Rescue at Cradle Lake Read online

  ‘Oscar Bentley’s?’ he demanded, startled.

  ‘Yes.’ She handed him the lamb and he was so astounded that he took it. ‘Just stand there and don’t move,’ she told him. Then: ‘No,’ she corrected herself. ‘Joggle up and down a bit, so the ewe’s looking at you and not me.’

  ‘I need to go.’ He was remembering Oscar Bentley. Yes, the lamb’s needs were urgent, but a broken hip was more so.

  ‘Not until we have the ewe.’ She moved swiftly away, twenty, thirty yards up the slope, moving with an ease that was almost catlike. Then she disappeared behind a tree and he realised what she was doing.

  He was being used as a distraction.

  OK, he could do that. Obediently he held the lamb toward the ewe. The ewe stared wildly down at her lamb and took a tentative step forward.

  The woman launched herself out from behind her tree in a rugby tackle that put Fergus’s efforts to shame. The ewe was big, but suddenly she was propped up on her rear legs, which prevented her from struggling, and the woman had her solidly and strongly in position.

  It had been a really impressive manoeuvre. To say Fergus was impressed was an understatement.

  ‘Put the lamb in your truck and back it up to me,’ she told him, gasping with effort, and he blinked.

  ‘Um…’

  ‘I can’t stand here for ever.’ If she’d had a foot free, she would have stamped it. ‘Move.’

  He moved.

  He was about to put a sheep in the back of the hospital truck.

  Fine. As of two days ago he was a country doctor. This was the sort of thing country doctors did. Wasn’t it?

  It seemed it was. This country doctor had no choice.

  He hauled open the back of the truck, shoved the medical equipment as far forward as it’d go and tossed a canvas over the lot. Miriam, his practice nurse, had set the truck up for emergencies and she had three canvases folded and ready at the side. For coping with sheep?

  Maybe Miriam knew more about country practice than he did.

  Anyone would know more about country practice than he did.

  He put the lamb in the back and started closing the door, but as he did so the little creature wobbled. He hesitated.

  He sighed and lifted the lamb out again. He climbed in behind the wheel and placed the lamb on his knee.

  ‘Don’t even think about doing anything wet,’ he told it. ‘House-training starts now.’

  The woman was walking the sheep down the slope toward the track. He backed up as close as he could.

  ‘Mess my seat and you’re chops,’ he told the lamb in a further refinement of house-training. He closed the door firmly on one captive and went to collect another.

  Getting the ewe into the truck was no easy task. The ewe took solid exception to being manhandled, but the woman seemed to have done this many times before. She pushed, they both heaved, and the creature was in. The door slammed, and Fergus headed for the driver’s door in relief.

  The woman was already clambering into the passenger seat, lifting the lamb over onto her knee. Wherever they were going, it seemed she was going, too.

  ‘I can drop them at Bentley’s,’ he told her. ‘That’s where I’m going.’

  ‘You’re going to Bentley’s?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’ He hesitated. ‘But I’m a bit lost.’

  ‘Go back the way you came,’ she said, snapping her seat belt closed under the lamb. ‘I can walk home from there. It’s close. Take the second turn to the left after the ridge.’

  ‘That’s the second time I’ve been given that direction,’ he told her. ‘Only I’m facing the opposite way.’

  ‘You came from the O’Donell track to get to Oscar’s?’

  ‘I’m not a local,’ he said, exasperated.

  ‘You’re the local doctor.’

  I’m here as a locum. I’ve been here since Thursday and I’ll be here for twelve weeks.’

  She stared and he thought he could see calculations happening behind her eyes.

  ‘That might be long enough,’ she whispered, and he thought she was talking to the lamb. She was hugging it close-two muddy waifs.

  He wasn’t exactly pristine himself.

  Whatever she was thinking, though, she didn’t expand on it. They drove for a couple of minutes in silence and he realised he didn’t even know her name

  I’m Dr Fergus Reynard,’ he told her, into what had suddenly become a tense stillness.

  ‘I’m Ginny Viental.’

