Critical Praise for
HANNAH ALEXANDER’S
Novels

SILENT PLEDGE

“I found a gaggle of caring, interesting people who stole my heart with their struggles and made me cheer with their triumphs. Bravo!”

—Lisa Samson

SOLEMN OATH

“Solemn Oath absolutely hit the ball out of the park. Hannah Alexander is going to have a hard time writing fast enough to keep up with reader demand.”

—Debi Stack

SACRED TRUST

“Alexander is great at drawing the reader into her story line and keeping them hooked until the resolution of the plot.”

— Christian Retailing

A KILLING FROST

“Running dialogue and a few twists will keep romantic suspense fans coming back for more.”

—Publishers Weekly

DOUBLE BLIND

“Native American culture clashes with Christian principles in the freshly original plot.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

GRAVE RISK

“The latest in Alexander’s Hideaway series is filled with mystery and intrigue. Readers familiar with the series will appreciate how the author keeps the characters fresh and appealing.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Silent Pledge
Hannah Alexander

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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In memory of our beloved cousin,

Mark Mercer Patterson,

December 24, 1954 to April 14, 2000.

Cheryl’s childhood playmate and defender.

May his courage and tender heart live on in the

character of Clarence Knight.

We wish to thank Joan Marlow Golan and her

excellent staff for giving us this opportunity to share

our books with a new reading audience.

SILENT PLEDGE

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

Questions for Discussion

Prologue

O dira Bagby sat on the edge of her great-granddaughter’s twin-size bed, soaking a thin washrag with water from an old mixing bowl. She squeezed out the excess and applied the rag to Crystal’s hot tummy. Odira winced every time seven-year-old Crystal coughed.

The hoarse crackle and wheeze sounded loud in their small three-room apartment, and the little girl bent double with the effort to breathe. Her pale, blue-veined face was flushed, and her mouth opened wide as she gasped for breath. The sound of her struggle was worse than a nightmare. Odira caught herself automatically trying to breathe harder and heavier, as if she could take in extra air for Crystal.

The room smelled like Vicks, even though Odira knew that rubbing the ointment on Crystal’s bony chest probably wouldn’t help. It’d never helped before, except to ease Odira’s arthritis for a while and make her feel as though she was at least doing something. Her hands always stayed sore and swollen from the thumping she did on Crystal’s back and chest. Crystal had cystic fibrosis.

“Gramma,” Crystal whispered, stiffening her neck to push the bare sound from her throat. She reached up and pressed her hand against her chest. “Hurts.”

“I know, little ’un.” Odira felt the tears in her eyes that Crystal never cried. “We’ll get help.” Heaving herself up, she lumbered the few feet across the room to her own bed.

She peered at the numbers on the secondhand alarm clock. It was almost midnight on a Saturday night. What was she supposed to do? Crystal’s mom had disappeared last year—and Odira didn’t know who the daddy was. The grandma, Odira’s sweet Millie, was dead. The grandpa “didn’t want nothin’ to do” with the whole mess. There was nobody else.

Bedsprings cried out in alarm as Odira sat down and picked up the receiver of her phone. She leaned forward and peered at the list of emergency numbers on the bedside stand. There was no E.R. in Knolls since the explosion last fall. Odira couldn’t afford a car on her social security, so she couldn’t drive Crystal to another E.R. She didn’t want to wait.

She did all she knew to do. She dialed the home number of Dr. Mercy Richmond.

Buck Oppenheimer woke to silent winter darkness in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Kendra. The room felt like the inside of the unheated toolshed out back, and for a moment he wondered if the pilot light in the central heating system had gone out again.

But as he listened to small sounds gradually creep to him through the house, he heard the furnace popping, and he felt warm air coming from the vent on his side of the bed.

So why was it so cold?

He listened for the soft sigh of his wife’s breathing but didn’t hear anything. He reached toward her and felt the emptiness of icy sheets.

“Kendra? Honey?”

He didn’t hear any sounds coming from the bathroom and no sound of drawers clattering or silverware clinking in the kitchen—sometimes when Kendra couldn’t sleep she’d go in and make some toast.

And sometimes when she couldn’t sleep…

Buck threw back his covers and scrambled out of bed, switching on the lamp. The bedroom door hung open, but there was no light coming from the rest of the house. He didn’t like the feel of this. He pulled on the jeans he’d worn home from the fire station a few hours ago. They smelled like smoke.

“Kendra?” he called again.

No answer.

She hadn’t said much when he came home two hours late from his shift tonight. There’d been a flue fire out in an old home north of town, and he couldn’t get away any sooner. Not that she got mad anymore when that happened, but ever since the arson and the hospital explosion last fall, Kendra was scared. Which was understandable—her fireman father had been killed a year and a half ago in the line of duty. Kendra said she knew that would happen to Buck someday, too.

He went into the kitchen. Kendra wasn’t there, but the door to the back porch stood wide open. Icy January wind blew in, nipping at the bare skin of his chest and shoulders. He stepped to the screen door and looked out, curling his toes up from the cold linoleum.

“Kendra?”

Quiet. Had she gone out again? He fought back the memory of two months ago when he woke up at 1:00 a.m. to find her coming through this very back door, a sweater slung over her arm, her makeup smeared, and the sound of a car motor heading off down the street. She’d acted high on something—not booze, but something. And, man, did they ever have it out that night!

Now he was hearing a car again…the sound of a motor, its chug-chug-chug reaching him through the dark. Music drifted faintly through the icy air. He felt the familiar pain rip through him.

Was she doing it again? After all he’d done for her, didn’t she even love him enough to be true?

He let out a deep breath and watched the white puff drift from his mouth. The air was as cold as he felt inside. How much was a man supposed to take?

Kendra’s mood swings were getting worse. If she wasn’t hiding out at home crying, she was laughing too loudly and flirting with all the guys down at the fire station, going to shows in Branson with her girlfriends, and buying things he couldn’t afford on his fireman’s salary, like lots of jewelry and expensive clothes. There was no middle ground.

He pushed the screen door open and stepped on the back porch, bracing himself in case she came walking in drunk, or maybe even with another guy.

He still heard the car motor idling, but the sound didn’t come from the road. And he recognized that idle. With a deepening frown, he looked toward the small garage where Kendra kept her five-year-old Ford Taurus. The music was clearer now. Clint Black. Kendra’s favorite. The doors were all shut.

But that was stupid. She knew better than to leave the motor running.

“No,” he whispered, then more loudly, “Kendra, no!” He reached inside and flipped on the porch light, then turned and raced down the wooden back steps and across the grass to the side entrance to the garage. Through the windowpane he could see the glow of the car’s interior light, but he couldn’t see around the shelving by the door to tell where she was.

He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

No answer. And she had the only key to the garage—she’d lost the spare one last month.

Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden-brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser—dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope….

She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job.

A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

“I…I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

“So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blackened her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

“Come ’ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

She took a step backward.

His expression didn’t change. “I said come ’ere.”

Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed—if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this—and then she would head to another town and never come back.

“You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow-brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

“Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been testing…

Suddenly his eyes narrowed, and his whole body surged toward her like a black cloud. His right arm rose, and she ducked as his hand came down on her shoulder. She winced and cried out and tried to get away. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt and jerked her toward him. She wrenched away and tried to run, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her.

She fell face-first onto the wood floor. Pain hammered her right cheekbone and elbow as she closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, waiting for a kick in the side or a smack in the head.

He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked back. Hard.

She flinched, but by now she was used to pain. As he lifted her, she drew her feet under her and swung up and around with her left elbow and slammed him in the jaw.

He grunted and let her go.

She stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself and kicked him hard, low in the gut. Without waiting to see what he would do, she ducked past him and ran for the kitchen, holding her hand over her eye.

He screamed a curse and came for her. There was no time to grab a coat, let alone the duffel bag. She just ran out the back door and down the steps and kept on running. She didn’t care where to.

Chapter One

T he crunch of tires on gravel echoed across the unpaved parking lot as Dr. Mercy Richmond drove into the apartment complex where Odira Bagby lived with her great-granddaughter, Crystal Hollis. A bare lightbulb glowed over the small concrete front stoop at the door nearest the alley so she’d know which apartment was Odira’s.

Mercy pulled as close to the steps as she could and reached over to turn up the heat in her car. The curtain at the window beside Odira’s front door was open, revealing a front room with an old threadbare sofa and a straight-backed chair crammed into a ten-by-ten-foot space, along with an old TV resting on a nightstand. An off-white lace doily topped the TV. Mercy had never been here before, but she knew the sixty-six-year-old woman supported herself and seven-year-old Crystal on social security. She couldn’t get a place at Sunrise Villa, the retirement apartments, because the new management didn’t want children.

Before Mercy could shift the gear into Park, the front door opened and out lumbered Odira, all two hundred seventy pounds of her, with wraithlike Crystal beside her, bundled all the way to her nose in a thick quilt.

As Mercy stepped out of the car into the icy wind and hurried around to open the door for them, Crystal started coughing again—the same hoarse, dry sound Mercy had heard in the background when Odira called a few minutes ago. It was typical of a child sick with bronchitis, maybe even pneumonia, brought on by the specter of cystic fibrosis.

“Hope you didn’t have to leave your own little girl at home alone for this,” Odira said in her booming baritone voice that always seemed to shake the walls when she came to the clinic.

“No, I dropped Tedi off at my mom’s on the way here.” Mercy got Crystal and Odira settled in the car, slid into the driver’s seat and pulled onto the quiet street for the five-minute drive to her clinic.

At the first stop sign, she noticed Odira sniffing…great, heaving sniffles. Tears, which she obviously could not contain, paraded down her cheeks. Odira was known to talk more than she breathed, a counterpoint to Crystal’s silent watchfulness. But not tonight.

Mercy cast a second concerned glance at the woman, where the dash lights illumined her broad, heavy face and rusty-iron hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of dull scissors. Beside her, Crystal’s face was thin and pale, filled with a sad knowledge. She raised her hand to cover her mouth when she coughed, just as Odira had taught her to. Her stout, clubbed fingers demonstrated the effects of oxygen deprivation to her extremities throughout her battle with CF.

“Are you two warm enough?” Mercy asked.

“I’m plenty warm.” Odira looked down at Crystal and wrapped a thick arm around her. Worn patches at the sleeves of her thirty-year-old coat had been carefully mended. “You okay?”

Crystal nodded and ducked her head into her great-grandmother’s side.

“What’s Crystal’s temperature?” Mercy hadn’t bothered to inquire about that over the phone because she knew that if Odira was desperate enough to call for help, Crystal was sick.

“Hundred and two.” Odira’s voice sounded like a solid mass in the confined space. “Couldn’t get her temp down, and the coughing just kept getting worse. Think she might have pneumonia again.” She sniffed and wiped at her wet face with the back of her hand. “Sorry…just couldn’t figure out nothing else to do but call you.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Odira.” Mercy laid her heater-warmed hand on Crystal’s face. Yes, it was hot. Crystal’s underdeveloped body was always fighting some kind of an infection. She’d had bouts of both bronchitis and pneumonia since Odira took over her care last year. Who knew what nightmares the child had suffered before that? She talked more now than she had when she first came to Knolls after her mother disappeared. She was healthier, too. That didn’t surprise Mercy. Love and kindness had great power over illness, and nobody could envelop a little girl in love the way big, awkward Odira Bagby could.

Mercy shared the hope with Odira that they would see Crystal live to adulthood, maybe even into her forties, with the new treatments and increased knowledge about this debilitating genetic disease. And by the time Crystal reached her forties, maybe they would have a cure.

As Crystal’s coughing and wheezing increased, Mercy turned onto Maple, the street that fronted Knolls Community Hospital and her clinic. The hospital came into view, glowing a dark rose color in the security lights set strategically around the grounds. Mercy slowed to the required fifteen miles per hour as she passed the property, set in a scenic residential section of town, with plenty of open lawn and evergreens. Bare branches of oaks and maples jutted out from between humps of burlap-protected rose plants.

She looked up to see, without surprise, that the administrator’s office was illuminated on the second floor. Mrs. Pinkley had opted to move her operations into an unused storage area rather than take the time to repair her own suite, which had been damaged in the explosions when the E.R. was destroyed. The E.R. was Estelle Pinkley’s first priority. Knolls Community usually employed about two hundred fifty people, many of whom would be out of work until they had the west wing with an emergency department. Estelle’s sense of civic responsibility had impacted her career as prosecuting attorney for a great deal of her life. Why stop just because she’d changed careers? At seventy, she was a more powerful force than a whole roomful of attorneys.

Odira sniffed and wiped her face again. “Sure do miss Dr. Bower.” Her heavy voice had an unaccustomed catch of sadness. “Bet you do, too. Bet you get all kinds of calls like this since there ain’t an E.R.”

Mercy reached over and patted Odira’s fleshy shoulder. “You know I wanted to come.” But what the woman said was true. Mercy’s practice had been overwhelmed the past three months. She missed Lukas a lot, and not just for his professional ability.

Lukas Bower, the acting E.R. director, was working temporarily at a hospital on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, a three-hour drive from Knolls. Patients and hospital staff members continually asked Mercy when he’d be back. She wondered, too. Nobody missed him more than she did.

“Don’t seem right he should be out of work just because some monster wanted to set fire to the E.R.” Odira pulled Crystal closer. “Don’t seem right we should all be suffering like this.”

“I feel the same way.” Mercy looked down at Crystal. “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

“My chest hurts.”

Mercy bit her lip and prayed silently, the way Lukas had taught her to do. God, please help me with this one. She’s so young. Why is she suffering like this? The question came up often lately in Mercy’s mind, and after all the talking she and Lukas had done about the subject, she still hadn’t found a satisfactory answer. Every time she found herself questioning God about it, she felt afraid. Sometimes it seemed as if all those great, profound truths she and Lukas had discussed last summer and autumn had deserted her, and that her new belief in Christ was just a fairy tale.

