Her Off-Limits Single Dad
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Marion Lennox
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14
CHAPTER ONE
THIS SEEMED LIKE a job for Air Rescue. The nearest helicopter base, though, was South Sydney, and their only available unit was caught up on another job.
They were on their own.
The crashed truck, on its side well below the road, seemed to have caught on a straggly coastal gumtree. From where Jenny stood it was a good ten metres down to the truck, then another ten to the rock-strewn surf beneath. The truck seemed to be balanced across the tree trunk. It looked like it could slip further at any minute and there seemed no way they could safely climb down.
‘Are we sure someone’s inside?’ she asked, and Gary grimaced.
‘We’re pretty sure.’
Jennifer Roden and Gary Drummond, Willhua’s only two paramedics, had been called to this crash by Chris, Willhua’s sole police officer. Chris, though, was caught up with a break-in and assault. He’d taken the frantic call from a member of the public, but could do nothing but pass the message to the ambulance service. That meant Gary and Jen were first on scene. First things first—they needed to check this wasn’t just a vehicle pushed over the cliff to avoid dumping charges.
From where they stood the truck looked old and rusty, and if it was worthless it’d be costly to get rid of. How much cheaper to drive it here, release the parking brakes and give it a push into the sea?
That’d be the easy scenario but it didn’t fit here.
‘Deirdre McConachie saw it go over.’ Gary, Jenny’s partner and Willhua’s senior paramedic, was staring down at the truck and looking grim. ‘Deirdre didn’t have her phone—she had to drive into town to call Chris. She told him the truck was weaving all over the road in front of her—she thought the driver might be drunk. She said it went straight down. Going over here... Well, Deirdre assumed it’d ended up in the sea and there’d be no hope of survival. She was too scared to look—she just headed fast into town for help—but by the look of the truck she guessed it might be Charlie Emerson.’
‘Who’s Charlie?’ Jen had only been in this job, in this town, for two days. Gary had worked here for thirty years and knew everyone.
‘Retired farmer. Hell, I’ll ring Chris back. We need urgent help. More cops. The State Emergency Service. They’ll have to come from Whale Head—and the chopper from Sydney.’
But as he spoke a gust of wind slammed across the face of the cliff and the truck seemed to shudder. And Jenny saw something in the side window facing upward. A face.
A dog? Definitely. Fawn-coloured, with oversized white ears. Staring straight up at them?
Surely no one would drive a truck over the cliff with a dog inside.
Unless it was a suicide attempt?
‘How old’s Charlie?’ she demanded. ‘He must be inside the truck as well. Or thrown out and in the sea?’
‘He’s eighty if he’s a day. Dammit, Jenny, Charlie must be behind the wheel.’
‘I’ll go down.’
‘Are you kidding? We need to wait for help.’
‘By which time the truck might have fallen. You have ropes in the back of the ambulance. I can abseil down.’
‘You? Abseil?’
‘It’s what I do for a hobby,’ she said, and she managed a smile. ‘You didn’t read my résumé, huh? That bag I tucked into the back of the truck yesterday—it has my abseiling gear.’
‘You’re kidding.’ He shook his head, staring down at the truck again. Its movement had them both almost mesmerised. ‘Jen, we’ve been desperate,’ he said as he stared. ‘Pete’ll be out of action for months, and that’s left me with just Chris and Doc. Pierson to help in an emergency. The first page of your application confirmed you had a pulse and qualifications. You were therefore hired.’
She managed a chuckle at that. ‘Wow, I’m flattered.’
It was Saturday evening. Jenny had arrived in Willhua on Thursday, planning to start work on Monday, but Gary had spent time with her the day before. So far she’d liked what she’d seen. Gary was in his sixties, he had the beginnings of arthritis in his hands which held him back, but he seemed skilled, sensible and friendly.
He was a far cry from the last man she’d worked for. Bottom-feeding toerag.
Now, however, was not the time to dwell on the humiliation she’d walked away from in Sydney. Now was the time to focus on the guy in the truck. It was late and the light was fading. If she was going down she had to go now.
‘I can’t abseil,’ Gary said. ‘Not when it’s this steep, and as your boss, I’m not sure I should allow it. Pete always does the climbing stuff. I’ll ring Doc Pierson. He’ll know what to do.’
‘Call him by all means,’ Jen said. ‘But I’m going. If Charlie’s had a heart attack, if he’s bleeding out...’ Already she was seeing this Charlie-the-farmer as a real person, not just a random accident victim. ‘There’s no choice.’
‘Can you do it without risk?’
That was a fair question. Safety was drilled into paramedics from their earliest training—Do not put yourself in danger. The last thing you wanted was to add yourself to the roll call of dead or injured. But still, almost every paramedic eventually faced situations where risk had to be weighed.
She was weighing risk now. It looked a simple abseil. The driver’s side of the truck was facing upward and the door looked clear. She couldn’t see the driver, but the dog was looking out of the window. She was assuming the driver had slumped sideways.
Deirdre had said the car had been weaving all over the road. So...drunk? Stroke? Heart attack? Diabetic hypo?
And at any minute the truck might fall.
Yes, there was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking.
‘I’ll push back if the truck moves,’ she told Gary. ‘But I might be able to clear an airway, or stop bleeding, at least do the basics. If you could lower the stretcher, maybe I could attach it to the tree, get it steady, even get him out.’
‘By yourself? In your dreams. But could we stabilise the truck?’ Bob sounded doubtful. ‘With the bushfires down in Victoria and the amount of rain we’ve had here, our local fire crew figured they were needed more down south. They left as part of the interstate response. We need a crane, but Jodie Adams has the only crane in Willhua, and her family has dinner with her mum in Whale Head on Saturday nights. She won’t be back yet. Could we use the ropes to attach the truck to...?’ But then he paused and stared around him. There were no trees near the road. It was a narrow strip of bitumen and the cliff rose steeply behind them. ‘To the ambulance?’
‘We could try,’ she said. ‘But that’s a heavy truck. I doubt the ropes’d hold—or they’d pull our truck over.’
What had she got herself into? she thought. She’d just come from a huge paramedic service in Southern Sydney, and her team had been multiskilled. Here there was no one but herself and Gary.
Willhua was a tiny coastal town that attracted retirees, plus people who liked out-of-the-way places—scuba divers, surfers, a paragliding community who used the wind to fly along the lonely but spectacular cliff faces. It had a tiny hospital that existed only because the place was so remote.
Pete, the paramedic she was replacing, had smashed his foot while surfing off the rocks a few weeks ago. With him out of action, the little town had been desperate for a replacement. The temporary job had seemed an ideal solution, a place to come and nurse her broken heart—or at least her shattered pride—but right now what she wanted was her huge metropolitan rescue team.
‘We could use a tractor,’ she said now. ‘Or something else heavy to hold things firm. But with this wind there’s no time to wait till they arrive. Once it’s dark I can’t abseil. But ring everyone you can think of. Meanwhile I’m going down.’
‘Jen, I’m your superior. What’ll people say if I let you go?’
‘They’ll say I have every certificate available in advanced abseiling skills,’ Jen said, with only an inward qualm at the slight...deception. As far as she knew, there were no certificates available for advanced or any other level of abseiling. ‘It’s only sensible.’
‘The risks...’
‘I won’t go into the truck,’ Jen promised. ‘And we have gear in the ambulance.’ She did have her abseiling kit—one of the things that had attracted her to this place had been the opportunity to practice her climbing skills, and she’d guessed, given the popularity of this place for windsurfers and paragliders, that she might even get to use her skills for professional reasons.
But to help someone in a truck in this position...
At least she could get to him, she reasoned. ‘I will take care,’ she told Gary. ‘We can’t just stand here and do nothing. Agreed?’
Gary stared at her for a long moment. ‘I should go myself,’ he said at last. ‘But...’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t.’
‘What, thirty years in the service and you’ve never learned how to clamber down cliffs like a rock crab?’ Jenny said, and tried a smile. ‘But isn’t that the reason I was employed, to add to the skill set your service offers? Are you happy to help me?’
He stared at her again, thinking. ‘I’d like you to wait for Doc. And for Chris. Either of them might know what to do. We need more people than me to control things.’
They both stared down at the truck again and another gust shook the tree holding the vehicle.
‘Yeah, but Charlie can’t wait,’ Jenny said. ‘Let’s go.’
It was eight o’clock on a Saturday night and Dr Rob Pierson had just disconnected from his nightly call to the hospital at Brisbane Central. The response had been pretty much the same response he’d had every night for the last four years.
‘No change at all, Dr Pierson. Your wife’s as comfortable as we can make her.’
Dammit, why wouldn’t they let her go?
He stared into the empty fireplace—it was cool enough to light a fire but he couldn’t be bothered. He’d have a drink and head to bed in a minute. Or maybe he’d check on Jacob again, then head through and do a fast check on his patients.
Willhua’s official doctor’s residence had been built to make a doctor’s life easy. There was therefore a door in the hall that led through to the rear of the hospital’s nurses’ station. Rob had also rigged up a video and monitor. If four-year-old Jacob called out, or if he moved from bed, Rob or one of the nurses on call could be through here in seconds.
It wasn’t a perfect system—Rob’s parents-in-law had raised it in court as yet another reason why Rob shouldn’t have custody—but the judge had come down on Rob’s side. Willhua was desperate to keep its doctor. Not only the nurses, but almost every local was only too ready to drop everything and take on Jacob’s care in an emergency, so somehow the system worked.
Willhua wasn’t all that prone to emergencies anyway, apart from the occasional paraglider or windsurfer who did something stupid. Such casualties were mostly airlifted to Sydney. The hospital was thus pretty much a glorified nursing home for the retirees who made up half the population. But Rob had a local farmer in tonight who was recovering from snakebite, plus he’d admitted a young mum with mastitis. She wasn’t desperately sick, but she was exhausted, and admitting her might force her lazy husband to step up and take care of the other two kids for a couple of days.
It wasn’t cutting-edge medicine but he liked it, though the ongoing conflict with his in-laws was doing his head in.
Maybe he should give in, he thought grimly. Head back to Brisbane. Sit by Emma’s bed for the how many years she might live like this?
He couldn’t do it, to himself or to Jacob. But his thoughts were bleak, and when the phone rang it was almost a relief.
‘Doc?’ He knew Gary’s voice well, and the single word conveyed trouble.
‘What’s up?’
‘We have a truck near the bottom of Devil’s Pass. We think it’s Charlie Emerson. Deirdre McConachie called it in, said the truck was weaving like he was drunk. It went straight over. It’s caught halfway down but not stable. Chris is caught up on the far side of the valley, you know the fire crew’s still down in Victoria and Jodie’s tow truck’s unavailable. Meanwhile we think Charlie’s stuck halfway down the cliff.’
His heart sank.
Safety had been drilled into him since medical school, and safety would be on the line here. There was a time when he’d have taken risks almost without thinking, but being sole parent to a four-year-old changed things. With Emma’s parents seemingly watching every move, almost paranoid in their need to protect their grandson, his appetite for risk was pretty much nil.
Pete, the paramedic who’d injured his foot, had been adept at cliff rescues, but Gary had reluctantly agreed some years back that he couldn’t do it. And this new woman they’d just employed? Gary had done the interview. Could she help or would he be forced to intercede? On his own?
‘Ring South Sydney Air Rescue,’ he said bluntly. ‘Get a chopper.’
‘I already have, but they’re caught up on another job and there’s no time to wait.’ There was suddenly an odd note of pride in Gary’s voice. ‘But our Jenny...the new lass...damned if she’s not an abseiler. She’s rigging herself a harness and she’s about to head down.’
‘She can’t!’
‘She says she can, and I believe her. Truck’s about to fall, Doc. She says she won’t take stupid risks and Charlie must be bad. Can you get someone to ring round for tractors? A few guys with decent ropes. Just in case. Then come?’
So there was no choice. ‘I need to hand over Jacob’s care but I’ll use the car phone to do the rest,’ he told him. ’Stop her until I get there and that’s an order.’
‘The lady’s got a mind of her own,’ Gary said, and the pride was there again. ‘And you know what? The way she looked at the whole set-up...the way she’s acting... I’m thinking she knows what she’s doing a lot more than the pair of us put together.’
The abseil down the cliff had been relatively straightforward. The tricky part now was to reach the person inside the truck without adding to its instability.
There was also a dog, and the dog wasn’t helping one bit.
The driver’s door was almost horizontal, a flat plane, and as soon as she reached the truck Jenny could see down inside the cab.
Charlie—or at least she assumed it was Charlie—was slumped across the seats. His legs were still almost in the driver’s seat position but he’d slide sideways so his head was on the passenger side. There was blood on his chest and on his face. The left side of his shirt was ripped and she could see a jagged wound on his upper arm.
The dog was clambering over his body, seeing Jen, desperate to get to this newcomer. A corgi? This was a complication she didn’t need. The dog, too, looked bloody, but she had no idea whether it was Charlie’s blood or its own.
As a trained paramedic Jen had been in situations before where a dog had been protective of an injured owner. Her heart sank, but she couldn’t get to Charlie without dealing with the dog.
She had ropes. There were light lines in the gear kit attached to her back.
First priority dog?
‘What’s happening?’ Gary yelled from up on the road.
‘I’m getting the dog out,’ she called back. Gary would understand the situation.
‘Hey,’ she said, turning back to the cab’s occupant, not sure if he could hear her but talking anyway. ‘Hold still there, Charlie, rescue’s happening.’
She hoped.
First things first. She steadied herself as much as she could, finding leverage for her legs, almost stability. And then she attacked the door.
Opening a truck door when it was the right way up was relatively easy, unless it was damaged. This door wasn’t damaged but, the way it was lying, it needed to be hauled up to open, a dead weight. Jen was fit, but even so it was a challenge, more so because the minute she got it open the dog was in her face.
‘Stay,’ she said firmly as she struggled. ‘Good boy. Stay still!’
And, amazingly, he did. He was on Charlie’s body, and he was leaning out to greet her, his tongue lolling. It was an impossible situation but at least he wasn’t vicious.
She hauled the door up further until finally its own weight caused it to slam back against the truck tray. Okay, she now had a clear entrance, but her access was still blocked by the dog.
She grabbed one of the cords she had in her kit and reached in, then gave herself a moment to steady, reassure the dog.
‘Now, mate, come on out,’ she told him and tugged.
And he did. The position of the truck must have given him a false sense of security, its side forming a flat surface. He scrambled out, and Jen saw grazing along his side—a lot of grazing. Blood. Lacerations. He whimpered as she hauled, but she had no choice.
‘Sorry, mate,’ she told him. ‘But we need to get your master safe first.’
She moved herself further along the tray and dragged the dog with her. The side of the truck formed part of a rusty crate. As she pulled, the dog lurched off the door onto the crate’s wire sides. There was a yelp of pain, but she had no time for further reassurance. Once the dog was stable she tied him fast and left him. If the truck fell, the dog would go too, but there was no choice.
And now Charlie. With the corgi out of the way she could get into the truck, but she had to be so careful. Her weight could easily make the difference, causing the truck to slide.
She steadied herself, fighting to find a decent toe-hold, allowing the ropes to hold all her weight when all her instincts were screaming at her to use the truck to balance herself.
Finally she leaned in.
Charlie looked grey. In his eighties, small, almost wizened, his face looked ghastly. ‘Pain,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t...bear...’
Pain from where? In this situation it was impossible to tell.
But stopping the bleeding had to be her first priority. How much blood had he lost? Was it his blood or the dog’s? In the fading light it was impossible even to guess.
‘Are you Charlie?’ she asked as she gloved.
‘I...yeah.’
‘I’m Jen, Willhua’s new ambulance officer, here to get you out of here,’ she told him. ‘But let’s get you a bit tidier first.’ She was forming a pad and applying pressure as she spoke, assessing, thinking fast.
She had to get him out, but to pull him out when he was already grey with pain...
‘Hey, you’ll be okay.’ They were easy words, but how to make them true?
By the look on his face, the pain he was feeling was excruciating. In the back of her mind was the description of him weaving on the road and then driving straight over. Heart problem? It had to be a possibility, but aspirin was out of the question here. She had no way of assessing internal bleeding. Risks, though, had to be weighed and tugging him out of the truck without pain relief might well kill him.
But giving pain relief in this situation was risky, too. Even finding a vein would be hard. Respiratory depression was problematic and pain might be coming from anywhere, but somehow he had to be dragged out.
Okay. Decision made. Low dose morphine.
‘I’m giving you something for the pain,’ she told him. ‘We’ll wait for a couple of moments to let it take effect and then get you out of here.’ When she’d figured out how.
The injection went home. Charlie was still staring at her with eyes dilated with terror and she grabbed his hand and held, hard.
And then, despite the slight tremors of the truck, despite the knowledge that the tree could give way at any minute, Jen forced herself into the space her training had instilled. She took a long look at the truck, at the guy’s position. The passenger side seemed damaged. The door must have been bashed open as it slid or tumbled down the cliff. Where the door should have been, she could only see broken glass, torn metal and rockface.
She didn’t want Charlie to talk any more than he must, but this was vital.
‘Charlie, was anyone else in the truck with you?’
And his terror seemed to grow. His eyes swivelled to see, and he made himself whisper.
‘My...dog?’ His voice faltered and he looked pleadingly up at her, as if trying to say something more but there was no strength. ‘My mate, Bruce?’
‘Is Bruce your dog?’
‘He was just...just here.’
And Jenny relaxed just a touch. ‘He’s safe,’ she told him. ‘I got him out. Now, let’s get you out too.’
But how? His legs weren’t trapped—thank heaven for small mercies. He must have been cut in the fall, she thought. Maybe there were crush injuries, but underlying everything...what? There was no smell of alcohol. Had a medical event caused this? Was there an underlying heart attack?
She pulled back so she was leaning out of the cab and grabbed her radio. ‘Gary?’
‘Reading.’
‘He seems alone apart from his dog. You’ll have seen me tie the dog to the tray? Nothing’s holding Charlie in the cab but we need to get him out fast. Bleeding, lacerations, severe pain, possibly internal injuries, possibly prior, maybe a heart attack?’
There was a sharp intake of breath as Gary processed the implications, but he was professional enough to move straight to the practical. ‘Doc’s here, on his way down now. He’s bringing the stretcher’
Yeah? That was like a shot of adrenalin all on its own. Gary had organised the ambulance floodlight, so the deepening dusk was now alleviated by the artificial light. She swivelled to look up the cliff and yes, a figure was near the edge, leaning back, his feet finding a foothold on the cliff face. The ropes around him, the way he held himself, told her that here was someone else who was capable of abseiling. And by his side Gary was lowering a stretcher rig, lined up for a vertical rescue.
She’d spent yesterday browsing the ambulance set-up, familiarising herself with what this service could offer. Because Willhua was remote and a lot of its retrievals were from the beach, they carried a stretcher rig. It consisted of a light metal frame with webbing, with maximum hand holds, fastenings to secure a patient if they needed to cross rough ground, with the rigging needed if the patient had to be hauled upward.
Such a rescue should wait for the specialised chopper team from Sydney, but Charlie’s breathing said they didn’t have the luxury of waiting. She swung herself back to the cab.
‘Charlie,’ she said and lifted his hand again and held. Shifting him before they had the stretcher in position seemed fraught—any movement could send the truck down. All she could do right now was reassure, reassure, reassure. ‘Doc’s on his way. Doc Pierson—you know him? They say he’s good. He’s bringing a stretcher so we can get you out.’
‘But...’ The man’s eyes were wild with fear, searching the cabin.
‘We have your dog safe,’ she repeated. ‘Everything’s okay except you seem to have broken some ribs. We’ll get you to the hospital.’
He closed his eyes and for a sickening moment she thought he’d gone into cardiac arrest. But her fingers found his wrist and his pulse was still there, weak and thready but constant.
‘Here.’ The voice came from above her and she almost jumped. She swivelled and here he was, the doctor she’d met for a brief moment when she’d arrived for her interview.
She’d come to Willhua a week ago in answer to the job advertisement, and Gary had organised an interview. This doctor had been there. They’d therefore met—just—but two minutes after her introduction there’d been a call. Someone had arrived at the hospital having sliced their hand while cooking.
‘It’s bleeding like stink and I can’t stop it,’ she’d heard the woman say via the speaker phone. The doctor—Rob Pierson—had apologised and left in a hurry.
‘You gotta get used to that here,’ Gary had told her. ‘It’s a small town, so any drama we all stop everything. Luckily dramas don’t happen all that often.’
Like on the first day of her first shift? The local policeman was caught up with an assault, and now, what had the doctor had to abandon to get here?
Regardless, she was blessedly glad to see him. What was more, he was moving as if he was accustomed to this type of situation. He’d swung down the cliff fast, with the stretcher attached by harness and the blue lines she recognised. He was now almost at eye level. With black hair, tanned, sun-weathered skin and a long, lithe body, he looked superbly fit, the type of guy she’d met during her climbing training. Now he was meeting her gaze, with eyebrows raised. Questions were in his dark eyes though, not in his voice.
But she knew what he was asking. Condition? Urgency? There was no room in the cab for him to take her place to examine, and no time either. Demanding a condition report within the patient’s hearing was also problematic. But that one questioning glance contained trust. One professional to another.
Her gaze met his and held, and she saw that he got it. The urgency.
This guy wasn’t so old, mid-thirties maybe, and in her work Jen had often found that younger doctors were suspicious of paramedics’ ability. Rob Pierson, though, glanced in at Charlie—a cursory glance, given the lack of light in the cab—then looked at Jen. Jen nodded and the decision seemed to be made.
‘Harness coming in,’ he said briefly. ‘Attach the line. Two minutes.’
