With the MD...at the Altar?

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“Doesn’t account for the fever, the red-eye or the jaundice,” Luke said, punching a few keys to bring up another data screen. “The white blood cell counts are within normal limits, so it’s not an infection. Or at least not one the patients’ bodies are recognizing yet and mounting an immune response against. Maybe something is attacking their thermoregulatory functions.” Along with several other systems, he realized, as the skewed lab results continued to almost—but not quite—explain the symptoms.

“We’re still missing something,” Bug said, frowning at the results.

“Yeah. The trigger.” Luke ordered the computer to print up the results. “Let’s sit down with May and Thom and put our heads together. We need to go through all the environmental toxins and poisons, natural and unnatural substances that could have these effects. Hell, maybe we’re even looking at a mixture of agents, a pesticide or something. DDT messes with estrogen levels in pregnant women. Maybe our answer is something along those lines.”

Bug paused at the doorway. “You want me to invite Roxanne to sit in?”

“Don’t even try matchmaking,” Luke said without rancor. “And no, leave her out of this. She’s in town interviewing family members. With any luck, she’ll come up with a common thread. If we can figure out the ‘what’ and she finds the ‘how,’ we should be able to nail this illness before anyone else dies.”

And then he could get the hell out of Raven’s Cliff.

“HOW MUCH LONGER will Henry be unconscious?” Mary Wylde asked. Jiggling a tow-headed toddler on one hip, the young mother looked exhausted. Her gas station attendant husband had been sick for nearly four days. Thankfully he wasn’t among the Violents, but his vitals weren’t good.

If he didn’t turn around soon, Rox feared he might not recover. “I don’t know how much longer,” she said honestly, “but a team of specialists is working on him now.”

“Oh.” Mary’s expression relaxed fractionally. “Thank God.”

Rox had heard a version of that reaction from every family member she’d spoken to so far, and she was trying not to let it bother her. Be grateful for the help, she kept telling herself. What matters most is savinglives and preventing new cases. Ego doesn’t come intoit.

Still, she couldn’t help feeling as though she’d failed the town, and herself. She’d spent the past two years trying to make herself part of Raven’s Cliff, yet many of the townspeople seemed to have more faith in the CDC outsiders than in her. Maybe it was because they remembered her fly-by-night father and his wild schemes. Maybe because some of them were still old-school enough to have more faith in a male doctor than a female.

Or maybe, in the end, it was because she just didn’t belong anywhere in particular, no matter how hard she tried.

“Well, if there’s nothing else…” Mary said, starting to ease back and shut the door as another baby began to wail inside.

“Wait.” Rox held up a hand. “I just have a couple of quick questions.” She ran Mary through the survey she’d come up with, mostly focusing on the patient’s habits and how they differed from those of the family members who hadn’t gotten sick.

Mary answered the questions as quickly as she could, casting glances back in the direction of the escalating cries. She pointedly didn’t invite Rox inside so they could continue their conversation, but that was okay. The young mother’s answers only confirmed what Rox had begun to suspect three houses ago.

She was pretty sure the Curse had something to do with locally caught fish.

The day before the symptoms began, three of the victims had eaten fish and chips prepared at the Cove Café. Two others, including Mary’s husband, had eaten fish purchased at Coastal Fish, a seafood market located adjacent to the piers. Mary, on the other hand, had eaten a salad because she was trying to lose ten pounds before beach season.

Rox’s gut told her she had the beginnings of a pattern. Maybe she should’ve seen it sooner, but seafood was a staple of the local diet, and the symptoms were nothing like typical food poisoning. It hadn’t been until she had the time to really compare her patients’ diets that the obvious answer had jumped out at her.

Okay, so I’ve got a pattern, she thought as she headed away from Mary’s house, jotting notes as she walked. Now what?

She had several other people to interview, but she was less than a block away from Coastal Fish. Instinct told her she should keep following up with the families, but her gut told her she already had her answer, and what could be a better next step than going directly to the source?

Knowing that working with a team meant being part of the team, and liking the feeling of connectedness, even if it came with Luke and their shared baggage, she pulled out her cell phone, intending to call and let him know what she’d discovered. But when she flipped open the unit, she saw the searching icon displayed.

No signal.

“Damn it.” She looked around, halfway thinking she’d head to her clinic and call from there, but the clinic phone was still down from the night before—it looked like Aztec had ripped the cable out of the exterior wall before he’d knocked on her clinic door…which was scary enough that she was trying not to think about it.

Besides, Rox thought, the reception was even worse out by the monastery, so Luke’s phone probably wasn’t receiving, either. Odds were it would be a wasted effort.

Deciding that her best bet was to obtain samples of the various catches before driving back to the monastery, she headed for Coastal Fish.

The shop front was the epitome of New England kitsch, decorated with netting, weather-beaten buoys, lobster traps and plastic lobsters. When she pushed through the swinging door, she found the air inside cool and faintly moist, carrying the good scent of fresh seafood. With racks of sauces and bread crumbs on two walls and the third dominated by a huge glass display case, the place was unpretentious but did a brisk business because the prices were good and the fish came straight off the boats, which literally docked at the back door of the shop.

The owner of Coastal Fish, Marvin Smith, stood behind the counter wearing a crisp white apron and a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. In his mid-sixties, stick-thin and balding, Smith had been the mainstay of the fishing community for many years until he’d retired to run the fish store. He was still the fishermen’s unofficial spokesman when things needed doing around town, which was both good news and bad for Rox.

