Authors: Meredith Webber,Alison Roberts
Not that the reason mattered.
‘I will,’ she promised, checking his blood pressure, pulse and respirations. He had the mask across his mouth and nose, but was talking easily through it. His breathing was still far too fast, but his pulse, though still tachycardic, was more regular than it had been when she’d automatically felt it earlier. ‘You start. Tell me all about yourself.’
‘Not worth talking about,’ he muttered weakly. ‘In fact, I’d have been better off if you hadn’t come.’
‘And here I thought you were pleased to see us,’ Kate teased, aware a little self-pity was quite normal in someone so ill.
‘Well, I was at first,’ Jack grudgingly admitted, ‘but only because I was feeling so lousy. Really, though, I’d be better off dead.’
‘Don’t we all feel that at times?’ Kate sighed.
‘I bet you don’t,’ Jack retorted, buying into the argument she’d provoked, although he was so weak. ‘Look at you—pretty, probably well dressed under those overalls, good job. What would someone like you know about how I feel?’
‘I would if you told me.’ Kate smiled at him. ‘In fact, you tell me the Jack story and I’ll tell you the Kate story, and I bet I can beat your misery with my misery—hands down.’
‘I bet you can’t.’
‘I bet I can.’
‘Bet you can’t!’
‘Can!’
‘Children, just get on with it.’
Hamish’s voice was pained, but Kate heard amusement in it as well. He knew they had to find out Jack’s background, and had guessed this was her way of goading Jack into telling it.
‘My family didn’t want me,’ Jack began, anxiety and pain tightening the words so they caused a sympathetic lurch of pain in Kate’s chest. ‘They all live in Sydney and they sent me right up here to work. Can you imagine a family doing that?’
‘Not to a nice boy like you,’ Kate told him, taking his hand to offer comfort even while she tried to stir him into further revelations. ‘But mine’s worse. My father died, then my mother, then my brother told me they weren’t my parents at all. They’d just brought me up because they’d felt sorry for me. So I didn’t really have a family at all. Beat that.’
Jack frowned at her, but had his comeback ready.
‘Mine’ll disinherit me when they find out about this,’ he said.
‘Well, that sounds as if they haven’t already done it. You’ve still got time to redeem yourself. And now you’re hurt, you can play the sympathy card. My brother—or the louse I thought was my brother—is contesting my mother’s will because he says I wasn’t ever properly adopted. How’s that for the ultimate disinheritance?’
‘That
is
a lousy thing to do,’ Jack agreed, but he was thinking hard, obviously not yet ready to concede in the misery stakes. ‘My uncle kicked me off his property.’
‘I traced my birth mother but found out she’d died the week before I got there.’
‘Wow! That’s terrible. So you don’t know who you are?’
‘Nobody—that’s who I am,’ Kate said cheerfully. She didn’t feel cheerful about it, but that wasn’t the point. Keeping Jack talking was the point. ‘Beat you, didn’t I?’
He looked at her for a moment then shook his head.
‘I lost my girl.’
His voice broke on the words and Kate squeezed harder on his hand.
‘That’s why my uncle kicked me out.’
‘Ah, that’s terrible, but can’t you get in touch with her again even if you’re not working for your uncle?’
Jack shook his head.
‘I tried. I really tried. I worked on another property. It didn’t pay much so I got this other job, then I had some time off so I thought I’d go and see her—tell her what was happening. But I couldn’t get a lift—I tried, I really tried—and I had to get back, and it turned out—Anyway, if I had got to her place, her dad would probably have killed me. It was her dad broke us up. He rang my uncle and told him we’d been seeing each other. Apparently he went mental about it and that’s why my uncle sacked me.’
The story had come tumbling out in confused snatches, but Kate was able to piece it all together.
‘Love problems are the pits,’ she sympathised, ‘but, really, yours are chicken feed, Jack.’
‘Chicken feed?’ He perked up at the challenge she offered him. ‘I’m shot and I lost my girl.’
‘OK, but what about this? I stop work to nurse my mother—’
‘Who wasn’t your mother,’ Jack offered.
‘That’s right, but I loved her.’ It was only with difficulty Kate stopped her own voice cracking. This wasn’t personal, it was professional, and Jack was sounding much more alert. ‘Anyway, I took two months off to nurse her at the end and my ever-loving fiancé and my best friend began an affair right under the noses of all our colleagues. OK, so I didn’t lose my job, but can you imagine going back to work with the pair of them billing and cooing all over the place, and everyone laughing about it?’
‘More swabs.’
