themselves. He’s wilting while I watch.’
The pumpkin was indeed poorly. Kirsty’s specialty was dying people, not pumpkins-but she knew a dying pumpkin when she saw one. If she’d been selecting pumpkins for a hospice, Spike might well have met her criteria.
He wasn’t totally limp. Some of the leaves closer to the roots were still stiff and healthy, but the leaves close to the pumpkin itself were visibly wilting. Susie had rigged up a sheet to give shade. She’d soaked the ground with water, so the patch was sodden, but obviously not enough water was getting through.
‘Someone’s wrenched him out of the ground,’ Susie whispered. ‘I guess we were lucky the whole plant didn’t break off, but as it is, Spike can’t get water and he’ll die.’
‘Won’t it ripen anyway?’ Kirsty said doubtfully-and received the look she’d used not so long ago on a junior intern who’d suggested using aspirin for renal colic.
‘It’s too soon. He’ll get bigger before he ripens. If he’s picked now he’ll never be any good. This must have been why Angus had his attack. He’ll have looked out the window and been rushing to help. Who can have done such a thing?’ Susie sank onto the wet ground and lifted the main stem into her hands. ‘This will break Angus’s heart. The damaged roots can’t supply enough water to get through.’
Kirsty opened her mouth to say something, and then she stopped.
No. What she was thinking had to be dumb.
‘What?’ Susie said. ‘Why is it dumb?’
‘You know, Jake does this to me, too, now,’ Kirsty complained. ‘Can’t a girl even think by herself?’
‘Jake loves you as much as I love you,’ Susie retorted. ‘He just doesn’t know it yet. What’s dumb?’
Ignore the Jake comment, Kirsty told herself. Concentrate on important matters. Like dying pumpkins.
She was a palliative-care physician. Her specialty was taking care of the dying. Not lifesaving. So far today she’d helped save Angus and now… Could she save a pumpkin? A medical step sideways.
‘I was thinking…’
‘I know you were thinking,’ Susie said, exasperated. ‘But you need to stop thinking and do something or the pumpkin’s cactus.’
‘You know, palliative-care doctors don’t use the word cactus,’ she said thoughtfully, her mind still racing. ‘It’s not a good image.’
‘Spike will die, then,’ Susie said, sounding even more exasperated. And fearful. She’d fallen for Angus in a big way, Kirsty thought. Angus was Rory’s uncle and he was therefore Susie’s family.
If Angus was Susie’s family then Angus was therefore her family. And his pumpkin was heading toward being…cactus.
‘Is it just water that’s flowing through the stem?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Yes.’
‘Ordinary water?’
‘There’ll be nutrients as well,’ Susie said. ‘From the soil. But that’s not as important as water.’
Kirsty knelt beside her twin and examined the pumpkin with care. Susie’s replanting had worked a little. The leaves closet to the ground were still firm. The wilting leaves were the furthest from the roots, and they were turning more limp by the minute.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Susie moaned. ‘How can we tell Angus?’
‘Shut up, Suze.’ She was examining the stem. It looked tough and prickly. Like a hairy forearm?
‘Let’s not bury him yet,’ she said softly. ‘Suze, if you cut off a flower and stick it in a vase it’ll suck up water. If you cut this stem and stuck it in water, would it suck it up?’
‘The pumpkin will draw water in,’ Susie told her. ‘But it’d never get enough. And the stem would disintegrate in two or three days, leaving us no better off.’
‘But if we could bleed water into the stem…’ Kirsty said cautiously. ‘Maybe via an IV line. Just until the roots recover.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘Oh,’ said Susie on a note of discovery. And then, ‘Oh-h-h.’
‘I’m not sure if it’d work,’ Kirsty warned.
‘It’d be better than sitting watching him die.’
‘And he might get infection from the IV site.’
‘There’s stuff you put on pruned branches to stop infection.’ Susie’s despair had suddenly evaporated, transforming into excitement. ‘Do you have what you need to put in an intravenous line?’
‘Jake’s lent me a hospital car. It’s the one they take out to emergencies when they need back-up. There’s an emergency kit in the back. There has to be an IV kit.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’
‘You’ve done what?’ On the end of the line Jake sounded incredulous. He’d rung to tell Kirsty the plane was due to take off at two, and he’d got a step-by-step account of their medical procedure from an excited Susie. But Susie had been too excited to make sense. She’d handed the phone over to Kirsty and gone back outside to continue supervision of their patient.
‘We’ve set up an IV line on Spike,’ Kirsty said, trying not to sound smug. ‘We used a tiny cannula and we’re running straight saline at the rate of 80 mil per hour. The leaves closest to Spike are already starting to stiffen. Believe it or not, it might just work.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘You’re not the only doctor who can be a generalist when the case requires it,’ she told him, giving up on the smug bit. She felt smug. Why not admit it?
‘No.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘Kirsty, do you know how the pumpkin came to be pulled out?’
Kirsty’s smugness faded. ‘I can’t imagine,’ she said slowly. ‘Maybe…Boris digging?’
‘Does it look like Boris has been digging?’
‘No.’ And suddenly she knew what he was thinking. What she would have thought of if Susie hadn’t been so traumatised. Only someone wishing to do enormous ill to Angus would do such a thing.
‘Who’s there now?’ Jake was demanding.
‘Me and Susie.’
‘Go inside and lock the doors. I’m coming home.’
He was being paranoid, Kirsty thought. OK, Kenneth might well be responsible for an uprooted pumpkin. He’d know how much the pumpkin meant to Angus and it’d be an easy way to hurt him. But as for locking themselves in…
But then she remembered the way Kenneth had looked at Susie and suddenly she stopped thinking Jake was paranoid.
Susie had been inside having a drink when the phone had rung, but she hadn’t been able to stay in. She’d returned to the veggie patch, Boris beside her.
Kirsty made her way back there now. Jake was being over-cautious, she told herself. There was no danger.
She rounded the hedge and Kenneth was there. With Susie.
Kenneth was pointing a gun straight at her sister’s head.
From heat to icy cold, just like that. The world stilled.
In her nice safe hospice back in nice safe Manhattan Kirsty had an emergency beeper she carried in her pocket, linked to the security service for the main hospital. She’d never used it.
She ached for her beeper right now.
‘Kenneth,’ she said sharply to distract him, trying to haul that pointing arm away from Susie. Susie was leaning heavily on her crutches, looking ill.
‘You’re her,’ Kenneth said indistinctly, and those two words told Kirsty a lot. They told her that he was ill-his speech was slurred and wary. They told her he was desperate. And they told her that the twin thing was confusing him.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded.
