by Norah Wilson
“And this professor you had a fling with?” Jace couldn’t help it. He pictured some older guy with a balding head and double chin and wanted to punch him in the face almost as badly as he had Dundas all those years ago. “Was he worth the time?”
“Harrison Broad was his name. He recruited me to be his teaching assistant one semester. An undergraduate anatomy course,” she said. “We hit it off. For a little while.”
“What happened?”
“Med school happened. The TA experience was good, but it took time away. I should have known better than to get involved in a relationship on top of that. Like Mick, Harrison wanted more than I could give him. I refused to shortchange my studies for anyone.”
“Good.” He couldn’t help it. He was proud of Ember, and dammit, despite himself, happy it hadn’t worked out with either of those losers. Okay, a professor and a bright student probably didn’t qualify as losers, per se. But if they were stupid enough to let Ember Standish get away... “They should have known better than to get between you and the books, huh?”
From the look on her face, he had no doubt she was remembering her rules for dating. Homework got done first—his as well as hers—after which she would go joyfully into his arms to kiss, laugh, talk. Dream.
“You think I worked hard in high school?” Ember said. “Double or triple that and you might get the picture.”
“Bet you kicked ass.”
“Yes and no.” A shadow flitted in her eyes. “Undergrad was tough, especially with Mom dying. And Ottawa? I came to love it, but it was a hell of a long way from little old Harkness, New Brunswick, for a girl away from home for the first time.”
They were supposed to have gone to Ottawa together.
She cleared her throat. “So, after Harrison, I avoided any more involvements. It was…for the best. I was one of the geek girls with her nose in the books at the library most every Saturday night.”
“Most every?”
“Oh, there were a few times I let loose. I had some more adventurous friends.”
He smiled at the sparkle in her eyes. He’d love to hear about those letting-loose times. But he’d also love to hear about the nights at the library. Mac and cheese dinner in the dorm. Her first patient of her residency. Her first success. And failure. Every moment of her life over the last few years. He would not have stood in her way.
Mick and Harrison had been fools. Idiots
“What about Ryker Groves?”
Two small lines formed in Ember’s brow. “What about him?”
“So you and he never…?”
“Like I told you before, he’s a friend. A good one. We catch a movie now and then. Have dinner or lunch whenever I’m in Harkness. He used to come up to Ottawa once in a while and we’d catch a Sens game together.”
“Seven Ten Sun…what’s the deal with that nickname?” Jace said. “Is that because of his height?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, so you call him that because you stayed up all night once to watch the sun rise at ten after seven.”
“Good guess, but no. I was driving home for Christmas one year. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’d actually planned to stay in Ontario for the holiday for once, but after my last exam, I changed my mind. I’d never missed a Christmas in Harkness, and when it came right down to it, it seemed wrong not to come home, you know? I got to thinking about Dad and Titus all alone, having to deal with the family Christmas party by themselves. Scott being…well, Scott, who knew if he’d be there to help out?”
What could he say to that? “It must be a hell of an undertaking.”
“Massive,” she agreed. “After Mom died, I didn’t think it would keep going, but it did.”
So he’d noticed. Noticed? More like he’d been painfully aware. Though he’d avoided attending the annual party, he hadn’t been able to escape it. The Harkness Times always sent Glee Henderson to cover the event, and the digital pictures she took got posted online. Each year Jace swore he wouldn’t access those pics. But every time—every freakin’ year—he eventually gave in. After the first few years, he stopped pretending and logged onto the newspaper’s site the very next day. First thing in the morning, he’d scroll through those Christmas snapshots looking for her. She hadn’t missed many of them. And every year she looked more lovely to him.
“What would Christmas in Harkness be without the Standish party?” he said.
“Exactly. Anyway, after that last exam, I had a power nap, packed a few things. Then I jumped in my car and started driving. It was about six thirty in the morning, and I’d driven all night. I was exhausted—absolutely beat. I was running on coffee. All I wanted to do was go home and crash, and I was just about there. But things didn’t go as planned.”
“Let me guess,” Jace said. “You got a flat tire?”
“You think I couldn’t change a tire?” She cocked her head. “Have you forgotten the stories I told you about my grandmother and great aunts?”
He held up his hands in mock defence. “So it wasn’t car trouble.”
“Well it was, but Ryker’s, not mine. His alternator quit.”
“This would be about seven ten in the morning?”
She shot him an exasperated look. “Hey, are you telling this story or am I?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“I was almost to Harkness when I saw a car stopped by the side of the road, hood up. The driver flagged me down.”
Jace’s jaw tightened. “You stopped for a stranger?” He didn’t add one as big as Ryker. “On a deserted road?”
“I’m a pretty good judge of character.”
“From first sight? The guy’s a giant. Have Scott and Titus heard this story?”
She sighed. “Can I finish?”
He reined himself in. “Be my guest.”
“Anyway, I stopped and this huge guy runs around to the passenger side of my car. It had started snowing about half an hour before, and he was covered in snow. He looked like a freaking Yeti. So he jumps in and says, Can you get me to Lightman House, fast?”
Lightman House. Jace knew of it. A home for mentally handicapped teenagers.
“Why’d he want to go there in such a hurry?”
“His sixteen year old nephew, Alexander, was there.”
Jace grew suddenly quiet.
“Alexander is well over six feet tall, but he has the mental capacity of a two-year-old. His mother—Ryker’s sister—did all she could for him, raised him on her own for the most part after his father left. But there came a point where she just couldn’t manage him at home and put him in the facility.”
Jace’s heart went out to the woman who’d had to relinquish her son. Six feet tall or not, he’d still be her baby...
“Alexander gets up every morning at six-zero-one.”
“Not six o’clock? Six-oh-one?”
She nodded. “Yep. That precise…six zero one. He gets himself dressed and sits back down on his bed. He turns on his TV, but he won’t come out of his room until ten after seven. Then he goes to the window behind the nurses’ station to look outside to see if the sun’s up yet or not. If it’s winter and still dark out, he’ll pull up a chair and wait for the sun to rise.”
“He does that every day?”
“Autism,” she said. “Routine is very important to a lot of people like Alexander. And every morning for the last year, Ryker’s sister, Paisley, has been there at Lightman House to greet him when he comes out of his room at seven ten. Then she goes off to work, or back home if it’s Sunday. And on Saturdays, she takes him out for a drive-through breakfast treat at Tim Hortons. It means everything for Paisley to let him know she’s still there—that he hasn’t been forgotten. It’s important to Alexander too.”
“But she couldn’t get there that particular morning?”
“Correct. She was in Fredericton having gallbladder surgery and…”
“Uncle Ryker was going to see Alexander in her stead and was frantic to get there on time.”
“Exactly. I’m so glad I stopped.”
“I guess, but…” He just couldn’t get past the danger aspect.
There was a knock on the passenger window. They both jumped. Between being engrossed in the conversation and the pounding of the rain, neither had noticed anyone approaching the vehicle.
Speak of the devil. Jace rolled down the window.
“Officer Douglas.” Jace slid a glance at Ember. Though her lips still looked well kissed, she wasn’t blushing like she’d been the last time Harry Douglas had rapped on their window. “Fancy meeting you here. Again.”
Douglas didn’t appear to be in the mood for reminiscing. “We’re asking everyone to get off the roads,” he said.
Ember leaned forward to speak around Jace. “Bad storm, huh?”
The old cop nodded. “Power’s out in half the area, and there’s been an accident up the road.”
“An accident? How far from here?” Ember’s tone was sharp.
“A mile or so up the highway. The ambulance has been called but there’s also been an accident in Upper Crandler.”
She keyed the ignition and the car roared to life. “North or South?”
