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  “Wouldn’t Freud have fun with you,” she muttered back to herself.

  “This is not reassuring. The wunderkind is not supposed to be talking to herself.”

  Leave it to Sammy to sneak up on her, Rachel thought, shifting to find him in the doorway. She forced a bright smile. “I usually do, you know that.”

  “Mmm. But it’s what you’re saying that’s disturbing.” He stepped farther into the room and shut the door behind himself before rounding the desks to sit down in his chair.

  Dr. Samuel Voss was a middle-aged man with coal-black hair that was trying to turn a distinguished gray at the sides, but instead looked as though it had paint streaks in it. Bland, slightly rounded features made his probing brown eyes more interesting and his kind mouth reassuring. But today the eyes had a harder glint to them and the mouth’s corners were turned downward.

  “You look like hell, kiddo,” he announced, his New York accent still pronounced despite having lived in Nooton for twenty years.

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  He folded his hands across his slight paunch. “Cute I don’t need this morning. What I need is an explanation as to why you’re doing your best to run yourself into the ground, and taking this clinic with you.”

  Preparing for battle, Rachel twisted her legs into a lotus position. The rebuke was nothing less than she deserved, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. “You know better than that, Sammy.”

  “Do I? I thought I did. I trusted you because you seemed to share my own sense of responsibility to an ideal. Instead, I learn that last night you shut this place down well before the scheduled hour?”

  “I know I went against policy, but nothing was happening.”

  “How would you know? You weren’t here.”

  Guilt crushed down on her chest and shoulders, along with dread. “Did something happen?” She would never forgive herself if anything had. Even though she knew she’d been wrong to break the clinic’s rules, she’d done so only when she’d been confident that they wouldn’t be depriving anyone of emergency medical care. The boardinghouse’s phone number, as well as Sammy’s, was listed on the front door, further assuring that.

  “All right, so there was no crisis, but that’s not the point,” he replied, scowling harder. “The point is something could have happened, and we both would have had to live with the consequences. What needs to be discussed is why? You came here with the same attitude I did when I opened the place. You said you wanted to help those who normally get shortchanged by the system. But from what I’ve learned from Cleo—and please don’t hold this against her, because her motives were concern, not vindictiveness—lately you can’t wait to get out of here. What’s more, you’re preoccupied. Troubled. Even I noticed that yesterday. It doesn’t take second sight to see something’s wrong. So now I’m asking. What’s happened? I depend on you, Rachel. At home I have a father who’s beginning to see people, family, who’ve been dead for years, including my mother. Let me tell you, with that pressure I don’t need things to fall apart here.”

  Rachel bowed her head and considered her clenched hands. She’d come here with the express intention of telling him everything, but now she realized she couldn’t do it. Not after this. If she tried to tell him that the reason she’d been closing early was to meet with a ghost on Black Water Creek Bridge, he would explode, maybe even have her shipped to Baton Rouge for psychiatric observation. Next he would notify her family, and then…Oh, God. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t do it. As open-minded as Sammy could be, this clearly wasn’t a good time for him to deal with this. There had to be another way.

  Even so, she owed him more than her cautious silence.

  She took a breath, but couldn’t think of anything to say. “It’s complicated,” she said, lifting her shoulders in a shrug to mirror the one he often gave her.

  He recognized it and narrowed his eyes. “Stop that. And take your time.”

  Uh-huh, she thought. As long as it was the truth. That was the message in his eyes. “The truth is, I can’t explain. Yet.”

  His heavy eyebrows angled into dark arrows. “Do you hear what you’re saying? This is worse than I thought.”

  “Can you be patient with me for a while longer?”

  “Patience is no problem. Negligence is another story, and I would be negligent if I didn’t press you for more. You don’t seem yourself, Rachel.”

  Wagging fingers now. It was all she needed. “No one is up to par these days with the weather as humid and depressing as it is,” she cried.

  “Maybe, but not to the point where they put a job on the line that they’ve trained almost half their life for.”

  A horrible thought crossed her mind. The sense of humor she was trying to maintain splintered. Died. “Sam…are you kicking me out?”

  “I’m angry and disappointed, not demented. But you’re not getting away with that nonsense about the weather, either.” He scowled at the mess on his desk, but in a way that made her believe he didn’t see any of it. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. “It’s the old hag, isn’t it?”

  “What? Who? Adorabella? She hasn’t—”

  “No, no. The other one. The quack too many people around here still use first before coming to me. What’s she done—threatened you with some kind of hocus-pocus swami business?”

  “Of course not. Granted, she’s strange…”

  “The woman is a walking menace. First thing this morning I had a patient in here with an ulcerous stomach. Ulcers, for crying out loud—and between you and me, one meeting with her worthless husband and I could see how she got them. Then there’s the five babies, two still in diapers…To top it all off, the bum’s sniffing around her younger sister. Do you know what that crazy woman’s advice to the poor soul was?”

