Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family

Because of Janey Stafford.

Three days ago in the middle of the night, just hours before the cyclone had hit, hearing Janey’s name in the A and E department when Marcia had turned up some ID, he’d felt an electric prickle of shock all the way up his spine. He’d had to check the woman’s identity for himself, with his own eyes—reach out and take a look beneath her oxygen mask to make sure it was really and seriously the same Janey Stafford, Alice’s sister, not someone else.

He’d recognised her at once. The glossy mid-brown hair, the brown eyes, the freckles, the features that weren’t quite regular enough to make her beautiful, except when she smiled, which of course she hadn’t been doing then, in her unconscious state.

And although he’d played down their past relationship to his colleagues, he’d been thinking about her ever since. Wondering why she was there. Wondering if he was kidding himself that it had anything to do with him. Remembering how steady and sensible she’d always been, unlikely to come to Crocodile Creek on a whim. Thinking of his lost son and—

Stop it, Luke.

You can’t afford this.

The ten-year-old with the iffy arm appeared in the makeshift clinic along with his mum, and Luke snapped back into the pretence of focus—into the cheerful humour that his fellow doctors might think was designed to lighten the atmosphere of disaster and loss all around them, but they were wrong. The humour was really just a way of anchoring himself to the work he had to do.

‘So?’ he said to the scruffy ten-year-old. ‘Circus tricks? Rodeo riding? Jumping off a fence wearing paper wings and trying to fly?’

The kid gave a reluctant grin. ‘Nah. We were cleaning up the mud in the living room and I slipped on it.’ Not a story you were tempted to doubt when he still had a crust of dried mud all down his side, and when dozens of homes around here had fine, flood-washed silt inches thick on their floors. The mother nodded, too.

‘You didn’t consider a bath before you came in?’

‘We’re saving water.’

Ironic, when they’d just had about twenty inches of the stuff coming down from the sky, but Luke understood the situation. The family could have lost their rainwater tank in the storm, creeks were contaminated with debris and dead animals, town mains supplies were cut off or compromised in some other way. The damage and danger hadn’t ended on Sunday with the passage of the storm.

‘How’s your arm now? Does it hurt?’ He went through some standard questions and checks, decided the forearm was fractured but not displaced and so the backslab and bandage would be fine. He’d do it himself because Marcia was still treating some dodgy-looking cuts on their previous patient.

And while he wrapped the bandage, he wondered about Janey.

If she’d been brought out of her medically induced coma.

If she was talking yet.

If she was in contact with her sister.

If he could possibly go and sit beside her hospital bed and wangle anything out of her about Frankie Jay. If she acted cagey, told out-and-out lies, or if she really knew nothing, the way she’d claimed the last time he’d spoken to her by phone from England several years ago.

‘Just a couple of mosquito bites.’

He blinked. The kid with the arm had gone, and here was the old man, playing down the infected bites covering a pair of ancient, skinny, reddish-purple legs which didn’t look as if they boasted very good circulation.

And, of course, Luke was aware that he’d finished with the kid and called the old man in.

Of course he was.

He’d said the right words. Bring him in to the hospital outpatient department in two weeks, Mum, so we can check that arm. Good luck with the mud. Tell me what I can do for you today, Mr Connolly. But once again he’d been operating on autopilot the whole time.

‘Bit nasty, though, aren’t they?’ he said about the bites. ‘Have you been wading around in some of this water?’

The old man shrugged. ‘Helping my son on the farm. Crop’s destroyed. Take us years to get on our feet again. Never seen anything like that rain.’

‘Wish we could send some of it to the drought areas down south, hey?’ Luke took a closer look at the bites and decided that a topical cream wouldn’t be enough to combat the multiple sites of infection, some of which were crusted with yellow-white pus. The man needed a course of oral antibiotic, but would he remember to take it? He’d probably rely on his daughter-in-law or his son to remind him. The man’s skin felt warm to the touch. ‘Pretty sticky out there, is it?’

Another shrug. ‘Not too bad.’

Luke wrote out the script, gave some instructions and saw the old man’s eyes glaze over. ‘Show the tablets to your daughter-in-law,’ he said firmly. ‘She’ll make sure you take them at the right times of day.’

‘She’s good,’ Mr Connolly agreed. He hunched his shoulders, put a fist over his mouth and geared up for a cough, but nothing came. His breath wheezed in and out.

‘Nothing else bothering you today, Mr Connolly?’

Something you’re not talking about, the way I’m not talking about Janey, or the kid…

The man shook his head. ‘It was me daughter-in-law brought me in, said I had to do something about the bites. I told her it was nothin’ but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘She did the right thing.’

Marcia was mouthing something at Luke from the door with a frown on her face, and he had another one of those chills down his spine as an odd intuition kicked into high gear. He ushered the old man out, patting him on the back in an attempt to coax him to move faster. What did Marcia have to report?

‘Someone’s been asking for you,’ she said, as soon as they were alone. ‘That woman from the bus crash.’

‘Janey Stafford,’ he supplied automatically.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘So you do know her.’

‘I said I did, the other night.’

‘You said you knew her sister.’

He wasn’t going to respond to that. ‘So she’s conscious?’ His head felt suddenly light, and his ears were ringing.

‘Doing a lot better. They’re talking about discharge tomorrow. She wants to see you, and—’ She stopped suddenly.

‘Yeah? What?’ he growled, ill at ease.

‘Nothing. One more patient. Roads are still crawling, apparently, people are just pouring out of the area and heading south, which is good because it means less stress on services. Did you take Mr Connolly’s temperature?’

Luke went still. ‘You asked me to, didn’t you?’ Damn, he’d totally forgotten, even when he’d touched the man’s warm skin.

‘I thought he was brewing a low-grade fever.’

‘Has he left? Could you try and catch him? I completely forgot.’

Oh, hell, he didn’t usually do this! He could have blamed the lack of sleep since Saturday, the stress, the makeshift conditions of the clinic, but he knew the problem was in his own head, and the distractions were far more personal, deeply rooted in his past. If Janey Stafford had come to Crocodile Creek because of him…If she had news about his son…If that unidentified kid whom Georgie and Alistair had found…

‘So you think—?’ Marcia began.

‘I don’t know what I think. What did you think?’

‘I wondered about pneumonia. He’s a smoker. I should have been more specific, Luke. I’m sorry, it’s my fault as much as yours.’