  ‘Ginny?’

  ‘Short for Guinevere, but I’m not exactly Guinevere material.’

  Hadn’t Guinevere been some gorgeous queen? If that was the case…

  But maybe she was right, Fergus decided. Maybe Queen Guinevere wouldn’t be splodged with lamb mud.

  But there was definitely gorgeous underneath the mud.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Ginny,’ he told her, figuring he should concentrate on keeping the truck on the slippery track rather than letting his attention stray to this very different woman beside him. It was a hard task. ‘Do you live around here?’

  ‘I used to live here,’ she told him. ‘I’ve just come back…for a while.’

  ‘Do your parents live here?’

  ‘They lived here when I was a kid,’ she said discouragingly. ‘I did, too, until I was seventeen.’

  She wasn’t seventeen now, he thought, trying again to figure her age. She looked young but there were lines around her eyes that made him think she’d not had things easy. But something in her face precluded him from asking questions.

  ‘Oscar Bentley,’ he said cautiously, searching for neutral ground. ‘You’re sure it’s his lamb?’

  ‘I’m sure. The cattle grid’s on our property but he has agistment rights. Oscar was an ordinary farmer fifteen years back. Now he seems to have lost the plot completely.’

  ‘He’s hardly made a decent access track,’ Fergus muttered, hauling the truck away from an erosion rut a foot deep.

  ‘He likes making it hard for visitors,’ Ginny told him. ‘Why has he called you out? Unless that’s breaking patient confidentiality.’

  ‘I’m not sure there can be much patient confidentiality about a broken hip.’

  ‘A broken hip?’

  ‘That’s what he thinks is wrong.’

  She snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Broken hip? I’ll bet he’s fallen down drunk and he wants someone to put him to bed.’

  ‘You know him well, then?’

  ‘I told you, I lived here. I haven’t been near Oscar for years but he won’t have changed.’

  ‘If you don’t live here now, where do you live?’

  ‘Will you quit it with the inquisition?’ she said, her voice muffled by the lamb again. ‘I hate the smell of wet wool.’

  ‘So don’t stick your nose into wet sheep.’

  ‘There’s a medical prescription for you,’ she said and she grinned. Which somehow…changed things again.

  Wow, he thought. That was some smile. When the lines of strain eased from around her eyes she looked…beautiful?

  Definitely beautiful.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she demanded, hauling her nose off the lamb as if the question had only just occurred to her and it was important.

  ‘I told you. I’m here as a locum.’

  ‘We’ve never been able to get a locum before.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why not,’ he said with asperity, releasing the brakes then braking again to try and get some traction on the awful track. ‘This is real resort country. Not!’

  ‘You’re seeing it at its worst. We had a doozy of a storm last week and the flooding’s only just gone down.’

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he conceded, staring out at the rolling hills and bushland and the deep, clear waters of the lake below. Sure, it was five hours’ drive to the nearest city, to the nearest specialist back-up, but that was what he’d come for. Isolation. And the rugged volcanic country had a beauty all its own. ‘Lots of…sheep,’ he said cautious
ly.

  ‘Lots of sheep,’ she agreed, looking doubtfully out the window as if she was trying to see the good side, too.

  ‘If you think sheep are pretty.’

  She twisted to look over her shoulder at the morose-looking ewe in the back of the truck. As if on cue, the creature widened her back legs and let go a stream of urine.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Sheep. My favourite animals.’

  He was going to have to clean out the back of his truck. Already the pungent ammoniac smell was all around them. Despite that, his lips twitched.

  ‘A farmer, born and bred.’

  ‘I’m no farmer,’ she said.

  ‘Which might explain why you were lying on the road in the middle of nowhere, holding a lamb by one ear, when the entire crowd from the Cradle Lake football game could have come by at any minute and squashed you.’

