LITMIR.BIZ

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      From inside the front office, a very pregnant brunette in a light-blue scrub smock and ponytail turned to see who had just come in.

      “May I help you?” she asked, an instant before her eyes widened. “Jenny Baker!”

      Pressing her hand to the small of her back, thirty-something Rhonda Pembroke turned to get a better look at the girl she hadn’t seen in four years. “Bess told me this morning that you were back. And Lois Neely was in here not two hours ago sayin’ you’ve moved into your grandma’s old place.”

      Word had definitely preceded her—which meant at least one of the two men she’d encountered during her first hours home had wasted no time spreading it. Jenny’s money was on Joe as the culprit. Lois worked as dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and Joe’s name had come up when Jenny had been met with virtually the same greeting at the diner an hour ago.

      “Are you really going to restore your grandma’s house?”

      Jenny’s smile faltered. She had no idea who had assumed such a thing, though she could see where someone might take it for granted. No one in her right mind would live there without redoing the place. Restoration, however, would cost a fortune she would never have.

      “It certainly needs work,” she replied, deliberately hedging as she nodded toward the woman’s girth. “How are you and your family doing? Is this your third?”

      “Fourth. I had a little girl while you were gone. But you didn’t come by to hear about me,” she insisted. “Who are you here to see? The doctor?” Her glance made a quick sweep of the bruises barely visible beneath the makeup on Jenny’s jaw. “Or Bess?”

      Jenny felt herself hesitate. Being Greg’s receptionist and office manager, Rhonda would know that he’d been hurt. He might even have told her that she’d helped him, and the woman simply assumed that she was there to see how he was doing. Which she was. Partly.

      It was whatever else he might have said that worried her.

      “The doctor,” she replied. “Is he available?”

      “He’s with a patient. But give me a minute.” Turning from the desk below the wide window, she dropped her hand from her back. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

      A large bulletin board hung by the door that separated the waiting area from the exam rooms. Wanting to take her mind off her growing uneasiness, Jenny glanced over a poster for a senior citizens’ exercise classes at the local community center. She had no idea why the local seniors needed a formal exercise routine. Most of those she’d known growing up got plenty of exercise working their gardens and gathering berries in the woods in the summer and shoveling snow and snowshoeing in the winter. The people in the North Woods seemed to be of hardier stock than those she’d encountered in the city.

      She was wondering if she could pick up a few extra dollars this winter shoveling snow for those who weren’t so hardy when the door suddenly opened.

      There was a little more white in Bess Amherst’s tight crop of salt-and-pepper curls than Jenny had remembered, and the crow’s feet around her narrowed hazel eyes seemed to have fanned a little farther toward her temples, but she hadn’t otherwise changed since Jenny had last seen her. The midfifties, suffer-no-whiners nurse practitioner still wore her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck, still preferred pastel plaid shirts and elastic-waist pants to the nurse’s scrub uniform Dr. Wilson had never been able to get her to wear, and still wore white athletic shoes—which more or less matched her short lab jacket.

      Stylish, she wasn’t.

      Interested, she always was.

      Jenny had known Bess since she was a child.

      “You’re too thin,” the woman immediately pronounced, hands on her hips. “I don’t know why you girls go off to the city and come back looking like waifs. Everybody’s always bragging about what great restaurants they have in Boston, but seems to me you girls never eat in ’em. And your hair.” Had it not been for the twinkle in her eyes, Bess might have looked as disapproving as she sounded. “How big-city you look with it all short and wispy like that.” She shook her head as she stepped forward, shoes squeaking. “Let me see that forehead of yours.”

      Before Jenny could even say hello herself, Bess nudged back the sweep of her dark bangs. She smelled faintly of antibacterial soap, rubbing alcohol and—vanilla. “The doctor said he didn’t get a chance to look at that,” she said, frowning, as she concentrated on the two-inch sidewalk burn above Jenny’s right eye. “What have you put on it?”

      “Nothing. I just dabbed at it with soap and water.”

      “Well, you need to keep your hair away from it. And it needs ointment. Come on back and I’ll get you some. And don’t go putting any makeup on it. Not until it heals. It doesn’t look like it’ll scar now, but it will if you get it infected.”

      Her shoes gave another chirp as she turned. After waiting for Jenny to pass, she closed the door behind her and glanced down the wide hallway to where Rhonda headed toward them, her hand at her back.

      “How’s her head?” Rhonda asked.

      “Just an abrasion. I’m going to give her some salve to put on it.”

      “I told Dr. Reid you’re here,” she said to Jenny. Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper as she moved past. “And I don’t blame you for wanting to come home.”

      Bess turned into a white room lined with black counters and lab equipment and pointed Jenny to a chrome-legged stool. A faint frown pinched her mouth. “She must have overheard the doctor tell me he wanted me to check on you. He felt bad that he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to check you himself.”

      “He wanted you to check on me?”

      “That’s the kind of man he is. If he thinks a person needs help, he sees that she gets it.” Her shrug looked vaguely preoccupied as she pulled open one of the dozens of drawers and motioned again for Jenny to sit. “Considering the pain he had to be in, I’m surprised he was thinking at all. Good that you were there for him.”

      Taking out what she was after, she closed the drawer, collected a small packet, a gauze pad and paper tape and walked to where Jenny stood by the stool. Since Jenny hadn’t sat, she proceeded to work on her where she stood. “Hold your bangs back.”

      “Bess, you don’t have to—”

      “Yes, I do,” she said, and pushed them back herself to dab at the scrape with the orange-brown pad from the packet.

      Jenny didn’t know what was on it, only that it smelled awful and stung like the devil.

      “It’s just too bad it took something like this to bring you to your senses and move back to where it’s safe. You’re lucky that hoodlum didn’t have something worse on his mind.”

      Paper crackled as she opened a gauze pad. Removing the lid from a little silver tube, she looped a coil of ointment onto the pad and moved Jenny’s finger to hold it in place when she positioned it above her eye.

      As desperately as Jenny wanted to leave the events of the past month behind, it seemed easiest to let the women assume she had come home only because she hadn’t felt secure where she’d been. The older residents of Maple Mountain had always regarded cities as dens of iniquity that lured and swallowed up their young people. Having one of their own back, battered and bruised, undoubtedly vindicated the attitude.

      All Jenny cared about was that Greg apparently hadn’t mentioned her comment about having been cleared by the detectives. If he had, the outspoken nurse practitioner would have already demanded to know what he’d been talking about. Bess had been good friends with her mother.

      “Keep this covered.” Deftly applying strips of tape, Bess secured the pad in place. With that done, she handed her the silver tube, a handful of gauze pads and the tape roll. “Use the salve twice a day.” The woman’s friendly scolding suddenly softened.

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