I plodded down the three flights of stairs, my mind heavy with worries about the invasion of the press in two days. I got into the car and sat for a minute, staring at the fine coating of salt on the windows. Then I drove toward town and found an empty parking space in front of a shop called the Wine Cellar. The sign was pretty—a burgundy wine bottle under an arch of purple grapes. Opening the door to the shop, I stepped inside a cozy room filled with old mahogany wine racks. Hundreds of bottles sparkled under tiny lights set in the ceiling. I spotted a sign for French wines and walked toward it with no expectations. To my surprise, I found several good Bordeaux selections, including a Château Beychevelle 2000 Saint-Julien. I picked up the bottle, the familiar single-masted ship on the label like an old friend.
On the far wall of the store was a long oaken counter with a varnish job that would have put a bowling alley to shame. Behind the counter, a man with a round, sunburned face was reading a boating magazine.
I walked over and placed the bottle on the counter. “I’ll also need a corkscrew, please.”
“That’s a nice Saint-Julien,” the man said, looking at the label. “Have you tried it?”
I told him I had.
“Yes…very nice.” He grabbed a plastic corkscrew and a paper bag. “I love that nose of licorice and black currant.”
I pulled a fistful of twenties from the bottom of my purse and set them on the counter. “Yes,” I said. “So do I.”
“I don’t sell too much of that,” he said, putting the bottle and corkscrew in the bag. “We do get the occasional tourist who buys it, and there’s a fellow in town who orders a couple of cases every now and then.” He passed the bag to me.
Must be a good customer, I thought, knowing the wine was pricey. I thanked him and walked toward the door.
“Miss? Uh, miss?” The man called to me and I turned. He waved something in the air. “Is this yours?”
I walked back and saw that he was holding the phone message Paula had given me. The one from Roy.
“It was stuck to your money,” he said.
I looked at Paula’s scrunched-up writing:
2:15
Ellen Branford—
Roy called. Says he’s sorry.
I thanked him and left.
Outside in the sunlight I looked at the note again and wondered what Roy was apologizing about. Leaving so abruptly? The lecture on developers and their supposed effects on small towns? I did think he was being overly sensitive about any changes happening in Beacon. Why Roy got his nose out of joint in the first place was beyond me. Hayden was only joking about that golf course idea. I had tried to tell him that.
I got into the car and headed away from town, ignoring the turn onto Prescott Lane, which would have taken me back to the inn. I headed toward Dorset Lane and Roy’s house, telling myself I was just going there to let him know I’d gotten his message and that I wasn’t upset with him.
Halfway down the street I saw the Audi sitting in the middle of Roy’s driveway like a green light at an intersection. I pulled my car in behind it, walked up to the front porch, and rang the doorbell three times. Nothing.
I drove back to town, past the shops and along the beach, to the place where the new house was being built. There, parked in the dirt area in front, sat Roy’s blue pickup, the late afternoon sunlight glinting off its hood.
Walking around to the back of the house, I expected to see the door open, to hear the whir of a saw or the ping of a hammer, to see Roy with a tool belt slung around his hips. But the house was quiet, and then I remembered it was Sunday.
As I looked toward the ocean, I saw someone standing on the rocks, throwing stones into the surf. Although his back was to me, I could see it was Roy. I called his name, but he didn’t hear. I walked toward him, the surf crashing, salt spray hanging in the air, and called to him again.
He wheeled around, a couple of stones falling from his hand. “Ellen. What are you doing here?” His hair looked wiry and windblown, his face sunburned, like he had spent an afternoon on a boat. His eyes looked tired or maybe mad. I couldn’t tell.
Oh, no, I thought. This is a bad idea. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “I got your message.” A wave broke over the rocks, and I stepped back to avoid the spray.
He held a gray stone in his hand and rubbed it between his fingers. “Yeah, okay. I’m glad you got it,” he said, hurling the rock into the ocean.
A valley of silence slid between us. “I didn’t have your number,” I told him. “And I wanted to let you know I’d gotten it. The message, I mean. Thanks for the apology.” I picked up a blue mussel shell from a pile at my feet. It was dark and smooth. As the waves whirled toward the rocks, I thought about the feel of Roy’s arms around me and the determined look in his eyes the day I fell through the dock.
