That Perfect Place Read online

  “Maybe I better sleep at my place tonight.” She reached for her jeans when he released her.

  “Stay. I sleep better when you are near.”

  “Usually, we both sleep less when I’m near.” Jill smiled.

  “I promise tonight I’ll just hold you for a while and maybe a kiss or some—”

  “Jakob, go to bed. I’m going to check on our patients and give the dogs a run. Newton has been eating something he shouldn’t and is terribly gassy.”

  “He probably got into some Doritos. He’s a sneaky thief.” He leaned over on his crutch and grabbed her ass, giving a squeeze before she could get away. Jill stopped in the doorway and shook it at him before running off.

  By the time she got back to the house, Jake was sound asleep. She moved the one-eared tabby cat and eased in beside him, but before she drifted off, she thought, it is nicer to have someone so dear, so near.

  hen Jill returned home from golf on Wednesday, all hell had broken loose. There were cars everywhere, and an ambulance pulled in behind her. Steph was on the porch and called out.

  “Brad and SJ took a trail ride, and Dusty fell off the steep trail and down into the swampy area with Brad on him.”

  “Oh my God, how bad?”

  “Don’t know yet. Follow the ambulance guys. Everybody else is already out there.”

  Jill raced along the path until she saw the group of people below her. Jake’s tall form was in the center. She slid down the hill searching for Brad. Jake was cradling the boy in his arms while a first responder pulled the stirrup off the saddle to free his trapped foot. The ankle was obviously broken. Once he was free they carried him to the dryer hillside to assess his condition. Brad was shaken and in pain but mostly just shocked and afraid for his dad’s horse.

  “Dad, don’t worry about me,” he pleaded. “See if you can help Dusty.”

  “I’ve got Brad, Jakob. You look at your horse,” Jill said as calmly as she was able with her heart pounding fit to break.

  She could see by the look on Jake’s face how grateful he was that she was there.

  The horse was still down in the mud and not struggling to rise as a horse normally would. Jake unbuckled the cinch and removed the bridle that was stuck on a branch and cranking the animal’s head into an awkward position. As soon as Dusty’s head was free he made a tremendous effort and got shakily to his feet. The crowd cheered, and Jill hugged Brad.

  “I think he’ll be all right, honey. Let’s get you out of here and get that leg taken care of.”

  “I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Brad,” his dad called over. “We may have some trouble getting Dusty out of the swamp.”

  Jake said quietly into Jill’s ear, “I’m going to need help with this horse. Tell Steph to get Jim to help me. You stay with Brad. Call me if you’re not happy with what the doctors are doing with him. I’ll get Dusty stabilized and be along as soon as I can.” She squeezed his arm in reply.

  Jake treated the horse for shock and put on a compression wrap to stop the profuse bleeding on his right front pastern as soon as they were out of the mud. When they reached the road, they loaded him into the trailer that Ed Deale had brought. It took twenty-five minutes to get the big horse to the clinic, and getting him back out of the trailer was a trial. By that point, all the he wanted was to sleep.

  Jim was very nice about helping despite his previous objection to horses. They put Dusty in a stall, started an IV, and gave him some Banamine for the pain. The wound was deep, and the bone was exposed.

  What they couldn’t see was whether there was any tendon damage.

  “Jake, go see to your boy. Dale is still here. He and I can knock him out and take a look at this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hey, I’m competent. I’ll just pretend he’s a cow.”

  “Don’t install any cloven hooves, OK?” Jake called back over his shoulder as he headed out the door.

  When Jake got to the emergency room they had just brought Brad back from x-ray.

  “Dad, how is Dusty? I am so sorry for what happened.”

  “Just exactly what did happen?”

  “SJ and I had ridden all around the property, and we were heading back along the creek trail. We were just at the high point when something spooked Lucy and she slammed into us. Dusty didn’t have a choice but to head down the hill or fall. We made it almost all the way down before he tripped and fell, and my foot got caught when I was thrown. I know he banged his foreleg hard on a rock when he went down. My head was real close to him at that point.”

