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  “Interesting,” she murmured.

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “I’m okay with that,” she acknowledged. “I’d rather that than giving him a beat down, especially if he is someone Leia has tried to help.”

  “It’s the other guy we want,” Dave said, “but, with the boat gone, it might be a little harder to find him.”

  “Have you checked the hospitals on the mainland?”

  “Yep. The word is out, so it’s just a matter of time to figure out where else he could have gone.”

  “If Leia were here, she would be the logical choice. But she’s not here.”

  “So, in other words, the old medicine woman?”

  “I would think it would be worth checking out anyway.”

  He nodded. “We’ll take a walk around to her later.”

  “You don’t think she’ll tell you?”

  “I don’t know. I think the islanders are fairly tight.”

  “Is there anything to worry about?”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  They finished breakfast quickly, and then Katie stood. “I want to go back to Leia’s place, so I can take a better look and take some more measurements.” She held up a pad of paper and a tape measure, ready to get down to business.

  “Good enough,” Dave said. “Let’s go.”

  As they got into the small skiff to make their way to the island, she noticed he was well armed. “Are you expecting trouble?” she asked quietly.

  “Expecting trouble, no. Ready for it, yes. I got caught by surprise yesterday, and that’s not happening again.”

  She nodded. “Is it okay to leave the captain alone with the prisoner?”

  “He’s fully armed,” he said confidently. “I don’t think that kid wants to tangle with him. Honestly, I don’t think that kid wants a part of any of it.”

  She didn’t say anything because there was absolutely nothing to say. They were short on men, and she really needed to take another look at the venue, so she could be well prepared to feed a large crew.

  As soon as they landed, they tied up in the usual spot, realizing that part of what she needed to do was figure out how they would get items off the small skiff onto land. “We’ll need a better transport system here for sure.”

  “Once the men get here,” Dave added, “they’ll be bringing and pulling together parts of a floating dock immediately.”

  “Are some coming by boat then?”

  “They are,” he confirmed.

  She left it at that, and, before long, they were measuring and discussing options. “So we can get a maximum of ten of our folding tables up here.” She thought about what all she needed. “That would leave one spare.”

  “If you can get away with nine, we’d be better off,” Dave noted, “because we’ve got to have room for people to walk around.”

  “I guess it depends on how quickly we can get something of a platform or a deck made here,” she murmured.

  “There will be a ton of building going on as soon as the team gets here, but you’ll see that within a few hours.”

  “I hope so,” she said, “because, at the moment, it just seems like an idyllic holiday mixed in with moments of terror.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “Oh, I hope those parts with me aren’t idyllic terror.”

  She burst out laughing. “Absolutely not, but what a great way to look at it.”

  “I don’t think so,” he protested. But he was smiling, and generally he felt just a sense of peace in his heart that he hadn’t felt for a very long time.

  The good news was that she didn’t feel like she was part of the equation where the trouble was concerned. Whoever it was who had shot at them before had apparently been after Leia, not Katie, so she was happy to let Dave look after that problem.

  By the time they were finished with their plans, and she’d wandered up and around again, trying to figure out how much of Leia’s space they could make use of, she turned to Dave. “It’s really hard to finalize plans until we know what access we’ll have here.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s all part of the larger scheme too.”

  “So, isn’t this wedding rushing it a bit?”

  “It is, but it’s also where Leia needs to come back and say goodbye.”

  “Right.” Katie could understand that. She herself had spent a lot of years working at this crazy job, traveling all over the world, and hadn’t put roots down anywhere. She had always been totally open to just going wherever she needed to be. “I guess I can understand that,” she said. “I don’t really have much in the way of a home base anywhere to say goodbye to.”

  “And are you okay with that?” Dave asked. “You always are there and available for work, so I never stopped to think if you had a permanent home somewhere.”

  “Right.” She laughed. “I am a workaholic. Don’t worry. I feel at home when I’m with you.”

  He grinned at that. “Did you ever want to get married again?” he asked her. “Or were you planning on being a jet-setting career woman all your life?”

  “At one point in time, I was hoping for a family. But I’m not sure that’ll happen now.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I never met anybody up to it, until now,” she said, “and I’m not sure what your thoughts are.”

  He looked at her in surprise and then down at his hands. “I would like to have a family at some point,” he murmured. “It would really help fill that lingering need inside.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened to yours.”

  “So am I, but it was a long time ago, and I’m as over it as I’m likely to get, I think. I will never forget either of them, of course, but I would never advocate for someone in that situation to stop living.”

  “Good. So, two or three?” He looked at her blankly, and quickly she grinned, realizing again that she needed to be more specific. “Two kids or three?”

  He burst out laughing. “How about we start with one?”

  *

  “Good.” Katie grinned. “Because … you remember last night?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Definitely. How could I forget?”

  “I wasn’t prepared for that to happen, and I didn’t use any birth control.”

  He could feel something inside his heart stop, then stared at her in shock. “Wow. Way to hit me where it counts.”