  There was that grin again. ‘The entire crowd from this side of the lake being exactly eight locals, led by Doreen Kettle who takes her elderly mother and her five kids to the football every week and who drives ten times slower than you. The last of the eight will be the coach who drives home about ten tonight. Cradle Lake will have lost-we always lose-and our coach will have drowned his sorrows in the pub. There’ll be no way he’ll be on the roads until after the Cradle Lake constabulary go to bed. Which is after Football Replay on telly, which finishes at nine-thirty, leaving the rest of Saturday night for Cradle Lake to make whoopee.’

  ‘How long did you say you’ve been away?’ he asked cautiously, and she chuckled. It was a very nice chuckle, he decided. Light and soft and gurgling. Really infectious.

  ‘Ten years. But nothing, nothing, nothing changes in Cradle Lake. Even Doreen Kettle’s kids. When I left she was squashing them into the back of the car to take them to the footy. They’re still squashing, only the squashing’s got tricker. I think the youngest is now six feet three.’ She brightened. ‘But, then, you’ve changed. Cradle Lake has a doctor. Why are you here?’

  He sighed. The question was getting repetitive. ‘I told you-as a locum.’

  ‘No one’s ever been able to get a locum for Cradle Lake before. The last doctor was only here because his car broke down here just after the war. He was on his way to visit a war buddy and he couldn’t get anyone to repair it. He didn’t have the gumption to figure any other way of moving on.’

  Fergus winced. He’d only been in the district for a couple of days but already the stories of the old doctor’s incompetence were legion.

  ‘Your truck’s still operating,’ Ginny pointed out. ‘So why did you stop?’

  ‘This is the hospital truck. And I ran my finger down the ads in the medical journal and chose the first place I’d never heard of.’

  She stared. ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted a break from the city.’

  She eyed him with caution. ‘You realise you won’t exactly get a holiday here. This farming land’s marginal. You have a feeder district of very poor families who’ll see your presence as a godsend. You’ll be run off your feet with medical needs that have needed attention for years.’

  ‘I want to be busy.’

  She considered him some more and he wondered what she was seeing. His reasons for coming? He hoped not. He tried to keep his face expressionless.

  ‘So, by break,’ she said cautiously, ‘you don’t mean a break from medicine.’

  ‘No.’

  She eyed him for a bit longer, but somewhat to his surprise she didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she didn’t want him asking questions back, he thought, and he glanced at her again and knew he was right. There was something about the set of her face that said her laughter was only surface deep. There were problems. Real and dreadful problems.

  As a good physician he should probe.

  No. He wasn’t a good physician. He was a surgeon and he was here as a locum, to focus on superficial problems and refer anything worse to the city.

  He needed to think about a fractured hip.

  They were bumping over yet another cattle grid. Before them was a ramshackle farmhouse, surrounded by what looked like a graveyard for ancient cars. About six ill-assorted, half-starved dogs were on the veranda, and they came tearing down the ramp baying like the hounds from hell as the vehicle pulled to a stop.

  ‘I’m a city boy,’ Fergus said nervously, staring out at the snarling mutts, and Ginny grinned, pushed open the door and placed the lamb carefully on her seat behind her. She closed the truck door as the hounds reached her, seemingly ready to tear her to pieces.

  ‘Sit,’ she roared, in a voice that could have been heard in the next state. They all backed off as if she’d tossed a bucket of cold water over them. Three of the mongrels even sat, and a couple of them wagged their disreputable tails.

  She swiped her hands together in a gesture of a job well done and then turned and peeped a smile at him.

  ‘You can get out now,’ she told him. ‘The dragons have been slain. And we’re quits. You rescued me and I’ve rescued you right back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he told her, stepping gingerly out-but all the viciousness of the dogs had been blasted out of them.

  But the dogs were the least of his problems. ‘Doc?’ It was a man’s voice, coming from the house, and it was a far cry from the plaintive tone that had brought him here in the first place. ‘Is that the bloody doctor?’ the voice yelled. ‘About bloody time. A man could die…’ The voice broke off in a paroxysm of coughing, as if the yell had been a pent-up surge of fury that had left the caller exhausted.

  ‘Let’s see the patient,’ Ginny said, heading up the ramp before him.

  Who was the doctor here? Feeling more at sea than he’d ever felt in his entire medical training, Fergus was left to follow.