  Jake wrapped his son in his arms to stop the pain in his chest. “Where else are you hurt? Did you hit your head?”

  “Not hard. We wore our helmets like you told us to. I will never make a face about wearing one again. I’ve got bruises all over, but my head is OK. Now tell me how your horse is.”

  The tall vet felt an urgent need to sit down when he thought about how much worse things could have been.

  “He has a big deep gash on his right foreleg. Jim is sewing it up, and he may have bowed a tendon. He’s awfully sore.”

  “You should go take care of him. Jill can stay with me.”

  “My son is more important than my horse.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the best horse vet there is. He needs you more than I do right now.”

  Jill came into the cubicle about that time.

  “Sorry, little girl’s room. How’s Dusty?”

  “Bad gash from the fetlock to the coronary band lateral side, maybe some tendon problems. We’ll see.”

  Jill rubbed his back, and he leaned against her.

  “Oh shit. I need to call Steve and Maggie.”

  “I’ll call them,” Jill said, taking out her phone.

  The doctor came in about that time with the x-rays. He put them on the viewer and stood back. Jake looked at them closely.

  “Just the distal tibia. Everything else looks OK,” Jake said.

  “Yep, simple closed reduction and hopefully no damage to the growth plate,” the doctor agreed.

  “What does that mean?” Brad asked.

  “It means you got lucky, Mr. Gundersen. No football this year, but you should be in good shape by Halloween. We’ll put you in a cast and send you home with some painkillers.”

  Jill came back in. “Good news. Apollo has continued to improve. He’s eating all the chicken they give him and drinking. He did pull out the IV though.”

  “Figures. I’d like to draw a blood on him to check his kidney function and do a CBC and differential.”

  “I could…” Jill began.

  “Absolutely not. No way are you drawing blood from a wide-awake lion. I’ll go down later and hit him with a dart.”

  “Jakob Gundersen, I am perfectly capable of shooting a tranquilizer gun into a captive cat. You’ve got enough to deal with at home right now.”

  He looked at her hard for a moment. “You’re right. Red darts. Be careful, big cats don’t always respond like they should to the sedatives. Make sure he’s out. That’s how I got bitten.”

  Jill kissed Brad. “I’ll see you later, sweetie. Call me if you need me to bring you anything.”

  “How about some sanity to my life?” Jake called after her.

  When the Gundersen men returned home a few hours later, Jeanine and SJ came over immediately with some dinner.

  Brad said he wasn’t hungry, but he kept picking at it until his plate was empty. Jake filled them in on Brad’s injury between bites.

  “Uncle Jake, when Lucy spooked it was because a man jumped up out of the bushes like he was surprised,” SJ said as he chewed on a straw. “I didn’t watch where he went because I was watching Brad go down the hill. But the guy looked like the one from Pakistan that was here before Callie left.”

  “Mirza? Are you sure?”

  “Not positive like I could swear in court, but pretty sure.” He had fashioned a triangle with his straw and started pushing it around the table.

  “Thanks
, SJ, and thanks for doing such a good job this afternoon. You kept your head and did the right things, especially setting him back on the horse.” Jake clapped the boy on the shoulder, and Sam Jr. grew an inch taller with pride.

  Jeanine hugged her son and then her nephew and finally her brother. “Brad, you’d better get to bed. Somebody will be here with you all day tomorrow. I need your dad here to catch up with his work load.”

  She turned to her youngest sibling. “Jake, what do you want me to do about tomorrow? We are way behind on things.”

  “Ah, just pack them in. Anything you can schedule. How is Jim set?”

  “He’s not swamped, so maybe he can do a few of your calls.”

  “Good. Jill and I will both do as much horse work as you can get to come in. I’ll catch up my farm calls Saturday, if I have to.”

  “Where’s Jill now?”

  “Brandeises. She’s getting a blood sample from Apollo, who seems to be better.” Jake stacked the dishes in the dishwasher. “I need to go down to the clinic. Can you stay with Brad? I have to see to Dusty and run the labs when Jill gets back.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” Brad complained.

