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  “But you act like you don’t even care about her.”

  “Would you back off? She left of her own free will.” And she’d made it very obvious that she felt Dane was coming on too strong already. “Quit trying to play matchmaker and just concentrate on learning right now.”

  “I am. I’m not sure I like learning that much.”

  “Why not?”

  Blaze stepped up onto the porch. “Because I’ve learned a lot more than I wanted to learn.” He pulled open the storm door and barreled inside without waiting for Dane. “A whole lot more than I ever wanted to know. Like how a grown man responsible for a bunch of teenagers doesn’t even have the nerve to call a woman and tell her how he feels about her.”

  “How do you know how I feel?”

  Blaze snorted. “Right.”

  Dane followed him inside and closed the door, relishing the coolness of air-conditioning against his sweaty face and arms.

  “Cook told me that you think just because one woman couldn’t stick it out, you can’t ever be married again,” Blaze said from the kitchen doorway. “I told Cook you weren’t that stupid.”

  “Do you mind not broadcasting my personal business through the whole house?” Dane grumbled.

  “Everybody’s gone except Cook, and he’s hiding out in his room. Willy and James went to Bertie’s to milk the goats, and the rest are taking care of the cows. You know, if you got married again, you could fix up that cottage out back—”

  “Not everybody gets married,” Dane said in his drop-the-subject voice.

  “No, but just because one woman couldn’t hack it doesn’t mean—”

  “Blaze—”

  “You know, it doesn’t all have to be about romance. You could just be Cheyenne’s friend. She needs good friends, and to her I bet it looks like you’ve said good riddance. What do you think that makes her feel about all that Christian kindness you keep preaching about?”

  “I don’t preach.” Dane couldn’t explain himself to Blaze. How was he supposed to admit to a sixteen-year-old kid that he was afraid a friendship with Cheyenne might turn into more than that for both of them? He’d felt a connection with her that he hadn’t experienced with another woman since Etta.

  He glanced at Blaze. “What did you mean a minute ago? You know, that thing you said about learning more than you wanted to?”

  Blaze pulled out a big stockpot and put it on one burner of a six-burner stove top. “Never mind.”

  Dane would have dismissed the subject except for the way Blaze deliberately avoided looking at him. “Blaze, is something bothering you?”

  Blaze didn’t reply as he went out into the mudroom and opened the freezer, shuffled through the bags of frozen meals, then shut the door and came back in carrying a two-gallon freezer bag of vegetable soup Cook had made a month ago. His thick brows were drawn together with apparently focused concentration.

  Dane opened a cupboard and pulled out some bowls.

  “Did you ever betray a friend?” Blaze asked suddenly.

  Dane glanced at him. Was this some new approach to convince him to call Cheyenne? “Probably.”

  “Do you still think I might be the vandal?”

  Wow, abrupt change of subject. Or was it? “I never felt you were the vandal, Blaze.”

  “I didn’t ask what you felt, I asked what you thought. Remember the day of Red’s funeral you told me that in your heart you didn’t believe I’d burned the barn, but you left this honker of a question about what your brain told you?”

  “I remember.” Sadly, he did.

  “We haven’t had any vandalism since then,” Blaze said. “Do you think it’s possible the vandal was someone who wasn’t from around here, and they just moved on?”

  “It could be. I’m praying that’s the case, and that they won’t come back.”

  Blaze stuck the frozen bag into the microwave. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know.”

  That didn’t seem to satisfy him. “I don’t think anyone from the ranch did it.”

  “Neither do I.” Dane watched him more closely. “Do you have some idea about who it might have been?”

  Blaze set the timer on the microwave and punched it on. He turned and looked at Dane with eyes so filled with sadness it broke Dane’s heart.

  “Blaze?”

  “I haven’t slipped out of the house at night lately.”

  “Okay. Why not?”

  “What do you mean? You told me not to.”

  “That didn’t stop you before.”

