‘WHAT the—?’
Luke braked sharply enough to cause a slight skid in the loose shingle of the road leading to his home as his headlights picked out the solitary figure running down the verge.
Being the back view of a person in an unnaturally bright spotlight was no hindrance to recognition, and Luke knew exactly who it was almost instantly.
At least this time the curvy figure was fully clothed. The last time Luke had seen Beth out of uniform had been at the staff swimming pool on Tuesday, and the image of her body in a swimsuit that had to be a size too small had been plaguing him ever since.
Not that that had stopped him frequenting the emergency department of Ocean View far more often than was customary. If anything, he was even less able to resist that magnetic ‘scab-picking’ effect than he had been the night she had appeared back in his life. That moment after dealing with the motorbike accident victim when he’d noticed the slippers had replayed itself in his mind countless times since.
Knowing that Beth was living in the motel unit allocated to new and single staff members had piqued his curiosity, but he had been largely in control of any encounters they’d had so far. And he wanted to keep it that way. He wasn’t going to risk another put-down like the one he’d received when he’d suggested they get together for coffee.
Right now Beth was apparently hell-bent on reaching his home. His sanctuary.
It was too much!
He braked again, this time coming to a halt. He pressed the button to unroll the window on the passenger side of the vehicle. Beth had seen him coming, of course, and she actually looked eager to speak to him, but Luke got in first.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
‘Luke!’ Beth’s jaw dropped. ‘I thought you were at home.’ She peered in at him, clearly disconcerted. ‘There’s a light on at your house.’
‘It’s automatic,’ Luke snapped. ‘To deter intruders.’
The rebuke went right over her head. ‘I need a phone. There’s—’
‘Hang on just a minute,’ Luke ordered. ‘How did you know it was my house?’
‘Ronald told me. No, Roz told me. Ronald just showed me where it was, but that’s not important, Luke. There’s a—’
‘It might be important to me. Who the hell is Ronald when he’s at home?’
‘For God’s sake, Luke!’ Beth raised her voice. ‘There’s a whole bunch of whales on your beach.’
‘What?’
‘I thought they were big rocks but then one of them moved and I saw—’
‘Get in.’ Luke had started rolling downhill again even before Beth could shut her door properly. ‘Have you reported it?’
‘I didn’t have my mobile with me. That’s why I was going to the house. I mean, your house.’
Luke reached for the phone plugged into the Jeep’s dashboard and punched in three numbers.
‘Emergency services,’ the voice responded promptly. ‘What service do you require? Police, fire or ambulance?’
‘Police.’
A new voice was on the line within seconds. ‘What is your location?’
‘Boulder Bay. Just north of Cloudy Bay, Marlborough.’ Luke knew that the call was probably being answered in a major centre such as Wellington or Christchurch.
‘And what is your emergency?’
A mass whale stranding.’ Luke could hear the surprised silence at the other end of the line as he concentrated on getting round a sharp bend in the road. ‘Sorry, but this was the fastest way I could think of to activate a rescue operation. I don’t have any numbers easily accessible for the Department of Conservation. They handle these sort of emergencies and we’ll need some assistance pretty quickly.’
‘Can you keep your mobile phone with you, sir?’ The officer from the police communications centre had recovered from the surprise. ‘We’re onto it. Someone should contact you very soon.’
‘Good. I should have some more information by then.’ Having stopped the vehicle and killed the engine, Luke unhooked the phone and clipped it to his belt. ‘Come on,’ he said to Beth. ‘We’d better go and have a closer look.’
Beth looked quite nervous about approaching the whales, but Luke had no hesitation in walking right up the nearest mammal. They were big, but not monstrous. Its blowhole was about level with Luke’s waist and the whale was eight to ten feet long. Mostly black, there were large patches of white and the size of the fins was another good clue to their species.
‘These are pilot whales,’ he told Beth. ‘That’s good.’
‘Is it?’
‘If they were sperm whales there would be no rescue operation. They’d all have to be killed and buried.’