  Rachel could imagine and thought of the stories she could tell him. “But if you saw how protective Jewel is of Adorabella. I talked to her only a while ago, Sammy, and—”

  “Eat a turtle heart,” he continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “Eat a live turtle’s heart, she tells my patient. That’s supposed to drive the bum out of her life and cure her problems.” With a groan, he sat back in his chair and rubbed his hands over his face.

  “You’re the one who told me that we can’t expect to alter people’s beliefs overnight,” Rachel reminded him, bending to get into his line of vision.

  He gave her a warning look. “The reason I told you all that is so you’d understand I’ve heard it all. So, now out with it. What’s the problem?”

  Go ahead, ask him. Say, “Okay, Samuel, since we’re on the subject of ghosts, turtle hearts and what-not, let me tell you about the dead man I’ve met on Black Water Creek Bridge. I guarantee it’ll finish turning your hair gray.”

  She moistened her lips. She racked her brain to think of a way to tell him. But in the end she could only shake her head. “I’m sorry. I need to handle this on my own.”

  Sammy sat forward and rested his hands on the paper-strewn blotter. “Do you hear what you’re saying, Rachel? Do you know what you’re forcing me—no, inviting me—to do?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You leave me no choice. I’m putting you on probation, effective immediately.”

  Rachel stood outside the clinic, weak-kneed from disbelief and miserably hurt, yet unable to cry. She’d long ago lost her ability to do that, back when she’d lost Roddie, but she was overwhelmed with a debilitating depression that was unlike anything she’d known since that horrible day.

  “You’ve hit a psychological wall, Rachel.”

  “You’ve been carrying too heavy a load for too long, Rachel.”

  “You’re out…you’re out…you’re out…”

  What was she going to do? Besides the guilt of having failed Sammy—everyone—what was she going to do? She had bills to pay.

  “Until you’ve straightened things out and are ready to talk, I don’t want to see you here.”
>
  Straighten things out. There was a joke. How could she do that when she didn’t even know what was going on? But she knew that arguing with Sammy would have been useless. He’d been resolute, overwhelmed with his own problems. Even when she’d challenged him about the workload this would burden him with, he’d insisted he couldn’t let it matter. He would solve the situation by working a few more hours each day, he’d told her, and close down for the rest as he’d done before she’d come to Nooton.

  That had made her feel worse. She realized she wasn’t only letting him and the staff down, but the entire town.

  Dejected, she walked across the parking lot. Two pickup trucks pulled into Alma’s Country Cookin’, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten yet. She couldn’t now. Whatever appetite she’d had was gone. It didn’t help that she felt as though everyone inside was staring at her as she passed. She was almost relieved to get on the bridge and merge with the denser mist, despite its being the source of all her problems. Veering from her usual path, she walked on the right side this time, the side where she’d been seeing Joe. As she approached the spot, her heart began pounding harder. If ever she needed the reassurance that she hadn’t been imagining all this, it was now. But what if he did appear? The mist wasn’t anything like the denser nebula it became at night; would it be enough to hide her from the curious at the café, or the boardinghouse…or Beauchamp’s? Doubtful, but despairing, she stopped, aware of her body’s tension and her senses’ alertness.

  “Joe?” She clutched at the guardrail and looked beyond it, then below to the creek that was barely visible in the vaporous mix. “Are you there?” she called in a hushed voice.

  She listened, waited, hoped…but in vain.

  Of course he wasn’t there. She stepped back from the railing both physically and mentally, and shoved her hands into the front pockets of her jeans. He wasn’t there because, as Sammy had pointed out, she’d run headlong into a psychological wall as a result of the pressure she’d been under these past years. What if Joe was, indeed, a result of that stress overload? It was feasible. For all she knew, Jay Barnes’s eccentricity could have played on her subconscious until she’d invented an alter ego of sorts, someone who intrigued her sexually and intellectually, yet was unattainable. Safe.

  So deep was she in her self-analysis, that the phantomlike touch of a finger across her cheek had her jerking backward and up against a steel beam. Astonished, openly afraid, she looked around for whoever could have crept up on her without her hearing them.

  But no one else was around.

  Rachel lifted her hand to her cheek, wishing…afraid to wish.

  “Then help me!” she cried out, spinning around in the direction from which she’d felt the touch, his touch. “Tell me what to do! Tell me why this is happening? Why me?”

  Her only reply was the distant horn from the 10:35 out of Baton Rouge as it dragged itself through town like an armored centipede. The horn sounded again to warn vehicles and pedestrians of its approach to the Cotton Road crossing a half mile beyond the woods which blocked her view—if she’d been looking in that direction. She wasn’t. She was staring at the man standing just outside of Beauchamp’s garage.

  How long had he been watching her? She could barely make him out in the concealing mist, let alone recognize him. But his typical uniform of jeans and T-shirt, and that hint of white on his hand, gave him away as much as his negative body language.

  “What is it you know?” she murmured. This involved him somehow, and she was going to find out how. Because she suddenly had nothing but time on her hands, she was going to make sure of it.

  Determined, she continued her walk across the bridge. There must have been something in her step that got through to him because he seemed to grow more tense. Then, abruptly, he retreated back into the garage. Go ahead, she thought, try to hide. But this time there was no door to shut her out.

