Stormbound Surgeon

CHAPTER THREE

THE house was stunning.

Amy drove Joss and Bertram out to Millionaire’s Row and turned her car off the road into a driveway leading to a mansion. As she had said, it was the most ostentatious house on Millionaire’s Row. Which left him more confused than ever. Amy’s car looked as if her next date was with the wrecker. Her dress was faded and shabby. She looked as if she hadn’t a penny to bless herself with, yet the house she lived in was extraordinary.

Or maybe extraordinary was an understatement.

It was set back from the beach but it had maybe a quarter of a mile of beachfront all of its own. The house was two storeys high and huge. It was built of something like white marble and the entire edifice glistened in the rain like some sort of miniature palace.

Or maybe not so miniature…

‘Wow,’ he said, stunned, and Amy looked across at him and smiled.

‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ Her smile was mocking.

‘It’s…’

‘Ostentatious? Over the top? Don’t I know it.’ She pulled into one bay of what appeared to be an eight-or ten-car garage and switched off the engine. The car spluttered to a halt, and a puff of black smoke spat out from under the bonnet.

‘Um…about your priorities…’

‘Yes?’

‘You don’t think you might do with one bedroom less and get yourself a new car?’

She appeared offended. ‘What’s wrong with my car?’

‘Er…nothing.’ He hesitated and then decided on honesty. ‘Well, actually-everything.’

‘Bertram likes it.’ She swung herself out of the car and opened the rear door for Bertram. She ran a hand under the silky velvet of his ears as he nosed his way out of his comfortable back seat, and the big dog shivered with pleasure. Amy grinned. ‘If your dog likes it, who are you to quibble? He’s a gentleman of taste if ever I saw one.’

Joss smiled in return. Her grin was infectious. Gorgeous! ‘Bertram likes smells and there’d be enough smells in your car to last a dog a lifetime. I reckon there are four or five generations of smells in that back seat.’

But she wasn’t listening to criticisms of her ancient car. She was intent on Bertram’s wonderful ears. ‘He’s lovely.’

‘You don’t have ten dogs of your own?’

‘No.’ Her voice clipped off short at that, as if collecting herself, and Joss gave her a strange look. There were so many things here that he didn’t understand.

‘Come through.’ She flicked a switch and the garage doors slid shut behind them, and then she walked up the wide steps into the house. ‘Welcome to my world.’

It grew more astonishing by the minute.

The house was vast but it contained barely a scrap of furniture. Joss walked through a wide passage leading to room after room, and each door led to a barren space. ‘What the…?’

‘I only live in the back section of the house,’ she told him over her shoulder as she walked. ‘Don’t worry. There’s a spare bed.’

He was staring around him and he was stunned. ‘You own this whole house?’

‘Sort of.’ She was leading the way into a vast kitchen-living area. Here was a simple table and two chairs, two armchairs which had seen better days and a television set. Black and white. Nothing else.

It grew curiouser and curiouser. He grew curiouser and curiouser.

‘You’ll have to explain.’

‘Why?’

Why? Of course she didn’t need to explain anything. He was her guest. She was doing him a favour by putting him up. But…

‘I’m intrigued,’ he admitted, and she grinned.

‘Good. I like my men intrigued.’

He was more intrigued by the minute, he thought faintly. She was a total enigma. And when she smiled… Whew!

‘Will you tell me?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘By the look of the weather I have forty days and forty nights to listen.’

‘I need to go back to work.’

‘I thought you were off duty.’

‘I have paperwork to do, and I don’t want to leave our new mother for too long. Mary’s there now but I don’t like to leave her on her own. I’ll stay for an hour but…’

‘Then we have an hour. Tell me.’

Amy made a cup of tea first. Hell, she really did have nothing, he thought as he watched her spoon tea leaves into a battered teapot and pour the tea into two chipped mugs. Nothing.

Poor little rich girl…

‘This house was my stepfather’s,’ she told him.