Beth was horrified. ‘Why?’
‘Because sperm whales have virtually no chance of survival once they’re grounded like this.’ Luke’s head was turning rapidly, scanning the length of the small beach. ‘It must have happened within the last hour or so. The tide’s turned so we’re going to have a long wait for enough water to try refloating them.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m amazed no one saw the pod coming in. There must be twenty or thirty animals here.’
Beth had come closer to the whale Luke was standing beside. She reached out a tentative hand and touched the rough cluster of barnacles that had seaweed trailing from it like an odd clump of hair. Then her hand stroked the black skin.
‘It feels warm,’ she said in surprise. ‘But it’s dry. Is it dead?’
‘Hard to tell just by looking,’ Luke said. ‘They can hold their breath for an extraordinarily long time. They can go into a diving reflex when they’re stranded like this.’ He walked to the head of the whale and gently touched the edge of its eyeball. The eye and then the whole whale twitched.
‘The what?’
‘The tail. It can swish pretty fast and it packs a punch.’
‘Oh.’ Beth hurriedly stepped away from the tail end of the large mammal.
‘Don’t step on the flippers!’
‘OK.’ Beth sounded out of her depth now and a second later she was clearly distressed. ‘Oh! Is that a baby?’
The whale she moved towards was only about the size of a large dolphin. It was lying on its side, a flipper moving weakly, and it made a mewling noise that had Beth dropping to a crouch beside it and reaching out to touch it.
‘You poor wee thing. Luke?’ Beth’s face was upturned to him and her tone was beseeching. ‘Can’t we do something? Can we save it?’
‘We’ll certainly do our best.’ How could he not respond to that heartfelt plea? The involvement of a baby in any kind of disaster exerted a greater tug on the heartstrings, but getting too emotionally involved with this kind of situation was a mistake that could easily affect the outcome. Luke turned away. ‘Come up to the house. We need a whole heap of stuff.’
‘Like what?’
‘Blankets and sheets. Shovels. Buckets. We’re going to have to keep them all cool and damp. We’ll need to dig trenches to get any of them lying on their sides upright again. We also need to dig moats around their flippers and tails. This way.’ Luke led Beth up the path that wound between boulders and into the native shrubbery that comprised his garden.
This was a bad idea, inviting Beth inside his home, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t carry everything himself and it could be some time before any further assistance arrived. The thought made Luke reach for his phone.
‘Who are you calling? The police again?’
‘No. My parents.’ It was sad, the way a puzzled frown appeared on Beth’s face. Her parents would probably be the last people she would think of contacting in any emergency. She had always had such a clear vision of the kind of family she wanted and it had come because she felt it had not been provided in her upbringing. The opposite had happened in Luke’s case, but it had taken extreme circumstances to show him the value of what he had always had.
‘They’re involved with Project Jonah,’ Luke explained. ‘And they’ve had a lot of experience with whale rescues over the years. Hi, Mum—Hang on just a sec?’
Luke opened his front door and turned to Beth. ‘There’s a linen closet next to the bathroom. Get as many blankets and sheets as you can find. Take the ones off the bed as well.’ He knew he sounded terse but he couldn’t help it.
Beth was going inside his house. It was never going to feel quite the same again, was it? He would think of her being there. Wondering what she thought about the things she saw. Whether she was drawn by the simplicity and homely feel of the place as much as he was. He would just be thinking of her, dammit, and he was already doing more than he should be of that.
‘Mum? Are you still there? Listen, there’s a pod of whales that’s beached itself practically on my front doorstep…’
Luke’s conversation with his mother faded as he went, presumably in the direction of a tool shed, and Beth went inside the house.
By the time she had taken a few steps she was feeling very puzzled. This must have been a holiday house in the past. Small and simply built, it had the feel of a quintessential New Zealand ‘bach’. Modifications had been made in recent times, like the new kitchen and bathroom, but Luke choosing this as his home seemed inexplicable. It was so far removed from the kind of mansion he had aspired to as his career had been taking off. The kind of home her parents had owned.
