Mimi felt dumpy.
“What are you doing to these poor dogs?”
“Hello, Mimi. Stay down, dogs.” The dogs didn’t exactly freeze in midstride, but they did stop trying to knock her over. As they settled down, Mimi saw each was wearing a harness.
“Aren’t they doing well?” Joe asked. “I had the belt and harnesses overnighted yesterday before the storm. This is only the third time I’ve had them out, but they really seem to have caught the hang of it.”
“The hang of hauling your butt around the lake?” she asked sarcastically.
He didn’t take offense. He laughed. Obviously something had tickled him. “No, no. Well, yes, actually. We’re skijoring.”
He looked at her as though he expected something to click. It didn’t. She waited expectantly.
“Skijoring,” he repeated. “It’s a sport invented by the Norwegians, a hybrid between cross-country skiing and mushing. The dogs love it.”
Mimi seriously doubted this, but when she looked at the dogs, they were staring at Joe with adoring concentration. They’d never looked at her like that. Except the time she’d shared the quart of ice cream she’d found hidden in the back of the freezer.
“They look exhausted.”
“Oh, no. They enjoy this. All animals thrive on performing the function for which they were bred.” He sounded like Solange.
“I don’t think Bill was bred to pull you around.”
“No. But he was bred to do something more than eat and sleep. Just like humans, animals need a job. It gives their life purpose, makes them happy, relaxed, more content.” Definitely, he was channeling Solange. Could you channel the living? Maybe she’d better give her mother a call…
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I read it in several of the books Prescott has on dog psychology and pack dynamics.”
She glanced at the dogs. No one was cringing. She didn’t see any welts. “Hm.”
“You’re unconvinced. Let me show you. The dogs really eat this up, and the little buggers are fast. Watch.”
He pulled his poles out of the snow and tipped forward. “Hie on!”
The dogs sprang to life, hurling themselves against the lines as Joe skated forward on his skis. He skated for about ten more yards before the momentum shifted to the dogs. Then they flew, and Joe flew right behind them.
Mimi watched in fascination. The dogs, tails whipping around like eggbeaters in a doggy delirium of joy, barked and scrabbled, pushing for more speed. She heard Joe laughing. And damn it, she couldn’t help but like him for it. And just when she was so close to being able to write him off as a pompous, self-important demagogue. He probably still was, but he was a really nice demagogue.
She watched, smiling now, noticing idly that if they kept going the way they were, they’d be skirting awfully close to the big tanning rock near Chez Ducky’s beach. Normally, it stood far enough out of the ice not to be a threat to snowmobilers, but the recent snow had covered it with—Oh, dear.
“Joe! Joe! Turn the dogs. Turn!”
Joe, hearing her shouts, turned to look at her. He raised one ski pole over his head and waved. The dogs veered to the side of the mound, but Joe didn’t. He hit it dead center. Then he really flew.
Chapter Thirty-two
“Another Tierney?” Bob, the ambulance driver, asked, wheeling the gurney up the ramp toward the Oxlip Memorial Hospital emergency entrance. He hadn’t been in the ambulance that had arrived at Fowl Lake to transport Joe, but he’d met them in the parking lot with the paperwork. Apparently Bob wore many hats.
He punched a code into the double-wide glass doors, regarding Mimi across Joe’s prone form. “You got some sort of vendetta going against these guys? Gonna pick ’em off one by one?”
“I didn’t do anything to this one or the last one,” Mimi said, offended. She damn well ought to be getting brownie points for saintliness rather than listening to some would-be mystery writer with a lurid imagination cast doubt over her selfless act.
After thankfully being able to connect to 911 with her cell phone, she’d hustled back to stay with Joe, who, as well as having a goose egg on his head, had all too obviously dislocated his shoulder and God knew what else. She’d left his side only when the ambulance arrived. She’d then shepherded the dogs into the house and been on the cusp of going back to Chez Ducky when Joe had requested—actually it had been more of a beg—that she follow the ambulance in the Prius so that as soon as they’d checked him out he could leave, a possibility made more likely if he had someone to drive him. He’d said “please” with nothing short of desperation.
