A Woman Worth Waiting For

by Meredith Webber

  ‘Not truckloads,’ she said, the aforementioned smile hovering uncertainly around her lovely lips.

  Ginny looked at him, wondering what on earth she could say next.

  Go home—that would be a good idea, but she didn’t want him to leave.

  Her heart favoured Kiss me again, but she’d had such a hard time not kissing him back just seconds earlier, she knew a repeat would be dangerous. At least until she’d had time to think through the consequences of kissing him back.

  ‘Would talking about it help?’ he asked, as if sensing her quandary.

  ‘Ever the psychologist, eh, Max? How could talking about it help? Especially when I’m not sure kissing you is a good idea, previous experience of rejection being foremost in my mind.’

  His lips moved into a smile shape, but there was so much sadness in it she couldn’t label it as such.

  ‘I deserved that,’ he said. ‘I’d like to promise you I’d rip my heart out rather than hurt you again, but who can make such promises? Who knows what will hurt another person?’

  He shrugged, his tall frame moving as if uncomfortable in its skin.

  Ginny slipped away from him, heading for the kitchen, where she busied herself at the sink.

  ‘We can’t just start again, as if six years had never been. Not that we ever had a real relationship to begin with.’

  She addressed the words to the mugs she was washing, but Max knew what she meant.

  ‘A friendship and a few electric kisses,’ he said, repeating the summing-up he’d used to himself to try to minimise his own pain as he’d penned the fateful letter.

  ‘A friendship and a few electric kisses?’ Ginny repeated. ‘Was that all it was to you?’

  Two strides took Max across the kitchen where he whisked the dish-mop from her hand, then again turned her to face him.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said bluntly, his gaze holding hers so she could read his sincerity in his eyes. ‘To me it was like the incarnation of an impossible dream, a joining of souls, a finding of a mate who was part of me, yet separate, my other half perhaps, the yin to my yang, or whatever corny or existentialist metaphor you want to use.’

  Ginny’s eyes widened and her voice quivered as she whispered, ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘You were just twenty,’ he said bluntly—perhaps cruelly. ‘Fine lover I’d have been, dumping those expectations—that kind of intensity—on you.’

  ‘But I felt the same way,’ she protested, anger colouring her cheeks. ‘Oh, I might not have been able to put it into such fancy words, but that’s how I felt. And when I tried to tell you, you analysed and dissected it, and acted as if it were a sociological experiment, right up until the end. Then you said goodbye and walked away without a second thought.’

  He heard the pain of her memories, and though he longed to touch her he knew it would be wrong.

  ‘I had second, third and fourth thoughts, Ginny. Even hundredth thoughts. Then, when I had to go—’

  ‘I would have waited, I told you that.’

  ‘For the month I thought it would be—yes. But when things changed, there was no way I could keep you dangling with some inflated image of me hovering over you like a guardian angel. Don’t think I didn’t consider it, but the more I thought about it the more I knew it was wrong. Even at a distance I’d have had an imprisoning effect, casting a shadow over your development—over those exciting early adult years—as you found your way to maturity.’

  He tried a smile, but it wasn’t good enough to win a response. Maybe he’d never see Ginny smile—really smile—at him again. Tiredness began to weigh down on him, like a woollen blanket wet with rain.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Let you get some sleep.’

  Ginny watched him walk away. So much was unresolved, but she, too, was tired, and how did you resolve an old hurt anyway? Did talking about it help? Apportioning blame?

  Probably not.

  And was the past really the issue? Wasn’t the present a more pressing consideration? Shouldn’t the ‘kissing him back’ scenario take precedence over other thoughts?

  She shivered as images of the consequences scooted through her mind.

  He reached the door and turned towards her, lifting his hand in a funny kind of salute before opening it.

  ‘Not going to see me to my flat?’ he asked, putting so much pathos into the words she had to smile.

  ‘I think you’ll manage on your own,’ she told him.

