Stranger in the Moonlight (36 page)

The two women again gave her a look.

“What?!” Heather asked, exasperated. She’d moved to Edilean because her husband worked nearby and he said the small town would be a great place to raise kids. And Heather had been thrilled to get a nursing job so close to their new house. But that was three weeks ago and now she didn’t know if she could stay there. All this week she’d been saying she was going to quit.

Betsy spoke first. “Everyone in town except her husband knows that Sylvia Garland isn’t going out with the girls on Thursday nights. She’s sleeping around—and Dr. Reede told her so.”

“What business is that of his?”

“Communicable diseases, I guess,” Alice said. “Besides, he’s used to working with people who have serious problems, like elephantiasis and leprosy.”

Heather had heard about Dr. Reede’s work around the world, but she wasn’t going to be put off by that excuse. “If he thinks that small town illnesses are beneath him, why doesn’t he leave?”

Yet again the women exchanged looks, then Alice spoke. “He tried to get other doctors to take over the practice for him.”

“But doctors today want lots of money,” Betsy said. “And they don’t want to live in a tiny town and have to care for locals who talk too much, and tourists who get too many mosquito bites.”

“Although he did enjoy that rescue last month,” Alice said. “He had to climb down the side of a cliff.”

“Great!” Heather said. “If everyone jumped off the side of a mountain would that make him happy?”

For a moment Alice and Betsy seemed to consider the idea. They too were worn out by Dr. Reede’s never-ending bad temper. In fact, though she’d never admit it, it was the real reason Alice was taking early retirement.

Heather dropped down onto a chair by the photocopy machine. “Doesn’t he have a personal life? A girlfriend? He’s a good-looking man. At least I think he would be if he weren’t always frowning. Has he ever smiled in his entire life?”

“Dr. Reede used to smile a lot,” Betsy said. “When he was a child he loved to come to the office to visit his uncle Tristan. He was a very sweet little boy who always knew he wanted to be a doctor. But then . . .”

“What happened?” Heather asked.

“Laura dumped him for the Baptist preacher,” Alice answered.

“Where?”

“Where what?” Betsy asked.

“Where did this Laura find a preacher so dynamic that she left a hottie like Dr. Reede?” Heather asked.

“A hottie, is he?” Alice asked. “Even though he never smiles?”

“If I just
saw
him I’d think he was gorgeous. But he opens his mouth and I can’t stand him. So what about this Laura? Where’d she go to find a man?”

“Nowhere. She lives here in Edilean. Her parents moved here in the 1970s.”

“Wait a minute!” Heather said. “You don’t mean Laura Billings, do you? The wife of the Baptist preacher here in Edilean?”

“The very one,” Alice said.

“But she’s . . .”

“She’s what?” Betsy asked.

“Drab,” Heather said. “She looks like she was always somebody’s mother. I can’t imagine her being the Great Love of anyone.”

“But she was. She and Reede were inseparable from seventh or eighth grade and all through college. Then he went away to medical school and she took up with the new pastor.” Betsy lowered her voice. “The rumor is that Dr. Reede was so depressed that he tried to kill himself, but he was rescued by Dr. Tris’s wife. This was before they were married and she was still a teenager.”

“Wow!” Heather said. “Drama in a small town. Are you saying that Dr. Reede has been sulking ever since Mrs. Billings ran off with another man?”

“More or less,” Betsy said. “Although he’d never admit it. For years he was a world hero.”

“Everyone falls back on that,” Heather said. “Africa, Afghanistan, and countries I’ve never even heard of, but that doesn’t excuse him
now
.”

“If you ask me,” Alice said, “that boy was trying to go so fast that he’d outrun his past.”

“And now he’s stuck back here in Edilean,” Betsy said with a sigh.

“And he lets everyone know that he doesn’t want to be here,” Heather added.

“Actually . . .” Betsy said, “he does a lot of good, only he doesn’t let people see it.”

“I know he does,” Heather said. “He’s a good doctor. He’s efficient anyway.”

“No,” Betsy said. “It’s more than that. He . . . Okay, let me tell you about something that happened a couple of months ago.”

