‘I’m grateful to Christine, too,’ she told him, refusing to be dismayed into a guilty conscience ‘But I’m not wearing brocade because of it. Or even the clothes she chose.’
‘You’ll hurt her feelings.’
‘Really?’ She looked at him in disbelief. ‘Is that why you stick with the brocade? You really think that she’d be devastated if you said, ‘‘Thank you, Christine, you’re very thoughtful but I don’t like red and gold brocade. I like yellow.’’’
He frowned. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t like yellow.’
‘Toby says you like yellow.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You don’t like Mr Addington’s yellow car?’
The corners of his mouth twitched. The look of strain eased a bit and Rachel found herself smiling inside. Good. ‘Who told you about Mr Addington’s car?’ he demanded.
‘Toby. You do like it?’
‘Of course I like it. It’s a Ferrari.’
‘Is that all you like about it? You’d like it better in red and gold?’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Michael’s Aston Martin is red. I hate that car.’
He raised his brows at that. Seemingly intrigued. ‘So what is it with you and Michael? You hate his dog. You hate his car. You fight with the man in public and he abandons you in a town with a bushfire threatening.’
How did she answer that? She couldn’t. She managed a shrug. ‘So?’
The coldness of her tone didn’t deflect him. He was still being nosy. ‘I don’t see that you have much of a marriage, Dr Harper.’
Should she tell him? No, she decided. His reaction to such a story was a complication she could do without. She hated telling people. She hated the way their faces shuttered down with shock and disbelief.
It was so much better to use Michael as a scapegoat. A pseudo-husband to hide the reality of pain. It was none of Hugo’s business after all.
‘I don’t hate Penelope,’ she told him, concentrating on the least of her issues with Michael. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘You don’t love her!’
‘She’s sort of…goofy.’ She grinned, moving right on. Steering fast from very dangerous personal relationships. ‘Come on, Dr McInnes. Share your work with me. Don’t sentence me to an afternoon with my goofy dog and your brocade walls.’
‘I was planning to go out to the fire front,’ Hugo told her. ‘There’s a command post out there. The teams are starting to show effects of smoke inhalation, heat exhaustion, burns. And the adrenaline isn’t letting them stop.’
‘Can I come with you?’
Those mobile eyebrows rose right up again. ‘In those clothes?’
She looked down at herself. ‘Maybe not,’ she agreed cautiously. ‘Maybe Mrs Sanderson could find me something a wee bit more suitable.’
‘Maybe we’ll grab a sandwich and then drop by the fire station,’ he told her, the smile she was beginning to know and to love resurfacing from behind his eyes. ‘I don’t think even Mrs Sanderson does a couturier line in yellow firefighting apparel.’
The fire front was closer than they had expected.
Cowral Bay was on a spit about five miles from The Narrows, the mile-wide strip of land connecting Cowral to the mainland.
The Narrows were covered in mountainous bushland and all of it was burning. Hugo had expected to drive through to the far side of the first ridge, but there were roadblocks just as the land started to rise, and he was waved to a command post that had been brought further south.
‘Hell.’ Hugo pulled off the road and they stared together up at the ridge. The wind had died a little, which meant the billowing smoke was spiralling skyward and they could see flames bursting up over the mountains.
And for the first time, Rachel got nervous.
Up until now the fire had been a sort of backdrop to her real worries. It was the reason she was stuck here and nothing else. Australians were accustomed to bushfires and this was a bushfire. In bush.
But maybe it could turn to something worse?
She stared down at herself. The officer manning the fire station had equipped her with heavy-duty overalls and big leather boots, and she carried a hard hat. She’d looked at herself in the mirror and had hooted with laughter. But now…now she wasn’t laughing.
‘This is big,’ she whispered, and Hugo looked over at her and nodded.
‘We lost a firefighter this morning.’
‘You lost…’
‘The wind changed,’ he told her. ‘He was trying to back-burn and he’d gone too far from his team. He was cut off and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. They brought his body down just before I came to find you.’
She swallowed. No wonder he’d looked strained.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I just did.’
There’d been no need, Rachel thought. Or there had been a need-a desperate need-but Hugo had been on his own for too long to realise it. Sharing trauma, talking about it, was the only way to cope in emergency medicine. But Hugo coped alone. Somehow.
‘What can I do?’ she asked in a small voice, and he looked across at her, assessing.
‘If you really want to help…’
‘I said I did, didn’t I?’ she snapped, suddenly angry. ‘I’m a member of your medical team, Dr McInnes. A team. You’re not on your own. Get used to it.’
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘Just use me,’ she said wearily. ‘Use me.’
He cast her another strange look. But the situation was dire. It was true. He did need her.
‘The team who were with Barry when he died…they’re still out there. They’re due to come in at two. I’d like to see them all. There’ll be real trauma. None of them would come off duty until their shift changed but I said I’d be available.’
‘And you want teams to be briefed?’
