His Runaway Nurse

by Meredith Webber

  Mrs Jakes came bustling in, preceded by the smell of fresh-baked cookies.

  ‘I’ll look after these two,’ she announced, and Majella followed the path Flynn had taken, out of the annexe and along the service road towards the SES headquarters.

  ‘Good,’ the SES captain said as she walked in. ‘I don’t want to send Flynn out on his own, so you can go with him. He’s taking a skinny gully on the edge of area three, probably too far away for the boys to have walked, but we need to check it and he knows the land down that way.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be helping Helen on the stall,’ Flynn asked—not exactly an expression of delight that she’d be his partner!

  ‘She and Sophie can manage, and keep an eye on Grace at the same time. All the stallholders have cut back to a minimum of staff and have joined in the search. The problem’s been finding enough locals to pair them with so they don’t get lost and cause more chaos.’

  As she spoke, Majella picked up a whistle from a range of equipment spread out on a table and slipped the lanyard attached to it over her head, then she took a water bottle and thrust it into the pocket of her jeans.

  ‘Let’s go!’ she said to Flynn.

  He didn’t move, instead staring at her as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real.

  ‘Now!’ she said, and walked towards the door, although it seemed to be several seconds before she heard his heavy tread following her.

  ‘My car’s here. I’ll drive to where we have to start.’

  He had a map in his hand, although she doubted he needed it—knew he didn’t need it when, instead of turning onto the main road, he took the track that led along the back of the showgrounds towards Parragulla House.

  ‘That gully?’ she whispered, through suddenly parched lips.

  Their friendship had been forged on horseback, her grandfather wanting her to ride well and trusting her schooling in horsemanship to Flynn. So together they’d ridden the trails that led into the forest at the back of her grandfather’s property, stopping to drink from one of the trickling, tinkling creeks that fed the river. But the gully had been special, almost hidden, and they’d ridden it more often as they’d grown older, tying the horses by the tumbling creek, sitting a while on a thick carpet of wild violets, talking to each other about things other than surcingles and saddle shapes.

  Talking about the way they’d change the world—no more hunger, no more fear, no more war—idealistic teenage talk, but heartfelt. Then later they’d talked about themselves, their own dreams, sharing little bits of themselves.

  Tentative.

  Shy.

  Young!

  ‘That gully,’ he confirmed, skirting the property’s eastern boundary and stopping behind the stables, once pristinely painted—white with green trim—but now a tired, dirty, dilapidated grey.

  ‘Has someone looked in the stables?’ she managed to ask, although her heart was beating erratically and nausea churned in her stomach.

  It didn’t make sense! The happiest times of her childhood had been in the stables—with the horses—with Flynn.

  Yet she was feeling far sicker now than she had when she’d entered the house. And feeling far more trepidation.

  ‘We’re to start there,’ Flynn said, so emotionless she wanted to strike out at him, although he could hardly know her reaction—hardly know the kiss they’d shared right here—her first and oh-so-innocent kiss—had been the catalyst for her abrupt departure!

  She followed him towards the fence, where he put his foot on the second strand of barbed wire, pushing it down, and held the top two strands up to make a gap wide enough for her to climb through. Then, in a movement as natural to her as breathing, although it had been twelve years since she’d held a fence for Flynn, she did the same for him, aware of the proximity of his body as he clambered through, aware with every cell of her body of Flynn the man, not the boy who’d been her friend…

  They searched the stables in silence, Majella because a huge lump in her throat precluded speech. She wasn’t sure if it was sadness, or something else, but no matter how hard she swallowed, it wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Majella?’

  Had he noticed her distress that he came to stand beside her?

  ‘Are you OK? Is it Grace? Does having a child of your own make you feel the boys’ disappearance more deeply?’

  He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close, and though the sympathy he provided was for now not for the past, she absorbed it, letting it strengthen as well as comfort her, letting it steel her resolve to find the boys, a resolve he echoed with his quiet reassurance.

  ‘We’ll find them.’

