The Mountain Midwife (5 page)

“Not good ones. You must have just laid down a new pile of gravel. Most of the tracks were obliterated by the stuff sliding back into the depressions.”

“Preparing for the winter.” Aware of silence, she turned to see the crime scene techs standing behind her, their equipment packed up, their faces grim.

“Why so much blood?” one of them asked.

“She was bleeding more than normal.”

She could have begun to hemorrhage again at any moment, especially with being moved so roughly, so soon.

The rest of Ashley’s muffin turned to goo in her hand. “I left to call the hospital to warn them I was bringing her in and . . . the man took off with her and the baby. I’m sure they were running from whoever was in that other truck.”

“Was she still alive when you left to call the hospital?” Jason asked.

“Yes.”

“Why did you leave her?” Jason asked as he had earlier. “Don’t you have a phone in your exam room?”

“I do, but my landline wasn’t working. Maybe the rain we had yesterday got to the cables belowground or something.”

Over her head, Jason exchanged a glance with the techs, then he turned back to her. “The cable going into the house was cut.”

C
HAPTER
4

H
UNTER LET HIMSELF
into his parents’ Great Falls house with the key he had carried with him since he was twelve and came home from boarding school for breaks. If he hadn’t wanted to avoid disturbing his parents, he would have gone straight to their house from the airport to avoid reporters. Either no one knew where the McDermotts lived, or reporters didn’t dare bother the residents of Great Falls behind their fences for something so trivial.

He wouldn’t have bothered the residents behind the iron gates if not for that odd message and his parents’ reaction to it. They hadn’t laughed it off; in fact, they had suggested he make the forty-five-minute drive right then and there.

The front of the house had been bright with lights, but the kitchen Hunter entered was dark save for a light over the stove, a bulb bright enough to show him an apple pie still steaming from the oven. Mom might have moved into the realms of the one-percenters after law school, but she was still a homemaker beneath
the corporate sophistication. Rarely had they gone without homemade pies or cakes or cookies she had somehow found the time to craft herself. Hunter smiled and broke off a bite of crust.

“I should slap your hand for that, Hunter McDermott.” Mom herself strode into the kitchen in three-inch wedge slippers, some velvety loungewear emphasizing her tall, athletic build. “If you want a piece, cut a slice. There’s coffee in the den.”

“Thanks.” He kissed her smooth cheek. “A new hair color?”

“Don’t try to flatter me. My hair is the same color it’s been since I was born.” She grinned and fluffed the shoulder-length fall. “Even if it comes from a bottle now. Now go into the den and I’ll bring in some pie. You’re probably starving.”

“I don’t remember when I last ate.” He cast a longing glance at a fridge he knew would be stuffed with all sorts of delicacies.

“You need a wife to feed you properly.” As she made her usual plea for him to marry and settle, she moved to the refrigerator and began to pull containers off the shelves. “Fruit? Cheese? Fresh vegetables?”

“Give the man some real food, Virginia.” Dad appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face drawn, his dark hair looking more gray than Hunter remembered. “A roast beef sandwich at the least.” He held out his hand. “How are you besides hungry . . . son?”

Hunter didn’t think he imagined the hesitation before the last word.

He shook hands with his father. “Hungry.”

Or maybe not. The cramping in his gut felt more like anxiety than starvation. But Mom would prepare a feast and he would eat every bite to please her. Feeding people was Mom’s way of showing she cared.

Dad took those he cared about golfing. Unable to do that at
one o’clock in the morning, he led Hunter into the den, a room full of overstuffed sofas and chairs and a sixty-inch plasma TV. From the fridge inside the wall-hung TV, Dad withdrew a can of soda and gave it to Hunter. “Or would you prefer coffee?”

“This is fine.” Hunter popped the top on the Coke and settled onto one of the chairs.

Dad took the one opposite him. For several minutes they didn’t look at each other, nor did they speak. The house was too large for them to hear Mom busying herself in the kitchen. Though the TV was on a twenty-four-hour news station, the sound was turned down. The room lay so quiet Hunter heard the crackling of the soda inside its can. He looked at his father, wanting to say something to break the awkward silence, but no words came to him. Questions crowded his head as they had all the way from Clarendon. With Dad a dozen feet away turning a glass of Pellegrino between his fingers, staring at the fizzy water as though it held answers like some pagan scrying bowl, Hunter’s mind went blank.

Then the news flashed a picture of him in the doorway of his townhouse, looking disheveled and annoyed, and the video of the rescue and explosion that had gone viral on YouTube, and Dad clicked the remote to turn up the volume.

“Other than a brief statement outside his townhouse earlier this morning, McDermott has managed to elude reporters thus far,” the reporter was saying. “Further attempts for information have been unsuccessful; however, we do hope for an interview soon. Stay tuned to this station . . .”

Hunter rose far enough to push the Off button on the set. “That will be the day when I give them an interview. I am no hero. I simply did what any responsible citizen would do.”

“Apparently not so many would have picked up a strange child.”
Dad set his glass on a side table and speared his fingers through his shock of salt-and-pepper hair. “We like to think we raised you right, even if we were away from home more than we were here. Sometimes the lure of money overtakes one’s life and one forgets what’s important.”

“I always knew you loved me.” Hunter spun the soda can between his hands, making the crackling inside more frenetic. He didn’t look at his parent—the man he always thought of as his parent. “You managed to attend most of my choir concerts and basketball games.”