The gruff demand reminded Kate that Jack wasn’t the only one hearing the story of her recent life, but Hamish had told her to distract Jack, and her strategy was working. She opened a new packet of swabs and passed them over, giving Hamish a look that warned him not to say one thing about her conversation.
‘No, I wouldn’t have gone back to work there either,’ Jack said. ‘But you’ve got another job now, haven’t you? I’ll never get another job.’
‘Piffle! Of course you will. Young, healthy, good-looking chap like you. You’ll get another job and another girl, both better than the ones before.’
Silence greeted this remark, a silence that stretched for so long Kate checked his pulse again. Then he said quietly, ‘I don’t want another girl, and I don’t know how to get … the one I want back now I’ve messed things up so much.’
‘We’ll help you,’ Kate promised rashly. ‘Won’t we, Hamish? We’ll get you better then we’ll help you find your girl.’
Hamish looked up from the business of debriding infected tissue from Jack’s leg.
‘We can certainly try,’ he said, but the frown on his face was denying his words.
Did he think they wouldn’t find the girl?
Or … Kate’s heart paused a beat … did he think they wouldn’t get this young man better?
‘O
KAY
,
THAT
’
S ABOUT
as clean as I can get it without actually removing the bullet,’ Hamish announced. ‘I’d like to go in and get it, but without X-rays to show us exactly where it is and where I’d have to cut, I wouldn’t risk it. You’re also losing a fair bit of blood, Jack. Had any problems with bleeding before?’
Jack ignored the question, closing his eyes as if the effort of talking to Kate had exhausted him.
Which it might have, though Hamish was thinking otherwise.
‘At least, doing it back at the hospital, we’ll have blood on hand should you need it. The helicopter will be back at first light, and we’ll have you in Theatre in Crocodile Creek a couple of hours later.’
Jack’s eyes opened at that, and he tried to sit up straighter.
‘Shouldn’t I go to Cairns? Or what about Townsville? That has a bigger hospital, doesn’t it?’
‘Bigger but not better,’ Hamish told him. ‘Besides, it’s too far for a chopper flight. Something about Crocodile Creek bothering you? We don’t really have crocodiles in the creek—well, not where it flows past the hospital.’
Jack didn’t answer, but turned his head away, as if not seeing Hamish might remove him from the cave.
And the prospect of a trip to Crocodile Creek …
Hamish watched Kate bend to speak quietly to the young man, no doubt reassuring him he’d have the very best of treatment at Crocodile Creek, but Hamish was becoming more and more certain that Jack had reasons of his own for avoiding that particular hospital.
But how to confirm what he was thinking?
He walked around to the other side and squatted beside the open pack, delving through it for what he needed. Then, from this side, he looked directly at Jack.
‘I’ll add some pain relief to the fluid now, so you should be feeling more comfortable before long, and then I guess we should do the paperwork. You up for that, Kate? Did you see the initial assessment forms in the pack?’
Kate’s frown told him she disapproved of the change in his attitude from friendly banter to practical matter-of-factness, but she didn’t know about a feud between two neighbouring families up here in the north, or the connection of one family to the hospital. Or about a baby called Lucky who was now called Jackson who had a form of haemophilia known as von Willebrand’s disease.
Or about the search for the baby’s father—a young man called Jack.
‘I’ve got them here,’ she said, putting ice into her words in case he hadn’t caught the frown.
‘Then fill them out. You and Jack can manage all the personal stuff then I’ll do the medication and dosages when you get down to that section. And while you’re doing it, I’ll take a look around to see if there’s a patch of clear ground from which we can winch Jack up in the morning.’
He found a stronger torch in the equipment backpack, turned it on and walked away, hoping his absence might help Jack speak more freely. If he’d talk to anyone, it would be to Kate. Nothing like a baring of souls to create a bond between people. But had she really been through so much emotional trauma or
had she made it all up to keep Jack talking? He had no idea, which wasn’t surprising, but what did surprise him was that he wanted to find out.
Hell’s teeth! He’d been in Australia for nearly two years, and while he’d enjoyed some mild flirtations and one reasonably lengthy and decidedly pleasant relationship, he’d remained heart-whole and fancy-free. So now, three weeks before he was due to return home, was hardly the time to be developing an interest in a woman.
Yet his mind kept throwing up the image of his first sight of her, a slight figure, dressed all in brown, except for those ridiculous purple sandals, standing in the gloomy hallway, with a stray sunbeam probing through the fretwork breezeway above the door and turning the tips of her loose brown curls to liquid gold.
‘Is he a good doctor?’ Jack asked, when Hamish had disappeared into the darkness.
Kate looked in the direction Hamish had taken, but already she could see nothing but inky blackness beyond the glow of the lamp.
‘I’ve just started work so I don’t know, but from the way he treated you I’d have to say he is.’
Jack closed his eyes and lay in silence for a while, but just when Kate had decided he’d drifted off to sleep he opened his eyes again and looked at her.
‘So you don’t know anything about the hospital?’ he asked.
‘Not a thing, except its reputation is excellent. Apparently the boss, Charles Wetherby, insists on hiring top-class staff and only buying the best equipment, so it has a name for being far in advance of most country hospitals.’
But her words failed to reassure Jack, who had not only closed his eyes but had now folded his lips into a straight line of worry.
Seeking to divert him, she pulled out the pad of assessment forms.
‘You must be tired, but before you drop off to sleep, how about we fill this out. There aren’t many questions.’
Jack opened his eyes and looked directly at her.
‘I should have died,’ he said, then he closed his eyes again and turned his head away, making it unmistakably clear that the conversation was over.
‘Full name?’ Kate asked hopefully. ‘Address? Come on, Jack, we have to do this.’
But the young man had removed himself from her—not physically, but mentally—cutting the link she’d thought she’d forged when they’d played their ‘whose life sucks the most’ game earlier.
She lifted his wrist and checked his pulse then wrote the time and the rate on the form. She filled in all the other parts she could, remembering Jack’s initial respiration rate, systolic blood pressure—she’d taken that herself before Hamish had started the second drip—and pulse, writing times and numbers, wondering about all the unanswered questions at the top of the form.
‘Asleep?’
Hamish’s quiet question preceded him into the light. She stood up, careful not to disturb their patient, and moved a little away.
‘He wasn’t—just closed his eyes to avoid answering me—but I think he’s genuinely asleep now. I’ve just checked him. His pulse is steadier but his systolic blood pressure hasn’t changed as much as I’d have thought it would, considering the fluid we’re giving him. Do you think there could be internal bleeding somewhere?’
‘It’s likely, and though I’ve sutured part of the wound and put a pressure pad on it, I’d say it’s still bleeding.’
‘That’s more than a guess, isn’t it?’ Kate looked up at the man who sounded so concerned. They’d moved out of the lamplight, but a full moon had risen and was shedding soft, silvery light into the gorge.
‘It’s a long story but we’ve time ahead of us. If you dig into the equipment backpack you’ll find a space blanket to wrap around Jack—there should be a couple of inflatable pillows in there as well. Put one under his feet and one behind his head and cover him with the blanket while I get a cuppa going and find something for us to eat.’
‘And then you’ll tell me?’
Hamish smiled, but it was a grim effort.
‘I’ll tell you what I’m guessing.’
Kate cupped her hands around the now empty mug and looked out at the broad leaves of the cabbage palms that filled the gorge. Hamish’s story of a newborn baby found at a rodeo, the dramatic efforts that had saved his life, the finding of his dangerously ill mother, and the fight to save
her
life, was the stuff of television medicine, while feuding neighbours and heart attacks turned it into soap opera.
Maybe she’d got it wrong.
She turned to Hamish, sitting solidly beside her at the entrance to the cave.
‘So you think Jack is Charles Wetherby’s nephew, sacked from the family property, run by Charles’s brother Philip, for consorting with the Cooper girl, daughter of the Wetherbys’ sworn enemies who live next door. And you’ve put all this together because his wound is bleeding and you think he has von Willebrand’s disease.’
‘Lucky—the baby—has von Willebrand’s disease and it runs through the Wetherby family,’ Hamish said patiently. ‘Originally, back when Lucky was found, Charles had no idea his nephew had been working at Wetherby Downs, because Charles and Philip rarely spoke to each other. But since Jim Cooper was admitted to hospital with a heart attack, Charles has been anxious about the Coopers’ property and that forced him to speak to Philip—’
‘Who told him about Jack and Megan—OK, I get that bit,’
Kate assured him. ‘And the family feud—I can understand that. But if Jack is Charles’s nephew, and Charles and Philip don’t get on, why’s Jack so against going to hospital at Crocodile Creek? It’s a good uncle and bad uncle scenario—like good cop and bad cop. You’d think he’d be happy to be under his good uncle’s care. Family does count, you know.’
Before the words were fully out, she knew they were a mistake. She didn’t need to look at Hamish to know those darned expressive eyebrows of his would be on the rise.
