Trading Secrets

“And feeling every minute of it,” the miserable-looking office manager announced in low tones as she walked in. “Sorry for the interruption, but Lorna Bagley just brought in her youngest with some sort of rash. I put them back in the isolation room since Bertie Buell is here for her blood pressure check. You know how Bertie is about being around anything she thinks might be contagious.”

At the mention of patients, Greg turned his frown to his watch. “You take Bertie, Bess. I’ll get the rash,” he said to Rhonda. “Tell Lorna I’ll be right there.”

Grasping the opportunity for escape, undeniably grateful for it, Jenny watched Bess, thwarted and disgruntled, head for the door as she backed toward it herself.

“Thank you, Bess,” she called, thinking of the bandage, the ointment, the welcome and for thinking of her for the job that, if not for Greg and his obvious reservations, she would have loved to take.

“I didn’t mean to keep you so long,” she said, turning back to see him move to the door himself.

He stopped an arm’s length away, his hand on the edge of the door, his body towering over hers. Glancing from the swath of blue covering the middle of his impressive chest, thinking it highly unfair that she could so easily recall how hard it had felt beneath her fingers, she jerked her eyes to his.

“Take care of that shoulder,” she reminded him, and slipped out with the feel of his uncertainty about her hounding every step.

The positive thing about a place as small as Maple Mountain was that neighbors always knew if a person had a problem or if they needed help. If someone hadn’t been seen or heard from for a while, someone else would inevitably call or drop by just to make sure everything was all right. People watched out for each other. People cared about each other.

Jenny had missed that.

What she hadn’t missed was the relative lack of privacy that came with such neighborly concern.

The people in and around Maple Mountain were a fiercely independent lot, opinionated to a fault about politics, their land and protecting it from anyone who might try to change the way of life that had worked just fine for them for however long they’d lived there. But for all that independence, they were also intensely interested in everything that went on around them. Strangers were easily identified, and a car didn’t pass through town that someone along Main Street didn’t note its license plate to see where it was from.

A car with plates from any state other than Vermont would elicit speculation about where its occupants were going and how long they would stay. A vehicle they recognized as belonging to their little part of the world invited solemn conjecture about its occupant’s destination. Especially if they knew, or knew of, its owner.

Old Parker must be heading into St. Johnsbury for that tractor part he’s needin’.

Bet Essie’s on her way out to her daughter’s to help with the twins.

Or observations about the vehicle itself.

Been a while since Charlie washed that truck of his.

Wonder how long it’ll be before Amos’s bumper falls off.

There wasn’t much that slipped by the locals. Where other locals were concerned, anyway. Visitors were treated politely, especially when they came to vacation on the lake in the summer and for the festivals that fed the town’s coffers. Their spending helped pay for everything from the newly paved parking lot at the community center to sports equipment for the elementary school. But only the residents warranted true interest in conversations at the diner or around the checkerboard at the general store. Especially if whatever that person was up to proved more interesting than what seemed to be going on anywhere else.

That was why Jenny wasn’t surprised when, by six o’clock that evening, she’d had no fewer than four visitors, including Joe who’d stopped by with a crowbar when he’d heard that she hadn’t wanted to pay ten dollars for one at the general store. He’d helped her pry off the particularly stubborn board covering the living room window and told her he’d be back tomorrow with a ladder and help her take the boards off the windows upstairs.

Carrie Higgins, who’d been Carrie Rogers when she’d hung out with Jenny’s older sister and Dora’s daughter, Kelsey, at the old grist mill behind the house, had stopped by to see for herself that Jenny was actually back and living in her grandma’s old place. Jenny hadn’t invited her in. She hadn’t invited anyone in because she hadn’t wanted to lie and say her furniture hadn’t been delivered yet, which was the only way she could think to explain why her bed was a pile of blankets and a comforter in a corner of the kitchen.

Carrie hadn’t seemed to mind the lack of an invitation. She’d just wanted to say hi and bring her a welcome-back Jell-O salad, the kind with pistachio pudding in it. So they’d stood outside under the old maple tree, Jenny holding the plastic bowl and Carrie holding her ten-month-old on her hip while her four-and six-year-olds tormented a caterpillar and promised each other they’d get together soon.

Gap-toothed Smiley Jefferson, who had the postal route and was the mayor’s brother-in-law, stopped to see if she would be putting up a mailbox, since the one out by the road had fallen to wood rot years ago, or if she’d be using a box at the post office.

Sally McNeff, who now ran her aging mother’s bookstore, stopped by on her way home from work to welcome Jenny home and tell her she was so sorry she’d been mugged.

