My head ached, and I had a bad, metallic taste in my mouth as I slowly regained consciousness. I could hear activity around me long before my eyes were able to focus enough to let me see where I was and who I was with.
Janet had her back to me. She was talking to a large woman with extremely thin, jet black hair that hung straight and stringy around her shoulders. When she stepped aside to allow me a clear view, I gave a tiny gasp at the sight of her. She was so fat that it rested in rolls down her body, reminding me of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. When she laughed at something Janet said, the fat on her body jiggled like Jell-O long after she’d finished. I found it mesmerizing.
When she realized that I was conscious and staring at her, her face darkened, and she said something to Janet. Her minion turned to look at me and then spoke to her before coming my way.
“Where am I?” My mouth was so dry it
I grew weary of the rambling voices and began to allow my body to float away as a means of escape from them. I was reveling in the sensation of floating in air when I felt someone yank me back to reality. My arms and legs were free from their bindings and the circulation was being roughly rubbed back into them.“Vickie, can you hear me?” managed to reach my mind. I recognized the male voice, but just couldn’t place it. “Vickie, answer me. Wake up, sweetheart. Can you hear me? Wake up?” Who was that man speaking? I knew that I knew him, but I just couldn’t think his name. It was so frustrating to not be able to put a name to thevoice, but I just couldn’t.“She’s not responding!”“She’s badly dehydrated. Here, try to get this past her lips. It should help.”I smiled with satisfaction when I was able to put Megan’s name to the second voic
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to help heal someone or something. As a little girl on my family’s dairy farm, I made it my mission to help my father with the care of the animals. Such was my dedication that when I found a baby bird that fell out of its nest, I took great pains to nurse it to health and see that it was able to care for itself before I set it free.Originally, I was determined to heal others the old-fashioned way, with herbs and energy work. I’d read plenty of how-to books on the subject and even taken a few online courses. When I left the farm as soon as I graduated high school and moved to find my way in the nearby city of Winchester, Virginia. I even went as far as to open my own holistic practice.It was when I attended a six-week course through the local college’s community education program on herbal remedies that I decided that it was okay to integrate herbal and energy healing wi
Wolf Junction may not have been as advanced both socially and economically as the rest of the country, but it was filled with history. To me, this made up for a lot.The home I’d rented was an enormous Victorian style house with a gorgeous wrap around porch. It was far too large for one person, but it had a two-room office set up with a space to act as the waiting room and its own entrance. I was of the frame of mind that having my office under the same roof where I lived would reduce my overhead. After all, I’d built up a considerable amount of debt putting myself through school. Fortunately, my holistic care skills paid for most of my living expenses during my years of education, but there was still the loan for the actual cost of schooling looming over me. As luck would have it, the place came partially furnished. So, I lived in a one-hundred plus year old house that was the size of a mini-hotel with enough
Angela McGraw was a few years older than me, but not by much. We looked to be about the same size too, but that’s where the similarities ended. Where my hair was sleek and dark, and my skin fair and unblemished, she sported a coppery head of wiry curls and flesh so peppered with freckles that it was impossible to count them. As my eyes traced them to the collar of her pale blue cotton blouse, I had to fight the urge to ask if they continued onto her back and chest. I guessed they did, but that was just a guess. I envied her those striking green eyes. Mine were such a common brown. I noticed that they resembled rich emerald when she spoke passionately on a subject; which was often.She’d been working as the county’s traveling social worker for five years. It was easy to tell that she loved her job by the way she lost herself into conversing about it whenever the opportunity arose.She was less outgoing and gene
Life was going so well that I’d completely forgotten about the fact that I’d taken the job with the intention of being the savior who discovered what was causing so many deaths. It was probably because there had been no deaths since my arrival. That changed on the anniversary of my fifth month in town.It was a Wednesday evening. It had been a particularly grueling day with difficult and uncooperative patients. Old man Smithson’s gout was acting up again and, of course, he had to argue with me as to what diet worked best to prevent the gout that was returning more and more frequently. Grannie Oleson had yet another asthma attack. As hard as I tried to convince her that she was allergic to the twelve cats she owned, I got nowhere. So, I simply treated her with herbs to help keep her passageways as clear as could be expected under the circumstances and wrote a prescription for an inhaler that Iwas certain she’d
I’d had no call to be around Zacharias Bolt before Jacob’s death. I thought it unfortunate that I found him to be a bit odd, since his was the only funeral home for several towns and I was the recently appointed official county medical examiner.Zacharias’ family had been in stiff competition with the Crowley family for the funeral business of the area for several generations. This, along with an over-abundance of fumes from embalming chemicals were surely what lend to his unlikeable personality. The smirk on his narrow and pinched face when he inspected the remnants of the Crowley morgue while delivering Jacob’s corpse to me was an immediate indication as to the person I’d be dealing with. He wasted no time comparing his state of the art set up to my pathetic -yes, he used the word ‘pathetic’- and antiquated one while speculating on the poor workmanship that surely was produced as a result.He clearly had no
I’d spent far too much time over lunch with Angela and Peter. By the time I got back home, it was almost four o’clock. There was no sense in starting the autopsy when I’d have to man my office for walk-ins from six pm until eight pm.I checked my calendar for the next day and saw that it was full. That left me no choice. I’d have to perform the autopsy after I closed the office at eight that evening. Since I’d had minimal sleep the night before because of a guilty conscience over my lustful actions in the presence of a dead man after working well into the night taking an inventory and moving a few things around in the morgue, I’d been looking forward to a decent night’s sleep. Hopefully I could discover what killed Jacob quickly and that would still happen.I decided to relax until it was time to run my office, so I fixed myself a cup of hot tea, grabbed the mystery I’d started a few da
With less than an hour before I had to open the office for potential walk-in patients, I decided to make a quick run to the grocery store for a few incidentals that I was about to run out of. I was debating about buying Folgers coffee or a new organic Hawaiian blend when the handsome Dr. Thomason came up behind me.“I’d go for the Folgers,” he said in the most intimate fashion imaginable into my left ear.I could feel his breath on the back of my head as my body tingled from head to toe. “I’ve always liked Folgers, but it’s not organic.”“I’d be careful with organic if I were you,” he offered. “That one’s fine because it comes from the United States and we have strict regulations, but a lot of the organic food comes from countries without laws to protect you. Organic to them isn’t always organic as we see it. You’re safer with American grown, even if it&rs