With the MD...at the Altar?
Jessica Andersen
Till death do us part?It had been two years since she’d last come face to face with Luke Freeman – and small-town doctor Roxanne Peters recalled the heartache vividly. Bringing in medical expert Luke was Raven’s Cliff’s best hope of solving a deadly illness and working long hours in close quarters led to sizzling tension between the pair.When Luke’s smouldering gaze met Roxanne’s, it was clear he too remembered all they’d once shared. But can they survive the terrifying outbreak spreading through Raven’s Cliff to make it down the aisle?THE CURSE OF RAVEN’S CLIFF – A small town with sinister secrets…
Rather than doing the smartthing and backing away fromhim, she took a step forward.
“Roxie,” Luke said, his voice low in warning. “Be sure before you start something you’ll regret later.”
“I’m not starting anything,” she said, and knew it was the truth. “I’m finishing it. Call it closure, call it once more for old time’s sake…call it whatever you want. I’m going to call it the goodbye kiss I never got.”
Working methodically when her hands wanted to shake and her pulse wanted to race, not even entirely sure what had got into her, Roxanne slipped off her gloves. Then she got him by one lab coat lapel in each hand and used that purchase to rise up onto her toes as his eyes went dark and her own blood heated.
He moved as she did, and they met halfway.
And kissed goodbye.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Roxanne Peterson – After giving up relief medicine for a place to call home, Rox never expects to find herself handling an outbreak in her hometown of Raven’s Cliff…or needing the help of the man who broke her heart.
Luke Freeman – The hotshot toxicologist has his dream job leading a CDC outbreak team, but this is the first time he’s been called on to handle a town overrun by both an outbreak and a two-hundred-year-old curse. Will his toughest case yet cost the life of the woman he once loved?
Perry Wells – The mayor wants the best for the residents of Raven’s Cliff…or does he?
Bug Dufresne – Luke’s teammate may be key to figuring out what is making the town’s residents sick – and why some of them simply become ill while others become murderous.
Patrick Swanson – The chief of police is fighting a losing battle against a serial killer, a missing woman and a deadly outbreak. Maybe the town truly is cursed.
Theodore Fisher – The eccentric businessman has offered to lift the curse by restoring the old, burned- out Beacon Lighthouse. How is he connected to the mysterious caller pressuring the mayor to sell him the property?
May O’Malley – When Luke’s teammate becomes ill, he’s forced to face some hard truths about himself…and his past.
The Seaside Strangler – This fanatic killer believes that sacrificing a woman to the sea gods lifted the town’s curse five years earlier. Now he must kill again to save Raven’s Cliff.
The well-dressed man – He keeps an injured, unconscious woman in the caves beneath Beacon Lighthouse. What is he after?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say ‘hi’!
With the MD…at the Altar?
Jessica Andersen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Special thanks and acknowledgement to
Jessica Andersen for her contribution to
The Curse of Raven’s Cliff mini-series.
Chapter One
Overtired, overworked and frustrated beyond belief, Dr. Roxanne Peterson pressed her cheek to the cool glass door of her small-town clinic. Even after nearly seventy-two hours of fighting the mysterious illness that had overtaken isolated Raven’s Cliff, Maine, she still couldn’t believe her town was in the throes of a deadly outbreak.
And it was her town, whether or not the intransigent locals accepted her as one of them rather than a newcomer.
She’d chosen this place, these people, despite the seaside town’s remote location, nearly perpetual overcast gloom and the curse that supposedly haunted the area. Honestly, she’d chosen Raven’s Cliff partly because of those things, and because her years of relief medicine in third-world countries had made her want to settle down somewhere, amidst people who needed her.
She’d never expected to be thrust back into desperate working conditions in Raven’s Cliff, fighting a mysterious deadly disease with too little help and not enough equipment or supplies.
Yet that was exactly what was happening, she thought on a long sigh, looking through the glass door of the clinic to the world beyond.
It was pitch-black and raining outside, and thick fog made it difficult to see the shops lining the main street of the seaside town, which led to the town square on one side, the boardwalk and fishing docks on the other.
In past years, even this late on a rainy night, a few locals and tourists would have been window-shopping, exclaiming over the moored fishing boats, or leaning over the cliffside railing to catch a faceful of sea spray from the breakers that pounded the rocky Maine coastline.
There was nobody out tonight, though. Not with death stalking the streets of the quaint fishing village in the form of a strange disease…and what it made its victims become.
The locals were calling it the Curse, referring to a local legend about the town’s sea-captain founder. Rox didn’t put much stock in curses, but the disease certainly had terrifying consequences. Some patients became seriously ill. Others went psychotic.
Thinking of the things that’d happened over the past few days, Rox shivered as she stared out into the rain. During her five years in medical relief work, she’d seen her share of infectious outbreaks and environmental poisonings, yet she couldn’t detect any pattern in this disease. The townspeople were getting sick without apparent rhyme or reason, with symptoms that didn’t match any known disease and had so far proved impervious to the broad-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals she’d tried in the way of treatment.
At the moment she was fighting a rearguard action with supportive, symptom-based therapies. Worse, she didn’t have enough manpower to do the work that needed to be done. Her two full-time staff members had been among the first to get sick, and the other local doctor, who filled in for her when she needed help, was out of the country. Worse, the local hospitals—the closest of which was some forty miles away—were refusing to take patients from Raven’s Cliff, and had barred their doctors from entering the town.
She couldn’t blame the hospital administrators for their decision. In fact, she supported it. With only one road leading into the town, and the only other access from the sea, the town was eminently suitable for a lockdown quarantine that would keep the disease from escaping and spreading to other portions of the state, while the experts worked to identify, contain and cure the disease.
Unfortunately, she was currently the only expert in town, and she was running out of steam.
She was working flat-out trying to keep her patients alive, treating individual symptoms rather than the illness itself because she had no idea what was causing a flu-like disease in some patients, and violent rage in others. Were the townspeople infected with something? Were they being poisoned? Was it some sort of allergin? An environmental toxin? She had no idea, and she was nearly dead on her feet trying to keep up with the work.
She couldn’t stop now, though. The death toll was up to four, the eight clinic beds were full with nonviolent patients and three of the violent patients were currently locked in the basement of the Raven’s Cliff Town Hall, in the RCPD jail.
With no response yet from the plea for help she’d sent the Center for Disease Control, she was on her own.
Tears threatened—grief for the dead, for the dying. For herself and the fact that she felt completely, utterly alone in the town where she’d spent the two happiest years of her bounced-around childhood.
“Knock it off,” she said aloud, hearing the words echo in the waiting room. “Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to change a thing. Getting some sleep might.”
Sometimes her subconscious did a better job than her waking self when it came to shuffling puzzle pieces into place. Besides, she was so tired she was going to start making mistakes soon if she didn’t catch a few hours of downtime.
Forcing herself to push away from the clinic door, she flipped the sign from Open to Closed, though that was a formality since she was on constant call. Then she flicked off the lights, plunging the waiting room into darkness. She was just about to head upstairs to her apartment when she saw movement outside.
She stopped and stared through the clear glass door, trying to make out details through the fog.
Was someone there? She could’ve sworn she’d just seen a figure slip from the porch to the shadows beside the fog-cloaked building diagonally across the street.
Maybe it’s a dog, she thought when she didn’t see the motion again. Or a raccoon. A deer. Heck, even a bear would be preferable to what her gut told her she’d seen: a human figure hiding in the shadows long after the 8:00 p.m. curfew that Captain Patrick Swanson, the chief of police, had issued earlier that day.