“Yeah, well, okay,” he said, tossing another stone. It flew far out, made a graceful arc, glistened for a moment in the sun, and then disappeared.
“I drove by the house,” I went on, “but you weren’t there.” I shivered as the wind blew through my shirt.
“I called,” Roy said, “because I wanted to tell you I was sorry. I know I walked off in a huff.”
“Yeah, we couldn’t figure out what happened.”
“I just got a little upset…about what your fiancé was saying.”
I shivered again and rubbed my arms. “He didn’t mean anything.”
“Is he a developer? Is he some kind of wheeler-dealer?”
“Hayden?” I started to laugh. “Wheeler-dealer?” I thought about his work as a litigator, his charity involvement, the run he would soon make for city council, the New York Times reporter and photographer who would be here in a couple of days. He was a wheeler-dealer, all right. “He’s an attorney.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
I sighed.
A seagull veered overhead, banked, circled, and flew off. Roy turned to me. “I want to show you something. Do you have a couple of minutes?”
I looked at my watch. It was five fifteen. Hayden would be waiting for me, waiting for the ankle bandage and the Pepto-Bismol and the Alka-Seltzer. I needed to get back.
Roy’s keys dangled in his hand, sunlight flickering off the metal.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do have a couple of minutes.”
We drove down roads now familiar to me, Roy shifting the truck and fooling with the radio, trying to tune in a station. We came to the stone wall I’d driven past three days before and drove on, the road running parallel to it. The sun was a yellow haze on the horizon, beginning its late afternoon descent. Finally the wall opened up, just enough to allow the intrusion of a dirt path, and we turned in.
“This is Kenlyn Farm,” Roy said, the truck rattling over a patch of bumpy ground.
“Yes, I’ve passed this several times,” I told him.
“My grandparents used to own this land.”
“They owned this?” I said, taking my first glimpse of what the wall had hidden from view.
Acres of wildflowers and tall grasses grew unimpeded. I hung my head out the window, gazing at the black-eyed Susans, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, purple lupine, and goldenrod running riot up and down the hills. I suddenly understood a lot more about Roy and why he’d been so sensitive about this place.
“It’s been out of the family for a long time,” he said.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, afraid I might break the spell. “Is it all right that we’re in here?”
He shrugged, ignoring the question. “I’ll show you the best view. It’s at the top of that slope there.”
He pointed to an incline ahead of us, and we drove toward it, stems and branches crunching and crackling under the truck’s wheels, rustling beneath the metal frame. He stopped a few yards from the wall and stepped out of the truck.
Then he came around and opened my door. “Be careful.” He took my hand and helped me down. The wildflowers were dense and high, almost to my knees, and from them came the steady hum of grasshoppers, crickets, and bees.
“Is it true that this all used to be blueberries?” I asked, turning around to take in the view from every direction.
“Yeah, it was once all blueberries,” Roy said.
We walked to the stone wall, which stood about three feet high at its tallest point. Much of the wall was lower, due to the effects of time and weather and obvious indifference on the part of its owners. Rocks and boulders had scattered to the ground as though they had jumped overboard to freedom.
Roy found a foothold and climbed up. Then he offered me his hand again, and I scrambled up and sat down on a large flat rock, swinging my legs over the wall next to his.
I gazed over the field, down the slope to a grove of pine trees at the bottom. “You’re right about the view.” I would have loved to photograph it in the late afternoon light.
Roy moved a few loose rocks from a pile on the top of the wall and placed them in some of the gaps around us.
“There’s a poem about fixing a wall,” I said.
He nodded. “Robert Frost. ‘Mending Wall.’”
I picked up a loose rock. “‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.’”
Roy looked down the length of the wall, with its lichen-covered boulders and tufts of green weeds sprouting in gaps between the stones. “‘That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,’” he said. “‘And spills the upper boulders in the sun, and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.’”
I sat there with my mouth open. “Do you know the whole thing?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Used to. Memorized it once for school. Could probably dredge it all up if I had to.”
“Impressive,” I said. A bee buzzed lazily at my feet.
Roy stared across the field. “I thought maybe if you saw this you’d understand why I got upset this afternoon.”
“Oh…you mean your lecture on developers?”
He nodded.
“I think I do understand. I know development can be a double-edged sword.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m not one of those crazy activists, those people who are against every new idea. I don’t think all development is bad. But I’ve seen some bad things done in the name of progress and improvement.”