  “I guess maybe I’m settling in a little. Anyway, I wasn’t the vandal. I’m going to check on Cook.”

  Cheyenne perused the empty ER with satisfaction as Ardis glanced up at her from the nurses’ workstation.

  “There you are, Dr. Allison. Did you get some rest?”

  “Not enough.”

  “There’s a fresh pot of coffee in the break room.”

  “I’ll get some.”

  “Nope, you stay right here.” Ardis pulled out the chair at the doctor’s workstation cubicle. “You’ll want to get to work on those charts so you can get home on time for once. You still take a cream and a sugar, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t believe after all these years you haven’t learned how to appreciate coffee in its natural state,” she teased. “I’ll be back with it.”

  Cheyenne grinned at her friend’s retreating back and started on her charts. Her grin disappeared. On the top chart was a sticky note with a reminder that she had failed to do an HEENT exam on a patient with a triple A—abdominal aortic aneurysm.

  She dropped her pen to the desk and hissed. “How stupid,” she muttered.

  Ardis returned with her coffee. “What’s stupid?”

  “The guy who was rushed to emergency surgery to prevent abdominal rupture? Med Records is complaining because I didn’t document an exam of his eyes, ears, nose, throat while I was at it. The guy’s life was in danger, and all they can…of all the stupid—”

  “Don’t blame Med Records, blame the people who make up the reimbursement rules,” Ardis said.

  “Yes, but—”

  Ardis leaned closer to her, frowning. “It’s okay, Cheyenne,” she said quietly. “The standards all clash, but that’s just the way it is. Honey, are you all right? You just haven’t seemed the same since you came back from Hideaway.”

  “Well, compared to the way I felt before I left, isn’t that a good thing?”

  Ardis hesitated, then shook her head. “It’s almost shift change, and you’re due back in the morning. Maybe a few of those charts can wait until then.”

  Cheyenne took a slow, deep breath and tried to calm herself. “That’s okay, I’ll get through them.” She thought again of Hideaway, and realized how much she looked forward to her trip back down there in a week and a half.

  Until then, she could endure.

  “Aha! I’ve got it.” Cheyenne raised her pen to the blank line of the offending chart. “Edentulous,” she murmured. “There, now everybody’s happy.”

  Ardis chuckled. “Nobody’ll know what the word means.”

  “They won’t care as long as their blank is no longer blank. You did tell me he’d been worried about his dentures.”

  As she completed the rest of her charts and paged through additional mail, she reflected on Ardis’s comment. She’d been right. Nothing seemed the same. Cheyenne knew she’d complained about a lot since she’d returned. She felt constantly edgy…empty.

  Again, she recalled the dream about Susan. “Cheyenne, you won’t follow…”

  But what was she supposed to follow?

  At the bottom of her stack of charts she saw another envelope someone must have slipped in when she was sleeping. She slit it open to find a physician schedule for August. Her name was down for the first Friday and Saturday of the month, with a sticky note from Jim with an apology and an explanation that three other physicians had requested that week off before she made her own
request.

  The disappointment overwhelmed her.

  Ardis looked up from her work. “Something wrong?”

  “Just the schedule.”

  On the other side of the partition that shielded the ER proper from the waiting room and reception desk, the secretary greeted someone. Cheyenne glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes to go before shift change.

  “How can we help you today?” came Patty’s voice.

  “My little boy’s sick. Can the doctor check him out?” came the voice of a young mother.

  “Sure we can. Sign here, please,” Patty said. There was a pause, then the sound of the chime that summoned the triage nurse. “Has any of your information changed since the last time we saw your son?”

  “No, it’s still all the same. Uh, could you tell me who the doctor is on duty?”

  “That would be Dr. Allison for fifteen more minutes. She’ll see him as soon as the nurse—”

  “Allison? You’ve got to be kidding. She’s still here?”

  Cheyenne glanced at Ardis, who held her gaze.

