Trading Secrets

“That oath?”

“The Hippocratic one. You’re supposed to keep what people tell you confidential.”

Greg wasn’t quite sure what he heard in the quiet tones of her voice, desperation or defensiveness. Either way, he couldn’t deny his quick curiosity why either would be there.

“My silence is only required of doctor-patient relationships.” He tipped his head, studied the plea in her lovely features. “In this case, I was the patient.”

“Please…”

“Are you here because you’re in trouble with the law?”

“No. No,” she repeated, more grateful than he could imagine that she no longer had to deal with people with badges who refused to believe a word she said. “I was completely cleared. So, please, just keep what I said to yourself. Okay?”

Completely cleared of what? he was about to ask when a blinding white light cut him off.

A vehicle came to a stop behind them. The dual beams of its headlights filled the car, causing Jenny to flinch as the light reflected off the rearview mirror.

The solid slam of a door preceded the appearance of another beam from a flashlight a moment before a black gloved fist tapped on the window on the driver’s side.

Jenny rolled the window down. Rain pounding, she saw Deputy Joe Sheldon lean down to see who was inside.

Clear plastic covered the local ex-football hero’s State Trooper-style hat. A yellow raincoat hid his uniform. In between, sharp eyes darted from her to Greg and back again.

Sharpness turned to recognition.

“Jenny Baker,” he said, speaking in the unhurried, deliberate way of a native of rural Vermont. His craggy face broke into a grin, calling attention to the hook-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth and making him look as if he might ruffle her hair the way he’d done years ago when he’d dated her older sister. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m moving back, Joe.”

“You don’t say.” Rain dripped from the brim of his hat. “Didn’t think you’d be one of the ones to do that. Huh,” he grunted. “Then, that must be your stuff I saw in your grandma’s place. Thought we had ourselves a squatter.” Satisfied with his conclusion, he leaned lower so he could look past her. “Say, Doc. I saw your Tahoe in the ditch out by Widow Maker.” He took in the towel, the way it was pinned at his shoulder and the wet shirt lying in his lap. “You okay?”

“I am now. Thanks, Joe.”

“Gave me a scare there, Doc. Looked all over the place for you when I saw you weren’t in your car. Thought you might have taken shelter at the old Baker place,” he told him, explaining how he’d come across Jenny’s few remaining possessions. “Just came by here to see if you’d made it back.”

His glance narrowed on the makeshift sling. “Need any help getting inside?”

Jenny looked toward Greg. He didn’t want her help, but there was no need for him to refuse Joe’s.

“You might get his front door for him,” Jenny suggested.

“Not a problem,” the deputy replied and headed around to pull open the car door for him, too.

Jenny was worried.

Greg hadn’t said that he would keep quiet. After he’d accepted Joe’s offer to help him into his house, he hadn’t said anything to her, except to thank her again for everything she’d done.

He’d been profuse with his thanks. What she’d wanted was his promise.

As she walked the block from the diner to the clinic the next morning, under skies of blessedly brilliant blue, she still didn’t know which bothered her more. That he hadn’t promised, or that he had so obviously preferred someone else’s help over hers after what she’d been through with him.

To be fair, she supposed she couldn’t blame him for not wanting anything else to do with her. All he really knew about her was where she currently lived, that she’d recently been involved with detectives and that she was a tad desperate to keep him quiet about that.

A knot of quiet anxiety had taken up permanent residence in her stomach. With her hand over it, she smoothed the front of the cocoa-colored blouse tucked into her beige slacks and climbed the four steps leading into the white clapboard building that had housed Maple Mountain’s only clinic for over a hundred years. She had come home to start over. No matter what Dr. Greg Reid’s impression of her, she didn’t want him making that start any harder than it was already.

The screen door opened with a squeak a moment before a bell over the white wooden door gave a faint tinkle.

Six dark wood chairs lined one wall of the tidy, pale-green reception room. Only one was occupied. A teenage mother—one of the McGraw girls from the looks of her flaming-red hair—sat with a listless toddler, soothing the child with pictures from an office copy of Parenting magazine.

“Hi,” said Jenny on her way to the reception window.

The girl smiled and went back to pointing at pictures.

From inside the front office, a very pregnant brunette in a light-blue scrub smock and ponytail turned to see who had just come in.

“May I help you?” she asked, an instant before her eyes widened. “Jenny Baker!”

Pressing her hand to the small of her back, thirty-something Rhonda Pembroke turned to get a better look at the girl she hadn’t seen in four years. “Bess told me this morning that you were back. And Lois Neely was in here not two hours ago sayin’ you’ve moved into your grandma’s old place.”

Word had definitely preceded her—which meant at least one of the two men she’d encountered during her first hours home had wasted no time spreading it. Jenny’s money was on Joe as the culprit. Lois worked as dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and Joe’s name had come up when Jenny had been met with virtually the same greeting at the diner an hour ago.

“Are you really going to restore your grandma’s house?”

Jenny’s smile faltered. She had no idea who had assumed such a thing, though she could see where someone might take it for granted. No one in her right mind would live there without redoing the place. Restoration, however, would cost a fortune she would never have.

“It certainly needs work,” she replied, deliberately hedging as she nodded toward the woman’s girth. “How are you and your family doing? Is this your third?”

“Fourth. I had a little girl while you were gone. But you didn’t come by to hear about me,” she insisted. “Who are you here to see? The doctor?” Her glance made a quick sweep of the bruises barely visible beneath the makeup on Jenny’s jaw. “Or Bess?”

Jenny felt herself hesitate. Being Greg’s receptionist and office manager, Rhonda would know that he’d been hurt. He might even have told her that she’d helped him, and the woman simply assumed that she was there to see how he was doing. Which she was. Partly.

It was whatever else he might have said that worried her.

“The doctor,” she replied. “Is he available?”

“He’s with a patient. But give me a minute.” Turning from the desk below the wide window, she dropped her hand from her back. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

A large bulletin board hung by the door that separated the waiting area from the exam rooms. Wanting to take her mind off her growing uneasiness, Jenny glanced over a poster for a senior citizens’ exercise classes at the local community center. She had no idea why the local seniors needed a formal exercise routine. Most of those she’d known growing up got plenty of exercise working their gardens and gathering berries in the woods in the summer and shoveling snow and snowshoeing in the winter. The people in the North Woods seemed to be of hardier stock than those she’d encountered in the city.

She was wondering if she could pick up a few extra dollars this winter shoveling snow for those who weren’t so hardy when the door suddenly opened.

There was a little more white in Bess Amherst’s tight crop of salt-and-pepper curls than Jenny had remembered, and the crow’s feet around her narrowed hazel eyes seemed to have fanned a little farther toward her temples, but she hadn’t otherwise changed since Jenny had last seen her. The midfifties, suffer-no-whiners nurse practitioner still wore her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck, still preferred pastel plaid shirts and elastic-waist pants to the nurse’s scrub uniform Dr. Wilson had never been able to get her to wear, and still wore white athletic shoes—which more or less matched her short lab jacket.

Stylish, she wasn’t.

Interested, she always was.

Jenny had known Bess since she was a child.