  “Don’t you remember the doctor saying you should not be left alone for twenty-four hours? Sometimes even simple fractures have complications.”

  Jim had done a thorough job on his partner’s horse. An x-ray had revealed a cracked coffin bone. The farrier had already been called to put on a heart-bar shoe that would stabilize the hoof. There was a lot of heat in the tendon, and Jake applied a support wrap and administered an anti-inflammatory. He brought Lucy into the stall next door so Dusty wouldn’t feel anxious about being alone.

  He was writing up a few notes in his office when Jill got back. They went to the lab together and ran the blood work quickly. Things were definitely improving for the remaining lion. Jill was happy to report that no one else had shown any signs of sickness.

  “Have you heard anything about McCaffrey?” she asked.

  “They airlifted him to Iowa City. I figured I’d wait until tomorrow to call. I don’t figure he has much of a chance though. It you don’t catch it early on, it’s usually fatal, I’m sorry to say.”

  “How awful. What about his cousin, the one with the knife?”

  “If anyone knows anything they aren’t saying.”

  “God, I hope they catch the guys who are doing this soon.”

  “Jill, what’s your opinion of Mirza? Could he be involved with this?”

  “Unless he’s a consummate actor, no.”

  “SJ said he saw someone who looked like him in the woods. I’m wondering if our antibiotic thief has our clinic staked out. He popped out, and that’s what spooked the horses.”

  “Jake, you don’t suppose this is some terrorist thing, do you?”

  “I’m afraid it’s either that or some wacko bent on killing cows the hard way. I found some cows the other day that were where they shouldn’t be and called Halloran. Christ, I hope that wasn’t what led to Brad’s accident. A car followed me that looked like one I saw parked on the property with the cows.”

  “Jake, stay out of it from now on. None of us could take it if something happened to you.” She took his face in her hands.

  He grabbed them and kissed her palms. “Do you know how great it is to be with someone who cares?” He kissed her chin and her neck before moving on to her lips, and then their tongue met and both were lost in the moment. He set her on the counter and ran his hands up under her blouse to cup her breasts and caress her nipples. Jill groaned and moved her hands up under his shirt to palm his nipples. She moved down, running her hands over his ribs and flat, tight abdomen, then down his groin. Jake scooped her up and moved to the bunkroom to pursue things to their logical conclusion.

  Jeanine was half-asleep when they got to the house, so Jill slipped quickly into the bedroom. She could hear Jake say to his sibling quietly, “Thanks, sis. Go get some sleep.” He came in after checking on Brad.

  “I’ll get up in a few hours to check on him.”

  “No, Jake. I’ll take the two-thirty check, and you just get up at five thirty like you usually do.”

  Jill was pretty sure he was asleep by the time he finished saying OK and thanks.

  Thursday the hospital was hopping. They worked through lunch to catch up and finished by six thirty. Thankfully, there had been no emergencies. Everyone, including Jim who claimed he needed to sign the cast, made at least one trip to the cabin to check on Brad who was pretty knocked out all day from the medications. SJ and Vanessa spent the day with him just in case.

  Jake ate a quick supper and headed once more for the Brandeis compound. Apollo was doing well, and his temperament had improved. They switched him over to oral antibiotics.

  Maggie was able to report that Carlos was also showing improvement. Jake told them about Donny McCaffrey. They had received word at the clinic about five that he had not survived. Steve had never really known Donny, but Maggie had lived just a block from his family growing up, so she was shocked.

  Knowing that Joel McCaffrey or her family would have informed her, Jake called Caroline on the drive home to fill her in on their son and offer condolences. She sounded a bit drunk when he called. She didn’t take the news about Brad well and worked herself into a frenzy claiming that she was a useless mother and why hadn’t he called sooner. He tried to tell her he was sorry about Donny, and she screamed into the phone.

  “I don’t want to hear about Donny.” Then she broke down crying.