The good news was that if the fishermen had noticed anything strange lately, he’d know. The bad news was that she wasn’t sure he’d tell her, because he’d find anything that threatened local fishing to be a personal threat, as well.

She checked, but saw no red tinge to his irises as she stepped up to the counter, where a glass display case offered a wide selection of local favorites arranged on fresh greens, with plastic lemons strategically placed for a hint of color.

“I hear you brought in some medical detectives from out of town,” Smith said in a gravelly voice. “Couldn’t take care of a few fevers on your own? Business is off, you know. Much more of this and word’s going to get around. It’s the start of summer—we can’t afford to lose the tourists.”

“We’re talking about far more than a few fevers here,” she said, stung. “People are dying.”

“Then why aren’t you off running tests or something?”

I am, she thought, but knew she would have to tread lightly if she wanted to get anything out of the combative ex-fisherman. “We’ve split up to pursue various angles of the investigation. I’m collecting samples from the main food sources in town.” She gestured to the door behind him, which led to a long, narrow room where the fish were filleted and weighed out. “Can I get back there? It won’t take long.”

“What won’t take long?” It took a second for Smith to process her intention. When he got it, he narrowed his eyes. “You want to take my fish?”

“I just need a small sample of each type,” she assured him, though she fully intended to take samples from multiple fish of each variety. The fact that the disease hadn’t struck everyone who’d eaten fish over the past bunch of days suggested the source might be a certain type of fish, or maybe even one specimen that had yielded multiple cuts, or had gone through a certain processing machine.

“You going to pay for it?”

“Of course,” she said, though it irked her to do so. A call to the police chief or the mayor probably would’ve cleared her way, but she preferred to handle things on her own. Besides, Mayor Wells had plenty to cope with right now—besides the outbreak, he was dealing with a vociferous group of locals who, at the town meeting the night before, had started pushing him to let local businessman Theodore Fisher buy and refurbish the burned-out Beacon Lighthouse, which some residents believed was the seat of all the bad luck Raven’s Cliff had suffered in recent months.

Rox didn’t put much stock in curses, but if rebuilding the lighthouse gave the town a common goal she didn’t see why it was such a bad idea. The mayor, however, was doing his damnedest to block the project for some reason.

“Okay,” Smith finally said, reluctance etched in his body language as he flipped up the pass-through and let her come behind the counter, then led her through the door to the processing area. “I guess I can’t stop you from buying fish, can I?”

“Thanks.” She moved among the big ice chests, trying not to make it obvious that she was checking each thermostat, each coolant line, looking for malfunctioning equipment that might be associated with the illness. “Do you supply the Cove Café?” she asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

“Why?”

“Just curious. I had an amazing cod sandwich there the other day and I was wondering if they purchased their fish through you.” That wasn’t entirely a lie—she’d had a good fish sandwich at the café, but it’d been more like a month ago, and she hadn’t particularly cared where the fillet had come from. She was looking for an easy connection among the sick people.

He shook his head. “Nope. They buy straight off the boats.”

Okay, so there went that theory. “You buy off the boats too, though, right? Have they been bringing in anything special lately?”

“Special in what way?” he asked, continuing to answer most of her questions with questions of his own, a technique she suspected was designed to put her on the defensive.

It was working, too. She found herself growing more tense as she worked her way into the processing room, toward where the narrow space opened directly onto one of the fishing piers. Smith followed close behind her, making her feel as though she was being stalked.

Or herded.

She turned to him. “Can you get me twenty or so of those little bags you use for small shellfish orders? I need to keep each of the samples separate. A grease pencil would be good, too.”

He didn’t budge, instead moving closer. His voice dropped to a growl. “What, exactly, are you going to test for?”

“That’s up to the CDC team,” she said, playing dumb.

“Where else have you taken samples?”

She was almost positive he would call and check, so she didn’t lie. “You’re the first.”

Catching movement out of her peripheral vision, she turned her head and saw two men enter from the pier. One was moving strangely, shuffling his feet as though he was having neurological problems.

Panic knotted Rox’s gut and her heart hammered in her ears. “Maybe I should come back later.”

“I don’t think so.” Smith blocked her exit on one side, and raised his voice to call, “Hey, boys, the lady doctor here seems to think our fish is poisoning the town. What do you think about that?”

There was an ugly mutter from the men, and they moved to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking her on that side as well.

She was trapped.

Chapter Four

Rox’s heart hammered as the two fishermen approached and Smith remained unmoving at her back, blocking her escape.

She held her hands away from her sides, palms up. No harm, no foul. “Come on, guys, I’m not looking to start any trouble here. I’m just trying to do my job.”

“By ruining ours,” the big guy on the left said. “It’s bad enough you’re telling people it’d be good for them to eat tinned foods and drink bottled water, and you’ve got the coast guard telling us we can’t put the boats into harbor anywhere but here. Now you’re trying to prove it’s the fish making people sick? What do you think’s going to happen to the town if the feds shut down the fishing grounds? We’ll starve!”

As he drew closer, she identified the dark-haired, dark-eyed man as Phil Jenks, a deckhand on one of the more prosperous fishing boats. He was big and brawny, shading toward overweight, and wore a plaid shirt beneath his waterproof coveralls. She’d seen him around town, didn’t know anything good or bad about him, but he gave her a seriously not-good vibe as he approached.

“I don’t want to ruin anything,” she said quickly. “Don’t you want to know if there’s something wrong with the fish you’ve been catching? Better yet, don’t you want me to prove that they’re fine?”