“North,” Douglas said, “but the road’s closed. We’re not letting traffic through. If you need a place to wait it out, the volunteer fire hall—”
“I’m a doctor,” she said. “If the ambulance is going to be held up, they’re going to need my help.”
“A doctor?” Officer Douglas reached for the mic on his coat. “I’ll radio ahead and get them to let you through the roadblock.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you. And travel safe, now. There’s a lot of water on the road. We’ve already had two cars hydroplane.”
“We’ll be careful,” she said.
Officer Douglas removed his hand from the window so Jace could roll it up again.
As she turned the car and pulled away, his heart beat faster. Apparently he was going to get to see her in action.
Chapter 15
ONE MILE had never seemed so long. Ember badly wanted to push the car harder, but Officer Douglas was right. She couldn’t help anyone if she put her rental in the ditch racing to the scene.
The roadblock consisted of a lone Prince Regional Police patrol car with its bar lights flashing, and one officer, dressed in a long yellow rain slicker with reflective stripes. She rolled down her window and identified herself and he waved her on.
She’d barely rounded the bend when she saw the flashing lights of two more patrol cars on the road. With dusk approaching, she almost missed seeing the victim’s tan-colored car in the ditch on its roof. From the degree of crumpling and the distance from the road, it looked as though it might have rolled more than once.
“That looks bad,” Jace said.
“Yeah.” As often as she’d dealt with motor vehicle accident victims, it still made her heart pound. And that was in a fully-staffed, fully-stocked trauma room, not at the accident scene. She had nothing with her, not even a stethoscope. Her medical kit was back at the farm. “Let’s hope they were wearing seatbelts.”
“Anything I can do to help?” he asked, as she pulled over onto the shoulder.
She glanced at her backpack in the back seat. “The victims will need to be kept warm, which could be a challenge in this rain. You could search my bag, the trunk, and bring anything that’s dry or waterproof.”
“Got it.”
They were expecting her, of course. The senior officer identified himself as Corporal Garrett Ames and his younger colleague as Constable Riley Mason.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“Middle-aged woman and her twenty-two year old daughter,” Ames said.
“Names?”
“Mom’s name is Margot Hunter. Daughter’s name, Kayla. They’re both from Crandler.” He ushered her around his car.
The two women lay on a tarp on the semi-soft shoulder of the road, each beneath their own Mylar first-aid blanket. The cops had obviously decided to use the squad car as a windbreak, and had rigged another tarp as a roof of sorts to keep the worst of the wind-driven rain off the women.
“Did you move the victims, or did they make their way up to the road themselves?”
“The passenger—Kayla—crawled out under her own steam. She then somehow got her unconscious mother out of her seatbelt and pulled her out through the smashed driver’s window. She had already dragged her up here when we arrived.” He shook his head. “Musta taken some adrenaline. Mother’s probably got sixty pounds on the daughter. She thought the car would catch fire, of course, like they do in the movies.”
“Looks like Mrs. Hunter’s conscious now.”
“She just came around about five minutes before you rolled up.”
She looked up at the officer. “Can you bring me whatever first aid supplies you have between these two patrol cars? I don’t have my medical bag with me.”
“I used a lot of the sterile pads on Mrs. Hunter’s head, but I’ll fetch what’s left.”
As the officer rounded the car, Ember knelt beside the two woman. “Hi, Margot. Hi, Kayla. I’m Dr. Ember Standish. Ambulances are on the way, but I’d like to have a look at you.”
“Please check my mom first.” Kayla tried to sit up.
Ember urged her back down. “I will, sweetie,” she assured the girl. “Losing consciousness gets her to the front of the line. But I need you to lie quietly too, okay?”
Kayla subsided and Ember started asking Margot a few questions, her name, where she lived, where they’d been going. Since her daughter didn’t contradict any of the answers, Ember figured Margot’s mental state was pretty good. When asked about pain, Margot said her head hurt. She tried to lift her left hand to touch the rough bandage job the officer had done, but cried out.