  She nodded against his shoulder then pulled herself free, checking the stalls, the tack room, neither of them speaking until they were once again in the open air, looking towards the hills and the start of the gully that was their search area.

  ‘You take the right-hand side, I’ll take the left,’ he said, practical again, although she guessed the empathetic man who’d caught her mood wasn’t far beneath the surface. ‘Go about twenty paces out then back, so you zigzag up the hill. Don’t go past the waterfall, it’s too dangerous to climb alone—we’ll go up together on one side then down on the other. You’ve got your whistle?’

  She held up the whistle to show him it hadn’t vanished since she’d hung it around her neck. Flynn looked at her for a long moment, seemed about to say something, then just nodded and began to walk, twenty paces from the creek, twenty paces back, calling to the boys, listening for replies, then calling again.

  They reached the waterfall at the same time, Flynn stepping easily across the big smooth rocks to cross the splashing, gurgling stream.

  ‘I’ll lead,’ he said, and, assuming her compliance, took off towards the bluff. Majella smiled to herself as she followed, but her smile faltered when Flynn reached back to take her hand, and the sensations that had vibrated through her in the stables returned, making breathing difficult and sensible thought impossible.

  The bluff wasn’t high but it was awkward, and climbing it required at least ninety per cent attention. But Flynn’s hand was holding hers, as it had in dreams from time to time, and the rightness of it struck her even harder than the vibration effect.

  ‘You’ve missed the foothold. Put your right foot into it then I’ll haul you up to where you can grip this rock with your left hand. Come on, Majella, we haven’t got all day!’

  ‘Testy, testy!’ she muttered at him, although maybe he was nagging because he, too, was feeling vibrations.

  Iron-man Flynn feeling vibrations from clasped hands?

  Hardly!

  She shook her head but managed to grab at the rock with her left hand and with her right foot firmly anchored, heave herself up to the next small ledge.

  ‘Kids would never have got up here,’ she told him, when, panting with the exertion, she finally reached the top.

  ‘I did it when I was six,’ Flynn said, and something in his voice made her look at him. He was staring out towards the town, his face strained and his eyes bleak.

  Not an iron man at all.

  ‘Oh, Flynn,’ she whispered, and now it was her turn to offer comfort. She put her arms around him, hugging not the man but the boy who, at six, had no longer had a father. He’d not only had to cope with his father walking out on them, to see his mother’s grief and his sisters’ bewilderment, but he’d then assumed the older man’s role, feeling himself responsible for his mother and two younger sisters.

  Flynn felt her body, soft and feminine, meld with his—felt his own respond—allowed himself five seconds—ten—then stepped away, muttering gruff thanks she might or might not have heard.

  ‘I’ll go thirty paces in then turn and walk parallel to the creek, you stay beside it, follow it to the next bluff, then we’ll cross and go back down.’

  No little boys in cowboy hats answered their calls…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WEARY searchers thronged the SES headquarters,
most clutching a fat sandwich in one fist and a steaming cup of tea or coffee in the other. Darkness had fallen, and where hope had once lifted the spirits and kept heavy legs moving, now despair curled in everyone’s mind and weighted down the feet that still tramped through the bush.

  ‘You’ve done enough,’ Flynn told Majella, who had taken over the first-aid post in one corner of the shed.

  ‘Do you think this is from a stinging nettle?’ she asked, ignoring his remark but looking up from the leg of a man she was treating. ‘Or an allergic reaction to some other plant?’

  He knelt beside her to examine the leg, which had long red weals raised along the calf.

  ‘Do you suffer from other allergies? Are there things that trigger asthma or hay fever or irritated eyes?’ he asked the man, who was a stranger, not a local.

  ‘Allergic to just about everything,’ the man said. ‘Stupid, really, when I like nothing better than being out in the bush.’

  ‘Use an antihistamine cream,’ Flynn told Majella, ‘but if you get stinging nettle burn and the patient knows that’s what it is, there’s a new cream that’s more effective for it.’