Joss took his mug of tea and sat, and Bertram flopped down beside him. It seemed almost ridiculous to sit in this vast room. Somewhere there should be a closet where this furniture should fit.

It wouldn’t need to be a very big closet.

‘Was?’

She sank into the opposite chair and by the look on her face he knew she was very glad to sit. Once more there was the impression of exhaustion. She looked like someone who had driven herself hard, for a very long time.

‘Was?’ he said again, and she nodded.

‘Yes.’

‘And now?’

‘It’s mine-on the condition that I live in it for ten years.’

He stared around in distaste. ‘He didn’t leave you any furniture?’

‘No.’

‘Then…’ He hesitated. ‘You haven’t thought of maybe selling the place and buying something smaller?’

‘Didn’t you listen? I said I had to live in it for ten years.’

He thought that over. ‘So you’re broke.’

‘Yes. Absolutely. It costs a fortune to keep this place.’

‘Maybe you could take in lodgers.’

‘Lodgers don’t come to live in Iluka.’ She hesitated and then sighed. She sat leaning forward, cradling her mug as if she was gaining warmth from its contents. As indeed she was. The house was damp and chill. It needed heating…

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Amy told him, seeing where he was looking. The central-heating panels almost mocked them. ‘Have you any idea of what it costs to heat this place?’

‘Why don’t lodgers come to live in Iluka?’

‘The same reason no one comes to live in Iluka. Except for retirees.’

‘You’ll have to explain.’

‘The town has nothing.’

‘Now, that’s something else I don’t understand,’ he complained. ‘My father’s married Daisy and seems delighted with the idea of coming to live here. There’s a solid residential population…’

‘On half-acre blocks which are zoned residential. We have a general store, a post office and nothing else. No one else has ever been allowed to build here.’

‘Why?’

‘My stepfather owned the whole bluff and he put caveats on everything.’

‘So?’

‘So there’s no land under half an acre available for sale. Ever. That means this strip along the beach has been bought by millionaires and it’s used at peak holiday times. The rest has been bought by retirees living their rural dream. But for many it’s turned into a nightmare.’

‘How so?’

‘There’s nothing here.’ She spread her hands. ‘People come here and see the dream-golf courses, bowling clubs, miles and miles of golden beaches-so they buy and they build. But then they discover they need other services. Medical services. Entertainment. Shops. And there’s nothing. There’s no school so there’s no young population. No land’s ever been allocated for commercial premises. There’s just nothing. So couples retire here for the dream and when one of them gets sick…’ She hesitated. ‘Well, until I built the nursing home it was a disaster. It meant they had to move on.’

‘That’s something else I don’t understand,’ he complained. ‘You built the nursing home? How did you do that when you can’t even afford a decent teacup?’

Amy rose and crossed to a kitchen drawer, found what she was looking for and handed it over.

He read in silence. ‘To my stepdaughter, Amy Freye, I leave my home, White-Breakers.

‘I also leave her the land on Shipwreck Bluff and sufficient funds to build a forty-bed nursing home…’

He read to the end, confusion mounting. Then he laid it aside and looked up to find her watching him.

‘Now do you see?’

‘I do-sort of.’

‘This place was desperate for a nursing home. There’s been huge numbers of couples for whom it’s been a tragedy in the past, couples where one has ended up in a nursing home in Bowra because they were too frail to cope at home but the other was stuck here until the end. And each time, as isolation and helplessness set in, my stepfather would offer to buy them out of their property for far less than they’d paid. He did it over and over. He found it a real little gold mine.’

He was struggling to understand. ‘Surely they didn’t have to sell their properties back to him. Surely they could have sold on the open market?’

‘With the restrictions on the place? No. It’s better now, but then… Then it was impossible.’

‘So where do you fit in?’

‘I don’t.’

That made Joss raise his eyebrows. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘My stepfather and I…didn’t get on.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Amy gave a mirthless laugh, then stooped to give Bertram a hug. Like she needed to hug someone. Something.

