Witch Dance (13 page)

A reception room without a receptionist. A clinic without patients. If she let herself, Kate could go into a blue funk.

“What else do you see?”

“Ice cream melting in paper cups I went all the way to Ada for, and cookies I burned with my own two hands in the oven from hell.”

“Kate . . . Kate . . . what am I going to do with you?” Laughing, he hugged her hard. “You have a building you never thought would be finished, the most up-to- date equipment money can buy, a fine medical degree, and more grit than a grizzly bear. Eventually people will come to you for healing, Kate. Trust me.”

“Oh, God, Eagle.” She wrapped her arms around his chest and was suddenly bawling like a newborn baby. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had . . . the
only
friend I have besides Deborah.”

He held her close, rocking her in the cradle of his arms. His beautiful, passionate Kate. The woman his people shunned.

Didn’t they know? Couldn’t they see? Kate’s clinic was the kind of progress needed in Witch Dance. Eagle believed in preserving the culture of his people, believed passionately, but he also understood that the little village would eventually die if it refused to move forward at all.

He smoothed her hair from her forehead and dried her tears with the tips of his fingers. His skin absorbed her tears, and he felt them in his own heart.

“They will come to accept you in time, Kate.”

“How can you say that? After all they’ve done?”

“Good. Your spunk is back. Fight, Dr. Kate Malone. Fight for what you believe in.”

“Is that what you do? Fight for what you believe in?” He tightened his hold while his silence screamed through the room. Kate pushed back the fear that threatened to defeat her. “I believe in you, Eagle Mingo, in the courage and wisdom of the man who defied his own people to help me build this clinic, in the essential goodness of the man who helped Deborah Lightfoot and her father face Hal’s disappearance.” She cupped her face and drew it close. “And I believe in us . . . in you and me together . . . on your blanket under the stars. . . .”

As he drew her hips into his, he wondered if there would ever be a time when Kate Malone would not bewitch him.

“How about on your examining table in your clinic, Dr. Malone? Don’t you think it deserves a proper christening?”

“Eagle.” With her hands tangled in his hair and her lips inches from his, she breathed his name.

Already they were flying.

 o0o

Winston Mingo saw them through the window, his son with the white medicine woman. The fears he’d held at bay all summer came crashing around him. There was no mistaking that look.

Dr. Kate Malone was more to Eagle than a passing fancy, more than a summer affair. If he told Dovie, it would break her heart. And Cole . . .

Now Winston understood his son’s concern, his anger. With trembling hands he opened the door and went inside. Without knocking. It was an open house, wasn’t it?

The bells over the door tinkled, and Kate and his son moved apart. Without hurry. Without guilt.

Somehow that made Winston proud.

“I’m glad you came,” Eagle told him. “Kate, this is my father, Winston Mingo.”

“Governor, you honor me.”

“Just Winston.” Dovie would kill him. He might not tell her. “You have a fine clinic here, Dr. Malone.”

“Just Kate, please.” She smiled at him.

Kate Malone had everything his son admired—grace, courage, intelligence. And she was the most beautiful woman Winston had ever seen. Dovie would flail him alive for that, too.

“Would you like a tour of the clinic?” she asked.

She showed him the modern equipment and talked enthusiastically about the need for accessible health care in Witch Dance.

“Will you stay with us, Kate?” he asked.

“Do you mean, am I committed or am I just passing through?”

“Yes.”

“Eagle asked me that the day we met.” Winston didn’t miss the look that passed between them. “Yes, Governor, I’m here to stay.”

Seeing the proud tilt of her head and the stubborn set of her chin, Winston never doubted for a minute that she would keep her word. A man could do worse than have grandchildren from such a woman.

Winston stayed for punch and cookies. And in that time, not a single person came through the door. He thought of the old medicine man who shook his gourds and waved his turkey feathers over the sick. He thought of all his people who had died because they refused to travel to Ada to the modern facilities there.

Eagle was right: There should be a way to blend the old ways with the new. When Winston took his leave, he had a new mission in mind, one he would carry through as quickly as possible . . . if he were not weighed on the path and found light.

 o0o

The clinic bell was still ringing from Winston’s exit when Eagle locked the door.