She turned into the dark parking area of her clinic, less than a block from the hospital. “Let’s get inside and get a breathing treatment started.”

Clarence Knight just happened to be in Ivy Richmond’s kitchen, raiding her refrigerator and practically swallowing three frozen chocolate chip cookies whole, when the phone rang for the second time Saturday night.

He jerked backward and knocked his head on the overhead compartment where Ivy had been hiding the treats from him. He thumped his elbow on the door and spilled crumbs down the front of his size 6XL T-shirt in his rush to get to the phone before the ringing could wake Ivy. If she came in and found him eating, she would roast him whole over an open fire, all four hundred twenty pounds of him.

He jerked up the receiver, then realized his mouth was still full. He chewed and swallowed. “Mmm-hmm?”

“Hello? Who is this?” It was a man’s voice. Sounded familiar. Sounded upset. “Clarence?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Is Dr. Mercy there?”

Clarence swallowed again. “Hmm-mmm.”

“Do you know where she is? This is Buck. I just tried her at home, and I couldn’t get her. I need her bad. Kendra tried to—” His voice broke. “She needs help. I’ve got to get her somewhere…got to get her on some oxygen.” There was another crack in his voice. “Clarence? You there?”

Clarence swallowed again. “Hol’ up, Buck. Ith’s okay.” One more swallow. There. “Mercy dropped Tedi off here a little bit ago, ’cause she was on her way to the clinic for some emergency. What’s the matter with Kendra?”

Buck took a breath. “She tried to kill herself. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She was running her car motor out in the garage when I found her. The doors and windows were all shut.”

Clarence grunted as if he’d been hit in the gut with a football. “Oh, man.” Poor Kendra. And poor Buck. “She okay? Where are you?” He knew they were still having trouble in their marriage, but was her life bad enough for her to want to die?

“We’re still at home. I’ve got to get her to Dr. Mercy’s,” Buck said. “There’ll be oxygen there.”

“Yeah, Dr. Mercy’ll check her out. Want me to call the clinic and see if I can let her know you’re coming?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Clarence.”

There was so much relief in Buck’s voice, Clarence went even further. “You’ll be coming right by here on your way….” He hesitated. He’d just started getting back out into public after losing all that weight, and he still had a long way to go. Could he do this?

Yeah, he’d do anything for Buck. Buck had been there for him when he was in trouble. “I could meet you out at the street. All you’d have to do would be stop and let me get in and ride with you. Then you wouldn’t have to do this all by yourself.” And maybe he could talk to Kendra some. He knew firsthand what depression could do to a person.

There was a pause, and he braced himself for Buck to turn him down. He’d lost over a hundred pounds since last spring, but he’d still draw a big crowd at a circus sideshow. He was big and clumsy and took up two seats wherever he went, and strangers stared and laughed, and he knew the few friends he had were probably ashamed to be seen—

“You’d do that for me, Clarence?” came Buck’s relieved voice. “It would help.”

Clarence blew out a bunch of air he hadn’t realized he was holding in his lungs. “Sure would, pal. Look at what you did for me last fall. I’ll be waiting out front when you get here.”

He hung up and glanced toward the hallway that led to Ivy’s bedroom suite. Good. No lights, and he thought he could hear her snoring over the hum of the refrigerator. Mercy’s daughter, Tedi, had gone straight to sleep in the spare bedroom without waking her grandma. He guessed neither of them had heard him on the phone.

Ivy had once compared his voice to a derailed locomotive running loose through the house, and she really griped when he woke her up in the middle of the night. Especially when she caught him eating.

Clarence and his sister, Darlene, had come to live with Ivy Richmond—Dr. Mercy’s mom—three months ago when their health got too bad to live on their own. And Ivy had bullied him every day since then to eat right, exercise, take his vitamins, exercise, take his medicine, drink a bucket of water a day and exercise. She’d even tried to make him go to church with her. He’d done everything but that.

Since he couldn’t bend over and pick up all the crumbs he’d scattered on his way to the phone, he shoved them aside with his foot. Though sloppy and crude, it might save his life. He had to hurry and brush his teeth and get out to the curb. He wanted to be there when that pickup truck came rolling by.

Shouldn’t’ve taken that Lasix a couple of hours ago. He knew from Mercy that the medicine kept him from retaining fluid, but it also kept him running to the bathroom all night long.

Crystal Hollis lay on Mercy’s softest, most comfortable exam bed in an overheated room, with a pink teddy-bear sheet draped over the lower half of her body. Some of the color had returned to her face, and the sound of her breathing was not as labored, nor her lips as blue, as a few moments before.

Mercy pressed the warmed bell of her stethoscope against the little girl’s chest. “Take a breath for me, honey.”

Seven-year-old Crystal had the body weight of a five-year-old, with stick-thin arms and legs and a slightly protruding abdomen—clearly the cystic fibrosis affected her pancreas as well as her pulmonary system. Which meant Crystal could eat as much as an adult and still not put on weight. It was a constant battle. She had an aura of maturity in her longsuffering expression and sad gray-blue eyes that befitted someone seventy years older.

Her chest sounded a little better, but not enough. She coughed and Mercy grimaced. The breathing treatments weren’t going to cut it this time.

“How’s she doin’, Dr. Mercy?” Odira’s deep voice rumbled from her chair four feet away. She leaned forward, her puffy face filled with tense worry.

Mercy sighed and placed the stethoscope back around her neck. She tucked the sheet back up over Crystal’s bony shoulders and took the little girl’s hand in her own. “I’d like to see her breathing better, Odira.” She perched on the exam stool beside the bed and faced the child’s great-grandmother. “The X-rays don’t show what I suspected, but this could be early pneumonia. I’d like to have her checked out by a pulmonologist in Springfield. I could transfer her to St. John’s and…” The expression of sudden fear in Odira’s face halted her words.

“But you’re her doctor,” the older woman argued. “You’re the one we trust. Couldn’t you just do one of those consults they talk about on TV? That big place up in Springfield would be so scary for Crystal, and they might not even let me stay with her. You know how those big places are.”

Mercy patted Crystal’s hand and released it, then stood up and walked over to the chest X-rays placed in the lighted viewer box. The films most definitely indicated bronchitis. Time to blast those lungs with high-powered antibiotics. Odira always made sure Crystal received the nutritional support Mercy suggested, including the pancreatic enzyme supplements and vitamins, but Mercy would increase the caloric intake even more for a while. Crystal’s fever had dropped a little, but Mercy didn’t want to take any chances.

Accompanied by the unrhythmic sound of Odira’s loud breathing, Mercy checked Crystal’s heart once more. With severe disease, right-sided heart failure could occur, but there was no sign that the CF had progressed that far. Would it be possible to keep them here?

Mercy turned around. “Odira, are you feeling okay?”

“Don’t worry about me, Dr. Mercy. I’m just worried about keepin’ our girl in Knolls. You people know how to take care of us right.”

“I’ll try,” Mercy said. “I’d like to get her temperature down before I decide.”

“You need me to be your nurse?” Odira asked. “I know how to follow orders, you know.”

“Yes, if you would.” Mercy gave her instructions to go to the staff break room and get a Popsicle out of the freezer for Crystal. It would be a special treat for the child and would be a painless way to help drop her temperature and add a little fluid.

Odira struggled to get to her feet and finally succeeded. “I sure do appreciate your heart, Dr. Mercy.”

Mercy knew her patients hated the thought of leaving Knolls for a hospital stay, even to places like Cox or St. John’s, two of the top-rated hospitals in the country. Mercy didn’t blame them. They liked a small community hospital with down-home caring, close to where they lived. Their indomitable hospital administrator took pro bono cases and occasionally paid for them from her own bank account. This would probably be one of those cases.

“Please, Dr. Mercy,” came Crystal’s soft, hoarse voice. “Can’t I stay here?”

Mercy sighed and looked over into the little girl’s solemn eyes. Her softheartedness always got her into trouble. But she supposed she could call Dr. Boxley as a consult. He was an expert on CF patients, especially children, and he’d given her advice on Crystal’s care before. And Robert Simeon wouldn’t mind checking her out as a favor. With his specialty in internal medicine, he’d had some experience with this, and he lived and practiced right here in town. And the ICU staff at this hospital was the best anywhere. Maybe…

She looked once more into Odira’s hopeful face and sighed. “I’ll set you up for an admission.”

The strain of worry gradually eased from the older woman’s heavy expression. She walked out into the hallway toward the back. “That’s our doc,” she called over her shoulder.

Chapter Two

D eep-voiced curses and shouts careened down the short hallway of the Herald, Missouri, emergency room, followed by the whiff of stale beer and marijuana smoke. The hospital was in for another exciting Saturday night on the shore of Lake of the Ozarks.

Dr. Lukas Bower stepped to an uncurtained window in the E.R. staff break room and stared out at the glimmer of frosty moonlight over the water. Ice crusted the shoreline but didn’t reach the center. He could see the bare branches of trees swaying in the wind like the fingers of skeletons, grasping through the air to catch the wispy clouds that drifted past.

He shivered. This place gave him the creeps, and he’d only been here a few days. He couldn’t say exactly why the town bothered him so much. Maybe it was just because he missed Mercy and Knolls and the friends he’d made there—the life to which he planned to return as soon as the new emergency room was built and his short-term contract here was up. Or maybe it was the depressing, uncooperative attitude of some of the staff here. Or maybe it was his own attitude.

He frowned at his image in the reflection from the window, at the harsh brilliance of fluorescent light that caught and bounced back from his glasses. With so many night and weekends shifts, he’d almost forgotten what the inside of a church looked like on Sunday morning, or how the crisp winter air smelled in the Mark Twain National Forest.

But by no means had he forgotten what Mercy Richmond looked like, the rich alto sound of her voice, the warmth and sweet fragrance of her on those rare occasions lately when they’d seen each other. The thoughts he was having only made things worse.

A shouted epithet echoed through the room once more. He turned from the window and glanced toward the open break-room door. All he’d heard for the past ten minutes was the arguing of the bikers who’d engaged in a brawl down the road at the apartments—if the rickety string of rock buildings by the lake could be called that.

The shouting grew louder. Lukas grimaced. Should he call the police to come and stand guard? With a population of about three thousand, Herald, Missouri, was only about a third the size of Knolls, and the police force had the same number of personnel. This was a rough town.

He walked back into the small five-bed E.R. to see if the X-rays were back on the patient who was shouting the loudest. They weren’t. Brandon Glass, the Saturday night tech, had to take care of both X-ray and lab, and sometimes he couldn’t keep up. He never attempted to disguise his resentment when Lukas gave him more orders.

“I’m not done with you yet, Moron,” one of the bikers muttered to the other through the thin curtain. “If my baby’s got a scratch on her, I’ll take it out of your hide.”

The privacy curtains were open, and Lukas turned around to glance at both men. The mouthy one held an ice pack to his nose, and the skin around his eyes had already begun to darken. Blood matted strands of his brown hair and stained his black T-shirt. Thanks to his running monologue, everybody within earshot knew that his “baby” was his Harley-Davidson. Thanks to his temper—and that of his antagonist in the next cubicle—and a broken beer bottle, his left forearm had just been prepped for suture repair.

Lukas sniffed. The room even smelled like motor oil and alcohol…and pot.

The other biker, who wore black jeans and boots and a black leather vest with nothing else, lay with his head turned way from his adversary. His name was Marin—from which, obviously, his biker buddies had hung the moniker of Moron, like little kids taunting one another. Marin’s antagonist attitude had apparently dissipated with the dwindling effects of the alcohol and other drugs coursing through his veins. His eyes gradually closed as Lukas watched. Good. They were winding down. Maybe the police could concentrate on breaking up barroom fights tonight. And maybe they could spend some time searching for that little girl who had disappeared from the Herald city park last week—if that acre of rusted swings and overgrown grass could be called a park. Lukas had overheard a conversation about that yesterday morning between a couple of policemen who were waiting for their prisoner to be X-rayed. Rumor said it was a kidnapping, and she apparently wasn’t the first child to disappear lately in Central Missouri. It made Lukas sick to think about it.

“Dr. Bower, the films are back,” came a strong, deep female voice behind Lukas.

He turned to see Tex McCaffrey—no one ever called her Theresa—hanging the X-rays up on the lighted panel.

“I had to do them myself. Godzilla’s in a bad mood tonight.” She cast a glare toward the open door that led directly into the radiology department. “Can’t get good help around here anymore.”

Lukas wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with her. Tex was the paramedic-bouncer in this joint, and she served as the E.R. nurse on Saturday nights and quite a few weekdays, from what Lukas could pick up from the nursing schedule. If something came in she couldn’t handle, she could call for a nurse from the twenty-bed floor—not that Lukas had heard of that happening. He couldn’t imagine efficient, self-assured Tex getting anything she couldn’t handle. In just the short amount of time he’d worked with her, he’d been very impressed by her skills…and her size. He didn’t have the nerve to ask how tall she was, but he had to look up at her to make eye contact, so she was taller than five-ten.

Lukas checked the films, nodded, returned to the sink. Nothing broken. “Ready to help me with the sutures?” he asked.

“Got it all set up. I cleansed it, then irrigated it with five hundred of saline.” She paused and grinned in the direction of the glowering patient in question. She blew a couple of stray strands of curly dark blond hair from her face. “Care to guess his alcohol level? Three-twenty.” She almost sounded proud of him as she stepped in his direction. “I put the suture tray out of his reach.”