Betsy told how she’d been sitting at her desk, typing out invoices of unpaid bills, when Dr. Reede came out of the exam room. She had long ago learned to keep her mouth shut around him, since she never knew if he was in one of his “moods,” as she and Alice called them. He varied from a grunt in answer to a greeting to a “Is there no work to do in here?”

But that day he’d stood there in silence until Betsy looked up from the computer. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“When does Mr. Carlisle come in again?”

She brought up the schedule on the screen. “Tomorrow.” Since Mr. Carlisle was a hypochondriac who wanted attention more than medicine, she asked if she should reschedule him.

Dr. Reede hesitated. “When are Mrs. Springer and Mrs. Jeffrey coming in?”

Mrs. Springer was a very nice middle-aged woman who usually brought the staff cookies, while Mrs. Jeffrey had a six-year-old daughter and was pregnant with twins. “Wednesday,” Betsy said. “Mrs. Springer at nine a.m. and Mrs. Jeffrey at three.”

“Change them,” Dr. Reede said. “Everybody on Friday. Carlisle at ten, Springer ten-fifteen, and Jeffrey at ten-thirty.”

“But—” Betsy began. There was no way that Mr. Carlisle would get in and out in a mere fifteen minutes. And Mrs. Springer was to have her annual physical. This was going to cause a traffic jam—and it would be Alice and Betsy who would have to do the apologizing.

“Just
do
it,” Dr. Reede snapped and went back into the exam room.

“So what happened?” Heather asked.

“Everyone was on time and everyone was predictable,” Alice said, her eyes twinkling.

“What does that mean?” Heather asked.

“Mr. Carlisle took forty-five minutes in the exam room and during that time . . .” Alice

began.

“They helped each other,” Betsy said. The two women had worked together for so long they often finished each other’s sentences. “Mrs. Springer put down her knitting and played with Mrs. Jeffrey’s daughter.”

“And when the young mother fell asleep in her chair, Mrs. Springer asked us for a pillow for her,” Alice said.

“And when it came time for Mrs. Springer’s exam, she said she’d reschedule and she took care of the little girl while Mrs. Jeffrey went in.”

“They’ve been friends ever since,” Alice finished. “Mrs. Springer is an honorary grandmother to the kids.”

Heather leaned back in her chair. “You think Dr. Reede did it on purpose?”

“If it were an isolated incident, I’d say no,” Betsy said, “but there have been other things too.”

“Such as?” Heather asked.

“One morning when I came in to work Dr. Reede was just getting off my computer. I was curious about what he was doing so I—”

“She snooped,” Alice interrupted.

“I did indeed. He was on Amazon and he was still logged on, so I looked at what he’d ordered. It was a novel by Barbara Pym.”

“Never heard of her,” Heather said.

“They’re sweet little English novels,” Alice said.

“I’d think he’d read horror stories, the more gruesome the better,” Heather said.

“I know he reads the
New England Journal of Medicine
from cover to cover,” Betsy said in the doctor’s defense. “Anyway, I thought I’d found out some secret about him.”

“She didn’t even tell
me
!” April said reproachfully.

Betsy continued her story. “The package came two days later, and I asked if he wanted me to open it. He said no and took it into his office. Three days later when Mr. Tucker left the exam room, he was carrying the book. I wouldn’t have noticed but he had a note from the doctor and the poor man couldn’t read the handwriting, so he asked for my help.” Betsy stopped talking.

“What did the note say?” Heather asked.

“Well . . .” Betsy said, “Mr. Tucker is in his seventies and all his family has moved away. His son lives in England. Or is it Sweden? Or maybe it’s Wyoming.” She looked at Alice, who shrugged. “Anyway, the poor man was alone and deteriorating fast. He was in here every other week with a new ailment.”

“‘Was’ alone?” Heather asked. “What happened?”

“The note he couldn’t read was the date and place of a book club meeting in the basement of the Baptist church. I didn’t tell the poor man so, but it was an all-female group.”

“Which is why they read authors like Barbara Pym,” Alice added.