It wasn’t too hard to figure out why. No place on earth could be more psychologically torturous for a germaphobe than a hospital.
“How’d you lure this one out onto the ice?” Bob asked. “Pretending to have another fit?”
“What?” Joe roused himself to say. “She was pretending to have a fit? When was she having a fit?”
“She says she was just rolling around on the snow, a woman her age—”
“Hey!” Mimi interjected.
“—a woman her age,” Bob repeated with satisfaction, “and that your son mistook her snow-angel making for a seizure and called us. She says your son just happened to fall into his own swimming pool in the process of racing down to the lake to help her.”
Bob eyed Mimi dubiously. “I think the whole thing is fishy is what I think,” he said. “Though I will admit she doesn’t look much like a black widow. Sharon Stone, she ain’t.”
“Hey!” Mimi said again.
“How’d she get you?” Bob asked Joe.
“She didn’t,” Joe said. “I was showing off and I ran into a boulder.”
“On an Arctic Cat?” Bob said, interested.
Joe looked at Mimi for translation.
“That’s a snowmobile.”
“No,” Joe said. “Behind some dogs.”
At this Bob shook his head, embarrassed for Joe. “Man your age playing with dogs. You guys growing something funny up there on Fowl Lake?”
“Hardly,” Joe said.
“So, you were stone-cold sober and just showing off to her,” Bob said as the door finally swooshed open. “What sort of dark spell has she got over the men in your family?”
“You spend a lot of time watching cable, don’t you, Bob?” Joe asked.
Bob flushed.
“Did Prescott say she’d ‘lured’ him out?” Joe demanded.
“Nah-uh,” Bob said in disgust. “Fact, he couldn’t stop moaning about how wonderful she was. I had to listen to a half an hour on what a perfect woman Mignonette Olson is.”
“Really?” Mimi asked, preening a little. She hadn’t realized Prescott had a crush on her. Oh, she knew Joe thought he did, but Joe had also thought she was scamming Prescott by delivering bogus messages from his dead mother. Prescott was obviously much more perceptive than his father.
“Course the kid was half delirious, but still,” Bob said, “that’s when I figured out something was not on the up ’n’ up. Kid like that oughta be drooling over Angelina Jolie, not”—he must have read a budding threat in her narrowing eyes because he said only—“her.”
“Watch it, fella,” Joe said.
Mimi gave Bob an exultant smile. Joe, white knighting for her. Of course, she knew enough about Joe to realize he’d white knight for anyone. He was white-knight prone. Still, it felt nice to be championed. So she decided not to remind him that he had entertained equally unflattering notions about her.
Then they were in the hospital’s emergency room. A girl with red-rimmed eyes and sweaty skin sat in a chair, and a green-nosed toddler ran around hurling picture books at the walls while his mother filled out some papers at the desk. Joe blanched as Bob wheeled him down a short open corridor with three curtained bays on one side. Two were open but the farthest one was occupied by someone doing heavy mouth breathing. Bob rolled him into the first bay.
A plump but pretty pediatric nurse�
�she had to be a pediatric nurse; no one else would wear little-yellow-ducky print scrubs—moseyed up with a clipboard. “This the guy from Fowl Lake?”
“Sure is, Karin,” Bob declared like he’d just pulled in a trophy-sized fish.
“This the same woman that was out there last time?” the nurse asked, nodding at Mimi.
“Yup.”
The nurse looked Mimi over. “Ah-huh.”
“Look, do you think a doctor could see Mr. Tierney?” Mimi surprised herself by saying. But since no one else seemed to be willing to get this show on the road and Joe seemed to be stricken mute with germ dread, she didn’t see she had much choice. It was almost the dogs’ dinner time.
“He’s not dying?” The nurse directed this laconic query at Bob.
“Nope.”
“Then we got paperwork to do first. Now”—she leaned over Joe—“you got insurance?”
