What a joke. So absurdly funny it was almost hysterical, Rebecca assured herself just before she burst into tears.
Rebecca found a new message waiting on her machine at home.
“Hi, Becky, this is Bonnie Lofton at the Mystery Gazette. Congratulations on your fine work at the accident scene. We think it’s a great story, and we’re just dying to get a front-page photo of you and Dr. Saville together at his clinic. We really need to get it today so it’ll come out tomorrow while it’s still timely news. Could you please call our office as soon as possible? The number is 555-8347.”
Rebecca liked Bonnie, who was married to Roy Lofton, Mystery’s only constable. With Bonnie as editor-in-chief, the Gazette had won several prestigious awards in journalism and was widely read throughout Mystery Valley and even much of the state.
But no way, she assured herself, was she posing with John Saville for a photo. At least for right now she’d rather have all her molars yanked out with a pair of pliers than have to face him.
However, even as she stewed, the phone rang.
She let the machine pick it up.
“Hi, again, it’s Bonnie calling back to tell you I’ve reached Dr. Saville, and he’s agreed to a photo shoot sometime early this evening at the medical office. I can’t say he was eager, but I badgered until he caved in. I hate to ask you on such short notice, but we really need that photo soon in order to make tomorrow’s paper. This is an important human interest story, and it would be a shame if the state TV networks cover it and we don’t. So please give me a call back as soon as you get this. I appreciate it.”
Oh, cripes, Rebecca thought as she rewound the message tape. Much as I hate to do this, I can’t stiff Bonnie. So Dr. Saville wasn’t too keen on the idea, either. Why should he be—he got what he wanted. Easy sex with no obligations…slam, bam, see ya, ma’am. He probably only agreed because he couldn’t resist the publicity for himself.
Reluctantly she called Bonnie at the Gazette and agreed to show up at the medical office at 6:00 p.m. It still hadn’t really sunk in yet how widely the Copper Mountain rescue mission was being reported. But she found out a bit later when she turned on the 5:00 p.m. Action Four news broadcast out of Helena.
By now the story no longer led the news, but it was still prominent. And sure enough, there was the footage of the tired young doctor coming over the berm with his patient— Rebecca and Dan Woodyard right behind him. So even though no reporter had caught them in time, obviously a cameraman did.
But the most riveting part of the broadcast was the brief footage from the intensive care recovery ward at Lutheran Hospital. The woman John had carried up, identified as Carol Brining, a retired schoolteacher from Michigan, was still weak and pale, but managed a plucky, grandmotherly smile from her hospital bed.
“There were heroes on that mountain,” she assured the camera, “and that’s why I’m alive today.”
Rebecca turned the TV set off and started to get ready for the photo shoot. Though the story brought tears to her eyes, it also left her feeling even more insecure. After all, the Admirers of John Saville Society had enough members already. This would only ensure more.
“What Bonnie’s hoping for,” explained O’Neil Bettinger, the Gazette photographer, “is a good representative photo of you two doing something together, doctor and nurse stuff. You know, some task you normally collaborate on, whatever.”
The three of them stood in the empty waiting room, only O’Neil looking relaxed and comfortable. The awkward tension in the faces and manner of the other two, however, had nothing to do with the fact of being photographed.
O’Neil’s innocent words nonetheless made Rebecca flush: You two doing something together.
“Well, we often confer over X-rays,” John suggested after an awkward silence. “Since Becky’s basically supervising postop care after a patient’s surgery, she needs to also understand the preoperative condition. So we get together and discuss it along with lab results and other tests.”
“Sure, sure, that sounds great,” O’Neil approved, already planning out the photo aloud. “We can hang an X-ray up on your light doohickey, then have you two on either side of it, both looking up at it in profile.”
John’s gaze had avoided hers since she’d arrived—or so it seemed to Rebecca. Now, however, she caught him frankly checking her out. She’d dressed in a full skirt with a small waist and a crisp, white short-sleeved blouse. Her long hair was pinned flat on both sides of her head but cascaded down over her shoulder blades in back, unrestrained.
