Secret Santa (19 page)

And with that, even if she hadn’t convinced Neil, she’d done a good job convincing herself. She left him standing in the cold, barren landscape and headed for all the responsibilities still awaiting her in Brevis.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

N
EIL
RUBBED
A
TOWEL
over his head, then tossed it into the bathroom hamper. A hot shower had made him feel marginally more sanitized, but it hadn’t cleared his head.

He couldn’t banish the image of what he’d seen that morning.

Correction. You can’t get over the idea that Charli is bought and paid for by Lige Whitaker.

Sure, the story of her mom’s shopping addiction—that could explain some of the weirdness. A lot, actually.

Clean clothes on, he followed the scent of coffee into his kitchen. He leaned against the kitchen sink and surveyed Charli’s house next door.

What would he do if someone wanted him to kill a story and threatened his family?

Yeah. He could see how Lige was swinging a big hammer. But people would get over the idea that Violet was a compulsive shopper, wouldn’t they? It wasn’t like she was secretly a raging meth-head.

The main thing Charli’s story didn’t explain was the money. Where had it come from? Why hadn’t Charli used it to pay off her student loans, or to at least create a slush fund in case her mother ever got in a jam?

Neil could not wrap his head around that question. Had Charli accepted a donation to the clinic from Lige? Had she somehow rationalized that maybe it wasn’t a bribe if it didn’t go directly to her?

Tired and weary from no sleep, Neil cut short his foray into the deduction business. He was not much good at it lately. And besides, he had a paper to put out. On less than two hours of sleep.

At the paper, Dawn ambushed him before he’d even got to his desk. “Just where have you been, Clark Kent? You haven’t answered your phone, you didn’t call in and you didn’t even send me a text.”

“I—” Neil considered what to tell her. He couldn’t believe the intense loyalty he still felt for Charli. What he’d witnessed this morning was the biggest exposé of the year. It would not only sell papers and win him a caboodle of press awards, but it might actually do some real good.

So why wasn’t he blurting it all out to Dawn?

“I can’t say,” he muttered. “I’m working on something.”

“Well, I sure hope so. Because, as the stick you appointed me to be when you hired me, I’m telling you, aside from that six-inch article you’ve got on the board of education, you have zip for the front page, and it’s already Friday. Got anything else on the Secret Santa? People are asking me if we’ll have it in this week’s edition.”

Neil groaned and collapsed into his chair. Why had he made such a big deal over the Secret Santa’s identity?

“Well?” She made a big show of tapping her foot. “C’mon, you can tell Auntie Dawn. What’s got you so...un-Neil-like? You’re usually focused and gnawing on something like this until the bone crunches into splinters.”

“I don’t have it,” he told her.

Oh, you have it, Bailey. You have it. You just don’t want it. You don’t want to hang Charli out to dry.

“You don’t have it, or you don’t have proof?” That was the reason Dawn made such a great copy editor. She quibbled over exact language. She wanted it precise.

He wasn’t sure what to say. If he told her he knew who the Secret Santa was—after all, Charli had confessed to it—Dawn would harangue him until he revealed Charli’s identity or fired Dawn, sold the paper and quit small-town journalism.

“The GBI is dropping the case,” Neil said. “They’ve got a higher priority corruption case in some other county, so they’re not pursuing it.”

Dawn flipped her palms faceup. “See? There’s your story. GBI loses focus. Santa still on the lam.”

“She’s not on the—” Neil clamped his mouth shut.

“What did you say?” Dawn reached around into her cubicle and yanked her rolling office chair around. Plopping down in it, she folded her arms. “Am. Not. Moving. Not until you spill.”

He stared at Dawn, started to make up some story out of complete moonshine so she would go away and leave him alone in his blue funk and not guilt him into writing the story he’d seen in stark reality a half hour before.

Neil realized what he was thinking.

What he was about to
do
.

Turn a blind eye on a story because it involved a woman he cared about.

“I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

“Believe it, dude. I can sit with the best of them,” Dawn shot back.

“No...I wasn’t talking about you.” Now for the life of him, Neil couldn’t figure out which was more unbelievable—that he was willing to throw his ethics over for Charli or that Brian was more right than he’d known in their morning phone conversation. Could Neil have fallen this hard for Charli so soon?