‘Look,’ she told him, wishing she was standing up and a little further away from him but resigned to making the best of things. ‘The story I told Jack—well, that comes under the heading of nurse-patient confidentiality so, please, pretend you never heard it and don’t you dare breathe so much as a word of it to anyone. I went back to work for a week after my mother died, and if one more person had put their arm around me or thrown me a “poor Kate” look, I tell you, I’d have slit their throat with the nearest scalpel. Stuff happens, and you have to move on. I’ve moved on, and that’s it.’
He nodded but didn’t speak. In the end she had to prompt him.
‘So why’s Jack worried about going to Crocodile Creek?’
‘He has a bullet in his leg.’
Kate turned to frown at the man beside her.
‘This is the bush. Out here, from what I’ve heard, people tote guns all the time. They shoot things—wild pigs and water buffalo and snakes. From the evidence of road signs on the drive up, they even shoot road signs. So he shot himself, gun going off as he climbed through a fence—isn’t that what happens? Or maybe Digger shot him by accident.’
‘So where’s Digger now? If he shot Jack by accident, why would he call for help then disappear?’
‘Because he had to be elsewhere. Had to take his cattle to market or organise a rodeo. I’m a city girl, how would I know where he had to be?’
She saw the glimmer of white teeth as Hamish smiled, but the cheerful expression passed quickly.
‘Outback people aren’t like that. They don’t desert their mates. And Jack’s worried about being disinherited for something that’s happened since his uncle sacked him. My guess is he met up with some unsavoury characters—no doubt innocently, he’s a city kid too, remember—and when he realised something was wrong, he tried to leave.’
‘And someone shot him? To stop him leaving? Someone who’s out there? With a gun?’
Kate must have sounded more panicky than she’d realised, for Hamish put a comforting arm around her shoulders and drew her close. It was probably a ‘poor Kate’ kind of hug and she should have been reaching for a scalpel, but the heavy arm was exceedingly comforting so she let it stay there—even snuggled a little closer.
Not a good idea as far as the immunity was concerned. She unsnuggled and thought a little more about Hamish’s hypothesis.
‘What kind of unsavoury characters might you have out here?’
‘Cattle duffers.’
‘Stupid cattle?’
Hamish laughed.
‘Cattle thieves. They steal cattle from properties in the area. These properties are the size of small countries so their boundaries can’t be watched all the time. The duffers keep the cattle somewhere safe—this gorge would be ideal—until they can alter the brands, then truck them to the markets.’
‘So Jack meets these guys who say come and steal some cattle with us and he does?’ She turned to study their sleeping patient for a moment. ‘He doesn’t look that dumb.’
Hamish turned to look as well, bringing his body closer.
‘No, but say he meets a couple of guys at a pub, and their story is that they’re droving a mob of cattle to a railhead. Something like that. Jack joins, thinking they’re OK, then
slowly works out there’s something wrong. I’d say he recognised his uncle’s brand on some of the cattle. He tries to leave and the boss, who’s about to reap a good reward for his thievery, tries to stop him.’
‘With a bullet?’
Bother the immunity. Kate scooted back to snuggle position by Hamish’s side.
‘They play for keeps.’ He tucked his arm back around her as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘It’s my guess he didn’t shoot to kill the kid. In his mind, that gave Jack a chance of survival and himself time to get the cattle away from here. Jack was lucky the second guy, Digger, had a conscience.’
‘That does explain Jack’s concern, but surely if he went into the job innocently, he can’t be charged with cattle … What was the word you used?’
‘Duffing.’
Kate nodded. ‘I like it. Cattle duffing. It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Not quite as nasty as stealing.’
‘Apparently it’s gone on ever since Australia was first settled, but that doesn’t make it right, or legal. No, our Jack will be in trouble. For a start, we have to report bullet wounds to the police.’
‘But if he’s the father of the baby, and we know he loves the girl because he told us so, then it’s not very lucky for Lucky if his father’s in jail. We’ll have to get him off the charge. Don’t people get a second chance? Or if he’s responsible for the police catching the duffers, won’t he be rewarded, not punished? Perhaps we could help catch the duffers?’
‘Well, that gives me hope,’ Hamish said.
Kate shifted reluctantly away from him so she could turn and look into his face.
‘Hope for what? What kind of hope?’
He grinned at her.
‘Well, I thought earlier you’d only come closer to me
because you were worried about a gunman lurking out there somewhere, but if you’re brave enough to take on a couple of armed desperados, then I guess you were cuddling up to me because you like me.’
He touched her lightly on the head, lifting one of her curls and twirling it around his finger.
Dangerous territory, finger twirls in hair that felt very … comforting?