Beth loved it. She could imagine how perfect a spot the small living area would be to watch the sun rise or set, but there was no time to stop and admire the sea view right now. The main bathroom was on the opposite side of the house, looking into a small garden, and the linen cupboard was easy to find.
Beth stacked all the sheets and blankets from the shelves near the front door and hesitated before fulfilling the other part of her instructions. She really didn’t want to find Luke’s bedroom and take the linen from his bed.
It was as difficult as she had anticipated. The bed smelt of Luke. Beth couldn’t believe how she could have remembered that faint, musky scent that she associated so strongly with lazy early morning love-making or just lying in someone’s arms, feeling loved and protected and so…safe.
She couldn’t help glancing swiftly around to see if there was any evidence of a female resident. A comb or lipstick maybe, or a feminine robe hanging behind the door. The only evidence she found anywhere suggested that Luke’s interest in housekeeping hadn’t grown much since his days of sharing a house with other young doctors.
The aroma from the pile of dirty socks and underwear in the corner of the new-looking en suite bathroom did not evoke any poignant memories. Beth’s nose crinkled and she hurried outside with the first armload of linen. Going back for the rest, she noted the dirty dishes on the kitchen bench and the CDs scattered on the floor of the living area.
The cover of the uppermost disc caught her eye. Seventies Retro it was called and it brought back a sudden and unwanted memory of the fancy-dress party of that era that she had attended with Luke to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of one of the surgical registrars he lived with. Beth had gone dressed in an orange Paisley caftan she had found in a vintage clothing store and she had covered her black curls with a long blonde wig.
She’d had the best time. The only really good time she had ever had attending the kind of parties Luke had preferred. Maybe that had been because the elite of the local medical community had all been in disguise that night, letting their hair down and having too much fun to be concerned with flaunting position or wealth or superiority.
And she had gone home with Luke well before the others had left the party venue and Luke had slowly removed her wig and that caftan and had looked at her with that look and said softly, ‘I just love unwrapping presents!’
But it had been Beth who had received the gift that night. Love-making so intense but so gentle. Until Beth had demanded more and had been given a lot more than she had bargained for. A lesson, in fact, on just how wild sex could be with a partner you trusted completely.
She had never trusted anyone else that completely, but that was only to be expected, wasn’t it? Luke had been her first real love and she had given him her heart. Maybe he still had a piece or two of it. Or perhaps she had lost them when she’d tried to put her life back together. It would explain why she’d never been able to offer anyone else the kind of love and commitment she had felt for Luke.
Could anything else ever be that good again?
It was a relief to leave the house and the memory behind. Luke was on the path with a laden wheelbarrow and her first armload of linen was balanced precariously on top of buckets and tools.
‘Help’s on its way,’ Luke informed her briskly. ‘A Department of Conservation team is flying in from Wellington and Mum and Dad are rounding up local volunteers. The police are going to cordon off the road so we don’t get inundated with sightseers, and I’ve offered the house as a base for the operations manager. They’ll need kitchen facilities and so on.’
‘You sound like you know all about this kind of thing.’
‘Not really. I helped at a stranding years ago on Farewell Spit, which is a much more common place for this to happen. I would have thought Boulder Bay beach was too steep and rocky, but there you go. It’s happened.’
‘They do it when one of them gets sick or injured, don’t they?’ Beth stumbled a little as she followed Luke. At 9 p.m. it still wasn’t completely dark but it was hard to see her feet around the pile of blankets she held.
‘Sometimes it’s because the leader is sick or disorientated and sometimes they just don’t know why it happens. There’ll be people coming to study the scene. They make a site map and examine and take samples from any dead whales.’ Luke looked up as a set of car headlights appeared on the road winding down the hillside.
‘I hope that’s my parents,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked Dad to ferry other volunteers down from the top of the hill. We don’t want too many vehicles down here or there won’t be room for the heavy stuff.’
‘Heavy stuff?’