  Oscar Bentley was a seriously big man. Huge. He’d inched from overweight to obese many years ago, Fergus thought as a fast visual assessment had him realising the man was in serious trouble.

  Maybe that trouble didn’t stem from a broken hip, but he was in trouble nevertheless. He lay like a beached whale, sprawled across the kitchen floor. A half-empty carton of beer lay within reach so he hadn’t been in danger of dying from thirst, but he certainly couldn’t get up. His breathing was rasping, each breath sucked in as if it took a conscious effort to haul in enough air. The indignant roar he’d made as they’d arrived must have been a huge effort.

  Ginny reached his patient before him. ‘Hey, Oscar, Doc Reynard tells me you’ve broken your hip.’ She was bending over the huge man, lifting his wrist. ‘What a mess.’

  The elderly man’s eyes narrowed. He looked like he’d still like to yell but the effort seemed beyond him. His breathing was dangerously laboured, yet anger seemed tantamount.

  ‘You’re one of the Viental kids,’ he snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m Ginny,’ she agreed cordially, and to Fergus’s astonishment she was looking at her watch as her fingers rested on the man’s wrist. Did she have medical training?

  ‘A Viental,’ the farmer gasped, and he groaned as he shifted his vast bulk to look at her more closely. ‘What the hell are you doing on my property? Why aren’t you dead?’

  ‘I’m helping Doc Reynard. Plus I pulled one of your lambs out of the cattle grid dividing your land from ours.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘I’ve been up on the ridge, looking over the stock you’ve been running on our land. Your ewes have obviously been lambing for weeks and at least six ewes have died during lambing. They’ve been left where they died. No one’s been near them.’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t call Doc Reynard for a lecture-and I didn’t call you. I don’t want a Viental anywhere near my property.’

  ‘You called Doc Reynard to get you on your feet again,’ she snapped. ‘There’s no way he can do that on his own-without a crane, that is.’

  ‘Let’s check the hip,’ Fergus said uneasily, and she flashed a look of anger back at him.

  ‘There’s no difference in the
length of Oscar’s legs. He has breathing difficulties but that’s because he won’t do anything about his asthma. He’ll have got himself into this state because he couldn’t be bothered fending for himself so he feels like a few days in the hospital. He does it deliberately and he’s been doing it for twenty years.’ She glanced around the kitchen and winced. ‘Though by the look of it, it’s gone beyond the need for a few days in hospital now. Maybe we need to talk about a nursing home.’

  She had a point. The place was disgusting. But still…

  ‘The hip,’ Fergus reiterated, trying again to regain control.

  ‘Right. The hip.’ She sat back and pressed her fingers lightly on Oscar’s hips. ‘How about that?’ she said softly, while both men stared at her, astounded. ‘No pain?’

  ‘Aagh!’ Oscar roared, but the roar was a fraction too late.

  Enough. He was the doctor and this was his patient. ‘Do you mind moving back?’ he demanded, lifting Ginny’s hands clear. ‘I need to do an examination.’

  ‘There’s no need. He’ll have stopped taking his asthma medication. Do you want me to get oxygen from your truck?’

  ‘I was called to a broken hip,’ Fergus said testily. He didn’t have a clue what was happening here-what the dynamics were. Her pressure on the hips without result had been diagnosis enough, but he wasn’t taking chances on a patient-and a situation-that he didn’t know. ‘Let me examine him.’

  Almost surprisingly she agreed. ‘I’ll get the oxygen and then I’ll wait outside. I’ll take care of the sheep. Someone’s got to take care of the sheep. Then I’ll come with you to the hospital.’

  He frowned. He wasn’t too sure why she intended coming to the hospital. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her. There was something about this woman’s presence that was sending danger signals, thick and fast. ‘You were going to walk home.’

  ‘He’ll have to go to hospital,’ she said evenly. ‘He’s drunk, his breathing’s unstable, and you won’t be able to prove he hasn’t got a broken hip without X-rays. How are you planning to lift Oscar yourself?’