The Mountain Midwife (26 page)

“I can’t blame him.” Heather’s voice was empty, flat.

Neither could Ashley.

“I wronged him terribly.”

Yes, she had.

“There’s no excuse for what I did. No forgiveness.”

“That’s not true.” Ashley smoothed Heather’s hair back from her face. “Whether you get it from Ian is one thing and up to him, not you. But God forgives.”

“I wonder if repenting means I need to give up this baby.” Heather folded her hands over her belly. “If so, then I’m out of luck. I won’t give her up. I want this baby, oddly enough.”

“I don’t find that odd. Babies are precious gifts.”

Ashley bent down so she could look into Heather’s face. “Did you do this on purpose?”

“No. No, of course I didn’t.” Heather’s eyes blazed, and she shoved away from the table. “How can you suggest such a thing?”

Ashley said nothing.

“I love my husband. I didn’t want to destroy my marriage.”

Ashley kept looking at her friend in silence.

“I wanted to make him regret how he’s been treating me, but not—Sometimes I could just hit you.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a patient has hit me.” Ashley cleared away Heather’s barely touched breakfast and went hunting for something more nutritious. “You had an affair to get Ian’s
attention—I’m going to say here as a friend that was stupid—and things got out of hand. I suggest you go to the pastor for counseling when Ian comes back. Tell him that’s what you want—if it is.”

“It is. I will. What are you going to do with those oranges? I hate eating oranges.”

“I’m going to juice them. The glucose will do you more good than caffeine, which won’t do you or the baby any good.”

Ashley set about making orange juice and preparing a bowl of bran cereal for Heather, saw the time, and forgot about breakfast for herself. “I want to get over to the hospital to see my patient there. Are you going to work?”

“Of course.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Will you be all right with some madman trying to run you off the road?”

Ashley compressed her lips, then shrugged. “I am probably being paranoid. Jase will find out who it was and look into the girl’s disappearance from there.”

“Come back here tonight if you like.”

“I will.”

But for Heather’s sake, not her own.

She snatched up her jacket from the coat tree in the foyer and let herself out the front door. Fog lay over the mountains, and the sun hadn’t yet made even a hint of its appearance to burn off the mist. No excursions over the Ridge until that happened.

Disappointed that the sun might not show itself this time of year, Ashley drove to the hospital. She had gotten Mary Kate’s room number the night before, so she didn’t bother stopping at the reception desk where the young woman behind the counter was already swamped with patients going in for surgery prep and family
members looking to find where they could wait for those patients. Most of the hospital employees knew Ashley. Occasionally one of her patients had to be admitted. The ones she saw nodded to her in greeting and let her pass without questions.

She reached room 312. The door was half open, so she knocked on the frame and walked in. In one bed, a woman, a stranger, watched TV while picking at her breakfast on a tray swung across her bed.

The other bed was empty.

“Excuse me.” Ashley approached the patient. “Has Mary Kate been taken for tests or something?”

“No ma’am.” The woman lowered the volume of the television with a remote control. “She got up and left with her momma this morning.”

C
HAPTER
19

H
UNTER
’
S MOTEL OFFERED
oatmeal, waffles, and cold cereal, but he wanted eggs that morning. So he drove across the highway to the diner. Not until he saw the sign on the door announcing when people needed to get in their pie orders did he realize the date. Thanksgiving was next week. Mom would expect him to be at the table in Great Falls with the rest of the family, probably a few stray relatives, and perhaps a dignitary or two who couldn’t get away for some reason. No fewer than twenty people with lots of food and wine and carefully regulated conversation. It was a family holiday he never missed unless he was out of the country and the timing wouldn’t allow him to get back in time. He never wanted to miss it. Usually at least one or two of the guests possessed a store of interesting stories to tell. If nothing else, Mom’s eighty-year-old uncle would regale them with tales of his life in some vague intelligence service whose name he never mentioned. In short, he had been a spy and didn’t care if he wasn’t supposed to talk about his adventures.

“If they want to lock up this old man,” Uncle Teddy was fond of saying, “it’ll just give me time to write my memoirs.”

Hunter suspected half the stories were made up, but the old man was still entertaining. He wanted to be there, safe in the comfort of familiarity and sameness. Yet no matter how much they all cared for him, strove to assure him nothing had changed just because he knew the truth, he had changed. Residual anger remained, a sense of discomfort.

And yet how could he ever be comfortable in the mountains when half the time he didn’t understand what people were saying to him?

And then the pretty, middle-aged proprietress of the diner met him at the door with a menu and a warm smile, and he kind of liked the idea of having roots there. Most everyone he’d met on the Ridge was kind, helpful, and polite. Ashley had gone—was going—out of her way to be kind and helpful when she had no reason to be other than—

Perhaps she liked him as much as he did her?

He hoped she did so much he felt like a high school kid with his first crush. Totally ridiculous. His determination of the night before to stay there and get to know her better seemed utterly stupid. He needed to go back to work, stop burdening Justin with everything, even if his partner was more than willing to take on some of the travel work “for the sake of true love.” Justin should give up digging tunnels and write romance novels.

The notion made Ian smile, and he slipped into a booth to study the menu for what kind of eggs the diner served, even though he already knew from previous visits. He already knew he wanted an omelet. Nothing fancy here like spinach and feta. Peppers, mushrooms, and onions were the closest things to vegetables for filling.
He decided no onions was best and placed his order with the server, who looked too young to be anywhere but in middle school. As she entered the kitchen, she called, “Momma, that Yankee fella wants an omelet with—” The swinging door closed, cutting off what else the girl shouted, and Hunter realized she probably was in middle school but working before classes started.