‘Tractors. Boats. Generators for the lights, that sort of thing.’
‘Good grief! I had no idea how much was involved in rescuing whales.’
‘Are you working tonight?’
‘No. And I’ve got the day off tomorrow.’
‘Good.’ Luke smiled. ‘How about coming to help me with a spot of triage, then, Nurse?’
‘Certainly, Doctor.’ Beth smiled back. ‘Do you have some colour-coded triage cards in that wheelbarrow first-aid kit of yours?’
‘No, but I’ve got a can of spray paint. We’ll put a big “X” on any obviously dead whales and that will save time later.’
The feeling of excited anticipation that the prospect of working with Luke was engendering evaporated. Beth didn’t want any of these whales to be dead. This was an extraordinary experience to be thrown into and Beth’s connection suddenly went way past being the person to have discovered the emergency.
She wasn’t about to stop and try to analyse why it was so important to her. Maybe it was because the whales had chosen Luke’s beach to strand themselves on. Or maybe she had accorded the situation the status of an omen regarding her new life in this place.
It didn’t matter. Her determination to succeed was powerful enough to feel like desperation and there was no time to lose.
At least fifty volunteers had gathered within an hour, and until the Department of Conservation officials arrived it was Luke’s parents, Don and Barbara, who took charge of the rescue operation. One whale was already dead—possibly the sick or injured member of the pod that had prompted the rest to strand themselves.
Pairs and trios of people were assigned a now numbered whale each to care for. Beth waited until finally Barbara shone her torch on the piece of paper she was writing on and then looked up.
‘Beth Dawson?’
‘I’m here.’
‘We’ll get you to look after the baby. Jack—you can help. You’ve got some experience.’
Jack showed Beth how to gouge a shallow trench in the sand parallel to the tiny whale’s body. Luke came past just as they were completing this first task.
‘That looks deep enough. Let’s try getting him upright. Dad?’ Luke’s father was talking to a man as he shone a torch on one of the larger whales. ‘Could you give us a hand?’
Don was also satisfied with the trench digging. ‘Make sure you keep his flippers flat against the body when we roll him,’ he advised. ‘They’re easy to injure.’
The four of them managed to roll the baby whale from its side quite easily, and the trench looked as though it would keep him upright securely.
‘Do you know about making a moat around the flippers and tail?’ Don asked Beth.
She nodded. ‘And Jack said we can’t make it too deep because that might make it difficult to shift him later.’
‘Sorry, Dad.’ Luke was draping a folded sheet over the whale’s body behind the blowhole. ‘You know Jack, don’t you? This is Beth Dawson.’
‘Hello, there.’ Don Savage had a smile identical to his son’s, and Beth found herself smiling back just as enthusiastically at the wiry man who looked to be in his seventies. ‘That name sounds familiar.’ He peered at her more closely. ‘You’re not the Beth, by any chance, are you?’
‘Um…’ Beth had no idea what she could say to that. What did he mean? Had Luke been bitter enough to describe her in lurid detail to his parents perhaps?
‘Your mate, Pete, is just over here.’ Luke took his father’s elbow and steered him away without acknowledging the interchange. ‘He and Doris are looking after number fifteen. You might like to come and check out their moats.’
Doris was the woman from the dairy and Beth had been astonished at how good it was to see a familiar face amongst the volunteers. A not-so-pleasant surprise came when she saw the arrival of the pretty blonde woman she had seen Luke talking to that day. At least she was directed well away from Beth’s position to join the group caring for the large bull whale who was assumed to be the pod leader.
Jack, Beth’s only partner in caring for the baby whale, was a man in his fifties and he was rapidly becoming a friend.
‘You’re going to be OK, Willy,’ he told their whale.
Beth grinned. ‘Willy? As in Free Willy?’
‘Yup. It’s the only whale name I know. Unless you can think up a better one?’
‘Willy’s fine by me.’
