LITMIR.BIZ

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      Coming home was turning out to be even harder than he’d thought it would be.

      Jeremiah waited until he heard the Jeep leave the ranch yard, its engine becoming little more than a distant purr. Just twenty minutes later Maggie’s old heap of a car jumped into life, and within minutes it, too, was gone off down the road. Then, quietly, Jeremiah threw back the quilt covering him and jumped to his feet.

      As he stretched the kinks out of his back and legs, he gave a low, deep-throated sigh of pure pleasure to be up and out of that bed. Saturday mornings on the ranch, he could count on one thing absolutely: Maggie would be gone for at least two hours. She’d have lunch with her friend Linda, who worked in the Curl Up and Dye hair salon, then do the grocery shopping for the week.

      “Thank God Sam picked today to go visit Bert,” Jeremiah muttered as he did a few deep knee bends, then touched his fingertips to his toes. “One more hour in that bed and I just might become an invalid.”

      An active man, Jeremiah hated nothing more than sitting still. And lying down just wasn’t in his game plan. A man of almost seventy knew only too well that soon enough he’d have an eternity to lie down. No point in hurrying things up any.

      Grinning to himself, he hotfooted it to the bedroom door and turned the old brass key in the lock. Just in case. Then he slipped over to the bookcase, pulled down a copy of War and Peace and reached behind it for his secret stash.

      “Ah.” He pulled out one of three cigars he had tucked away, then quickly found a match and lit it. A few puffs had him sighing in pleasure. Then, before he could forget, he walked to the bedside table and picked up the phone.

      Punching in a few numbers, he puffed contentedly while he waited for his old friend to answer the phone. When he did, Jeremiah said, “Bert? Good. Wanted to warn you. Sam’s headed your way.”

      “Damn it, Jeremiah,” the good doctor complained, “I don’t like this at all. Told you when you first thought it up it was a harebrained scheme, and nothing’s changed.”

      It was an old song and Jeremiah knew the words by heart. Bert had been against this plan from the beginning. It was only their long-standing friendship that had finally convinced the doctor to go along with it.

      Jeremiah tucked the cigar into the corner of his mouth and talked around it. “There’s no backing out now, Bert. You signed up for this. And blast it, man, you know it was my only choice.”

      “Telling your grandsons you’re dying is your only way to get ‘em home?”

      Jeremiah scowled into the shaft of sunlight spearing through his bedroom window. Reaching out, he lifted the sash high so that a brisk breeze flew in, dissipating the telltale cigar smoke. Did Bert think faking his own demise was a piece of cake? It sure as hell wasn’t. Doing nothing but lying around sighing all day was making him sore all over. And pretending to be old and feeble irritated the hell out of him. Plus, he didn’t care for the fact that he was worrying Maggie, either.

      But despite how it went against the grain to admit it, the truth was there staring at him, so no point in avoiding it. “Yes, it was the only way. The boys haven’t been back since…”

      A long pause fell between the two old friends as they both remembered the long-ago tragedy that still haunted the Lonergan boys. Finally Bert Evans broke it with a sigh of resignation. “I know. Fine, fine. In for a penny…”

      Jeremiah grinned and tried to remember where he’d stashed his spare bottle of bourbon. It might be early in the morning, but he felt as if a toast was in order. Things were moving right along according to plan.

      “Thanks, Bert. I owe you.”

      “You surely do, you old goat.”

      When he hung up, Jeremiah chuckled, took a long drag of his cigar and blew a perfect smoke ring in quiet celebration.

      Coleville hadn’t changed much.

      Sam drove down the narrow main street and let his gaze slide across familiar storefronts. Early on a Saturday morning, there were plenty of people filling the sidewalks and almost no parking spaces.

      A small town, Coleville was fifty miles from Fresno, the closest “big” city. To keep its citizens happy, the town boasted a supermarket, a theater and even one of the huge national chain drugstores. And sometime over the years, Sam noted, it had also acquired one of the trendy coffee shops that were dotting nearly every corner of every street in the country.

      The schools were small, as they’d always been, populated by the children who lived both in town and on the surrounding farms and ranches. And the only doctor worked out of a small clinic at the edge of town. Emergencies were handled here first and then, if needed, the patient was either driven by ambulance or airlifted into Fresno and the hospital.

      Sam pulled his grandfather’s Jeep into the clinic parking lot and shut off the engine. The sun blasted down on him out of a brassy sky, and he squinted at the squat building in front of him. Bert Evans, M.D.

      was written across the wide window in florid gold script that was peeling at the edges. The whole place needed a good coat of paint, but there were terra-cotta tubs on either side of the double front doors overflowing with bright flowers, and the walkway and porch were swept clean and tidy as a church.

      He climbed out of the Jeep, shoved the keys into his pocket and headed for the door. As he walked, memory marched with him.

      He saw himself as a kid, running into the clinic and badgering Dr. Evans with hundreds of questions. The doctor had never lost patience with him. Instead he’d answered what he could and provided old medical books so that Sam could discover other things on his own.

      It was in this little clinic that Sam had first decided to become a doctor. Even as a kid, he’d known he wanted to be able to fix people. To help. He’d had grand plans back then. He’d wanted to be the kind of doctor that Bert Evans was. A man who knew his patients as well as his own family. A man who was a part of the community.

      Well, things changed. Now he did what he could, when he could, and tried not to get involved.

      A bell over the door jangled cheerfully when he stepped into the blessed cool of air-conditioning. Three kids and their tired mother sat on the green plastic chairs in the waiting room. The mom gave him a tired smile and an absent nod while two of her kids tried to kill each other.

      Behind the reception desk a young woman sat typing on a computer keyboard, and Sam flinched inwardly because he’d half expected to find Dr. Evans’s old nurse still enthroned in this office. But the woman had been at least a hundred when he was a kid.

      “Can I help you?” The young woman looked up from her task and gave him a smile that offered a lot more help than he required at the moment.

      “I’d like to see Dr. Evans for a minute,” he said. “Tell him Sam Lonergan’s here.”

      She stood up and smoothed her hands down her pale cream-colored slacks while somehow managing to showcase her truly spectacular breasts, hidden behind a light blue sweater. “If you’ll have a seat…”

      He didn’t, though. When she left the room, he wandered around, looking at all of the framed photos on the wall. What Dr. Evans had always called his “trophies.” Babies he’d delivered, kids he’d treated, adults he’d cared for in life and seen into death. Dozens—hundreds—of faces smiled at him, but Sam only saw one.

      That familiar grin slammed a well-aimed punch to Sam’s gut, but he couldn’t seem to look away. The boy in the photo was only sixteen—and would never get any older. Sam’s hands fisted at his sides. The sounds of the squabbling kids behind him faded into nothing and he lost himself staring into the face of the one person he should have saved and hadn’t.

      “The doctor will see you now.” A tug on his shirtsleeve got his attention when the soft voice didn’t.

      “What?” He stared at the doctor’s assistant, shook off the memories clouding

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