“Closed for the day,” he said, reaching for Kate.

The sweet madness overtook them, and they reeled against the walls and rolled on the floor. Eagle’s voice lifted and soared with the dark beauty of his native tongue. Impaled by him, impaled and dying the bright, exquisite death of passion, Kate knew that she would never hear his voice without wanting him.

“You will come to me tonight,” he said even as they still lay tangled together.

“You could stay with me.”
Forever
, she thought, pulling his face down to her aching breasts.

“The nights will soon be too cool to sleep under the stars.”

“Will we sleep?” she said, laughing.

“Only if you wish.”

He began to move in her once more, and she knew that she would go to him, galloping through the night on Mahli, flying to him on the wind.

 o0o

The first thing Kate heard when she returned from Eagle’s campsite was the sound of the phone, ringing and ringing in the cold half-light of early morning. She drew Mahli to a halt, dismounted, and patted her neck.

“Wait here, old girl.”

There was no need to tie the mare. Eagle had trained her well.

Kate took the steps at a run, the sound of the telephone setting her nerves jangling.

“Hello,” she said, breathless. She placed her hand over her pounding heart.

The woman at the other end of the line was crying. “Kate, you have to come to Boston. Something terrible has happened. Clayton . . .”

The line went dead. Kate jiggled the receiver.

“What? Who is this?”

Her only answer was silence.

Chapter 14

“Don’t expect too much, Kate.”

Exhausted from her long flight across the country, Kate stood in the hospital corridor and listened to Dr. Wayne Epsmith’s report on Dr. Clayton Colbert.

“The bullet went in close to the heart. We’ve done what we can to repair the damage, but . . .” Wayne Epsmith shook his head.

“Is he going to die?”

“With this kind of damage, the odds are not in his favor, Kate. You know that.”

As a doctor, she did. As Clayton Colbert’s friend, she didn’t want to know. She wanted to sit by his bedside and hold his slack hand and watch the machines do his breathing and hope that tomorrow everything would be better.

She wanted to believe in miracles.

“I’m sorry, Kate.” Dr. Epsmith put his hand on Kate’s shoulder. “I know how much Clayton meant to you.”

He used the past tense. As if the bullet had already done its job.

She couldn’t even say thank you for fear of breaking down. Her eyes were red and puffy, for she’d cried all the way from Oklahoma to the Hudson River. She’d barely been able to get from Logan Airport in one piece.

Inside the ICU cubicle, Clayton lay against the pillows, his face drained of the rich copper tints of his heritage. Kate stood silently by his side, not yet willing to make her presence known, wishing she could spare him this final humiliation: Her golden idol had turned to clay. The man she respected and revered above all others, the doctor who had taught her to save lives, had tried to take his own.

The previous night after the line had gone dead, she’d tried frantically to reach him. She called his house and got no answer. Then she called the hospital, expecting him to be on duty, expecting him to laugh and say the phone call was a sick prank.

Instead, she talked to Melissa Sayers Colbert. “He’s asking for you, Kate. He keeps calling your name, over and over.”

“Why? Why did he do it?”

“Because he loved” —Melissa became hysterical, sobbing and keening into the phone. Kate hung on to the receiver, her knuckles turning white— “me. It was me he loved. Clayton loved me.”

“Of course he did, Mrs. Colbert. He always spoke of you in glowing terms.”

“He did?”

“Yes. Always,”

Now, looking down at his pale face, Kate whispered, “Why, Dr. Colbert? Why?”

His eyelids fluttered open. One hand lifted feebly toward her as he tried to focus his eyes.

“Ka—”

“Shhh. Don’t talk. I’m here.” She took his hand, scared by the cool, boneless feel of it.

He closed his eyes once more, and his chest heaved with his shallow breathing.

“I talked with your wife,” Kate said. “She’s right outside in the waiting room. She hasn’t left your side since they brought you in.”
Why? Why?

“The . . . clinic . . .”

“It’s wonderful. We had a beautiful open house.”
Just the two of us, three counting the governor.

“The house . . .”