Their eyes met, held, but then he looked quickly away again, his face firming into a frown.
New doubts filled her.
By now they’d all moved back into examination room A, and John switched on the backlit X-ray reading screen.
“Perfect,” enthused O’Neil, a short, balding, slightly hyper man in his middle forties, dressed in a garish plaid sport jacket. “There’s already an X-ray hanging there. That’s a…jaw, isn’t it?”
“Knee,” John corrected him with a straight face.
“Knee. Sure, sure, I didn’t look close,” O’Neil muttered as he opened the top of his twin-lens reflex camera and took a quick light reading. “What’s the deal on this one, Doc? Broken bone?”
“Well, this patient is a teenage athlete who severely extended the left knee and damaged some cartilage and ligaments. He’ll be undergoing surgery with me and an orthopedic team to strengthen the knee without actually replacing the joint. It’s called an interstitial buildup, done mostly in younger patients to restore full use of the joint. It was first developed in sports medicine.”
“Huh, interesting. Okay, Doc, now act just like you would if you and Becky were conferring. By the way, shouldn’t you be wearing a starched lab coat or something?”
“Not here at the office, no. But I wouldn’t be wearing this, either,” John admitted, unbuttoning his dark-blue suit jacket and laying it aside.
“Good, good,” O’Neil encouraged as they pretended to confer. “Just keep that up while I move around the room and take a few different angles. Bonnie likes to have a choice.”
By now Rebecca very much regretted agreeing to this. John was standing so close she could smell his aftershave lotion. Thank heaven she had the excuse of an X-ray to keep from looking at him.
O’Neil had moved farther back, out of hearing range, if they spoke in low tones.
“Guess you didn’t plan on seeing me like this, huh?” John muttered in her ear.
“Nor you me,” she replied with forced lightness. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t want to be here, either.”
So I was dead right earlier today, John thought. She did hustle me out of her place. And now she’s making sure I get the message that she’s not interested in a repeat performance.
“Be brave,” he muttered with sarcasm. “The ordeal will soon be over.”
Her gaze cut momentarily to his face. She read contempt in his eyes. It stabbed her insides.
“Perfect,” O’Neil pronounced again. “I shot half a roll of film. Bonnie should get a nice piece together with it.”
Rebecca hardly even heard him, her pulse was so loud in her ears, surging like angry surf. After the shoot all she wanted to do was escape to her car before tears overwhelmed her again.
O’Neil made it to his vehicle first. She was about to open her door when John’s voice arrested her.
“Becky!”
She looked back over her shoulder. He had to lock the front doors, so he’d been the last one out of the building. Now he stood in the gathering darkness, an indistinct form watching her.
Her heart cooled and froze into a ball of ice.
She didn’t want another rejection like she’d had with Brian. She couldn’t endure another set of hopes crushed and broken. She’d been foolish to have succumbed to John Saville simply for the fact that the rejection was sure to come. And she should have known it going in.
She was not his equal, not in social status,
nor in education. He was a handsome doctor in the peak of his vigor. It was only natural that he would want to play the field for a few years more. He would need to take his time choosing the wife who would enhance his lifestyle and career. There was no reason to rush into a relationship and saddle himself with a nobody. He would never pick her. It was all so brutally obvious she couldn’t believe how stupid she’d let herself be.
So fool me twice, shame on me, she thought bitterly to herself.
“Yes?” she asked him, her voice cool, pleasant and even.
“This morning—what happened between us, I—that is, we’re only human, you know. These things can get out of hand, I suppose and—”
“Don’t worry about it. I enjoyed it,” she answered, her tone a model of detachment. “Sorry if you were disappointed. I don’t have the experience of some women, you know.”
“Are you kidding? In fact, I…”
But his words fell away. He stood there in silence. Just watching her.