“Yes.” He rolled to his side, gritting his teeth as he fumbled for his wallet in his back pocket. He thrust it at the nurse. “The card’s in there. Can we please hurry?”
The nurse opened the wallet and retrieved the insurance card inside. “Hold on, there, sport. We’ll get you patched up soon enough. First things first.”
A grubby little hand reached over the side of the gurney and gripped the rail, followed by the top of a small round head sprouting tufts of wispy blond hair. Then came a pinched, red-cheeked face, the most predominant feature being a very snotty nose.
Wide brown eyes met even wider blue ones. “Oh, God,” Joe breathed.
“Wha’ wong wid yo?” the small creature asked.
“Justin Bjorkland, you get right back to your momma, you hear me?” the nurse said, plucking the child from his perch on Joe’s gurney and swatting his baggy behind.
Mimi looked down at Joe. His eyes were closed. It looked suspiciously like he was praying.
“Your shoulder was dislocated, Mr. Tierney,” said Dr. Youngstrum, a tired-looking woman in her fifties. “Your wrist is not in good shape. You wrenched that knee pretty severely. I don’t care if you actually lost consciousness or not, that’s still a nasty bump on your head. You should stay overnight for observation. Besides, I don’t know how you’re going to get around without a wheelchair for the next few days. You can’t grip crutches with that hand and your opposite leg isn’t going to bear weight for a while. The nursing home—”
“No!” Joe surged forward, banged his bruised knee, and yowled.
The doctor regarded him stoically. “I was going to say, the nursing home attached to the hospital has an extremely good physical therapist. A couple days there and you’d be—”
“No!”
“A couple days there,” the doctor went on as if the interruption had never occurred, “and you’ll be much further along in your recovery than if you just go back to your son’s place.”
“I don’t care,” Joe said, his head wagging back and forth like a truculent child’s.
Mimi supposed she shouldn’t be amused, but she was. Joe would have been aghast at his behavior if he was in his right mind, but he wasn’t. The Demerol they’d given him before popping his shoulder back into place had sent him straight to the land of no impulse control, where every thought is given voice and the foremost thought in Joe Tierney’s mind was that he didn’t want to spend one more minute than necessary in what he’d a few minutes ago described as a “pestilence-ridden heap of virulence,” known to the rest of the world as a hospital.
“Fawn Creek doesn’t have any private nurses or home care. We have a nursing home. You need someone with you for at least the next forty-eight hours.”
“She’ll stay with me!” Joe said.
Mimi, who’d been picking diligently at a hangnail, looked up to see whom Joe was pointing at. He was pointing at her.
“Huh?”
“If she’ll stay with me, I can leave, right?”
The doctor shrugged. “Sure. I can’t keep you here against your will. Well, actually I can, but—”
“Nuh-uh,” Mimi said.
“Please, Mimi.” Joe was gripping the bed rails with white knuckles and his eyes reminded her unpleasantly of the ones from Eduard Munch’s The Scream. “You were already watching the dogs. Just for a couple days. Just until I can stand.”
The dogs. She thought of Blondie’s sweet face, and Wiley’s clownish one, and Bill…She thought of Blondie and Wiley. Someone would have to take them for walks and feed them. Besides, it might be nice to watch Joe Tierney choke a little on his pride once he came out of his drug-induced panic.
“Please,” he said, his panicked gaze shooting toward the sound of someone hacking in the waiting room.
“Okay,” she said graciously.
Chapter Thirty-three
On the drive from Fowl Lake, Joe sat in the back of the Prius with his leg propped up over the back of the passenger seat. Crowding next to him was a folded wheelchair. He didn’t say much. Mimi assumed he was dozing, but occasionally, when they hit a rut, he moaned.
When they arrived at Prescott’s, Mimi got the wheelchair out and opened it on the drive. She then let the dogs out and returned to the passenger side to help Joe. She found him already halfway out the back, stuck.
“Let me help you,” she said, reaching in to lift his leg down.
“Did you wash your hands when we left the hospital?” Joe asked.
“What?”