If not, then why does this hurt so much?

“Neil?” Dawn prompted. “If you weren’t talking about me, what were you talking about? You’re pale as cotton, my friend.”

“I—I was about to do something—the same thing...I was judging somebody else for.” The admission was a humiliating one for Neil to make. He’d always been so proud of the way he stuck to his guns and wrote straight down the middle of any issue.

“What is going on with you?” Dawn had lost her playful stubbornness. Now she leaned over and touched his shoulder. “You okay?”

He winced at the concern in her face. Dawn felt sorry for him? When he’d been about to make the mistake of his career?

Still, the answer to Dawn’s question was a big fat
no.
He was not okay. But if he didn’t write what he knew, if he held back on what he’d seen this morning, on what he’d heard from Brian, how was he different from Charli?

* * *

C
HARLI
HAD
SPENT
the past seventy-two hours since going out to Lige Whitaker’s farm in almost nonstop activity. Friday had been taken up until way past closing with patients, then she’d trucked it back out to the farm to check on the workers. Saturday and Sunday, she’d divided her time between the migrants—more people sick, but none critically ill—and catching up on all the paperwork she’d let slide. Plus, she’d had to do two admissions in the hospital for her paying patients.

Even so, Charli was failing miserably in her effort to catch up on everything she’d let slide—including her mother.

Charli hadn’t realized her mom had taken a powder until sometime late Sunday. That’s when she noticed that a) her mom wasn’t answering her calls and b) aside from one call that had gone to voice mail, her mom hadn’t called her, either.

Nope. Her mom was gone.

No note. No phone call. Just a breezy voice mail assuring Charli that she’d decided to “take a little trip for a change of scenery!” No destination, no clue as to where that change of scenery was. And Charli’s desperate calls back? They went unanswered. Violet was gone.

Her mom had done this before. One Christmas, to escape Charli’s father’s wrath over debt, she’d used a secret credit card, and Charli and her mother had spent a weekend—and several thousand dollars—in a luxury hotel suite in Atlanta. Charli had been six and thoroughly charmed over the room service and “girls’ weekend” her mother had dubbed the Escape. Her father? Not so much.

It hadn’t been the last time, either.

Lige had told Charli about her mother asking him for a loan. It stood to reason that he’d told her mother that Charli knew she needed money. And that bit of deduction had paradoxically made Charli less worried about her mother. Charli figured that when the credit limit tapped out on whatever card her mother had managed to get, she would turn up, broke, sad and full of remorse.

Just please let it be a very small credit limit,
Charli thought grimly.

She didn’t have time to worry. Her two-hour foray just that morning at Lige’s farm, to again check on his workers, had put her even more behind on everything. Irate patients had to be rescheduled, labs had to be checked and the hill of charts on Charli’s desk had morphed into a small mountain range.

Charli was grateful for the packed schedule, the hustle from room to room to room. She didn’t have time to think about Neil or her mom or how she still hadn’t made that report to DPH about a probable STEC outbreak.

Who am I kidding? That’s all I’m thinking of.

She took a stealthy peek at her cell phone, which was lying beside the chart of her current patient. She should call DPH. She should try her mother. She should call Neil again. But he hadn’t called her. No text message. No email. No voice mail. No missed call.

No Neil.

She wanted to shake the phone until it produced the desired, “Hey, I got your forty-three calls and messages with all your apologies, and I accept.”

But what if he didn’t call her back?

Those calls—okay, not quite as many as forty-three, but a lot more than a few—had netted her nothing. Voice mail on his house phone. A cool and distant, “He’s not available, but I’ll leave another message,” from Dawn at the paper this morning.

Charli had made one bad choice, and that choice had led her further than she’d wanted to go and kept her longer than she’d ever dared imagine it would.

She pulled her focus back to the chart in her hand and tried desperately to remember her patient’s name. She should remember this dearly familiar face, with its kind, twinkling blue eyes. The woman had taught her English in sixth grade. There it was. Roerden.

“Very good, Mrs. Roerden, everything looks good—”

“You got the test results back, then?” Mrs. Roerden asked.