  “Just a warning. After all that happened yesterday, it’s not like we were thinking all that clearly, right?”

  “No, that’s for sure,” he said. “But, if it happens, I can’t say I’d be at all upset.”

  “Neither would I.”

  With that, he helped her back into the skiff, and they headed around the point toward the village again. This time they drew less attention, but they were standing closer together this visit, and, instead of just holding hands, she had her arm looped through his elbow.

  “So we don’t appear to be quite the oddity today that we were yesterday,” she noted quietly.

  “No, I noticed that. I’ll take that as a good thing.”

  “I’d say so,” she murmured. “It’s interesting how quickly we get used to a different norm.”

  “Looks like Leia led the way for a lot of them.”

  “True enough.”

  As they walked up to the old medicine woman’s home, a line was waiting to see her. Dave stepped forward and asked, “Is there a problem here? What’s going on?”

  “She was attacked,” said one of the men, his voice harsh.

  Dave stared at him in shock. “When?” he asked urgently.

  “Yesterday.”

  At that, Dave stepped around the line to try to see the woman herself. And, indeed, she was unconscious and sported a head wound. He bent down to look at it from a Western medicine point of view. “It doesn’t look very good,” he muttered. “That is pretty serious, as far as head trauma goes.”

  “Where’s Leia?” one of the men asked. “She would fix this.”


  “I don’t know if she can fix this. It probably needs time as much as anything.” Dave gently checked the bloody area covering the old woman’s hair. He found an open wound that needed stitching. “We need to close this wound.” He pulled out his phone and sent Bullard a message, asking for a time frame for his arrival.

  Instead of getting a text response, his phone rang. Bullard.

  “We’re on our way. Maybe two hours.”

  “Is Leia there?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  Bullard immediately handed over the phone.

  “Leia, the old medicine woman has been attacked.”

  “Oh my God. “How badly?”

  “She’s got an open head wound. The wound itself isn’t that bad,” he noted. “The trauma will be the problem. I can certainly stitch it up, though it’s a day late.”

  “That would have been better of course. But still, it will heal faster with less chance of infection if you can clean it up now and close the wound.”

  “Did you leave any medical supplies here?” he asked.

  “Yes, she has some there,” Leia said quietly. “Send me a photo of the injuries.”

  He quickly disconnected and sent photos, then spoke to one of the women nearby. “Leia left some medical supplies. Do you know where they are?”

  She looked at him blankly. One of the other men translated, and she immediately got up, walked over, and pulled out a large basket, carrying it to him.

  He riffled through it to find disinfectant, antibiotic lotion, some sutures, and even casting material to set broken bones. He smiled at that and immediately cleaned the woman’s head, while she lay here unconscious, then quickly sutured up the wound on the one side. He was checking over the rest of her, when his phone rang.

  Katie answered it for him. “Leia wants to know if there are any other injuries?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I can see. It looks like she was attacked from behind.”

  After she relayed that, Katie turned back to Dave. “Leia said there’s no violence on the island.”

  “She doesn’t know about the potshot somebody took at us or the guy on the boat that we’ve got tied up.” He turned to look at the others. “Did anybody see anything?” Dave counted several headshakes, but one man stood there, staring at him. “What did you see?” Dave asked.

  The man shrugged. “One of you.”

  “One of us? A white man?”

  “Yes. He came here for help.”

  “Did he have an injured wrist?” He pointed above his hand.

  The man nodded. “It was bandaged. He asked her for help.”

  “And she wouldn’t give it?”

  He shook his head. “She said she couldn’t help him. He got really angry and hit her.”

  “Nice,” he muttered. “I wonder why she wouldn’t help him?”

  “It was ugly,” said one of the women. “The hand, it was an ugly wound.”

  Dave nodded. It should have been because he’s the one who created it. He looked around. “Does anybody here know who he was?”

  They looked at each other, but nobody said a word.

  He sighed. “Come on, guys. I know he’s been around here. But we need to help her, and I need to know who did this.”

  They just shook their heads and wouldn’t say a word.

  He looked at Katie and shrugged. “Any ideas?”

  She held out the phone, with Leia still on the call, speaking to one of the young women.

  “Leia wants to ask some questions.”

  The woman took the phone. “Leia?”

  The conversation was one-sided, as they couldn’t hear the rest of it, but the woman fell silent after being animated, and then she gave a name.

  When the phone was handed back to her, Katie asked, “What was that all about?”

  “One of the old woman’s family did this,” she said.

  Katie shook her head. “Ouch. Pretty harsh to do this to your own family. Especially to someone her age.”

  “If she wouldn’t help him, I can see it,” Leia explained, her voice harsh. “He’s always been a problem. He always wants more than he has.”

  “But I thought he was white.”

  “Yes, and he only comes here when he wants something. His father was a white man. His mother was a native woman from the island. His mother went with his father to the mainland and then came back many years later with a son. It’s Pietro and his friend Ramon.”