Naming the baby made it all seem even more personal. Beth joined people queuing to share buckets and make trips into the surf and back, carrying water to fill the moats and tip carefully over the whales’ backs. Beth knew without being told not to tip water into Willy’s blowhole but she hadn’t known it still needed to stay moist. Using a corner of the wet sheet to dampen the skin on the whale’s head, Beth leapt back and nearly fell over when it released a breath with a noise like the vent being opened on a pressure cooker.
She laughed, but the spray was cold. Her legs were now soaked from the knees down from filling the bucket in the surf, and it all got colder over the next hour or two. The first of a supply of hot drinks was provided at the same time as the generators were set up to flood the area with artificial light, and the atmosphere changed as the rescue operation went into another gear under the expert supervision of Department of Conservation experts.
No one was more determined or focussed than Beth, however.
‘I think number fifteen must be Willy’s mother,’ she told Jack excitedly. ‘Have you noticed how she answers every time he makes a sound?’
Number fifteen didn’t just respond vocally to the baby. It had a tendency to thrash its tail, which had Doris and Pete scrambling out of the way at regular intervals. The operations manager became concerned.
‘We might have to try moving the baby. You’re kind of hemmed in here and it could be dangerous if this one gets any more distressed.’
‘But we think that’s Willy’s mother,’ Beth exclaimed. ‘If we separate them, she’ll only get more upset, won’t she?’
‘Willy?’ The Department of Conservation official shook his head, clearly unimpressed with Beth’s bond with the baby whale. ‘We’ll see how it goes,’ he said noncommittally. ‘I’ll be back.’
Jack took a turn hauling buckets of water just after 1 a.m. ‘The tide’s turned,’ he told Beth. ‘It’s on its way back in.’
‘How deep does it need to get before we start refloating the whales?’
‘We’ll be about knee deep by the time the adults can be shifted. We’ll have to hang onto this little chap for a while, though, or even shift him further up the beach. Once we get them all back into the water we have to keep them together in a group for an least an hour to try and reorientate them.’
‘Is that so they won’t just beach themselves again?’
‘That’s right. And after we’ve let them go, we’ll all have to stand in a line in the waves and bang metal things together to try and persuade them to head out to sea. We’re in for the long haul, I’m afraid. You’re not too tired or cold yet, are you?’
‘No.’ Beth’s tone was valiant but she was tired. And very cold. And her stomach was hurting. When the next cup of soup came her way she found she couldn’t swallow more than half of it. The warmth was welcome but it made her feel sick.
Cramp, she decided, from crouching over Willy too long without stretching her muscles.
‘I’ll get some more water,’ she told Jack. ‘Be back in a minute.’
Luke saw Beth struggling to carry a full bucket of sea water.
She looked exhausted. And very pale. Luke couldn’t suppress the memory of how much he’d always loved the smooth, milky quality of Beth’s skin, but seeing her right now did not make him want her the way it had in the swimming pool the other day.
What it did make him want to do was to take her in his arms and hold her until she warmed up. Until the lines of strain on her face eased. He wanted to tell her what a great job she was doing and how impressed he was at the way she threw herself so wholeheartedly into helping others—people or animals. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right. She didn’t have to be so worried.
The only comfort he could offer, however, was a smile and an outstretched hand to relieve her of the burden of the heavy bucket.
‘Here, let me help you with that. You look done in.’
Beth hesitated, as though she was about to refuse his assistance. She gave in and let him take the bucket but she didn’t return his smile. She grimaced, in fact, and dug the fingers of her right hand into her abdomen just beside her hip.
‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got a stitch from carrying that bucket.’
‘Have a rest for a minute.’
‘Mmm.’ Beth looked away abruptly. Had she read a level of concern she didn’t appreciate? Luke carefully made his expression and tone as neutral as possible.
‘I’ll bet you’re wishing you hadn’t come to live in Hereford after all.’
A startled glance let him know he’d said the wrong thing…again.
‘I meant this,’ he added quickly. ‘There’s not many places you could go to and end up having to knock yourself out saving whales.’