He moved a little closer to me on the wall. I held my breath.
“And I come from a long line of stubborn Maine Cummings folks who felt the same way,” he said.
“Really? How far back does your family go in Maine?”
“Five generations.” He pointed to the sun, which had become a soft ball of putty on the horizon. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“My people were all from Augusta,” he said as he fit another stray rock into a small crevice between us. “That’s the state capital,” he added with a wink.
“Yes, I know that.”
He stared at me again. “You’ve got nice eyes. A little green, a little blue. I can’t really figure them out.” He continued to look at me, leaning in closer.
“They’re green-blue,” I said, pulling back.
“I think I just said that.” He smiled, letting his gaze rest on me a little too long.
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t let him make a pass at me. No, that would be horrible. But then why did I come here? Just to tell him I’d gotten his message? Or was I feeding my ego with his attention? “So your ancestors were from Augusta?” I asked, turning the subject back to his family.
Roy picked up a small stone from the top of the wall and pointed to a shiny pink streak down the middle. “Yeah, until my grandfather broke the mold and moved to Beacon.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He met a woman from Beacon,” Roy said, “and he fell in love.”
The breeze ruffled the wildflowers below us. I could feel him staring at me again.
“The woman was my grandmother,” Roy said, running his hand lightly along my arm.
I jumped down from the wall, ignoring the tingling feeling that was spreading inside me. “Well, he ended up in a beautiful place,” I said, looking around. “Look at all these flowers.” I tried to pick a tiny blue flower, but the stem was tough and wouldn’t break.
Roy walked up beside me. “You can’t do it like that.” I could feel the warmth of his body next to mine. We were almost touching. “You’ve got to do it like this.” He snapped the stem in his hand, his arm brushing against my side. Then he picked several more and handed the flowers to me, our fingers briefly touching.
The sun continued to drift toward the horizon as we walked along the wall, the insect sounds becoming softer.
“What happened then?” I asked. “To your grandparents.”
“Oh…well, they bought this property. My grandfather wanted to start a blueberry farm.”
I watched a grasshopper jump from a thicket of brush in front of us. “That sounds nice.”
Roy nodded. “Yeah, this was a big area for blueberries way back when. You saw the statue in town?”
“The statue?”
“The woman with the pail of blueberries.”
It sounded like the statue I was trying to photograph when I fell through the dock. “Yes, I think I know the one.”
“Different, isn’t it?” he said. “Most towns would have a statue of the founder, somebody like that. We have the blueberry lady.”
“I thought she was holding a bucket of grapes.”
Roy’s eyebrows shot up. “Grapes? Don’t ever admit that to anybody else from Beacon. They’ll ride you out of town on a rail.”
I laughed.
He reached out and touched a spot above my right eye.
I flinched.
“You’ve got something on your face,” he said, trying to brush it off.
“It’s a freckle. It won’t move.”
He leaned in. “Oh, yes, I can see that now.”
I started walking again. “So then what happened?”
“What happened? Oh, with the farm? Well, my grandfather learned everything there was to know about blueberries. Then he figured out what kinds of blueberry plants would be best for this piece of land.”
“I didn’t know there was more than one type.”
Roy looked surprised. “Of course there’s more than one.”
“Interesting,” I said. I wondered how they grew. Somehow I pictured them on vines, in thick clusters, growing over trellises. “They grow on vines, right?”
He scowled and brushed an insect off his shirt. “Vines? Blueberries? They grow on bushes.”
“Oh, yeah, bushes. Of course.”
He picked a black-eyed Susan and handed it to me. “This is nice, Ellen,” he said. “I like it.”
“Yes, it’s pretty.” I twirled the stem between my fingers.
“I wasn’t talking about the flower.”
I gave a nervous laugh and felt the heat rise in my face. I had to get him back to the story. “So then what happened?”
Roy smiled. “I think my grandfather could have grown anything from alfalfa to artichokes. That’s what Uncle Chet always said. He knew what worked and what didn’t. What made stronger plants, bigger berries, that kind of thing.”
“Sounds like he found his calling,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess it was his calling.” He brushed a piece of hair off my forehead. “There,” he said. “That was in your eyes, and your eyes are too pretty not to be seen.”