Broad-shouldered Tex was in her early thirties and could probably throw the whole biker gang on their kickstands if they got too rowdy. She was also Lukas’s next-door neighbor in a duplex at the edge of town. Her first cousin was Lauren McCaffrey, who was once one of Lukas’s favorite nurses down at Knolls—until she got him involved in this mess.

Lukas pulled on a pair of sterile gloves as he followed Tex’s athletic form to the curtained exam cubicle. She had set out 5.0 nylon for the suture and the requested lidocaine for anesthetic. Good. He glanced at the patient’s name on the chart again, hoping he could pronounce the last name properly. Proper name enunciation helped raise the patient comfort level, and he really wanted this particular patient to be comfortable.

“We’re ready to start, Mr. Golho—”

“I told you when I came in, don’t call me mister,” the muscled, tattooed man growled from beneath the ice pack on his nose. “Nobody calls me mister when I’m on the road.”

Oh, yeah. Lukas glanced at a note Tex had penciled in on her chart. So much for proper name enunciation. How could he have forgotten? “Catcher.”

“Ha!” came a voice from the other side of the curtain. Apparently Catcher’s antagonist hadn’t fallen asleep after all. “Why don’t you tell ’em where you got the name?”

“Shut up.”

“You want to know where it came from, Doc? They called him that ’cause he used to ride without a shield, and he caught bugs in his teeth.”

“I said shut up!” Catcher came halfway off his exam bed before Tex grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back.

“How do you feel about another tattoo, Catcher?” she asked, giving him a leering grin as she eased him back onto the exam bed. “Dr. Bower, here, is gonna test your pain tolerance.”

While Lukas cringed at her choice of words, Catcher repositioned the ice pack on his nose and laid his head back against the pillow. “No prob. Go to it.” He closed his eyes.

Lukas nodded. “Okay, Catcher. Have you ever had an allergic reaction to any anesthetic in the past?”

One eye came open. “Why?”

“Because I’ll be injecting lidocaine into the wound.”

“No, you won’t.” Both eyes were open now, and their dark brown-gray gaze held Lukas in a hard stare.

“Excuse me?”

“No ’caines. Can’t do them.”

No lidocaine? No anesthesia? Lukas did not want to hear this. He did not feel safe sticking a needle and Dermalon into the flesh of an already combative drunk. “You mean you’ve had a reaction in the past?”

“I mean I’ve been busting a cocaine habit, and I’m not going back to that.” Catcher took a firmer grip on his ice pack. “Just do it.”

Lukas looked at Tex and shrugged. Coming to work in Herald had been a big mistake. Oh, Lord, let my fingers be tender, because any moment I may have to eat them.

“Am I gonna die now?” Crystal’s matter-of-fact tone stabbed the silence in the exam room.

Mercy turned from her vigil by the telephone, where she’d been waiting for Dr. Boxley to return her call. Thank goodness Odira was still in the other room. “No, honey.” She got up and crossed to Crystal’s side and pressed the back of her hand against the child’s face. “You’re just sick again. Are you feeling worse?”

“No.”

Mercy gently stuck the wand of the tympanic thermometer into Crystal’s ear. She waited a few seconds to get a reading. The temp was almost back down to normal. “Aren’t you feeling any better?”

Crystal tilted her head sideways, seriously considering the question. “Yes.”

Mercy sat down on the exam stool next to the bed and took Crystal’s left hand in both of her own. “Then why do you think you’re going to die?”

Crystal’s clear water-blue eyes held Mercy’s for a long, quiet moment. “A girl at school told me.”

“Then don’t listen to her.”

“But then I asked Gramma. She said I might, but when I do, I’ll go straight to heaven and I’ll never get sick again.” She paused for a few seconds. “I’d like that.”

As a mother, Mercy couldn’t help imagining her own daughter saying those words. She’d never heard a child so young expressing a wish to die. What hurt the worst was the realization of Crystal’s suffering, both physical and emotional. From a year of treating Crystal, Mercy knew that the little girl, with her soft heart, worried more about her great-grandma Odira than she did about herself. Odira wasn’t in the best health, with her excess weight and high blood pressure. What would become of Crystal if anything happened to her great-grandmother?

“But, Crystal, we want to keep you here with us longer,” Mercy said softly. “I know it might be selfish of us, when heaven is so wonderful, but do you think you could be strong for Gramma and me?” Jesus, what do I say? How can this be happening? She tried not to think about the situation, but the questions grew too numerous too quickly. Her faith still felt so fragile.

“Gramma needs me,” Crystal said quietly. “I’ll stay awhile.”

They heard the sound of Odira’s footsteps and heavy breathing, and then she came lumbering through the open exam-room door. “I didn’t even think about using a Popsicle to get Crystal’s temperature down. Here’s a red one, her favorite. You’ve got a nice little freezer in there. Looks like you’ve got that back room all set up like an emergency room. I bet you use it a lot, what with the hospital—”

They heard the crash of a door flying open out in the waiting room, then the boom of a familiar voice—like a jet during takeoff. “Dr. Mercy! You in here?”

Clarence held the door open for Buck to carry Kendra through. “Dr. Mercy!” he called again. “Got those patients for you.” He tapped Buck’s shoulder and gestured toward the open doorway that led to the exam rooms at the back of the waiting room. When he’d telephoned Mercy she’d told him just to bring Kendra to the first exam room. Clarence knew where everything was. He should. He’d been here enough times.

After he’d finally lost enough weight to get around on his feet a little better, Dr. Mercy had made him come to her office once a week so she could weigh him and check him over. He hated going, hated the way the other patients in the waiting room stared at him and whispered. Still, when Mercy asked him to do something, he did it. If she asked nice.

Mercy came rushing down the hallway, her long dark hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, wearing baggy old jeans and a thick wool sweater. Her dark eyes looked tired. “Hi, Buck. Bring her back here. I have a bed ready for her. I’ll need you and Clarence to help keep an eye on her.” She reached forward and laid a gentle hand against Kendra’s cheek, and some of the tiredness cleared from her eyes. “Hang in there, Kendra. We’ll get you on some oxygen.” She pulled the stethoscope from around her neck, warmed it in her hand for a second, then placed it against Kendra’s chest.

Clarence watched Mercy as she guided Buck into the exam room and helped him lay his wife on the bed. He enjoyed watching her work. When she treated patients, she acted as if they were a part of her own family. Of course, that also meant she nagged them like family. At five feet eight, she was four inches shorter than Clarence, but there were times when she seemed bigger than life, especially when she stood over him as he balanced on that dinky little exam bed wearing nothing but his shorts and a sheet.

But the times she made the biggest impact on him were when she saw his depression and bullied it out of him. He didn’t get that way as often as he used to, but some days the heaviness of his thoughts messed him up big-time. Those were the days he didn’t want to diet, didn’t want to exercise, didn’t even want to get out of bed. That was when her tender toughness showed itself. She could look into his eyes and say, “Clarence, we’re going for a walk. Get your shoes on,” or “You haven’t come this far to give up. Just get through today,” and then she would tell Ivy to keep watch. And Ivy could be the queen of mean.

As soon as Buck eased Kendra down onto the exam bed, Kendra covered her face with her hands. Her body shook with sobs that grew louder and more forceful. “Why didn’t you just let me die?” She turned her head sideways on the pillow, and her light brown hair, as soft-looking as a sparrow’s breast, fell across her cheek. “Everybody’d be better off that way.”

Buck took a deep breath and hung his head, his square jaw working like a grinding machine. Buck was a big man, lots of muscles, with hair cut so short that his ears, which were already big, looked like doorknobs. He had a big heart, and nobody doubted that he loved his wife. Except her.

Clarence wished there was something he could do to help them both.

Mercy leaned over. “Kendra, tell me how you feel. Do you have a bad headache?”

Tears dripped across Kendra’s nose onto the pillow, and her lower lip trembled. “Yeah, real bad.”

Mercy gestured to Buck. “Would you please hook up the oxygen? I want her on a one hundred percent nonrebreather mask.” She reached toward a box beside the bed. “Kendra, I’m going to put this little clip on the end of your finger. It’s attached to something called a pulse oximeter, which will tell me how much oxygen you have in your system. And I’m sorry, honey, but I’m going to have to stick you for blood. It’s going to hurt, because I have to go deep enough for an artery. We’ve got to find out how aggressively we need to treat you. Buck, has she been confused?”

“Yes, at first.” Buck scrambled around until he found the tubing and mask he needed. “On the drive in I had the windows open, and she cleared up. Now she just keeps crying.” He stepped back over to his wife’s side.

Mercy leaned over Kendra again. “Are you dizzy? Do you feel sick to your stomach?”

Kendra’s face puckered. She covered it with her hands once more and didn’t reply.

Buck cleared his throat, tried to speak, cleared it again. “She was feeling sick earlier, Dr. Mercy. She had some shortness of breath.”

Mercy turned around and saw Clarence standing in the doorway. “Call an ambulance for me, would you?”

“No!” Kendra cried out. She reached toward Buck, eyes wide and frightened, and tried to sit up. “Don’t let them haul me away!”

“It isn’t for you,” Mercy took Kendra’s arm and eased her back down. “I have another patient tonight. I need to transport her over to the hospital, and I can’t leave you right now.”

Clarence picked up the telephone in the room, then hesitated and frowned at Mercy. “You want to call an ambulance to haul somebody less than a block? Doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mercy checked the pulse oximeter box. “Do you have a better idea? I have a sick child in there, and her great-grandmother isn’t in much better shape.”

“Let me take ’em.” Clarence spoke the words against his will, as if something outside himself were making the decision for him.

“I can drive, long as I can fit behind the wheel. I’m a mechanic, you know. My driver’s license is up to date.”

“Thank you, Clarence. Take my car.” Mercy leaned back over Kendra. “My keys are on the desk in my office, and use the south entrance at the hospital. Get a move on. They’re waiting for the patient.”

For a moment, disbelieving, he could only stare at her. Just like that? He hadn’t driven in two years, and she trusted him with her new car?

And then, in spite of the pain that still lingered in the room from Kendra’s tears and Buck’s stoic silence, he felt a glow of satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. For once, he was on the giving end.

Chapter Three

T ex blotted and held, blotted and held as Lukas finished the last of the twelve interrupted sutures on Catcher’s arm. The big biker hadn’t even grunted through the ordeal. In fact, Lukas was sure that he himself had been the only one who grimaced every time the needle pierced flesh. Even with alcohol to mask the pain, it had to hurt. This man was tough.

Company had begun to arrive halfway through the procedure, as the first of Catcher’s biker friends came clomping into the E.R. carrying plastic packs of pimento cheese sandwiches and chips and soda they’d purchased from the vending machine in the waiting room. After an irritable glance in their direction, Tex had shown no reaction to their arrival. Even when one of the buddies came in and handed half a sandwich to Catcher, Lukas didn’t make a remark. They weren’t supposed to have food in the E.R. and if OSHA found out about the infraction, there would be complaints and fines and forms filled out in quadruplicate, but Lukas wasn’t in the mood to play hall monitor to a bunch of aging tattoos this early on a Sunday morning. Most of them just came in for a minute to check on their buddies, then wandered out to the waiting room, which was separated from the treatment area by a door and a sliding window where the secretary sat.

One husky woman wearing tight denim jeans and a heavy gray sweater shoved through the dividing door, food and soda tucked against her side by her left arm, holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her right hand.

“Hey, Catcher!” she blared. “They treatin’ you okay back here? I’ll bash heads if they’re not.” She took a deep whiff of air. “Phew, smells like medicine and puke back here. Don’t you guys have any air freshener?”

Lukas clipped the nylon thread. “Okay, two more and we’re finished poking you, Catcher.”

Someone else in leather and tattoos stepped into the E.R. doorway from the waiting room beyond. “Hey, look, they got a TV! Hey, nurse, you guys got cable here?” A blare of music screamed through the rooms.

Lukas heard Tex’s sharp intake of breath and caught a glimpse of her angry scowl, and he shook his head at her. “We’re almost finished here.” Lord, please just hold this all together a little longer. Give me patience and compassion.

A loud clank and clatter pierced his concentration. His hands almost jerked the final suture too tightly. Neither he nor Tex could look up from their work just now, but as soon as he’d snipped the last of the threads, Tex put her things down and snapped off her gloves.

“If you’ll finish up here, I’ll check out the crash,” she said.

Lukas could almost see her flexing her muscles as she metamorphosed from Tex the paramedic to Tex the bouncer. Uh-oh. Not only was she about to make a scene, but she was also about to make him look like a coward. He did have a little pride left.

“Um, Tex, why don’t—”

Catcher groaned. “Oh, Doc, I think I’m gonna hurl.”

With a final glance over his shoulder to see Tex strutting off to bash heads, Lukas grabbed an emesis basin. “Breathe in through your nose if you can, Catcher, then out through your mouth. There you go.” He took the ice pack from Catcher’s limp hand and placed it against the man’s forehead.

More voices shouted from the other room. Tex’s was the loudest. “I said put that chair back down where it belongs and give me that coffeepot!”

Lukas had Lauren McCaffrey to thank for all this. Sweet-faced, innocent-eyed Lauren. When her cousin Tex heard through the family grapevine that there was an E.R. physician temporarily without a job, she’d called Lauren, looking for a replacement for a doctor on suspension.

“Scenic views, right there on the Lake of the Ozarks,” Lauren had said. “Small-town E.R. probably a lot like Knolls. It’ll be like a vacation. How much trouble could a five-bed E.R. be?”

And so Lukas had signed on for three months—until the earliest estimated time of completion for the Knolls E.R.

More shouts rang out from the waiting room, and then Lukas heard the squall of a siren as an ambulance pulled up outside, lights flashing.

This place needed more staff on Saturday nights. It was time to call the police. And he would never trust Lauren McCaffrey again.

