Carnal Innocence

herself to breathe slowly, Caroline could manage to hold down a little tepid water. She sipped again, breathed deeply, and waited for Burke Truesdale to come back out of the trees.
    He hadn’t asked her to go in with him. She supposed he’d taken one look at her face and known she wouldn’t have made it ten feet. Even now, as she sat on the top step of the porch, her hands almost steady again, she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten from the pond back to the house.
    She’d lost one of her shoes, she noted absently. One of those pretty navy and white flats she’d bought in Paris a few months before. With glazed eyes she stared down at her bare foot streaked with dirt and grass. Frowning with concentration, she toed the other shoe off. It seemed important somehow that she have both feet bare. After all, someone might think she was crazy, sitting there on the porch with one shoe on. And with a body floating in the pond.
    When her stomach pitched, rolled, and threatenedto expel even the tap water, she dropped her head between her knees. Oh, she hated to be sick, hated it with a passion only someone who had recently recovered from long illness could feel. The weakness of it, the shaky loss of control.
    Clenching her fists, she used all her concentration to pull herself back from the edge. What right did she have to be sick and scared and dizzy? She was alive, wasn’t she? Alive and whole and safe. Not like that poor woman.
    But she kept her head down until her stomach settled, and the dull buzzing faded from her ears.
    She lifted it again when she heard the sound of a car bumping down her lane. Caroline brought a weary hand up to her face as she watched the dusty station wagon squeeze through the overgrowth.
    She’d have to cut those vines back, she thought. She could hear them brushing against the already scarred paint of the car. Must be some clippers in the shed. Best to do it in the morning, before the day heated up.
    Dully, she watched the station wagon stop beside the sheriff’s cruiser. A wiry man with a red tie knotted around a turkey neck climbed out. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, and a white hat atop a full head of hair he’d dyed as densely black as coal and slicked into a modified pompadour. Pouches of loose flesh dipped below his jaw and his eyes, as if the skin had once been full of fat or fluid and had stretched under the weight.
    His black slacks were hauled up with sassy red suspenders, and he wore the heavy, shiny black tie shoes Caroline associated with the military. But the cracked leather bag he carried announced his profession.
    “You must be Miz Caroline.” His high-pitched voice would have made her smile at any other time or place. He sounded eerily like a used-car salesman she’d seen on the old RCA console only the night before. “I’m Doc Shays,” he told her as he propped one foot on the bottom step. “I tended to your grandfolks near to twenty-five years.”
    Caroline gave him a careful nod. “How do you do?”
    “Fine and dandy.” His sharp physician’s eyesscanned her face and recognized shock. “Burke gave me a call. Said he was headed on down here.” Shays took out a huge white handkerchief to mop his neck and face. Though he could move fast when he had to, his slow and easy pace was more than bedside manner. It was the way he preferred to do things. “Hell of a hot one, ain’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why don’t we go on inside, where it’s cooler?”
    “No, I think …” She looked helplessly back toward the shielding trees. “I should wait. He went in there to see … I was throwing stones in the water. I could see only her face.”
    He sat beside her, took her hand in his. Fingers still nimble after forty years of medicine monitored her pulse. “Whose face, darlin’?”
    “I don’t know.” When he reached down to open his bag, she stiffened. Months of vigilant doctors with their slim, shiny needles had her system jittering. “I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything.” She jolted to her feet, and though she tried, she couldn’t keep her voice from shrilling. “I’m all right. You should try to help her. There must be something you could do to help her.”
    “One thing at a time, darlin’.” To show good faith, he shut his bag again. “Why don’t you sit on down here and tell me all about it? Nice and slow. Then we can figure out what’s what.”
    She didn’t sit, but she did gain enough control to take several long breaths.