Read Just Over The Mountain for Free Online Page B

but too bad that she can’t squeeze one more career into her day. You know what I mean.”
    “Sydney is already starting to complain, and she’s been in here less than a week.”
    She was just about to ask him if he was complaining as well, but she was distracted by the sight of two teenage boys—twins—who were replicas of her first boyfriend. Tall for their fourteen years, lanky, freckled, with unruly, curling brown hair. They wore identical sulks typical of their age, and long baggy shorts that hung low on their skinny frames. It was like stepping into the past. They had to be Chris’s boys.
    “Right this way, gentlemen,” Susan was commanding. She followed them into an examining room and closed the door. June shook her head with silent laughter. She considered what a handful those two must have been and felt a pang of momentary envy.
    A few moments later she and Susan were exiting their examining rooms at the same time. Susan put two folders into the slot outside the door and said, “I’m giving the Forrest twins to John because he’s a male doctor and they’re at ‘that age,’ you know.”
    “Good move. Physicals? For sports?”
    “Football. And they’re behind on immunizations, like everyone else.”
    “Football,” she said, perhaps wistfully. Of course. “Did their father bring them in?”
    “No, actually. Birdie did. She’s in the waiting room. Would you like to see her?”
    “No need,” June said, but she was thinking, Sooneror later we’re going to come face-to-face, Chris and I. She had no idea what to expect.
     
    Tom went alone back into the woods of Shell Mountain, in Trinity County. He drove his Range Rover along an old, abandoned logging road, and he had second thoughts now that he had come this far. He should’ve called Jerry, the shrink. Or maybe his Veterans Administration counterpart, Charlie MacNeil. And it would have been appropriate to call in some law enforcement with jurisdiction, since he was beyond his territory. But he wasn’t here on legal business, he rationalized. He just wanted to talk to a friend.
    When the Mulls first visited June months ago, it was because their sixteen-year-old, Clinton, had been stepped on by their jenny, and his foot had begun showing symptoms of gangrene. She had instructed them to go immediately to the hospital, lest Clinton die. But Clarence, who had suffered from paranoia and delusions since the war, took the boy straight back home, to their little shanty in the woods. This was where Tom found him the first time, and where he suspected Clarence might have fled now.
    But why was the question. Since they’d rescued him, Clarence had been doing great on antidepressant and psychotropic drugs. Things had been going well for the family. Added to that, there was the miracle of Jurea’s plastic surgery, an event no one could have predicted. Well, no one but June, he thought with a smile. Anyone who looked at Jurea’s morbid scars would havethought her condition hopeless. Why, when things were so good, would Clarence flee?
    Tom parked the Range Rover out of sight of the shanty and went the rest of the way on foot. As it came into sight, it became clear Clarence was there. The jenny was back in the small, crudely fenced corral and smoke curled from the makeshift chimney. Relief was still a ways off, though. The first time Tom had approached this place, back when Clinton’s foot was injured and before Clarence was on medication, all that greeted him was a shotgun blast.
    He stood behind a good-size tree. “Hey, Clarence!” he yelled.
    It was a little while before there was any sign of life. The rag pulled back from the hole in the door that served as a glassless window. “What you want, Chief?”
    He sounded sane. But then…
    “I was just wondering where you went off to,” Tom yelled. “Jurea…she’s worried.”
    “She’d know where to find me,” he yelled back.
    True. It was Jurea who’d mentioned the house in the forest about the same