‘Last year in bushfire season I had a volunteer go home after suffering smoke inhalation. He didn’t tell anyone he was having trouble breathing, then started coughing uncontrollably. By the time I saw him it was almost too late. I want the dangers spelled out to everyone, whether they’ve heard it five times or not. I want them to know to keep fluids on board. The professionals-even the well-trained volunteers-have been augmented now by helpers who mean well but haven’t got two clues as to personal safety. They’re working in teams but they get good ideas and go off by themselves. The guy this morning… He’s in his sixties and he runs-ran-the local hardware store. He thought he knew it all. The fire chief has taken it hard. He’s taken the volunteers through the safety drill but I want the medical bits spelled out in words of one syllable. I don’t want any more deaths.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Make it sound dire,’ Hugo told her. ‘There’s no second chances out there.’
‘I can do dire.’ She nodded. There was no laughter between them now. There was only medical need.
Which was how, half an hour later, overalled and booted and wearing her hard hat for heaven’s sake- ‘We wear them all the time when we’re on duty,’ she’d been told. ‘It’s a habit that makes sense not to break.’ -Rachel found herself lecturing to a group of people who looked as out of place as she was.
Hugo was with the team of firefighters who’d lost their friend. She was with everyone else. Trying to sound knowledgeable. And authoritative.
She did. It was amazing what you could do when needs must.
‘You stay hydrated,’ she ordered. ‘You carry water all the time. You never remove your hard hat. Ever. You keep your protective clothing on no matter how hot you get. You feel unwell for any reason, you get back here. For any reason. You start to cough, I want you back at base. You get any chest pain, a sore throat, your legs start aching-anything at all-you get back here fast. There’s no medals for heroics. If you put your life at risk you’ll put your whole team at risk. Now, before you go I want you to run past me individually and tell me a really brief medical history, and if there’s anything a
t all you’re vaguely worried about, you tell me now. You hear? Now!’
‘She’s amazing,’ one of the firefighters told Hugo.
Miriam was one of the semi-trained volunteers. She’d been on the front line with Barry and she was suffering a nasty burn on her hand as well as shock from that morning’s trauma. Hugo had what he needed to treat her on the spot but, having cleaned and dressed her burn, he was sending the woman home. Now they stood together in the clearing, watching Rachel assessing her firefighters thirty feet away. Each catching their breath before they moved on.
‘She is amazing,’ Hugo agreed. They could hear her voice, raised in authority. ‘Bossy!’
‘You’d think she’d been trained to do it.’
‘Be bossy?’ Hugo smiled. ‘Maybe she has.’
‘I wish I’d been a bit bossy,’ Miriam said, and there was a load of bitterness and regret in her voice. ‘Barry knew what we were told to do. We were just mopping up after backburning. If anything gets away, call for help, we were told, but when it flared he started fighting like a madman. The rest of us were retreating and he took it as a personal challenge. Then it was all around him. If I’d been a bit bossier…’
‘Barry wouldn’t have taken it from you,’ Hugo said gently. Miriam was usually a clerk in the shire offices. She was so out of place here it was almost ridiculous. ‘He’d never take orders from someone without authority.’
‘He’d have taken orders from your Rachel,’ Miriam told him. ‘You just have to hear her. She seems…in charge.’
She did.
But what had Miriam said? ‘Your Rachel…’
His Rachel. The words were unnerving. Miriam had meant them to denote that he and Rachel were a team but, looking across and seeing Rachel, it seemed almost more than that. She was listening to an elderly man who was telling her exactly why he should be allowed to fight the fires. Sam Nieve. Hell. It was obvious to anyone the man couldn’t firefight. Hugo half rose to intervene but he didn’t need to. He couldn’t hear what she was telling him, but the man’s shoulders didn’t sag. Instead, his chest puffed out, he removed his helmet and he departed with an air of increased importance. His little car took off in the direction of the town and Hugo gave a sigh of relief.
Sam had a heart condition. He was the last person they’d want on the fire line but he was almost as stubborn as Barry. How had she convinced him?
If anyone could, Rachel could, he thought. The lady was amazing.
His Rachel?
No. The lady was married. The lady was…taken.
They worked solidly for three hours, but then it was time to return to the town. Hugo had patients in hospital and he had a clinic to run. He needed to return. The teams had changed over, the off-duty firefighters had gone back to the town to sleep and the on-duty members were lined up against the fire front.
The doctors would be needed again at change-over-or earlier if emergencies arose-but maybe because of the work they’d done, there’d be less chance of an emergency.
They could only hope.
‘You did really well,’ he told Rachel as they drove homeward, and she flushed.
‘If we’re forming an admiration society, can we make it mutual?’
‘Nope. What did you tell Sam to make him give up his plans to fight fires?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I used you.’
He raised his brows and grinned. ‘You used me?’
‘I told him you’d lost two patients in two days and there wasn’t room in the funeral parlour for a third. I also told him if you lost someone else you’d be in for a breakdown and it’d be on his head if the town lost its doctor.’
‘Gee, thanks very much,’ he said faintly, but she hadn’t finished yet.