Rox’s instincts told her to call the cops to investigate. Under normal circumstances she never would’ve bothered them with something so mundane…but these were far from normal circumstances. Sure, it might be an animal, or teenagers refusing to let the curfew spoil the start of their summer fun. Then again, it was possible that Captain Swanson’s last house-to-house sweep had missed seeing the red-tinged eyes and faintly jaundiced skin tones that were the only warning signs before the disease hit full-force.
Better to call the cops and have it be a raccoon thanhave a new Violent on the loose, Rox thought.
That was what the townspeople were calling the patients whose symptoms leaned toward psychosis: Violents. More accurately, as far as Rox could tell, they became uninhibited. The good tendencies in their personalities decreased and their negative sides took over, amplifying their normally controllable impulses and making them uncontrollable.
Of the four dead, only two had died from the disease itself. The other two had been murdered by one of the Violents. The threat of more such cases had left the townspeople locking their doors tight, and watching each other with grave suspicion. Are you gettingsick, everyone was thinking. Am I?
Knowing she was far better making the call than not, Rox turned the lights back on and headed for the phone on the waiting room desk. She was halfway there when someone knocked on the glass door.
Her heartbeat kicked into overdrive as she turned and looked back. The glare of the lights reflecting on the glass panel meant she could only make out the indistinct figure of a man outside her door. She couldn’t tell who it was. More importantly, she couldn’t see his eyes or skin.
Training and compassion told her to answer the door in case someone needed her. Logic said she should wait for the cops.
Logic won, but just as she grabbed the phone, the man outside kicked his way in.
Rox screamed when the safety glass spiderwebbed and shattered inward.
Fingers trembling, she stabbed 9-1-1 on the phone. “It’s Roxanne. I need help!”
It took her a second to realize the phone line was dead.
The wind howled through the broken door and driving rain spattered against the figure of local fisherman Aztec Wheeler as he stepped through the door.
He’d gotten the nickname Aztec from his straight, dark hair, sharp features and prominent nose, and his take-no-prisoners style on the high school basketball court. But this wasn’t the easygoing young jock Rox had known in school, and it wasn’t the grown man who’d asked her out twice since she’d come back to town and opened the clinic. This was someone else entirely.
Or rather, something else.
Aztec’s dark hair was plastered to his skull and he was soaked to his yellow-tinged skin, but he didn’t seem to notice the discomfort—his attention was locked on Rox, and his reddish eyes were hard with anger. With rage.
Smiling terribly, he lunged across the waiting room and grabbed her.
Panicked, Rox screamed and thrashed, trying to break free from his grappling arms. She elbowed him in the ribs, but he twisted, putting his face near hers. It took her a terrified moment to realize he was actually trying to kiss her.
“Stop!” She shoved at him, but he was an immovable wall of muscle. “I said stop!”
“You should’ve said yes.” His clothes were soaked and cold, but his skin and breath were fever-hot. “You shouldn’t have turned me down like that.”
Her panicked brain made the connection. He’d been interested in her, had asked her out a couple of times and she’d said no. Now, the Curse had warped his brain, turning a harmless crush into an obsession and loosening his normal control over his emotions.
She braced her forearm against his collarbone and pushed away, trying to reason with him, trying to talk to the man she knew him to be. “Listen to me, Aztec. You’re sick. You don’t really want to do this, the Curse is making you—”
He got his lips on her ear, but instead of kissing her he bit down, hard.
Pain lanced and Rox screamed, then screamed again when he yanked at her white doctor’s coat, tearing the buttons and leaving the garment hanging half off her. Panic-stricken, she kneed him in the crotch, praying he would feel it.
Aztec doubled over with a howl.
Sobbing, Rox yanked away and bolted for the broken front door. She slipped and almost went down on the rain-slicked threshold, but kept going, running into the darkness.
The rain slashed at her, soaking through her clothes within seconds as she fled through the nearly impenetrable fog, headed for the town hall and the RCPD entrance around the side of the building.
The air smelled of the sea, thick and salty. Thunder grumbled in the distance and the wind howled like a living thing.
Rox ran for her life. Tears mingled with the rain on her face as Aztec’s footsteps slapped on the wet pavement too close behind her. He howled something that might have been her name, and she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the police station before he caught up.
No! she screamed inwardly. She put her head down and pushed harder, her legs burning as she pounded up the street.
Aztec closed on her. He grabbed her white coat, but she pulled free and kept going. She had to keep going, had to—
She saw headlights pause at a cross street up ahead. They turned toward her, creating bright halos in the thick fog.
Heart jammed in her throat, Rox waved her arms and ran into the light. “Help me!”
For half a second nothing happened, as if the driver didn’t see her—or more likely couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then the big black SUV accelerated toward her with a roar. When it was nearly on top of her, the driver slammed on the brakes, slapped the transmission into Park and lunged out of the vehicle, snapping to his companions inside the big car. One of them tossed something to him, and he caught it and spun toward Roxanne, shouting, “Hit the deck!”
Though she couldn’t see his face through the fog, the sound of his voice instantly kicked her back two years, to another epidemic on another continent. Another lifetime.
“Down!” he barked, and she obeyed automatically, throwing herself onto the wet pavement just as Aztec grabbed her hair. His wet fingers slipped and she fell free.
Something hissed over her head and hit Aztec with a sizzling thump. Seconds later, electricity jolted through Rox as the Taser’s 50,000-volt charge transmitted through Aztec and across the wet pavement, giving her an unpleasant shock.
Aztec, though, bore the full brunt of the blast. He gurgled, collapsed in a heap and lay twitching.
The wand hissed again, retracting into its telescoping handle where it would remain coiled like an electrified version of Indiana Jones’s bullwhip. Rox knew this because she knew the weapon, just as, without even looking, she knew the man who carried it.
Luke Freeman, hotshot CDC toxicologist…and the ex-lover who’d deserted her, sick and miserable, in a third-world hospital two years earlier, proving once and for all that “in sickness and in health” wasn’t in his vocabulary when adventure called.
Damn him.
There was absolute, utter silence for a half second, broken only by the sound of the wind and rain. Then Luke muttered a curse and crouched down to touch her shoulder. “Rox? You okay?”
No, I’m not okay, she wanted to snap, because her body was still vibrating with electricity, along with another sort of heat, one that came from memory and hurt. Her stomach balled on a heave of denial and the small, childish wish that she could close her eyes and make all of this go away.
None of it was okay. It wasn’t okay that people were dying in Raven’s Cliff. It wasn’t okay that turning down Aztec’s casual dinner invite had nearly cost her her life. And it was seriously not okay that when the CDC finally got around to answering her call, they’d sent the one person she’d specifically requested they not send: Luke “I’ll love you when it’s convenient” Freeman.
Ignoring his helping hand, she pulled herself off the wet pavement and turned her back on him. She took her time swiping her hair out of her face, trying not to think about what she looked like—sopping wet with the stress and grief of the past seventy-two hours written on her face.
Then again, why should she care? Whatever they’d had between them had died years ago. She was a different woman than the one he’d known, smarter and stronger and far more aware of what mattered and what didn’t in the long run.
Telling herself that their past relationship fell squarely into the “doesn’t matter” category under the present circumstances, she gave up on her appearance and turned to face her ex.
He stood in the street, heedless of the rain, with three other people at his back. Silhouetted against the fog-diffused illumination from the streetlights above, he looked larger than life, like a hero come to the rescue.
And he’d probably practiced the pose, she thought sourly as she limped to close the distance between them, and took stock.
With short brown hair, glittering brown eyes, chiseled features and a mouth that was—as usual—tilted in a crooked grin, Luke looked good. Then again, he’d always held up under even the worst circumstances, so she’d expected him to look good. What she hadn’t expected was the flare of memory that sucker punched her in the gut at the sight of him.