  The voice at the reception desk continued. “She’s not touching my son. I heard she was being sued because she killed one of her patients.”

  “I don’t know where you heard that,” Patty said, her voice still soft and conciliatory. “Dr. Allison’s an excellent physician, board certified in emergency medicine. She’s—”

  “She’s a threat to my little boy. If she’ll be gone in fifteen minutes, we’ll wait.”

  Cheyenne suppressed a gasp of almost physical pain. She shoved away from the desk. “I’ll be in the call room if you need me, Ardis.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Ardis, is Mrs. McKenzie’s lab back yet?” Cheyenne asked. She was concerned about the risk of stroke for the seventy-three-year old patient, who’d presented by ambulance with chest pains and shortness of breath and dangerously high blood pressure Despite the clonidine pills, the pressure remained high.

  “Yep, it all looks pretty good.”

  “Go ahead and call her family physician and I’ll talk to him.”

  “She’s new in town and doesn’t have one.” Ardis gestured Cheyenne aside. “She said a couple months ago she had to stop taking some of her medications because the total cost was eight hundred dollars a month and she couldn’t afford it.”

  Cheyenne sighed and closed her eyes. She saw this kind of thing too much. “Okay, get me whoever is on call for family practice—Dr. Frazier, isn’t it? I’ll be in six.” She washed her hands and entered exam room six, where a slightly impatient woman sat with her two-year-old daughter who had been in yesterday for an earache. Cheyenne was reminding the mother that it usually took two days on antibiotics before there was noticeable improvement. When the secretary slid the curtain back and leaned inside. “Dr. Allison, I have Dr. Frazier holding for you on line two.”

  Cheyenne apologized to the annoyed young mother and took the call at her workstation. As she had feared, she received the typical doctor-to-doctor brush-off. “She sounds too complicated, Dr. Allison. You need to have Internal Medicine take care of it.”

  Cheyenne brushed past Ardis on her way back to room six. “Okay, it’s back in your court, Ardis. Dr. Frazier wants Mrs. MacKenzie to go to Internal Medicine.”

  Cheyenne returned to room six and repeated the exam she had given yesterday. As she’d expected, the involved ear looked the same. After some further discussion with the mother, Cheyenne wrote a script for a codeine elixir and requested that the patient be taken to her pediatrician in seven to ten days.

  “Dr. Bagby is on line one, Dr. Allison,” the secretary told her when she got back to her workstation.

  Cheyenne picked up the receiver and explained Mrs. MacKenzie’s situation to the specialist. “I’ll be happy to consult, Dr. Allison, but Dr. Frazier should be able to take this patient,” came the reply. “Mrs. MacKenzie’s problems are obviously all secondary to noncompliance. Once she’s back on her regimen, she should do fine.”

  She hung up the telephone to find Ardis standing beside her. “Hot potato.”

  “You want me to call Dr. Frazier again?”

  “Let me check Mrs. MacKenzie first, and I’ll let you know.” Cheyenne returned to room four. A quick check of her elderly patient’s lungs revealed mild expiratory wheezing that hadn’t been apparent earlier.

  “The IV medication we gave her must have aggravated her asthma,” she told Ardis, and gave her the appropriate instructions. Cheyenne squeezed Mrs. MacKenzie’s arm. “We’re going to have to place you in ICU.”

  Back in the break room, she poured herself a cup of coffee and slumped at the table. She got one of the hot potato cases at least once or twice a week. The Family Practice guys didn’t want to take on a complicated patient who could crash, because then they could get sued. The Internal Medicine guys didn’t want any more complicated patients because their lives were full of complicated patients. Nobody wanted the patient, and those poor souls who were hurting and sick often fell through the cracks of the hospital politics game. And that was just in Columbia, which most of the rest of the country would consider medical care heaven, due to the high ratio of physicians to patients.

  “Knock-knock, can I come in?” Ardis walked to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup of thick, black, ER-style coffee. No creamer, no sugar. What a woman.

