The bad news was that three of the original PSP patients had died and there didn’t seem to be anything the doctors could do about it.
Dale was bone tired. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe he was losing his edge. Or maybe there were too many memories, too many emotions threatening to break through. Whatever the cause, he saw each of the blond patients’ faces, and cringed. He heard each of their cries and saw each pair of scared blue eyes, and lost the professional detachment that made him the best of the best.
Tansy had always been able to blend medicine with compassion. At first, he’d mocked her for it. Then, he’d envied her. Now, he didn’t know how he felt.
“You okay?” As though summoned by his thoughts, she was at his side, touching him on the shoulder.
“I’m fine,” he said shortly, and moved away from her hand and the weakness it represented. But he wasn’t fine. Every time he saw an islander’s face or heard the broad accent, he was thrown back in time to the days just before his parents’ deaths. The days just after.
Tansy waited, and Dale wished he could reach for her. Wished he could talk to her. But he didn’t know how. Sharing meant vulnerability. Trask had taught him that.
Finally, she sighed and asked, “Ready for the meeting?”
He nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”
They left the patients with Hazel for the night. The young man, Curtis, had died, despite the dialysis and their best efforts to help his kidneys and liver clear the toxin. His girlfriend Miranda was finally breathing on her own, though she hadn’t regained consciousness. Both the sheriff and the mayor were nonresponsive—alive only because of the machines that breathed for them.
Little Eddie was still hooked up to a respirator, as well. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d collapsed. Too long, but what more could they do? The symptoms made no sense. PSP came from eating tainted shellfish, yet none of the patients had eaten the same foods before they collapsed. How could they fight something that didn’t follow the rules?
The fear level on the island was escalating rapidly on the wings of sorrow over lost spouses, lost children.
Lost parents.
At the thought, the word
murder
whispered around the edges of Dale’s brain, but he shook off Trask’s words. At seventeen, Dale would have given anything to have his uncle believe that his mother wouldn’t have gone out on the boat after dark. Now, he couldn’t afford to even ask the question. He had an outbreak to solve, and he had to get Tansy back to Boston.
Besides, the proof had been irrefutable. The
Curly Sue
had gone down with all hands aboard. Period.
“None of this makes any sense,” Tansy murmured
as they crossed the motel lawn and headed for the small, white building that served as Lobster Island’s meeting place.
Dale nodded. “You’re right. There’s something strange going on.”
Which was why he wanted her off the island. Churchill had agreed to arrange a charter for the next day and Dale planned to bundle her onto the plane, kicking and screaming if necessary. Once she was safe on the mainland, he could deal with the rest of it. This was his problem, not hers.
“It’s almost as though there’s a new, concentrated source of the toxin somewhere on the island.” Tansy scowled. “We’d know more if the test had worked.”
Salt water had leaked into their centrifuge and fried the hell out of its programming. They hadn’t noticed the problem until halfway through purifying the first set of blood samples, and the mistake had set them back by hours. They still didn’t know whether they were dealing with PSP or something else.
“Churchill said he’d call for more field kits and some satellite phones,” Dale said, not bothering to tell Tansy she’d be gone long before the new equipment arrived, or that they were virtually cut off otherwise.
Almost a week before their arrival, a vicious spring storm had damaged the island’s radio tower and the connections to the mainland, making the phones and the two-way radios highly unreliable. Churchill had the only working satellite phone on the island, but that
didn’t bother Dale. Churchill had come through for him before. He’d come through again.
“Ready?” Tansy held open the door to the meeting room, and Dale hung back from the buzz of voices and motion inside. Then he sighed and nodded.
“Ready.” Ready as he’d ever be.
There was a speculative murmur from the sea of tanned, weather-beaten men and women when Churchill introduced him as Dr. Metcalf. Dale bent down to the ancient microphone and did his best.
Keep the locals calm. Have a plan. Don’t foster panic.
The directives spooled through his head, though in his experience with outbreaks, the rules were easier spoken than followed.
“Hi folks, and thank you all for coming. We want to keep you informed as to what’s going on here. I’m Dr. Metcalf, as most of you know. Beside me is Dr. Whitmore.”