“No!” Kendra’s shoulders came up from the pillow, her hands grasping Buck’s shoulders in desperation. Her eyes widened in fear above the clear oxygen mask. “You’re gonna shut me away like I’m crazy!”

Mercy saw Buck’s expression freeze as he held his wife.

“No, Kendra,” she said firmly. “That’s not what this is.” She took the younger woman by the shoulders, eased her back down and readjusted the mask. “Listen to me for a moment.” She waited until she felt some of the tension release from Kendra’s arms, then took her by the hand and squeezed. “Honey, you’re in trouble. You have an illness that is causing you to behave the way you are, and we need to get you help.” She paused. How would she explain this to a child? “We need to protect you until we can get your illness under control with medication. We’re going to put you in the hospital for ninety-six hours, and the doctors and nurses up there will keep a close eye on you and make sure you’re safe.”

Kendra held Mercy’s gaze for a moment, focusing first on Mercy’s left eye, then on the right, with disconcerting intensity. Her whole body quivered, and again tears dripped down her cheeks. “Where?”

“Cox North in Springfield. They’re specially trained to take care of cases like this.”

“What kind of a case is this? What’re you talking about?”

Mercy tried to pick her words carefully, but she had to be honest. “From what I’ve heard and seen, and from what I know of you personally, I’d say you have bipolar disorder, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so…”

Kendra tightened her grip on Mercy’s hands. “Does that mean I’m crazy?”

“No,” Buck snapped in frustration. He closed his eyes and sighed, combing his fingers through his short hair. He stepped back from the bed and flexed his shoulders wearily. “What am I going to do with her, Dr. Mercy?”

“Stop talkin’ over my head like I’m a kid.”

“Then stop acting like one.”

The antipathy shot between them like an electric bolt as their gazes held for a long moment.

“This won’t help,” Mercy said softly. She gave them a few seconds to calm down as she watched the changing emotions play over Kendra’s face. She looked like a young Michelle Pfeiffer, with an exquisite beauty that could easily have transmitted itself onto the movie or television screen. But all she’d ever wanted was a husband and children. Lots of children. They’d discovered recently that she couldn’t have kids, just a few months after her fireman father was killed in the line of duty.

“I won’t go to any psychiatrist.” Kendra’s soft soprano voice once again held anger and pain.

“You’re going,” Buck said, frustration still evident in his voice.

“I’m sorry, Kendra,” Mercy said, keeping her voice firm. “You tried to commit suicide tonight, and we can’t take the chance that it’ll happen again. Too many people love you.”

Kendra snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

Mercy leaned forward. “You feel that way right now because your mind isn’t processing your emotions properly. But your condition can be treated. You’re sick, and just like we’d do if you had some kind of bacteria in your body that was making you sick, we can treat you with something that will help your brain work better. We’re going to keep you safe and administer some medication and give you time to heal.”

Kendra glanced around the small exam room as if seeking a way to escape. “Can’t you just do that here? Why do I have to go all the way to Springfield?”

“Because our hospital doesn’t have the facilities to care for you.”

Kendra closed her eyes, and her whole body stiffened. “You mean you don’t have a padded room here,” she said.

Mercy understood, and the identification she felt with Kendra right now was disconcerting. Depression was painful, but manic depression must be like standing on a fault line during an earthquake. It was frightening how easily your mind could betray you.

Kendra sniffed and wiped several stray tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. When Buck grabbed a tissue from the exam-room desk and tried to give it to her, she ignored him and withdrew from his touch.

Mercy suppressed a sigh. She’d tried several times to explain to Buck why she thought Kendra was behaving the way she had been in the past six months. And Buck had tried, without success, to bring Kendra in to see Mercy for a thorough exam. All he’d managed was to get her checked for strep throat a couple of months ago.

The tears in Kendra’s eyes shimmered like blue crystal. “What kinds of drugs would they make me take?”

“I’m not sure,” Mercy said. “The doctor in Springfield will decide that.”

“I don’t want a doctor in Springfield. You know me better than they would.”

Buck reached over and covered her hand with his. She tried to jerk free, but he held her fast. “Stop fighting this, Kendra.” He looked at Mercy. “I know the procedure. If you’ll do the paperwork and call Cox North, I’ll take her up. I’m a trained EMT, so it’ll be legal, and I’ll see if Clarence will come with me, just to make sure she stays in the truck.” He shot Kendra a biting glance. “Otherwise, Kendra, the ambulance will have to take you, with a policeman riding shotgun.”

“Why should you care?” she snapped back. “Just as long as you get rid of me. They could be hauling me to the junkyard.”

“Cox is a good facility,” Mercy said quietly. “I know from firsthand experience. I was there for a ninety-six-hour involuntary stay five and a half years ago, and I remember the time well. The staff treated me with patience and concern.”

Husband and wife focused their suddenly silent attention on her. Neither showed surprise at her words, because most people in town knew about the incident.

Mercy had seldom spoken about those days, though, and she did so now with difficulty. During a nasty custody battle over Tedi, at the same time Mercy’s father was dying of cirrhosis of the liver, Mercy sought help for her own depression. Unfortunately, the physician on call that night was a buddy of her ex-husband, Theo. They had joined forces, double-crossed Mercy and had her committed before she could do anything to stop them. When Theo used the incident in court against her, she lost custody of Tedi. She had worked five years to rebuild her practice.

For months after that horrible time in her life, she’d vowed never to “ninety-six” a patient. She’d been adamant about it until the night when a patient she had so kindly released nearly died from a second suicide attempt.

She placed her hand on Kendra’s arm. “Honey, I’m sorry, but you no longer have a say in the matter. You’re going to Cox North.”

Clarence carefully parked Mercy’s car exactly where he’d gotten it. He pulled the keys out of the ignition, then leaned heavily on the door and steering wheel to heave himself out. He couldn’t get that little girl, Crystal, or her grandma Odira, out of his mind. Because of his help they were tucked safe and warm in a comfortable hospital room with smiling, cheerful nurses. Sure, he’d only driven them a block down the road, and any taxi could have done that, but the taxis in Knolls didn’t run this time of night.

Most people wouldn’t understand being so helpless. They could do for themselves and didn’t think much about it. But up until just a few months ago he’d been stuck in his bed most of the time, too heavy and in too much pain from pulled muscles to even walk out the front door. He’d been so bad that even his own baby sister had nearly died trying to take care of him. A guy could feel like he’d lost his manhood in a situation like that, but tonight, in just the past couple of hours something had changed.

The squeaky hinges on the front door of Mercy’s clinic interrupted Clarence’s thoughts.

Buck Oppenheimer stepped out into the darkness. “Clarence, is that you?” He squinted and peered harder, raising his hand to shade his eyes from the glow in the room behind him. “I need a big favor.” His hoarse voice cracked with weariness as he pulled the door shut behind him.

Clarence shivered in the icy winter wind. “From me? Sure. What’s that?”

“Would you ride shotgun? Dr. Mercy said she’ll let me take Kendra to Springfield without a police escort if you’ll go along. I don’t want to take any chances. Kendra’s fighting this, and there’s no telling what she’ll do. Sorry, pal. I know it’ll be a long night for you, but—”

“When do we leave?”

Buck stared at him in silence for a moment. “Thanks, Clarence. You don’t know how much you’ve…helped.” His voice caught, and he turned away. “You can’t know what this means to me.”

“Wanna bet?” Clarence knew better than to get sentimental or sappy with Buck. “How about when you drove me to the E.R. when Darlene almost died? You visited me in the hospital when I wasn’t a very nice guy to be around.” Buck’s life had been the pits, too, back then. Kendra had kicked him out, and he’d been suspended from his job with the fire department pending an arson investigation.

Buck turned back around and held out his hand. “Call it even after tonight?”

Clarence took the hand and looked Buck in the eyes. “It’s never even, you know. That’s what friendship’s all about.”

Lukas hovered closely over seventy-year-old Mrs. Flaherty so he could hear her above the noise of the continuing party in the waiting room and the snores emanating from the sleeping bikers in two of the other exam rooms.

“Can’t figure out what happened,” Mrs. Flaherty said in a voice barely above a whisper. “One minute I was brushing my teeth at the sink, and the—”

“Catch that before it falls, Boots!” came a shout from the other room.

“—woke up no telling how long after that. I called my daughter, but before—”

“Hey! Get away from that set! I wanna watch—”

“—and you can imagine how she felt when she came in and found—”

Tex walked into the room. “I called the police, Dr. Bower. They’re busy with a break-in down at a dock and can’t come right away.” She glared over her shoulder at the noise. “If I had a stun gun…”

Mrs. Flaherty reached up and touched Lukas’s arm. “Dr. Bower, do you think I’m having a stroke or something?”

Lukas glanced over at the lady’s middle-aged daughter, who sat in the far north corner of the exam room, hands clasped at her knees.

“Mom was just lying there when I found her, Dr. Bower. I couldn’t wake her up for at least five minutes. When I did I just brought her in. I didn’t wait to call an ambulance or anything. Do you think it’s her heart?”

Lukas studied his patient’s chart—or that part of it Tex had managed to fill out before leaving to call for backup. There were no security personnel at this hospital. Mrs. Flaherty had managed to walk in assisted by her daughter, and she showed no muscle weakness. A quick finger-stick glucose check had revealed normal blood sugar.

Another shout of raucous laughter reached them, and Mrs. Flaherty flinched. She didn’t look bad now. Her color was pink and healthy, and perspiration no longer beaded her skin. Lukas would put her on a monitor.

Another shout. And from the exam rooms where Catcher and his friend were sleeping came loud snoring.

Lukas knew trying to listen to Mrs. Flaherty’s chest right now would do no good. He wouldn’t hear anything above the noise. This town needed military intervention. He took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on the tray table, then took a deep breath. He was stuck with Catcher and friend until they sobered up, but he would not allow their crowd of troublemakers to endanger the lives of other patients in this facility, not while he was in charge—or at least not as long as he was alive. How long that would be after he’d voluntarily thrown himself to the wolves…Oh, well, time to get tough.

“Tex, keep an eye on Mrs. Flaherty. Get her on a monitor, do an EKG, check electrolytes, and if you can hear above the noise, get a history. If I’m not back in five minutes, call the county sheriff. Or maybe the ambulance…No, wait a minute, Quinn’s still on duty. Forget that.”

Anger. Work with the anger now. He wrenched open the door that separated the waiting room from the E.R. proper and flung it back so hard it crashed against the wall. Then the door bounced back and slammed him in the shoulder and shoved him sideways. He felt the pain, which only served to make him angrier. As he stomped into the battered waiting room, he saw at least ten pairs of eyes directed toward him. Silence fell for just a moment, and he made his move.

“Everybody! Out of here! Now!” he shouted in his deepest, most fury-filled voice, but just then a commercial blared on the TV, negating the effect. He continued anyway for a few seconds, taking advantage of the shock on their faces and the impetus his anger gave him to overwhelm the terror he knew was in his mind somewhere, seeking an outlet.

“Look at this mess!” He gestured toward the chairs toppled onto their sides and the pages of newspapers scattered across the floor. The coffeepot was empty, and it looked as if half the coffee had spilled onto the carpet.

He marched over to the TV and ripped the cord from the socket, plunging the room into complete, blessed silence this time. “I said out of here! This isn’t your own personal nightclub.” So much for patience and compassion.

The partiers stared at him as if he were an alien being. Then three of the biggest, meanest-looking men exchanged nods and slowly moved toward him.

Lukas swallowed and forced himself not to back up or turn and run. Lord? I could use some help here!

“We’re not goin’ anywhere till Catcher and Moron can come with us!” a woman shouted back.

What was her road name? Birdbrain? What a weird bunch. He glanced at the three men who continued to move toward him, one step at a time, from three different areas of the room, as though they were stalking a wild animal. He just hoped the end wasn’t too painful.

He cleared his throat and tried not to flick a nervous glance at the stalkers. Don’t act afraid. “I’ll gladly release them if any one of you is sober enough to sign them out and take care of them until they can take care of themselves.” He looked from face to face—three women, seven men, with grubby, not-quite-in-focus faces—and didn’t get a volunteer. “Fine, then. I’ll keep them here.”

“Fine, then. We’ll stay, too,” the woman shouted.

“Then you’re a brave bunch,” Lukas said.

“Why’s that?” she taunted.

“When Catcher finds out you left his bike alone down by the lake for anybody to carry off, nobody will be able to save you.”

“My bike!” The loud, gruff voice came from the E.R. entranceway, and at the sound all attention pivoted in that direction. Even Lukas’s stalkers halted their steps to turn and see Catcher, all six feet four inches, two hundred fifty pounds of him, glowering from the threshold, his clothes splattered with drying blood.

He took a step forward, and Lukas wondered if the rest of them could see how unsteady the movement was.

“You left my baby down there all alone!” he thundered, then groaned and hunched forward. Lukas rushed over to grab him before he fell. But Catcher straightened himself and sent Lukas a warning glance. He raised his good arm and pointed toward the door. “Get out of here! All of you, get out of here! Boots, you’re walking, and I’m taking your bike. If my baby has a scratch on her when I get there, I’ll take it out of all your hides!”

Lukas’s stalkers were the first ones out the door, followed by Birdbrain and the other women. Catcher turned to bring up the rear of the procession. Lukas let him go.

Chapter Four

A t two o’clock Sunday morning Mercy stood on the front step of the Richmond Clinic and watched the taillights of Buck Oppenheimer’s big red pickup disappear into the cold darkness. Kendra’s condition was stabilized. She had recovered, clinically, from the carbon monoxide poisoning and now sat between Buck and Clarence on her way to four days of forced hospitalization in Springfield.

This was the right thing to do; Mercy knew it.

