Chapter Three
On Friday, Nora hired a receptionist named Wynd. “Wynd with a y,” the woman had said, coming in carrying the Moonflower Bay Monitor, in which Nora had run classified ads all week. She hadn’t been sure that anyone actually read the classifieds anymore, but she’d figured it couldn’t hurt.
Wynd with a y looked exactly like Nora would have expected someone named Wynd with a y to look. She was wearing a floral romper thing, and her blond hair was twirled into two messy buns on the sides of her head. She looked like a young Gwyneth Paltrow going for a Princess Leia–at-Coachella look.
But she was also an experienced administrator, having been the manager of a small law firm in Grand View, the next town down the lake. She was at the end of maternity leave for her second daughter, who was almost one, and her older child was starting kindergarten in the fall. “I liked the law firm, but I think a job right in town is going to be a better fit at this phase of life.”
Wynd was also a certified yoga teacher and “energy worker,” whatever that was. But she seemed genuinely interested in health and wellness.
In other words, Wynd was dippy but qualified. Though that wasn’t really fair. Dippy was in the eye of the beholder. It wasn’t like they had to be friends. Nora stuck out her hand. “You’re hired, but there’s a catch. I’m only planning to be here for two years. My hope would be to find someone to buy the clinic from Dr. Baker, which might mean you could stay. But I can’t promise that this will be a permanent job. If you accept, we’ll be signing a two-year contract.”
“That actually suits me. My husband and I are hoping to move to the countryside sometime in the next few years to start farming. We have some land already, and we’re trying to save enough to build a house there and get things going.”
“Well, great. That sounds like an adventure. What will you farm?”
“Alpacas.”
“Wow.” She’d been expecting something more along the lines of sunflowers or organic heirloom tomatoes. “I didn’t know there was demand for alpaca meat.” She didn’t even know what alpacas were, actually. Maybe they were tasty?
“You don’t eat them.” Wynd looked horrified. “You raise them for their wool. But we’re also going to have retreats where people can come and commune with them.”
“Ah. Of course.” Well, she’d stepped in it there. Moving on. “When can you start? I’ve hired a nurse. Amber Grant—maybe you know her?” Nora couldn’t quite believe her luck. Amber the nurse had been okay with the two-year clause as well. She was interested in surgical nursing, but she needed additional training for that, so she was happy to gain some general experience at the clinic while she went to night school.
“I know of her,” Wynd said. “She used to work at Lawson’s Lager House, I think?”
“Right. Part-time while she was in nursing school. She graduated this past spring.” Amber had driven to Toronto for an in-person meeting with Nora after they’d had a great phone interview, and they’d clicked immediately. While on paper Nora might have preferred someone with a little more experience, it had been immediately clear that Amber was going to make a great nurse, and that she would be a useful link to the local community.
“I only drink biodynamic wine,” Wynd said, “so I don’t go to Lawson’s. So I don’t know her–know her.”
“Well, you’ll meet her soon enough. I’m aiming to open two weeks from Monday, but she’s going to start next week, helping me get things ready. Maybe you could join us. We can learn the ropes together, basically. We also need to send letters to all of Dr. Baker’s old patients notifying them that the clinic is reopening.”
“That sounds great—in theory. I just have to get some care lined up for Parsnip.”
“You’d be welcome to bring Parsnip in. Not once we’re open, of course, but that would be fine in the run-up to opening. I love dogs.” The thought of dogs made her heart pinch, actually.
“Parsnip is my younger daughter.”
Oh. Nora coughed to cover a laugh. Wynd had talked about having day care already set up for her little one, so she’d assumed Parsnip was a nonhuman creature. “Right.” She needed to stop putting her foot in her mouth here. “Okay. Well, same logic applies. I love kids, too.”
“I have her enrolled at a day care center,” Wynd explained, “but her spot doesn’t open until after Labor Day. I wasn’t expecting to get a job offer this quickly.” She scrunched her forehead like she was thinking. “My mother is going to take Cicada in the afternoons after school in the fall, and I’m sure she could take her for this last stretch of the summer, too, but I think giving her the baby as well will be too much.”