  She spread antihistamine cream on the man’s leg, then, as he left, with her admonishments to put on long trousers and a shirt with long sleeves if he wanted to continue searching, she turned and picked up a small purple jar.

  ‘You mean this?’ she said to Flynn, holding up a balm made from the sap of the cunjevoi plant, a big-leafed native of the lily family that often grew near stinging nettles. ‘Helen Sherwood developed it, after using the sap from the leaves on nettle stings when she was a child.’

  Another patient was approaching, a man with a bloody handkerchief tied around his leg, but Flynn had time to ask, ‘How’s Naomi?’ before the man arrived.

  Majella smiled.

  ‘The baby is just gorgeous and Naomi’s holding up. Thanks for sending the nurse to see her. Mrs Jakes is kind but also talkative. The nurse insisted Naomi try to sleep and although she probably won’t, she might doze a little if she knows the baby is all right and no one’s talking at her.

  ‘Yuck!’ she added, as the new patient arrived and peeled off his handkerchief to reveal a bloody, lacerated leg. ‘How on earth did you do this?’

  ‘Missed my footing on a ledge and slid down about ten metres to the next ledge,’ the man said, making Flynn wonder if it was such a good idea to have helpers from the festival in the search party.

  But as the man sat down and Majella began to unlace his boots, Flynn squatted down to get a better look at the wound. The scrapes and scratches weren’t deep, but they covered a large area. The man, he guessed, was in his sixties, healthy enough but at an age when wounds on the lower limbs could easily turn to ulcers.

  ‘I’ll clean it up,’ he said to Majella. ‘Can you check through that first-aid kit and see if there’s some liquid skin—it’s not really skin but a spray-on preparation that will cover the entire graze.’

  ‘You’d cover it, not leave it open?’

  It wasn’t exactly an argument, but the Majella he had known had so rarely questioned his decisions he glanced up at her, saw the green eyes, not challenging but enquiring, as eager to learn as she had always been.

  He explained his thoughts, wondering about her training, wanting to ask more of what she’d learned but knowing this wasn’t the time.

  Wanting to know so much…

  It seemed to Flynn that they’d been patching people up for hours, but when he checked his watch it was only a little after ten. The next shift of searchers, including most of the patients he and Majella had seen, had gone back into the darkness, with torches now, while the police had called for trained dogs to be brought in. Every light in the showgrounds and the town had been turned on and a large fire burned brightly near the camping area, everyone hoping light might guide the footsteps of the two small boys.

  Majella was leaning back in the chair they’d used for patients, sipping on a cup of tea, when she turned to Flynn, a frown marring the smooth skin of her forehead, her freckles standing out tonight against the tired paleness of her skin.

  ‘I wonder if they found the cave?’ she whispered, her voice indicating her uncertainty, and, it seemed to Flynn, an element of fear. Then she sat up, put down her cup, and said, ‘Do you have a crowbar?’

  The question was so urgent he answered without asking why.

  ‘In the back of my car. I always carry one, just in case I need to move a tree or rock off one of the back roads.’

  ‘A rock. We may need to move a rock. Come on.’

  She headed out of the shed, not stopping to tell the organisers where she was going or why.

  ‘What cave?’ Flynn demanded, catching up with her as she strode towards where he’d parked the big four-wheel-drive. ‘There are no caves around here.’

  ‘There’s a cave,’ she said. ‘Come on, get the crowbar and we’ll walk. It’s up that scree between the boundary of the showgrounds and Grandfather’s property. It wouldn’t have been far for the two boys to have walked.’

  ‘There’s no cave,’ Flynn found himself repeating, although he half smiled at the awareness that this time it was Majella giving orders.

  But a crowbar?

  ‘It’s got a tiny entrance. I used to go there when I was little but then I got too big to crawl through, but I always believed if I could shift the big rock near the front I could make the entry bigger.’

  They were out of the showgrounds now, following a narrow lane that had once been used to bring the locals’ milk cows in from the common, back in the days when every family had had a cow.