  Chapter 7

  Katie could see the consternation among the faces in the group, when the locals realized they knew who had attacked the old woman, and that it was a black sheep of her own family. Katie looked down, as Dave gently made the older woman more comfortable, straightening up her body and placing a pillow ever-so-slightly under her neck to support it before covering her up. She checked for a temperature, as his gaze studied her skin.

  “You have a lot of medical experience, don’t you?” Katie asked Dave.

  “Bullard and I both do,” he said.

  “Will she be okay?” one of the women asked anxiously. The woman was heavy with child, and it was obvious that she was close to her time and stressed out.

  He turned toward her. “I can’t be sure. She’ll need to wake up for us to evaluate that.”

  The woman nodded and gently rubbed her belly. “I need her to help with the baby,” she murmured.

  “Does she look after everybody’s medical needs here?”

  The group nodded.

  He frowned at that. “Do you not go to the mainland at all?”

  “Not if we can help it,” the woman said. “We have to pay them.”

  “And here, she just looks after you?”

  “We’ve come to her for decades, generations even,” the woman explained.

  He nodded and assessed the look of his unconscious patient again.

  “You’re not happy about how she looks, are you?” Katie asked.

  “I’d feel a lot better if she were awake. Concussions are tricky things, and so are head wounds.”

  Katie didn’t know the first thing about that kind of medicine. “Well, Leia’s coming. Maybe she’ll help.”

  “She might, and she’ll certainly settle down these other people, I’ll bet, but there’s nothing much to be done for head injuries like this. It just takes time.”

  “If the old woman were in a hospital, would she be okay?”

  “Only if the brain isn’t swelling inside,” he noted. “They would just monitor her otherwise. And it’s like they say, medical care is out of reach for anybody here. There’s no free medical anywhere, and they don’t have a way to earn cash.”

  “Right.” Katie sighed at that. “Life is just fine and dandy, until something traumatizing happens, and then you realize the safety net you thought you had isn’t quite a safety net anymore.”

  He nodded and stepped up to some of the locals. “Where can we find this Pietro?”

  One of the men shrugged. “He went back to the mainland.”

  “To get his wrist fixed?”

  One of the other men said, “To bring back friends.”

  “Ah, so, he wants to continue the fight, huh?”

  The other man nodded.

  “We’ll see how he likes that,” Dave muttered. “And what about Ramon?”

  “We haven’t seen him,” one of the women said nervously. “Not since yesterday.”

  “Does he hang around with Pietro a lot?”

  “Too much,” the man replied.

  “And what about anybody else here? Do they hang out with that group?”

  “No,” the pregnant woman replied. “Most of us just want to live our peaceful island life.”

  “And Pietro and Ramon want something different?”

  “They always want something different,” she said, stifling a heavy groan, as she tried to shift the large weight she was carrying.

  Katie looked at her. “Is it just one baby or two?” she asked, with a smile
.

  “One. I think.” She gave her a bright smile. “But I’m overdue.”

  “Ah, so that will be fun too,” Dave said, as he studied her. “You’re in labor, aren’t you?”

  She looked at him fearfully. “How did you know?” she asked.

  “I recognize the signs.”

  “Are you a doctor?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not like a midwife, no,” he said. “But I’ve done a lot of doctoring in my time.” He looked at his watch. “Leia should be here in about an hour and a half.” That brought a murmur of excitement from the others. “Does anybody resent Leia being here?” he asked.

  Immediately everybody shook their heads. “No. She saved many of us,” the pregnant woman said. “She helped my sister deliver her baby, and we thought it was dead. But Leia saved it.”

  “Well, let’s hope she arrives in time to help you with your birth,” Dave said quietly. He looked back at Katie. “We need to head back.”

  She nodded. “I don’t feel very good about leaving the medicine woman.”

  “We’ll stay with her,” the pregnant woman said. “Can we send you word if something changes?”

  “Please do, and, as soon as we see Leia, we’ll bring her here.”

  At that, everybody seemed to calm down slightly. Dave and Katie represented a new element here, but Leia’s good relationship with them was giving them access to the group of villagers. Although Pietro targeting Leia had brought the trouble here too.

  With that, Dave smiled, turned, and reached out a hand for Katie, and they slowly walked back to their boat.

  “Do you think it’s safe to leave?”

  “We have to. And the villagers need to figure out what Pietro and Ramon are doing here as well.”

  She grimaced. “I’m not sure they have a clue. Obviously some relatives in every family don’t like the scenario, and I think that’s what we’ve got going on here.”

  “I wonder if it was Leia as a woman or Leia as a doctor who was valuable to them.”

  “Kind of sucks if it’s either slash or. But considering how poor their medical service is, I’m guessing it may be the doctor part.”

  “It’s not so much that it’s poor medical help just because their lives are simple. I’m sure the medicine woman has picked up many natural tricks over the years to heal people. Sometimes we just complicate things with our modern Western medicine,” he murmured.