Her chest tightened and heat flashed through her, a complicated mix of heartache, anger and betrayal. She’d thought she was over him, that she’d gotten past wanting some sort of explanation for what he’d done. Now she realized she’d been lying to herself.
How could you leave me like that? she wanted to ask him.
Instead, she lifted her chin and said, “Thanks for the rescue. Then again, you always were good at making a grand entrance.” Implying that his exits weren’t nearly so slick.
His eyes went dark and his expression flattened, but he didn’t rise to the barb. Instead he gestured to Aztec, who had gone limp with the aftereffects of the Taser zap. “I take it this is what you meant by ‘some patients have been exhibiting violent tendencies’ when you called the CDC?”
“Trust me, if I could’ve handled it on my own, I never would’ve put out the SOS.” Her voice was sharp enough to have Luke’s three teammates shifting and looking at each other behind his back.
There were two men and a woman. One of the men was a tall, lean guy with a pronounced right tilt to his aquiline nose, while the other was shorter and stockier, and wore a beard. The woman was dark-haired and pretty, and stood a little apart from the men. All three of them, along with Luke, were wearing jeans and sturdy boots, and blue hooded raincoats emblazoned with the CDC’s sun-ray logo.
Luke crouched down beside Aztec without touching the fallen man. “Talk to me,” he ordered Rox.
So much for introductions, she thought. She sent an apologetic glance toward the rest of the team, but they looked as if they were used to their leader’s rudeness.
Then again, she remembered how that worked. You either figured out how to live with Luke’s mannerisms or you hit the road. It wasn’t like he was going to change.
“Roxie?” Luke prompted.
Gritting her teeth at the nickname, and the familiar peremptory tone she’d once found sexy, she ran through the typical symptoms of the Violents. They developed red-tinged eyes and yellowed skin, followed by fever and a profound shift of mental paradigm—as compared to the nonviolent patients, who typically presented with the same red eyes and yellow skin, but progressed to fever and malaise, followed by neurological symptoms such as loss of coordination and speech. In both cases, the patients became catatonic approximately six hours after the initial symptom onset, though some had gone down almost immediately, while one of the Violents had lasted nearly a day before collapsing, and had taken two innocent victims during that time.
She finished by saying, “Symptomatic treatments are maintaining the patients’ conditions so far, but they’re not showing any improvement, and my gut says they could crash at any moment. The two diseaserelated deaths were people I didn’t get to in time.”
And the guilt of that weighed heavily. She’d been too slow to recognize that what she’d initially thought was a low-grade flu epidemic was actually far worse. Because she’d been too slow to institute the house-to-house searches, there had been four deaths. Retired fisherman Elmer Tyson and his wife Missy, who had lived in a small cliff-side cottage north of town, had died holding hands in their shared bed. Michael Thicke, the chef recently hired to improve Raven’s Cliff’s single Italian restaurant, and his sous-chef, Brindle MacKay, had both died of stab wounds sustained when local boat mechanic Douglas Allen went Violent in the middle of his appetizer course.
All because of the disease, and Rox’s too-slow reaction time.
When she finished her recitation, Luke nodded slowly, still staring at Aztec. “Is it infectious?”
“Not as far as I can tell, thank God,” she answered. “There’s no evidence of second-stage transmission.” Meaning that she hadn’t identified any cases where one victim had contracted the symptoms from another. “Unfortunately, that’s about all I know. There just hasn’t been time to go any deeper.”
She told herself she shouldn’t feel guilty, that she’d done the best she could. But deep down inside, small insecurities kept saying, You know how to handle outbreaks.You should’ve been able to get the diseaseunder control in the first day or so. If she had, there wouldn’t have been any need to call in reinforcements.
“No help from the locals?”
“The area hospitals aren’t willing to risk having a patient go bad. They’re just not set up for the level of restraint the Violents could need if they break out of catatonia.”
“And you are?”
“I’m making do,” she said firmly. “The Violents we’ve identified so far are restrained on cots in holding cells at the police station, and the cops are doing door-to-door sweeps twice a day, looking for the early symptoms. The chief of police has instituted a curfew, and Mayor Wells held an emergency town meeting this evening to let people blow off some steam.”
Luke glanced up at her, brown eyes intent with the look she knew meant he was shuffling and filing every bit of information in the mental log he kept of each case. “You don’t like the mayor.” It wasn’t a question.
Shoot, Rox thought. She’d been trying to keep her voice neutral. “You should probably form your own opinion.”
“I trust your judgment.”
The simple four-word statement probably shouldn’t have annoyed her, but she found herself bristling, wanting to scratch at him for acting like he respected her opinions after he’d treated them like they meant nothing before.
But that was the key, she reminded herself. That was then. This was now. So she took a deep breath to settle the flare of anger, and said, “Wells is a little on the slick side for my taste, and rumor has it he’s got his eyes on bigger and better, and doesn’t mind making deals to get things done.”
Luke shrugged. “Sounds like a politician to me.”
“Yeah.” Rox left it at that because she didn’t have any real reason to dislike Mayor Wells. Just her gut feeling that his charming smile hid things that weren’t in the best interest of Raven’s Cliff or the town’s inhabitants.
“This disease have a name?” Luke asked.
“The residents are calling it the Curse.”
“Why?”
She lifted one shoulder. “Local legend about a fishing captain and a lighthouse—not important.” She didn’t think now was the time to get in to the town’s recent problems, which had ranged from the loss of the mayor’s daughter, Camille, in a freak wedding-day accident, to the discovery that they had a serial killer in their midst, one who thought he could lift the Captain’s Curse by brainwashing women and sacrificing them to the sea.
Some said the bad luck had come with the arrival of the reclusive stranger who’d bought a property outside of town, some that it was attached to the destruction of the Beacon Lighthouse five years earlier…while others said that it dated as far back as the late 1700s.
As far as Rox was concerned, the superstitions were nothing more than a way for the locals to deal with a serious run of bad luck.
She didn’t deal with luck, she dealt with science.
Luke frowned. “Since when do you discount legends? You were usually the first one looking to bring in the local medicine man and ask him to do his voodoo schtick and help heal the village from the inside out.”
“That was Africa and this is Maine—it’s a little different. Besides, this time I’m the local medicine man,” she said, but her voice lacked bite as she felt the weight of the responsibility, and the failure. “And so far my ‘schtick’ hasn’t made a dent, so I’d appreciate it if you and your team could get to work ASAP.”
Luke looked at her for a long moment, expression far more complex than the surface charm she remembered. Finally, he nodded. “You’re the boss. That is, assuming you want us to stay.”
He was giving her an out, an option of sending him away. Only there wasn’t any possibility of that, because her people were dying and she couldn’t help them on her own. He’s here and there isn’t time to requestanother team before more people die, she told herself. In the end that was what it came down to.
She’d come back to Raven’s Cliff because she’d wanted a more personal relationship with her patients than the here-today-gone-tomorrow life of relief medicine. Now, the town needed her to set aside her past history with Luke and accept his expert help.
Telling herself that she could handle this, that forewarned was forearmed when it came to men like Luke Freeman, she turned to his three teammates, who were still ranged behind him as though waiting for the go-ahead.
Rox stuck out her hand. “I’m Dr. Roxanne Peterson. Welcome to Raven’s Cliff.”
FROM THE DARK SHADOWS beside Lucy Tucker’s junk store, Tidal Treasures, the Seaside Strangler stood in the rain and watched the doctors carry Aztec’s motionless form to the police station.
Part of him was disappointed that the others had arrived when they did. He’d been poised to come to Roxanne’s rescue, ready for her to see him as a protector rather than just another part of the town’s background scenery. Then again, it was probably best that he hadn’t needed to expose himself like that. He had far more important work to do.
