The Mountain Midwife (4 page)

But she called you Zachariah.

He doubted even someone in the news world could have dug
up his birth certificate or school records in the time since the video emerged and now. He had legally changed the name Zachariah to a mere
Z
nearly fourteen years earlier. And the rest of the message, off in the middle, added with the abandoned name, belonged to either someone lost in a weird fantasy or else frighteningly sane.

For all her smoker’s gravelly voice, she sounded too sane to ignore.

His hand less than steady, he punched the 2 to save the message, then called his parents.

“Hunter.” Mom answered the phone on the first ring. “We’ve been waiting up for you to call. Are you all right? You weren’t hurt? They didn’t try to arrest you or anything? The media aren’t hounding you? You know you can go to the cabin if—”

“Let the boy talk.” Dad’s calm voice on another line interrupted Mom’s spate of questions. “Of course they didn’t arrest him. He wouldn’t be home if they had.”

“I was detained for questioning and then let go.” Hunter spent the requisite fifteen minutes calming Mom’s concerns and answering their questions, giving a quick version of the minor rescue that had turned into the saving of half a dozen lives.

“It wasn’t terrorists, Mom.” He tried to stop his mom’s rant about how dangerous the world was and how he should stop traveling.

As if he could and still do his job.

“It was a local anti–European Union organization, and that family and I were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“More like you were in the right place at the right time,” Dad interjected. “God is good.”

“He is.” Hunter rubbed the back of his neck. It felt as though someone had replaced his muscles with steel bands.

Even Mom quieted to think about that.

Hunter was tempted to say good night and hang up, yet if he didn’t ask, didn’t set the nonsense to rest, he wouldn’t get the sleep he so desperately needed.

He took a deep breath. “Mom, Dad, I got the weirdest message on my voice mail. Part of a message. The voice mail filled up and cut her off, but I heard enough.” He stopped and laughed. “Never mind. It had to be a crank call.”

“You’re bound to get those after you’ve been in the news,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t have a listed phone number.”

“Probably not, and I’d put this down as too ridiculous to think about, except the woman called me Zachariah.”

Silence crackled along the phone line for half a minute, then Mom said, “Well, it is on your birth certificate.”

“But no one has used it since I was in kindergarten, so how would some woman in the 540 area code know to call me that unless . . . unless—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words “unless she’s telling the truth.”

It was too absurd, too impossible.

“Never mind,” he said again. “I think I’m suffering from delayed shock along with jet lag. Let me get some—”

“Five-four-oh?” All of a sudden Dad sounded his sixty-five years and then some.

“That’s southwest Virginia.” Mom’s voice had gone squeaky.

And Hunter’s blood ran cold.

“What—” Dad coughed. “What did she say?”

His throat thick, Hunter shook his head to clear it from the nonsense of that message. But the twanging voice rang in his ears as if the message were playing over a loudspeaker in the room. “I feel ridiculous even bringing this to your attention, but she said . . . she said she’s my mother.”

C
HAPTER
3

A
SHLEY BOWED HER
head and kneaded the taut muscles on the back of her neck. Unfortunately, the action brought her gaze in contact with the bloodstains marring the ivory tiles of her examination room floor. Now more brown than red, the stains lay as a stark reminder of what had taken place in her home during the night.

“I don’t know what else to tell you, Jase.” She shifted her eyes to the sheriff’s deputy seated at her kitchen table, a cup of coffee before him, forearms resting on the pale wood with the relaxed posture of someone who had sat in that chair at that table with a cup before him many times.

He had, from after-school snacks, to pizzas after high school dances, to a hundred glasses of sweet tea or cups of strong coffee in the intervening twelve years. He was her friend and had been since kindergarten. Not once had he sat at that table in an official capacity.

The crackle of his radio blasted a reminder of his official
capacity into the room, the words loud and clear. No one had seen the trucks Ashley described—for what her description had been worth. No hospitals within a fifty-mile radius reported the arrival of a woman who had given birth that night.

“Let’s go through it all over again.” Jason Fox rose and crossed the room to the coffeepot. He held up the nearly empty carafe. “I don’t want to take the last of this.”

“Go ahead. I can make more.”

Or not. She had already drunk twice her daily caffeine intake. Though Jason was at least six foot four, he probably didn’t need any more either. On the other hand, both had been awake half the night and she had an appointment in four hours.

She looked at the bloodstains again. “When can I clean that up? I have a patient to attend this morning.”

“You may need to reschedule her.” Jason returned to the table.

Ashley gave him a look of exasperation. “I don’t have any time to reschedule her, and it’s not like pregnancy can be put on hold.”

“I’ve been assured the state boys will be here any minute.” Jason straddled his chair. “Now come sit down and let’s go through this again just in case you remember something else.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

A cat meowed and began to weave around her ankles.

“If that was advice,” she said, stooping to pet the calico, “you need to be clearer.”

“Meow.” The cat headed for the door to the basement, where plastic bins held cat food.

“Ah, I understand that.” Ashley held up a hand for Jase to wait for her, then descended the basement steps to scoop food into the three cat dishes. Four more cats appeared, seemingly materializing from thin air, and began to purr around the bowls. Before
heading back up the steps, she gave each one a pet or scratch behind the ears.

Jason was nowhere in sight.

“Did you leave?” Ashley called out. “Can I get a shower and go to bed?”

No answer.