“Good. I’m so happy that you were satisfied,” she answered like a clerk at a counter. Then she got into her car and drove away.
She didn’t once look back. Her heart hammered her ribs. Even now she meant what she’d just told him. It wasn’t their lovemaking she regretted, only its horrid but oh-so-logical aftermath.
However, she suspected she knew what he had started to suggest in the parking lot: couldn’t they perhaps continue a convenient little secret affair? A no-hassles sexual liaison. The good doctor could grab himself a “nooner” now and then, something to tide him over until he selected the proper rich debutante wife. Perhaps his weekend getaways with Louise, or whomever, weren’t quite enough to contain his raging testosterone.
For a few awful moments she recalled the cold, impersonal note that Brian had sent her when he dumped her and left for his new practice outside New York City: “I’m not cut out for this provincial life. You like it here just fine among the cattle and rednecks you grew up with, but I want more out of life than this place can offer.”
And even though John had chosen, for whatever secret reasons of his own, to settle here in Mystery Valley, he was probably the same arrogant, social-climbing creep Brian had proved to be.
“You can go straight to hell, John Saville,” she announced out loud, a brittle smile on her face. But the defiance in her tone was a far cry from the aching despair in her heart.
Ten
“Girls, I just don’t understand it for the life of me,” Lucinda Shoemaker confided to Rebecca and Lois on Wednesday morning. “Several friends have told me, quite rudely, that my makeup is all wrong. And I could feel Dr. Saville staring at my face during our appointment. Should I perhaps try a different shade for the eyeliner?”
Lois had to struggle to keep a straight face, and normally Rebecca would have been cracking up, too. Lucy had a reputation as a harmless eccentric, and her downright ghoulish makeup jobs had been a standing joke around town for years now.
It was a shame, actually, because the fiftyish widow was quite attractive, with regal bone structure in her face. But her hideous war paint only scared away potential beaux.
This morning, however, Rebecca had no heart to join Lois in her mirth. Oddly, seeing the huge, full-color photo of John and her on the front page of this morning’s Mystery Gazette had only deepened her depression and made her regret posing for it. It seemed to mock her true plight by creating the impression they were a “good team.” Which they were, medically speaking—but only medically speaking.
“Perhaps you need a better makeup light,” Lois suggested, her tone tactful.
“Light?” Lucy blinked a few times while she tore a check from her leather wallet and handed it to Lois. “No lights on my vanity table, thank you. These days I apply my makeup by candlelight only, dear. After all, that’s the light we gals need to look best in.”
“By candlelight?” Lois repeated, astonished. Again her amused eyes met Rebecca’s, and the latter had to force a grin.
Any other time, Rebecca would have found this admission absolutely hilarious. Today, however, nothing seemed funny.
“But if you apply it in candlelight,” Lois explained, “it will clash horribly with other lighting. You can’t truly tell how much you’re putting on—especially rouge,” she added in a not-so-subtle hint, for Lucy’s cheeks were practically caked with it.
“Do you think so?” Lucy tried to sound politely interested, but a little sniff gave away her true skepticism. “If so, then it’s up to the rest of the world to burn more candles. At my age others must compromise to keep the illusion of my beauty alive.”
“It’s not an illusion,” Lois assured her. “You have beauty, all right. It’s simply mismanaged.”
After Lucy had left, still unconvinced her system was faulty, Lois turned her amazed face toward Rebecca.
“Do you believe that woman?” she demanded, convulsing in laughter.
“She’s a space cadet, all right,” Rebecca agreed, looking up from a patient file on her computer screen and trying to muster a smile.
Her halfhearted acting, however, did not fool Lois. The latter had noticed all morning how worry molded Rebecca’s face when she thought no one was looking.
“What’s wrong?” Lois demanded with frank concern. “Usually Lucy makes you break up with laughter.”
“I guess I’m still a little off-kilter from the accident Monday night,” she fibbed. “You know, lost sleep and all that.”