  He responded to her smile, flicking a mischievous one her way, then he sobered and added, ‘Make sure both your doors are locked.’

  It was a reminder of why he was really here.

  And that his presence was temporary!

  If she kissed him back, and then he left again, would the heartache be easier the second time around?

  ‘They lock automatically,’ she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SARAH woke to the shrill demands of the telephone. She glanced at the little clock propped by her bed then grimaced as she realised she must have slept through the alarm.

  Though it wasn’t late enough for the hospital to be phoning, wanting to know why she wasn’t at work.

  ‘Sarah Kemp speaking.’

  ‘I’m glad, even when you’re half-asleep, you still remember you’re a Kemp.’

  Tony’s deep voice, as clear as if he were talking from the next suburb, swamped her with a rush of love and longing.

  ‘We’ve got to stop being apart like this!’ she told him. ‘Each time it happens I forget how much I miss you until you’re actually gone.’

  ‘But think of the reunions we can have,’ he teased, and she felt her skin warm with memories.

  ‘Do you remember a Max McMurray?’ she asked when the silly nothings of lovers had been exchanged.

  ‘Psychologist chap? American who grew up in Australia. I met him when I was in the States and we clicked. He was going through a rough patch and we had a few drinks together. He talked about things he’d probably only have mentioned to a stranger. His mother was dying of cancer. He was an only child and, with his father dead, he was her sole emotional support. He’s a good man at his job, from all I hear. Why? Is he at the hospital?’

  ‘Yes. Flatting next door and in love with my colleague, I’d say.’

  She heard Tony sigh.

  ‘You’re about to marry off another poor unsuspecting 57 couple. It will get that bachelors will fear your arrival in their town.’

  Sarah chuckled and asked about his course, passed on James’s latest doings and gave him a rough idea of her roster.

  ‘Is Max there because of the killings?’ Tony asked.

  She explained Max’s situation and could almost feel Tony’s worry coming in waves across the phone, but he wouldn’t ask her not to take a job he might not fancy her doing.

  ‘Stay alert,’ he did warn, and she accepted it in the spirit of total love in which he offered it.

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  They talked of personal things again, so she was smiling when she hung up.

  The department was caught in its early morning vacuum, the lack of patients making the place seem eerily empty. Brad and his team were signing off. He told her about the fourth victim coming in, adding in a tired, defeated voice, ‘The rest of the night was quiet. Maybe having a doctor murdered puts people off. They’re all going to their private doctors, or paying for the on-call twenty-four-hour service.’

  ‘Well, at least I can tell Max we’ve discovered one way to cut down on stress in A and E,’ Sarah said, then found she had to explain who Max was and why he’d accompanied Ginny the previous evening.

  ‘Terrible, losing that girl,’ Brad muttered, though Sarah had only mentioned the stress study, not Max’s connection to serial killers. ‘She looked so darned like Isobel—that made it worse.’

  ‘Did you know Isobel well?’

  Sarah asked the question automatically, and was surprised when Brad frowned.

  ‘I
don’t think anyone knew her all that well. Of course, her husband must have, but though we worked together, she was on my team when she first arrived, we weren’t ever likely to become friends.’

  ‘Ginny said she had money. Did it make her stand-offish? Was that why?’

  Brad shook his head.

  ‘No. She was as natural and friendly as anyone, just kind of self-contained.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’m getting out of here before the spell breaks. That was something about Isobel. She worked darned hard while she was here—never skived off or failed to pull her weight—but come knock-off time, she was out the door like lightning.’

  Maybe her husband expected her home, Sarah thought, but he was a specialist, and likely to be working ridiculous hours himself. Did she rush home to cook him meals?

  Was Paul Markham a man who considered a woman’s place to be in the kitchen?

  Sarah set the questions aside as the intercom directed her to cubicle one. The day’s work had begun.

  ‘He woke up about an hour ago, said he felt sick, then suddenly he was shivering and throwing up. Just like this.’