Hoping someone higher up had changed their mind about her home being a crime scene and Jase had left, but knowing she wanted that too much to believe he was no longer nearby, Ashley pulled the plastic label off a package of homemade blueberry muffins from the freezer and set the foil-wrapped package in the oven. Jase and her patient that morning would appreciate the nourishment since she would, no doubt, leave the house without eating breakfast. Mary Kate was a server at a local diner who desperately needed to stop working twelve-hour days but couldn’t afford to. If necessary, Ashley could examine Mary Kate upstairs; she kept enough equipment in her car to manage, but climbing steps with her perpetually swollen feet would be another burden on the overburdened young woman.

And what had happened to that other overburdened young woman?

“Oh, why did I even answer the door last night?” She thumped her forehead against the dividing wall between the end of the counter and the back door. “Why? Why? Why?”

She had answered the door because caring for those in need had been drilled into her since she was old enough to comprehend what that meant. Perhaps caring for others was in her DNA after generations of midwives on both sides of her family. Even when the practice fell out of fashion in the late 1800s, Docherty and Tolliver women practiced the art in the Virginia mountains. Her mother
was the first one to receive a master’s degree in nurse-midwifery, and Ashley had followed in her footsteps when the door to becoming a doctor slammed on her dreams of being the first Tolliver female to go to medical school.

To distract herself until Jason returned, she turned on the television she kept on a rolling cart in the kitchen. She could move it into the exam room for playing educational videos or to entertain children waiting for their mothers. A twenty-four-hour news program blared into the kitchen with some kind of news alert.

Reflexively, her gaze shot to the screen, and her eyes widened in appreciation for the man caught in the camera’s glare. Tall and rangy, with rectangular glasses and tousled dark hair that should have been trimmed at least two weeks ago, he looked like the sort of college professor her friends and she would have gone googly-eyed over as freshmen. He wasn’t old enough to be a professor, though, or barely. Maybe a year or two older than her own twenty-nine.

“The rest was pure coincidence with a happy outcome.” He spoke in the well-modulated, restrained tones of someone who had attended the best schools all his life.

The shouted questions of reporters drowned what he said next, and the slamming of the back door on a blast of cold wind obliterated the reporter’s explanation.

“Oh, him.” Jason’s tone held a sneer.

“Who is he?” Ashley lowered the volume but kept her gaze on the screen. The picture of the man in the doorway remained shrunk in one corner while a video of the same man scooping up a child about to run into the street, several women running after him, and then an explosion filled the rest of the screen.

“Some engineering type from northern Virginia was overseas and rescued a little girl from running into the street. Her whole
family came running after him and got out of the way of an exploding car just in time because of it.” Jason nudged her arm. “Haven’t you seen the news in the past day?”

Ashley shook her head. “I was driving all over Brooks Ridge yesterday seeing patients.”

“Doing real heroic work.” Jason’s tone held more admiration than Ashley liked. “Not some rich guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Not every stranger would go after a little girl. Those women look about to lynch him.” Ashley turned off the set. “But I can see why he’s a sensation.”

Jason groaned. “Not you too. All the women at the station are drooling. I think he looks like a nerd.”

“He does, but he also looks . . .” Ashley paused to think of the right word.

The roar of a car engine and crunch of gravel in the drive announced the arrival of someone. Many someones, judging from the number of slamming doors and voices too loud for the quiet night. Fortunately, her nearest neighbor lay a quarter mile away. Unfortunately, this was likely the tech guys from the state police, and she would not be able to go to bed for a couple of hours before her workday began.

“Kind.” Ashley finished her thought, then pushed away from the wall and made more coffee. May as well tank up. The techs rapped on the back door, and by the time Jason let them in and they began to swarm into the kitchen, she had set out napkins and disposable coffee cups beside the carafe on the table. The sweet tangle of blueberries and cinnamon wafting from the oven announced that the muffins would be warm enough to eat in mere minutes.

The men stopped and sniffed appreciatively. The state guys
gave the coffee longing glances but set to work taking pictures, dusting for fingerprints, and collecting blood samples.

Jason returned to the table. “Sit down, Ash. Let’s go over everything one more time.”

“Let me get these muffins out of the oven first.” She opened the oven door, and her mouth began to water at the richness of cinnamon and brown sugar steaming into the air.

Behind her, someone moaned.

Smiling for the first time since the strange man and terrified young woman had stumbled through her door, Ashley slid the muffins onto a plate and set them on the table. “Help yourselves.”

Jason did. The others cast longing glances at the pastries, then continued their work.

“You can take them with you if you like.” Ashley peeled the paper off a muffin and took a healthy bite. Chewing and swallowing gave her a moment to think about what she had already said to Jason and how to begin again.

“I’m recording this.” Jason set a digital recorder on the table. “Today is October twenty-second . . .” He continued with establishing time, date, and place, then turned the mic her way. “Go.”

“From where?”

“Start with what time they rang your doorbell and why you let them in.”

In her examination room, something rattled and thudded.

Ashley winced at the sound and the absurdity of Jason’s question. “It was just past midnight, and why wouldn’t I let them in? I knew at once that the girl was in labor. Her contractions were coming close together and her water had broken.”

“How did you know—” Jason stopped at the look of disgust Ashley shot him. He shrugged. “I forget how highly trained you are.”

“I took her back here to the exam room and . . .” She progressed through the series of events right up to the truck roaring up her drive and chasing the man, woman, and baby off in their vehicle.

“He came within a foot or two of hitting me, and that was because I heard him coming and jumped out of the way.” She shuddered in recollection. “Did you get tire tracks?”