Lois was a good friend, not just a fellow employee, and Rebecca had often confided in her when troubles weighed on her mind. But right now she still felt overwhelmed with misery she couldn’t even begin to discuss. She had returned to the office this morning to find the relaxed, affectionate John Saville of yesterday returned to his cold vinyl-boy self. It was weird, like being whisked back in time.
The complete reversion to his former personality made her feel even more uncomfortable with her memory of making love with him. Like a woman riding on a train who dreamed about a woman riding on a train, she felt confused about what was real and what was just imagination.
Only yesterday, yet it already seemed like a distant, blurry memory, not a recent event. At moments she could even believe it had never happened. As if she really had gone home alone and simply dreamed about making love with him.
Lois’s voice jarred her back to the present. “Funny—the good doctor, too, is ‘off-kilter’ this morning.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed,” Rebecca replied lamely.
Lois watched Rebecca from speculative eyes. “He hardly spoke when he came in, and he’s been camped back in his office.”
“Is that right?” Rebecca replied absently, feigning great interest in the patient history on her screen.
When sadness wasn’t making her feel like weeping, anger made her want to march right back to his office and slap his face.
True, she had just recently been initiated into the ranks of those who’d had sex, but now she could see how the experience had temporarily washed away all her common sense. She now knew the most valuable lesson about men: they were wonderfully intense in the throes of lust, but then, their passion spent, they ran like a river when the snow melts.
The phone on Lois’s half-moon desk burred.
“Dr. Saville’s office,” she answered. After listening a moment, she said, “No, this is the office number. Hang on and I’ll transfer you to his private line.”
Lois transferred the call. “‘May I pleeeze speak with Jooohn?’” she repeated, exaggerating her enunciation. “This gal talks like a speech therapist to the nobility.”
Rebecca paid little attention to her friend, busy finding the lab results John Saville had requested on one of his patients. She printed it out and headed back to his office. There was a file folder taped to his door; she was grateful she didn’t have to face him.
She dropped the printout into the file and started to turn away.
Abruptly, however, John’s voice rose a few decibels, as
if in mild irritation.
“Look, sure I can make it this weekend. No problem. But please don’t call me at the office. You’ve got my home number, haven’t you?”
She felt a sharp pang behind her heart. It was the woman Lois had just transferred to his line. Louise Wallant had a precise, somewhat stilted enunciation, indicative of her snobbish, superior personality.
Misery crushed her all over again. The idea that John could make love to her yesterday, seeming to be so passionate, then set up another tryst for this weekend, was as devastating as she feared it would be. Nor could she fail to feel the irony of her present misery. In the beginning, his “secret weekends” had enhanced the mystique, the enigma this man seemed to be, as did his reluctance to talk about his past or what he was up to. In fact, it had been her curiosity about who the real Dr. John Saville was that first put her on the path to falling in love with him.
Now, however, she had the sinking conviction that the “mystery man” was simply slinking off to a clichéd sordid sexual liaison. Barbara Wallant’s comment about the “celebration” for Louise’s new bed and breakfast opening up only strengthened Rebecca’s conviction.
Even in the depths of her despair, however, she cautioned herself against putting the noose before the gavel, as Hazel called it. She already knew John was spending weekends with Louise, for example. How could she blame him now for something that was going on before she had even met him?
She returned to the front office, still lost in the moil of troubled, conflicting thoughts.
“I wonder,” Lois speculated, “who that is on the phone? She wasn’t trying to make an appointment.”
“Who cares who she is?” Rebecca snapped, clearing her computer screen.
Astonished, Lois stared at her for a long moment, her eyes narrowing at her friend’s tight-lipped frown.
“Evidently,” she replied in a mild tone, “one of us cares very much.”
Toward the end of Wednesday afternoon, Hazel went out back to the main barn to check on Pavlov’s cows as she called the Lazy M’s experimental breeds.
The M.D. Courts His Nurse Page 10