She hadn’t had enough hugs in her life, Joss thought with sudden insight and he put a hand out as if to touch her…

It was an instinctive reaction and it didn’t make sense. She looked at his hand, surprised, and he finally drew it away. It was as if he’d surprised himself. Which he had.

‘So tell me why he’s left you this-and tell me why you’re in trouble.’

She blinked and blinked again. The concern in his voice was enough to shake her foundations.

No one was concerned for her. No one. Not even Malcolm.

‘I…I need to get back.’

‘No.’ He stood and lifted the mug from her hands, placed it on the sink and then put his hands on her shoulders. Gently he pressed her into the opposite chair, then sat down himself. His eyes didn’t leave hers. They were probing and caring and kind-and she felt tears catch behind her eyes. Damn, she never cried. It must be the pressure and the emotions of the morning, she thought. Or…something.

But Joss was still watching her. Waiting.

‘I… It’s just… I’m fine. The terms of the will…’

‘Are draconian.’

‘I guess.’ She shook her head. ‘You have no idea.’

‘So tell me.’

She shrugged and then settled in for the long haul. ‘My mother married my stepfather when I was nine years old. We came here. But we soon learned that my stepfather was a control freak. He was…appalling. My mother’s health was precarious at the best of times. He bullied her, he manipulated her-and he hated me.’

‘Because you were feisty?’

‘Feisty?’ Amy looked startled and then gave a reluctant chuckle. ‘Well, maybe I was. I only know that my own father had taught me that the world was my oyster, and here was my stepfather drilling into me that I was only a girl, and I wasn’t even to be educated because that was such a waste. There wasn’t a school here so I had to do my lessons by correspondence but he took delight in interrupting. In controlling, controlling, controlling.’

Joss thought it through-to the obvious, but dreadful next step. He thought about it for a moment and then decided, hell, he’d risk it. In his years as a doctor he’d learned it was better to confront the worst-case scenario head on. So he asked.

‘He didn’t abuse you?’

That shocked her out of her introspection. She took a deep breath and shook her head. She might be shocked by the bluntness of his question, but the idea wasn’t incredible. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘Apart from hitting me-which he did a lot-he didn’t touch me. But…’ She shuddered then, as if confessing something that had been hidden for a very long time. ‘The awful thing is that it’s not such a stupid question. I’m sure he wanted to. The way he looked at me. It was only…that was the only matter in which my mother stood up to him. If he ever touched me-like that-she’d have gone straight to the police, she told him, and she meant it. So he hated me from a distance. Oh, he hated me.’

‘So you left?’

‘As soon as I was fifteen I was out of here. Somehow I ended up in a city refuge, I met some great people and I managed to get myself educated. There’s help if homeless kids want it badly enough. Which I did. I would have liked to have done medicine but that was impossible so I made it nursing. But my mother…she wasn’t allowed to contact me, and she was getting worse. Medically there was nothing here for her. So my mother and many more of the population here were being screwed by my stepfather for everything they had, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I wasn’t allowed home unless I promised I’d give up nursing and stay here permanently.’

‘The man was a megalomaniac,’ he said, stunned, and she nodded.

‘He was.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I should have come home but I didn’t know-couldn’t guess-how ill my mother was. When my mother died I was so angry… But at least, or so I thought, I’d never have to have anything more to do with my stepfather. But my independence still rankled. It must have, because when he died he left this crazy will.’

‘Leaving you the lot.’ Joss frowned. ‘Maybe because he felt sorry for the way he treated you.’

‘No.’ Anger flashed out then. ‘Not because he felt sorry for me. No way. It was a last gesture to get at me. He knew I’d come. Because of my mother’s distress and because her friends here were in such trouble, he knew the idea of setting up a nursing home would be irresistible. But he and his nephews after him have made sure that I haven’t a cent other than what was put into the terms of the will.’

‘He’s left you nothing else?’