Charli flipped through the chart and saw a note to call the labs about the delay. She cursed her forgetfulness. Tugging at her earlobe, she said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t have those results yet. Not all of them. Let me call the lab.”

Picking up her cell phone—and checking in vain for any sign of Neil’s relenting—she dialed the lab’s number. The person answering grumbled at first, then realized she was talking to a doctor and got radically nicer.

It irritated Charli to think the woman was civil only because Charli had an M.D. after her name.

On a sticky note, she jotted down the lab results the tech gave her, asked for them to be faxed as soon as possible and was about to hang up when the woman said, “Oh, by the way, we got that rush order for you on those stool samples.”

Charli felt her fingers go numb as they gripped the phone. “Yes? Good. You can fax—”

“Looks like you have a pretty big STEC outbreak. You reported it to DPH yet?”

“STEC, huh? I thought as much.” Charli swallowed. Hearing it from the lab made it real in a way she could no longer deny. She risked a glance at Mrs. Roerden, who sat on the exam table with the heel of one shoe flap-flapping against the sole of her foot. “I’m with a patient now. Can you fax me those results so I can review them?”

Her heart hammered away in her chest as she tried to finish up with Mrs. Roerden without completely losing it. What she wanted to do was run to the fax machine and yank the results off the tray.

Mrs. Roerden slid off the table. She straightened her clothes and reached over to give Charli a motherly pat on the arm.

“Dear, you needn’t be so nervous. You always were an anxious little thing. Remember? When I had you in English, I told you that you were going to have ulcers before you were forty? Relax. Your patients will forgive you if you’re not perfect. Didn’t we forgive your father for all those times he had less than a stellar bedside manner?”

“Oh, Mrs. Roerden...” Charli had to blink away tears. The sweet patience of the woman almost undid her. “You have no idea what that means to me. Most people—I miss my dad, don’t get me wrong, and I was looking forward to working with him—but...most people around here seem to think he walked on water.”

“Your father?” Mrs. Roerden laughed. “I think somebody has been in an awfully big hurry to install stained-glass windows.”

Charli reached for the tissues she usually saved for patients to use. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” She blew her nose and tossed the tissue in the trash.

Mrs. Roerden waited for Charli to finish rinsing her hands in the sink before explaining. “Oh, it’s a saying my mother used. It means... What does it mean?” She cocked her head to one side and fiddled with the string of pearls at her throat. “It means that when somebody dies, people are quick to forget all the qualities that made the person human. I don’t want that. And I’ll bet your father wouldn’t, either. So don’t go putting in stained-glass windows. He was just a man, Charli. Oh, listen to me, calling you by your first name as if you’re still in my classroom. I mean, Dr. Prescott.”

Charli squeezed her teacher’s hand. “You of all people can call me Charli. I would have never made it through English 101, much less med school, if you hadn’t hammered grammar into my head.”

“I’m proud of you, dear. To think someone I taught grew up to be a doctor! Well, that is an accomplishment!” Mrs. Roerden beamed and went out the door.

Charli watched her go with a sinking heart. If Mrs. Roerden knew the corners Charli had cut recently, would she think so highly of her?

Her nurse, Shelly, rushed up to her in the hallway as Charli dragged herself to the next patient. Shelly had a sheaf of papers in her hand and a frazzled expression on her face.

“What is it?” Charli asked. She took the papers and glanced at them. It was the lab results from the migrants. There it was, clearly spelled out, as she’d expected—STEC, or more precisely, good old
E. coli
O157:H7.

Charli resisted the urge to ball up the papers. How long did she have to figure out a good way to neutralize Lige’s threat to her mom? Not long. She had to call DPH. This was mandatory. And if she remembered correctly, the lab was required to report this to DPH, anyway.

Lige would have to like it or lump it.

“What a day!” Shelly blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Can you take out five minutes to talk Julianne Brantley down off the ledge? Her granddaughter is in the E.R., and Julianne is insisting you come in and admit her. I’m sorry, I know you’re behind, but Julianne has completely lost it.”

Charli tore her attention from the labs. “Her granddaughter’s how old? Six? Seven? Was it an accident? Didn’t I give her booster shots?”