Grave Risk. Hannah Alexander

I’ve made some kind of mistake that I can’t remember…. I’m a worthless nurse…. I destroy everything I touch….

      “You could be wrong this time, Noelle,” she murmured. The weight of responsibility, already heavy enough to crush her, increased yet again. “There’s something you aren’t telling me. I can see it in your eyes.”

      Noelle released her then. “Have you stopped taking your medication?”

      “Don’t change the subject.”

      “That is the subject!”

      When they were younger—when Jill, barely past childhood herself, felt the responsibility for Noelle’s welfare resting solely on her own small shoulders—she had been much worse. Caught up in the conviction that something was horribly wrong at their home in Cedar Hollow, she had feared for Noelle’s life if other members of their family discovered Noelle’s gift, and had slapped her to keep her quiet about it.

      Something had been wrong then. How could Jill be sure something wasn’t wrong now as well? She and Noelle were far too familiar with the specter of murder.

      “Have you stopped taking your medication again?” Noelle repeated.

      “I’m taking it, just not as much. I’m titrating down.”

      “Why?”

      “I don’t need as much. I can get a handle on this thing without chemicals flowing through my body all the time. You know how much I hate that stuff.”

      “But you hate the OCD more,” Noelle said. “Look what it’s doing to you right now, and this is a horrible time to reduce the meds. You need to increase the dosage, not cut back on it.”

      Voices reached them from the bed and breakfast, and Jill glanced in that direction, barely a block away, to see another familiar figure stepping out onto the broad front porch.

      “Noelle?”

      “What?”

      “Please tell me I’m not hallucinating.”

      Noelle followed her line of vision, then caught her breath in a tiny gasp. “Depends on what you think you see,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “If you think that’s Attila the Hun, you’re hallucinating. It’s just a distant descendant of his. He was in the spa earlier this morning.”

      “What was Austin Barlow doing in your spa?”

      “Paying a friendly visit.” The sarcasm didn’t abate. Noelle had never liked Austin.

      “We need to suggest an autopsy for Edith,” Jill said, softly, so her voice wouldn’t carry to Austin.

      “For what? You think anyone’s going to listen to us?”

      “We can try.”

      “As you said, Cheyenne is sure it was an MI that killed Edith,” Noelle said. “Myocardial infarction. Nobody’s going to listen to my hunch. Remember, Cheyenne’s the doctor. I’m not. So that’s exactly what they’ll call it—just a hunch.”

      “They’ll listen to you before they’d listen to me,” Jill said. “Remember, I’ve been a little jumpy since last year. I’ve called the sheriff a couple of times about noises around the house.”

      “Well, I’m the one who admitted to breaking and entering last year,” Noelle said.

      Jill shook her head. “You were tracking a killer. The sheriff knows that.”

      Noelle nudged Jill. Austin was glancing toward them.

      “I’ll talk to the sheriff myself,” Jill said. “I’m telling you one thing now, though, sis. I’m going to run lab tests on that blood I drew from Edith.”

      Noelle nodded. “That’s something we can take care of as soon as we’ve spoken with Bertie.”

      Chapter Six

      The massage room became so silent Rex could hear the quavering voice of the traumatized masseuse out in the lobby, apparently still talking to her mother on the telephone. Cheyenne and Karah Lee stared at him, waiting.

      He didn’t want to say anything else.

      “Jill never mentioned being engaged,” Cheyenne said.

      “One doesn’t always like to talk about a broken relationship,” he said.

      “I don’t know why not,” Karah Lee said. “We talk about everything else around here, especially among the office staff. Who broke it?”

      Cheyenne cleared her throat. “Uh, careful. We could be invading private turf.”

      Rex raised his eyebrows at them. You think?

      Karah Lee spread her hands. “If we’re going to be working together for the next few weeks, we’d better make sure we’ll all get along.”

      “There will be no trouble between Jill and me,” Rex assured them. How could he have forgotten that special character that had always been such a vital part of Hideaway—the…inquisitiveness?

      “It sure didn’t look that way to me a while ago,” Karah Lee said. “Jill wouldn’t even talk to you.”

      “She was upset about Edith. Both of us know how to behave in a professional manner.”

      “Does this mean you’re not going to tell us what happened to your engagement?” Karah Lee asked, patently disappointed.

      He glanced at Cheyenne to see if she would use her authority to curb this vein of inquisitiveness. But she appeared just as curious as Karah Lee.

      Obviously, they had been well nourished in the soil of small-town know-thy-neighbor’s-business. “We parted under less than ideal circumstances,” he said.

      Karah Lee leaned forward, as if settling in for a story.

      

      Fawn followed Austin onto the porch, still intrigued by this man and his so-called mission. “So, did you suddenly get religion or something?”

      He gave her another irritably amused glance over his broad-but-bony left shoulder. “How did you guess?”

      She frowned at him. She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. “Well, I mean, I guess I don’t know much, but I’ve never heard of someone going out of his way to return to his hometown and start making apologies to everybody.”

      “A fella does if he’s smart. Especially if he wants to stay awhile.”

      “So you are moving back here?” As she asked the question, she caught sight of Jill Cooper and Noelle Trask standing at the edge of the greenway that bordered the municipal boat dock. They were staring in this direction.

      Fawn glanced at Austin, and found him staring back at the sisters.

      “Uh-oh,” she said softly. “It must be time for another apology.”

      He ignored her and stepped toward the two women.

      

      Rex decided to give his colleagues what they wanted. In fact, if he knew for sure he could trust them, he might even be willing to enlist their assistance in paving the way for a better relationship with Jill—at least a working relationship—but that was taking it too far.

      “We discovered quickly that we worked well together,” he said. “Jill wanted to be an intensive-care nurse. When we did shifts together, she seemed to read my mind.”

      “She does that with me,” Cheyenne said. “She seems able to tune in to what I’m doing.”

      Rex shrugged. “And all this time I was under the impression there was this special bond between the two of us.”

      “So you got engaged?” Karah Lee asked, obviously impatient with the slow pace of the narrative.