‘He’s left barely enough to cover the running costs of the home-though we do get government subsidies now and it’s improving. But still… I’m allowed to take out my nurse-manager salary and that’s it. Even that often has to be ploughed back to make up shortfalls. The nephews removed the furniture-everything that wasn’t nailed down. Their plan is to make me as uncomfortable as possible so I’ll leave, because if I go before the ten years is up they’ll have the lot.’

‘And how many of your ten years have gone?’

‘Four.’

‘Six years to go?’

‘Six years of purgatory,’ she said-lightly, but he knew it was just that.

‘Is there any relief?’

‘I… Yes.’ Amy sighed and then managed a smile. ‘Oh, of course there is. Heck, in six years’ time I’ll be fabulously wealthy.’

‘Is that why you’re doing it?’ Somehow he didn’t think it could be, and her answer was no surprise.

‘No.’ Her response was fierce. ‘I’d walk away if I could, but the covenants he’s put on this place are unbelievable. People like your stepmother moved here in all faith but they found they’ve done their money cold. There’s nothing here for them. The nursing home is their only hope for future support.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Talk to the lawyers,’ she said wearily. ‘They’ll tell you. The place is a disaster and if I walk away there’ll be three or four hundred couples who’ll have to walk away with me. They’ll lose everything they own.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘As bad as that.’

Silence. Then: ‘Do you have any support at all?’

She caught herself then. ‘I… Of course I do. There’s Malcolm.’

‘Malcolm?’

‘My fiancé.’

Her fiancé.

Of course. There had to be a fiancé. For the first time he concentrated on her hands and there it was, a diamond solitaire, declaring to the world that she was taken.

Well. That was fine. Wasn’t it?

Of course it was. There was no reason in the world for his gut to wrench.

But she’d risen and was laying her coffee-mug on the sink, intent on the next thing. ‘I need to go.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. I’ll call you if I need you.’

‘Did you come home just to offload me?’ he asked, and she grinned.

‘Of course. Why else would I come home in the middle of the day?’

‘Because you’re off duty?’

‘There is that. But I have paperwork to do, and I really would like to be there for our new mum.’

‘You’ll ring me the minute you’re worried?’

‘The minute I’m worried I’ll be here in my wreckage-mobile to cart you back to the hospital so fast you can’t blink.’

‘Wreckage-mobile permitting?’

‘Wreckage-mobile permitting.’

‘You realise if you leave then I’m stuck?’

Amy thought about that. ‘Do you want me to drop you off at your father’s?’

‘No!’

‘There you go, then.’ She smiled. ‘A willing captive. My very favourite sort.’

Humph.

Willing captive or not, as soon as she left that was how Joss did feel. Trapped.

He explored the house-sort of-but a proper tour could take days. He figured out which bedroom Amy used. That’d be the room with blankets on the single bed and one ancient and overflowing dresser.

Then he figured out his bedroom-the one with the single bedstead and nothing else-though surprisingly there were blankets and linen folded at the end. It seemed as if Amy did have guests.

Guest, he corrected himself. One guest and one guest only sometimes. Not often.

‘So where’s this Malcolm?’ he asked, and was surprised to hear the note of anger in his voice.

But there were no answers.

Bertram was loping along by his side and he apologised in advance for the sleeping arrangements. ‘This is a single bed,’ he told his dog. ‘That means me. On my own. No bed-sharing with you!’

The dog looked at him mournfully and Joss folded his ears back. In truth he liked the dog sleeping with him as much as Bertram liked obliging.

Sleeping by himself was the pits.

‘Can you tell me where this fiancé comes in?’ he asked of Bertram, and Bertram cocked a head to one side as if thinking about it. ‘Yeah, like me, you don’t understand. If he’s such a hero, why doesn’t he loan her some furniture? If she was my girl…’

Now that was not a thought worth pursuing.

