A Doctor's Confession. Dianne Drake

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      “Her first?”

      “After a couple of miscarriages. She’s pretty nervous.”

      “And I’m pretty nervous about your swollen ankles. So go put them up, and call me if you need anything.”

      “Like lemonade,” Mellette teased.

      “Leave the lemonade out of this.”

      Once back outside, Maggie tried not looking for Alain Lalonde, but that was nearly impossible as all the building activity was directly in her line of sight as she sat on the porch. “Okay, so he’s good to look at,” she said as she poured herself another lemonade. Good to watch, good to turn into a little midday fantasy. After all, there was no harm in looking, was there?

      After Billie Louviere’s checkup, a couple of walk-ins presented themselves at the clinic, and by midafternoon Maggie had actually seen enough patients that she was getting tired. Not exhausted, but with just the right amount of weariness setting in that she really felt she’d done a good day’s work. It was time to go home, though. Eat a quick bowl of gumbo and head on back to town.

      Even though she was taking the summer off from school, she still had casework for a couple of legal clients to go over this evening, and she did want to read a chapter in one of her law textbooks, if she stayed awake that long.

      “Time to get up,” she called down the hall to Mellette, who was still napping in Justin’s former bedroom. While no one actually lived at Eula’s House anymore, named for Justin’s grandmother, they kept the upstairs as a residence, hoping that one day it might be turned into a very small hospital ward. The downstairs had been converted into a clinic that maintained a portion of Eula’s herbal practice, as well as a proper medical clinic. To outsiders it might seem a confused mishmash of traditions, but to the people of Big Swamp it was where they could seek medical help in whatever form they chose.

      “Come on, Mellette. We need to eat, then I’ve got to get out of here. Go home, go over some case files.” She pushed open the bedroom door to look in on her sleeping sister. Then gasped. Her ankles were puffier than before. So were her hands, and even her face, especially around her eyes, looked puffy.

      “You okay?” she asked as she approached the bed.

      “Headache,” Mellette said. “A little nauseous. Think the heat’s done me in.” She started to sit up, but Maggie gently nudged her back down.

      “Stay there. Don’t get up yet.”

      “Why?” Mellette asked. Mellette, a nurse herself, had worked in emergency medicine at New Hope, where their mother, Zenobia, was chief of staff.

      “Because you’re tired, and tiredness and pregnancy aren’t a good combination. I’m going to go downstairs and get you a drink of cold water, so don’t get up. Hear me?”

      “Hear you,” Mellette said, as she dropped back into her pillows and shut her eyes.

      Two minutes later Mellette had a blood-pressure cuff strapped to her sister’s arm, and two minutes after that she was on her way back downstairs to find Justin.

      He was outside, talking to Mr. Tool Belt. “Something’s wrong with Mellette,” Maggie interrupted, not beating around the bush for a more tactful way to approach it. “I don’t do obstetrics so I can’t tell for sure, but she’s awfully swollen, her blood pressure is on the high end of normal and—”

      “Where’s she swollen?” Alain Lalonde cut in.

      Both Justin and Maggie gave him an inquisitive look. “Feet, ankles, eyelids …” Maggie answered, not sure why she was giving a symptom list to the carpenter.

      “Urinary output normal?” Alain went on.

      Maggie shrugged, quite surprised by the carpenter’s line of questions. “I didn’t ask her.”

      “Nausea, vomiting, headache?” Again from Alain.

      “Nausea and headache.” More than surprised, she was confused.

      “Onset?”

      “This afternoon,” Maggie said. “Why do you care?”

      “Alain was probably the best high-risk obstetrician in Chicago,” Justin answered.

      “You knew?” Alain asked. “And you didn’t ask why I’m here, doing carpentry?”

      “A man has a right to his privacy. I didn’t want to invade yours.”

      “So Mellette … I think it may be preeclampsia. If it is, we caught it in time. But I think you’d better be getting your wife to her obstetrician pretty damned fast.”

      Justin turned to run to the clinic, then paused and signaled for Alain to accompany him, leaving Maggie outside to wonder what had caused a doctor to quit and become a carpenter. Not that there was anything wrong with being a carpenter, because there wasn’t. But why had Alain put himself through so many years of medical training just to quit? It made no sense, especially as he was so highly regarded, according to Justin.

      So what made a doctor give it up to come to Big Swamp and bang out a clinic expansion? It was a question for which she had no answer. And it was a question for which she was going to find an answer, especially as this man was about to touch her sister. Darned straight, she was going to find an answer.

      Instead of going upstairs to Mellette, Maggie went straight to the computer in the office and entered the name Alain Lalonde into a search engine. The first thing that turned up was a headline about a wounded army doctor who saved the lives of his men and women. They had been under siege and he’d drawn the fire away from his escaping crew and patients. Had been shot in the leg in doing so, spent several weeks in the hospital in rehab. Received a medal.

      “Amazing,” she said, as the second thing that turned up was of an obstetrician accused in a malpractice suit. Something about performing a Caesarean when it hadn’t been necessary. The article said he’d gone against orders from the woman’s personal physician and performed an emergency C-section when a normal delivery would have worked.

      “And someone sued you for that?” Maggie whispered. It didn’t make sense to her as long as the baby had been healthy, which it apparently had been. Was it the lawsuit that had made him quit, or had he just burned out?

      “Who are you?” Maggie whispered as she clicked out of the articles. “Alain Lalonde, just who are you? And why are you working as a carpenter and not an obstetrician?”

       CHAPTER TWO

      “HOW FAR ALONG are you?” Alain asked as he checked Mellette’s blood pressure.

      “Twenty-four … no, twenty-five weeks now.”

      “And when did your symptoms start?” He pumped up the blood-pressure cuff and deflated it slowly.

      “A couple of days ago, but only swollen ankles. I honestly didn’t think anything about it because of the heat.”

      “In СКАЧАТЬ