Secure in the knowledge that Roxanne was safe for the moment, he eased back along the junk store porch, knowing what he had to do next to ensure that she and all the other innocents in Raven’s Cliff would be released from the threat that hung over the town.
He’d done it once before, and his sacrifice had bought the town peace for five long years. Then, just a few months ago the curse had come back and the gods of the sea had risen up and demanded another sacrifice. He’d tried to appease them once already, but he’d been thwarted, and the townspeople had rejoiced at the woman’s safe return.
Just look what that got them, he thought in a flare of righteous indignation. An epidemic. A diseasestraight from the halls of hell, one that turns mentwisted and evil.
As far as he was concerned, there was only one way to abate the curse and bring peace to the town of Raven’s Cliff.
Another Sea Bride would have to be sacrificed.
Chapter Two
Within twenty minutes of Luke and the others carrying the groggy Violent into the Raven’s Cliff Police Department, the briskly efficient officers on duty had gotten the patient secured in a cell and called in the chief of police and the mayor to meet with the CDC team.
After a round of introductions, Luke sent his teammates—clinical specialist May O’Malley, geneticist Bug Dufresne and biochemist Thom Harris—to check on the patients down in the holding cells and back at the clinic, and do something about Rox’s busted-in door.
Then, as Rox started telling the mayor and chief of police about what the CDC team could do that she couldn’t, Luke leaned back and watched them, dropping into detached-observer mode partly so he could avoid thinking about his own reaction to seeing Rox again, and partly because his job was often as much about local politics as it was medicine.
When he’d first left relief work for a coveted job as head of a CDC outbreak response team, he’d discovered that the protocol was pretty consistent whether he was covering an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in Africa or a cluster of food poisoning from bad burgers in middle America. When he first showed up at an outbreak site, the powers that be always welcomed him with open arms, but as time passed, he invariably discovered local undercurrents that affected his ability to do his job.
As such, he made a point to figure out right away who was who among the players, and what they were likely to think about outside intervention.
In this case, he pegged Captain Patrick Swanson as a straight shooter who would help if asked and stay out of the way otherwise. The chief of police was a barrel- chested no-nonsense guy in his fifties, who came off as the epitome of a career cop who pretty much lived and breathed for his town. He was exactly the sort of guy Luke liked to have on his side.
Consistent with Rox’s warning, Mayor Perry Wells was another story. He was probably the same age as Swanson, but that was where the similarity ended. Even though he’d been rousted out of bed near midnight, the mayor was neatly put together in casual slacks and a designer pullover, and didn’t let his charm—or the perfectly calculated degree of tension on his face—slip for a second. Luke pegged him as a politician’s politician, and figured he’d be one to watch.
“I trust Roxanne implicitly,” the mayor said, turning to Luke. “If she says you’re the best man for the job, then I know we’re in good hands.”
Luke suppressed a grim smile. He knew damn well she hadn’t said anything of the sort—she’d called him “experienced” and “competent,” a description that, although accurate, was probably better than she thought he deserved.
Swanson said nothing, just kept looking from Rox to Luke and back again, as though trying to figure out the source of the obvious tension humming in the air between them, evident in the way she didn’t look at him unless she had to, and the distance that gapped between them in the wide lobby of the police station.
Luke was tempted to tell the police chief not to worry, that it was personal and wouldn’t affect the job. That he’d been a complete bastard to Roxie, saying he loved her and then taking off without an explanation.
Granted, there’d been an explanation once, but its statute of limitations had long since expired. Besides, Luke figured it was better to let her hate him and move on with her life than try to make excuses that would only complicate things further. As a doctor, he knew the clean cut was almost always preferable to lingering pain. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to keep it clean. The moment he’d gotten wind of her call to the CDC, he’d been on the phone mobilizing his team and pulling the strings necessary to get them assigned to Raven’s Cliff despite her having specifically said she didn’t want him.
She might not have wanted him, but from her brief description of the outbreak, he’d known she needed him, so he’d booked the flight and headed for north- coastal, middle-of-nowhere can’t-get-theyah-from-heyah Maine.
He’d told himself it was because he owed her, and because he was the best in the business. But now, standing in the same room with her, all too aware of how her short, light brown hair brushed against her sun-kissed cheeks, and how her soft hazel eyes skimmed over him rather than latching on, he knew he’d made a fatal mistake in coming to Raven’s Cliff.
If he’d really been thinking about her and about what he owed her, he would’ve stayed far away, because the moment she’d turned and looked at him out there in the rain, the moment their eyes had locked again after nearly two years apart, he was right back in that crazy, stirred-up place he’d been in the day he left her.
And damned if he didn’t want to jump back in and make exactly the same mistakes again, even knowing the things that’d come between them two years earlier hadn’t changed one iota. If anything, they’d gotten worse.
“What do you need from us?” Captain Swanson asked, unfolding from the cross-armed position he’d held as he leaned up against the front desk of the police station.
It took an almost physical effort for Luke to pull his attention away from Rox and focus on the case, warning him that he’d better get his head in the game, pronto.
“We’re going to need a place to spread out,” he said, thinking of the wide variety of scenes he and Rox had worked together before. “Someplace where we can safely restrain the violent patients, preferably with a couple of levels of security.” He paused, then turned to Rox. “You know the sort of place we need. Any suggestions?”
There was a long pause before she said, “There’s an abandoned monastery on the edge of town that’ll suit. It’s got several wings we can segregate, the rooms
have sturdy, lockable doors and there’s plenty of space for the lab equipment. The place is in the middle of the forest outside of town, and there’s a high fence surrounding the entire property.”
“Sounds perfect.” And it did sound perfect, but he could hear the reluctance in her tone, warning him that it wasn’t as simple as that. “What’s the bad news?”
She grimaced. “Depending on who you listen to, either the people who’ve lived there over the years have all been overly imaginative, or the place is haunted.” She lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Either way, it gives me the creeps.”
Frankly, Luke was starting to think the whole town was creepy, from its pea-soup fog banks and the burned-out lighthouse he’d glimpsed from the road, to the haunted monastery and the sickness that turned normal people into monsters.
But he’d long ago learned that beneath differences in politics, religion and superstition, human beings all had the same basic biology. And that was what he had come to cure.
“The monastery it is,” he said, not wanting to waste any more time discussing it…or thinking about the woman standing opposite him. “Let’s get started.”
The sooner he figured out what was going on in Raven’s Cliff, the sooner he could fix it and get out of town before he did something really stupid…like try to pick up the pieces of a relationship he’d deliberately sabotaged two years earlier.
ROX TOOK HER OWN CAR to the monastery because she needed the space, and needed to know that she could leave at any time—assuming her patients didn’t require her attention, of course. She hadn’t ever—and wouldn’t ever—put personal issues ahead of her patients’ safety.
She had a feeling she might be tempted over the next few days, though. Somehow she’d forgotten how potent Luke could be in close quarters. Or maybe he’d grown even more so over the two years they’d been apart.
The Luke she remembered had been handsome and charismatic, a born leader who could make even the most resentful medicine man grateful for his help, and who could convince even the most insecure patients they were going to live. And he was still all of those things now…with the addition of a darker undercurrent she didn’t remember, one that hinted of shadows and sadness and more complexity than he’d had before.
Worse, that dark sexiness only made him more compelling.
All of which meant she could be in some serious trouble, she thought as she drove the winding road leading to the monastery in the rainy darkness. Behind her was a convoy composed of the CDC team and a crew of a dozen off-duty cops, fishermen and other healthy locals Captain Swanson had talked into volunteering to get the monastery ready for patients.