  After a few heavy sobs, she said, “He was the love of my life and the worst thing that ever happened to me. I don’t want you at the funeral, Jakob. I can’t stand having you around to remind me how stupid I am. Brad can come if he’s up to it though. I’m going to hang up now. Don’t call me again.”

  Jake felt awful the rest of the way home. What had he ever done to make her feel that way? He treated himself to a beer and a shot before bed, hoping it would wash away the bad taste; it didn’t.

  riday night both Gundersen men were grumpy—Brad because he hurt worse today than yesterday and Jake because of his conversation with Caroline. Jill was at Jim and Tina’s for the evening, so Jake was scrounging in the kitchen when Brad’s grandparents stopped by to see him. Marilyn and Dean greeted their former son-in-law warmly.

  “Please, forgive anything Caroline said to you yesterday, Jakob,” Marilyn said as she unloaded some brats, sauerkraut, and potato salad. “She’s always been a very self-destructive person, always lashing out at the wrong people. She’s really hurting right now.”

  “Ah hell, you know as well as I do she resents the fact that Jakob is a certified brainiac and she can barely balance a checkbook. She knows she was wrong to treat him like she did but won’t admit it. Why she couldn’t be more like our other two kids, I’ll never know.”

  “Dean,” Marilyn whispered harshly, “she’s still our daughter. And I’ll thank you not to bad-mouth her in front of her son.”

  “Don’t worry, Grandma,” Brad said from his dad’s lounge chair, “Mom explained it this way, Dad’s the kind of guy you need to fix it when things go wrong, and she’s the one you need when you want to forget that they do go wrong.

  She’ll apologize to me about Dad. She always does. I’m supposed to pass it on.”

  The adults exchanged amused looks. He understood his mother better than her former husband.

  “So what was this shit Donny was into?” Dean asked. “I can’t believe there could be terrorists here in Iowa. What would be the point?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake answered, but his mind was racing. He shut out the other’s chatter. That was it exactly. Terrorists would gain little with such a sparsely populated state as Iowa. So why?

  Were they trying to build a better weapon before unleashing it on a higher-profile target and made mistakes that had shown their hand before they were ready? Or, if enough animals in enough locations were infected at the same time, it could be very co
stly to livestock production in the affected states. Grazing animals were often in remote locations. Once enough were infected to cause an epizootic, it would take years of diligence to eradicate the disease. Jake pulled himself back to the present, vowing to speak to Halloran one more time.

  Jim’s truck was not in the drive when Jill pulled in. She took some time to admire her sister’s design work on the house. The outside was finished with faux stone and new sage-green steel siding, and it would look fantastic when the landscaping was put in. The inside was mostly completed, but the kitchen was all torn out so they were cooking mostly on the back porch. Tina was alone and agitated when Jill got to the house.

  “Do you remember when I said that Jim and I were practicing to make a baby? Well, we won’t be practicing anymore.”

  “Oh, Tina, you two aren’t splitting up, are you?”

  “No, silly. I peed on the stick, and it turned blue. I’m knocked up.”

  “Are we happy?”

  “Yeah, I promised Jim I’d sacrifice my body to give him one if he promised to stick around long enough to raise it.”

  “So you two are getting married?”

  “Why does one have to go with the other? Look how many marriages end in failure. Sorry,” she said when she saw her sister wince. “The M word scares me. Jim says he’ll stick by me no matter what, but he would like to make it legal.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t have enough faith in your relationship to make it a matter of public record?”

  “I don’t have any doubts about me and Jim.”

  “To me that’s what you’re implying. I’d be hurt if I was him. Jim is a real stand-up kind of guy. Tina, I still believe in marriage, I just didn’t choose well the first time. Besides,” she said, trying to lighten her criticism, “it makes taxes and insurance easier. Not to mention Christmas cards.”

  “Oh Christ, you’re right. I didn’t think about how he feels. I know he’s pretty conventional at heart. Damn. Why is life so complicated?”

  “If a church wedding bothers you, just have it done at the registry office.”