I looked down at my bouquet so he wouldn’t see me blush. “So they had the farm.”
“Yeah, they had a good business. They sold to grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, that kind of thing. And my grandmother had a blueberry stand.”
I thought about all the blueberry stands I’d seen so far in Maine. “And they did well?”
“Yes, they did all right. Then my grandmother had Uncle Chet. From the time he could walk he was out here running around in the bushes, pulling off the berries, and eating them. He used to tell me he always had purple stains on his clothes. He had all of my grandfather’s talent. Maybe even more. He loved this place.”
Roy stopped at a spot where several boulders had fallen from the wall into the field. He picked them up and hauled them back in place. “There,” he said, wiping the dirt off his hands.
I pictured a boy in overalls running through the rows of blueberry bushes under a warm summer sun. “It sounds lovely.”
“I’m sure it was.” Roy paused. “But nothing lasts forever.” He looked away, toward a robin that landed on the wall and was fluffing its wings. “My grandparents eventually sold it. They just got too old to keep it up.”
We came to a corner of the farm where a group of oak trees clustered together and one huge oak stood off by itself, like someone at a cocktail party who didn’t want to join the group.
“Didn’t they have your uncle to help them? If he loved it so much…”
Roy walked toward the lone oak and leaned against its trunk. “No, he left Beacon when he was twenty and he didn’t come back for years.” He looked up at the canopy of branches and leaves suspended above us like a sculpture. “Something happened—he never wanted to talk about it, but the farm only made him sad.”
I let my gaze drift from the stone wall at the top of the field, across the meadow, and down toward the pine trees at the very bottom. “I can’t believe he didn’t miss it, though.”
A spot of sunlight flickered through the trees and landed on Roy’s shoulder. “Oh, I think he did,” Roy said. “In fact, I never heard it from him, but other people told me it was really hard for him to come back and see the farm in somebody else’s hands. Live in this town and have to drive by it all the time.”
“So why did he come back?” I said.
The patch of sunlight slid across Roy’s face. “I guess because it was still his home.”
I thought about that. I wondered if you could ever really get your true home out of your system. Probably not.
“Who owns the land now?” I asked him.
“Some guy from Boston bought it a few years ago, but he died and his kids inherited it. They don’t live around here. They want to sell it, but they want to subdivide it first. You know, slice and dice.”
Slice and dice. Yes, I did know. I had done that very thing for more than one client, and I’d never given it any thought other than what price per acre it would ultimately yield. I never thought about what the land had been or what it might have meant to the people who lived there.
“Could you buy it?” I asked.
Roy laughed. “Not really. Besides, what would I do with a hundred acres? I’m not a farmer.”
“I don’t know. I guess it was just wishful thinking. I was hoping you could get it back into your family. That way maybe you could do something with it one day when you got married. Or you could give it to your children.” I plucked a stem of Queen Anne’s lace and added it to my bouquet.
“Yeah, well, I doubt I’ll be getting married any time soon.”
“No? A nice, good-looking, gainfully employed man like yourself? I would think you’d be in demand.”
Roy stopped and gazed down the hill. “The right girl’s not in my life.” He shook his head. “Gotta have the right girl to get married.”
I wondered if he’d ever been married. He stopped and I watched in awe as he gently removed a ladybug from his sleeve and deposited it on a stem of purple lupine.
“Came close to being married once,” he said, as though he were reading my mind. “But I waited too long. She ended up with another guy. They have a couple of kids, last I heard.”
“How long ago was that?”
He thought for a moment. “Oh, about six years.”
“And nobody since?”
“Nobody serious,” he said as he picked up a fallen rock and placed it back in the wall. “If I ever get lucky enough to find the right girl, I’m not going to mess it up again. I’m not going to let her go.”
I smiled. “What are you going to do? Put her in handcuffs?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not handcuffs.” He scratched the back of his neck and half closed his eyes. Then he smiled. “Maybe I’ll build her something. Maybe I’ll build her a palace.”
“A palace…now, there’s a thought. Like the emperor who built the Taj Mahal for his wife. How romantic is that?”
“But didn’t she die in childbirth?” he asked. “Isn’t that why he built it?”
He was right. That probably wasn’t the best example. “I think she did die in childbirth,” I said. “But putting that aside, what woman wouldn’t want a palace?”