‘I told him brute strength wasn’t all that was needed here. I told him that if the fire worsened, it was really important that everyone’s roof is clear and they have their hoses ready. There are lots of people who are just blind when it comes to this type of thing.’ She grinned, ignoring the fact that his brows had hit his hairline. ‘I suspect, in fact, that Mr Nieve’s own personal gutters around his roof are not as clean as they should be. I seemed to hit a nerve. Anyway, I suggested he contact the local school and borrow a few of the older kids and do a house-to-house check.’
Hugo whistled, seemingly totally astonished. ‘Well done, you.’
‘It’s true,’ she said gently.
‘What’s true?’
‘You really don’t want any more deaths.’
‘What do you think?’
She looked at him, considering. ‘I’m all for them,’ she said at last, teasing for a smile. ‘More deaths mean fewer patients and patients mess up your consulting rooms faster than anything I know.’
He laughed with her, but there wasn’t a true smile behind his eyes.
‘The two deaths…’ she probed gently, and waited. He needed to talk, she suspected. There wouldn’t be a lot of professional support in this one-doctor town.
And it seemed like it was professional support he was uncomfortable with.
She didn’t let him off the hook. She waited and finally he shrugged and started to speak.
‘Last night’s death was expected,’ he told her. ‘It was Annie’s time, but I was fond of her for all that.’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘Annie started making me chocolate cakes when Beth died and we’ve had a weekly chocolate cake ever since. And Barry…Barry was a pompous little prig who didn’t deserve what happened to him. He has a sweet little wife and a couple of obnoxious kids who’ll miss him for ever.’
Silence.
More silence.
‘It’s hard, this country practice,’ Rachel said at last. She was combing pieces of debris from her hair with her fingers. She’d taken her hard hat off before she’d got back in the car, which had been a mistake. The air was thick with falling ash, and most of it seemed to have ended up in her hair. ‘You get attached.’
‘Something you don’t do?’
‘It’s not all that easy getting attached when you work in emergency medicine,’ she agreed. ‘I keep track of some patients but not many.’
‘So when you finish up a shift, the day’s over.’
‘Pretty much.’
‘It’d be a great life,’ Hugo said softly, and Rachel didn’t miss the note of bitterness in his voice.
‘What, so you’d really like to swap?’
‘I’d just like to turn off sometimes,’ he told her. ‘This town… I came here for a few years to look after my ailing grandfather and I’ve never been able to leave.’
‘Because you can’t get anyone else to replace you?’
‘Partly.’
‘And partly what else?’ She’d twisted sideways to watch him. They were nearly back in town now-their time for intimacy was almost over and she regretted it. She liked this big, gentle man with the laughing eyes. She liked him a lot. It seemed such a shame that he was meant for…the likes of Christine?
She’d seen the way Christine had looked at Hugo. Hugo may have married one sister but by the look in Christine’s eyes and by the accounts of local gossip he was destined to marry the other.
But Hugo wasn’t talking about Christine. Or he was, but only in that she was part of the tapestry of Toby’s life. ‘Partly because my life is here,’ he told her. ‘Toby’s life. The people here love him. He has Myra and Christine and…so many people. He has the freedom of the place-there’s not a soul in Cowral Bay who doesn’t know who he is and watches out for him.’
‘And in return you watch out for them,’ she said softly. He was concentrating on turning into the hospital car park but it wasn’t the concentration that was causing the set look around his mouth. He cared. He’d certified the deaths of two of Cowral’s own in the past twenty-four hours and it had bitten deep.
Rachel saw deaths most days. She worked in a big city emergency department.
Two deaths wouldn’t affect her like thi
s.
Maybe they should. Maybe she should be more involved.
She was involved enough. How could she be any more involved than she was right now?
She should be home…
‘It must be amazing,’ Hugo said, ‘to leave work at night and be free to go to the movies, go out to a restaurant-do anything you want.’
He had to be kidding. If he knew how much she hated eating out… And when had she last gone to a movie? Going to movies on her own sucked. ‘I have responsibilities,’ she said stiffly, and he nodded.
‘Of course you do. Penelope. Michael.’
‘Michael’s not-’
‘You’re right. Michael’s none of my business.’ He cut her off as he switched off the engine. ‘But I’m interested. What do you do with the rest of your life? How do city doctors without kids operate? It’s a world away from what I know.’
‘You did it once.’
‘It’s so long ago I’ve forgotten. I wouldn’t mind remembering.’
Remembering what? He was talking about the giddy social life Michael enjoyed, Rachel knew, and that was so far away from her own experience that it was ridiculous. She closed her eyes. What was the point in explaining? There wasn’t one. This man had enough on his shoulders without burdening him with her personal tragedy.
‘You wouldn’t be interested,’ she said flatly. ‘And you have work to do. Is there anything else I can do to help?’
He looked at her and once again she had the feeling he saw more than she wanted him to. But he couldn’t know. How could he possibly know about Craig?
He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He was shaking his head, moving on.
‘You’ve done enough.’
‘You’re doing clinic?’
‘For a couple of hours.’
‘So Toby and I will see you at dinner.’
‘That’s right. So you can take your overalls off, Dr Harper, and turn into a guest again. Exercise your dog or something.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll see you later.’
End of conversation. But he was still watching her. His eyes still held hers.
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