‘You’re one of the Viental kids,’ he snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m Ginny,’ she agreed cordially, and to Fergus’s astonishment she was looking at her watch as her fingers rested on the man’s wrist. Did she have medical training?
‘A Viental,’ the farmer gasped, and he groaned as he shifted his vast bulk to look at her more closely. ‘What the hell are you doing on my property? Why aren’t you dead?’
‘I’m helping Doc Reynard. Plus I pulled one of your lambs out of the cattle grid dividing your land from ours.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘I’ve been up on the ridge, looking over the stock you’ve been running on our land. Your ewes have obviously been lambing for weeks and at least six ewes have died during lambing. They’ve been left where they died. No one’s been near them.’
‘Mind your own business,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t call Doc Reynard for a lecture-and I didn’t call you. I don’t want a Viental anywhere near my property.’
‘You called Doc Reynard to get you on your feet again,’ she snapped. ‘There’s no way he can do that on his own-without a crane, that is.’
‘Let’s check the hip,’ Fergus said uneasily, and she flashed a look of anger back at him.
‘There’s no difference in the length of Oscar’s legs. He has breathing difficulties but that’s because he won’t do anything about his asthma. He’ll have got himself into this state because he couldn’t be bothered fending for himself so he feels like a few days in the hospital. He does it deliberately and he’s been doing it for twenty years.’ She glanced around the kitchen and winced. ‘Though by the look of it, it’s gone beyond the need for a few days in hospital now. Maybe we need to talk about a nursing home.’
She had a point. The place was disgusting. But still…
‘The hip,’ Fergus reiterated, trying again to regain control.
‘Right. The hip.’ She sat back and pressed her fingers lightly on Oscar’s hips. ‘How about that?’ she said softly, while both men stared at her, astounded. ‘No pain?’
‘Aagh!’ Oscar roared, but the roar was a fraction too late.
Enough. He was the doctor and this was his patient. ‘Do you mind moving back?’ he demanded, lifting Ginny’s hands clear. ‘I need to do an examination.’
‘There’s no need. He’ll have stopped taking his asthma medication. Do you want me to get oxygen from your truck?’
‘I was called to a broken hip,’ Fergus said testily. He didn’t have a clue what was happening here-what the dynamics were. Her pressure on the hips without result had been diagnosis enough, but he wasn’t taking chances on a patient-and a situation-that he didn’t know. ‘Let me examine him.’
Almost surprisingly she agreed. ‘I’ll get the oxygen and then I’ll wait outside. I’ll take care of the sheep. Someone’s got to take care of the sheep. Then I’ll come with you to the hospital.’
He frowned. He wasn’t too sure why she intended coming to the hospital. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her. There was something about this woman’s presence that was sending danger signals, thick and fast. ‘You were going to walk home.’
‘He’ll have to go to hospital,’ she said evenly. ‘He’s drunk, his breathing’s unstable, and you won’t be able to prove he hasn’t got a broken hip without X-rays. How are you planning to lift Oscar yourself?’
‘I’ll call in the paramedics,’ he snapped.
‘Excuse me, but this is the last home and away football match for Cradle Lake this season,’ Ginny snapped back. ‘If by paramedic you mean Ern and Bill, who take it in turns to drive the local ambulance, then you’ll find they refuse absolutely to come until the match-and the post-match celebration-is over. Especially if it’s to come to Oscar.’
Which was why he had come here in the first place, he thought dourly. The call had come in and there’d been no one willing to take it.
‘That leaves you stuck,’ she continued. ‘For a couple of hours at least. Unless you accept help.’
‘Fine,’ he conceded, trying not to sound confused. ‘I’ll accept your help. Can you wait outside?’
‘Very magnanimous,’ she said, and she grinned.
His lips twitched despite his confusion. It was a great grin.
Get on with the job. Ignore gorgeous grins.
‘Just go,’ he told her, and she clicked her disreputable boots together and saluted.
‘Yes, sir.’
CHAPTER TWO
SHE went. Fergus did a perfunctory examination and then a more thorough one.
Oscar had no broken hip, but Ginny was right-the man was dead drunk. His blood pressure was up to one ninety on a hundred and ten and his breathing was fast and noisy, even once he was on oxygen. Fergus checked his saturation levels and accepted the inevitable.
‘I gotta go to hospital, don’t I, Doc?’ Oscar demanded, with what was evident satisfaction. His breathing was becoming more shallow now and Fergus wondered whether he’d drunk a lot fast just as they’d arrived-just to make sure. ‘I told you I got a broken hip.’
‘You don’t appear to have broken anything,’ Fergus told him. ‘But, yes, you need to come to hospital.’ He gazed around the kitchen and grimaced. ‘Maybe we need to think about some sort of permanent care,’ he suggested. ‘Unless there’s anyone who can stay with you.’
‘That’s not me,’ Ginny said through the screen door. ‘Or anyone in this district. This isn’t exactly Mr Popular here. What’s the prognosis?’
‘Mr Bentley needs help with his breathing,’ Fergus said, trying not to sound like he was talking through gritted teeth. He knew by now that the diagnosis she’d made had been spot on. ‘He’s not safe to leave alone. The ambulance will have to come out to collect him.’
‘I told you-they won’t come for at least a couple of hours.’
‘Will you stay with Mr Bentley until they come?’ he asked, without much hope, and she shook her head.
‘Nope. I’m needed elsewhere and I can’t stand Mr Bentley.’
‘I can’t stand you either, miss,’ the farmer snapped. ‘You and your whore of a mother. You and your family deserved everything you got.’
Ginny had opened the screen door and stepped inside, but Oscar’s words stopped her. She flinched, recoiling as if she had been struck. Her colour faded and she leaned back against the kitchen bench as if she suddenly needed support.
‘No family ever deserved what happened to us,’ she whispered, and she turned to Fergus as if she couldn’t bear the sight of the man on the floor. She swallowed, evidently trying hard to move on from his vicious words. ‘Obese patients like him are the pits,’ she said, ‘and if you leave him alone he’ll stay alive just long enough to sue. More’s the pity. So you need to take him to hospital. If neither of us want to sit here for a couple of hours, that means we use the back of your truck. I got the ewe out.’
‘You got the ewe out,’ he said blankly, and she managed a weak smile.
‘That would be the sheep, city boy. The one that was…well, making herself at home in the back of your Land Cruiser. I put the ewe and her baby in the home paddock.’ She glared down at Oscar with disdain. ‘I put hay in there, too, and I filled the trough,’ she said. ‘Much to the relief of the rest of the stock. You’re so off our property. I’d rather let the place go to ruin than let you agist on our place again. The dogs are starving. The sheep are fly-blown and miserable, and there’s a horse locked up…’ She broke off and Fergus saw real distress on her face. ‘I’ll get the RSPCA out here straight away,’ she whispered, ‘and I hope you end up in jail. You deserve to be there. Not hospital.’
Whew. ‘Ginny, can we keep to the matter at hand?’ Fergus said, trying to keep control in a situation that was spiralling. ‘We can’t take Mr Bentley in the truck.’