“I guess I’ll find out someday.”
We stood in silence for a moment and then Roy said, “I’d better get you back.”
We walked to the truck, and I turned around to take one last look at the view. “Well,” I said, “if you can’t buy it, you’re not going to be able to stop them from subdividing it.”
Roy turned to me, his blue eyes quiet, resigned. “I can’t stop them from subdividing it, Ellen.”
We stood there for a moment as a hawk flew overhead, its wings barely moving, its body suspended like a whisper above us. Then Roy opened the passenger door.
“Hold on a second,” I said as I noticed something near the truck’s front wheel. Next to the tire track, where stalks of wildflowers lay crushed and matted, a cluster of purplish-blue caught my eye. I pushed back the flowers and pulled on a gnarled branch. It snapped, and I held a piece in my hand. On the branch were three tiny blueberries.
Everything around me seemed to stop—the insect hum, the breeze, the slow descent of the sun. I held up the branch, my hand trembling. “Look,” I said. “They’re still here.”
He touched the tip of the branch. “Blueberries can be pretty hardy. They can survive for a long time in the right conditions.” He smiled at me. “Kind of nice to know, isn’t it? Some things keep going no matter what happens around them.”
I thought about the woody stalk with its three bright berries living on after Chet, after Gran. I held onto it as I climbed into the truck. The sun cast threads of golden-red over the field. The insects had quieted, as if they, too, knew the end of the day was near. Roy started the engine, and we drove out of the farm and onto the main road, the cool evening air streaming through the open windows.
“You never really explained why you’re still here in Beacon,” he said.
We drove alongside the farm and then turned left at the intersection, heading back toward town. “Do you remember,” I said, “how I told you I found the house where my grandmother grew up?”
Roy slowed down to let a squirrel dart across the road. “Yeah. You said it’s on Comstock Drive.”
“There’s a painting in the attic of that house, done on plaster. The people who own the house found it when they were renovating, when they pulled off the drywall. My grandmother was the artist. It’s really an amazing piece of work, and the painting is of her and your uncle.”
Roy turned abruptly and stared at me. “My uncle? And your grandmother? She painted the two of them?”
I nodded. “Yes. They were teenagers, standing under an oak tree. It’s kind of…almost mystical, I guess. And beautiful. Really lovely.”
“I’d like to see it.”
I wanted him to see it, although I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to work that out. I told him about the painting at the Beacon Historical Society and the Bugle article in the library, and the camera shop, and my meeting with Lila Falk.
“Wow,” Roy said as the road meandered up a hill and around a bend. “You’ve been busy. And all the stuff you found out—you didn’t know about any of it?” His voice was so animated. It made me feel even more excited.
“No, we didn’t know any of it,” I said. “And I keep finding out more and more. That’s why I’ve stayed. We never knew Gran was an artist or that she went to art school. And her paintings are so good.” I looked out the window and watched the woods, thick with pine trees, slide past. “I just wish she hadn’t kept it a secret.”
Roy downshifted and turned a corner. “Maybe she sent you up here to uncover the secret. Maybe that was part of her plan.”
Could that have been part of the plan? Could she have wanted me, expected me, to uncover all of this? I wanted to believe it, but it didn’t seem likely. “How could she have known I’d find her painting in the Porters’ attic?” I said. “It was buried under plaster until recently. Or that I’d end up at the camera shop and then meet Lila Falk?”
Roy slowed the truck as we headed toward a stop sign. “Well, maybe she didn’t know exactly how you’d find out, but she might have figured if you came up here you’d find something.” Roy looked over and smiled. “And you did. You found a legacy that might have been lost forever if you hadn’t come.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe, along with delivering the letter, she was hoping I’d uncover her past.
“I guess you could be right,” I said.
We drove on without a word, the only sound the hum of Roy’s tires against the road. Then he turned onto Paget Street, and the ocean and the buildings of downtown Beacon came into view. When we got to the construction site, he pulled up next to my car, walked around, and opened his door for me.
“Thanks for showing me the farm,” I said, stepping down from the truck.
He stood by the hood. “Thanks for finding the blueberries.” He put his hands in his pockets, and I could see the slight suggestion of a smile on his face, accompanied by the tiniest of wrinkles near his eyes.