So why did it hurt so badly to remember the look of betrayal in Kendra’s eyes when the men placed her gently into the cab of the truck? Mercy shivered at the wind and stepped back inside the waiting room, though she didn’t shut the door.

As she watched tiny flakes of snow glitter in the light from the front step, other memories haunted her—of seeing her daughter terrified and in danger, and being unable to help; of feeling frightened herself by her own father’s alcoholism. She’d lived with past pain for so long she frequently had trouble enjoying the present.

Another gust of wind scattered tiny flakes across her face, and she finally closed and locked the door behind her. “Lord, help Kendra to see the truth of Your love,” she whispered. “Heal her, Lord. And please complete the healing in me.”

Mercy had begun, in the past few months, to put her patients in God’s hands as quickly as possible when her worry for them began. All she had to do now was learn to leave them there, to stop trying to control every situation.

She went into the front office and e-mailed the final pages they would need at Cox North for Kendra’s admittance.

The telephone rang beside her as the information was posted, and she picked up quickly.

“Hi, Dr. Mercy, this is Vickie over at Knolls Community. I thought you might still be in your office. I just wanted to let you know that Crystal and Odira are both settled in, and Crystal was already asleep when I left the room. We’ll keep a close eye on both of them tonight.”

Mercy felt a little easing of tension at the nurse’s reassuring tone. “Thank you, Vickie. I’ll be over in the morning to check on Crystal.”

After hanging up, Mercy walked back into her office.

She stepped over to her desk and plopped down into the leather chair for a moment. She stretched out her arms and flexed her shoulders, rolled her head around and took a few deep breaths. Odira hadn’t looked healthy tonight. Maybe in the morning Mercy could check her out.

Time to go home, but right now she was too tired to move. Would she ever again get a whole eight hours of sleep in a row? Should she consider getting a partner to take part of the load? At one time she’d hoped Lukas might stay around and help her with the influx until the E.R. was complete. She’d even dropped a few hints on several occasions, during those rare times the two of them had been together in the past three months. He hadn’t caught the hint. She hid her disappointment, telling herself that he was, at heart, an emergency physician. Family practice would probably bore him.

But deep down she found herself wondering was he, for some reason, avoiding her?

She knew he cared for her. She knew it. She could see tenderness in his eyes when he looked at her and hear gentleness in his voice. He cared a lot about Tedi, as well, and the two of them spent hours together laughing and talking and working on homework assignments when Lukas was in town.

Mercy couldn’t help the doubts that surfaced, memories of last fall when Lukas had told her he couldn’t see her anymore. But hadn’t all that changed? During the explosions at the hospital, Mercy experienced a more powerful explosion in her own life—she’d realized she could no longer deny God’s power or her need for Him. She had accepted Christ and had announced her newfound faith to a congregation of people at the Covenant Baptist Church. Since then she had witnessed the power of her new faith in many ways. The most obvious was her sudden ability to get along with Theodore—not with perfect ease and not always without resentment, but enough to make Tedi comfortable when they met together.

She glanced at the framed snapshots she kept of Tedi on the credenza—baby pictures, and then school pictures from kindergarten to the most recent sixth-grade shot. Tedi was the joy of her life. Just spending time with that bubbly, outspoken child renewed her, made her laugh and gave her courage. After everything Tedi had been through, from the divorce nearly six years ago to the near-death experience last year, she was recovering and growing every day. No parent could be more proud.

And then Mercy’s gaze drifted to the unframed snapshot of Lukas, the only picture she had of him. She still remembered the day she’d snapped it. He was covered in mud from a hike in the rain. His glasses were steamed up enough to camouflage the blue of his eyes, but not enough to hide the smile that radiated across his face, relieving a habitually serious expression. In the picture, his light brown hair was darkened to coffee. His well-built five-foot-ten frame carried him well, and somehow the way he stood and looked at the camera revealed his affection for her. Or maybe his demeanor had impressed itself upon her so much since last spring that she automatically saw it when she looked at him.

She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She would never forget their first hike together in the Mark Twain National Forest in August last year. The spiderwebs were thick across the narrow, overgrown logging trail they followed. Lukas had insisted on walking ahead of her, watching for snakes, knocking down the webs for her, even though he hated spiders. His thoughtfulness was one of the many traits about him that endeared him to her. She didn’t have the heart to point out that she’d been hiking those trails for years and was used to the spiders and the snakes and the ticks and the chiggers. She let him help her over the rough spots, as he had been doing in her life since April. But she was in another rough spot now, and he wasn’t here.

Did he know how much she needed him?

Lukas paused at the threshold to the E.R. call room. A big black spider at least an inch in width skittered across the wall and behind the curtain beside the twin-size bed. Lukas hated spiders. His oldest brother, Ben, had been bitten by a brown recluse years ago and would always bear a deep, ugly scar on his right forearm, just above the wrist. He’d been in the hospital for a week and a half. Lukas was only eight at the time, and the memory had scarred his psyche worse than it had Ben’s.

Good thing Mercy wasn’t here to see Wimp Bower in action. Of course, if Mercy were here, he would put on a brave front and chase the spider down and kill it, gritting his teeth and shuddering with every move. And Mercy would be laughing because she knew how much he hated spiders. And he wouldn’t mind, because he loved to hear her laugh. She laughed so much more now than she did when he first met her.

And here he was thinking about her again.

Ignoring the slight scent of mildew that hovered throughout the call room, he stepped inside and crossed to the student desk placed beneath the wall phone.

And just then it rang. He jumped backward, as if the spider hovering somewhere in the darkness had suddenly growled an attack signal.

Irritated with himself, he grabbed up the receiver. “Yes.”

“Dr. Bower, a man just came in by ambulance,” said the new, inexperienced secretary, Carmen. “They say he looks like a stroke. He’s strapped down, and Tex had just left to go down to the cafeteria to find something to eat, and I’m all alone here.”

“Is he responsive?” Lukas hadn’t heard an ambulance report, and he’d only walked back here a couple of minutes ago.

“Just a minute and I’ll ask.”

“Never mind. I’ll be right there. Have Tex paged over the speakers.” Lukas hung up and returned to the E.R. to the overhead blare of Carmen’s voice. He walked into the cardiac room to find Quinn Carnes and Sandra Davis—the paramedic and emergency tech—transferring a seemingly unconscious elderly man from a gurney to the exam cot. The patient was fully immobilized, arms and all, to a long spine board, with head blocks, C-collar, the works. He had a hundred percent nonrebreather mask over his face. But no IV. No ET tube, so his airway was not protected.

“Hey there, Doc,” Quinn said, walking over to the desk in the exam room and tossing his paperwork down. He reached up in a habitual gesture and scratched at the thick, wavy brown-gray hair that grew to his shirt collar. “Got you a gomer here.”

Lukas flinched. He hated that term. Gomer meant “Get Out of My E.R.” and was used by burned-out, unprofessional personnel who felt the patient wasn’t worth their trouble.

“His wife found him down and unresponsive and dialed nine-one-one,” Quinn continued. “Looks like a stroke. Finger-stick glucose was one-oh-seven on scene. The wife’s on the way in her own car, but no long-playing record here.”

Lukas cringed as he stepped over to the side of the bed, and he saw Sandra glare at her partner with obvious disgust. Although Quinn was probably in his midforties, he apparently had only been on an ambulance crew for a couple of years. Lukas believed he never should have been allowed to work with patients in the first place, but there were probably few contenders for the job in a town like Herald. Lukas knew the man was presently working as many hours as possible with the ambulance service and bugging hospital personnel to give him some shifts in the E.R. If Lukas had anything to say about it, that wasn’t going to happen.

“What’s the gentleman’s name? ” Lukas asked, unable to keep irritation from his voice.

“Mr. Wayne Powell,” Sandra replied for Quinn. Her voice was hesitant, soft, as it had been the other time Lukas had seen her in here. “His poor wife was almost hysterical when she called.”

Lukas leaned forward and squeezed the patient’s upper arm. “Mr. Powell?”

“Told you he’s out of it, Doc,” Quinn said over his shoulder as he sat down to do paperwork.

Lukas took the patient’s arm in a firmer grip. “Mr. Powell! Mr. Powell, can you hear me?” he called more loudly. “I’m Dr. Bower. Try to open your eyes if you can.”

No response.

Tex walked into the room, slightly breathless from her rush back down the hallway. Her large frame and broad shoulders seemed to fill the already crowded little exam room. “Can’t leave this place for two minutes without—Uh-oh, what’ve we got here?”

“I’m still trying to find out.” Lukas rubbed his knuckles hard against the man’s sternum and didn’t even get a groan. The sternal rub would rouse him if anything would. “Tex, we’ve got an unresponsive patient with an unprotected airway,” he said. “Set up for an intubation, but first let’s get the suction set up.” He couldn’t believe Quinn hadn’t intubated this patient.

Tex turned to the cabinets on the left and opened a door to pull out some equipment.

Quinn looked over at them and gave a quick chirp of irritated laughter. “Would you relax, Doc? Don’t you think I’d have done that if he needed it? He’s not throwing up or anything. His airway’s clear.”

Lukas grabbed the black box that Tex handed to him. He broke the safety lock and opened the box, pulled out the laryngoscope and endotracheal tube and snapped the blade into place. “An unobstructed airway is not the same as a protected airway. If this is a stroke patient, he’s at high risk for aspiration.”

Tex came around with the suction. “Got it, Dr. Bower.”

Lukas reached over to pull off the oxygen mask just as Mr. Powell retched. “Tex, get the suction catheter in. Quinn, Sandra, help me here.” He reached for the grips and turned the patient toward him as Sandra rushed to help. Good. The man’s body didn’t slip. They’d done a good job of securing him. Quinn ambled over to help.

“Sloppy job, Quinn,” Tex snapped above the sound of the suction. “Sloppy, sloppy. Why didn’t you intubate this guy on scene? I’d have taught you how if you needed me to. Maybe I could teach you how to do an IV, too, while I was at it, and how to hook up a monitor. And I didn’t hear your radio report. I was gone less than a minute. Trying to sneak up on us?”

“No time,’ Quinn said. “We were busy, and we were just about a mile away. There wasn’t time for little nonessentials.”

“You call lifesaving and preparation nonessentials?” Tex snapped. “If you’d spend a little more time worrying about your patients and less time whining about your bank account, you might make a good paramedic someday.”

“You try going on scene every once in a while.”

Tex returned his glare and shook her head. “I did it for five years.”

“Sure, but most of that was years ago,” he taunted. “Things have changed. You think being a med-school dropout makes you special.”

“I didn’t drop out, you stupid jerk.”

“Tex,” Lukas snapped, “keep your mind on what you’re doing.”

“Sorry, Dr. Bower.” She suctioned for a couple more seconds, then pulled the tube back. “He looks clear.”

“Good, let’s get him back over. I need an IV now, and give him Ativan, two milligrams. Sandra, take over that suction and keep it handy, just in case.” He called over to the secretary across the E.R. “Carmen, I need an EKG, CBC, electrolytes, PT and PTT—”

Carmen turned around in her chair, eyes widening in panic. “What? Slow down, I can’t get all this down.” She grabbed a pen and a pad. “Now, what was that?”

“Just do a standard cardiac workup,” Lukas said gently. “It’s taped on the wall to the right of the phone.” He turned back to Mr. Powell and tried to wake him up again. No response. He pulled out his penlight and checked the man’s pupils. They were sluggish, and the one on the left looked a little dilated. Nothing obvious.

“Call for a helicopter launch. He’s going to have to be flown to Columbia.” Lukas slipped off Mr. Powell’s shoe and, with the point of an ink pen, ran the tip up the bottom of the man’s foot. The big toe curled upward.

Positive Babinski’s. The abnormal reflex was found in stroke victims. Quinn should have intubated.

“Dr. Mercy, help me.” The feminine voice drifted to her from the dark mist, soft and indistinct. A sudden, frantic pounding reached her, and then the quiet voice again. “Help me.”

Mercy awakened suddenly with her face pressed against the hard surface of her desk. The overhead light blared down on her, and her right shoulder and arm were splayed across the back of her chair, cramped and stiff. The pounding continued to sound in her head from her dream, but as she listened all she heard were soft puffs of wind against the window and the scratch of branches from the cedar tree against the rain gutter.

She got up, stretched and walked to the darkened waiting room. All was quiet. Was she dreaming about Kendra? Were the worry and stress of the past few months finally taking their toll?

Just in case, she opened the entrance door, and freezing wind rushed in, mixed with a powdery feathering of snow. She shivered and stepped back into the warmth but didn’t close the door for a moment.

“Hello?” she called out into the cold. She felt foolish. Of course it had been a dream. “Is anybody out there?”

The snow had barely frosted the walk, and there probably wouldn’t be any accumulation. There hadn’t been much in the forecast for the weekend. Of course, that could change.

She shivered and started to close the door and lock it when she caught sight of something in the swirling snow, just outside the door—the bare outline of a footprint. Even as she watched, the force of the wind obliterated it.

“Hello?” she called again.

No one answered.

Lukas sat at his tiny workstation in the E.R. a few feet from the secretary. Carmen muttered under her breath every time she picked up a new chart to code. She had asked him so many questions in the past thirty minutes that he’d almost decided to offer to do the coding himself, but he wasn’t sure he knew the routine, either. Every E.R. had a different office procedure.

He rested his chin on his fist and fought to keep his eyes open, listening to Marin’s snores in the curtained exam room across the small aisle from the desk. Tex and Carmen were making bets on whether or not the bikers would return to get their buddy.

Carmen whistled suddenly. “Who’da thought Catcher would have such good insurance? Too bad he left AMA. Now we’ll probably be stuck with the bill.”