‘No.’ Beth sounded incredibly weary. Was she thinking of other reasons why she might wish she hadn’t come to live in Hereford? Like seeing him again?
The mournful cry of a nearby whale seemed to echo Luke’s melancholy thought. He stared at the back of Beth’s head for a second as she started walking slowly back towards her own whale. Then he followed.
‘Why did you come here, Beth?’
‘I told you. I wanted a new start.’
‘But why here? In Hereford.’
Beth shrugged. ‘The job just happened to be in the nursing gazette. I’d been out to the airport to say goodbye to a friend and I guess the time was right to make a decision. I didn’t want to do anything as drastic as Neroli had done, though, like leaving nursing. Or New Zealand.’
‘Neroli? Your friend with the red hair and freckles? The one that always laughed a lot?’
‘That’s her.’ Beth turned and smiled, as though pleased that Luke had remembered so clearly. ‘She hadn’t been laughing much in the last few months she was here, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘She got held at knife point in ED by a gang member who was as high as a kite on drugs. It was terrifying enough to make her throw in the towel and give up nursing. I can’t say I blame her either. It was pretty scary.’
Luke caught his breath. ‘Were you there when it happened?’
‘Yes.’
And she’d been caught in the middle of a gang war on her first night at Ocean View. She must have been as terrified as Neroli had been and yet she’d defended herself without hesitation. More than that—she’d set the tone for the whole department to cope with a nasty few hours.
A peculiar sensation sneaked up on Luke. It wasn’t that Beth had changed into some stroppy individual who went around sorting out anybody who displeased her. She had always been amazing. Brave and clever. She wouldn’t attack anyone without justification.
He’d never understood why she’d wanted so little to do with her family until her bitter remarks in the car park that morning.
He’d never understood quite why she’d dumped him either, but the thought that she might have been justified was not one he wanted to explore. He’d been put down enough by Beth, and this wasn’t the time to go looking for any more emotional injuries. Besides, she’d made it quite clear that she didn’t want to start raking up the past.
‘What?’ Beth had turned again and was looking at him oddly.
Luke blinked. ‘What?’ he echoed.
‘You just muttered something about raking up the past.’
‘Did I?’ Luke tried to dismiss the embarrassment of having spoken that last thought aloud. ‘Maybe that’s what I was doing when I came back here.’
Beth gave him a sharp look. ‘I had no idea you were living here.’
Her tone implied that it was the last place she would have come if she had known. Luke gritted his teeth. And he’d been trying to avoid a put-down, too.
‘This is the last place I would have expected you to be,’ Beth continued. ‘You told me you grew up in Nelson.’
‘I went to school in Nelson,’ Luke corrected.
‘And you called that Hicksville. I seem to remember you saying you wouldn’t be caught dead, trying to practise any kind of medicine in some provincial backwater.’
Luke’s shrug dismissed the comment as irrelevant now. ‘Things change. People change.’
Not that much they didn’t. Beth took the last few steps towards Willy in silence.
Things didn’t change to that kind of degree unless something absolutely catastrophic happened. The new chill that suddenly ran through Beth was enough to make her shudder.
Was Luke sick? Had all the stress of his ambition and workload and then his sister dying given him a heart attack at an early age, maybe, and forced him to slow down?
The fear the thought provoked was powerful enough to make Beth realise just how much she had been kidding herself.
She had never stopped loving Luke Savage.
She never would.
Turning back, Beth searched his face but she could find no answers.
‘What changed, Luke?’ she asked quietly. ‘Why are you living here?’
The simple words explained nothing and yet they explained it all.
It was precisely what Beth was searching for, wasn’t it? But home could be a person as much as a place. And the home that Beth’s soul craved had nothing to do with any real estate or stupid casserole dishes.
Her home could only be with the man she loved.
A man who no longer loved her.
She was still staring at Luke when she heard someone call his name with some urgency from near the car park.
And Luke, with a smile that seemed almost apologetic, handed the bucket back to Beth.
Then he turned and walked away.