then there were the birds…
Her island paradise had become a place of sick children and dead birds!
The combination of words played again and again—like an echo—in Beth’s head as day dawned, grey and wary, outside the window. Now, tired though she was, she tried to put aside emotion and just list the facts.
The celebration of the opening the previous day had been dampened by the fact that the ten-bed hospital attached to the medical centre was half-full. Sick adults were bad enough, but the sick children?
Lily, Jack and Robbie hospitalised here in the medical centre, Danny not well last night. For these children a simple cold was a big concern—flu was even worse.
Bird flu!
Not a fact but an inescapable thought…
The feared words hadn’t yet been spoken but Beth imagined she could hear them murmuring on the soft tropical wind that blew across the island and whispering at her from the palm fronds. The worrying thing, as far as Beth could see, was that no one was doing anything to find out if this might be the flash point of a pandemic.
Charles Wetherby, head of Crocodile Creek Hospital and the prime mover in expanding the medical presence on Wallaby Island, would normally have taken charge, but he’d been distracted by the official events and the dignitaries attending them, to say nothing of the fact that his ward, Lily, was one of the sick children.
Distracted generally, it seemed to Beth, although she didn’t know him well enough to be sure distracted wasn’t part of his usual personality.
As far as the mystery illness was concerned, blood samples had been sent to the mainland for testing—that was a fact—but there were so many different strains of flu, would an ordinary pathology lab on the mainland think to consider bird flu or even have the facility to test for it?
In the pale dawn light Beth sighed, knowing she had to go through with a decision she’d made some time around midnight as she’d sat beside Robbie’s bed, looking at the child but seeing a much smaller and younger child—not Robbie, but Bobby. Later we’ll call him Bob, Angus had said, it’s more manly than Rob.
But Bobby had never grown to be a man, and Angus?
She sighed again.
Angus was a short electric cart ride away, in the luxury resort on the southern end of the island.
Angus was a pathologist who specialised in epidemiology.
Angus would know about bird flu.
She had to go there.
She had to ask him.
Before another child got sick…
Before another child died…
Beth left the small electric cart in the parking lot at the edge of the resort.
‘Stay!’ she said firmly to Garf, the camp’s goofy, golden, curly labradoodle, who considered riding in the carts the best fun in the world and had hurled himself in beside her before she’d left the clinic.
Garf smiled his goofy smile and lay down across the seat.
Not that he’d guard the cart for her—he’d be more likely to encourage someone to steal it so he could have another ride.
Smiling at remembered antics of the dog she’d grown so fond of, she walked along the path through the lush tropical greenery that screened the small cart park from the resort itself, and found herself by the pool. It looked a million miles long and she realised it had been designed to seem as if it was at one with the surrounding sea. At this end, there were chairs set around tables that sheltered under wide umbrellas, and closer to the pool low-slung loungers, where a few people were already soaking up the very early rays of the rising sun.
To her right, the resort hotel rose in terraced steps so in a way it repeated the shape of the rugged mountain beneath which it sheltered.
‘Wow!’
The word escaped her, although she’d been determined not to be impressed by the magnificence of the newly rebuilt resort.
And possibly because she was so nervous over approaching Angus that she’d been concentrating on the setting to exclude Angus-thoughts from her mind, and talking to herself helped.
Then she remembered Robbie Henderson—and Jack and Lily and the other patients—and why she was there. With steady steps and a thundering heart, she made her way towards the building.
‘You are not the wimpy twenty-five-year-old who fell for the first hazel-eyed specialist who looked your way—awed by someone in his position taking notice of a first-year resident,’ she reminded herself, muttering under her breath to emphasise her thoughts. ‘You’re a mature, experienced woman now, a qualified ER doctor and head of the Wallaby Island Medical Centre. All you’re doing is what any sensible medico would do—seeking advice from an expert.’
Who happened to be the love of your life, an inner voice reminded her.
‘Past tense!’ she muttered at the voice, but it had been enough to slow her footsteps and she needed further verbal assurances to get her into the resort.
‘What’s more, he won’t bite you. He’ll want to help. In fact, it’s probably only because he hasn’t heard about the kids being sick that he hasn’t already offered. And he’s kind, he’s always been kind—work-obsessed but, once distracted from his work, very kind…’
She’d been telling herself these things all night, repeating them over and over again to Garf on the fifteen-minute drive through the rainforest that separated the camp and clinic area from the hotel, but the repetition wasn’t doing much to calm her inner agitation, which churned and twisted in her stomach until she felt physically sick.
‘He’s not answering the phone in his room, but if you go through to the Rainforest Retreat, he could be having breakfast there.’
The polite receptionist, having listened to Beth’s explanation of who she was and whom she wanted, now pointed her in the direction of the Rainforest Retreat, a wide conservatory nestled into the rainforest at the back of the hotel building, huge potted palms and ferns making it hard to tell where the real forest ended and the man-made one began.
Beth paused on the threshold, at first in amazement at the spacious beauty of it and then to look around, peering between the palms, her eyes seeking a tall, dark-haired man whose sole focus, she knew from the past, would be his breakfast.
Whatever Angus did, he did with total concentration—yep, there he was, cutting his half-grapefruit into segments, carefully lifting the flesh, a segment at a time, to his mouth, chewing it while he attacked the next segment.
‘The kitchens in hotels never get it cut right through,’ he’d complained during their weekend honeymoon in a hotel in the city, and from then on it had been her mission in life—or one of them—to ensure his grapefruit segments were cut right through.
Although Angus’s morning grapefruit