  Sarah listened to the woman’s explanation as she examined the little boy, then she excused herself, told the nurse what she’d need when she returned and headed for the desk.

  ‘Is there an anaesthetist available? I want to do an urgent lumbar puncture and some sedation will help in keeping him still after it’s done.’

  While the clerk paged the on-duty anaesthetist, Sarah hesitated, wondering if Ellison’s protocol required a paediatrician to do the procedure. She asked for one anyway. The child would have to be admitted, so the sooner the paediatrician became involved, the better.

  Satisfied she’d covered the bases, she hurried back to the cubicle.

  ‘I’m starting a drip, and as soon as the anaesthetist gets here I want to do a lumbar puncture,’ she explained to the anxious mother. ‘Is he at kindergarten?’

  The woman nodded and while the nurse held and comforted the child, Sarah used a tourniquet to distend the veins on the child’s left hand, found a tiny one and inserted a cannula into it.

  The mother spoke soothingly to the child, but as Sarah finished what she was doing, and turned away to dispose of the needle, the woman followed her and whispered, ‘I saw the spots. It’s that terrible disease, isn’t it? Children die from it.’

  ‘Not children who are treated early,’ Sarah said firmly, returning to her patient and taping the plastic sleeve firmly into place. She spoke reassuringly to the child, explaining what was going on, but the little mite was beyond caring.

  Sarah left the nurse to connect fluid to the cannula and turned to the mother.

  ‘With your permission we’ll take some blood, but we’ll also need a sample of fluid from his spinal canal to test it for meningococcal disease.’

  The mother agreed, anxious to do anything to help her child.

  Sarah was handing two vials of blood to the nurse, and dictating the tests she wanted run, when a white-coated man came in.

  ‘Tell them it’s urgent,’ she told the departing nurse, then she introduced herself, explained her concerns and was relieved when he offered to do the lumbar puncture.

  ‘I know the drill, but it’s so long since I’ve done one,’ Sarah muttered to him. He added a mild sedative to the drip to calm the child while the long needle and stylet were inserted into the space between his third and fourth lumbar vertebrae.

  Within minutes the small patient had drifted off to sleep, and the anaesthetist’s skill made short work of the delicate operation.

  The paediatrician, defying Sarah’s assumption that he wouldn’t be on duty so early, arrived as the sample was also sent to the lab. He took note of what Sarah had already done, then used a calculator to work out the antibiotic dosage based on the child’s weight.

  ‘We’ll have to keep him in,’ he said to the anxious mother, ‘and as we want to keep him still for the next six hours—it’s a precautionary measure after a lumbar puncture—I’ll give him another sedative shortly. He’ll probably sleep right through the morning. Do you want to go home and organise things there?’

  The woman looked doubtful, turning to Sarah for reassurance.

  ‘They’ll take good care of him?’

  ‘The best,’ Sarah promised her. ‘And you can come back as soon as you like, and stay as long as you like.’

  ‘Well, the older kids could do with some organising, and my husband’s due at work about now.’

  She reached out and laid her fingers on her sleeping son’s cheek.

  ‘I’ll be back very soon,’ she whispered to the little boy. Sarah accompanied her out of the cubicle. Now the paediatrician was here, he would arrange the transfer to the ward. She, in the meantime, had more patients to see. The morning line-up had begun.

  ‘Going my way?’

  Max met Ginny as she came out the door of her flat. He congratulated himself on injecting just the right amount of casualness into his voice, despite the erratic behaviour of the inner man.

  ‘I guess so,’ Ginny responded quietly to his offer of company.

  ‘Well, don’t sound so darned excited by the prospect!’ he growled, exaggerating his pique to cover what he really felt.

  He took her elbow as they walked down the steps, then decided that wasn’t a good idea as the closeness caused chaos in various uncontrollable places in his body.

  But he could hardly drop it, could he?

