Chapter 4

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 I

was certain she’d never get filled.

I’d just finished cleaning up after dinner and was settling in for a well-deserved evening of wine, a hot bubble bath, and a good book when my phone rang.  Against my better judgement, I answered it.  It was sheriff Max Orwell calling to ask me to meet him out at the rest area just outside of town on route 33.  He had a dead body and no coroner to declare it dead.  It seems, the former doctor doubled as a coroner and medical examiner. I would have found out sooner or later that these things were expected of me.  It just would have been nice if it was later.

I took a moment to look longingly at the grand staircase that led to the second floor where my big, beautiful claw foot tub awaited me before I pulled on my sneakers, grabbed my coat, handbag, and car keys and headed out to meet Max.

Less than fifteen minutes later, I was standing next to the very tall, very handsome Officer Max Orwell and staring down at a dead man who lay with his face buried in the overgrown grass.

Max squatted next to the body. “His name is Jacob Tripp.”

“Who found him?”

He shrugged as he took out a pair of tweezers and pulled several long, coarse hairs off Jacob’s bare shoulder. “I got an anonymous tip.  That’s how it’s been since these deaths started happening.”

I took a closer look at Jacob. “It looks like he was bitten.” I pointed my finger to a spot behind his ear.  “There.  Do you see where the flesh is punctured in several places?”

Max knit his brows together and squinted at the spot I was referring to.  “It doesn’t look much like a bite to me.”

“What do you think caused those wounds, then?” I asked impatiently.  Something deep inside told me that the man had been bitten.  I didn’t care what Max thought.

“I couldn’t rightly say.  I just don’t think it’s an animal bite. We’ve got no animal in these parts that would make a mark like that.  Besides.  If it was an animal, don’t you think it would have torn the flesh a might better than just leaving a few puncture wounds?  What animal does that?”

“You have me there,” I admitted.  Even though my gut still insisted that Jacob died from some kind of bite, I had no explanation to Max’s question.  “I guess that will better be determined during the autopsy.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Max said thoughtfully.  “The old doc used to declare the person dead and then send the body off to Mechanicsburg for the autopsy. Those people don’t give a shit about what happens to us here in Wolf Junction.  I think we’d be better off at getting to the bottom of what’s going on if we kept things within our town.  You’ve got that morgue set up in your basement.  How about you doing the autopsy there? The sheriff’s department will, of course, provide you with all the supplies you need.’

“Are you asking me to become the county examiner?”

Max displayed a perfectly straight set of teeth as he smiled that smile that I was certain got him into any bed he chose. “I suppose I am.”

My first instinct was to jump at the

opportunity to expand my income, but I exercised my usual constraint and asked to be allowed to think on it.  Grant it, my business wasn’t brimming over with patients at the moment, but it was growing steadily.  Could I handle the responsibility of being the county’s medical examiner?  I remembered how busy they were in the morgue at the hospital I interned at and wondered if that was what I wanted.  Then I laughed.  How ridiculous it was of me to compare the ton of deaths that came through a busy city hospital to the sporadic ones that would show up on my doorstep.  After all, hadn’t I been living there for five months without seeing one corpse?

“You can think about it, but don’t take too long. Okay?  We’ll have to ship Jacob off to Mechanicsville Hospital soon if you won’t take him on.”

I heaved a sigh.  “I don’t know why I said I had to think about it.  It’s been a bitch of a day and I guess I just let it get to me.  Of course, I’ll do it.  Do you have a place to put him until I get the morgue set up to act as an examining room?”

There was both appreciation and relief in his voice when he informed me that he’d have the one remaining funeral home hold onto Jacob’s body until the following day.  He also reiterated that the county would be supplying the examining room with whatever I needed and asked me to make a list by morning so that he could put a rush order on it.

“I doubt the setup will be complete in a day,” I said, “but I imagine I have enough equipment to perform an adequate examination.”

“I think there’s a refrigeration system down there,” Max mused.  “It’s been years since I had an occasion to go down there, but I think I saw one.”

“To tell you the truth, I breezed through there once and haven’t been in it since,” I admitted. “I’ve been keeping myself busy building my practice and furnishing the main house.  It’s so big.  I can’t imagine ever being able to truly complete its décor.”

“It looked pretty good to me when I came to dinner,” Max mused.  “I’m sure I told you, but just in case I didn’t, I had a great time that night.  Both the food and the company were excellent.”

I smiled with pride and satisfaction. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Soon, I hope.”

