Safe Haven

by Hannah Alexander

  Karah Lee grinned back. “You plan to sneak over and do some snooping while I work?”

  “Nope, I’m just going along for the ride.”

  “Good to have you.” All they’d said was that a woman had fallen in her front yard. The neighbor was afraid to try to help her, in case she’d injured her back.

  “Taylor, I thought about calling you last night, but you were off duty and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Call me about what?”

  “You said Tom was suspicious about Casey.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think he might have called for federal assistance to search for her?”

  “Not without going through Greg, and Greg didn’t seem willing to do that when I talked to him on Sunday.”

  “Would he have told you if he had?”

  “Yes. What are you getting at?”

  “Some guy in a suit came to the clinic last night after Cheyenne left, showing us pictures of Casey and claiming to be a federal investigator.”

  Taylor’s foot slid noisily from the accelerator and he gaped at her.

  “Uh, you might want to watch for your turn,” she said as a tree limb came at them from the darkness and brushed the left front fender of the vehicle.

  He pressed the brake, belatedly signaled, turned, but didn’t speed up after completing the turn. “No federal investigator’s been in touch with us here.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Did he say he was FBI?”

  “Federal Bureau of Independent Investigators.”

  “Never heard of them. Name?”

  “Detective Withnell. Could we get a move on? There’s a patient waiting for me.”

  Taylor replaced his foot on the accelerator, and the Jeep surged forward. “What did you tell him?”

  By the time they reached their destination, Karah Lee had completed a replay of the conversation she and Jill had conducted with their visitor. “Jill thinks he’ll be back.”

  “So someone thinks our runaway might still be in the area?” Taylor asked, releasing his seat belt and opening his door.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Could be, but I haven’t seen any signs of her since Friday, and I’ve been looking.”

  “Good. Will you please just keep your eyes open?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  They saw their patient sitting on the ground a few feet from her front porch, with a younger woman hovering beside her. In the glow from the porch light, the patient appeared to be about sixty years of age. The younger woman rushed across the grass to greet them as they climbed from the vehicle.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said, glancing over her shoulder toward the victim, then lowering her voice. “That old crank is driving me crazy. She’s trying to bully me into taking her to the clinic myself.”

  “When did the accident take place?” Karah Lee asked.

  “I heard her hollering about ten minutes ago through my bedroom window and realized it was a human and not a rooster crowing—though it’s hard to tell the difference, if you ask me.”

  “I take it you two don’t exactly get along,” Karah Lee said.

  “Like I said, Ethylene’s a crank. She can’t get along with any of her neighbors. I didn’t want to move her, in case I did more damage.”

  “That was the right thing,” Karah Lee said as she hurried to the patient’s side.

  “It’s about time somebody showed up,” the older woman muttered. “You know how long I’ve been sitting here?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” Karah Lee knelt beside the woman. “We came as soon as we received the call.”

  “I know what’s wrong with me, I broke my leg. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I stepped off the porch to get my paper, and somebody’d come up and dug a hole in my yard last night. I didn’t even see it till I went down.”

  “Ma’am, I’m Dr. Karah Lee Fletcher. Are you Mrs. Hutchins?”

  “I’m Ethylene Hutchins. You’re the doctor? I thought you were the paramedic. Where’s Cheyenne? She’s my doctor.”

  “I’m the one on call this morning, Mrs. Hutchins. Your neighbor did the right—”

  “I said my name’s Ethylene.”

  “Thank you, Ethylene, you can call me Karah Lee.”

  “Some neighbors I’ve got,” Ethylene grumbled, glancing at the retreating figure of the lady who had called for the ambulance. “Wouldn’t even help me into the house, and sure wouldn’t even think about loading me up and hauling me to the clinic just a few blocks away. How much trouble could that be?”

  Karah Lee reached into her medical kit. “Are you in any pain right now, Ethylene?”

  “No more’n anybody else would be with a broken leg.”

  “We’ll see if we can help you with that pain, and I’d like to get you down to the clinic to check you out, but the ambulance is still a few minutes away.”

  “I told that blasted woman I don’t need any ambulance. All I need’s to have this leg set. Why can’t you just haul me off the way you got here? In that gas eater over there.” She pointed toward Taylor’s Jeep.

  Karah Lee suppressed a grin and looked at Taylor, expecting a protest—Taylor loved his SUV, and was always singing its praises. Apparently, he had other things on his mind at the moment, however.

  “Ethylene, you say this hole wasn’t here last night?” he called over his shoulder, inspecting the ground where she had fallen.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “It doesn’t look as if anyone’s been digging, it looks as if the earth caved in from below. The grass is still in place.”

  “Whatever caused it, I still fell, and I don’t want to wait around on no ambulance when I can get a ride with you. Are we going or not?”

  “We’ll wait for the ambulance,” Karah Lee said.

  “You going to pay for it? Those ambulance trips cost money I don’t have, and don’t try telling me we can make arrangements for that later. Dr. Cheyenne can set my leg. She took care of my arm last fall.”