  “Didn’t I see an envelope addressed to you from Larry Strong yesterday?” She joined Cheyenne at the table.

  “Yes.”

  “So how’s that going?”

  “They’ve decided to settle for a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You’re just going to drop it?”

  “It isn’t as if I have a choice. Do you know how much it would cost to get my own attorney?”

  “Okay, but who have you talked to about this?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to—”

  “Baloney. How are you supposed to find witnesses if you don’t talk to anybody? I can testify that you did everything right. We all did. And we weren’t the only ones in the room. Didn’t the police report absolve Susan of blame in the accident?”

  “Kirk claims she could have avoided the accident if she’d been thinking clearly. I’m sorry, Ardis, but I give up. I can’t fight it, and I don’t have the strength.”

  “The old Cheyenne would have spoken to everyone who saw Susan that afternoon, beginning with the taxi driver and ending with the police report, or even eyewitnesses of the accident.”

  “Maybe I’ve just changed, Ardis,” she said irritably. “Have you thought of that? I hate the ER abuse. I hate not having more control over the treatment of patients. It’s frustrating.”

  Ardis sipped her coffee, studying Cheyenne in thoughtful silence. “The place in Hideaway is for rent.”

  “Good. You should be getting some income from it. That’s a good, solid house. So what does that have to do with—”

  “It’s pretty, too, since you gave it a facelift. The rent would be reasonable.” She put her cup back on the table. “Especially for you, since you’ve put all the time and work into the place.”

  “For me? Ardis, what would make you think—”

  “You told me they need a doctor down there.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t tell you I wanted the job.”

  Ardis winked at her. “You didn’t have to. I wouldn’t go making any quick decisions, but maybe you need to step back and take a look at what you really want in your life.” She leaned back and stretched. “Who knows? I might be interested in a slower pace myself. Every good doctor needs a good nurse.”

  Cheyenne cruised down the street in front of Kirk and Susan’s place—she refused to think of it as just Kirk’s place. She desperately hoped he wouldn’t glance out the window and see her car. Sooner or later, however, if this meeting went well, it wouldn’t matter what he did.

  She parked in front of the Harrison house, three doors down. This time, when she rang the doorbell, an attractive, plu
mp lady in a red silk pant set answered the door. When Cheyenne explained who she was, the woman smiled.

  “You’re the sister! Please, come in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about contacting you in the past few months.”

  Cheyenne entered the broad vestibule, caught by the blend of gemstone colors that were Susan’s signature. “I came to speak with you once, but you weren’t home. Your husband…seemed a little preoccupied.”

  “Oh, him.” The lady dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “He never tells me anything, just treats me like a mushroom, keeping me in the dark and shoveling dirt at me every so often.” She chuckled to take the sting from her words as she led Cheyenne into a bright room with a wall of windows offset with stone and at least thirty plants of various sizes and description. “I was at your sister’s funeral, and I would have spoken with you then, but you were surrounded by so many family members, I didn’t want to intrude. I just wanted to tell you what a treasure your sister was.” She gestured around the room. “Susan was a true artist, and a kind person. I think of her a lot when I come in here, because this was the last room that ever felt the touch of her artistic hand.”

  Cheyenne sat down in an oversize leather wingback chair, and for a moment she felt caught by a tight band of unrelenting grief. “I was wondering, do you remember much about that last day? Did she say anything to you about why she might have been driving?”

  “I sure do. Her husband told her to, that’s why.”

  “How did he do that?”

  Mrs. Harrison settled back on her sofa. “Well, right away when she arrived that day, I could tell something was wrong, because she wasn’t her usual cheery self. But we knew she and Kirk hadn’t been getting along that well—he and my husband golf together—and so I just figured that was it. But when she climbed up on her stepladder, she stumbled and nearly fell. When I asked what was wrong, she told me she was on medication and wasn’t supposed to do heights or operate machinery.”