Lukas shook his head and picked up the phone to check on Mrs. Flaherty, who, at his request and upon agreement by the attending physician, had been placed on telemetry on the floor. He knew it wasn’t his responsibility, but he wanted to know how she was doing and if she’d had another episode of syncope—unconsciousness.

Finally a harried, breathless female voice answered. “What is it?”

“Uh, yes, hello, this is Dr. Bower checking on our telemetry patient, Mrs. Flaherty. Is everything okay there?”

There was a short silence, then a sigh. “Sorry, Dr. Bower, we didn’t have a unit available. Dr. Cain downgraded the admission for us so we could keep her here.”

Lukas let that sink in for a moment. “Mrs. Flaherty isn’t on telemetry?” Nobody was watching her? His request had been ignored? “Dr. Cain specifically agreed with me that—”

“Look, we’re operating on a skeleton crew, Dr. Bower. The patient looked fine to us, and she’s just a couple of doors down. We check on her when we can. Mr. Amos wouldn’t allow us to transfer her.”

Lukas clamped his teeth down on his tongue for a moment. Since when did the administrator for this hospital have a license to practice medicine? There had been a few guarded remarks about the fact that the man was paranoid about spending money, but when did money become more precious than human lives?

“How many nurses are on the floor tonight?” Lukas finally asked.

There was a pause. “One RN and one LPN.”

“That’s it? What’s the census?”

“We have nineteen patients on the floor.”

“And you’re the only RN in the whole hospital?”

“That’s about the size of it, Dr. Bower,” she said, sounding suddenly weary. “And you’d better not let Mr. Amos hear you complaining, or we’ll have one less doctor.” She hung up.

Lukas groaned. What else was new?

Chapter Five

T he loud, piercing cry of a hungry newborn baby streaked through the darkness of nineteen-year-old Marla Moore’s dreams, echoing through the small room like a ricocheting bullet. It was her baby. Her little Jerod. And only she could stop the crying.

Even as she opened her eyes to the dim room illumined by the night-light, her hands automatically pushed back the blankets and pillows. With stiff limbs and swollen feet, she climbed from bed as if Jerod were pressing a remote control programmed for Mommy.

She stepped once more onto the cold painted concrete floor, but before she reached the used crib that she’d bought at a yard sale, she tripped over the house shoes she’d pulled off when she got into bed. She stumbled backward against the bedside stand. The corner of the stand dug hard into the inside of her right calf, and she cried out. She grabbed the side of the crib for support.

Jerod’s cries grew louder and more insistent.

“Stop it!” she snapped. “Just stop it!” She bent over and rubbed her calf, then reached down and picked the newborn up into her arms. Feed him. Then she could get back to sleep for another couple of hours before she had to repeat the routine all over again.

She sat with him on the side of the bed and fumbled with her dirty pajama top. Everything was dirty. She barely had enough diapers for tomorrow, and she hadn’t done laundry in three weeks. How could she? Before she had Jerod, the doctor had told her to stay in bed so she wouldn’t go into premature labor. Now there was nobody to help her. Marla would have called a church for help, but every time she thought about calling someone, shame kept her from following through.

This little town had turned out to be a setting for a nightmare, and she was living it. She couldn’t help feeling she deserved some kind of punishment, but why did this little baby have to suffer for her sins?

Maybe he didn’t. There was an adoption agency in Jefferson City that her doctor had told her about. She had the card somewhere in her purse, and she could call them anytime, day or night. But she hadn’t even been able to think about asking for help without feeling horrible guilt.

Jerod’s cries stopped as soon as he started his early-morning snack, and gradually the pain in her leg began to let up. She’d have a monster of a bruise. She remembered those tight stockings they’d made her wear at the hospital. She was supposed to use them after she got home, too, and she’d done so the first day. But they were hard to put on, and she was so tired she just gave up. If there’d been anyone here to help her…

Against her will, Marla thought again about Dustin. She could close her eyes and see his long, lean face. Now that Jerod was quiet she could concentrate—again—on that last argument before she left Bolivar. She remembered Dustin’s voice when he told her to get an abortion.

Now he didn’t want anything to do with her. As far as Dustin was concerned, Jerod didn’t even exist. Neither did Marla. With Dad gone, there wasn’t anybody else to care.

She sniffed and her face puckered as her body ached all the way from her legs to the middle of her back. “Jesus, what am I going to do? Where are You? Do You hate me now?” They were questions she’d asked into the silence of this room many times these past months. Marla Moore had been a born-again Christian since she was eleven. She’d been raised right.

On the night she conceived, she’d been a virgin, and after that night she’d felt so guilty and so scared that she’d refused to give in again. And when her worst fears came true and the test read positive, she’d told Dustin. He’d dumped her, just that fast. Of course, when she thought about it honestly, their relationship had been going downhill for a long time. Had they ever even had a real relationship? What about the rumors about his other girls?

She looked down at the rounded top of Jerod’s head, the sparse dark hair shadowed in the night-light. For the past nine months she hadn’t planned past this time in her life. She thought about the name of that adoption agency in Jefferson City. It was called Alternative, and these people specialized in helping unwed mothers. The nurse at the clinic had encouraged Marla to give the place a call for help, even if she planned to keep Jerod.

As soon as she could get to a phone, she would make the call. But she couldn’t give Jerod to someone else to raise…could she? She loved him so much, even if he was driving her crazy right now.

She shivered. The room was cold. She tried to keep the heat turned off as much as possible so the bill wouldn’t be so high next month. Her telephone had already been cut off. Her landlord had come by twice looking for rent money that she didn’t have, even though the place was cheap, renting out weekly to whoever came along…right now her neighbors looked and sounded and partied like a biker gang.

When Jerod finished his meal she didn’t take him back to his crib. Instead, still shivering, she climbed back beneath the blankets and drew him in beside her. How much was she willing to sacrifice to make sure Jerod was warm, had clean diapers and had a home to live where the landlord wouldn’t threaten to kick him and his mother into the street?

Monday she would find a pay phone and call that place, Alternative. But she wouldn’t give Jerod to someone else. Who could love him as much as she did?

Clarence sat with his overlapping fat pressed against the handle of the pickup truck door, feeling it dig into his side and hoping the lock was a tough one. Too bad Buck didn’t have a king cab. That would have made this ride a lot more comfortable, and Kendra wouldn’t be squeezed between them like a baby sandwiched between two sumo wrestlers. Okay, maybe a sumo wrestler and Arnold Schwartz-his-name. Still a pretty tight fit. Clarence felt like he was being used as a giant plastic lid stuck over the end of a jar to keep the contents from pouring out. Kendra was pretty special contents.

Why hadn’t he at least thought to bring his sugar-free breath mints? He always carried them because they were the only thing Ivy let him eat. And why hadn’t he taken a shower tonight?

And why, oh, why, had he taken that stupid Lasix? The medicine had kicked up a notch, and it was running water into his bladder like a faucet.

Kendra’s quiet sniffles continued. “Why do you hate me?” she asked, her face highlighted in the glow from the dashboard lights.

“I don’t hate you.” Buck’s grip tightened on the steering wheel.

Clarence wanted to reach down and pat her on the knee and tell her everything would be okay. He wished he could explain to her how much Buck really did love her. Why did women have to talk such a different language from men?

He could tell folks a lot of things they probably didn’t realize. It was a funny thing about people who were average weight and height and didn’t have any disabilities—sometimes they ignored those who were different. They didn’t act that way on purpose, but people said and did things in front of him that they wouldn’t do in front of skinny people. When he retreated inside himself and kept his mouth shut, somehow he seemed to disappear from their sight—which was crazy, of course, big as he was. But maybe his size didn’t count as much as his silence.

Yeah, it was his silence. For two years he hadn’t spoken to anyone but Darlene, and she’d been so busy supporting them that she didn’t have that much time to talk. Ever since last spring, when Lukas and Mercy had barged into his life and turned everything upside down, things were different. And ever since then something had been changing in him. The depression that’d helped land him in this mess in the first place lifted, a little at a time. The talks he and Lukas had about God, about meeting human needs, had touched him and stayed with him. Lukas and Mercy both had a special calling from God to help people. Lukas had talked about that once, and for a long time Clarence hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind. He and his sister were both alive today because Lukas and Mercy had honored that calling.

And as Kendra continued to sniff and Buck continued to grip the steering wheel too hard, it occurred to Clarence that somehow he was still being touched by this calling. Maybe it was contagious—he felt a gentle urge to pass the healing on to others.

He remembered words Lukas had spoken to him only a few weeks ago during one of their talks. He’d said, “Trust me, Clarence, God has something in mind for you, too. I think He’s calling you, and you’re trying to avoid the call because you don’t think God has any use for you. But you’re wrong. Just listen for Him, Clarence. Just be ready.”

And Clarence had made some typically stupid remark like “God doesn’t need any more tubs of lard in His pantry” and the subject had been dropped.

Until now. Lukas and Mercy and Ivy were miles away, but Clarence suddenly realized what Lukas was talking about. And he was suddenly as sure of God’s presence as he was of the fact that if they didn’t stop at a service station soon, he was going to have to ask Buck to pull over alongside the road.

But before he could say anything, the first billboards came into view, and the lights of Springfield burst out over the trees. Kendra covered her face with her hands. Quiet sobs shook her shoulders.

“It’ll be okay, honey,” Buck said, his voice cracking from worry and lack of sleep.

“You don’t know.” She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a shredded tissue to wipe her nose. “You don’t even know what it’s like to feel this way. You save lives and put out fires for a living. Everybody thinks you’re wonderful. They just think I’m useless, like some leech attached to you.”

“You’re the only one who feels that way. I thought we’d settled this a long time ago.” Buck slowed as they drew nearer to the city and more cars appeared on the four-lane highway.

“Why did you even bother to take me out of the car? I’d’ve been out of your way for good then.”

Clarence winced at that and glanced at Buck’s expression in the light from an oncoming car. She’d cut deep on that one. Muscles tensed at Buck’s jaw, and his eyes filled with the quick kind of tears that even the toughest man couldn’t prevent when his heart was being mangled. He didn’t say a word.

Clarence cleared his throat. “Ain’t gonna work, Kendra.”

She sniffed and dabbed her nose and looked at him.

“Nothing’s gonna make Buck stop this truck and turn around and take you home, because then you might try to kill yourself again, just like Dr. Mercy said. And Buck couldn’t stand that. Losing you would tear him up.”

The tears on her cheeks sparkled in the city light.

“Try thinking about how that’d make him feel,” Clarence said, knowing even that would be hard for her right now. A depressed person had trouble thinking about other people.

And then, as he tried to imagine what might be going through her mind right now, another powerful revelation struck him. He was thinking about other people. All those things Lukas told him were true, about loving your neighbor as yourself, about caring for the needs of others, of giving what was in your heart, and how good that could make you feel. Lukas had said living like that was just about the most important thing in life.

Lukas also said there was one thing more important—to love God first. Ivy had said the same thing, and so had Mercy. When you loved God first, everything else fell into place.

And God took your life and made it mean something.

Clarence blinked and looked out his window at the lights of a residential section of the eastern edge of Springfield. The window reflected the outlines of Buck and Kendra and his own dark bulk, as big as both of them put together.

As Buck touched the brake and turned from Highway 60 to Highway 65, Clarence replayed Lukas’s words in his mind. Was God really using him tonight to help Odira and Crystal and Buck and Kendra?

The thought overwhelmed him and brought tears to his eyes.

He sniffed. Kendra turned and looked up at him. Oh, great, here was big, bumbling Clarence crying and getting ready to drip all over the place.

“What’s wrong?” she asked softly.

The compassionate sound of her voice made his tears come faster, and he didn’t really know why. Maybe it was just because all the pain in this truck cab couldn’t help but affect him.

Or maybe it was something else. Maybe God was here with them. What did Ivy put in those chocolate chip cookies?

“Clarence?” Kendra said.

He shook his head. “I’m okay.” He wanted to tell her she would be okay, too, but he didn’t know. Who was he to predict how everything would turn out in the end?

But maybe, like Lukas was always telling him, things could be better. With prayer.

Could he pray?

Out of respect for Ivy, he always bowed his head when she said grace over the meal—even though he barely had enough of a meal to pray over. If she could talk to God for his sake, why couldn’t he talk to God for Kendra’s sake and for Buck’s?

He closed his eyes and felt tears slip down his cheeks. He knew, from those preachers Ivy listened to on TV, that all he had to do was think the prayer.

God, let me help them. Let me show them everything will be okay because You’re here and You care. You are here, aren’t You?

The sudden, soft touch of a hand on his arm startled his eyes open.

“Clarence?” Kendra said. “You sure you’re not sick?”

He smiled and looked down at her. “Nope, but I could sure use a bathroom. Buck? Think you could pull over at that station over there? Looks like the place is open.”

Marla heard Jerod’s tiny baby voice again. She turned toward him on the bed before she even opened her eyes, but a sudden sharp pain caught her in the chest.

She gasped and grabbed at the spot between her ribs. Her breath came in shallow pockets of air, and she could feel her heart beating faster.

Fear washed through her. Was she having a heart attack? Was this what it felt like?

Jerod cried louder. Marla struggled against the pillows and finally pulled herself up.

About five seconds later the pain went away. Oxygen once more entered her lungs, and the sudden relief washed over her in a powerful wave. What was going on?

She took a few more deep breaths and reached for her crying baby, but before she could pull him into her arms, the piercing shaft stabbed her again and forced her backward. She cried out from the shock. “God, help!”

Again the pain subsided and her lungs filled. Was this some weird kind of asthma attack? It didn’t feel like one. And there hadn’t been the usual warning. Still, her inhalers—the ones her doctor gave her for free because she couldn’t afford them—were in the top drawer of her rickety bedside stand. She’d better get them out.