I found myself staring into his beautiful sky-blue orbs shamelessly as I pondered the possibilities of having him over to dinner without other dinner guests.  Would he come? Would he consider me too forward?  I knew I was living in the modern age where women thought nothing of initiating the connection or hook-up as some call it, but I was still too inexperienced to feel confident in trying.  So, I tore my eyes away from his loveliness and looked at Jacob’s lifeless body instead.

I was so disappointed in myself that I could spit.  What was wrong with me?  Didn’t he hold my gaze just as long as I held his?  He certainly wasn’t the first to look away.  That cowardly act was all mine.  Was he interested in me even if it was just a little?  Even if it was just for sex?  I’d reached a point in my life where I’d be okay with that.  At least, I thought I would.  It wasn’t like I was saving my virginity for that special one. I’d just never been tempted to give it up.  Well, I had once with the hot and sexy Doctors Without Borders member, Dr. Peter Thomason. But, no one since then… until now.

A sudden burst of courage surged through me as I stood to face him. “I’ve been a little too busy to put together a dinner party, but maybe you’d like to come over by yourself?”

He moved toward me until there were a mere few inches between us.  I was a tall, five-feet-seven inches, but he still towered over me. “I was hoping you’d make that offer.”

The pheromones being emitted from his body were enough to charge a stallion. My abdomen contracted while tiny electrical jolts shot through me in places that normally lay dormant.  I could feel the moisture creeping into my crotch and my nipples tingled. Wow.  All this from a simple acceptance to a dinner invite.  I could only imagine what my body would do if he kissed me.

I didn’t have long to wait.

He wrapped me in his powerful arms as he gently placed his lips to mine.  I couldn’t help worrying about how inexperienced my kisses would feel to him as he explored my mouth with his tongue, but I shoved all concern into the recesses of my mind.  I had every intention of being selfish and enjoying what was happening without worrying about what he was getting out of it.

My legs went weak and buckled from my weight.  Fortunately, it didn’t seem to interfere with his kissing. He simply tightened his hold to help support me as I lost myself in the moment.

I could hear a deep throated moan, but I didn’t realize it was me making it until he pulled his lips from mine and the moan continued to flow from my lips.  Now, that was embarrassing. If he didn’t know I was a novice before, he certainly did now.

Either it didn’t bother him to discover what a novice I was when it came to making love or it turned him on even more because, instead of stopping after that kiss, Max got into things full swing.  Before I knew what had happened, I found myself rolling around on the ground next to our corpse with my pants around my ankles and his fingers probing between my thighs. We were kissing with a type of frantic frenzy while he had his hand up my shirt to expose my generous breasts.  I don’t know if it was the cold night air assaulting the moisture he left behind on my tingling nipples when he shifted his mouth from one breast to the next or the fact that it felt like something was inserted inside of me -which very well could have been his finger, I couldn’t tell for sure- that brought me back to my senses.  Was this really happening?  Was I about to lose my virginity on the cold, still frozen ground of early spring while next to a dead man? Could things get any tackier than that? Oh, hell no!

My emotions were all over the place.  The selfish part of me said, ‘Corpse be damned.  This guy is hot, and my body is ready.’ While the sensible part of me shouted, ‘Slut!  Have you no respect for the dead?  What’s wrong with you?  There’s a time and a place for everything and this is neither the time or the place.  If this hot and sexy guy is really into you, he’ll wait.’ 

The sensible part of me won the battle. I summoned the where-with-all I needed to push him from my breast and roll away before he could return. His eyes were glossed with lust and determination as he reached for me.  I scooted away as fast as I could until there was enough distance between us to prevent those pesky pheromones from overwhelming us with

temptation and desire once more.

A look of chagrin quickly consumed him as he watched me struggle to tuck my breasts back into my bra and make my shirt sit aright on my body.  “I’m so sorry, Vickie.  I don’t know what got into me.”

“I played a part in this,” I sniffed as I stood and brushed at my pants while directing my gaze toward the body.  “Let’s

forget it happened, shall we?”

His face looked like I’d punched it as hard as I could and then, maybe, followed up with a good swift kick in the stomach, but he said no more about it.  “I’ll call Zacharias at the funeral home.”

I nodded. “I’ll get started on setting up.  Have Zacharias ring me in the morning to arrange to bring him over.  You don’t need to be with him, do you?”

He shook his head without looking at me.  I’m sure he assumed that I asked that question because I didn’t want to be around him.  It was never farther from the truth. I simply asked the question to be clear on how things ran in the county. 

If my pathetic behavior, followed by my equally pathetic remark, didn’t show how badly I needed tutoring in dealing with the opposite sex, I didn’t know what did.