Damn, what was he going to do with himself? Isolation was all very well, but…

He needed things. Like a razor. Like a spare shirt. He thought about his belongings. They’d been in the trunk of his car and the trunk had been mangled into the steering-wheel. Any razor would be matchsticks.

His laptop had been sitting on the floor of the front passenger seat. Maybe it was OK. Please…

He could ring the police sergeant and find out if anything was salvageable. Jeff would probably still be out at the wreck, clearing debris and making the roadblocks safe.

But he’d quite like to return to the hospital. Charlotte’s head injury was a worry. In her condition, not to have a doctor on standby seemed downright dangerous.

There was only one solution.

Sighing, he lifted his phone from his belt and called his father.

‘So tell me about Amy Freye.’

He was still sitting at Amy’s kitchen table while his father and his father’s new wife clucked their concern about his accident and stared around them with open-mouthed astonishment. It seemed they’d never been in Amy’s home and they were stunned. ‘No, Daisy, I don’t want another cup of tea. I want some gossip.’

But he wouldn’t get gossip from this pair. He’d get nothing but praise.

‘Amy’s wonderful,’ Daisy declared. ‘She’s saved this town single-handed.’

‘Explain.’

And he got the story again-the same story Amy had told him, embellished with gratitude.

‘The old man robbed us blind,’ Daisy told him, easy tears appearing in her eyes at the memory. ‘We-my late husband and I-moved here because we were stupid, and as soon as we bought we were stuck fast. Oh, we thought it was fantastic when we first arrived but then John got sick and there was nothing. Not even a pharmacy. I spent my life on the road between here and Bowra, and then when John got worse he had to go into the Bowra Nursing Home. I figured that I’d have to sell-but people had woken up by then that there was never going to be any commercial development.’

‘No commercial development at all?’

‘No.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘There’s one general store and a post office-that’s it. During the height of the season there’s supplies from Sydney delivered to the millionaires, but that style of shopping is out of the range of ordinary people like us. The wealthy like their isolation but for us…it’s the pits. So I was stuck. I couldn’t get a buyer at half the price we paid. Then John died. And fortunately so did Amy’s stepfather. Then Amy arrived and it’s all different.’

‘How is it different?’

‘Every way you can think of,’ Daisy said roundly. ‘She’s built the home but she’s done so much more. She runs meals on wheels to take decent dinners to the old folk stuck at home. She runs shopping rosters so we’re not always in the car to Bowra. The nursing home’s set up so the Bowra doctor can visit and do minor procedures here. She’s organised pharmacy supplies so we can get urgent medicine. Everything. Half the people in Iluka are still in their homes today because of Amy.’

‘I could never have moved here without her,’ his father told him. ‘I met Daisy when I came to play an interclub bowls match and it felt like heaven. But then Daisy told me the problems she’s been having… We still couldn’t sell her place, but with Amy we’re safe for another six years.’

‘For as long as she’s stuck here,’ Joss said thoughtfully.

‘Yes. And even after that. As long as she puts up with us for the legal ten years, then the nursing home will be a going concern for ever.’

‘There’s a lot riding on her staying.’

‘She has a good heart,’ Daisy said roundly. ‘She’ll stay.’

‘And she’s engaged to a local man.’

‘Sort of. Malcolm is an accountant in Bowra and his dad’s a lawyer. He met Amy when his father was looking after Amy’s legal affairs and…well, there’s a bit of a dearth of young men around here.’

‘He doesn’t look after her very well.’

‘Well, they’re not married.’

‘If I was engaged to Amy…’

‘Yes, dear, but you’re not,’ Daisy said patiently. ‘And, of course, Malcolm can’t move here. His practice is in Bowra and when it rains it floods and the road’s cut. Though not always as spectacularly as it is now.’

There was a lot he still didn’t understand but it was time to move on.

‘You guys have two cars, right?’

His father and stepmother looked at each other. ‘Yes, but…’

He saw where their thoughts were headed. ‘No, I’m not planning to try a stunt jump over the river. I know I’m stuck here.’