More carefully this time, she reached toward Jerod. He needed changing before she did anything else. She picked up one of the last three clean diapers, and as she did so, she pressed against the new bruise on her right calf.

“Ouch!” She couldn’t hear her own voice over the sound of Jerod’s squalling. And she barely caught another breath before the shaft struck her chest again, harder than before. She dropped the diaper on the floor and gasped. The pain grew worse, and the dim room went black for a few seconds.

But Jerod’s cries brought her back.

She took shallow breaths, willing her heart to slow its beating. She felt weaker now, and she didn’t have the strength to pick up the diaper. She pulled open the drawer and took out both inhalers. While Jerod continued to cry, she fumbled with the sprays. She could barely concentrate on breathing.

Someone pounded from the other side of the paper-thin wall at the head of her bed. “Shut that kid up in there!” came a rusty female growl.

The woman must be a part of that biker gang. Marla wanted to tell her to shut up, but she didn’t have the courage, or the energy.

Another throb in her leg made her grimace. If she’d worn the stockings they gave her, she would have had some protection.

She reached down to unfasten Jerod’s dirty diaper when she felt the hit again. This time the pain shocked her like a kitchen knife jutting through her ribs. She nearly fell on top of the baby before she could push herself away. The room grew blacker. In desperation she slid from the bed to the cold, dirty floor and groped for the telephone, but then she remembered that it had been disconnected.

She had to get help. What if something happened to her? Jerod would be all alone. He could freeze in this room before daylight.

As the pain once more let up, she glanced toward the thin wall. “Help me!” she called as loudly as breath would allow. “Somebody help me, please!”

She heard a muffled groan, and again someone pounded on the wall. “Turn off that TV!”

She closed her eyes in hopeless despair. “No, God, please, don’t let this happen.” With the last of her strength, and the healthy cries of her cheering section, she shoved the inhalers into the pocket of her pajama top, scrambled to the door of the tiny efficiency apartment, unlocked it, and used the threshold to pull herself to her feet.

That was a big mistake. Everything went black again. She dropped to her knees and pushed the door open and felt the bite of winter wind brace her exposed flesh.

“Somebody help me!” she called out into the night. “Please!” As she said the last word the pain came again, and her baby’s cries grew softer as she slumped across the front walk.

Clarence shivered as he climbed back up into the darkened cab of the truck. “Sorry about that, guys. Couldn’t help it. Mercy has me taking this stuff that—” He broke off when he realized that Kendra was crying again, and Buck was sitting at the steering wheel, facing forward, his hands practically white from gripping so hard. The human emotional pain was thick enough in this truck to cut with a chainsaw.

They’d been arguing again. He felt guilty for making them stop. While he was gone, they had just hurt each other worse. But maybe he could help them.

“Look, you two, it’s really late and you’re tired, I know. I’ve gotta tell you, things aren’t gonna be this bad all the time.” He reached over and patted Kendra on the arm. “I’ve been there. I wanted to die, but I don’t anymore. There really are people who care about you, and even though you don’t see it right now, you’re gonna have to trust that I’m telling you the truth.”

Buck’s hands loosened on the steering wheel, and he shot a glance across the cab at Clarence, then at Kendra. She didn’t move. It was as if she felt her husband looking at her, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of reacting.

Clarence hoped he was doing the right thing. “Would you just let me do something to help?” He waited until they both turned to look at him, and then he took a deep breath and let it out. How hard could it be? “I want to pray for you.”

He couldn’t believe he’d said the words until they left his mouth. Suddenly he thought he might have to go back to the bathroom.

He saw Buck’s eyes widen, and he felt a hot flush rushing over his body. Where’d he get the stupid idea he could pray? Who’d’ve thought that he, church-hater Clarence Knight, would pull something like this at three-thirty on Sunday morning? Had to be lack of sleep.

But then something happened to Buck’s expression. Surprise seemed to gradually change to hope. Maybe it was the dim light in the cab or the weird shadows cast by the blinking sign on the front of the convenience store, but it looked real. Clarence remembered Ivy’s constant harping: “‘Ask and it will be given to you….’ God answers our prayers.” And he didn’t know of anybody who needed prayer more than these two right now. And there wasn’t anybody else in this truck.

“Yeah, I know, sounds funny coming from me, but what could it hurt?” he said at last. “I mean, what’ve you got to lose?”

Buck sighed and closed his eyes. “Nothing, Clarence. We’ve got nothing to lose. Go for it.” He bowed his head.

Kendra turned and stared at her husband for a long moment. Clarence watched her. For a few seconds some of the pain left her eyes.

Then Clarence bowed his head, like Ivy always did. “God, first of all I need to say that we’re praying this in the name of Jesus, just so I don’t forget at the end.” He didn’t understand all that yet because he’d never tried that hard to listen, but he knew Ivy always said these words to end her prayers. “And then I want to ask You to give Buck and Kendra some of the love I think You’ve been showing me lately. And then I want You to stay with Kendra after Buck and I leave, because I think she’s going to need You worse than anybody. And that’s all I can think of to say right now.” He raised his head and looked at them. “Guess that oughta do it.”

Chapter Six

L ukas was drifting to sleep in the call room early Sunday morning when he heard the blare of a siren. He opened his eyes to the sight of orange and red flames racing across the wall, and he sat up with a shout.

And then he realized that the flicker was from an ambulance outside. Its lights penetrated the window blinds in fiery streaks of color. Lukas pushed his blanket back and got out of bed. Sometimes he still had nightmares about the explosions in October, of following Buck Oppenheimer through the collapsing E.R. and fighting the inferno that nearly engulfed them.

The telephone rang. He reached over, felt for his glasses on the desktop and picked up the receiver.

“Dr. Bower, this is Tex,” came the voice over the phone. She sounded irritated, but with Tex’s deep voice it was hard to tell. “Quinn and Sandra are bringing somebody in. Of course they didn’t radio us, so I don’t know what’s going on. I tell you, that man should not be wearing a uniform. Want to join us?”

“I’m on my way.” Lukas grabbed his stethoscope from the desk and rubbed at the lenses of his glasses with the hem of his scrubs as he squinted his way out of the call room.

When he reached the E.R. he saw Quinn and Sandra wheeling a slightly overweight, unresponsive young woman into the E.R. from the ambulance bay while Tex held the door and helped push. Quinn was doing chest compressions and an IV had been established, with a needle and tubing connected to her left arm. The patient had been intubated, and an ambu bag was attached to the tube, which Sandra squeezed rhythmically to help the woman breathe. Sandra was pushing the cot with her free hand. The woman had been stripped to the waist. The odor of sour milk lingered around her.

Lukas rushed toward them. “Carmen,” he called to the secretary over his shoulder, “call a code and launch a chopper.”

Carmen swiveled in her chair and stared at him blankly. “What?”

Lukas shook his head. “Get me a nurse down here from the floor. Tell her we’ve got a code. Then call our airlift service and get them here.” He grabbed the end of the gurney and helped Sandra and Tex push it inside. “What’s the rhythm?”

“V-fib,” Quinn said. “I’d just intubated her on scene, and then she crashed.” His words came fast, almost as if he were trying to convince Lukas he’d done everything right. “She was unresponsive, and she had inhalers in her pajama pocket. Had to be asthma—”

“How many times have you shocked?” Lukas asked.

“Three with one dose of epi.”

“What?” came an irritable voice from the doorway.

Lukas turned to find Tex already in the trauma room, snapping the plastic lock from the tool chest-shaped crash cart beside the exam bed. “That’s not current ACLS guidelines,” she muttered.

On the count of three, they transferred the patient from the gurney to the bed, and Tex immediately replaced the leads to the hospital monitor on the woman’s bare chest. The v-fib rhythm continued, with the line racing across the monitor screen above the bed in an irregular steak knife-edge pattern. The monitor emitted a high, continuous beep.

“Well, you got your intubation this time, Dr. Bower,” Quinn muttered. “Hope you’re happy, because it’s not doing her any good.”

Lukas ignored the comment. “What drugs have you given?”

“I just finished the first dose of epinephrine as we pulled in.”

“Then we’ll have to shock again quickly. Stop compressions but keep bagging.” Lukas positioned his stethoscope on the woman’s chest, listened, frowned. “I don’t hear good breath sounds.”

“So? She was obviously in broncho spasm,” Quinn snapped. “She had inhalers, remember? Or weren’t you listening?”

“And you just took that for granted?” Tex’s voice rose like mercury in a hot room. If she saw Quinn’s flush of anger or glare of growing resentment, she didn’t acknowledge it. “Did you even check the placement of the tube when you did the procedure?”

“What good would it do if she was in broncho spasm?” Quinn’s lips thinned and whitened.

Lukas raised his hand for silence and repositioned the stethoscope over the belly. Now he heard breath sounds, and he felt a chill of foreboding. “It’s in the wrong place. The tube’s in the esophagus instead of the trachea.” The oxygen was flowing straight into her stomach. She wasn’t getting any oxygen. “We have to reintubate.” He turned to the others. “Sandra, stop bagging and take over the compressions. Hurry! Tex, get me a syringe, then get the suction ready.”

Tex moved quickly. “It’s one thing to miss placing the tube correctly, Quinn,” she said as she worked. “That’s happened to all of us. But to leave it there…unforgivable! You might as well have placed a pillow over her face and suffocated her! Why didn’t you check?”

Quinn’s jaw jutted forward. “I told you she had inhalers. If you hadn’t made such a big deal about that old man’s tube earlier, I wouldn’t have even wasted my time on this one.” He took a step backward, then pivoted and stalked out of the room.

“No!” Lukas shouted after him. “Quinn! You don’t walk out on a code!”

“Just let him go, Dr. Bower,” Sandra said, her soft voice growing softer as she worked hard to continue chest compressions. “He won’t listen to anybody. I tried to get him to check his work, but he was in too big of a hurry. If I can’t get another partner I might as well quit. This is stupid.”

As soon as Tex handed Lukas the syringe, he attached it to the tiny balloon at the mouth end of the endotracheal tube and deflated the air from the gear that kept it in place. He pulled the tube out of the patient’s mouth and checked the monitor to make sure the rhythm was still v-fib.

“It’s time for another shock. Sandra, bag her again.”

Sandra stood at the head of the bed and placed the bag valve mask over the patient’s face. Tex charged the defibrillator to 360 joules and handed the paddles to Lukas.

“Clear,” he called, and made sure everyone was out of touch with the bed, then pressed the paddles to the patient’s chest. The body jerked into an arch with the sizzle of electric current, then fell back onto the bed. Everyone looked at the monitor. The rhythm had changed.

“All right!” Tex exclaimed. The v-fib had stopped, and now the blip danced across the screen with more powerful strokes.

Lukas pressed his fingers against the woman’s throat, feeling for the carotid artery, and the hope that had flared within him died painfully. There was nothing. “Oh, no. Pulseless electrical activity.” This was worse! They couldn’t break this new rhythm with a shock. What was happening here?

“Sandra, bag her again,” he said.

The nurse from upstairs came rushing into the room, and Lukas gestured to her. “You’re just in time. I want you to do chest compressions.” What could be causing this? “Let’s intubate now, Tex. And let’s get some fluids in.” What would cause respiratory arrest and pulseless electrical activity in such a young woman?

“Dr. Bower,” Sandra said softly, “the bra we cut off her was a nursing bra.” She indicated the young woman. “She’s been nursing. She was all alone outside the apartment building.”

Lukas felt as if he were on a treadmill going twenty miles an hour. He had to keep up. “Carmen, contact the police,” he called toward the secretary as he worked. “They need to check the area for a baby!” He had to focus. If the woman was recently pregnant…severe respiratory distress…pulseless electrical activity…He caught his breath.

“Oh, no, Dr. Bower,” Tex groaned. “That sounds like massive pulmonary embolism.” Lukas nodded. A blood clot in the lung was deadly.

Quinn came rushing back into the room, puffing from exertion and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry, Dr. Bower. That won’t happen again. I mean it. I’m sorry. I was just so—”

“Can it, Quinn,” Tex snapped. “We don’t have time tonight for your theatrics.”

Lukas ignored the interruption. “Let’s get her set up for a pacer, and get me dopamine.” Now he knew what to do. But was there time?

Marla drifted in a dark fog, for a few moments far from the pain and cold and terror. But the drifting didn’t last. Her baby…Jerod! She could hear echoes of his cries, and she couldn’t get to him. He needed changing. He would have to be fed again soon, and there was no one to help him.

And then another voice reached her from some distant place…. “We’ve got a pulse….” Marla’s chest hurt again, and somebody was pushing her, hard. Her throat hurt. She felt the pressure in her ribs and heard more people talking around her…. “We’ve got a blood pressure, Dr…” She felt something hard pinch her arm…. “The helicopter’s landing, Dr….”

Something brushed across her shoulder, and light beamed past her closed lids. But she couldn’t open her eyes. She felt the rise and fall of her chest, and the continued sharp pain under her ribs, as if someone was stabbing her from the inside out.

The pain was too much. Even with the echoes in her memory of Jerod’s cries, she couldn’t force past that barrier of pain. She tried to form words on her lips, but something was in her way. She couldn’t speak. Jesus, take care of Jerod. He’s so little and helpless.

She could almost hear her baby’s cries again, wished she were back in the cold, grungy room with wet diapers and neighbors banging on the wall for silence.

And then, as if from somewhere besides the room where she lay, a strong, familiar voice reached her, a voice different from the ones that shot around her with businesslike efficiency. This one was unhurried, calm, even joyful. “It’s time to come home, Marla. I’ll be here with you.”

The sound of the voice permeated her and gave her a feeling of warmth, and she wondered if she were in a coma. But that voice… Dad? She thought the word and heard her own voice, though her mouth did not move.