“What?” I asked. The way he was looking at me made me nervous. “What is it?” I clutched the bouquet of flowers and the blueberry branch.
He took a step closer. “Why did you come here today, Ellen?”
The question was a lot more difficult than it sounded. Why had I come? I still wasn’t sure myself. Was it just to let him know I’d received the phone message? Or was there something more? Was I falling in love with him? Is that what was happening? I wanted to look away, but I felt trapped.
“What do you mean?” I said. I could hear the nervous tremble in my voice.
“I just mean what made you come here?” He moved in even closer. I could almost feel him without touching him.
“I told you. I felt bad about what happened this morning and…” I began to gesture, my fingers twitching like marionette hands. “I knew you were upset and when you called I figured it would be good if…I mean, I thought maybe I should…that…” I looked away. Oh, God, what was I saying? I wasn’t making sense.
Roy cocked his head, the smile still on his lips. He stared at me, almost as though he knew that if he looked at me long enough he might get me to do something crazy, like throw my arms around him again or admit that I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Another second or two and I would be totally under his spell. His eyes were so bright and so blue, like the waters of the Caribbean, clear and deep and full of bright yellow fish and purple ferns and red coral, and they were pulling me in, those eyes, and I was going under, ready to hold my breath and take the dive.…
And then I heard his voice. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You wanted to make sure we were back to having a clean slate.” He smiled and, with a little shrug, he added, “Okay, done.”
Was that it? Was he letting me off the hook? But I didn’t want to leave anymore. I wanted to stay there and float away in his eyes.
Roy opened my car door, and I slid into the driver’s seat in a fog. I watched him get into his truck. I watched him shut the door. I watched while he started the engine and I heard the sputter of the motor. He put up his hand, a motionless wave. I put up my hand, and I could almost feel us touching.
I took the key with the braided ribbon from my handbag and unlocked the door to the room. I was shocked to see Paula and a man wearing a white doctor’s coat in the room. What was going on? How long had I been gone?
Hayden was still lying on the bed, but the man in the white coat, who reminded me of my twelfth-grade physics teacher, was wrapping Hayden’s ankle with a bandage.
“What’s going on?” I rushed to Hayden’s side.
“It’s all under control,” Paula said, giving me a confident wave. “Doc’s taking care of him.”
I looked at the man unrolling the bandage. Then I turned to Hayden. “What happened?”
“It just got worse,” he said, wincing. “Puffed up like a basketball.” He looked so pale and, suddenly, so small. “I called down for more ice, and when Paula came to deliver it, she took one look at me and rang for Dr. Herbert.”
“Thank God,” I said, taking Hayden’s hand, wondering how I could have been so callously wandering around Kenlyn Farm with Roy Cummings when I should have been here with Hayden.
“It’s hard to find someone on a Sunday,” Paula said. “Especially for a house call.” She smiled at the doctor. “But Doc here is married to my cousin, Laurie, so I knew he’d come.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I’m Ellen, his fiancée.”
“Glad to help,” Dr. Herbert said as he secured the bandage with clips. “I’m going to give you a couple of prescriptions,” he told me. “One for the pain and one for the swelling.” He took a pad out of his pocket and scribbled something. “He’s probably torn the ligament, but he should be better in a day or two.” He handed me the prescriptions. “Just keep him off of it for a couple of days.”
“I will, Doctor. Thank you very much. You’re so kind to do this. Let me give you my card and you can send me the bill.”
He picked up his black doctor’s bag and I handed him my card. Then he followed Paula out the door.
I sat on the bed next to Hayden, weighed down by my guilty conscience. “Sweetheart,” I said, leaning over to give him a hug. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t get back sooner. I had no idea you were feeling this bad.” I kissed his forehead.
“It’s all right. I knew you needed some time on your own to decompress.”
“I never even went to the pharmacy,” I admitted sheepishly. “Thank God Paula got that doctor over here.”
Hayden adjusted his bandaged leg on the pillows. “I guess you’ll have to go to the pharmacy now, though. What did he prescribe, anyway?”
“Let’s see.” I looked at the first prescription. “Tylenol with codeine.” Then I saw something odd. Little paw prints across the top of the prescription sheet.
Paw prints?
Underneath the paw prints I saw the name: PETER HERBERT, DVM, HERBERT ANIMAL HOSPITAL. The guy was a vet.