Penelope looked at her with the sad eyes of an Afghan hound who hadn’t been fed.
‘You ate my hamburger,’ Rachel told her. ‘Don’t even think about looking at me like that.’
She sighed. Her stomach rumbled a response. She put her hand on Penelope’s collar and started trudging toward the hospital.
There was the sound of vehicle behind her-a big one. She moved onto the verge.
A fire truck came around the bend on the wrong side of the road. It veered onto the grassy verge and she had to jump for her life.
If she’d been one whit less angry she might have been hit, but her reflexes were working fine. Rachel was tired and hungry and worried, but there was still a vast well of anger directed at Michael and herself and her circumstances. When the fire truck swerved around the bend on the wrong side of the road it was almost as if she expected it.
She yelped and leapt, and as the truck screeched to a halt she found herself sprawled ignominiously in the grass at the side of the road with Penelope somehow sprawling on top of her.
Great. What else could possibly happen to her? She lay and addressed herself to a clump of grass right under her nose.
‘Beam me up, Scottie. Where’s a spaceship when you need one?’
‘Are you OK, miss?’ The horror in the voice above her had her pushing herself up from the road. She might be mad as fire but no one here deserved to think they’d squashed her.
‘I’m fine.’ She rolled over, shoved a startled Penelope off, hauled her Crimplene down to something akin to decency and tried to look fine. ‘Honest.’
‘Oh, heck…’ The man had reached her. He’d been driving the truck. Behind him his fellow firefighters were climbing down from the cab to see what was wrong. The engine was still running and the truck lights were illuminating the road. ‘I could have killed you.’
‘It’s your lucky day. You didn’t.’ She tried a smile and the muscles almost worked. Sort of.
They were gathering round her now, a bunch of men and women with black-grimed faces, fire uniforms and hard hats. They looked exhausted. They were looking at her with concern.
She must look a real candidate for her women’s refuge, she thought, and the concept was looking more and more appealing. If there was a women’s refuge somewhere around here that would take her with an Afghan hound, she’d be in there like a shot.
Or maybe… She gave Penelope’s backside another shove… Maybe even without an Afghan.
‘We’re really sorry,’ the fireman told her, and she tried focusing on the man before her. He looked scared to death.
‘I guess you weren’t expecting hikers,’ she told him. ‘It’s too dark to walk off the road.’ She hauled herself upward. Someone gave her a hand which she accepted with gratitude. Then she looked more closely at the man before her. Under the soot there were cuts and scratches, blood as well as grime. He looked dreadful. ‘Are you OK?’
Stupid question, really. It was absolutely obvious that he wasn’t. ‘I just…’ He wiped his hand across his eyes. ‘My eyes… The smoke…’
And he’d been driving.
‘You need to go to the hospital,’ she told him.
‘That’s where we’re going. There was a shed-the farmer told us it was used for storing hay so we made an attempt to save it. What he forgot to tell us was that he stored fuel in there as well. The thing went up with a bang that scared us almost as much as we scared you. But that’s all the damage, thank God. There’s a few of us with sore eyes, but we’re thinking that we’ve been lucky.’
Lucky or not, they looked shocked and ill. Rachel’s personal problems were set aside in the face of these peoples’ needs. ‘You should have been treated before you drove.’
‘Doc’s been busy,’ someone said. ‘We heard up on the ridge that he couldn’t come up. He’s been caught up with a dogbite or something.’
Of course he’d been caught up. And there was no one else, Rachel thought. He was on his own.
Except for her. Hugo had her, whether he liked it or not. And a fat lot of use she was, she thought ruefully, hiking round the country with her crazy Afghan hound, looking for food and for shelter as if she were destitute. It was time she hauled herself together and started being useful.
‘Tell you what,’ she said, brushing gravel from her knees and trying to stop her knees from doing the shaking they were so intent on. ‘Let’s all go to the hospital. I’m a doctor and I’m needed there. But if it’s OK with you…’ She managed a shaky grin as she looked around their smoke-filled eyes which were now tinged with disbelief. A doctor in Crimplene… But she wasn’t going down that road. Explanations could take hours.
‘Indulge me with something I’ve always wanted to do,’ she told them. ‘I’m a country girl from way back. Once upon a time I even drove my dad’s truck at hay-carting so I have my heavy vehicle licence. So all you have to do is say yes. Let me drive your fire engine.’
Which was how Dr Rachel Harper, MD, dressed in glorious Crimplene and Doris Keen’s sandals, with gravel in her knees, nothing in her stomach and dog hair all over her, got to drive the Cowral Bay fire truck with a bunch of ten disgustingly dirty and slightly injured firefighters and one potential Australian champion Afghan in the back.
You told me to have a weekend to remember, she silently told her absent mother-in-law as they headed for the hospital. Well, Dottie, I’m doing just that.
Hugo wasn’t at the hospital, and Rachel was aware of a stab of disappointment. But at least the nurses knew her from that afternoon when she’d helped with Kim. They greeted her as a friend, and the orderly took over Penelope’s care as if she was no trouble at all.
‘You’ve come to help, miss,’ he told her as the firefighters milled around the emergency room, and it was obvious to everyone that Rachel needed to turn into a doctor again. ‘You’re very welcome. I’ll give your dog some dinner, shall I?’
Dinner… Yes!
‘Actually, I-’
But dinner wasn’t her destiny. ‘It’s great that you’re here.’ David, the ginger-haired nurse who’d helped with Kim, was looking more flustered than he had that afternoon. ‘One of our old farmers had a stroke an hour ago. Dr McInnes had to go out there in a hurry and here’s all these guys needing checking. Can I give you a hand and we’ll see what we can do together?’
She worked for an hour. It was solid medicine but straightforward, washing out eyes, checking bruises and cleaning scratches. One of the women was suffering slightly from smoke inhalation and Rachel decreed that she be admitted, but the oxygen alleviated the symptoms almost immediately. Great. She worked steadily through on. Minor stuff.
Except the man who’d been driving the truck. He had a sliver of something nasty in his eye as well as a cut that was deep enough to need stitching. But it was the eye she was worried about.
Rachel shoved her rumbling stomach aside and focused.
She dropped in fluorescein-a yellow stain-and examined the eye through the ophthalmoscope. And worried.
‘Can we X-ray?’ she asked David.
‘Sure.’
The X-ray came back-still worrying. She pinned it against the light and fretted some more as the door opened behind her.
‘Problem?’
She turned and it was Hugo. For a moment-for just a moment-it was as much as she could do not to fall into his arms with relief. She’d pushed hunger and exhaustion and shock away but the events of the day were catching up with her. She was really close to breaking point.
Falling into a colleague’s arms wasn’t exactly professional. She got a grip. Sort of. Mental slap around the ears. She hauled herself into as much of a medical mode as she could muster.
‘There’s a foreign body just at the edge of the cornea,’ she told him, turning back to the light-box and
