When Summer Comes

She had the grace to look abashed. “I’m sorry. I was afraid you were going into shock. You need a doctor.”

The other man glanced up at her. “I’m not a doctor.”

She sent Levi an apologetic grin. “But he is a veterinarian.”

“Who’s mostly retired,” the guy said with a note of exasperation.

“Still good at his craft.” She patted his shoulder with obvious affection. “This was my grandfather’s friend and next-door neighbor. Now he’s my friend and neighbor. Godfrey Blume, meet Levi McCloud.”

* * *

“So what do you think?” Callie shooed Rifle out of her way so she could pour the coffee she’d put on a few minutes earlier. Levi McCloud was asleep in her bed, but Godfrey was sitting at her kitchen table.

Every time her neighbor yawned she felt bad about waking him in the middle of the night. He was nearing eighty. But she hadn’t expected providing Mr. McCloud with medical attention to take several hours. She’d been so caught up in helping to wash and bandage his wounds, she hadn’t noticed the passage of time until she saw the break of dawn. Now her rooster was out in the yard, crowing for all he was worth.

She couldn’t help smiling when she caught sight of the old bird strutting past her kitchen window. She loved early mornings. They reminded her of summers with her grandparents and awaking to the smell of frying bacon.

“I did what I could,” Godfrey said. “But I wish he would’ve let us take him to the hospital. Or even to a real doctor. I’ve never seen an attack like that.”

And her neighbor had worked with animals his whole life! She frowned as she set the sugar and cream on the table. “We did what we could.”

“Mr. McCloud is a surprisingly stubborn man, given the extent of his injuries.”

Once Godfrey had ascertained the large number of stitches their patient required, they’d both tried, once again, to get him in her car. Godfrey could only offer him a topical analgesic to ease the pain—and Tylenol. But there was nothing they could do to overcome Mr. McCloud’s resistance. He tried to leave on his own power when they insisted, and would’ve done so if they’d pushed it any further. At that point, Godfrey had relented and agreed that some care was better than none.

“We should report the dogs to animal control,” she said. “They need to be restrained before they hurt someone else—a child, for instance.”

“I plan on looking into it.” Her neighbor had been the only veterinarian in town for most of his life. He’d officially retired three years ago, when the newly licensed Harrison Scarborough opened his practice. But some people still brought their animals to Godfrey.

“Do you have any idea whose pets they might be?” she asked while pouring herself some cranberry juice. She was on a strict diet that precluded alcohol, salt and coffee, among other things.

He smoothed his shirt over his belly. “My bet? There’s a couple of pit bulls down the road, around the bend.”

“Really?” Callie had never seen any, but she’d been pretty preoccupied of late. Adjusting to the shock of her diagnosis, especially since she’d never consumed much booze, hadn’t been easy. She’d thought only alcoholics had to worry about cirrhosis. “You think it’s them?”

“I can’t imagine what other dogs it could be. I know all the rest of the animals in the area, and they wouldn’t do something like what we saw.”

“Whose pit bulls are they?”

“Belong to a couple of young men, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, who are renting the old Gruper place. They’re here for the summer, doing some prospecting.”

Gold panning and dredging had become popular pastimes. A lot of tourists visited “the heart of gold country” to relive the history of the ’49er. Coloma, where gold was first discovered in California, was an hour away, but the entire area had been rich in ore. At 5,912 feet, the nearby Kennedy mine was one of the deepest gold mines in the world.

“So you’ve met these men?” she asked.

“Just last week. I was selling my gold dredge. They saw my flyer on the bulletin board at the diner and came over to buy it. I guess they weren’t finding anything using the panning method.”

“Did you like them?”

“Not a bit.” Godfrey spoke with his usual candor, but she’d already guessed his feelings from his sour expression.

“Why not?”

“They’re unruly braggarts with big mouths and no respect. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought they were related to the Amoses.”

The Amoses weren’t as bad as they’d been immediately after their father went to prison. As a matter of fact, she really liked Cheyenne’s husband. But she didn’t mention that she now knew Dylan and cared about him. She didn’t want to veer off topic. “I’m surprised they didn’t hear their dogs growling and barking. You’d think they would’ve gone out to see what was going on.”

He shrugged. “They were probably passed out, drunk.”

“They’re big partiers?”

“That’s the impression they gave me.”

“Great.” She rolled of her eyes. “Just who you want living so close—and with a couple of unsafe pit bulls, too.”

He acknowledged her sarcasm with a tip of his cup. “Fortunately, it’s only for three months.”

Rifle brushed up against her, wanting some attention, so she bent to scratch behind his ears. “Short-timers or no, they still have to keep their dogs from biting people,” she said. “Mr. McCloud could’ve been killed.”

Godfrey sipped his coffee before responding. “I plan on heading over there later.”

Knowing he’d do whatever needed to be done, she changed the subject. “Will Mr. McCloud be okay?”

Her neighbor’s hands were oversize, like her injured guest’s, except that Godfrey’s were also thick. When he was stitching up Levi’s bite wounds, Callie had been impressed by how dexterous his sausagelike fingers could be.

“As long as those bites don’t get infected, he should be. He’ll have a few scars, but I made the stitches very small. That’ll help. In my opinion, he should get a tetanus booster, but he claims he was in the military, that his shots are current.”

“They make sure soldiers stay up on that sort of thing, don’t they?”

“They do. If he was really a soldier.”

Apparently, Godfrey was taking nothing for granted. The people of Whiskey Creek could be suspicious of outsiders. But Callie believed at least that much of McCloud’s story. He had a tattoo on one shoulder depicting an eagle with the word Freedom. A tattoo on the other arm said R.I.P. Sanchez, Williams, Phelps, Smith. The names were in different fonts, as if they’d been added as he’d lost friends.

She preferred not to consider how hard that would be to cope with.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help, G.,” she said, using the nickname her grandfather had given him. Poppy had coined a nickname for everyone. It was usually a shortened version of that person’s first name but Godfrey became a little tricky. Only his wife sometimes teased him by calling him God.

“Happy to help. You know how much Mina and I care about you.” Although his words were kind, he shot her a warning look from beneath his hairy eyebrows that indicated she might not like what was coming next.

“But...” she said, giving him the opportunity to speak his mind.

“But I’m going to stick my nose into your business and tell you that I think you should send this man on his way.”

“I will, of course. As soon as he’s better.”

“I mean as soon as he wakes up.”

Rifle wandered off as she sat down at the table. “G., he just got over a hundred stitches!”