“Cicada is your older daughter?”
“Yes.”
Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.
The door opened and Nora turned, grateful for the distraction. It was the police chief. She’d met him after the birth yesterday. He wasn’t wearing a uniform today, though, so he must be off duty.
“Dr. Walsh. I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing. But I can see you’re busy. I’ll come back later.”
“No, no! We’re nearly done here.” She turned to Wynd. “Let’s say two weeks from today will be your official start, if that works for you. That will get you in here a bit before we open the day after Labor Day. No pressure, but if you’re able to put in some hours before that, that would be great. Feel free to bring…” She couldn’t say it. “Feel free to bring your daughter. I’ll appreciate any help you can offer, and you and Amber and I can get to know each other. I have your contact info, and I’ll text you mine. If you can bring in a social insurance card, we’ll do the tax forms. Sound good?”
Wynd smiled widely, and Nora felt herself returning it. She waved goodbye to her receptionist—yay! She had a receptionist!—and turned back to the chief.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Collins.” Was that right? She wasn’t sure what to call him. “Chief Collins?”
“Call me Sawyer. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
“Sawyer, then.” She hesitated. She wasn’t in the habit of telling people to use her first name. She was young and short and female, all traits she had learned contributed to people sometimes not taking her seriously as a physician. At the hospital, she had learned from senior women colleagues to announce herself as “Dr. Walsh” and not even let her first name be known.
But what were total life resets for if not to shake things up?
“Sawyer,” she said again, “call me Nora. What can I do for you?”
“Well, mainly I’m here to invite you for drinks. I meet a couple buddies on Friday nights at Lawson’s Lager House, just across the street. My girlfriend and a friend of hers will be there tonight, too. You want to join us?”
“I’d love that, thanks. Now?”
“The others come around five, but why don’t we head over now if you’re ready? I have a few professional things I want to talk to you about.”
A few minutes later they were settling in at one end of a large, gleaming wooden bar, and Nora was shaking hands with Benjamin Lawson, the proprietor, who seemed to be quite friendly with Sawyer. “Nice to meet you, Benjamin.”
“We’re glad you’re here, Dr. Walsh. Call me Law. Nobody calls me Benjamin.”
Should she tell him to call her Nora, too? It was an odd thing, living and working in a small community. She didn’t know yet who she was going to be friends with. In the city, if she was friends with someone, she would never treat them. But as the only doctor in town, she supposed she didn’t have that luxury.
“Glad you’re here, but I am annoyed you stole Amber from me.” His twinkling eyes telegraphed that he was kidding.
“She seems like she’s bound for great things. I’ll be lucky if I can hold on to her for the two years I plan to be here. So technically, I think life stole Amber from you.” Nora smiled to show she was teasing, too.
Screw it. She was just going to go with her gut here. So what if she had to perform a
testicular cancer screening on this guy at some point? She would worry about that later. “And you call me Nora.”
“Well, kidding aside, we are truly glad you’re here, Nora.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. You all must really miss Dr. Baker.” The clinic had been closed for almost a year, but it seemed that its former owner loomed large in town.
Sawyer answered as Law was hailed by another customer. “We miss having a doctor, anyway.”
“But not him specifically? Hmm. The plot thickens.”
“Dr. Baker was fine, but from the town cop to the town doctor, he was a bit old-school.”
“What does that mean?”
“He refused to face the fact that we have a fentanyl problem, for one.”
“Ah. You’re not alone there, unfortunately.” The emergency room back in Toronto had been well acquainted with that problem.
“Right. And I get that it’s a wider public health problem. It’s not like I expected Doc Baker to single-handedly solve it, but just last week we had a kid OD on some kind of street cocktail. Thankfully, the paramedics arrived in time to save him, but honestly, it didn’t look good there for a while, and I could use some advice on naloxone. Should my officers and I be carrying it, do you think? Dr. Baker told me not to open the force to potential legal liability, but I’m not sure that’s right. I can’t keep just standing there doing nothing.” His voice had risen, and he rolled his eyes. “Sorry. I’m getting intense.”
