The shrill ring of the telephone pulled Allie Branning from a deep sleep, and she slit open her eyes and waited for Mark to answer it. It took two rings for her to realize that Mark wasn’t there—he was on duty tonight. Wearily, she rolled over to his side of the bed and groped for the telephone on his bed table. Her free hand automatically went to her eight-month pregnant belly as she brought the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Allie, it’s me. I’m sorry I woke you, but something’s happened.”
She reached for the lamp and turned it on, squinting against the light. Slowly, she sat up. “Mark, what is it?”
“It’s Stan Shepherd. He’s come down with some kind of illness, and he’s in a coma. They’re helicoptering him to Slidell.”
“A coma? I just saw him yesterday. He was fine.”
“It happened during the night. The thing is, Celia’s showing a few symptoms, like she may have whatever it is, too, and they’re taking her in the ambulance. She’s really strung out, Allie. I’d go there myself if I wasn’t on duty…”
“I’m getting dressed right now,” Allie said, sliding out of bed and pulling the phone cord into the closet with her. “Mark, what kind of illness is this?”
“I think it must be food poisoning,” he said. “We’re not sure. I’m gonna call Aggie Gaston next. She’ll want to be there with her niece. She may want to ride with you.”
Allie pulled on a pair of maternity jeans, then stopped and held the phone with both hands. “Mark, is Stan going to be all right?”
“I don’t know, Allie. Pray on the way, okay? I’ll be doing it from this end.”
“I love you,” she said, suddenly stricken at how fragile life could be.
“I love you, too. Call me from the hospital when you know anything. And be careful.”
Mark punched off the cell phone he kept with him in case Allie, in her delicate condition, needed to reach him, and called information for Aggie Gaston’s phone number. When there wasn’t a listing for Aggie herself, he asked for Dugas Gaston, her husband who had died over twenty years earlier. As he’d suspected, it was still listed under his name. Aggie, the eighty-one-year-old Cajun spitfire who played “Aunt Bea” to the firemen by bringing them at least two meals a day, was one of the town’s staple citizens.
“Who you callin’ now?” George asked him as he drove the fire truck back to the station.
“Aunt Aggie,” Mark said. Though Celia was the only one in town truly related to Aggie Gaston, everyone in town referred to her as Aunt Aggie, for she seemed like family to them all. “I hate to wake her up, old as she is.”
“You just afraid she’ll be too tired to bring you some good eats tomorrow.”
Mark grinned. “And you don’t care a whit about that, I guess.”
“Hey, I can cook ’em up myself.”
“Right. That’s why you show up at mealtime even when you’re off duty.”
The big Cajun laughed.
Mark dialed the number and listened as it rang once, twice, three times. Despite Aunt Aggie’s vast wealth due to an inheritance that she’d invested in Microsoft before anyone knew who Bill Gates was, it was just like her to keep only one phone in the house. He pictured her getting up and pulling her robe on, as if anyone on the phone could see her, then turning on the light and making her way downstairs to the telephone in the hallway. As if he’d imagined it all just right, she answered on the fifth ring.
“Hello?”
“Aunt Aggie, this is Mark Branning,” he told the Cajun woman. “I’m terribly sorry to wake you, but I thought you’d want to know that Stan and Celia are being transported to the Slidell Hospital. They’ve come down with some kind of illness, and Stan is in a coma.”
“Oh, me, no!” she shouted. “Mark, how my Celia is?”
“Not that bad yet,” he said. “Look, I don’t know that much, but I thought you’d want to go over there. I’m on duty, but if you call Allie, she can drive you.”
“I call her right now.”
The phone clicked, and he slipped it back in his pocket.
Dan came into the garage, a barbell in his hand. “Hey, Mark, do you know what Celia was talking about? Saying she’d seen arsenic poisoning before?”
“No. I don’t have a clue. She hasn’t been in Newpointe but a few years, and she doesn’t talk much about her life before she came here. She must have had some experience with it then.”
“Yeah, I guess. Just seemed weird. Did you call Aunt Aggie?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She and Allie are on their way over there.”
He only hoped that it wouldn’t be too late.