“My elbow!” she gasped, pulling her arm in close to her chest.
Judging from the tears in the older woman’s eyes, she was in considerable pain. That elbow was probably broken, but it would have to wait.
“You must have got banged up pretty good,” Ember said. “I’ll take a look at it in a bit. Right now, I need to know if anyone’s bleeding.”
The mother looked to her daughter.
“Nothing serious. Not anymore, anyway. That bump on Mom’s head bled quite a bit until the officer bandaged it up. But other than that, just some scrapes.”
“No breathing issues? Chest pains?”
Both responded in the negative.
“Good.” She pulled out her iPhone and took the Tardis cover off it and called up the BP app. “I need to check your blood pressures, but I don’t have my stuff with me. We’re going to have to improvise and I’ll need your help. Can you do that?”
Both women nodded.
“Is your right arm okay, Margot?”
“Yes.” She drew it out from under the space blanket to demonstrate.
“I’ll need you to hold the phone like so, with your finger over the camera eye.” When Margot obliged, Ember guided the base of the naked phone to Margot’s chest and held it there until the screen yielded readings. Her BP was elevated, but nothing more than could be expected given the circumstances and the pain she was in.
“Your turn, Kayla.”
Having just seen it done on her mother, Kayla took the phone from Ember, covered the camera eye and placed it over her heart as her mother had done. When it beeped, Ember took it back. She was expecting to see another elevated pressure, but what she saw made her heart jump and pound.
Maybe it was a mistake.
“Shoot. Can you do that for me again, Kayla?” Ember said. “I hit a button and lost it before I got the reading.”
“Sure.”
Ember checked the positioning of the phone and Kayla’s finger, which were perfect. She put her own finger to the edge of the phone, pressing down to make sure there was firm enough contact with the girl’s chest. As they waited for the result, both Officer Ames and Jace rounded the cruiser, the former ca
rrying two first aid kits and the latter sheltering the dry clothes he’d rounded up under his coat.
The phone beeped and Ember took it from Kayla again. And again, those terrifying numbers.
Her systolic blood pressure was under 80. Shifting her entire focus to the younger patient, she took a pulse. Shit, shit, shit. She squeezed one of Kayla’s fingernails. The capillary refill was slow. Way too slow. She must have internal bleeding, which would have been exacerbated by her exertions, dragging her mother out of the wreck. The girl needed EMTs now. They could give her IV fluids and transport her to a hospital qualified to treat trauma.
Ember got to her feet. “I need some help here, right now,” she barked at the men. “We have to elevate this patient’s legs.”
“What’s wrong?” Margot asked, alarm in her voice.
“Mom?” Kayla made a move as though to sit up, but couldn’t get more than her head off the ground.
“Lie back, Kayla. It’s okay,” Ember said, even as she directed Corporal Ames to lift and hold the girl’s feet about a foot off the ground. She wrapped the space blanket as snugly as she could around Kayla’s legs and got Ames to adjust his grip to hold the crinkly material in place.
“What’s going on?” Margot asked.
“Your daughter’s blood pressure is dipping. I’m just trying to get it up a little bit.” She adjusted the top part of the blanket, wrapped it snuggly around the girl. “Jace, I need those dry clothes.”
He moved around Ames. When he got into the shelter of the improvised tarp tent, he pulled the clothing out. Ember started piling them around her patient.
“Wouldn’t they be better under the waterproof blanket?” Jace asked.
She shook her head. “The Mylar reflects her own body heat back to her. We don’t want to get in the way of that, but I’m hoping the extra layers will enhance that effect.”
She turned to Ames. He sat on the ground now, the better to support the weight of Kayla’s legs. Rain slid down his yellow slicker to soak his uniform pants, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s the ETA on those ambulances?” she asked.
“I just radioed. One’s six minutes out. If they don’t run into anymore downed trees.”