“Remember the verses I read for you so often when Mom died? ‘The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart—devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.’”

You mean I’m dying? she asked.

“‘Those who walk uprightly enter into peace—they find rest as they lie in death.’”

But, Dad, I’m not righteous, she said sadly. Look what I’ve done.

“Your righteousness has been purchased. It’s time to come home.”

But my baby…

“Dr. Bower, I’ve lost the pulse,” came a brisk voice from nearby.

The wall of pain slipped down and pulled away. Marla felt as if a blanket of comfort were being wrapped around her. She could see again. Her father was holding out his hand.

“No blood pressure,” came another voice, this one receding, growing fainter. “Doctor, we’ve got asystole…flat line!”

But the alarm in the fading voices did not disturb her. Dad spoke again. “I have some people for you to meet.” And he took her in his arms and led her home.

Lukas called the code long after they lost the pulse and the rhythm flattened, battling his own sense of horror and pain as he’d battled to keep death from taking this young mother. He called time of death for the record, then took a deep breath and willed himself to be composed.

Sandra sniffed with silent tears as she gathered the trash that had collected on the floor. Tex muttered under her breath as she disconnected the monitor from the leads. She paused and glanced at Quinn, her green cat’s eyes narrowed with angry disgust. She shook her head and resumed her work.

“What’s your problem, Texas, can’t take the pressure?” Quinn reached over to remove the equipment from the body of the deceased. “No wonder you couldn’t handle your resident training.”

“No!” Lukas reached out to stop Quinn’s movements. “Don’t touch anything on her.”

Quinn raised his hands in an exaggerated show of obedience. “Hey, Doc, lighten up. I’m just trying to help out. After all, she was alive until we brought her to you. ”

Sandra gasped and looked over at her partner.

Tex shoved some trash into a biohazard container and straightened to tower over the man. “Breathing into her belly all the way here was what killed her. We might have saved her if you’d given her a chance in the first place, but no, you didn’t even bother to check.”

“Tex.” Lukas was too tired and grief-stricken to break up any more fights on this shift. “Quinn, everything has to stay in place in case the coroner wants to have an autopsy performed. Tex, will you go call him?” Maybe that would get her away from Quinn long enough to get her temper under control. To see that she did so, he walked out with her.

“That man shouldn’t be allowed to touch patients,” she muttered to him as they left the curtained room.

Lukas shushed her. Her voice carried past the thin barrier of curtain like the growl of an angry crocodile. Even though he agreed with her, he had to look at both sides. “You know an intubation like that can be difficult. Even the most skilled practitioner could have missed it under those circumstances.”

“Yeah, but I’d’ve at least checked her breathing. Couldn’t you tell by Quinn’s expression that he hadn’t?” She lowered her voice at last to a hoarse whisper. “I’m going to talk to Sandra later. That girl’s scared of her own shadow, but maybe I can bully her into telling the truth. Quinn’s incompetent. It’s probably because he works too many hours, but that doesn’t excuse his disregard for human life. They need to get rid of him.”

“And who would they find to replace him?” Lukas asked dryly.

She grimaced. “Good question. The hospital doesn’t want to pay anything. That’s why we’ve got a bunch of losers here already.”

“And where does that put you and me?”

She didn’t even blink. “You’re here to keep busy until the E.R. is rebuilt in Knolls.”

“And why are you here?” Lukas asked. “You’re no loser. I’ve seen you work. You know your stuff. I couldn’t help picking up on Quinn’s reference. Are you a resident?” He studied her more closely and saw the sudden tightening of her lips, the hooding of her eyes.

She looked away. “I’m a paramedic right now, Dr. Bower. I’m here because this is home…or it was.” She sighed. “The guy you’re replacing? Dr. Moss? He thought he was coming here for a break from family practice. Ha! Now he’s on suspension here and his license is in question, and it’s not even his fault. You’d better look over you shoulder around here. No telling who’ll try to stab you in the back.” She glared in Quinn’s direction and walked off to use the phone at the nurses’ desk.

Carmen swiveled in her chair to face Lukas. “Dr. Bower, a friend of mine from the police department just called. They didn’t find any baby, but they called the landlord of the building where the woman was living. He’d gotten complaints from the neighbors for the past two or three days about a baby crying.”

“Did he say how many people lived in that apartment with her?”

“Just the woman. Last time he saw her she was pregnant, and that was last week, when he dropped by to try to get rent payment from her, which he didn’t get. Looks like she was broke, and the room was a mess, like she’d been sick for a while. The baby was obviously a newborn.”

“Did they give you a name?”

“Said the woman was Marla Moore. She stayed inside a lot. I guess the landlord’ll have to come down and make identification or something. The police haven’t found any relatives yet.”

“But the baby,” Lukas said, “what about the baby?”

Carmen shrugged. “If it’s a newborn, it couldn’t’ve crawled off. Somebody’s got to be taking care of that baby.” The telephone buzzed again, and she turned back to the desk.

“Hey, Dr. Bower?” came a quiet male voice from behind him.

Lukas turned to find Quinn standing there, head bowed, arms folded across his chest. “I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time in there. I guess I was pretty nervous.”

“You don’t walk out on a code, Quinn. We needed you. Where did you go?”

“I…I’m sorry. I nearly lost my cool for a little bit. I mean, we were fighting for a young mother’s life, and Tex made it sound like I’d really blown it.” He shot a quick glance toward Carmen and Tex, who were both on the telephone at their desks. “What are you going to put on your report?”

“What do you mean?”

Quinn shrugged. “I need this job bad, and I can’t afford to lose it. What are you going to say about me?”

Lukas felt the fresh weight of grief sharpen his tongue. “The truth usually works.” He turned away and left Quinn standing there.

He went into the call room for a moment. He had reports to fill out, work to do, but he knew from experience that if there were no other patients who needed him, it was best to spend some quiet time after a painful event like this one. If there was any time he needed prayer more…

And then he realized something. During that whole code, in all the confusion and angry words and difficult decisions, he’d forgotten the most important thing. A habit that he’d developed in his first E.R. rotations years ago was to pray on the run while treating victims of severe illness or trauma. Praying had become second nature for him; he did it without thinking. But this time…this time he’d been caught off guard. He’d allowed his anger at Quinn to divert him from the most important treatment.

“Forgive me, Lord.” He covered his face with his hands. He knew God didn’t need his permission to save a life or to guide the hands and minds of the staff when they were working with patients. Still, he had no doubt that prayer was an energizing touch, a powerful connection between God and the caregivers. Yes, prayer operated on a spiritual level, but weren’t human beings as much spirit as body?

And what if Marla Moore did have a baby? Was there a husband? She was so young….

Just three months ago Lukas had lost a drowning victim, a young woman like this one. Some fishermen had found her at the shore of the lake and had contacted him by car phone as they raced with her from the lake to the hospital. They’d been devastated when they couldn’t save her. So had Lukas. The loss always hurt the worst with the young ones, as if fresh new canvas had been ripped from the center of a painting in progress. With Marla it looked as if an even newer life was involved.

“Lord, please take care of Marla’s baby. When they find her family, touch them with Your healing power and give that baby an earthly mother. And help me not to push You to the side next time.”

He paused and took a new breath. He had to return to work, but he might not have a chance to get back here soon, and he needed to eat something to keep his strength up and his mind sharp—he hadn’t eaten for eight hours, and he’d barely slept.

Quickly he pulled open the top side drawer of the desk and reached in for the peanut butter sandwich he’d packed yesterday before coming to work. He unwrapped the aluminum foil and pulled it back, then recoiled with disgust. Someone had taken several bites out of his sandwich—he could see the teeth marks clearly. In place of those bites was a dead fly.

He smashed the foil back together over the sandwich and threw the whole thing into the trash can.

He was beginning to hate this place.

A soft call reached Mercy through the darkness, indecipherable through the haze of the drug she had used so she would be sure to get some rest before returning to the hospital. But in spite of the drug, her eyes flew open. She listened. Had her mysterious visitor at the clinic followed her home?

“Mom?” Her bedroom door slid open, and a glow came through from the hallway night-light to reveal the dark outline of Tedi’s sleep-mussed hair. “Can I sleep with you?”

Automatically Mercy scooted over and pulled the covers back. Tedi came forward quickly and climbed into the nest of warmth Mercy’s body had generated. She placed her icy feet on Mercy’s legs, then giggled when her mom gasped.

“Nightmares?” Mercy asked, grimacing at her daughter’s late-night-snack breath. She should have let Tedi say at Mom’s for the rest of the night instead of waking her again and dragging her out into the cold air to come home. She felt so lonely without her…but that was a selfish motive.

“Yeah.” Tedi paused a moment, then said more softly, “And I missed you.”

“I’m right here.” Mercy reached out and gathered her daughter close, bad breath and all.

Tedi snuggled against her. “You’re gone so much, though. Can’t Lukas just come back and help you at the clinic until the E.R. opens up and you don’t get as many calls?”

“I don’t think so, honey.” Mercy sighed and glanced at the clock. She’d only slept three hours. This was going to be another tough one. Now she would lie awake and worry that she wasn’t giving her daughter enough attention, that too many of her patients were falling through the cracks, and that if she did get back to sleep she might miss another emergency call. Had she done the right thing keeping Odira and Crystal here at the community hospital?

And if she continued to worry like this, would she ever sleep again?

Tedi’s rhythmic breathing deepened and her body relaxed. Mercy couldn’t even close her eyes. So she started doing what she’d been practicing lately when the nagging specter of insomnia attacked her—she prayed. And she began with a prayer for Lukas to return.

Lukas struggled with his frustration as he returned to the E.R. proper. All his life he’d wanted to be a doctor, although when he was growing up he envisioned himself as the faithful family practitioner who had an office attached to his home, who made house calls and whose wisdom and compassion alone could make people feel better. He’d watched too many Marcus Welby, M.D. reruns. By the time he reached his third year of premed, he’d been forced to acknowledge that medical practice wasn’t what it used to be. Still, being a doctor was all he’d ever wanted to do.

It wasn’t until his first experience in an emergency room during fourth-year rotations that he felt the adrenaline rush of life-and-death decisions. He’d been addicted ever since. He could get high on a successful pediatric code. His heart could break at the death of an elderly nursing-home patient. And it was still all about people.

People were also what made the job difficult. There were so many extremes, and so many burnouts, and he kept in mind that it could also happen to him. His first burnout with people had come before his ninth birthday.

When he was a skinny, shy kid of eight, he’d had to get glasses. His two older brothers picked on him and teased him when their parents weren’t watching. Because of that, he remembered backing further and further into a shell until he barely spoke to anyone at all, and their teasing only grew worse.

One day Dad took him on a walk, just the two of them, out through their vegetable garden to a small grove of apple trees that always produced the crispest, sweetest apples in the farming community where they lived.

Dad picked an apple from the tree and held it out to Lukas. There was a brown, worn-looking spot near the top. “See this, Lukas? The apple grew too close to the branch, and that branch rubbed against it when the wind blew. Some years these are the apples I like the best, because a lot of times they seem to have the sweetest taste.”

Lukas took a bite of the apple, grimaced at the hard bitterness and heard his dad chuckle.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention something,” Dad said. “Strange, isn’t it? The same rubbing that makes a lot of the fruit sweet some years can also make the fruit bitter and hard other years. Guess it has to do with how much sunshine they’ve had.” He placed an arm around Lukas’s shoulders. “Anyway, that’s my opinion. People are like that, and you’re not too young to learn the lesson. God’s love is your sunshine, you know. Just let Him shine through you in spite of the bad weather and the teasing you always get from your brothers. You’ll be glad you did.”

And so as Lukas approached Carmen at the front desk he forced a smile. This was her first office job, and she was understandably nervous, especially with the unforgiving attitude of many of the staff. Her harried expression always seemed on the verge of panic when an ambulance came in or when Lukas gave orders. She was one of the youngest on the staff.

“How’s it going, Carmen?” he asked as he stepped up to the computer where she worked.

She jerked and looked up at him, her fingers fumbling on the keyboard. Her gaze darted quickly to an item on her desk, then away again. “Fine, Dr. Bower. The coroner’s on his way, and Quinn and Sandra took off a few minutes ago. Tex finally went to grab a bite because she’s starving, and nobody else has checked in.” She got to her feet, eyes wide, movements nervous.

Lukas wished the poor woman could relax a little. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t last here very long. He frowned and glanced again at an item on her desk that he’d noticed earlier—a blue-and-white tube of surgical jelly.

He shrugged and started to walk away when the phone buzzed beside Carmen’s left elbow. She jumped and jerked it up, answered sharply and listened, catching Lukas’s gaze. When she thanked them and hung up, she shook her head. “That was Sandra. She and Quinn went back to the apartments where they found Marla. Did you know that’s where the bikers are staying? The police checked the place out. They found baby stuff, but no baby. A couple of the neighbors heard the commotion and came out. They said they’d heard a baby crying for a while, but they’d gotten used to that in the past couple of days. Nobody can find anything now.” She shrugged and sat back down in front of her keyboard.

Lukas stared at her. “But they’re still looking, right?”

She repeated her shrug. “I don’t know, Dr. Bower. Quinn said the police are busy tonight. Maybe they just don’t have time to look.”

Lukas glanced at the wall clock. It was 4:00 a.m. Sunday and freezing outside. “Where could a newborn baby possibly be? Surely if someone found a baby they’d call the police immediately.”

“You would think,” Carmen said darkly, “but I’ve already heard some rumors. You know the little girl who disappeared from the park last week? Some people think she was kidnapped. Quinn told Sandra there was a black-market baby ring in the area, and he thinks those bikers have something to do with it. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

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