Trees crowded close on either side of the road, bending down beneath the gusting wind, making her feel trapped in the dark tunnel of their branches. Or more accurately, it was the man in the black SUV directly behind her that made her feel trapped.
Why had Luke come?
If the fates had sent him as a test, she’d already failed. She was supposed to be over him, damn it. Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking about the look he’d sent her as they’d left the police station—part speculation, part heat, as though she wasn’t the only one suddenly suffering sexual flashbacks.
Then again, why wouldn’t he think of her that way? They’d been good together. Hell, they’d been better than good. The months they’d spent partnered through the Humanitarian Relief Foundation had been pretty much a blur of clinic hours and sex, both of which had been incredibly satisfying until their little differences had become bigger ones, and he’d taken the easy way out, leaving her with plenty of money to get home once she’d recovered from her fever, along with a breezy note about a dream job with the CDC. The note had contained nothing about them, nothing about the future he’d promised her.
“Which is exactly why I’m keeping my hands and all other body parts to myself this time,” she said aloud as she pulled up to a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates set into a high brick wall. “Been there, done that, bought the heartache.”
And if she told herself that a few million more times, she might even stop thinking about how wide his shoulders stretched beneath the CDC windbreaker. He’d gained a few pounds since she’d seen him last, and damn, they looked good on him.
“Stop it,” she finally told herself. “There are far more important things to worry about right now.”
Then again, the threat of the Violents and the deadly disease gripping her town was probably why she was fixating on Luke. Guy problems were normal. What was happening in Raven’s Cliff was far from normal. It was almost as though the town truly was suffering under an evil curse.
“So deal with the disease,” she told herself, because that was the only thing she could hope to fix. “We work it one step at a time. First step—move in to the haunted monastery.”
Trying not to talk herself into being even more creeped out than she already was, she got out of her car and used the keys Mayor Wells had given her to release a heavy padlock. The gate resisted at first, then gave way with a groan and swung inward. Aware of the others watching her from their idling cars, she blocked the gates open, climbed back in her car and drove along the narrow stone driveway leading to the monastery.
When her headlights picked out the main building, she saw that it was just as dark and creepy as she remembered, if not more so.
The stone building towered three stories high and stretched nearly the length of a football field on either side of the main entrance. The structure was made of heavy granite blocks, with marble pillars and peeling white-painted wood trim covered in a thick layer of moss and ivy. A series of narrow windows were nearly hidden beneath the dense greenery, glinting like the eyes of a predator peering through underbrush.
Built back in the town’s heyday by the founding family, the Sterlings, the monastery had been a glorious place through the 1800s and early 1900s. Like the town itself, though, it had seen better days. Now the marble was cracked and crumbling, and the air blowing in through the vents of Rox’s car carried the scent of decay.
“I wish I’d never mentioned this place,” she said, trying to ignore the faint shiver working its way down the back of her neck. “We could’ve made do at the clinic.”
Then again, that would’ve meant being in very close quarters with Luke. Maybe the monastery wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least she’d be able to put a few doors between them, giving her some space. Some privacy.
She avoided the road leading to the parking lot off to the side of the huge stone building, and instead pulled up right in front of the wide stone stairs leading to the main entrance.
All the better for a quick getaway if I need one, she thought wryly, but deep down inside she knew that even though the idea of escape might be sorely tempting, she wasn’t going anywhere. This was her home. These were her people. If there was anything she could do to heal and protect them, then she’d do it, even if it meant spending the next few days—or longer—with Luke.
Speak of the devil, he was already out of his car and jogging up the main stairs, lighting the way with a heavy metal flashlight she knew from years past could double as both illumination and self-defense.
When she joined him, he flicked the cone of light in her direction. “No ghosts yet.”
“I didn’t say I thought it was haunted,” she said. “But wait until you get a load of the interior. If there was ever a place that deserved its own horror flick, this is it. Around here it’s a rite of passage for kids to sneak into the monastery and spend the night.” It was also a prime make-out spot, but she didn’t want to go there.
She tried a couple of keys, found the right one and got the front door unlocked. It opened with a theatrical creak that had a few of the volunteers shifting from foot to foot and looking at each other as if unsure this was such a good idea.
“Let’s get the electricity on first,” Luke ordered, taking charge of the situation. He gestured to one of his male teammates. “Thom, you can find the central panel, right? The mayor said we’d have juice if we hit the main breaker.”
Thom, a tall, lean biochemist with a crooked nose, nodded and clicked on his own heavy flashlight. “I’m on it.”
Within a few minutes, a scattering of lights came on, illuminating the entryway and glowing farther into the sprawling stone building.
Like the outside, the once grand inside of the stone monastery had fallen into disrepair, with splashes of graffiti painted on many of the walls, and the charred remains of a campfire sitting smack in the middle of the entranceway.
Luke looked around, his gaze lighting on the religious motifs carved into the lintels over each door, then picking out the three main archways leading from the entrance. He glanced at Rox and raised an eyebrow. “Suggestions?”
“Our best bet is to close off the east wing,” she said, pointing to their right. “That’s where the most vandalism has taken place, and according to local legend, it’s also where things tend to go ‘bump’ in the night.”
He nodded. “Not the best place to stick patients who are already mentally compromised. We do that and we’re just asking for problems.”
“Among other things.” Rox pointed straight ahead. “We’ll want to keep the kitchen wing open. Besides food, that’ll be our best bet for setting up lab space. We can put the patient and sleeping rooms in the west wing.” She jerked her thumb left, toward a locked door that had so far defied the vandals’ efforts to break in. “I was in there on a field trip once, and I’m pretty sure I remember there being decent-looking rooms with sturdy doors. No doubt Captain Swanson can hook us up if we need to change out the locks or anything.”
“This place is cool,” Thom said, emerging from the shadows of the east wing and making them all jump slightly. He had a smudge of dust on the shoulder of his drying CDC raincoat, but his eyes were lit with an adventurer’s curiosity that sent a faint pang through Rox. He continued, “Somebody should use it for a school or something.”
“They tried,” one of the off-duty cops said. “Since the seventies, it’s been used as a boarding school, a summer camp for smart kids, a corporate retreat and a wellness center. None of them lasted long.”
“That’s ’cause it’s haunted,” one of the fishermen said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
There was a general mutter of agreement and more shifting of feet, but before Rox could jump in with her “now let’s be rational” speech, Luke raised his voice and said, “I don’t know much about ghosts. What I do know is that you have a medical emergency here, and it’s my job to get it under control. So here’s the plan. Thom, you take half of the volunteers and see what needs to be done to get the north wing functional as both a kitchen and a field lab.” He gestured to his shorter, bearded teammate. “Bug here will take the rest of you into the west wing to get the rooms set up. Rox, I want you and May to head back to your clinic and prep the patients for transport. I’ll stay here and troubleshoot. We’ll have this place ready to go by dawn.”
If anyone else had said something like that, Roxanne would’ve laughed, but she’d seen Luke create a workable triage and quarantine area out of even less, so she had no doubt he could transform a falling-down monastery to suit their needs in under five hours.
She nodded to May, a pretty brunette who had introduced herself as the team’s clinical specialist. “We can take my car,” Rox said. “You need anything from the SUV?”
May shook her head. “I’m good to go.”
But before Rox could turn away, Luke called her back. “Wait.” He held out a .22 she hadn’t known he was carrying. “Take this. There could be more out there like your friend Aztec.”
The memory brought a shiver, and she reached out to accept the small gun without protest. As she did so, her fingertips grazed his palm.
The touch brought a spear of unexpected, unwanted heat that had her drawing away from him, had her voice going husky when she said, “Thanks.”