  “I’m sorry, Ethylene,” Karah Lee said, “but Dr. Cheyenne is out of town.”

  “Fine, then you can set it.”

  “I’ll take some X rays of your leg and check you out, but if you need an orthopedist to—”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Ethylene snapped. “You’re not dumping me on some guy with a fancy title stuck to the end of his name, and you’re not sending me out of Hideaway. I can’t afford it. I’m a year away from Medicare, and I don’t have insurance.”

  “Then it’s important for us to get it right the first time, isn’t it?” Karah Lee pulled her stethoscope from her medical kit.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” Ethylene asked.

  “Family practice.”

  “Haven’t you ever fixed a broken bone?”

  “Yes.” Several of them, but in Columbia Ortho was always within shouting distance, and they always checked her handiwork.

  “Good. Get me up from here and call your ambulance people off.”

  Again, the specter of doubt made Karah Lee hesitate. “Ethylene, please—”

  “You can either call them off now, or I’ll send them back home when they get here.”

  Karah Lee glanced helplessly at Taylor, then shrugged. “Okay, we’ll immobilize your leg and take you to the clinic, but if the fracture is complicated—”

  “We’ll worry about that if it happens,” Ethylene said. “Get me up from here.”

  Fawn woke up in hell. She felt the flames all through her body, and her skin felt like desert sand. Her eyes hurt too much to open them at first, but a quiet thump echoed through her mind, like a knife plunging, until she forced her lids apart.

  The room where she lay was dark, but as she struggled to sit up, the light came on in the hallway.

  She’d fallen asleep and now she was caught!

  Quick, get off the bed. Get behind the door. Peek out into the hallway to see if anyone’s out the
re.

  But she couldn’t move. She felt as if she’d been glued to the mattress, which suddenly felt hot and suffocating.

  Voices reached her, then she heard footsteps down the hallway. Slowly, she sat up. Her body felt as if it had been poured full of wet cement. Hot cement.

  They had her. They knew. This might even be the sheriff coming to handcuff her and take her out. Or maybe it was the ranger. Or what if it was Harv? The killer, himself? What if he’d discovered where she—

  “In here, Taylor.”

  Fawn froze and waited for the end to come. And then she recognized the voice. It was Dr. Karah Lee, and she was talking to the ranger and somebody else…sounded like a grumpy woman. And they hadn’t come in here.

  Maybe there was time to get out.

  Under cover of their voices, she climbed down from the bed, but when she straightened to rush across the room, the floor bucked with her, and she stumbled. The room spun around. She grabbed the end of the bed rail.

  For a moment, she leaned against the bed and listened to the doctor’s soothing voice in the other room. What if I just stayed here?

  “…don’t want to move unnecessarily and cause more damage, Ethylene. That’s it, we’ll be finished with this in just a moment, then I’ll let you rest.”

  Fawn closed her eyes. The voice was so kind, so calm.

  She was about to sit on the bed again, when she heard someone call out from the front of the clinic. “Okay, I’m here, but I have to leave again. Dane wants me to unlock the general store at seven. Karah Lee? Where are you?”

  Fawn recognized that voice. Blaze.

  “In X ray,” Dr. Karah Lee called back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Hey, who’s been taking books from the stack this early in the morning?”

  Fawn stiffened. She looked down at the children’s books on the counter. He’d noticed as soon as he walked in. And there wouldn’t be a chance to take them back to the waiting room. He was too sharp. What else would he notice?

  “Keep it down, will you?” Karah Lee called. “We’ve got a patient.”

  “Sorry.”

  Fawn knew she couldn’t stay. What had she been thinking? With Dr. Karah Lee, maybe it would’ve been okay, and maybe even with Blaze—he’d been so sweet to her Friday—but there were too many other people, and she wasn’t supposed to be here. That meant Taylor would have to do something about it. She was a criminal, according to the police and the newspapers. Who was going to believe her?

  She forced herself to stand up straight, then staggered to the door and listened. After making sure the hallway was empty, she slid out, holding on to the wall for support as she turned left toward the back exit. She fumbled with the dead bolt and pulled the door open, peered out, and tottered from the clinic like an old geezer, trying hard to be as quiet as possible.

  She was never going to make it back to the barn.

  Karah Lee sat down in Cheyenne’s peaceful office while she waited for the X-ray films to develop on Ethylene Hutchins’s leg. Taylor had stepped out for a few minutes, and Blaze was still wandering around the clinic somewhere, muttering about books missing from the stack on the table.

  Except for that, the place was quiet. It felt strange, because usually by the time Karah Lee arrived for work in the morning there were patients already here, the telephone was ringing and Jill had everything under control—or at least as controlled as it could be.

  This morning, for the first time, Karah Lee realized what Cheyenne had envisioned for this clinic. People like Ethylene depended on them for all her medical care, and she refused to consider other options. Sure, treatment of complicated medical problems here could be considered substandard care, compared to the treatment patients would have with a specialist in Branson or Springfield, but if they refused a specialist, what then? Dismiss them from the practice? Unthinkable.