“Mr. Turner went there to return the book and he—”

“Let me guess,” Heather said. “He met someone.”

Betsy smiled. “Mrs. Henries. She was sixty-eight and had been widowed two years before. Her two children also live elsewhere. Dr. Reede told Mr. Turner that Mrs. Henries had left the book in his office and would he please return it to her.”

“And it was the book the doctor had ordered?”

“Yes, it was. Last week I saw Mr. Turner and Mrs. Henries sitting in the town square, and they both looked very happy—and Mr. Turner hasn’t been back in this office since. All his physical complaints seem to have disappeared.”

Heather was quiet for a moment. “Because the doctor’s done a few good deeds doesn’t

excuse his bad behavior to most of his patients.”

“You mean he should be nicer to the many females who come here with no real problems but
always
end up inviting Dr. Reede out?” Alice asked.

“Or the men who live on beer and chicken wings but can’t understand why they’re so tired?” Betsy asked.

“And what doctor today makes house calls?” Alice asked. “Dr. Reede does. If a person is genuinely sick, he goes to them. One time he delivered the baby of a woman pinned inside a wrecked car. He slithered in through the broken back glass while the EMTs cut the door open to get her out. And he’d cut his leg enough to require stitches, but he didn’t tell anyone.”

“I don’t understand,” Heather said. “I keep hearing about this Dr. Tristan and how everyone loves him. What would
he
have done in those situations?”

“The same things, but his attitude is different. Dr. Tris would have gone through the back windshield too, but he wouldn’t have yelled that the EMTs weren’t doing their jobs quickly enough,” Betsy said.

“And while he was delivering the baby he would have teased and flirted with the young woman until she was half in love with him,” Alice said.

“Would he have put the knitting lady and the pregnant woman together?” Heather asked.

“Probably, but he wouldn’t have done it in secrecy,” Betsy said.

Heather looked from one to the other. “Didn’t some philosopher say something about it being better to give anonymously?”

Alice and Betsy were looking at her with little smiles on their faces.

“Okay,” Heather said, “so maybe I won’t quit. Maybe the next time he snaps at me I’ll try

to remember some of his good deeds. But damn! He’s hard to be around. Maybe if he had a girlfriend he—”

“You think we haven’t tried that?” Betsy asked quickly. “We have paraded every pretty girl within fifty miles of here past him. Tell her about the party you threw at your house,” she said to Alice.

“I cooked for three days, and along with the other guests I invited eight very pretty, young, single women. Betsy and I made a list, then filled it: tall, short, skinny, plump.”

“Never married, been married with a child, even a young widow.”

“Betsy and I made sure Dr. Reede talked to each of them, but he wasn’t interested.”

“So what’s his sex life like?” Heather asked.

“I have no idea,” Betsy said somewhat stiffly.

“And we certainly don’t ask,” Alice added.

“It seems to me that the only thing that’s going to make Reede Aldredge happy is to get out of Edilean,” Heather said.

“That’s the conclusion we came to.”

“Maybe
we
can get another doctor to come here.”

Alice pulled a thick file folder out of the cabinets. “These are the letters we’ve sent.”

“And the replies.”

As Heather flipped through them and noted the refusals, she said, “There
has
to be a way. I need this job. It’s a good salary and good benefits. If I could just figure out what he needs I’d give it to him.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Betsy said.

“We’re open to suggestions,” Alice said.

“And we’ll help you,” Betsy said, and they all three nodded.

They didn’t know it, but a bond had been formed by the women. They were united in a single purpose: to find out what Dr. Reede Aldredge wanted and to give it to him.

Chapter One

Sophie tried to control her anger, but it wasn’t easy. She could feel it rising in her like bile, traveling upward from her stomach.

She was driving her old car and she was about twenty miles from Edilean, Virginia. The scenery was beautiful, with trees sheltering the road, the fading sunlight playing on the leaves. She’d heard about Edilean from her college roommate Kim Aldredge. The two of them, with their other roommate, Jecca, had laughed at Kim’s portrayal of the little town as a cross between heaven and . . . well, heaven. “Everyone knows everybody!” Kim said with enthusiasm.