At least one or the other of them had. Rarely did both parents appear. Both had attended his high school graduation, but only Mom had managed to attend his graduation from MIT because it fell in an election year and Dad was swamped with work.

“We didn’t do enough.” Dad rose and headed for the door. “Let me see if I can help your mother. She’ll have three trays of food, if I know her.” His footfalls were silent on the thick carpet as he headed toward the back of the house.

Hunter rose and covered the distance to the French door in three strides. The long window opened onto an expanse of brick too elegant with its groupings of wrought-iron furniture and potted plants to call anything but a terrace. Beyond the fairy lights running along the edge of the covered area, flowering shrubbery gave way to lawns and gardens, all kept immaculate by two full-time employees. Hunter had liked helping the gardener dig bigger holes for new trees. Perhaps that was where his pleasure in digging tunnels began. Few holes in the ground took more engineering skill than carving a massive hole through a mountain without bringing millions of tons of rock down to destroy landscapes and lives. It wasn’t the occupation his parents wanted for him. He was supposed
to be an attorney like his siblings and parents. Perhaps the fact that he rarely saw any of them due to their sixty- and seventy-hour work-weeks, even with Mom spending many of those hours in the house with him in the early years, had sent him running in the opposite direction. At least he was outdoors most of the time, breathing in fresh air and feeling the sunshine, even if he sometimes worked as many hours as his family did. Or maybe he showed no interest in the law and politics because he was more different from the rest of his family than he had known.

The sugar and caffeine of the Coke unsettling his otherwise empty stomach, he retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and returned to his seat just as the rattle of dishes and murmur of voices sounded in the hallway. He set water and soda on a side table and stepped to the door to remove the laden tray from Mom’s hands. “I can’t eat half this, you know that.” He set the tray on the coffee table. “But it all looks delicious.”

“Well.” Mom laughed a little shrilly. “Your dad and I haven’t eaten yet either. We’d just gotten home when you called.”

“A gallery opening,” Dad added. “The paintings were good, but the food was terrible.”

“A new artist?” Hunter began to fill a plate with rolls, cold cuts, cheese, and fruit.

“New, but not young.” Mom began to fill two plates. “A second career for one of our neighbors.”

Hunter balanced his plate on his knee and began to eat so he didn’t have to talk, could hold off asking the question to which he wasn’t certain he wanted the answer.

“After her daughter moved to Seattle, Lucy Buress decided to pursue her lifelong urge to paint and turned out to have real talent with it.”

“But her son is a caterer and provided the food.” Dad grimaced. “I think the hors d’oeuvres were leftovers from a wedding last weekend.”

Mom laughed and shook her head. “So rude, but the things did have a warmed-over taste to them.”

“Swedish meatballs, of all the boring things, and they tasted like dog food.”

Hunter grinned for the first time in too long. “And when did you last taste dog food, Dad? Especially since we have never had a dog.”

His parents laughed, then silence fell. Everyone nibbled at the food and avoided one another’s eyes.

Hunter bore the discomfort for another five minutes, until he managed to eat a handful of grapes and a roll stuffed with roast beef so tender it melted on his tongue. With strawberries, fresh pineapple slices, and another roll still on his plate, he set the china aside and leaned toward his parents. “It’s time to talk.”

Side by side on the brown leather sofa, they exchanged glances and nodded.

“It is.” Dad belied his comment by biting into his sandwich.

Mom broke a grape off its stem but didn’t place the fruit in her mouth. She stared at the deep red globe. “Why don’t you tell us again what that woman said on your voice mail?”

Hunter closed his eyes and conjured the voice. “She sounded rough. Old, maybe, but more like she’s smoked a couple packs a day all her life. Rough and lots of coughing in between. And with her accent, she wasn’t all that easy to understand.”

“What kind of accent?” Dad asked.

“You know, that kind of southern, but more twangy accent from the mountains?”

“We know.” Both parents spoke together. Hunter thought one muttered, “All too well.”

“Go on,” Dad said.

“She called me Zachariah.” Hunter’s ears rang with the name he hadn’t been called for two decades and that he had legally changed as soon as he was old enough to do so. “She knew my name was once Zachariah, not even Zachary like some people used to think before I changed it. She kind of laughed after she called me that, then said, ‘This is your mother, and if you’re gonna go around rescuin’ people in foreign countries, you can come home and rescue your sister.’ ” He made himself look at his stone-faced parents before he continued. “I would have put it down as a crank call, except for that use of Zachariah. I can see someone around here, an old teacher or friend from elementary school, knowing something like that. But how would a woman in the 540 area code know it? That’s mostly southwestern Virginia. Around Christiansburg and Blacksburg. I’ve only been there once—when I visited Virginia Tech. And everyone knew me as Hunter by then. So how—how—” He didn’t know how to form the question, or even if it was the right question.

Dad heaved a sigh heavy enough to blow his paper napkin from the table to the floor. He let it lie there as he focused his brown eyes on Hunter. “She knew the name Zachariah because that was the name she gave you.”

“But—” Hunter swallowed, and the right question slid into his head. “So she is my birth mother?”

Mom started to cry, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

Dad bowed his head. “Yes, Hunter, Sheila Brooks is your birth mother.”

C
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5