  She walked briskly past the turn-off to the boardinghouse, along the gravel-strewn shoulder of the road, thinking about what she should say to him. If the dubiously named “Mudcat” Beauchamp was around, it would make things more difficult, maybe impossible. Somehow, though, she would figure out a way not to leave until Jay Barnes understood she had things to say to him.

  Beauchamp’s was one of those places her mother would have described as “men’s territory,” an environment no refined woman would be caught in. The smell of petroleum products, sweat and whatever had been discarded in the fifty-gallon oil drums on each of the two fuel-pump islands assaulted her nostrils when she was still a dozen or so yards from the brown sheet-metal building. Rachel decided this area could give some hospital odors a legitimate challenge.

  She spotted Dwight Beauchamp through the glass door of his office. Even though he saw her, too, and held up a fat finger, obviously meant to signal “I’ll be with you shortly,” she pretended she didn’t notice and continued inside.

  Jay Barnes stood at the back wall of the garage, partially hidden by a large truck, the kind that transported the crude oil from the wells on the south part of town to the refinery in Baton Rouge. He seemed to be trying to dismantle some kind of spray gun; however, due to his injured hand, he was having problems.

  Although the thick rubber soles of her athletic shoes made virtually no sound on the cement, she could tell from his squared shoulders and stiff bearing that he knew she’d arrived. It made it easier to think of an opening line.

  “How’s the hand today?”

  “Not bad enough to warrant a house call.”

  “This isn’t a professional visit. I simply found myself in the area and thought it would be polite to ask.”

  He set the spray gun onto the wooden workbench hard enough to rattle a number of the cans and tools scattered across it and turned around. “You put great stock in being polite, do you?”

  His deep voice turned silky smooth, which had Rachel debating exactly how much bolder she should get during this confrontation. She decided that, no matter what, direct was best. “Why are you working so hard at intimidating me?”

  “Because I want you to leave me alone.”

  “Believe me, the feeling’s mutual.”

  That seemed to give him a moment’s pause. Then he crossed his arms, and she found herself staring at muscles that said he wasn’t a man used to laying around and watching TV.

  “You’re good, I’ll give you that,” he muttered. “Playing the dedicated professional with just the right amount of innocence mixed in to emphasize your femininity.”

  Rachel hated hearing herself reduced to the bare essentials like a microwave cupcake. She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets to keep herself from taking a not-too-smart swing at him. Roddie had always said she should have been born a boy for all her tomboyish impulses. “It’s not going to work, you know. This macho technique of trying to scare me into minding my own business is…bunk. I may not have the investigative skills to find out why you’re treating me like this, but I have my own reasons for trying.”

  “And what might they be?” Jay Barnes replied in a tone that indicated he wouldn’t believe her, no matter what she said.

  Rachel wished she could afford to wet her lips, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how his steady stare intimidated her. “I’ve seen you before. No, to be more accurate, someone who looks like you. Too much like you not to be related. Only he didn’t call himself Barnes…but his initials were J.B.”

  Was it concern over job security or something else that had him shooting a glance toward the office to see if she’d been overheard? Rachel felt her heartbeat kick into overdrive. Had she pushed too hard? What if he tried something here?

  After another long moment of studying her, he said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out of here. Now.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “And I don’t intend to.”

  “Then I’m staying.”

  He took a step toward her. “Do you know all I have
to do is turn on one of those compressors over there and it would make enough of a racket to block out almost any sound you might make?”

  “Trying to bully me again, Mr. Barnes?”

  “Glad you’re bright enough to pick up on that.”

  Rachel searched his hard, uncompromising face, the bottomless pools of his unreadable eyes, and wondered how far she dared go before she had to retreat.

  “What’s the plan? Murder? Rape?”

  “I’m feeling generous. Pick one.”

  When he took another step toward her, she decided it was time to step back. “Maybe I should warn you that I’m stronger than I look.”

  “Sure you are.”

  The next step was pure reflex. “If you are foolish enough to try anything, you won’t get away with it.”

  “Oh, I bet I would. But on the other hand, what makes you think I care at this point?”

  The back of her thighs came in abrupt contact with the truck’s front fender. It had a crushing effect on her bravado. “Stop it,” she whispered.

  “I will…if you’ll get lost.”

  “Talk to me first.”

  “About what?”

  “You. Who are you?”

  “Jay Barnes.”

  “That’s a lie.” Rachel couldn’t believe the words came from her mouth, but once they did, she knew there was no taking them back. And somehow she didn’t want to. As for Jay Barnes, he looked ready to pounce.

  “What did you say?”

  His voice held that familiar deceptive softness and Rachel was more than a little relieved to hear the office door open and Dwight Beauchamp call, “What’s up, J.B.?”

  Hearing those initials, Rachel stared up at the man who, out of sight of his boss, had her wrist in a painful grasp. She had the oddest feeling that he hadn’t even heard the man. “Let me go,” she demanded, her lips frozen from contained fear.

  “Shut up.” He glanced around the truck toward Beauchamp and called, “Nothing.”

  “Lady need some bodywork done?”