The crowd quieted, save for a woman at the back of the room who sobbed into her hands. The names of the dead islanders flickered through Dale’s brain and the image of the still, sheet-wrapped forms lying side by side in the temporary motel morgue settled heavily on his heart.
He continued, “Dr. Hazel is with the patients right now. We’re doing everything we can for them, but we need your help. We need you to—”
“How many of us are going to die?” a red-eyed man in the front row interrupted Dale. “My Mary’s already dead. Are my children going to get it? Am I?”
Your parents are gone, boy. You’ll live with me.
Dale willed away the memory of Trask’s voice. It had no place here.
He gritted his teeth and answered, “There haven’t been any new cases since yesterday, and the symptoms aren’t infectious. There’s no reason to believe you’re in greater danger than anyone else on the island.” Which wasn’t entirely reassuring.
“We should leave!” shouted a woman in the back. Curtis’s mother. Her eyes were dark holes in her head, and the deep lines beside her mouth attested to the hours she’d spent at her son’s bedside watching him die by degrees. “We should leave Lobster Island and never come back. This place is cursed! We lose a dozen people a year to the sea, the catches are worse and worse, the spring storms destroyed half the fleet, and
now this?
” She spread her hands to the murmuring, nodding crowd. “We should take our families and go.”
“Go where?” a beefy man in the middle of the crowd shouted. “You said it yourself, lobstering’s been bad and half the fleet is broken beyond repair. If we could even get the boats to the mainland, what would we do then? Most of us are broke!”
“Broke is better than dead!” a second woman called from the edges of the shifting, muttering sea of islanders.
“People, people, please! I need you to calm down and listen to me.” Dale raised his hands for silence, knowing he was on the edge of losing the crowd. “Ac
cording to Churchill’s information, the weather service is tracking a tropical depression headed this way. It should hit us in the next two or three days, which means the mainland crossing isn’t safe right now.”
Not that many of the shabby lobster boats would survive the crossing on a calm, clear day. The currents between Lobster Island and the Maine coast were brutal.
The buzz in the room dropped a notch, and Dale continued. “By then, we should know where the toxin is coming from, and how to fight it. Until we do, it would be best if you all continue to eat canned food and try to drink only bottled water.”
There was disbelieving silence. Then a grizzled captain asked, “Where are we supposed to get bottled water?”
Dale closed his eyes. He and Tansy had raided the island’s single grocery store early that morning, after spending a sleepless night helping Hazel with twenty cases of food poisoning. They’d come away from the little store with a few tins of boiled ham and a half-dozen bottles of cola.
Their downed plane had contained gallons of spring water and freeze-dried rations along with canned goods and the field kits. But until Churchill’s charter arrived, they had nothing. And if the storm moved in faster than expected…
They could be in big trouble.
But the islanders didn’t need to know that right now. So Dale forced a confidence he didn’t feel. “Do
your best. Until we know where the toxin is coming from, you shouldn’t eat or drink anything that hasn’t been brought in from the mainland.” He leaned into the microphone. “Beyond that, if any of you experience an upset stomach, tingling or burning in your fingertips and tongue, or any other symptoms, you should come to the motel immediately. The earlier we see you, the more we can help.” He hoped.
“Excuse me.” A man stood up from his chair in the second row. His navy trousers, white button-down shirt and capped teeth instantly marked him as an outsider. He lifted a hand. “I’d like to say a few words.”
“We know what you’re gonna say, Roberts, and we don’t wanna hear it,” a lobster captain yelled.
A murmur of agreement bolstered this opinion, but from his seat behind Dale on the stage, Churchill called, “As acting mayor, I’ll remind you that everyone in this assembly has the right to speak his or her piece. Even real estate developers.”
Roberts ignored the gibe and took the podium, nudging Dale aside. “I think you’ll be interested in what I have to say, especially if you wish to leave the island with enough money to start over.”
Dale eased his way off the stage and headed for the door. He’d said what he’d needed to say. The islanders would need to make their own decisions now. Personally, he’d take the money and run.
Roberts continued, “I represent a group of men who are very interested in purchasing this island for development purposes.”