He nodded, eyes suddenly dark and hooded. “Be careful.”
She left before she said—or did—something she’d regret, like ask him why he’d left her two years earlier, or why he’d come back to her now. They both knew there were other teams that could’ve taken the Raven’s Cliff assignment.
The question was, why hadn’t he let them?
“RUMOR HAS IT you’ve got the CDC on your doorstep,” a mechanized voice said the moment Mayor Wells answered the ringing phone.
“Do you have any idea what time it is? And why the hell are you calling on this line?” Sitting on the edge of his king-size bed, Wells gripped the handset so hard the plastic creaked in protest. “Beatrice might’ve answered.”
In reality, it would’ve taken far more than a ringing phone to disturb his wife. She’d been using tranquilizers heavily ever since the previous month, when their daughter Camille had fallen from the rocky cliffs into the sea during her wedding—her wedding, for God’s sake.
Her body hadn’t been recovered yet, and both the mayor and his wife were stuck in a state of seesawing hope: they hoped that her body would wash up so they could bury her properly, while praying she didn’t, because as long as her body hadn’t been found they could pretend she might still be alive.
Wells envied Beatrice the oblivion she’d found in the tranqs, but he didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to grief because he had a town to run. Despite his best efforts, the whispers about the Captain’s Curse had been growing louder over the past few months, even before the outbreak.
And now this.
“The doctors won’t be an issue,” he assured the man on the other end of the phone, who he knew only as a string of numbers from a Swiss bank account that made regular deposits into his own. “They won’t be looking anywhere near your chemical purchases. You have my word on it.”
The mayor was sweating lightly, though.
“Make sure they don’t.” The line went dead.
Wells sat for a minute, holding the handset to his ear, staring out the window into the black, rainy night. Then he stood and went to the wall safe where he kept an unregistered gun locked and loaded. He pulled out the weapon, checked the safety and tucked the firearm into the inner pocket of his briefcase.
Just in case.
Chapter Three
By midmorning, Luke’s team and the volunteers had not only managed to clean and sanitize the kitchen and thirty small residential rooms in the west wing of the monastery, they’d also moved the patients from the clinic and police station into their new quarters.
The three Violents—Aztec Wheeler, boat mechanic Doug Allen and Jake Welstrom, a father of four whose symptoms had been identified during one of the house-to-house sweeps, thankfully before he hurt his family or himself—were locked in stone-walled rooms with barred windows, located at the back of the west wing.
The eight other patients—including Rox’s clinic assistants, Jeff and Wendy Durby, as well as all four members of the Prentiss family plus librarian Cheryl Proctor and gas station attendant Henry Wylde—were housed in the middle of the west wing, in well-ventilated rooms under lighter precautions.
The doctors had staked out rooms close to the entryway, giving them equal access to the patient rooms and the kitchen, which would serve as both mess and lab. There, the members of the CDC team were working on processing the first set of blood and urine samples for analysis.
The outbreak response was up and running, and Rox knew she should be incredibly grateful. Instead, as she stood in the middle of the entryway watching the organized chaos that would hopefully put her town on the road to recovery, she felt a pang of resentment.
She’d barely been keeping ahead of the symptomatic treatments on her own, never mind being able to investigate the sickness or its cause, but there was a part of her that didn’t want the others involved. She kept feeling as though she should’ve been able to handle this by herself, in her own clinic.
“Bug has the first set of blood samples spinning down,” Luke said, appearing in the archway leading to the kitchen wing. “We should have some preliminary results in fifteen minutes or so, and that’ll give us a starting point for figuring this thing out.”
He’d changed out of the dust-smeared clothes he’d been wearing the last time she’d seen him, into jeans and one of the long-sleeved button-down shirts they’d both favored on assignment. Made of a high-tech nylon composite, the garments looked like cotton, but wicked away sweat and heat, and were nearly indestructible.
The sight of the shirt—and the fact that she’d long ago donated hers to Goodwill because she would never need them again—sent a little jab beneath Rox’s heart.
Luke made a wide gesture to encompass the monastery, which was slightly less creepy in the light of day. “What do you think?”
“I think you made good on your promise to get this done by morning,” she said, and her thoughts of a moment before made her voice sharper than she’d intended, lending accusation to the words.
“As opposed to other promises I didn’t make good on, you mean?” Boots ringing on the stone floor, he moved to face her, expression resigned and maybe a bit impatient. “Go ahead. Ask me why I left you the way I did.”
In other words, he was willing to talk about it if she wanted to fight. He might even be willing to say he was sorry for the way he’d left, though not for the actual act of leaving. But she could tell from his expression that it was going to be the same sort of circular argument they’d excelled at during the last few weeks before she got sick, the ones that never ended with a winner or a loser, just the incompatibility of two people who had great sex but wanted different things out of life.
She’d been looking to slow down and scale back to something more intimate at a time when his career had been poised to take off. Part of her had known the end was coming for them even before he’d left, but she had never expected—and could never forgive—how he’d abandoned her in a field hospital, sick and alone.
“I don’t need to ask,” she said calmly. “You left because the CDC put out an emergency call. Fine, I get that. But if you’ve got a guilty conscience because you weren’t man enough to tell me goodbye to my face, you’re just going to have to live with it. You earned it.”
They locked eyes for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Fair enough,” she echoed. In a deliberate effort to shift the subject back to where it belonged she said, “Have you had a chance to check out my patient notes?”
He nodded, both to her question and, she suspected, to her change of topic. “They’re pretty good, given the circumstances.”
She didn’t bother to defend her scribblings because she figured “pretty good” was an accurate assessment. By the time she’d figured out she had a major problem on her hands, the patients had been coming in so quickly and their symptoms had been so severe that she’d been hard-pressed to do more than scrawl a few details on each chart.
“I was thinking I’d talk to the families and get a better idea of what the patients have been exposed to lately,” she said. “We still haven’t seen any evidence that it’s transmitting person-to-person so I’m betting on a toxin.”
“Of course it’s a toxin,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious. But his eyes lit with the same adventurer’s interest she’d seen in Thom’s expression the night before, the same kind she used to live for. “Question is, which one, and where is it coming from?”
When she felt that same adventurer’s excitement stir sluggishly in her blood, she shoved it aside, telling herself that the mystery had mattered in a different lifetime, to a different woman. Not now, and not to the person she’d worked hard to become.
“I’ll ask around town, get a victim profile and get back to you.” She turned away, suddenly needing to get out of there, to get away from him and his teammates.
“Hey, Roxie?” he said, calling her back.
She turned, hoping he couldn’t read her emotions the way he once had. “Yeah?”
“You still have the twenty-two?”
She patted the pocket of her light windbreaker. “Right here. I hate to admit it, but I feel safer carrying it, especially after what happened last night with Aztec.”
“Good. You’ve got my number, right?”
She grimaced. “Don’t count too heavily on cell phones. The coverage is pretty spotty out here, and there are dead zones like you can’t believe.”
“Then watch yourself, and be back by dark.” He paused, and something moved in his expression. “You and I are on night shift together.”
He turned and disappeared into the kitchen wing before she could ask whether that had been his idea or someone else’s. She didn’t call him back, though, because she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know either way.
WHEN LUKE REACHED the utilitarian kitchen, he was relieved to find the large space deserted, save for a bank of portable auto-samplers doing their thing on the first set of patient blood samples. That gave him a moment alone to lean on the wide farmer’s sink and look out the window, seeing nothing but Rox’s face in his mind’s eye.
He saw the terror on it when she’d run from the Violent. He saw the defiant expression she’d worn just now as she stood up to him. Even more, he saw the woman he’d known back then, and how her face had been so much more open, her laugh so much easier than it was now.