Right. Deep breath.
Pulling a grown man out of a truck in this position seemed impossible. She didn’t think she could do it. But they had to get him out of here, and the harness was a godsend. It was hard to get it fitted, but somehow she did, and with that came a slight lessening of tension. Now he was harnessed, the blessed safety lines fixed, all she had to do was shift him upward so if the truck plunged he wouldn’t follow.
All she had to do? Shifting a dead weight was easier said than done.
‘Swap.’ Rob’s order was a curse snap and she obeyed instinctively. If she knew how to achieve this she would have fought him, but she was only hoping he might have more of an idea than she did.
She backed out, using her climbing ropes to steady her, conscious all the time of not putting weight on the truck.
She risked another glance at Rob as she emerged from the cab. The unspoken message, one medic to another. Situation dire.
‘On my signal, tell Gary full strength on my ropes,’ he told her. ‘You control Charlie’s line, using it to help pull as much as you can.’ And then, as he moved closer, he spoke to Charlie.
‘Charlie, mate, this is Rob Pierson. Dr Pierson—you know me. We need to get you out of here, but we need your help. I’m going to link my hands under your shoulders and pull, but do you reckon you can push a bit with your legs? I know it’ll hurt like hell, but a nice comfy stretcher’s waiting.’
Could he do it? It was almost a vertical lift. Jen shifted a little on her ropes, ready to grab what she could if—when—he emerged. The safety lines attached to Charlie would help, but not much. She couldn’t see how...
But he did. One moment Rob was bent over-all she could see was his back. The next he was pulling back and, miraculously, Charlie was in his hold.
What sort of Herculean strength...?
But there was no time for questions. As Charlie emerged she grabbed his thighs and helped manoeuvre him. Rob had set the stretcher up so it was hanging just above the tray. In less time than she would have believed possible they had him fastened, and Rob was calling upward.
‘Bring us up!’
There must be more people on the clifftop by now, Jen realised, because the ropes tightened instantly. Rob moved into position beside the stretcher, attaching himself, stabilising it as it moved. Then, with the utmost care from those above—that’d be Gary, she thought, even if he couldn’t abseil he’d know the drill—Rob and the stretcher were on their way upward.
The whole process had been so fast she felt dazed. She let herself hang for a moment, using her feet to steady herself, but taking a moment to let her breath subside to normal.
And then the dog whined.
She’d almost forgotten him. Bruce, the dog. He was crouched low, flattened on the wire crate. Another gust of wind hit and the truck shuddered again. She couldn’t leave him.
‘Another harness,’ she yelled upward.
‘Someone else?’ She heard alarm in Gary’s voice.
‘Dog,’ she called. All attention up on the road had to be on Charlie, but she’d promised. ‘He’s too big for me to carry but I reckon a harness might work.’
And Gary must have agreed because a rope came down, with a harness.
It was a stupid fit—a human harness—but the dog seemed almost paralysed with pain and fear. She hooked the harness around his rear and the corgi looked up at her with limpid trusting eyes that made her melt.
‘It’s okay, boy,’ she said softly. ‘Let’s get you to your master.’
And somehow she managed it. She had whoever was up the cliff pull gently, she swung on her rope with the dog in her arms, the harness took her weight from her rear, and she steadied Bruce and herself by finding footholds as she rose.
And, moments later, she and the dog were on the road.
This was a very different scenario than the one she’d left, what, half an hour back? There were people everywhere. Gary and Rob were crouched over the stretcher. A guy in a policeman’s uniform—was this Chris?—was in charge of the rope pulls, and there were at least half a dozen locals looking desperate to help.
Thank heaven. She let herself slump on the road for a moment, cradling the dog, letting herself believe that the drama was over. Then she rose and carried the dog across to the stretcher.
If anything Charlie looked even worse than when she’d last seen him. Rob was setting up a syringe. Gary was trying to fit an oxygen mask, but the old guy was fighting him.
‘Bruce,’ he gasped.
‘Hey, we have him.’ She knelt by the stretcher, holding the corgi so he could see him. ‘Here he is. Bruce.’
The old man’s eyes widened in hope. He stared wildly—and then he looked straight past her.
‘Stumpy,’ he stammered, and he tried to raise his hand to pat his dog. ‘I knew she... But where’s...where’s Bruce?’
‘Who’s Bruce?’ Rob snapped, his voice urgent.
‘Best...best mate,’ Charlie whispered—and stopped breathing.