“No, it’s worth getting intense over. My first reaction is yes you should be carrying it, but let me look into it some more and get back to you.” She’d read a bit about police forces across the country debating whether officers should carry the overdose-reversing drug. But there might be legal and liability issues she wasn’t aware of. “And that’s not me blowing you off,” she added. “I’ve never had to think about the intersection of medicine and law enforcement. So give me a couple weeks to do a little research, and we can put our heads together?”
He smiled. “I’d appreciate that.”
“You said a few things? What else?”
Sawyer glanced over his shoulder. Someone was approaching. She followed his gaze.
Aquaman.
He was wearing jeans and a weathered gray T-shirt, and he had his hair in a messy bun.
“Hey,” Sawyer said. Jake gave a slight nod. Sawyer was sitting on the last stool on the long side of the bar, and Jake took the next stool over, the first on the short side, putting them at a ninety-degree angle from each other. “You know Dr. Walsh.”
Nora gave a little wave. “Yeah, Jake turns out to be a talented birth attendant.” Also, is he or is he not some kind of man-god hybrid? Asking out of scientific curiosity.
Sawyer chuckled, and Law showed up and set a beer in front of Jake. Jake remained silent.
Sawyer turned back to Nora. “We have meth, too. There are some dealers in town. Though it hasn’t been quite as prevalent since a lab was busted in Grand View last year. But I’m not sure how long the reprieve will last.”
“Oh. Right.” She had assumed that since Jake had arrived, the professional confab would come to an end, at least temporarily. “Fentanyl and meth. Got it.”
“I have one more for you, though maybe less dramatic: measles.”
“Yes, I read about the outbreak around here, and I know it’s a growing problem in a number of communities.”
“I had to drive a kid to the hospital in Zurich a couple years ago,” Sawyer went on. “He was having seizures.”
“Encephalitis?”
“Yep. Never want to see that again.”
“So,” she said, “fentanyl, meth, and measles. You sure know how to make a girl feel welcome.”
“Yeah, sorry.” He winced. “We also have amazing sunsets, a main street covered in moonflowers—and the lake, of course.”
“Don’t forget the mermaids.” A woman appeared behind Sawyer, and she wrapped her arms around him from behind.
“Evie.” His voice went all low as he leaned back against her.
“Happy Friday,” she said, her voice going husky, too.
Wow. These two were into each other. They were practically oozing pheromones.
“Nora, this is my girlfriend, Eve Abbott. She owns the Mermaid Inn—we both live there. Eve, Nora Walsh.”
Eve greeted her warmly, and Nora said, “I hear this town is a little mermaid crazy.”
“You heard right,” Sawyer said. “Wait until you see the Mermaid Parade.” He rolled his eyes. “There’s some kind of collective insanity that takes over—maybe you can diagnose it.”
“Oh, you love the parade,” Eve teased.
Soon they were talking easily, but an idea was starting to brew in Nora’s mind. She was going to honor her pledge to look into the issue of whether the local police force should carry naloxone, but beyond that, she wasn’t kidding herself that one cop and one doctor could do much about meth or the opioid crisis. But measles? At least locally? That might be a different story.
Her attention was drawn by a woman settling herself on the stool on her other side. She was— Nora shot off her stool. The newcomer was covered in blood. What was it about this town and medical emergencies? “What happened? Where’s the wound?” She turned to Law, who’d been drawn by the commotion. “Call 911.”
“It’s fake blood!” The woman held up her hands. “Oh my God, I’m sorry! It’s all fake!”
Nora sat, though her adrenaline was still pumping. But yes, upon further inspection, the blood was not quite the right color.
“Are you the new doctor?” the woman asked. Nora, still buzzing, nodded. “I’m Maya Mehta. I’m the owner and artistic director of the Moonflower Bay Theater Company. I run a theater camp for kids. We did stage combat today—the final swordfight scene from Hamlet. So sorry.” She waved her hand at the others. “These guys are used to me showing up in all kinds of disarray.”
Law reappeared with a wineglass and set it in front of Maya. He uncorked a bottle of white wine and silently poured her a glass. She must be a regular. “Maya.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Benjamin.”
Nora wondered what had happened to “Everyone calls me Law.”
“I need to talk to you about your monstrous pizza oven,” Maya said.
“You have pizza here?” Nora asked. She loved pizza. Rufus had not loved pizza. Therefore, Nora had had very little pizza in the last few years. But Nora was the mistress of her own destiny now, and that destiny, she decided right then and there, was going to include a lot of pizza.
Law slid her a small laminated menu. “I just built a wood-burning pizza oven out back.” He glanced at Aquaman. “Well, Jake built it.”
“And it’s belching smoke everywhere,” Maya said.
“It is not belching smoke everywhere. It’s properly vented and is one hundred percent to code.”
“My costumes are in the back of my building. The kids are doing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe next week, and Aslan’s head smells distinctly like smoke. And Aslan has asthma.” Then, seeming to forget her beef with Law, she leaned forward and slapped the bar. “Jake! Your stepmom found me a great old wardrobe, but I need to rip out the back of it for it to really work on the whole gateway-to-Narnia front. Can you help me?”
Jake answered without looking up from his beer. “Yep.”
It occurred to Nora that that was the first word she’d heard Jake speak since he’d arrived.
The thing about the new doctor was that she asked good questions. After Maya was done talking at him about her wardrobe, Jake listened to the doc talking to Sawyer and Eve about the town’s public health challenges. She’d listened intently and asked intelligent questions.
And the question she’d asked him last weekend was still rattling around in his head.
What was your son’s name?
Also, a question he had been asking himself: What the hell had possessed him to tell her about Jude? He never talked about Jude, and Nora Walsh was a com
plete stranger.
It was just that she was so competent. She had reacted to the chaos of the birth, and to Colleen’s fear, with the perfect mixture of detachment and compassion. Briskness leavened with dry humor. She seemed like the kind of person to whom you could say, “I had a son who died,” and she wouldn’t overreact. Usually people responded one of two ways. They made him feel like he was drowning in an avalanche of pity. They brought their casseroles and asked their hushed-but-entitled questions, as if they had a right to know what was in his soul. Or, worse, they stood there with their intact families and their not-dead children and told him that God worked in mysterious ways, utterly oblivious to the fact that he was often this close to punching their lights out.
But not Dr. Walsh. She just looked at him like a dead kid was a thing that happened—a sad thing, but a thing—and asked, “What was your son’s name?”
Not “How did he die?” Or “How old was he?” Those were the things people seemed to want to know. The salacious details. The things that would allow them to answer their real question: “How tragic is this, actually?”
“What was your son’s name?” though. That was a real question. Who was this person you had but now don’t have? It was a question about Jude rather than the circumstances of his death.
“Oh, I have a question for you guys.”
He jerked his head up. Was she including him in “you guys”?
“So I’m living in Southbank Pines. In Harold Burgess’s house.”
Sawyer glanced at Jake. “Yeah. How’s that working out?”
“Fine, except the major draw was supposed to be a deck out back. I’ve spent the last several years living on the twentieth floor of a high-rise, and I was really excited about a deck. But it turns out that what I actually have is a vaguely deck-shaped collection of rotten wood that disintegrated when I tried to stand on it. I know it’s just a rental, and it should be Harold’s responsibility, but I’m going to be here for two years, so I’m ready to throw some money at the problem. Jake said you guys have a carpentry business. Any chance I can hire you?”
“Of course,” Sawyer said quickly. Jake tried not to roll his eyes. They didn’t do decks. They did fine carpentry. As in bookshelves. One-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. Canoes for rich people with more money than sense. “But no charge.”
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