“Yeah,” shouted a whiskered man in the back, “and most of us have told you to go to hell!”
The crowd shifted and muttered, some resentful, some considering.
Dale slipped out of the room, thinking that once the outbreak was over he might talk to Roberts about selling his parents’ place. HFH could use the money to replace the plane.
Tansy joined him a moment later and touched his arm. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep.”
Dale pulled away from her, and from the offer. “I think I’ll go back to the clinic and help Hazel. I’m not that tired.” It was a lie. He didn’t want to go back to his parents’ house. There were too many memories there. And he didn’t want to be alone with Tansy. There were too many memories there, as well, and he was feeling too exposed.
“Hazel will be fine, and we both need sleep. Forty-eight hours on duty is our limit. HFH policy.” She steered him to the dirt path he’d run down a thousand times in his nightmares. The path to his empty house.
It wasn’t until they passed the black-shadowed hedge at the far edge of the town common that Dale saw the dark figure waiting for them, heard the faint rustle of movement, and his every sense went on instant alert.
Ambush!
Chapter Five
“Tansy, run!” He shoved her towards the brightly lit meeting house and turned to face their attacker. “Don’t ask, just run!”
The shadowy figure lunged, and Dale leapt back. He stumbled over a tree root, kicked out blindly and connected, feeling a spurt of surprise when the other man went down with a grunt and didn’t get up.
“Whaddid you do that for, boy?” The boozy voice rose up from the ground, and Dale’s gut soured at the smell of cheap beer and cheaper gin.
He stepped back quickly and bumped into Tansy. “I told you to run,” he snapped, his voice harsh with anger and embarrassment.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said quietly, crouching down beside the drunk. She raised her voice. “Trask? It’s Dr. Whitmore. Tansy. Can you stand?”
Leave him there,
Dale wanted to say.
This is his problem, not ours.
But it saddened him to think that his uncle, a man he’d once idolized, had crawled into
a bottle the day after his wife’s death and still hadn’t emerged, fifteen years later.
If that’s what love did to a man, then Dale wanted no part of the emotion.
“Come on,” Tansy said, “help me lift him up. We can’t leave him here. Let’s get him home.”
Together, they hefted Dale’s uncle to his feet and turned him towards the dusty path. Trask balked. “No. Don’t wanna go home. Wanna see Hazel. My Hazel. But she won’t come to the house. Says it’s too much like Suzie there.” His head lolled bonelessly. Dale curled his lip at the fumes and cursed the punch of pain when Trask murmured, “My Suzie.”
“Let’s haul him to the motel and dump him on one of the benches to sober up,” Dale said roughly, hating that Tansy had seen this, hating that she knew what he’d come from. Who he might have turned into.
“Be reasonable, Dale. Hazel is busy with the patients. Let’s take him home and get some coffee into him.” Tansy’s tone was chiding. In the darkness lit only by the reflected lights from the meeting house, her face reflected her disappointment. In him.
“Don’t want to go home,” Trask repeated, straightening and looking almost sober. “Need to talk to you, boy, about your parents. About Suzie. You were right—they weren’t lost at sea. I’ve got
proof!
I’ve got—”
“There you are, old friend!” Churchill’s voice broke into the suddenly tense moment. He and his Amazonian bodyguard-cum-chauffeur, Frankie, ap
peared out of the darkness. “We’ve been looking for you! Rumor had it you were tying one on at The Claw.”
Dale winced at the thought of Churchill being forced to babysit his drunken uncle. Without a word, as though she did this five times a week, Frankie lifted Trask’s limp form in a fireman’s carry and walked down the dark path to the house Dale’s uncle had shared with his bride.
When they were gone, Churchill touched Dale’s sleeve. “If it helps any, this is the first time I’ve seen him drunk since the day you left.” When Dale didn’t answer, the older man sighed, and said, “I’m sorry you had to see this, son. I’m sorry you came back.”
Then he, too, was gone, swallowed up into the shadows with only a swirl of sound to mark his passing.
Dale and Tansy were silent for a moment, then she hissed a breath. “I can’t see how that would help any.” She turned to him. “That man just all but accused you of driving your uncle to drink. How dare he? What right does he have?”