‘You’re very welcome to stay with us for as long as you like,’ Daisy told him, and his father beamed his consent. They’d come out to Amy’s practically twittering with excitement, and now they were aching to take him home.

‘I’m happy here,’ he told them, and Daisy looked around and shuddered.

‘Yes, dear, but it’s hardly cosy.’

‘And that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Look at this place.’

They looked-and they could only agree.

‘We didn’t think she lived like this,’ Daisy told him. She was clearly puzzled. ‘We thought…well, she lives in such a huge house we thought that her clothes and her car were a sort of eccentric choice.’

‘She has no money.’

His parents looked shocked at the thought. ‘Of course she has money. She lives in this place…’

‘Which is costing her a bomb, but she can’t even afford to heat it. I gather she has no money at all.’

‘She told you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’ve only just met her.’

‘I have a very confiding nature,’ Joss told them, and got an odd look from his stepmother for his pains.

‘She really has nothing?’

‘So I gather. The old man left everything but the house and the nursing home to his nephews.’

They practically gaped. And then Daisy moved straight into the organisational mode Joss was starting to dread. ‘Well! I’m sure we could find all sorts of furniture to give her and so could half the population of Iluka. If we’d had any idea… Most of us are in a position to give. We think so much of Amy…’

‘It wouldn’t work.’ Joss was doing some on-the-spot thinking. ‘She’d sell it. She’s strapped for cash and the nephews are breathing down her neck for more. But if you lent her things…’

‘Lent?’

‘Like, for six years. Would you do that?’

He watched their faces and saw the measure of respect and affection in which Amy was held. There was no hesitation at all. ‘Of course we would.’

‘We’ll get onto this straight away,’ his father told him. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to do it. If the town had known… I know Jack Trotter-he’s Shire President. I’m sure there’s things we can do. This town’s coffers are very healthy indeed-there’s not a lot of traffic lights that need maintaining around here. Come to think of it, there’s not a lot of anything that needs maintaining. Now, how about you, lad? You don’t want to stay here, I assume?’ He looked around the barren room in distaste. ‘It puts a man off money, seeing the place like this.’

‘It does.’ But Joss hesitated. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Dad, I might stay on. If you can lend me one of your cars…’

‘Surely.’ But his father’s face was a question. ‘But why?’

‘It’s just… The reason I was leaving was to get down to work on this conference paper. That still applies. This place is quiet…’

‘And you need to be here as our furniture arrives.’ Daisy was smiling in a way Joss didn’t like. It meant his stepmother was reading far too much into his intention to stay. ‘You leave the boy be, David. He doesn’t want to be staying with a couple of oldies like us when he could be staying with Amy.’

‘Amy’s engaged,’ David said, surprised. He’d caught the gist of where Daisy was headed but he didn’t follow.

‘Yes, she is,’ Daisy muttered, and Joss raised his eyebrows.

‘You don’t like this Malcolm?’

‘No.’ Daisy was blunt and decisive.

‘That’s not really fair.’ Joss’s father was frowning. ‘You hardly know the man.’

‘I know that he’s wishy-washy.’

‘He’s a decent bloke.’

‘He’s never going to set the world on fire,’ Daisy retorted. ‘He’s an accountant in Bowra and he’s the sort of man you’d know from five years old that was where he’d end up.’

‘That’s a bit harsh. Amy must like him,’ Joss said mildly, and Daisy snorted.

‘Yeah. Like she had a choice. He’s a presentable young man and presentable young men are a bit thin on the ground here. And as for Malcolm… He’s onto a very good thing with Amy Freye and he’s enough of a money manager to know it.’

‘In six years, maybe.’

‘Would you take great trouble to hold onto a gold mine even though you knew it wouldn’t pay out for six years?’

He thought that through. ‘I guess I would.’

‘There you go, then,’ Daisy said triumphantly. ‘He’s wishy-washy and a gold-digger. I rest my case.’