“Don’t worry about the house. I’m not much of a housekeeper, as you well know, but it’s still in passable condition. I’ll go on a real cleaning spree when I get home; then, when you come back to Witch Dance, that house will shine from top to bottom.”

Clayton Colbert was dying, and she couldn’t seem to stop her meaningless chatter. She was a doctor. She’d have to get used to death.

Brian and Charles floating away in the water came to her mind.
No
. She’d never get used to death.

“They’re . . . yours, Kate. My will . . .” Clayton felt himself drifting away. He couldn’t go. Not yet. He clung to Kate’s hand. It was warm and full of strength. If he could just hang on, her energy would flow through him. “I want you . . .”

“Please, Dr. Colbert . . .”

“. . . to have them.”

Silent tears flowed down her cheeks, and Clayton knew: Kate loved him, loved him in the purest, most beautiful way.

He didn’t have to die after all.

Melissa came in and kissed him. Her lips felt dry and cold. Beyond his wife’s head he saw Kate, his beautiful Kate with hair like a halo.

“I love you,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear.

“Flat line,” someone said. Melissa flung herself across his chest, but he didn’t feel a thing. He was already floating, floating toward the light that was as bright as his Kate’s hair.

 o0o

Melissa Sayers Colbert stood beside the open grave, watching Clayton being lowered into the ground, wretched and broken in her grief, holding tightly to the hand of the woman standing beside her. Leaves fluttered down from the oak tree and landed, golden, on the casket.

“Dr. Colbert would have liked that,” Kate Malone murmured. “He always found beauty in nature.”

Melissa didn’t know. There were many things she hadn’t known about her husband, things she’d learned from the woman beside her. Kate Malone.

Her nemesis. Her comforter.

He would have liked being buried in Witch Dance with Muskogean words spoken for him, Kate had said, but Melissa couldn’t bear the thought of having him so far away. She had to take comfort where she could get it, and the familiar words of the Episcopal priest made the sight of Clayton’s bronze casket disappearing into the dark hole bearable.

Keening in her agony, Melissa flung herself outward, toward the grave. Kate’s hands stayed her. Kate’s arms sustained her.

“Everything is going to be all right. Shhh . . . everything is going to be all right.”

But it wasn’t. She’d killed her husband. She knew that as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger. The scene in the study replayed itself—Clayton with his head bowed, defeated, and she, oblivious of his pain, taking her pleasure any way she could get it.

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

Nothing in her life would ever be all right again. Clayton was gone from her forever.

Without knowing she was in the arena, Kate Malone had won. And even that didn’t matter anymore.

“Will you take me home?” Melissa sounded as old and tired as she felt. “I want to hear about Witch Dance. I want to know what Clayton had for breakfast and whether he read the paper in the morning or at night. I want to know what he did when he was walking the land, what he said, how he looked, how he acted. I want to know everything about him.” Oh, the wasted months. The wasted years when she’d stayed behind in Boston while he was roaming carefree over the land he loved. “Make him live for me again, Kate. Please.”

Kate took Dr. Colbert’s widow to their Beacon Hill house and told her every moment of Clayton’s last summer. In doing so, she relived her own summer, the soaring beauty of the land and the scorching passion of Eagle Mingo. It all rolled over her like the tide, with the same force, the same inevitability. The deep velvet nights with the stars hanging so low, they burned the skin. The muted mornings, as soft as pastel gowns, stitched and laced and beaded with love rituals. The thunder of horses’ hooves in the bright indigo days with the two of them racing along the river while the call of the winged ones echoed off the hills.

Her summer had a name, and its name was love.

Wrapping her arms around herself, wishing they were Eagle’s arms, she leaned toward the fire. Melissa’s voice was nothing more than a muted counterpoint to her thoughts.

Love
. She was in love with Eagle Mingo.

Had he found her note on the clinic door? Did he miss her as terribly as she missed him? Did he want her as desperately?

“Clayton had a deep tribal affinity,” Melissa was saying. “I guess I never realized that.”

Kate knew someone else whose tribal affinity was even stronger, someone whose very being shouted
Chickasaw
.