  And so Cheyenne Allison, knowing she could be sued, risked everything in order to treat everyone she could. Karah Lee felt overwhelmed. She had been taught from day one that those specialists were her safety net. She’d referred patients daily in Columbia, where the physicians, per capita, were much higher than elsewhere because of the focus on medicine in that city. There was almost always a doctor eager to take her referrals.

  Her safety net had suddenly been removed, and now even Cheyenne was gone. Karah Lee was not an emergency physician, she was a new family practice doc.

  She glanced around the sparsely furnished office. “What am I doing here?” she whispered.

  Was she even really a good doctor? All this time she’d been so proud of her independence from her father’s money, and now she was discovering how very dependent she actually had been.

  “Karah Lee, something’s going on.” Blaze stalked into the office, holding two children’s books up for her inspection. “You saw me stack everything just right on the table in the waiting room last night, didn’t you?”

  Karah Lee frowned at him for a moment, mentally switching gears. “Uh, yes, but I didn’t—”

  “I had these two right on top. Dog stories. Kids love the dog stories, and I knew we had some kids coming in this morning, so—”

  “So what happened?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out. You know where I found these? In exam room four. And you know what else? The bed was a mess. I cleaned that room before we left last night, remember? It’s a good thing Jill didn’t find it first, or she’d be nagging me about it all day.”

  “I don’t suppose you found a book titled Goldilocks lying around anywhere,” Karah Lee said dryly.

  He gave her a blank look.

  “You know, as in ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’”

  “I don’t think we’ve got that one.”

  Don’t kids even read the classics these days? “Never mind. What else alerted you?”

  “There are potato chips and pretzels and a candy bar missing from the vending machine.”

  “How many?”

  He held up three fingers. “One each. Somebody shook the machine to get them to fall. It’s easy to tell, because they’re missing from the front of each row.”

  “But we would have heard someone shaking it.”

  “Sure, if we’d been here when it happened.” He spread his hands to his sides. “I’m telling you, something’s going on here.”

  “Raccoons?”

  He glared at her.

  “Sorry. We locked up last night before we left, and I haven’t been near the back door. Did you check it this morning?”

  “Yes, but you know that dead bolt locks automatically. I’ve even locked myself out a couple of times. It’s one of those old ones.”

  “Have you noticed anything else missing?”

  “No, but give me time.” He pivoted and left the room.

  Now that she thought about it, she had heard a couple of noises last night. But Blaze had thought the sounds came from the water softener.

  As Blaze powered up the computer in the other room, Karah Lee heard a strange series of beeps, and a moan.

  She was pretty sure the moan came from Blaze.

  “What is it?” she called.

  He came walking slowly back into the office. “I think someone’s been messing with the computer.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because it told me so. Remember I warned you last night that it’ll shut down after three wrong password entries?”

  Great, just what they needed. “Have you searched the rest of the clinic?”

  “Yeah, but don’t we have enough evidence? I think some little kid sneaked in here while we were still open and crawled into one of the cabinets or something until we locked up.”

  “A kid who knows how to power up a computer?”

  “Why not? An eight-year-old can operate a computer these days.”

  “Taylor didn’t say anything about a child missing from the neighborhood. Where’d he go, anyway?”

  “I think he went outside for a smoke.�
��

  Karah Lee frowned. “For a what?”

  Blaze winced. “Oops. Would you forget I said that? Taylor’s bigger than me, and it’s none of our business what he does on his own—”

  “Fine, I’ll talk to him later about any missing children. Right now we have a broken leg to set.” She suddenly felt irritable “Where’s Jill?”

  “I’m here,” came a voice from the other room, accompanied by the sweet aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and freshly brewed coffee.

  Unfortunately, they would have to wait until later for breakfast.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Taylor completed his report in the Jeep, then considered going back inside for one of the cinnamon rolls and a cup of the coffee he’d seen Jill carry over to the clinic from the bakery a few minutes ago. Blaze and Jill could both brew a decent cup of coffee, but the bakery used freshly ground beans first thing in the morning, and its brews were out of this world.

  For now, however, they would all be busy with Ethylene and her harangues, and he wasn’t in the mood to hang around and deal with those.

  He opened the glove compartment for an extra ink pen, and his gaze flicked over the pack of cigarettes he’d stashed there yesterday. He didn’t usually allow himself to smoke this early, but for some reason he’d awakened from a nightmare about Chip about four this morning. It had been the reason he’d switched on the ambulance radio and caught the message about Ethylene. In fact, he’d gone out on this call specifically to escape the memories crashing down on him with such alarming vividness—the after-effects of his “sharing” time with Karah Lee.

  He pulled out a cigarette and his disposable lighter and slid them into his shirt pocket, then closed the glove compartment and got out of the truck.

  He was strolling across the broad, summer-green lawn by the dock when he saw a canoe gliding quietly toward him from across the lake. Dane Gideon waved from the boat. The man’s white-blond hair and neatly trimmed beard and mustache—sprinkled more liberally with white than with blond—made him appear slightly older than his thirty-nine years.