Back then, she’d said she wanted to slow down, to do something smaller and more intimate than the relief work they’d both loved. I want to belong somewhere, she’d said, as though belonging to him hadn’t been enough.
Well, she was a part of Raven’s Cliff now, and the way she’d interacted with the police chief and the volunteers—even the blowhard mayor—suggested that she belonged.
So why did he get the feeling she still wasn’t happy?
“She’s living in the middle of an outbreak site, you idiot,” he said aloud.
These people were her responsibility, which made it personal for her in a way he’d never ever wanted to experience. But because it was personal for her, and dangerous for her, and hell, his damn job, he’d do his best to figure out what was making her people sick, and how to stop it. And then…
And then nothing. He’d leave, which was exactly what she wanted. She’d made it clear just now that she didn’t need an explanation or an excuse from him, didn’t need an apology. She wanted her town healed and him gone.
“I can do that.” Ignoring a faint sense of disquiet, he strode to one of the auto-samplers and hit a few buttons harder than necessary, making the machine beep in protest.
“That’s not going to get it to work any faster,” Bug said from the outer kitchen doorway, which led to a small courtyard. “Science takes the time it takes.”
“I know.” Luke turned away from the machine to glare at the stocky, bearded geneticist. “And don’t quote me to myself.”
“Sorry. Just thought you might need a dose of rational detachment and good old scientific perspective.” Bug crossed the flagstone kitchen to check how many minutes were remaining on the analytical program. Way too casually, he said, “You going to put me on bedpan duty for the rest of the year if I ask about her?”
Luke muttered a curse under his breath. He’d known his teammates would ask about him and Rox. He’d just been hoping it would be later rather than sooner.
The four members of the outbreak response team spent too much time in close quarters not to know each other well. May, their most intuitive member by far, had picked up on the vibes right away, and had asked him about it the night before. “Rox and I have a history,” he’d answered, and hoped she’d tell the others what he’d said, and they would leave it at that.
Apparently not.
“Maybe not bedpans,” Luke said, “but dishwashing at the very least.”
Bug pretended to think about it. “I can live with that. So what’s the deal? You two are giving off enough sparks to power a couple of sequencers and a cryofridge.”
Luke would’ve winced, but he couldn’t deny the observation. Things between him and Rox had never been subtle. Something that strong just couldn’t be hidden. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be controlled, either. Couldn’t be trusted to last.
“She and I used to have a thing.”
“No kidding.”
“I ended it.”
“And from the looks of it, not very well.”
This time it was Luke’s turn to say, “No kidding.” He didn’t bother trying to explain. Rox didn’t want to hear it, and it wasn’t anyone else’s business but theirs. So he said simply, “We’re here to do the job, end of story.”
Bug seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. But as he turned away and busied himself removing small tubes from the centrifuge and placing them in a rack, he said, “If you want to talk about it sometime, you know, I wouldn’t mind. I used to be married.”
Luke couldn’t tell if Bug thought that made him an expert on relationships or exes. “Used to be?”
“She wanted to stay home and do the family thing, and she didn’t want to do it alone, so she found a guy who didn’t disappear for weeks at a time on zero notice.” The geneticist’s shrug conveyed a sense of inevitability. “I don’t blame her, and I don’t blame the job. I love the job. The two just weren’t compatible.”
“Sorry to hear it.” Sorry but not surprised. It was something of a theme in their line of work—the couples who made it were typically the ones who worked together, not the ones who struggled to keep things going long-distance. Then again, the couples who worked together also had a nasty habit of flaming out in public. It was a completely no-win situation as far as he could tell.
Just then, the auto-sampler beeped to announce that it had finished its first run. Relieved, Luke reached out and clapped Bug on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
He’d rather solve an unsolvable outbreak than try to figure out interpersonal relationships any day.
The two men peered at the computer screen, where the results of the preliminary blood and urine tests were displayed.
“What the hell?” Bug recoiled in surprise, then leaned back in for a second look. “Their hormone levels are off the charts!”
And it wasn’t just one or two of the levels that were elevated, Luke saw. The plasma levels of cortisol, aldosterone, testosterone, DHEA, estrogen and several others had spiked in every one of the sick people. More important, the levels were nearly double in Violents compared to the nonviolent patients.
“Not just any hormones,” Luke said grimly. “Steroid hormones.”
“The Violents are on a ’roid rage?” Bug said, surprised. But then he nodded. “It fits the symptoms, sort of.”
“Doesn’t account for the fever, the red-eye or the jaundice,” Luke said, punching a few keys to bring up another data screen. “The white blood cell counts are within normal limits, so it’s not an infection. Or at least not one the patients’ bodies are recognizing yet and mounting an immune response against. Maybe something is attacking their thermoregulatory functions.” Along with several other systems, he realized, as the skewed lab results continued to almost—but not quite—explain the symptoms.
“We’re still missing something,” Bug said, frowning at the results.
“Yeah. The trigger.” Luke ordered the computer to print up the results. “Let’s sit down with May and Thom and put our heads together. We need to go through all the environmental toxins and poisons, natural and unnatural substances that could have these effects. Hell, maybe we’re even looking at a mixture of agents, a pesticide or something. DDT messes with estrogen levels in pregnant women. Maybe our answer is something along those lines.”
Bug paused at the doorway. “You want me to invite Roxanne to sit in?”
“Don’t even try matchmaking,” Luke said without rancor. “And no, leave her out of this. She’s in town interviewing family members. With any luck, she’ll come up with a common thread. If we can figure out the ‘what’ and she finds the ‘how,’ we should be able to nail this illness before anyone else dies.”
And then he could get the hell out of Raven’s Cliff.
“HOW MUCH LONGER will Henry be unconscious?” Mary Wylde asked. Jiggling a tow-headed toddler on one hip, the young mother looked exhausted. Her gas station attendant husband had been sick for nearly four days. Thankfully he wasn’t among the Violents, but his vitals weren’t good.
If he didn’t turn around soon, Rox feared he might not recover. “I don’t know how much longer,” she said honestly, “but a team of specialists is working on him now.”
“Oh.” Mary’s expression relaxed fractionally. “Thank God.”
Rox had heard a version of that reaction from every family member she’d spoken to so far, and she was trying not to let it bother her. Be grateful for the help, she kept telling herself. What matters most is savinglives and preventing new cases. Ego doesn’t come intoit.
Still, she couldn’t help feeling as though she’d failed the town, and herself. She’d spent the past two years trying to make herself part of Raven’s Cliff, yet many of the townspeople seemed to have more faith in the CDC outsiders than in her. Maybe it was because they remembered her fly-by-night father and his wild schemes. Maybe because some of them were still old-school enough to have more faith in a male doctor than a female.
Or maybe, in the end, it was because she just didn’t belong anywhere in particular, no matter how hard she tried.
“Well, if there’s nothing else…” Mary said, starting to ease back and shut the door as another baby began to wail inside.
“Wait.” Rox held up a hand. “I just have a couple of quick questions.” She ran Mary through the survey she’d come up with, mostly focusing on the patient’s habits and how they differed from those of the family members who hadn’t gotten sick.
Mary answered the questions as quickly as she could, casting glances back in the direction of the escalating cries. She pointedly didn’t invite Rox inside so they could continue their conversation, but that was okay. The young mother’s answers only confirmed what Rox had begun to suspect three houses ago.
She was pretty sure the Curse had something to do with locally caught fish.
The day before the symptoms began, three of the victims had eaten fish and chips prepared at the Cove Café. Two others, including Mary’s husband, had eaten fish purchased at Coastal Fish, a seafood market located adjacent to the piers. Mary, on the other hand, had eaten a salad because she was trying to lose ten pounds before beach season.