Jenny had been alone for all of fifteen minutes and was inside washing the multi-paned front window when another vehicle pulled onto the rutted driveway.

Across the narrow ribbon of road that led into town, the land rose in a long and gentle hill. Only the trees at the top were illuminated by sunlight. In another hour it would be dusk. But just then the air glowed golden. In that gentle light she watched a gray bull-nosed truck rumble toward the house. She had already cleaned the outside of the glass, and light spilled across the dusty hardwood floor, taking some of the dreariness from the room. Or maybe simply illuminating it. In the brighter light, she could more easily see how badly the ivy-print wallpaper was pealing.

The truck pulled to a stop behind her sporty black sedan. Finishing the pane she was washing, careful of the crack in it so she wouldn’t wind up with a hole where the foot-wide pane had been, she tried to make out who was driving it. With the wide maple trees shading the weedy and overgrown lawn, all she could see was the pattern of light and shadow on the windshield.

Curiosity got the better of her. Leaving her task, she absently tugged her short white T-shirt over the waistband of her denim capris and moved to the open front door as the truck came to a stop. The screen door screeched in protest when she pushed it open.

Reminding herself to go through the collection of odds and ends on the back porch to see if a can of oil lurked in their midst, she sidestepped the loose board on the porch and came to a halt at the top step.

Greg climbed from behind the wheel. Before she could even begin to imagine why he was there, the slam of his door sent birds squawking as they scattered from the trees.

He had her yellow towel with him. Seeing her framed by the posts on the porch, he headed toward her, his stride relaxed and unhurried. Without the lab coat covering his golf shirt and khakis, she could see that the sling completely encased his arm, holding it nearly as close to his body as he’d held it himself last night.

She needed to forget last night. Certain parts of it, anyway.

“I hear Charlie Moorehouse loaned you his truck,” she called, thinking the comment as good a way as any to keep things neighborly.

She watched him glance toward Charlie’s newest acquisition. The fact that the old guy had lent the doctor his pride and joy attested to how grateful he had been to Greg for getting him through his last bout of gout.

“He’s saved me a lot of hassle,” he admitted, sounding grateful himself. She’d also heard that truck was an automatic. With the use of only one arm, he couldn’t have driven anything else. “He dropped it off for me after he and his son towed my SUV into St. Johnsbury.”

“How long before you get it back?”

“Not sure,” he replied, and stopped at the foot of the steps. He hadn’t come to exchange small talk. He wanted something. She could tell from the way his deceptively casual glance slid over her frame, his mouth forming an upside down U in the moments before he held out her neatly folded towel.

He also didn’t appear totally convinced that he should be there.

“Do you have a few minutes?” he asked as she took what he offered.

“Sure.” Despite a quick sense of unease, she gave a shrug. “I was just cleaning.”

Behind her, the window sparkled. Above, cobwebs laced the corners of the porch roof.

“That ought to keep you busy for a while.”

“Until spring, I would imagine.”

The U gave way to a faint smile. “Then, I won’t keep you long. Bess is on me to hire you,” he admitted, getting straight to the point. “She said she’s sure you’ll have no trouble picking up medical terminology and our procedures. Since you appear to have considerable office experience, I wondered if you wanted to tell me why I shouldn’t offer you the job.”

The question threw her. So did the intent way he watched her as she crossed her arms over the folded yellow terry cloth and waited for her to either recover from his blunt query or invite him in and answer it.

“Because I already have one?”

Something in his eyes seemed to soften. She wasn’t sure what it was. It hinted at patience, yet looked more like weariness. The draining kind of weariness that sucked the spirit from deep inside a man.

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Unfortunately, she did. She also knew she had several very good reasons to ignore the quick tug of empathy she felt for what she saw. For starters, if he was tired, it was probably because he hadn’t slept well with his arm throbbing or aching or whatever it was probably still doing. More important, he seemed far more perplexed by her than interested in her sympathy.

Perplexed didn’t begin to describe what Greg felt when it came to the quietly pretty woman warily eyeing him from three steps away. The more he learned about her, the more bits and pieces of her past and personality he picked up, the more mysterious she seemed. And the more interested he became.

That interest bothered him. She wasn’t his patient, so he couldn’t excuse his curiosity about her as a way to better tend her needs. Even if she had been a patient, his interest went light-years beyond the professional. Yet he wasn’t about to fully acknowledge the inexplicable pull he felt toward her. He was already involved with someone. He had been for two years. Unlike the other men in his family, he would not cheat on a woman—even if he was having serious second thoughts about the relationship.