  Ginny solved the problem by stepping away, leaving him with a hard-to-explain sense of loss instead of relief.

  ‘I don’t see how sitting around in Ellison A and E is going to stop someone else being murdered.’ She muttered the words so crossly he felt obliged to defend his position.

  ‘I won’t cause any problems. Just sit there. Remember, the stress study is my primary reason for being here, the other is simply an added interest.’

  ‘Not very interesting for the girl who died last night,’ Ginny snapped. ‘It’s not a game, not an intellectual exercise. It’s real, Max.’

  She sounded so distraught that he took her elbow once again, stopping her headlong rush towards the road.

  ‘I’m very aware of how real it is, Ginny. And it’s certainly more than an intellectual exercise for me.’

  He looked into her eyes and read her uncertainty. It made him ache to hold her, and promise protection from all life’s mysteries and pain. But he’d forfeited the chance to make her his—and no one could fulfil such a promise anyway.

  Though the attraction between them appeared to be as strong as ever—well, it was on his side—he knew a stable relationship needed more than attraction to make it work. Ginny was old enough now for them, if they both wished, to explore whatever was there a little further. Perhaps a long way further. But what if that’s all it turned out to be? A fleeting physical thing?

  What if it fizzled out and she was hurt again?

  Or if she wasn’t, but he had to go through all the agonies of parting?

  Uncertainty made him keep a firm grip on her arm and, when a break appeared in the traffic, he guided her across the street.

  ‘Then if it’s more than an intellectual exercise, what are you doing? How are you thinking?’

  He could hardly answer the last question truthfully. His most recent thoughts weren’t going to prevent further attacks on innocent young women. He set attraction aside and let his mind zigzag through the information in his head, picking out what could be shared.

  ‘Although the hairdresser was slightly different in that people don’t just walk into the salon and look around, the place where she worked had big windows where passers-by can look in. With both Yvette, the second victim, the girl from the cosmetics counter at the department store, and Isobel, anyone could have hung around for quite some time, observing without being obvious in the observation.’

  ‘So you’re saying the young woman who came in last night probably worked in a public place. Or a
place where public are expected to be, so someone hanging around didn’t raise any alarms.’

  Max shrugged. Nothing was ever so cut and dried.

  ‘If it’s found she did work with the public, then it’s one more thing police can add to their warnings, isn’t it? Beyond the slim build and long dark hair. It takes a lot of little things, but gradually you can build up a picture.’

  ‘A picture! Security cameras!’ Ginny stopped so suddenly Max was glad they were off the road. ‘I know the hairdressing salon wouldn’t have had a security camera but a department store would, particularly around cosmetic counters where small, easily snaffled objects are displayed.’

  ‘So you’re hot on the trail now!’ Max teased. ‘I guess the police have already thought of that.’

  In fact, he knew they had the relevant tapes, and tapes from the A and E waiting room at the hospital. And though the hairdressing salon didn’t have a security camera, there was one sited in the mall outside and the police had video specialists scanning the video tapes for any person who appeared on more than one.

  What he didn’t know was how much of the investigation he was at liberty to reveal. He’d have to ask Brent.

  ‘We have security cameras in the waiting room.’ Ginny’s mind was obviously following the same mental track. ‘I suppose the police have already taken the tapes. If they haven’t, they’d better get cracking because the tapes are reused every month.’

  They’d reached the emergency entrance and paused, Max intending to go around to the public door.

  ‘Now, why would you know a bit of technical knowledge like that?’ he asked.

  He won a smile—the real thing—flashing wide across her face and shining in her eyes.

  ‘We had a kerfuffle in the waiting room a few months back, when we had to subdue a fellow who’d taken some dodgy ecstasy. We fixed him up, admitted him, then what did he do when we discharged him a few days later but go straight to a solicitor? Next thing, well, it was a couple of weeks later, we’re slapped with a writ for grievous bodily harm—something about using unnecessary force in controlling him.’