A vast world away from his, indeed. He hadn’t worked a real job until he entered an internship between his sophomore and junior years in college. If he had grown up here, he would probably have done something to earn money to support his mother.

Except his mother had died. Perhaps he would have ended up in a foster home or worse. Or perhaps relatives would have taken him in. He would never know. He might have never known save for that video in Portugal.

His omelet appeared, perfect in all its high-caloric glory. He needed another run. He’d needed a run last night to get the nonsense of Ashley out of his head. The hour being too late for one, he had tossed and turned and seen her every time he closed his eyes.

Her world was a world away from his. He was supposed to marry some well-bred career woman.

And if he wanted to, he would have long ago. He had plenty of opportunity. A good thing he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine telling a wife that he wasn’t who she thought he was, that he had come from—what? Lesser people? Not hardly.

Around him, men and women ate and talked and prepared for their workdays. Some were dressed in business attire. Others looked like laborers. Two drove big rigs that were parked around the side of the restaurant. They contributed to the economy, the ebb and flow of commerce, and the human race, perhaps more productively than did the McDermotts, who tried to influence congressional votes
with their reports and speeches that always made their cause look like the better option. Ashley had given up her dreams of becoming a doctor for the sake of these people, for the women.

As though his thoughts of her had conjured her from the air, Ashley flung open the door at that moment and charged through. She didn’t hesitate to look for a table or anyone; she skirted chairs and patrons and shoved her way through the kitchen door. In the seconds she took to cover the dining room, her panic showed. She was panicked and at the diner.

Mary Kate.

Hunter shot out of the booth and followed Ashley into the kitchen. She held the owner’s arm and her voice was shrill. “Where is she? Where is Mary Kate, Lucy Belle?”

“Calm yourself, Ashley Esther.” Lucy Belle removed Ashley’s hand from her arm, but only to hold it between both of hers. “Mary Kate is just fine. She’s in the cellar cleaning out pumpkins for my pie fillings.”

“She’s in the cellar?” Ashley’s voice rose to a crescendo, then she stepped back, took a breath deep enough to be visible in the rise and fall of her chest, and set her hands on her hips. “Mary Kate is eight months pregnant. She is about two points away from preeclampsia, and she was hospitalized yesterday for dehydration and bronchitis because of both those conditions, and you have her in the cellar cleaning out pumpkins?”

Lucy Belle paled. “She just told me she had a bad cold and Boyd was in the hospital. I told her she had to wear a mask to do the pumpkins with a cold, but we keep those around here, so she took one and her gloves and went down.”

“To hide.” Ashley spoke this last through gritted teeth. She swung away from Lucy Belle and startled at the sight of Hunter
lounging in the doorway rather enjoying the scene. Her face grew an adorable pink. “Well, now that everyone has seen that unprofessional display of mine, may I go down and persuade her to leave?”

“You can go down,” Lucy Belle said, her lips twitching at the corners. “But I doubt you can persuade her to go. She needs the money.”

“And you take advantage of her.”

“Ashley Esther Tolliver, is that any way to talk to someone who whooped your bottom when you were nine?”

The kitchen staff and teenage server all laughed. So did Ashley.

“No ma’am, don’t want a repeat of that.” Ashley skirted a Latino man with a carton of at least three dozen eggs in his arms and reached for a side door. “I’m still going down. Want to join me, Hunter?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Hunter followed her through the doorway and down a steep set of steps lit by a single dim bulb hanging from a wire. He wondered if it was up to code. He’d learned some things about structural engineering, but indoor buildings never held his interest.

The cellar was the opposite of outdoors fresh air. Dark and damp, it smelled of concrete and mildew and a hint of sour from the stacks of pumpkins in crates along one wall. Beside those crates, Mary Kate sat at a table beneath a fluorescent light scooping pulp from the center of a pumpkin the size of a basketball and ladling the mess into an enormous kettle. “This pot’s almost full,” she called without looking up.

“What are you doing here?” Ashley dropped her hands onto Mary Kate’s shoulders.

She still jumped. “Miss Ashley, I didn’t expect—that is—what are you doin’ here?”

“Looking for you after I went to check on you in the hospital.”

“I couldn’t stay there. I need the money with Boyd sick and this baby coming.” She patted her enormous belly.

“Mary Kate, you don’t have to work like this. I told you I’d help you.”

“I won’t take charity, and I feel fine.”

She looked better than she had the day before, but her breath still wheezed in her chest loudly enough to be heard through the mask over her nose and mouth.

“Sometimes we all need help of one kind or another.” Ashley’s voice had gone soft with compassion, her eyes tender. “There’s no shame in it.”

“There is if you can’t never pay it back.” Mary Kate resumed her scooping.

Ashley bit her lip, took a turn around the cellar, then returned to Mary Kate’s side. “Do you want to lose this baby, Mary Kate?”

Mary Kate didn’t answer. She tossed the empty pumpkin rind into a box on the floor and reached for another gourd. One whack of her cleaver, and the pumpkin lay in two halves, insides oozing.

Ashley paled. “Mary Kate, you don’t mean that.”

“I don’t mean nothing, Miss Ashley, ’cept I need to work as long as I can. I’ll be by for my appointment next week.” A subtle shift of her shoulders turned Mary Kate’s back to them, a silent dismissal as profound as the dismissal of how she valued the life of her child.

Face white, Ashley turned away and walked toward Hunter at the foot of the stairs, then past him and up the steps. He followed, not liking the glassiness of her eyes, sure she would trip and fall or walk into something like one of the hot stoves in the kitchen. But she negotiated steps and kitchen just fine. Hunter stopped long
enough to leave money beside his half-eaten breakfast, then left the diner in Ashley’s wake.