‘Do your parents live here?’
‘They lived here when I was a kid,’ she said discouragingly. ‘I did, too, until I was seventeen.’
She wasn’t seventeen now, he thought, trying again to figure her age. She looked young but there were lines around her eyes that made him think she’d not had things easy. But something in her face precluded him from asking questions.
‘Oscar Bentley,’ he said cautiously, searching for neutral ground. ‘You’re sure it’s his lamb?’
‘I’m sure. The cattle grid’s on our property but he has agistment rights. Oscar was an ordinary farmer fifteen years back. Now he seems to have lost the plot completely.’
‘He’s hardly made a decent access track,’ Fergus muttered, hauling the truck away from an erosion rut a foot deep.
‘He likes making it hard for visitors,’ Ginny told him. ‘Why has he called you out? Unless that’s breaking patient confidentiality.’
‘I’m not sure there can be much patient confidentiality about a broken hip.’
‘A broken hip?’
‘That’s what he thinks is wrong.’
She snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Broken hip? I’ll bet he’s fallen down drunk and he wants someone to put him to bed.’
‘You know him well, then?’
‘I told you, I lived here. I haven’t been near Oscar for years but he won’t have changed.’
‘If you don’t live here now, where do you live?’
‘Will you quit it with the inquisition?’ she said, her voice muffled by the lamb again. ‘I hate the smell of wet wool.’
‘So don’t stick your nose into wet sheep.’
‘There’s a medical prescription for you,’ she said and she grinned. Which somehow…changed things again.
Wow, he thought. That was some smile. When the lines of strain eased from around her eyes she looked…beautiful?
Definitely beautiful.
‘Why are you here?’ she demanded, hauling her nose off the lamb as if the question had only just occurred to her and it was important.
‘I told you. I’m here as a locum.’
‘We’ve never been able to get a locum before.’
‘I can’t imagine why not,’ he said with asperity, releasing the brakes then braking again to try and get some traction on the awful track. ‘This is real resort country. Not!’
‘You’re seeing it at its worst. We had a doozy of a storm last week and the flooding’s only just gone down.’
‘It’s not bad,’ he conceded, staring out at the rolling hills and bushland and the deep, clear waters of the lake below. Sure, it was five hours’ drive to the nearest city, to the nearest specialist back-up, but that was what he’d come for. Isolation. And the rugged volcanic country had a beauty all its own. ‘Lots of…sheep,’ he said cautiously.
‘Lots of sheep,’ she agreed, looking doubtfully out the window as if she was trying to see the good side, too.
‘If you think sheep are pretty.’
She twisted to look over her shoulder at the morose-looking ewe in the back of the truck. As if on cue, the creature widened her back legs and let go a stream of urine.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Sheep. My favourite animals.’
He was going to have to clean out the back of his truck. Already the pungent ammoniac smell was all around them. Despite that, his lips twitched.
‘A farmer, born and bred.’
‘I’m no farmer,’ she said.
‘Which might explain why you were lying on the road in the middle of nowhere, holding a lamb by one ear, when the entire crowd from the Cradle Lake football game could have come by at any minute and squashed you.’
There was that grin again. ‘The entire crowd from this side of the lake being exactly eight locals, led by Doreen Kettle who takes her elderly mother and her five kids to the football every week and who drives ten times slower than you. The last of the eight will be the coach who drives home about ten tonight. Cradle Lake will have lost—we always lose—and our coach will have drowned his sorrows in the pub. There’ll be no way he’ll be on the roads until after the Cradle Lake constabulary go to bed. Which is after Football Replay on telly, which finishes at nine-thirty, leaving the rest of Saturday night for Cradle Lake to make whoopee.’
‘How long did you say you’ve been away?’ he asked cautiously, and she chuckled. It was a very nice chuckle, he decided. Light and soft and gurgling. Really infectious.
‘Ten years. But nothing, nothing, nothing changes in Cradle Lake. Even Doreen Kettle’s kids. When I left she was squashing them into the back of the car to take them to the footy. They’re still squashing, only the squashing’s got tricker. I think the youngest is now six feet three.’ She brightened. ‘But, then, you’ve changed. Cradle Lake has a doctor. Why are you here?’
He sighed. The question was getting repetitive. ‘I told you—as a locum.’
‘No one’s ever been able to get a locum for Cradle Lake before. The last doctor was only here because his car broke down here just after the war. He was on his way to visit a war buddy and he couldn’t get anyone to repair it. He didn’t have the gumption to figure any other way of moving on.’
Fergus winced. He’d only been in the district for a couple of days but already the stories of the old doctor’s incompetence were legion.
‘Your truck’s still operating,’ Ginny pointed out. ‘So why did you stop?’
‘This is the hospital truck. And I ran my finger down the ads in the medical journal and chose the first place I’d never heard of.’
She stared. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted a break from the city.’
She eyed him with caution. ‘You realise you won’t exactly get a holiday here. This farming land’s marginal. You have a feeder district of very poor families who’ll see your presence as a godsend. You’ll be run off your feet with medical needs that have needed attention for years.’
‘I want to be busy.’
She considered him some more and he wondered what she was seeing. His reasons for coming? He hoped not. He tried to keep his face expressionless.
‘So, by break,’ she said cautiously, ‘you don’t mean a break from medicine.’
‘No.’
She eyed him for a bit longer, but somewhat to his surprise she didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe
