearing a loose T-shirt and soccer shorts, came in rubbing sleep from her eyes. At fifteen she was rangy and still a little coltish, but destined to be the prettiest of them all with shoulder-length curly blond hair and vivid blue eyes. She shuffled toward the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of milk. “How come everybody’s here?”
“Your father has news,” Ida said.
Margie sat on the far side of Harper as the last vehicle, Carson’s Volvo, pulled in outside. Her nephew Davey’s laughter carried through the open window, and a second later, Carson ambled in with the ten-month-old perched on her hip. She leaned down and kissed her father, then her mother, and took the coffee her mother held out to her before settling into her usual place on the opposite side of the table from Flannery. Slim-hipped and ivory-skinned, she looked more Margie’s contemporary than ten years her senior. She kept her auburn hair short and feathered at the temples, giving her a touch of innocence that belied her core of steel. A soldier’s wife, she’d been battle tested as the war in the Middle East dragged on.
“Thanks, Mama,” Carson said when Ida handed her a cracker for Davey.
The room was silent save for the baby’s chortling while Ida laid strips of bacon in a cast-iron pan on the stove. She turned the heat down low, poured her own coffee, and took her seat at the opposite end of the table from her husband, the four sisters ranged between them. “Well then. Edward?”
As if he’d been waiting for his wife to give him permission, he cleared his throat and looked at each of his children in turn.
“The board of trustees has sold the hospital.”
For a second, Harper couldn’t think above the exclamations and one pointed curse word from Flann.