  ‘Up here!’ Majella said, scrambling as quickly as she could up the tumble of loose stones, well lit by moonlight. ‘See that clump of bushes. The cave’s behind them.’

  Lumbering behind her with the heavy crowbar, dodging the stones and rocks she dislodged, Flynn indulged himself with disbelief. Hadn’t he roamed these hills from childhood? Didn’t he know every bush and stone and crack and crevice for miles around the town?

  A cave? She was imagining it.

  But now she was kneeling in the bushes, scrabbling at them, then her head disappeared and all he could see in the torchlight was a very shapely butt.

  She was calling softly, saying the boys’ names, but so quietly he doubted anyone a yard away would hear them.

  Then, as he once again squatted next to her, he heard her say, ‘It’s OK. We’ll get you. You’re all right. You’re very brave boys. Very brave. I’m going to shine my torch inside so you can see the light. Do you think you could come close to where the light is?’

  She backed out, face filthy but eyes gleaming with excitement.

  ‘They’re in there,’ she said. ‘Blow the whistle—no, don’t blow it. The noise will echo in the cave and frighten them again. Damn, we should have brought a walkie-talkie, but we can’t leave them now to go and tell someone. Break a branch off that bush and I’ll push my torch through the opening. Once they have light, it won’t seem so bad. And my water bottle, I’ll push that through as well. I don’t suppose you’ve got a chocolate bar. No, didn’t think so, but I’ll take your torch and put it on the ground inside the tunnel so I can see where I’m pushing things.’

  She took the branch he broke off and disappeared again, talking softly all the time, telling the boys how good and brave they were, telling them to come and get the light and the water bottle and that soon they’d be out.

  Flynn, meanwhile, was examining the rock formation. There was a rock that might conceivably be moved—if he were superman!

  ‘They crawled in, can’t they crawl out again?’ he asked Majella, who’d emerged again, dirtier than ever. ‘Moving that rock will be a Herculean task.’

  ‘We have to do it so I can go in and help them out,’ she said, so determined—so sure he could move rocks, and maybe mountains. ‘The problem is, the entry tunnel is quite long, maybe six or seven feet, and from inside, although there’s light from a fissure somewhere up the
rock wall so the cave’s not totally dark, the tunnel looks very dark—and scary! That’s why they haven’t crawled out.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘So go to it, Hercules!’ she challenged, but when he set the crowbar at the base of the rock, she stopped him, suggesting he move it more to one side, so they could use another rock as a fulcrum.

  ‘Army training,’ she said, as if his amazement had been spoken. ‘We get to do all these totally useless exercises—or when we’re doing them they seem totally useless—then, bingo, something happens, like this rock, and a long-ago memory of a yelling sergeant provides an answer to rock removal.’

  She’d been setting up the rock she wanted as a fulcrum while she was explaining, then she joined him on the end of the crowbar and together, bodies working as one, they forced it down and down until Flynn was sure the solid steel would break, or they would both get hernias. Then a movement, only slight, and a groan of protest from the rock, but it did move, an inch, another inch, and then three or four, bringing a yelp of triumph from Majella before she remembered the echoes and slapped a hand across her mouth.

  ‘Let me try now,’ she said to Flynn, dropping to her knees again, calling to the boys, telling them about the signal Flynn would blow on the whistle to let people know they were found, and not to be frightened by it.

  Flynn knelt beside her and saw the narrow tunnel she was preparing to squirm through, while voices in his head yelled in protest—telling him to stop her, it was dangerous, she’d kill herself.

  ‘You can’t go in there—you won’t fit. Or the rock might move and you’ll be trapped. There’s got to be another way. Let me get some more help.’

  She smiled again.

  ‘While the boys spend more time frightened and alone? I don’t think so, Flynn, and at least, if I get stuck, you’ll know where to bring the searchers. But now the rock is moved, I will fit. The way it was, when I began to grow, my hips used to get stuck, although I’m sure there’s a theory that if one’s head will fit through an opening the rest of you should be able to.’