Rox’s gut told her she had the beginnings of a pattern. Maybe she should’ve seen it sooner, but seafood was a staple of the local diet, and the symptoms were nothing like typical food poisoning. It hadn’t been until she had the time to really compare her patients’ diets that the obvious answer had jumped out at her.
Okay, so I’ve got a pattern, she thought as she headed away from Mary’s house, jotting notes as she walked. Now what?
She had several other people to interview, but she was less than a block away from Coastal Fish. Instinct told her she should keep following up with the families, but her gut told her she already had her answer, and what could be a better next step than going directly to the source?
Knowing that working with a team meant being part of the team, and liking the feeling of connectedness, even if it came with Luke and their shared baggage, she pulled out her cell phone, intending to call and let him know what she’d discovered. But when she flipped open the unit, she saw the searching icon displayed.
No signal.
“Damn it.” She looked around, halfway thinking she’d head to her clinic and call from there, but the clinic phone was still down from the night before—it looked like Aztec had ripped the cable out of the exterior wall before he’d knocked on her clinic door…which was scary enough that she was trying not to think about it.
Besides, Rox thought, the reception was even worse out by the monastery, so Luke’s phone probably wasn’t receiving, either. Odds were it would be a wasted effort.
Deciding that her best bet was to obtain samples of the various catches before driving back to the monastery, she headed for Coastal Fish.
The shop front was the epitome of New England kitsch, decorated with netting, weather-beaten buoys, lobster traps and plastic lobsters. When she pushed through the swinging door, she found the air inside cool and faintly moist, carrying the good scent of fresh seafood. With racks of sauces and bread crumbs on two walls and the third dominated by a huge glass display case, the place was unpretentious but did a brisk business because the prices were good and the fish came straight off the boats, which literally docked at the back door of the shop.
The owner of Coastal Fish, Marvin Smith, stood behind the counter wearing a crisp white apron and a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. In his mid-sixties, stick-thin and balding, Smith had been the mainstay of the fishing community for many years until he’d retired to run the fish store. He was still the fishermen’s unofficial spokesman when things needed doing around town, which was both good news and bad for Rox.
The good news was that if the fishermen had noticed anything strange lately, he’d know. The bad news was that she wasn’t sure he’d tell her, because he’d find anything that threatened local fishing to be a personal threat, as well.
She checked, but saw no red tinge to his irises as she stepped up to the counter, where a glass display case offered a wide selection of local favorites arranged on fresh greens, with plastic lemons strategically placed for a hint of color.
“I hear you brought in some medical detectives from out of town,” Smith said in a gravelly voice. “Couldn’t take care of a few fevers on your own? Business is off, you know. Much more of this and word’s going to get around. It’s the start of summer—we can’t afford to lose the tourists.”
“We’re talking about far more than a few fevers here,” she said, stung. “People are dying.”
“Then why aren’t you off running tests or something?”
I am, she thought, but knew she would have to tread lightly if she wanted to get anything out of the combative ex-fisherman. “We’ve split up to pursue various angles of the investigation. I’m collecting samples from the main food sources in town.” She gestured to the door behind him, which led to a long, narrow room where the fish were filleted and weighed out. “Can I get back there? It won’t take long.”
“What won’t take long?” It took a second for Smith to process her intention. When he got it, he narrowed his eyes. “You want to take my fish?”
“I just need a small sample of each type,” she assured him, though she fully intended to take samples from multiple fish of each variety. The fact that the disease hadn’t struck everyone who’d eaten fish over the past bunch of days suggested the source might be a certain type of fish, or maybe even one specimen that had yielded multiple cuts, or had gone through a certain processing machine.
“You going to pay for it?”
“Of course,” she said, though it irked her to do so. A call to the police chief or the mayor probably would’ve cleared her way, but she preferred to handle things on her own. Besides, Mayor Wells had plenty to cope with right now—besides the outbreak, he was dealing with a vociferous group of locals who, at the town meeting the night before, had started pushing him to let local businessman Theodore Fisher buy and refurbish the burned-out Beacon Lighthouse, which some residents believed was the seat of all the bad luck Raven’s Cliff had suffered in recent months.
Rox didn’t put much stock in curses, but if rebuilding the lighthouse gave the town a common goal she didn’t see why it was such a bad idea. The mayor, however, was doing his damnedest to block the project for some reason.
“Okay,” Smith finally said, reluctance etched in his body language as he flipped up the pass-through and let her come behind the counter, then led her through the door to the processing area. “I guess I can’t stop you from buying fish, can I?”
“Thanks.” She moved among the big ice chests, trying not to make it obvious that she was checking each thermostat, each coolant line, looking for malfunctioning equipment that might be associated with the illness. “Do you supply the Cove Café?” she asked, trying to keep her voice casual.
“Why?”
“Just curious. I had an amazing cod sandwich there the other day and I was wondering if they purchased their fish through you.” That wasn’t entirely a lie—she’d had a good fish sandwich at the café, but it’d been more like a month ago, and she hadn’t particularly cared where the fillet had come from. She was looking for an easy connection among the sick people.
He shook his head. “Nope. They buy straight off the boats.”
Okay, so there went that theory. “You buy off the boats too, though, right? Have they been bringing in anything special lately?”
“Special in what way?” he asked, continuing to answer most of her questions with questions of his own, a technique she suspected was designed to put her on the defensive.
It was working, too. She found herself growing more tense as she worked her way into the processing room, toward where the narrow space opened directly onto one of the fishing piers. Smith followed close behind her, making her feel as though she was being stalked.
Or herded.
She turned to him. “Can you get me twenty or so of those little bags you use for small shellfish orders? I need to keep each of the samples separate. A grease pencil would be good, too.”
He didn’t budge, instead moving closer. His voice dropped to a growl. “What, exactly, are you going to test for?”
“That’s up to the CDC team,” she said, playing dumb.
“Where else have you taken samples?”
She was almost positive he would call and check, so she didn’t lie. “You’re the first.”
Catching movement out of her peripheral vision, she turned her head and saw two men enter from the pier. One was moving strangely, shuffling his feet as though he was having neurological problems.
Panic knotted Rox’s gut and her heart hammered in her ears. “Maybe I should come back later.”
“I don’t think so.” Smith blocked her exit on one side, and raised his voice to call, “Hey, boys, the lady doctor here seems to think our fish is poisoning the town. What do you think about that?”
There was an ugly mutter from the men, and they moved to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking her on that side as well.
She was trapped.
Chapter Four
Rox’s heart hammered as the two fishermen approached and Smith remained unmoving at her back, blocking her escape.
She held her hands away from her sides, palms up. No harm, no foul. “Come on, guys, I’m not looking to start any trouble here. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“By ruining ours,” the big guy on the left said. “It’s bad enough you’re telling people it’d be good for them to eat tinned foods and drink bottled water, and you’ve got the coast guard telling us we can’t put the boats into harbor anywhere but here. Now you’re trying to prove it’s the fish making people sick? What do you think’s going to happen to the town if the feds shut down the fishing grounds? We’ll starve!”
As he drew closer, she identified the dark-haired, dark-eyed man as Phil Jenks, a deckhand on one of the more prosperous fishing boats. He was big and brawny, shading toward overweight, and wore a plaid shirt beneath his waterproof coveralls. She’d seen him around town, didn’t know anything good or bad about him, but he gave her a seriously not-good vibe as he approached.
“I don’t want to ruin anything,” she said quickly. “Don’t you want to know if there’s something wrong with the fish you’ve been catching? Better yet, don’t you want me to prove that they’re fine?”
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