“You’re touching me and you were touching things all over that hospital. I saw you touch the rail where that kid was. I just want to make sure you washed your hands when we left.”
Telling herself to make allowances for his drug-addled state, she smiled reassuringly. “Of course I did. I don’t want to get sick, either. Now, do you think you can swivel your legs out the door? Then all we have to do is stand you up, pivot you on your good leg, and dump you in the chair. Do you think you’re up to that?”
He gave a manly snort of disdain.
“Okay, put your arms around my neck.” She bent down and smiled invitingly.
“Can’t. They strapped my left arm to my side.”
“Right. Okay. Here’s how we’ll do this: first, stick your good leg out and put your foot on the ground. Thatta boy. Now, I’m going to get my shoulder under your good arm and then we’ll stand up together.”
Dutifully, Joe lifted his good arm, allowing Mimi to put her shoulder under it. She wrapped her arms tightly around his chest, tucking her head under his chin, and prepared to stand.
“Your hair smells good,” Joe said.
“You know, if you didn’t sound so surprised I could almost take that as a compliment. Now, on the count of three—”
“I mean, it’s really nice.”
“It’s Jo Malone. Whenever you’re ready.” His body felt very solid and very warm pressed next to hers. Even drugged up and laid low he managed to exude polished masculinity.
“Really? You don’t seem like the expensive-shampoo type,” Joe said.
Of course he’d know who Jo Malone was. His girlfriends probably wore it.
“I got it on eBay,” Mimi said. “Ready? One. Two. Three.”
She heaved, pulling him toward her. Together, they wobbled upright. Joe’s good arm shot out and he braced his hand on the Prius’s roof, steadying them.
He looked down into her upturned face. “You also have spectacular eyes,” he said, relevant of nothing.
“You do, too.” And he did. Black Irish good looks were killer.
“I know you didn’t try to con Prescott,” he blurted out.
She hesitated a second, amused. This probably wasn’t the best time to have a heart-to-heart. She had all her wits about her, and Joe was wacked out on Demerol. On the other hand, too bad for Joe. She was interested in hearing what he thought without a safety net of good manners and cosmopolitan polish to fall back on.
“Really?” she said. “How do you know?”
“I called him and asked him about you. I was very crafty. He had no idea you were…what
do you call it?”
“A spiritual conduit?”
“Bull.” Joe didn’t seem at all averse to standing on one leg, the two of them wrapped in each other’s arms. He seemed quite content, in fact. But then, so was Mimi. It felt oddly comfortable chatting like this. She suspected it wouldn’t have been nearly so comfortable if Joe had been more himself.
“That’s what it says on our Web site.”
“Sounds pretentious.” Thus Ozzie’s best commercial efforts were damned. Privately Mimi agreed, but loyalty kept her mouth shut. “Anyway, Prescott didn’t have a clue that’s what you do. He thinks you’re a widow bravely facing destitution and fending off despair through sheer optimism and courage.”
“Why am I despairing?” Mimi asked curiously.
“I dunno. The widow thing I suppose,” Joe said. “You have to know he has a crush on you. Even the ambulance driver knows.”
“Well”—Mimi lowered her eyes modestly—“it is kinda obvious. I suppose that worries you. I mean, just because I haven’t taken advantage of him doesn’t mean I won’t.” He didn’t deny it. “And yet, it didn’t keep you from asking me to stay with you for a few days while you recuperate. What does that tell you, Joe?”
He pondered this for a minute, and if he didn’t realize how odd the circumstances of the conversation were, what with her arms tight around his chest and her head nested against his shoulder, her face tilted up to his like a lover’s, well, she wasn’t going to mention it.
“Either I really hate hospitals,” he finally said, “or you have really, really pretty eyes.”
She smiled. “You sound disheartened.”
“I am. I can’t figure you out. Most of the time you don’t seem like a nut.”
“Why, thank you, Joe,” she said solemnly.
“But you are. You’d have to be to drop out of Brown a month before completing your undergraduate degree and with a 4.0 average—”
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