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this is Franklin Dunn, practitioner of law and other unsavory habits, voice of the town council, and the worst patient I’ve ever had.”
    Dunn bowed, extended a hand. “It’s about time we got a real doctor around here.”
    Nathan consulted the chart, the faint hint of a smile on his face. “Tsk, tsk.” He shook his head. “Not following my orders, I see.”
    “They were absurd orders.” Dunn glowered.
    “May I see?” Rachel interrupted and Nathan handed her the chart. She flipped through the pages, aware that the two men had exchanged a conspiratorial wink. After a second she nodded, closed the chart and regarded Mr. Dunn.
    “Your blood pressure is up,” she said evenly, and turned to Nathan. “I suggest we bleed him.”
    “What?” Dunn’s normally florid complexion paled.
    “We’ll just make an incision, say, in the ankle, and drain off some blood. Your pressure will go down, if only until the next time, and you can go home.” She smiled sympathetically. “It’s quite scientific, really, and we hardly ever take too much blood these days.”
    Nathan burst out laughing and Dunn looked back and forth between them, confused.
    “Franklin, I think you might have just met your match,” Nathan said. “You’ve been taken.”
    Dunn looked at Rachel, who arched her eyebrows, her face composed and serious. Dunn, whose successful law career was less from legal expertise than the inborn ability to determine at a glance which way a prospective juror would vote, looked again. He could not tell what Rachel Adams was thinking. And he smiled.
    “If you ever get sick of medicine, I can get you into a really good law school.”
    “I hope he didn’t think I was being a smartass,” Rachel said after they left Dunn.
    “Franklin just looks like a pompous stuffed-shirt. And he likes to intimidate people if they’ll let him, but he has a great deal of respect for those who can out-maneuver him. Which you did.” He replaced Dunn’s chart on the desk and picked up another. “He just needs to unwind a little, relax.”
    Emma Sutter snorted, coming up beside him. “There you go again, giving advice and never taking it.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re discharging Frank, your old fishing buddy; why don’t the two of you take a day or two off?”
    “That’s a wonderful idea,” Rachel agreed.
    “Oh, I don’t . . .”
    “Here you are,” Emma continued, “living alongside a national park, two miles from Freedom Lake, and you can’t take a day off to enjoy it? I think you’d better enjoy it while you can because you—aren’t getting any younger.”
    “It would do you good,” Rachel added.
    “But what about my patients?”
    Rachel turned to Emma. “Half an hour ago those were our patients.”
    Nathan sighed, lowering himself into a chair. He looked at their faces and nodded. Reluctantly.
    “I’ve never seen a more half-hearted concession in my life.” Emma bustled down the hall.
    “I knew I should have put a lake in that laboratory,” Nathan mused, rubbing his chin.
    “It’ll make a new man of you.”
    “I haven’t even used the old one,” he protested and then stood. Their eyes met, Rachel respectful but undeniably an equal.
    “And,” he added, starting toward the next patient room, “I should have bound your feet when you were a child.”
    Rachel smiled. “You’ve been taken.”
    “Smartass.”
     
     

TWELVE
     
    Susan Donlevy was one of the new breed of nurses; incredibly efficient, bright and always questioning. She had taken the job in the middle of nowhere precisely for that reason. The doctors in the huge hospital complexes valued her conscientiousness but deplored her pathological doubt. Her employment pattern was always the same; a quick rise to the top, based on her formidable nursing abilities, then a subtle reassignment when she stepped on some toes.
    She was very tired of being transferred.
    She considered going into computer programming, where absolute accuracy would